Ho Chi Minh City, Da Lat & the Southeast

The land around the Saigon River was part of the Khmer world, and a Khmer port called Prey Nokor stood where Ho Chi Minh City now is. Vietnamese settlers moved in during the 17th century, and in 1698 the Nguyễn lords sent Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh to set up an administration, Gia Định, which grew into the city of Saigon. The uplands were the domain of the Mạ, K'Ho, Stiêng and Chơro peoples, while the Bình Thuận coast was part of the last Cham principality.

France seized Saigon in 1859 and made it the capital of the colony of Cochinchina, laying out boulevards, a cathedral, a post office and an opera house, and turned the red-earth uplands into rubber plantations worked by contract labourers. In the 1890s the scientist Alexandre Yersin explored the Lâm Viên plateau, and Đà Lạt grew into a hill station for colonial officials. Vũng Tàu, then Cap Saint-Jacques, became a seaside resort.

From 1955 Saigon was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam. The war was fought on its doorstep: communist fighters dug the Củ Chi tunnels beneath the Iron Triangle north-west of the city, and in the Tết Offensive of 1968 they struck inside the city itself. North Vietnamese tanks broke through the gates of the Independence Palace on 30 April 1975, and the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976. After the lean years that followed, Đổi Mới made it the engine of the economy, and the 2025 provincial reform merged Bình Dương and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu into an enlarged city.

Southerners, and Saigonese above all, see themselves as open, relaxed and generous — quick to invite a stranger to eat, less formal than Hanoians, and more interested in business than in politics. The southern accent softens and merges several northern sounds, and many Saigonese still call their city Saigon. Its culture is one of migrants, from the Chinese community of Chợ Lớn, with its Cantonese, Fujian and Teochew temples, to recent arrivals from every province.

Religion is more varied here than in the north. The Catholic community is large, many of its families descended from northerners who moved south in 1954; the Cao Đài faith, founded in 1926, blends Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Christianity and honours figures such as Victor Hugo as saints, with its Holy See at Tây Ninh; and the Bà Đen mountain nearby draws Buddhist pilgrims. Southern amateur music, đờn ca tài tử, is UNESCO intangible heritage, and cải lương, a reformed opera, grew up in the southern towns.

Đà Lạt has its own identity: a city of honeymooners, artists and flower growers, with an old French architectural heritage and a reputation for romance. The K'Ho people of the surrounding hills have their own gong music and weaving traditions.

Ho Chi Minh City is Vietnam's largest city and its commercial capital, with more than 9 million people even before the 2025 mergers and millions more across the industrial suburbs. Its old districts mix colonial avenues, alley neighbourhoods and skyscrapers, and Thủ Đức, to the east, is a newly built-up area of high-rises and technology parks. Biên Hòa and Thủ Dầu Một are big industrial cities; Vũng Tàu lives from offshore oil and weekend tourism; Đà Lạt from tourism, agriculture and universities.

The economy is the country's largest: factories in Bình Dương and Đồng Nai make shoes, furniture, textiles and electronics, the ports handle much of Vietnam's trade, and banking, start-ups and consumer industries are concentrated in the city. Farther out, Lâm Đồng grows flowers, vegetables, tea and coffee in greenhouses and on terraced slopes.

The city runs late: coffee on low stools, lunch of cơm tấm, and evenings of street food and crowded pavements. Flooding at high tide, traffic and the cost of housing are its constant concerns.

Southern cooking is sweeter, more generous with herbs and coconut, and fond of abundance. Cơm tấm, broken rice with grilled pork chop, shredded pork skin and a steamed egg cake, is the Saigon breakfast; hủ tiếu, a clear pork noodle soup of Teochew Chinese origin, and bánh xèo, a crisp turmeric pancake with shrimp and pork wrapped in lettuce and herbs, are everywhere. Saigon also has a street culture of ốc, shellfish and snails cooked in dozens of ways and eaten with beer, and of bột chiên, fried rice-flour cakes with egg.

Along the coast, Vũng Tàu is known for bánh khọt, little crisp rice cakes topped with shrimp, and Phan Thiết for its fish sauce, fermented in wooden barrels. Tây Ninh is famous for bánh tráng phơi sương, rice paper dried in the night dew, and muối tôm, a chilli and shrimp salt, while Củ Chi is known for bò tơ, tender young beef.

Đà Lạt cooks for the cold: bánh tráng nướng, rice paper grilled over charcoal with egg and toppings, hot soy milk from night-market stalls, artichoke tea, strawberries and avocados. Lâm Đồng also makes the Vang Đà Lạt wines and grows much of Vietnam's highland tea around Bảo Lộc. Bia Saigon is the local beer.

Ho Chi Minh City's centre is compact: the Notre-Dame Cathedral and Central Post Office, the Opera House and City Hall, the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum, the Bến Thành market and the Jade Emperor pagoda, with the temples and markets of Chợ Lớn to the west. The Củ Chi tunnels lie on the north-western edge, and a little further north-west is Tây Ninh's Cao Đài Holy See, with Bà Đen mountain and its cable car rising from the plain nearby.

South-east, Vũng Tàu has its beaches and the giant statue of Christ on Núi Nhỏ, and boats from its harbour reach the Côn Đảo islands, with their colonial prison and a national park where turtles nest. Further up the coast, Phan Thiết's Po Sah Inư Cham towers stand on a hill outside the town, and Mũi Né's dunes, the red dunes near the village and the larger white dunes inland, are best seen at sunrise.

Inland, Cát Tiên National Park protects lowland forest along the Đồng Nai River, with a gibbon rehabilitation project and the Crocodile Lake wetland. Đà Lạt, higher still, has Xuân Hương Lake, the Crazy House guesthouse, the Art Deco railway station, Bảo Đại's summer palace and the Langbiang mountain, while the volcanic caves and waterfalls of the former Đắk Nông province form a UNESCO Global Geopark.