The history of Vietnam

Vietnam's history began in the Red River Delta, where the Bronze Age Đông Sơn culture and the semi-legendary kingdoms of Văn Lang and Âu Lạc gave rise to a distinct Viet people. For more than a thousand years the delta was ruled by Chinese dynasties, until independence was won in 938. Successive Vietnamese dynasties then defended the kingdom of Đại Việt against China and the Mongols, while pushing south through the lands of the Cham and Khmer to the Mekong Delta. In the nineteenth century France conquered the country, and the struggle for independence that followed turned into thirty years of war against France, and then against the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. Reunified under communist rule in 1976, Vietnam has since 1986 opened its economy and become one of the fastest-growing countries in Asia.

Stone tools and fossil teeth show that humans lived in the caves of northern Vietnam for hundreds of thousands of years. Around 10,000 years ago the Hòa Bình culture of hunter-gatherers lived in the limestone hills of the north, and later Neolithic communities grew rice in the river valleys and along the coast. The Phùng Nguyên culture of the second millennium BCE worked copper and bronze, and by the middle of the first millennium BCE the Đông Sơn culture of the Red River and Mã River valleys had become one of the most accomplished bronze-working societies in South-east Asia.

Đông Sơn is best known for its great bronze drums, cast by the lost-wax method and decorated with scenes of boats, warriors, dancers, birds and houses on stilts. Drums of this type have been found across southern China and island South-east Asia, a sign of wide trading networks. The people of the delta grew wet rice, kept buffalo and pigs, fished, and travelled the coast in long dugout canoes. In the far south a different world was taking shape: the Sa Huỳnh culture of the central coast, with its jar burials and jewellery traded as far as the Philippines and Taiwan, is generally linked to the ancestors of the Austronesian-speaking Cham.

Vietnamese tradition traces the nation to the Hồng Bàng dynasty, descended from the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the fairy Âu Cơ, whose eighteen Hùng kings ruled a kingdom called Văn Lang. The story was written down only in the fourteenth century, and modern historians treat its early dates as legend, but most accept that a chiefdom or early state of the Lạc Việt existed in the delta during the Đông Sơn period, with hereditary lords called lạc hầu and lạc tướng.

Tradition holds that in 257 BCE Thục Phán, a leader of the neighbouring Âu Việt, overthrew the last Hùng king and founded Âu Lạc under the name An Dương Vương. His capital at Cổ Loa, north of present-day Hanoi, was a vast spiral of earthen ramparts, and excavations there have found tens of thousands of bronze arrowheads, supporting the legend of a magic crossbow. After the fall of the Qin dynasty, the Qin general Zhao Tuo (Triệu Đà in Vietnamese) set up his own kingdom of Nanyue, centred on Panyu, today's Guangzhou, and around 179 BCE he absorbed Âu Lạc. Vietnamese chroniclers long counted Nanyue as a native dynasty; modern historians see it as a southern Chinese state that ruled the delta loosely through local lords.

In 111 BCE the armies of the Han emperor Wu conquered Nanyue, and the Red River Delta became the commandery of Jiaozhi under the Han dynasty. Chinese officials, settlers, writing and Confucianism gradually took root among the local elite, while Buddhism arrived by sea from India and became strong in the delta early in the first millennium. Resistance was frequent. In 40 CE the sisters Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị led a revolt that drove out the Han governor and ruled for three years, until the general Ma Yuan crushed them in 43. Another woman, Lady Triệu, led a rising against the Wu kingdom in 248, and both remain national heroes.

Under the following dynasties the province was renamed several times. In 544 Lý Bí declared an independent kingdom of Vạn Xuân, which lasted until the Sui reconquest of 602. The Tang dynasty organised the territory as the Protectorate of Annam, the "pacified south", a name that Europeans would still use for central Vietnam a thousand years later. Revolts continued, among them that of Mai Thúc Loan in 722, and as Tang power crumbled the local Khúc family took control in 905. Chinese rule left a deep mark on government, language and learning, but the Viet language survived, and with it a sense of separate identity.

The southern two-thirds of modern Vietnam had a separate history. From the late second century CE, Cham peoples on the central coast founded the kingdoms known collectively as Champa, Hindu and later partly Buddhist states that grew rich on maritime trade and built brick temple towers, of which the sanctuary of Mỹ Sơn is the finest survivor. Champa was a federation of coastal principalities rather than a single kingdom, with centres at Indrapura, Vijaya and Panduranga, and it fought repeatedly with both its northern neighbours and the Khmer Empire, sacking Angkor in 1177 and later falling briefly under Khmer rule.

