Who ruled Ho Chi Minh City?

Ho Chi Minh City, still widely called Saigon, lies on the Saigon River in southern Vietnam, just north-east of the Mekong Delta and a short distance inland from the South China Sea. Its river gave access to the sea and to the rice of the delta, which made it a natural port and market. Its history is unusually young for a major Asian city: it was a Khmer trading settlement until Vietnamese settlers arrived in the 17th century, then a French colonial capital, then the capital of South Vietnam, and finally the economic engine of a reunited country.

In the first centuries CE the region belonged to Funan, an early state of the lower Mekong, and later to Chenla and the Khmer Empire. The Khmer knew the settlement as Prey Nokor, a fishing village and port on the edge of the forest. In the early 17th century, as Vietnamese settlers pushed south, the Cambodian court allowed the Nguyễn lords of central Vietnam to set up a customs post there. In 1698 the Nguyễn envoy Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh organised the area as a Vietnamese district, a date now treated as the city's founding. Chinese settlers, among them refugees loyal to the fallen Ming dynasty, also came to the region, and in the late 18th century their community founded Chợ Lớn, the "big market", beside Saigon. It became the region's trading hub.

During the Tây Sơn wars of the late 18th century the town changed hands repeatedly. Nguyễn Ánh made it his base and, with help from French advisers, built a large star-shaped citadel in 1790 before going on to unite Vietnam as the emperor Gia Long.

France attacked Saigon in 1859, destroyed the citadel and, by treaty in 1862, took the surrounding provinces as the colony of Cochinchina, with Saigon as its capital. The French laid out a grid of tree-lined boulevards, built a cathedral, a post office, a theatre and a governor's palace, and turned the port into the main export outlet for rice from the Mekong. Saigon was also the capital of French Indochina until that role passed to Hanoi in 1902. In 1931 Saigon and Chợ Lớn were joined into a single administrative unit.

After Japan's wartime occupation, French forces returned in 1945 and fought the Việt Minh until 1954. When Vietnam was divided at the Geneva conference, Saigon became the capital of the State of Vietnam and, from 1955, the Republic of Vietnam. During the Vietnam War its population swelled with refugees and American servicemen, and communist forces attacked targets across the city in the Tet Offensive of 1968. On 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese tanks entered the presidential palace and the southern government surrendered. In 1976, when the country was formally reunified, the city was renamed after Ho Chi Minh.

The years after 1975 brought re-education camps, collectivisation and the flight of many residents by sea. The Đổi Mới reforms of 1986 revived private trade, and the city became the country's largest economic centre. In 2025 it absorbed the neighbouring provinces of Bình Dương and Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu, making it an administrative unit of about 14 million people and the largest city in Vietnam.