Saigon hits you straight away: a river of motorbikes that never stops, skyscrapers rising next to century-old markets, the smell of coffee and pho on every corner, and the energy of a city that never sleeps. It has officially been called Ho Chi Minh City since 1976, but its soul —commercial, cosmopolitan, passionate— is still Saigon's, the great metropolis of southern Vietnam and the most modern and vibrant city in the country.
Behind that vitality lie layers of history. Elegant District 1 keeps its French colonial heritage in the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the splendid Central Post Office designed in Eiffel's era, the Opera House and its boulevards. And the memory of the 20th century is present everywhere: the Reunification Palace where the war ended in 1975, the sober and harrowing War Remnants Museum and, on the outskirts, the Cu Chi tunnel network, a testament to the resistance.
This guide takes you through essential Saigon: the colonial centre and its monuments, the key places for understanding the war with sobriety and respect, the markets and the best street food in the country, and how to use the city as a base for the Mekong Delta. With practical tips for getting through its legendary traffic, real prices and everything you need to find your way around this unstoppable metropolis.
Saigon is a young city compared with Hanoi, but its history is intense. The area was part of the Khmer kingdom (Cambodia) and then of the Champa kingdom before being settled by the Vietnamese in the 17th century, when the Nguyen lords extended their rule southwards; a small outpost called Prey Nokor became the Vietnamese Gia Dinh/Saigon. In 1859 the French conquered it and made it the capital of Cochinchina and the 'Pearl of the Far East', with grand boulevards and colonial buildings. After the 1954 partition, Saigon was the capital of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, until on 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese tanks entered the presidential palace and the city fell, bringing the war to an end. In 1976, reunified Vietnam renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the revolutionary leader. Since the Doi Moi reforms (1986), the city has been reborn as the country's great economic centre. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The south won from the Khmer: the Khmer and Chinese Saigon that was capital of Cochinchina and of the wartime south, the rice bowl of the Mekong Delta, and the prison island of Phu Quoc.
Read the history of South (Saigon and the Mekong) →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 16 activities in Ho Chi Minh. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In Vietnamese terms, Saigon's history is fairly recent, and it starts out as someone else's land. For centuries, the lower Mekong Delta belonged to the sphere of the Khmer Empire (today's Cambodia). Where the city would later stand, there was a trading post and port known by the Khmer name Prey Nokor. It was an area of marshes, rice paddies and canals, home to Khmer people and to various other Southeast Asian communities.
Over the 17th century, the Vietnamese push south (the Nam tien) changed the fate of these lands. The Nguyen lords, who ruled southern Vietnam, gradually extended their control over the Mekong Delta through settlement, political marriages and agreements with the weakened Khmer court. By the end of the 17th century, the area had become part of Vietnamese territory. The old Prey Nokor turned into a Vietnamese town that would come to be known as Sài Gòn, and its citadel and administration were organised under the name Gia Dinh.
In the 18th century, Saigon-Gia Dinh grew into the main centre of the south. It had a busy port and a large community of Chinese merchants, who settled in the Cho Lon ('big market') district, still the Chinese heart of the city today. During the wars between the Tay Son and the Nguyen at the end of the century, the city served as a refuge and base for the future Emperor Gia Long. By then it was already a mixed, commercial city, very different from stately imperial Hue or ancient Hanoi.
The big turning point came in the mid-19th century with the French conquest. French troops took Saigon in 1859, and in 1862 southern Vietnam was ceded to France. It became the colony of Cochinchina, with Saigon as its capital. The rest of Vietnam was a protectorate, but Cochinchina was a direct colony, and Saigon became the showcase of French power in Indochina.
The French rebuilt the city in their own image. They laid out wide tree-lined boulevards and put up monumental buildings: Notre-Dame Cathedral (1877-1883), the Central Post Office, the Governor's Palace, the Opera House and the City Hall. They installed sewers, trams and a modern port, and filled the centre with European-style villas, cafés and shops. Saigon earned the nicknames 'Pearl of the Far East' and 'Paris of the Orient'. It was an elegant, cosmopolitan city, but it was built on colonial exploitation of rubber, rice and Vietnamese labour.