Further south, the Mekong Delta belonged to the world of Funan, an early trading state whose port at Óc Eo has yielded Roman coins, Indian jewellery and Chinese bronzes. Funan gave way in the seventh century to Khmer kingdoms, and the delta remained Khmer land, thinly settled, until Vietnamese settlement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Central Highlands were home to many other peoples, among them the Jarai, Ede and Bahnar, who kept their independence from the lowland states for most of their history.

In 938 Ngô Quyền defeated a fleet of the Southern Han at the Bạch Đằng River, luring the ships onto iron-tipped stakes hidden beneath the water at high tide. He proclaimed himself king in 939, ending more than a thousand years of Chinese rule. After his death the country split among twelve warlords until Đinh Bộ Lĩnh reunited it in 968 as Đại Cồ Việt, with its capital at Hoa Lư. Lê Hoàn, who seized the throne in 980, defeated an invasion by the Song dynasty in 981. The new kingdom accepted a tributary relationship with China, sending missions to the Chinese court while its rulers called themselves emperors at home, a balance that lasted until the nineteenth century.

In 1009 Lý Công Uẩn founded the Lý dynasty, and the following year he moved the capital to Thăng Long, the site of Hanoi. The Lý rulers, devout Buddhists, built pagodas and dykes, created a stable central administration, and in 1054 named the country Đại Việt. They founded the Temple of Literature in 1070 and held the first civil service examinations in 1075. The general Lý Thường Kiệt fought off another Song invasion in 1075 to 1077. The Trần dynasty, which took power in 1225, faced the gravest threat yet: the Mongol Empire. Mongol armies invaded in 1258, and twice more under Kublai Khan in 1285 and 1287 to 1288. Each time the Trần abandoned the capital, harried the invaders and waited for heat and disease to weaken them, and in 1288 Trần Hưng Đạo destroyed the Yuan dynasty fleet at the Bạch Đằng River, in the same way Ngô Quyền had done.

In 1400 the minister Hồ Quý Ly overthrew the Trần and began radical reforms, including paper money and limits on landholding. In 1407 the Ming dynasty invaded on the pretext of restoring the Trần, and for twenty years Vietnam was again a Chinese province, its books carried off and its people subjected to heavy taxes and forced labour. In 1418 Lê Lợi, a landowner from Thanh Hóa, began the Lam Sơn uprising, advised by the scholar Nguyễn Trãi, and by 1427 the Ming armies had been defeated. Lê Lợi founded the Later Lê dynasty in 1428, and Nguyễn Trãi's proclamation of victory became a founding text of Vietnamese nationhood.

The Lê state was more Confucian than its predecessors, run by scholar-officials chosen through examinations. Its greatest ruler, Lê Thánh Tông (1460 to 1497), reorganised the provinces and issued the Hồng Đức legal code, which gave women notable rights of inheritance and property. In 1471 he captured the Cham capital of Vijaya, killing tens of thousands and taking the Cham king prisoner. Champa survived only as a shrinking state centred on Panduranga, which was finally absorbed in 1832. Many Cham turned to Islam, and their descendants remain a minority in Vietnam and Cambodia today.

From 1527 the Lê throne lost real power. The general Mạc Đăng Dung seized the crown, and supporters of the Lê fought the Mạc for most of the sixteenth century. When the Lê were restored in 1592, power lay with two rival families: the Trịnh lords in the north and the Nguyễn lords, who from 1558 governed the south from the region of Huế. Both claimed to serve the Lê emperor, but they fought a long war between 1627 and 1672, and then divided the country at the Gianh River for a century. The Nguyễn built walls and bought Portuguese cannon, and European traders, among them the Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese, did business at Hội An. Catholic missionaries arrived, and the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes helped develop the romanised script, quốc ngữ, that became the national alphabet in the twentieth century.

Blocked in the north, the Nguyễn expanded south in the process known as Nam tiến, the southward march. Vietnamese settlers moved into the Mekong Delta, and in 1698 the Nguyễn set up an administration at Gia Định, the Khmer port of Prey Nokor, which grew into Saigon, today's Ho Chi Minh City. By the mid-eighteenth century the whole delta was under Vietnamese control, at Cambodia's expense, and Vietnam had taken its long S-shape.

