The largest city in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon) is situated on the banks of the Saigon River. It began as a small fishing village known as Prey Nokor (which means "forest land" in Khmer); the area was inhabited by the Khmer people for centuries before being conquered by the Vietnamese in the 16th century. It has been called, "Paris in the Orient" because of the wide elegant boulevards and historic French colonial buildings that resulted from the French colonial occupation of Vietnam in 1859. In 1954, the French were defeated by the Communist Viet Minh and withdrew from Vietnam. When the country was partitioned into North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam), the southern government, retained Saigon as its capital. Known as Saigon until the end of the Vietnam War, it was the capital of the French colony of Indochina, and later of the former state of South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. At the conclusion of the Vietnam War ("The Fall of Saigon") on April 30, 1975, the city came under the control of the Vietnam People's Army, and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City (although Saigon is still frequently used to connote chicness and modernity). Now home to a well-established ethnic Chinese population, its population now exceeds seven million people. |
