In this, the largest of
Vietnam’s cities, you’ll see the hustle
and bustle of Vietnamese life
everywhere, and there is something
invigorating about it all. Contrasting
images of the exotic and mundane abound.
There are street markets, where bargains
are struck and deals done; the pavement
cafés, where stereo speakers fill the
surrounding streets with a melodious
thumping beat; and the sleek new café
and pubs, where tourists chat over beer,
peanuts, coffee and croissants. A young
office worker man oeuvres her Honda
Dream through rush-hour-traffic, long
hair flowing, high heels working the
brake pedal. The sweating Chinese
businessman chats on his cellular phone,
cursing this necktie in the tropical
heat. A desperate beggar suddenly grabs
your arm, a rude reminder that this is
still a developing city despite the
trimmings.
The city churns, ferments, bubbles and fumes. Yet within this
teeming 300-year-old metropolis are
timeless traditions and the beauty of an
ancient culture. In the pagodas monks
pray and incense burns. Artists create
masterpieces on canvas or in carved
wood. Puppeteers entertain children in
the parks, while in the back alleys,
where tourists seldom venture,
acupuncturists treat patients and
students learn to play the violin. A
seamstress carefully creates an ao dai,
the graceful Vietnamese costume that
make the fashion designers of Paris envious.
Actually, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is not also much a city as
a small province covering an area of
2029 sq km stretching from the
South China Sea almost to the Cambodian
border. Rural regions make up about 90%
of the land area of HCMC and hold around
25% of the municipality’s population;
the other 75 % is crammed into the
remaining 10 % of land, which
constitutes the urban center.
Unofficially the city is still called
‘Saigon’ but officially, Saigon refers
only to district 1, which is one small
piece the municipal pie. Southerners
certainly prefer the name Saigon, but if
you have to deal with government
officials, it’s better to use HCMC. To
the west of the city center is District
5, the huge Chinese neighborhood
called.Cho Lon, which means Big Market.
However, it is decidedly less Chinese
than it use to be, largely thanks to the
ant capitalist and anti-Chinese campaign
from 1978-1979, which caused many ethnic
Chinese to flee the country – taking
with them their money and
entrepreneurial skills. Many of these
refugees are now returning ( with
foreign passports) to explore investment
possibilities and Cholon’s hotels are
once again packed with Chinese-speaking
business people. Officially, greater
HCMC claims a population of 51/2
million, although seven to eight million
may be the real figure: the government
census counts only those who have
official residence permits and probably
a third of the population lives here
illegally. Many of these illegal
residents actually lived in the city
before 1975, but their residence permits
were transferred to rural re-education
camps after reunification
RECOMMEND VISIT PLACE IN HCM CITYON YOUR TRIP
Not surprisingly, they (and their children and grandchildren)
have simply sneaked back into the city, although
without a residence permit they cannot own
property or a business. They are being enjoyed
by an in creasing number of rural peasants who
come to seek their fortune many end up sleeping
on the pavement. Still, the city accommodates
them all. This is industrial and commercial
heart of
Vietnam, accounting for 30% of the country’s
manufacturing output and 25% of its retail
trade. Incomes here are three times the national
average. It is HCMC that the vast majority of
foreign businesspeople come to invest and trade.
It is to here that ambitious young people and
bureaucrats – from the north and south –
gravitate, in order to make a go of it.
Explosive growth is making its mark with new
high-rise buildings, joint-venture hotels and
colorful shops. The downside is the sharp
increase in traffic, pollution and other urban
ills. Still, the city’s neoclassical and
international-style buildings, and pavement
kiosks selling French rolls and croissants, give
neighborhoods such as district 3 an attractive,
vaguely French atmosphere. The Americans left
their mark on the city too, at least in the form
of some heavily fortified apartment blocks and
government buildings. HCMC hums and buzzes with
the tenacious will of human being to survive and
improve their lot. It is here that the economic
changes sweeping Vietnam (and their negative
social implications) are most evident.
HISTORY
The French captured
Saigon in 1859, becoming the capital of the
French colony of Cochin China a few years later. In 1950, the author Norman Lewis described
Saigon as follows “ Its inspiration has been
purely commercial and it is therefore without
folly, fervors of much ostentation….a pleasant,
colorless and characterless French provincial
city. The city served as the capital of the
Republic of Vietnam from 1956 until 1975, when
it fell to advancing North Vietnamese forces.
Cholon rose to prominence after Chinese
merchants began setting there in 1778 and,
despite the mass migrations after 1975, it still
constitutes the largest ethnic-Chinese community
in Vietnam.