Alongside that prosperity, nationalist feeling kept growing. Anti-colonial movements, trade unions and revolutionary groups sprang up in Saigon and the surrounding region. Resentment of French rule, inequality and the harsh conditions on the plantations fed a push for independence that would eventually turn into armed struggle. Behind the elegant colonial façade lay the tensions of a country that wanted to control its own future.
After the French defeat in 1954 and the Geneva Accords, Vietnam was split along the 17th parallel, with a communist North whose capital was Hanoi and a South whose capital was Saigon. The city became the political centre of the US-backed Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). It was also the main stage of what would become one of the most devastating wars of the 20th century.
Through the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Saigon lived an odd, tense double life. It was a city at war and also a bustling capital, full of American soldiers, foreign press, refugees from the countryside, trade and nightlife. The big hotels in the centre, the Continental, the Rex and the Caravelle, served as headquarters for correspondents and military officers. From their terraces you could follow the official press briefings, which journalists ironically nicknamed the 'Five O'Clock Follies'. All around, the war hit hard. The 1968 Tet Offensive brought fighting into the city's own streets. Just a few kilometres away, in Cu Chi, Viet Cong guerrillas operated from a vast network of underground tunnels and held out against the bombing.
The South Vietnamese regime was plagued by instability, coups and corruption, and it relied more and more on the United States. The war killed millions of people across Vietnam and left terrible after-effects. One of the worst came from Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed over large areas that still causes illness and birth defects today. The War Remnants Museum documents that human cost without holding back.
The war ended in Saigon. US troops pulled out (as agreed in 1973), and in early 1975 the North launched a final offensive. North Vietnamese forces advanced quickly south, and by late April Saigon was surrounded and in chaos. In the last days there was a desperate evacuation. 'Operation Frequent Wind' airlifted thousands of Americans and South Vietnamese by helicopter from rooftops across the city. The images went around the world, including the famous one of people crowding to board a helicopter on top of a building.
On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city centre, and one of them smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace (today the Reunification Palace). Northern troops took the seat of the South Vietnamese government, and the last president, Duong Van Minh, announced an unconditional surrender. The fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War and the existence of South Vietnam. It marked the North's victory and the reunification of the country under a communist government.
The event is remembered in very different ways. For official Vietnam it was liberation and reunification. For hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who fled the country in the following years, many of them by sea as 'boat people', it meant tragedy and exile. In 1976, reunified Vietnam officially renamed the city Ho Chi Minh City, after the revolutionary leader who had died in 1969, though people never stopped calling it Saigon.
The years after 1975 were very hard for the city. It went through a centrally planned economy, shortages, 're-education' camps, the exodus of the boat people and international isolation. Change came in 1986, when Vietnam adopted the reforms known as Doi Moi ('renovation'), which opened the economy to the market. No city made more of that shift than Saigon. Its trading tradition and entrepreneurial energy turned it into the country's economic engine.
Over the following decades, Ho Chi Minh City changed at dizzying speed. Foreign investment, factories, skyscrapers, shopping centres and a growing middle class all arrived. Today it is Vietnam's richest and most dynamic city. Its Landmark 81 tower is among the tallest in Southeast Asia, millions of motorbikes fill its streets, its nightlife is intense, and its food and coffee scenes are booming. In December 2024 the first metro line opened, a symbol of a city trying to bring its infrastructure up to speed with its growth.
And yet, beneath the skyscrapers, Saigon keeps its many layers. There are the colonial boulevards and monuments of District 1 and the temples and markets of Cho Lon. Memories of the war are everywhere, at the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi tunnels. Street life goes on as it always has, with pho stalls, little plastic stools and coffee with condensed milk. A metropolis of the future that also holds intense memories, Saigon is still, as ever, the restless, passionate heart of southern Vietnam.
