Vietnam

The territory of present-day Vietnam has been inhabited since prehistoric times, with the Dong Son culture of the Red River Delta producing distinctive bronze drums from roughly the first millennium BCE. Vietnamese tradition traces the earliest polity to the legendary Hong Bang dynasty and the kingdom of Van Lang, succeeded by Au Lac in the third century BCE. In 111 BCE the Han empire incorporated the northern lands as the commandery of Giao Chi, beginning roughly a thousand years of intermittent Chinese rule that left enduring imprints on language, administration, and Confucian learning, while also provoking repeated revolts, most famously the rising of the Trung sisters in 40 CE.

Vietnamese independence was consolidated after Ngo Quyen's victory at the Bach Dang River in 938. A succession of indigenous dynasties, the Ly, Tran, Le, and briefly the Ho and Mac, governed from Thang Long (modern Hanoi), repelling Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century and gradually expanding southward in a process known as the nam tien, which absorbed much of the Hindu kingdom of Champa by the seventeenth century. From the sixteenth century the country was effectively partitioned between the Trinh lords in the north and the Nguyen lords in the south, until the Tay Son rebellion of the 1770s briefly reunified the realm. In 1802 Nguyen Anh founded the Nguyen dynasty as Emperor Gia Long, with his capital at Hue, and adopted the name Viet Nam.

French involvement, beginning with the seizure of Saigon in 1859, culminated in the establishment of French Indochina in 1887, which combined the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam, the colony of Cochinchina, and neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. Colonial rule reshaped the economy around rice and rubber exports while nationalist and communist movements gathered force, the latter organised after 1930 by Ho Chi Minh. Japanese occupation during the Second World War weakened French authority, and on 2 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi.

The First Indochina War (1946 to 1954) ended with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords, which provisionally partitioned the country at the seventeenth parallel into a communist north and a Western-aligned Republic of Vietnam in the south. The ensuing Vietnam War drew in the United States on a massive scale through the 1960s before American withdrawal in 1973 and the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on 30 April 1975. Reunification followed in 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a single party state under the Communist Party of Vietnam. A brief border war with China in 1979, prolonged occupation of Cambodia until 1989, and severe postwar economic strain set the stage for the doi moi reforms launched in 1986, which introduced market mechanisms while preserving party rule.

In the post Cold War era Vietnam normalised relations with China in 1991 and with the United States in 1995, joined ASEAN that same year, and acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2007, becoming one of Asia's faster growing economies. The country today is a unitary socialist republic governed under the 2013 constitution, with political authority concentrated in the Communist Party of Vietnam and exercised through the National Assembly, the State President, and the Prime Minister.