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HO CHI MINH CITY |
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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.
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