Why do people still say Saigon? Who is Ho Chi Minh? A brief history and explanation
Two remarkably different societies under one nation
“We say Saigon. We – the people of Saigon I mean. ‘Ho Chi Minh’: that’s for the Northerners.”
What locals told me
What’s the background of the ‘Saigon’?
Why was the city renamed Ho Chi Minh?
Who was Ho Chi Minh? What did he do?
Ah, the beautiful and complex city of Saigon, where I’ve spent the last two weeks. Or is it Ho Chi Minh?
We’re all familiar with the name of a city, or even country changing. Perhaps the most notable are New Amsterdam becoming New York, or Bombay becoming Mumbai. In recent history, the Czech Republic has become Czechia; Turkey, Türkiye; and this year, Port Blair, India became Sri Vijaya Puram.
Like with Port Blair, name changes are often to do with anti-colonial reasons. Many names we once knew were romanised for the sake of being to difficult for their coloniser to pronounce, or even completely made up by the coloniser.
Does this mean this is the case with Saigon? Vietnam was not long ago part of Indochina, a colony of France. Does that make Saigon politically incorrect or offensive? Well, the answers are a bit of a mixed bag. The spelling Saigon is indeed a romanised spelling of Sài Gòn, but its history goes back far longer than colonial occupation. Whether it would offend a Vietnamese person to say ‘Sài Gòn’ I learned really depends on their background, such as whether they are from the North or an ardent supporter of the communist revolution. But to someone from Ho Chi Minh City, or a Saigonese, you won’t offend them, and in fact, as I learned from my time there: they might refuse to refer to the city as Ho Chi Minh, only saying Sài Gòn.
Travel diary: September 28th 2024, Ho Chi Minh City.
I took a walk around the old corridors of my apartment building today. It’s a classic complex you find in Saigon – built in the 50s or 60s, reminiscent of those photos of old Kowloon you see. The locals call them “vertical villages”. I think of them more as cities: the corridors their bustling centres. 10 stories, 100 stories told in each. The floors were a worn-out vinyl check. Puckering here, black marks from some child’s shoes there. The building was laid out as two ‘H’ shapes, and around each corner, some kind of trade was happening. On floor 7, the floor below me, bags of clothes were stacked two metres high along the hall, the loud, rhythmic punching of sewing machines emanating from the open metal door of apartment 712. A woman sat on a chair, somewhat obscured by the towering bags, shouting at someone out of view. Customers came in and out of 712. I got the impression that they were the other residents of the building. On floor 6, someone had a metal workshop, sparks flying out of the door. Floor 3 was home to a woodworking business. Ms Tran’s collagen facelift clinic was her former lounge on floor 1. When I walked up the stairs onto floor 9, there was an old sofa and some chairs by the elevator with a group of guys laughing and talking joyously. Just behind them to their side, an older lady sat on a small plastic stool painting a young woman’s nails. She crouched over her coffee table, with a desk lamp shining brightly onto her client’s hands. She had all the equipment: books filled with styles; pots of colours; that UV thing that professionals use to dry the varnish quicker.
I stopped and stared at the scene for perhaps a little too long. In what other country can you expect to see such a convivial social scene play out in an apartment corridor? My staring caught the attention of one of the guys.
“Where are you from?” He said.
“I’m from London. Do you speak English?” I asked, as I never want to make someone feel uncomfortable by becoming too technical with my language.
“Of course! Come sit with us”.
I accepted without hesitation as serendipitous moments like these are always the best when travelling. The seven-or-so men, around my age, all shimmied to the left one, making space for me on the plastic chair closest to me.
I sat with them for about an hour and got to know them. They were all friends from high school, with a tradition of meeting in this corridor every weekend no matter what. They were all 29/30 now. One was the son of the woman painting nails, but they all called her “mum”. The lady having her nails painted was the girlfriend of one of the guys. I asked them a few questions about the culture of Ho Chi Minh. The food, what locals like to do, streets I should check out and whatnot. In their warm responses, a few times they said “Ho Chi – Saigon, I mean”. After some twenty minutes of chatting to them, one of them explained to me:
“We say Saigon. We – the people of Saigon I mean. ‘Ho Chi Minh’: that’s for the Northerners. They changed the name to Ho Chi Minh City. But it’s just for documents and advertising. Everyone here says Saigon still”.
Indeed, one of the famed tourist river cruises is eponymously named ‘Saigon River Cruise’, and the shopping centre which lays right in the eye of the city goes by the name of ‘Saigon Centre’. Even one of the main railway stations is called ‘Sài Gòn’ Railway Station. Saigon, or Sài Gòn to be true to Vietnamese traditional spelling, was the official name of the city until the fall of the city to the communist army in 1975.
So, what’s the background of the ‘Saigon’?
“why exactly the name Sài Gòn was chosen by Vietnamese refugees remains a bit of a mystery”
Contrary to what I originally thought, the name Saigon is not actually a French colonial creation. Its etymology is rather more mystical, with much more history to it.
What we do know is that the name had been used informally by locals since the early 17th century. From my museum visits in Vietnam, I learned about the Trịnh–Nguyễn war (1627-1672, 1774-1775), a long and protracted civil war between factions of Lords (somewhat comparable to the Wars of the Roses). This war divided the nation in two quite literally almost at the same point that it was during the Vietnam War (1965-1975). During this time, many refugees fled the conflict to the Khmer city of Prey Nôkôr (present day Saigon). The Vietnamese refugees colloquially referred to the city as Sài Gòn. Over the next two-hundred years, constant conflict and subsequent food and work insecurity pushed more Vietnamese to Prey Nôkôr. The Vietnamese diaspora, settling within a simultaneously weakening Khmer Kingdom, gradually became the ethnic majority. When the French captured the city in 1859, they chose to westernise the name Sài Gòn to “Saïgon”, showing that, by this point, it had become the more common name for the city.
