Names of Ho Chi Minh City

A 1910 postcard showing the name "Saigon" (French: Saïgon), a westernized version of the Vietnamese Sài Gòn.

The city now known as Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnamese: Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh listen) has gone by several different names during its history, reflecting settlement by different ethnic, cultural and political groups. Originally known as Prey Nôkôr while a part of the Khmer Empire,[nb 1] it came to be dubbed Sài Gòn (listen) informally by Vietnamese settlers fleeing the Trịnh–Nguyễn War to the north. In time, control of the city and the area passed to the Vietnamese, who gave the city the name of Gia Định. This name remained until the time of French conquest in the 1860s, when the occupying force adopted the name Saïgon for the city, a westernized form of the traditional Vietnamese name.[1] The current name was given after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and honors Hồ Chí Minh, the first leader of North Vietnam.[nb 2] Even today, however, the informal name of Sài Gòn remains in daily speech both domestically and internationally, especially among the Vietnamese diaspora and local southern Vietnamese.[2]


Cite error: There are <ref group=nb> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=nb}} template (see the help page).

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference salkin-96-354 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Stanley D. Brunn; Jessica K. Graybill; Maureen Hays-Mitchell, eds. (2016). Cities of the world: regional patterns and urban environments (Sixth ed.). Lanham. p. 447. ISBN 978-1-4422-4916-5. OCLC 922034582.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)