One block northwest of the Reunification Palace, at 28 Vo Van Tan, the War Remnants Museum (daily 7.30-11.45am & 1.30-4.45pm; $1) is probably the city's most popular attraction. Its exhibits speak for themselves, a distressing compendium of the horrors of modern warfare. Some of the perpetrators of these horrors are on display in the courtyard outside, including a 28-tonne howitzer, a ghoulish collection of bomb parts, and a renovated Douglas Skyraider plane. A series of halls present a grisly portfolio of photographs of mutilation, napalm burns and torture. One gallery details the effects of the 75 million litres of defoliant sprays dumped across the country, including hideously malformed foetuses preserved in pickling jars; another looks at international opposition to the war as well as the American peace movement. The museum rounds off with a grisly mock-up of the tiger cages, the prison cells of Con Son Island. There's a water puppetry theatre (daily 9-11am & 2-4pm; $2) opposite the souvenir shop. A minimum of five people are required for a performance.

Five minutes' stroll through the parkland northwest of the Revolutionary Museum, a red flag billows proudly above the Reunification Palace (daily 7.30-11am & 1-4pm; $4 including guided tour; entrance on Nguyen Du), which occupies the site of a colonial mansion erected in 1871 to house the governor-general of Indochina. With the French departure in 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem commandeered this extravagent monument as his presidential palace, but after the February 1962 assassination attempt, the place had to be pulled down. The present building was labelled the Independence Palace in 1966, only to be retitled the Reunification Hall when the South fell in 1975. Spookily unchanged from its working days, much of the building's interior is a veritable time-capsule of Sixties and Seventies kitsch: pacing its airy rooms, it's as if you've strayed into the arch-criminal's lair in a James Bond movie. Most interesting is the third floor with its presidential library, projection room and entertainment lounge complete. The basement served as the former command centre and displays archaic radio equipment and vast wall maps.

A pleasing, pagoda-style roof crowns the city's History Museum (Mon-Sat 8-11.30am & 1.30-4.30pm; Sun 8.30am-4.30pm; $1), whose main entrance is tucked just inside the gateway to the Botanical Gardens. If you want to visit the museum only, use the side entrance on Nguyen Binh Khiem to avoid paying the extra $1 for the gardens. The museum houses a train of galleries illuminating Vietnam's past from primitive times to the end of French rule by means of a decent if unastonishing array of artefacts and pictures. Other halls focus on ceramics, Buddha images from around Asia, Champa art and Vietnam's ethnic minorities. There's also a water puppetry theatre ($1).

After ten minutes' walk northwest from the Botanical Gardens up Nguyen Binh Khiem, you'll reach the spectacular Jade Emperor Pagoda (daily 6am-6pm) on Mai Thi Luu, built by the city's Cantonese community around the turn of the century, and still its most captivating pagoda. If you visit just one temple in town, make it this one, with its exquisite panels of carved gilt woodwork, and its panoply of Taoist and Buddhist deities beneath a roof that groans under the weight of dragons, birds and animals. A statue of the Jade Emperor lords it over the main hall's central altar, sporting an impressive moustachio. The Jade Emperor monitors entry into Heaven, and his two keepers - one holding a lamp to light the way for the virtuous, the other wielding an ominous-looking axe - are on hand to aid him. A rickety flight of steps in the chamber to the right of the main hall runs up to a balcony, behind which is set a neon-haloed statue of Quan Am. Left out of the main hall stands Kim Hua, to whom women pray for children, and in the larger chamber behind you'll find the Chief of Hell alongside ten dark-wood reliefs depicting all sorts of punishments.