Overview of Ho Chi Minh City

Situated on the banks of the Saigon River, Ho Chi Minh city Vietnam has passed by many names over the centuries, most recently in 1975.

Ho Chi Minh city was originally founded as Prey Nokor, alittle fishing village and main port of Cambodia below the Khmer, within the sixteenth century. The name Prey Nokor means that "forest city" or "forest land" and reffered to the swampy forests upon that it absolutely was founded. within the seventeenth century, Vietnamese settlers flocked to Prey Nokor and by 1698, Nguyen Huu Canh, a Vietnamese noble was sent to expand Prey Nokor into a Vietnamese settlement. By that point, Prey Nokor had became called Gia Dinh officially, however Sai Gon additional popularly (Sai Gon coming back from obscure etymology however most assuredly reffering to the foresty space of the city).

In 1859, the French conquered Saigon and encorporated it because the capital into the newly-formed French colony of Cochinchina, that later became French Indochina and subsequently South Vietnam. There, the French labeled Prey Nokor Saigon. The French architectural vogue is visible in several of the remaining nineteenth century buildings, for instance the Museum of Fine Arts and therefore the HoChiMinh town Museum.

During the Vietnam-American War, Saigon was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) till its unification with the North Vietnamese in 1975 that united the 2 halves. it absolutely was subsequently renamed Ho Chi Minh town in honor of the pseudonym of the Vietnamese guerilla leader-Ho Chi Minh (real name Nguyen Tat Thanh).

Today, Ho Chi Minh town is that the largest town in Vietnam, larger than even the capital Hanoi, with quite eight million individuals, and hosts the most important variety of companies in Vietnam - over three hundred,000. it's climbing, slowly however surely, into the new millennium.