An ideal companion for those who want more than a guidebook, for those who wish to dig a bit deeper into this enigmatic country. Journalist and travel writer Carol Howland was so beguiled by Vietnam and saw it changing so fast that she rushed back to spend a year, travelling the length of this long, thin country - to capture its traditional culture before it disappears. Delving into this two thousand-year-old civilization, she meets a man who creates 'antique' Buddhist statues, a woman who 'sculpts' royal banquets, the aged manservant of the last dowager queen and one of the men who might have become emperor - if Vietnam still had an emperor. She leads us through the palaces of the last imperial capital, now a World Heritage Site, and takes us backstage at Hanoi's classical opera and the traditional water puppet theatre. The writer penetrates Vietnam's traditional culture in a friendly, bemused and insightful way, through the stories and the lives of the people and the cultural leaders she met.