Cultural colors in Hue Festival. Photo: Minh Tam 

The series of activities aims at comprehensively exploiting cultural and landscape resources, preserving and promoting unique values of the heritage land, diversifying tourism products, and gradually privatizing in the direction of opening up many opportunities for local people to actively and proactively participate as activity investors, practitioners, and also essential beneficiaries. This can be considered a correct and indispensable direction, consistent with the characteristics of a Festival city.

In the past two years, Hue Festival has operated under a new mechanism, achieving sound effects, attracting more tourists, and eliminating the “overwhelming” impact of festivals.

The festival is produced for a specific market segment, with organizational technology that differs significantly from traditional festivals. The festival promotes local image, country, and people..., and meets spiritual life requirements. It may bring profit if invested as a valuable product on the market. Traditional festivals are born from the community's spiritual needs, derive from the community’s voluntariness and "rules", meet people’s spiritual needs, and are considered an identity brand if cleverly organized.

Hue Festival and Hue Traditional Craft Festival are events with affirmative goals, content, and audience. They are internationalized and considered valuable typical cultural events under essential preservation and quality development. Therefore, the Four Seasons Festival must reasonably focus on the seasons’ highlights. At the same time, it must also affirm that Hue Festival and Traditional Craft Festival are the core and soul of the Four Seasons Festival, not the season's highlight.

Mission and vision

Hue is a unique heritage architectural urban and a substantial intangible cultural treasure, both royal and folk... Soon, Thua Thien Hue will become a centrally governed city. This urban area will develop rapidly and sustainably based on preserving and promoting the value of the ancient capital's heritage and Hue's cultural identity, with typical values of culture, heritage, ecology, landscape, environmental friendliness, and smart urban.

The primary and consistent direction for Hue is sustainable development. The connotation of sustainable development indicates the progress in the quality of society in all aspects, the harmony between living standards and quality of life, human attributes, and values. These include economic growth and the need to improve the living standards of the entire population, associated with people's harmonious and comprehensive development.

Culture is one of the four pillars of sustainable development. Culture must be linked to economics, while economics must be included in culture. That is the strategy of sustainable development and the message and prerequisite for the development of Hue. The reserves and essence of Hue's cultural heritage and the art of living of Hue people is an endless "gold mine". Yet, they will be exhausted if not used with care, bravery, and enthusiasm.

One of the goals at the inception of Hue Festival is to promote the introduction of the unique identity and values of the cultural traditions and lifestyle of Hue, the country and people of Vietnam, and to selectively absorb the quintessence and experience of preserving and promoting culture in the trend of international integration. Hue Festival hosts splendid and attractive art programs from many cultures and contributes to recreating, enhancing, and promoting intangible values. Hue Festival has become one of the endogenous resources of Hue's sustainable development.

In the new period, in parallel with the consistent theme of “Cultural heritage with integration and development”, it is necessary to link the content of “Hue - A green city with sustainable development”, including the orientation of rapid and sustainable development for Thua Thien Hue. From the Festival’s consistent theme, relevant authorities need to determine the theme for each festival period and develop a corresponding script, content structure, and primary activities, then affirm the role and position of Hue Festival by building and expanding its brand name.

Story: Nguyen Duy Hien