Names of Ho Chi Minh City

The city now known as Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon (its antecedent) (Vietnamese: Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh  listen) has gone by several different names during its history, reflecting settlement by different ethnic, cultural and political groups. Originally known as Prey Nôkôr while a part of the Khmer Empire, it came to be dubbed Sài Gòn ( listen) informally by Vietnamese settlers fleeing the Trịnh–Nguyễn War to the north. In time, control of the city and the area passed to the Vietnamese, who gave the city the name of Gia Định. This name remained until the time of French conquest in the 1860s, when the occupying force adopted the name Saigon for the city, a westernized form of the traditional name. The current name was given after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and honors Hồ Chí Minh, the first leader of North Vietnam. Even today, however, the informal name of Sài Gòn remains in daily speech both domestically and internationally, especially among the Vietnamese diaspora and local southern Vietnamese.

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