AROUND HO CHI MINH C ITY
CU CHI TUNNEL
The town of
Cu Chi has now become a district of greater Ho
Chi Minh City (HCMC), and has a population of
about 200,000 (it has about 80,000 residents
during the American War). At first glance, there
is litter evidence here indicate the intense
fighting, bombing and destruction that event on
Cu Chi during the war. To see that went on, you
have to dig deeper – underground. The tunnel
network of Cu Chi became legendary during 1960s
for its role in facilitating Viet Cong (VC)
control of a large rural area only 30km to 40km
from HCMC. At its height, the tunnel system
stretched from the south Vietnamese capital to
the Cambodia border; in the district of Cu Chi
alone, there were more than 250km of tunnels.
The network, parts of which were several stored
deep, included innumerable trap doors, specially
constructed living areas, storage facilities,
weapon factories, field hospitals, command
centers and kitchens. The tunnel made possible
communication and coordination between the
VC-controlled enclaves, isolated from each other
by South Vietnamese and American land and air
operations. They also allowed the VC to mount
surprise attacks wherever the tunnel went – even
within the perimeters of the US
military base at Dong Du – and to disappear into
hidden trapdoors without a trace. After ground
operations against the tunnel claimed large
numbers of US casualties and proved ineffective,
the American resorted to massive firepower,
eventually turning Cu Chi’s 420 sq km into what
the authors of the Tunnel of Cu Chi (Tom Mangold
& John Penycate) have called ‘ the most bombed,
shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally
devastated area in the history of warfare’. Cu
chi has become a place of pilgrimage for
Vietnamese school children and communist-party
cadres. Parts of this remarkable tunnel network
(which are enlarged and upgraded versions of the
real thing) are open to the public. The
unadulterated tunnels, are hard to get to and
are rarely visited.
There are numerous war cemeteries all around Cu Chi.
HISTORY
The tunnels of Cu Chi were the built over a period of 25
years, which began some time in the late 1940s.
They were the improvised response of a poorly
equipped peasant army to its enemy’s high-tech
ordnance, helicopters, artillery, bombers and
chemical weapons.
The Viet Minh built the first dugouts and tunnels in the
hard, red earth of Cu Chi (the area is ideal for
the construction of tunnels) during the was
against the French. The excavations were used
mostly for communication between villages and to
evade French army sweeps of the area. When the
VC’s National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency
began in earnest around 1960, the old Viet Minh
tunnels were repaired and new extensions were
excavated. Within a few years the tunnel system
assumed enormous strategic importance, and most
of Cu Chi district and the near by area came
under firm VC control. In addition, Cu Chi was
used as a base for infiltrating intelligence
agents and sabotage teams into Saigon. The stunning attacks in the South Vietnamese capital during
the 1968 Tet Offensive were planned and launched
from Cu Chi. In early 1963, the Diem government
implemented the botched Strategic Hamlets
Program, under which fortified encampment,
surrounded by many rows of sharp bamboo spikes,
were built to house people ‘ relocated ‘ from
communist-controlled areas. The first strategic
hamlet was in Ben Cat district, next to Cu Chi.
Not only was programmed carried out with
incredible incompetence, alienating the
peasantry, but the VC launched a major effort to
defeat it; the VC was able tunnel into the
hamlets and control them from within. The end of
1963 had overrun the first showpiece hamlet. The
series of setbacks and defeats suffered by the
South Vietnamese Forces in the Cu Chi area
rendered a complete VC victory by the end of
1965 a distinct possibility. In the early months
of that year, the guerrillas boldly held a
victory parade in the middle of Cu Chi town. VC
strength in and around Cu Chi was one of the
reasons the Johnson administration decided to
involve US troops in the war. To deal with the
threat posed by VC control of an area so near
the South Vietnamese capital, one of the
USA’s first actions was to establish a large
base camp in Cu Chi district. Unknowingly, they
built it right on top of an existing tunnel
network. It took months for 25th Division to
figure out why they kept getting shot at in
their tents at night.
The US and Australian troops tried a variety of methods to
‘pacify’ the area around Cu Chi, which came to
be known as the Iron Triangle. They launched
large-scale ground operations involving tens of
thousands of troops, but failed to locate the
tunnels. To deny the VC cover and supplies, rice
paddies were defoliated, huge swathes of jungle
bulldozed, and villages evacuated and razed. The
American also sprayed chemical defoliants on the
area from the air and then, a few months later,
ignited the tinder-dry vegetation with gasoline
and napalm. But the intense heat interacted with
the wet tropical air in such a way as to create
cloudbursts that extinguished the fires. The VC
remained safe and sound in their tunnels. Unable
to win this battle with chemicals, the US
army began sending men down into the tunnels.