In 1771 three brothers from the village of Tây Sơn launched a rebellion against the Nguyễn lords that swept away both ruling houses. The ablest of them, Nguyễn Huệ, defeated an invading Siamese army in 1785, and in 1789, having made himself Emperor Quang Trung, routed a Qing dynasty army at Đống Đa outside Thăng Long. He died suddenly in 1792, and the surviving Nguyễn heir, Nguyễn Ánh, fought back from the south with help from Siam and from French volunteers recruited by the bishop Pigneau de Behaine.

In 1802 Nguyễn Ánh took Thăng Long and was crowned Emperor Gia Long, ruling for the first time a country stretching from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand. He made Huế the capital, built its great citadel, and in 1804 gained Qing recognition for the name Việt Nam. His son Minh Mạng (1820 to 1841) centralised the state on Confucian lines, renamed it Đại Nam, and fought the Siamese of the Rattanakosin Kingdom for control of Cambodia, which Vietnam occupied in the 1830s and tried to absorb. Suspicious of Western influence, Minh Mạng and his successors persecuted Catholic missionaries and Vietnamese converts, and several missionaries were executed. These persecutions gave France its pretext for intervention.

In 1858 a French and Spanish fleet attacked Đà Nẵng, and in 1859 French troops took Saigon. By the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, Emperor Tự Đức ceded three southern provinces, and in 1867 France seized the remaining three, creating the colony of Cochinchina. In the 1870s and 1880s French forces moved into the north, and treaties of 1883 and 1884 made Tonkin and Annam protectorates. China, which still regarded Vietnam as a tributary, fought France in the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885 and then gave up its claims. In 1885 the young emperor Hàm Nghi fled Huế and called for resistance in the Cần Vương ("Aid the King") movement, which fought on until his capture in 1888; its guerrillas also killed many thousands of Vietnamese Catholics, whom they regarded as collaborators. In 1887 France joined Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia in the Indochinese Union, later adding Laos, with French Indochina governed from Hanoi.

Colonial rule brought railways, ports, rubber plantations and rice exports, but the profits went largely to French companies and a small landowning class. Peasants lost land, taxes on salt, alcohol and opium fell heavily on the poor, and plantation workers lived in harsh conditions. Nearly 100,000 Vietnamese were sent to France as soldiers and labourers during World War I. The Nguyễn emperors remained on the throne in Huế with little power.

Nationalist movements grew from the beginning of the century. Phan Bội Châu sent students to Japan and sought to expel the French, while Phan Châu Trinh called for reform and modern education. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party, founded in 1927 on the model of China's Kuomintang, launched the Yên Bái mutiny in 1930, which was crushed with mass executions. The same year Nguyễn Ái Quốc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, founded what became the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. He had been converted to communism in Paris by reading Vladimir Lenin on the colonial question, and his party, drawing on peasant grievances, organised the short-lived Nghệ-Tĩnh soviets of 1930 to 1931 before French repression scattered it.

After France fell in 1940, the forces of the Empire of Japan entered northern Indochina and in 1941 the south, leaving the Vichy French administration in place. In 1941 Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam and founded the Việt Minh, a communist-led front for independence. On 9 March 1945 Japan overthrew the French and set up a nominally independent Empire of Vietnam under Emperor Bảo Đại. Wartime requisitions, the disruption of transport and bad harvests caused a famine in the north in 1944 and 1945 that killed between several hundred thousand and two million people.

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Việt Minh seized power across the country in what became known as the August Revolution. Bảo Đại abdicated, ending the Nguyễn dynasty, and on 2 September 1945, in Ba Đình Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, quoting the American Declaration of Independence. Under Allied agreements, however, Chinese Nationalist troops occupied the north and British forces the south, where they helped French troops return.

Negotiations between Ho Chi Minh and France broke down in 1946, and after the French bombardment of Haiphong in November and fighting in Hanoi in December, full war began. France set up a rival State of Vietnam under Bảo Đại in 1949, while the Việt Minh, led militarily by Võ Nguyên Giáp, fought a guerrilla war from the northern mountains. The victory of Mao Zedong in China in 1949 transformed the conflict: Chinese weapons and advisers flowed to the Việt Minh, and in 1950 China and the Soviet Union recognised Ho Chi Minh's government. The United States, seeing the war as part of the Cold War after the outbreak of the Korean War, came to pay most of France's war costs.

