Washed ashore above the Mekong
Delta, some 40km north of the South
China Sea,
HO CHI MINH CITY
is a city on the march, a boomtown
where the rule of the dollar is
absolute. Fuelled by the sweeping
economic changes wrought by
doi
moi, this effervescent city,
perched on the west bank of the
Saigon River, now boasts fine
restaurants, immaculate hotels, and
glitzy bars among its colonial
villas, venerable pagodas and
austere, Soviet-style
housing-blocks. Sadly, Ho Chi Minh
City is also full to bursting with
people for whom progress hasn't yet
translated into food, lodgings and
employment, so begging, stealing and
prostitution are all facts of life
here.
Ho Chi Minh City started life as
a fishing village known as Prei
Nokor and, during the Angkor period
(until the fifteenth century), it
flourished as an entrepôt for
Cambodian boats pushing down the
Mekong River. By the seventeenth
century it boasted a Khmer garrison
and a community of Malay, Indian and
Chinese traders. During the
eighteenth century, Hué's Nguyen
Dynasty ousted the Khmers, renamed
Prei Nokor Saigon , and
established a temporary capital here
between 1772 and 1802, after which
the Emperor Gia Long used it as his
regional administrative centre. The
French seized Saigon in 1861, and a
year later the Treaty of Saigon
declared the city the capital of
French Cochinchina. They set about a
huge public works programme,
building roads and draining
marshlands, but ruled harshly. After
a thirty-year war against the
French, Saigon was finally
designated the capital of the Republic
of South Vietnam by President
Diem in 1955, soon becoming both the
nerve-centre of the American war
effort, and its R&R capital,
with a slough of sleazy bars
catering to GIs on leave of duty.
The American troops withdrew in
1973, and two years later the Ho Chi
Minh Campaign rolled through the
gates of the presidential palace and
the communists were in control.
Within a year, Saigon had been
renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