But why exactly the name Sài Gòn was chosen by those Vietnamese refugees remains a bit more of a mystery, with many theories brought to the table.
The most popular belief is that the name referred to the once dense and tall forest that surrounded the city, “Sài” meaning “twigs”, and “Gòn” meaning “boles”. This would make sense as it is a translation of Prey Nôkôr into Vietnamese, which also referred to the forest.
However, many linguists now discount this theory for various linguistical, jargon-filled reasons that mean to say the distinct difference of Prey Nôkôr to Sài Gòn shows the latter wasn’t derived from the former. Instead, they look further back to the Cham culture which preceded the Viet and Khmer cultures, arguing that both names are independent derivatives of Cham language that developed separately and simultaneously.
These two theories hold the most water, however, other theories include Sài Gòn descending from Thai languages, Laotian, and even Cantonese.
In conclusion: it was Central and Southern Vietnamese refugees that coined the term Sài Gòn. I will save a deeper historical analysis of the North-South divide for another time. However, it is clear why many Saigonese generally consider the name Ho Chi Minh City to be a form of Northern domination beyond ideological factors.
Why was the city renamed Ho Chi Minh?
The Fall of Saigon happened on April 20th, 1975, when the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN) rammed a column of Soviet T-54 tanks through the gates of the Independence Palace, where the South Vietnamese government was held. It was the end of a near 30-year struggle for unified Vietnamese independence and self-determination. In honour of revolutionary victory and their late leader, the new People’s Republic of Vietnam renamed Saigon Ho Chi Minh City in 1976. This was the final step in their victory plan; the North Vietnamese had referred to Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City since 1946, and it was in their manifesto to officially change the name upon Saigon’s capture. The name Ho Chi Minh City is effectively a symbol of the North Vietnamese civil war victory.
Who was Ho Chi Minh and what did he do?
Far away across the ocean
Far beyond the sea's eastern rim
Lives a man who is father of the Indo-Chinese people
and his name is Ho Chi Minh.
Ho Chi Minh is the revered mastermind of the Vietnamese communist revolution and considered the father of Vietnam by many of its people. When you land in Ho Chi Minh City, the song, The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh, plays on repeat. He founded the Viet Minh, the original group of freedom fighters from the North intent on expelling the French colonists. But he was more than a freedom fighter figure; he was an intelligent, cunning, multi-lingual Statesman. Before World War 2, he had spent time in France founding the French Communist Party, and deeply understood the culture of European statesmanship. During the war, he worked with the American OSS (now known as the CIA) to overthrow Japanese and French occupation, hoping to later use this as a bargaining chip to secure independence. Following the war, Ho Chi Minh spent time in Europe negotiating with the Americans and French for independence, recognising the de-colonial change of wind of post-war Europe. However, the French saw things differently, ultimately refusing to let any of its colonies go without a fight during the 20th century.
The French retook Indochina as a colony once again, and Ho Chi Minh returned to Hanoi empty-handed. He now knew that the only way to secure independence was now through force.
“If we have to fight, we’ll fight. You’ll kill ten of us, and we’ll kill just one of you. But in the end, you’ll be the one who gets tired of it” - Ho Chi Minh on his return to North Vietnam.
The simmering conflict against the French soon blew up into full-scale war when the French bombarded the port of Hai Phong in November 1946 following a clash between French soldiers and Vietnamese police over the seizure of a cargo boat. A month later, a Viet Minh invasion of Hanoi resulted in a three month battle with a systematic French shelling and bombardment of the city. This captured the international attention, especially in France, and galvanised Ho Chi Minh as the recognised leader of the revolutionary forces. Throughout the next ten years of French rule, Ho Chi Minh orchestrated more attacks and gradually gained control of most of North Vietnam. By 1947, the revolutionary armies were at 60,000. By the 1960s, they were in the millions.
Ho Chi Minh understood how to capture the international public eye, something he did multiple times in his life. Shortly before his death, he executed the Tet Offensive plan of 1968, in which the PAVN and Viet Cong ambushed the US and South Vietnamese across the entire country, attacking all the major cities and US bases. This included famously the imperial city of Hue, where Full Metal Jacket is set, and even the capture of the US Embassy, which caused complete outrage in America, leaving many questioning if the war was winnable.
Although the Tet Offensive basically saw the front line redrawn along the previous 13th Parallel between North and South (ish), it was ultimately successful in terms of cultural impact; support for the Vietnam war in the US plummeted overnight as graphic depictions of the war’s failure made it to US television. It fed into the great popular upheavals in the West of 1968, a year where the public became overwhelmingly convinced that governments did not have the interests of the people in hand. International student protests, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy all fed into this.
Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 before his nation’s victory, but he had started a movement that could not run out of steam. Today, he is depicted on all of Vietnam’s bank notes. Children learn about his history intimately in school. His face is on murals across the country. The Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, where he is buried, is one of the must-see sights of Hanoi. He has been effectively deified in Vietnamese history.
The Anthropology of Travel is an alternate travel business bringing a new philosophy to travel. It was founded by travelling couple Tian Franklin and Caitlin Denton, who quit their jobs in May 2024 to pursue this project. The Anthropology of Travel aims to rethink how we travel by emphasising cultural connections and lessons, and slow travel concerned with education, society and environment that may encourage individual growth and collective action in tackling global issues.
Inspirational piece of writing. ❤️