In 1954 the Việt Minh besieged the French base at Điện Biên Phủ, hauling artillery onto the surrounding hills, and the garrison surrendered on 7 May after 56 days. The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel, with the Việt Minh in the north and the State of Vietnam in the south, and called for national elections in 1956. Around a million people, many of them Catholics, moved south, and a smaller number went north.

The elections never took place. In the south, Ngô Đình Diệm, backed by the United States, deposed Bảo Đại in 1955 and founded the Republic of Vietnam, which refused to hold the vote. In the north, the communist government carried out a land reform between 1953 and 1956 in which thousands of alleged landlords were executed; estimates range from about 13,500 to far higher. Diệm's government repressed communists and other opponents, and from 1959 Hanoi supported an armed insurgency in the south, organised from 1960 as the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Viet Cong. Supplies reached it down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia.

Under John F. Kennedy, the number of American advisers grew to about 16,000. Diệm's Catholic-leaning rule provoked Buddhist protests in 1963, and in November he was overthrown and killed in a coup the United States had tacitly approved, followed by a series of unstable military governments. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, Congress authorised President Lyndon Johnson to use force; sustained bombing of the north began in 1965, and the first American combat troops landed at Đà Nẵng that March. US troop numbers peaked at over half a million in 1968 and 1969, and South Korea, Australia and other allies also sent soldiers.

The Vietnam War was fought with enormous destructive power. American aircraft dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than the Allies had used in the whole of the Second World War, and the herbicide Agent Orange was sprayed over large areas of forest and farmland, leaving lasting illness and birth defects. Atrocities were committed on both sides: American soldiers massacred several hundred villagers at Mỹ Lai in March 1968, and communist forces killed thousands of civilians during their occupation of Huế. The Tết Offensive of January 1968, in which communist forces attacked cities across the south, was a military failure for them but turned American public opinion against the war. Ho Chi Minh died in September 1969. President Richard Nixon began withdrawing American troops while expanding the bombing and the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended direct American involvement.

Fighting between north and south continued, and in the spring of 1975 a North Vietnamese offensive overran the southern army. On 30 April 1975 tanks broke through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, and the South Vietnamese government surrendered. Estimates of the total Vietnamese dead in the war from 1955 to 1975 range from under one million to more than three million, alongside about 58,000 American dead.

The country was formally reunified on 2 July 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Hundreds of thousands of former officers and officials of the southern regime were sent to re-education camps, some for many years, and private trade in the south was abolished. Economic hardship, persecution and, from 1978, a campaign against the ethnic Chinese Hoa community led to a mass exodus. Hundreds of thousands of "boat people" fled across the South China Sea, and many died at sea.

Relations with the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia collapsed into border warfare, and in December 1978 Vietnam invaded, capturing Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979 and ending the regime. Vietnam had just signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, and China, which backed the Khmer Rouge, invaded northern Vietnam in February 1979 for about a month before withdrawing with heavy losses on both sides. Vietnam occupied Cambodia for a decade, facing a Western and Chinese embargo and depending on Soviet aid, while collectivised agriculture and central planning brought shortages and inflation of several hundred per cent.

In December 1986 the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party adopted Đổi Mới, or "renovation", under Nguyễn Văn Linh. Farmers were allowed to work their own plots and sell their produce, private businesses were legalised, prices were freed and foreign investment was invited, while the party kept its monopoly of political power. Within a few years Vietnam went from food shortages to being one of the world's largest rice exporters. It withdrew from Cambodia in 1989, normalised relations with China in 1991, and survived the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The United States lifted its trade embargo in 1994 and restored diplomatic relations in 1995, the same year Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization in 2007.

Over the following decades Vietnam became a manufacturing centre for electronics, clothing and footwear, and poverty fell sharply, though the government remains a one-party state that censors the media and imprisons critics. Disputes with China over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea have periodically flared, and Vietnam has drawn closer to the United States, upgrading relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2023, while maintaining ties with China and Russia. Nguyễn Phú Trọng, party general secretary from 2011, led a wide anti-corruption campaign that brought down thousands of officials, including two presidents. After his death in July 2024, Tô Lâm, the former minister of public security, became general secretary, and in October 2024 the general Lương Cường was elected president. In 2025 the government merged the country's provinces into 34 provincial-level units, and in January 2026 the party congress re-elected Tô Lâm as general secretary for a further five years.