Ba Dinh Square is the largest public square in Vietnam, a vast open rectangle of lawn and ceremonial pavement in front of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. The square is bounded on the north by the mausoleum itself, on the west by the Presidential Palace and Ho Chi Minh's stilt house, and on the south by the National Assembly building. It is used for state occasions, military parades, and national ceremonies, and is otherwise a quiet, slightly formal open space where local families and schoolchildren on trips come to stand where history happened.
The scale of the square is designed to convey the solemnity of the state, and it does: standing in the middle of it in the early morning before the crowds arrive, with the mausoleum's grey granite mass in front of you and the trees behind it, is a more affecting experience than it might sound. The flag-raising and lowering ceremonies happen here each day at dawn and dusk respectively; the military precision of them draws Vietnamese visitors who treat the ceremony as genuinely important, not as spectacle.