Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnam's commercial hub, formerly Saigon
Ho Chi Minh City, which almost everyone still calls Saigon, is Vietnam's boomtown, a humid southern metropolis of close to ten million where millions of motorbikes flow through the streets like a river. It is the country's commercial and financial heart, brasher and faster than the capital Hanoi to the north, a place of rooftop bars, French colonial facades, glass towers, and crowded markets where the energy of a fast-growing economy is palpable on every corner.
The city spreads across the low, flat delta of the Saigon River as it approaches the Mekong delta and the South China Sea, only a few metres above sea level. Tropical and monsoonal, it swings between a wet and a dry season and faces growing risks from flooding and subsidence on its soft delta ground. The river remains a working waterway, lined with ports, while gleaming new districts rise on reclaimed land across the water from the historic center.
Originally the Khmer settlement of Prey Nokor, the area was settled by Vietnamese migrants who called it Saigon, and the French captured it in 1859, making it the elegant colonial capital of Cochinchina. As capital of South Vietnam it became the focus of the long war that ended when northern forces took the city in 1975, after which it was renamed for the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. Since the market reforms of the late 1980s it has surged ahead as the engine of Vietnam's export-driven growth.