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Vietnam (Việt Nam)
Vietnamese. Name of the
easternmost Southeast Asian nation on the Indochina Peninsula,
stretching from north to south along the South China Sea. It was
established after the Vietnam War with the unification of South
Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam, which was itself
created in 1954 by combining
Cochinchina
with southern
Annam, and
North Vietnam,
which encompasses the regions formerly referred to as northern Annam
and
Tonkin. The name
literally means ‘Viet [of the] South’ and refers to the people who
lived here, i.e. to the south of
China, the
Asian giant of which it was part for over a millennium. Though of
unknown linguistic origin, it has been suggested that the word Viet
in its Chinese form, i.e. Yue (越), which means
‘beyond’ or ‘to surpass’
and which besides and abbreviation for Yue Nan (越南), i.e. ‘Vietnam’,
is a generic word for peoples or states of south China, or south of
China, and hence Vietnam may be understood to mean the land or
people from southern China, or beyond the southern border of China,
depending on the historical period. Vietnam is situated along the
South China Sea, which by the Vietnamese is referred to as the East
Sea, and borders
China,
Laos
and
Cambodia.
Vietnam's total population is
around 96 million, of which over 85% are ethnic Vietnamese, who are
also referred to as the Viet or
Kinh,
whilst the rest consists of 53 different minority groups. Vietnam
covers a total area of ca. 331,212 km², has 4,639 kilometers of land
borders, a coastline of 3,444 kilometers, and at its narrowest
point, the country is only 50 kilometers across.
Whereas
Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, is the largest city, the
country's capital is Hanoi, Fansipan (Phan Xi Păng) with an altitude
of with 3,143 meters is the highest mountain,
and the
Mae Khong
is the longest river.
The Dong has since long
been the name for the
currency of Vietnam,
even during
the French occupation of Indochina, when the currency was officially
known as the
French Indochinese Piastre
(fig.),
it had the value printed on the banknotes in multiple languages,
i.e. French, Chinese,
Khmer,
Lao, and Vietnamese, and the currency for the latter was already
referred to as Dong.
The country today is a Unitary Marxist–Leninist One-party Socialist
Republic and is officially known as the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
See Vietnam's Places of Interest.
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