ABSTRACT
Hochiminh City in Vietnam has been shaped by successive waves of colonisation, by a 20-year war against the Americans, by alternative prescriptions for development driven by different ideological interpretations and by Vietnamese pragmatism in advancing economic and social development. The traditional Vietnamese name for Hochiminh City was GiaDinh, discarded by the French in 1862 in favour of Saigon and officially renamed Hochiminh City in 1975. Today the citizens of Hochiminh still refer to the city as Saigon and introduce themselves as ‘Saigonese’.