These ‘tunnel rats’, who were often involved in
underground firefights, sustained appallingly
high casualty rates. When the Americans began
using German shepherd dogs, trained to use their
keen sense of smell to locate trapdoors and
guerrillas, the VC put out pepper to distract
the dogs. They also began washing with American
toilet soap, which gave off a scent the canines
identified as friendly. Captured US uniforms,
which had the familiar smell of bodies nourished
on US-style food, were put out to confuse the
dogs further. Most importantly, the dogs were
not able to spot booby traps. So many dogs were
killed or maimed that their horrified handlers
refused to send them into the tunnels. The US
declared Cu Chi a free-strike zone: minimal
authorization was needed to shoot at anything in
the area, random artillery was fired into the
area at night, and pilot were told to drop
unused bombs and napalm there before returning
to base. But the VC stayed put. Finally, in the
late 1960s, American B-52s carpet-bombed the
whole area, destroying most of the tunnels along
with everything else around. The gesture was
militarily useless by then because the US
was already on its way out of the war. The
tunnel had served their purpose. The VC
guerrillas serving in the tunnel lived in
extremely difficult conditions and suffered
horrific casualties. Only about 6000 of the
16,000 cadres who fought in the tunnels survived
the war. In addition, thousands of civilians in
the area were killed. Their tenacity was
extraordinary considering the bombings, the
pressures of living underground for weeks or
months at a time, and the deaths of countless
friends and comrades. The villages of Cu Chi
have since been presented with numerous
honorific awards, decorations and citations by
the government, and many have been declared
‘heroic villages’. Since 1975 new hamlets have
been established and the population of the area
has more than doubled; however chemical
defoliants remain in the soil and water, and
crop yields are still poor.
THE TUNNELS
Over the years the VC, learning by trial and error, developed
simple but effective techniques to make their
tunnel difficult to detect or disable. Wooden
trapdoors were camouflaged with earth and
branches; some were booby-trapped. Hidden
underwater entrances from rivers were
constructed. To cook, they used ‘Dien Bien Phu kitchens’ which exhausted the smoke through vents many
meters away from the cooking site. Trapdoors
were installed throughout the network to prevent
tear gas, smoke or water from moving from one
part of the system to another. Some sections
were even equipped with electric lighting.
Presently, two of the tunnel sites are open for
visitors. One is the
village of Ben Dinh and another one is at Ben
Duoc.
BEN DINH: This small, renovated section of the tunnel system
(admission 65,000d) is near the
village of Ben Dinh, 50km from HCMC. In one of
the classrooms at the visitors center, a large
map shows the extent of the network (the area
shown is in the northwestern corner of greater
HCMC). The tunnels are marked in red, VC bases
are shown in the light grey and the light blue
lines are rivers (The Saigon River at the top).
Fortified villages held by South Vietnamese and
American forces are marked in grey, while blue
dots represent the American and South Vietnamese
military posts that were supposed to ensure the
security of nearby villages. The dark blue area
in the center is the base of the American 25th
Infantry Division. Most prearranged tours do not
take you to this former base, but it is not off
limits and you can arrange a visit if you have
your own guide and driver. To the right of large
map are two cross-section diagrams of the
tunnels. The bottom diagram is a reproduction of
one used by General William Westmoreland, the
commander of American forces in Vietnam
(1964-1968). For one, the Americans seemed to
have had their intelligence information right
(though the tunnels did not pass under the
rivers, nor did the guerrillas wear headgear
underground).
The section of the tunnel system presently open to visitors
is few hundred meters south of the visitors’
center. It snakes up and down through various
chambers along its 50m length. The unlit tunnels
are about 1,2m high and 80cm across. A
knocked-out M-41 tank and bomb crater are near
the exit, which is in a reforested eucalyptus
grove.
BEN DUOC: these are not the genuine
tunnels, but a full reconstruction (admission
65,000d) for the benefit of visitors. The
emphasis here is more on the fun fair (tourists
are given the chance to imagine what is was like
to be a guerrilla) and attracts far more
Vietnamese than foreigner visitors
TAY NINH
Tel: 066 * Pop: 41,300
Tay Ninh town, the capital of Tay Ninh province, served as
the headquarters of one of
Vietnam’s most interesting indigenous religions,
Caodaism. The Caodai great temple at the sect’s
Holy See is one of the most striking structures
in all of Asia. Built between 1933 and 1955, the
temple is a rococo extravaganza combining the
conflicting architectural idiosyncrasies of a
French church, a Chinese pagoda, Hong Kong’s
Tiger Balm Gardens and Madame Tussaud’s Wax
Museum. Tay Ninh province, northwest of HCMC, is
bordered by Cambodia on three sides. The area’s
dominant geographic feature is Nui Ba Den (Black
Lady Mountain) , which towers above the
surrounding plains. The Saigon River forms Tay
Ninh province’s eastern border. The Vam Co River
flows from Cambodia through the western part of
the province.
Because of the one-vaunted political and military power of
the Caodai, this region was the scene of
prolonged and heavy fighting during the
Franco-Viet Minh War. Tay Ninh province served
as a major terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
during the American War, and in 1969 the VC
captured Tay Ninh town and held it for several
days. During the period of tension between
Cambodia and Vietnam in the late 1970s, the
Khmer Rouge launched a number of cross-border
raids into Tay Ninh province, and committed
atrocities against civilians. Several cemeteries
around Tay Ninh are stark reminder of these
events.
