Saigon - Ho Chi Minh City E-Book

Klaus H. Carl

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 74

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Saigon is the city known for the unexplainable languidness that possessed the “French and American” Europeans that lived in Vietnam. At night, in front of a drink, the memories of flowery young girls in their traditional costumes surrounded by the thick smells of the ngoc man, the feverish sounds of the city's motion piercing through the humid heat of the Asian nights hauntingly reappear. A city of contrasts, Saigon has lived through dramatic changes: the turbulence of the South for which it was renowned was replaced by the terrible coldness of the North and the joyfulness of the city was imposed a rigid doctrine. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh and a new city was created. But although appearances may change, people remain the same. So what came of these changes? A few red flags… and a number of Japanese motorbikes.

Leseprobe

SAIGON

HO CHI MINH CITY

Publishing Director: Jean-Paul Manzo

Text: Klaus H.Carl

Translation from German: Jane Ennis

Design and layout: Matthieu Carré

Photograph credits: © Klaus H.Carl

© 2024, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2024, Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image-Barwww.image-bar.com

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-63919-885-6

Contents

A Permanent Process of Change

Geography

From North to South

Population

Religions

Arts and Crafts

Economy

The Commercial Capital

The Town Centre

Temples and Pagodas

Conclusion

History

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Notes

A brook cut from its source drains away and dries up. A tree deprived of its roots withers away. A revolutionary without morals will never achieve his goals.

A Permanent Process of Change

Saigon – a name that evokes memories of the colonial period, tragedies such as the Indochina and Vietnam wars, the division of the country into North and South Vietnam, or the fleeing boat people and their wretched plight.

It is the world-famous name of a town that was once known as “The Pearl of the Orient” or “The Paris of the East”, which is now striving unceasingly to regain its former reputation. Saigon is not Ho Chi Minh City, but merely one of many districts in a central administrative region of the same name, containing about six million inhabitants, and covering an area of at least 2,000 square km. In the immediate catchment area there are at least 18 million inhabitants. Cholon, formerly Chinatown and now amalgamated with Saigon, belongs to this administrative region, as does the agricultural sector Cu Chi (approximately 50 km west of Saigon) and Gia Dinh. Especially in South Vietnam, people only use the name Saigon, even if the whole conurbation of Ho Chi Minh City is meant.

In order to understand this, a brief outline of recent Vietnamese history is necessary. It had originally been intended to allow the two states of North and South Vietnam to continue to exist independently for five years after the armistice of 1973. However, the refugee problem and economic difficulties in a region that had become almost ungovernable, pushed the government in Hanoi into unification earlier than intended, and also forced it to call elections in 1976. In July 1976 the country was proclaimed The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Saigon, already recognised as the undisputed economic centre of Vietnam, became the core of the city-state “Than Pho Ho Chi Minh”.

1. Balloons for the New Year

2. Greeting cards

3. A Young Vietnamese woman with her child

Saigon is a relatively young city. Originally known as Gia Dinh, it was founded in 1764 by the Vietnamese on the site of fishing villages previously occupied by the Khmer – whom the Vietnamese expelled – at Song Sai Gon, in a lowland plain on the northern side of the Mekong Delta, approximately 50 km from the coast. It owes its present-day structure to the French, who conquered the city on 1859, meeting hardly any resistance from the Vietnamese To their surprise the French were also offered the surrounding provinces by Emperor Tu Duc – an offer that a colonial power simply could not refuse – and they immediately set out to plan and develop the city on the Parisian model, with wide avenues and boulevards. The typical buildings – post office, opera house, town hall and of course a cathedral dedicated to “Notre Dame” – were built during this period.

At first Saigon was merely the capital of the colony of Cochin China, then it became the seat of the colonial administration of Indochina, and in 1954, when the Treaty of Geneva confirmed the end of French colonial rule in Indochina, Saigon was proclaimed the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam.

The city changed a second time under American influence, during the period of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese, who fought so desperately, call it “The American War”. The American forces needed bars, amusement arcades, supermarkets and massage parlours for their off-duty personnel, and people to work in all these establishments. In order to partake of the blessings of the dollar as shoe cleaners, taxi-drivers or maids, people were torn from their traditional family structures and poured into this supposed paradise from the surrounding countryside until it was full to bursting, living in hastily erected slums on the outskirts of the city. In fact, there were never more beggars, drug addicts or prostitutes than at this time, during which much more than half the population were dependent for their livelihood on the Americans, who had built an entire garrison town. The famous Rue Catinat of the “Paris of the Orient”, leading directly from the river to the cathedral, degenerated into “The Brothel of Vietnam”. Tu Do (meaning freedom), now known as Dong Khoi, became the nightclub quarter of Saigon, with its hundreds of bars and hotels where rooms could be rented by the hour. The town became the undisputed sleaze capital of the world. Hotel bars were rendezvous points for diplomats and journalists, and thus became rumour mills in which gossip became opinion and real or imagined facts became dogmas.

4. Buildings overlooking Minh Square

5. The view from Le Duan Street

6. Glass facade

7. Glass facade

This did not change after until the American withdrawal and the takeover by North Vietnam in April 1975. The number of inhabitants in Saigon had almost doubled and an attempt was made to solve the problem of overpopulation by compulsory resettlement. Hundreds of thousands of Saigonese were transferred to hastily established, barely functioning “New Economic Zones”. These failed, however, due not only to the fact that there was no financial assistance for the people who had been moved into these areas, but because the Vietnamese have extended families which are very much rooted in their native land and practice ancestor worship.

Many of the remaining inhabitants of Saigon also lost their jobs, or could not find jobs for which their qualifications were appropriate. Furthermore, it was a region orientated almost entirely towards agriculture, and basic industries either did not exist, or could not function because spare parts were unavailable. Saigon’s situation deteriorated further after 1978, when the campaign against the black market – mainly run by the Chinese with goods from Thailand – intensified. Many self-employed professionals, especially doctors and pharmacists, had already left the town and fled abroad, taking their assets with them. Now the forced expropriation of the Chinese traders’ goods drove them also to take flight across the sea. They too took all their moveable assets with them. The plight of these “boat people” often attracted the attention of the media, especially the tabloid press.

The third phase of change began at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, as gangs of building workers tackled the urgent needs of restoration and modernisation in their city. A few years earlier, a bicycle had represented the highest aim in life. Today more than a million motorcycles inch their way through the crowded streets.

The inhabitants of Saigon have new dreams: of cars, or homes in the suburbs, since the rents in the inner city are now comparable with those in Singapore and other large cities of this region. This is of course especially true of young people – approximately half of the inhabitants of Saigon were born after 1975 – who are drawn to the city from the rest of Vietnam. But many Vietnamese who fled into exile to escape the Communists are now returning, and since the mid-1990s, foreign investment capital is creating a building boom (although there are also some investment failures). Now the clouds are reflected in the characterless, boring, glass exteriors of the skyscrapers just the same as in the skyscrapers of capital cities the world over. Saigon is the headquarters of the Chief Buddhist of Vietnam, as well as of a Catholic Archbishop. The city has two universities and an Institute of Agriculture, as well as many research institutes and an Academy of Art.

8. The Saigon River

9. Dwellings along the Thi Nghe canal in the Botanical Gardens district

10. Dwellings along the Saigon River

11. Dwellings along the Saigon River

Geography