The Vietnam War in Saigon: a timeline
To understand the sights in this city you need to understand what happened in it, and the short version is stranger than most people expect. For most of the war, Saigon was not a battlefield. It was a capital city full of bars, hotels, journalists, spies and money, sitting in the middle of a war that was happening somewhere else. Then, twice, the war came to the city itself. The second time, it ended here.
This is not the full story of the Vietnam War, which is a much bigger subject. This is what happened in Saigon.
Before the Americans
The war did not start with the Americans. It started with the French.
Vietnam had been part of French Indochina since the 1880s, and Saigon was its showpiece, a city of boulevards, opera houses and cafes built to look like a French provincial capital dropped into the tropics. That arrangement ended in 1954, when the Viet Minh destroyed a French army at Dien Bien Phu and the First Indochina War was over.
What followed at the negotiating table shaped everything after it. Vietnam was split in two at the seventeenth parallel, with Ho Chi Minh and the communists in Hanoi and an anti-communist state in the south. Saigon became the capital of that southern state, and in 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem pushed aside Emperor Bao Dai, the last of the Nguyen emperors, and declared the Republic of Vietnam with himself as president.
The split was supposed to be temporary. Elections were meant to reunify the country in 1956. They never happened.
Diem, the monks, and a coup
Diem ruled from the palace that now stands in the middle of District 1, and he ruled badly. He was a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, he filled the government with his family, and he treated dissent as treason. By the early 1960s his own capital was turning against him.
It came apart in 1963. In June, an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down in the middle of a Saigon intersection, was doused in petrol by a fellow monk, and burned to death without making a sound while a crowd watched. Malcolm Browne photographed it. The image went around the world in a day and it destroyed whatever was left of Diem’s reputation abroad. His sister-in-law responded by joking about barbecued monks.
In August, Diem sent special forces into Xa Loi Pagoda and pagodas across the country, beating and arresting hundreds of monks. That was the end of him. In November his own generals staged a coup, with Washington’s quiet approval. Diem and his brother fled the palace through an underground tunnel, hid overnight in a church in Cholon, surrendered the next morning, and were shot dead in the back of an armoured personnel carrier on the way into the city.
Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated. The war was about to get much bigger.
The Americans arrive
American combat troops landed in 1965, and within a few years there were half a million of them in the country.
Almost none of them were in Saigon. The fighting was in the countryside, in the jungle, in the highlands, and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that fed men and weapons south. Saigon was the rear: the headquarters, the airbase, the press corps, the embassies, and the money. The city filled with soldiers on leave, with correspondents filing copy, and with an economy built on serving both.
This is the Saigon of the famous hotels. Every afternoon at five, American officers briefed the press at the Rex, sessions the journalists nicknamed the Five O’Clock Follies because so little of what was said matched what reporters had seen in the field themselves. In the evenings they drank on the roof of the Caravelle, where you could watch artillery flashes on the horizon with a glass in your hand.
But the Viet Cong were already in the city. They were living in it, working ordinary jobs, and quietly digging.
The Tet Offensive, 1968
At the end of January 1968, during the Tet new year truce, the war walked into Saigon.
The Tet Offensive hit more than a hundred towns and cities across South Vietnam at once, and the attacks in the capital were designed to be seen. Commandos blew a hole in the wall of the US Embassy and fought inside the compound for six hours. Others attacked the palace, the radio station, the naval headquarters and the airbase. The weapons for the palace attack came out of a bunker dug under a private house on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, a few minutes’ walk from the target.
Militarily, Tet was a disaster for the north. The uprising they expected never came, and their forces were cut apart. But that was never really the point. American audiences had been told the war was nearly won, and then watched a firefight inside their own embassy on the evening news. General Vo Nguyen Giap lost the battle and won the war.
The Americans leave
After Tet, American policy shifted from winning to leaving.
Troop numbers fell year by year. The Paris Peace Accords in 1973 gave Washington the exit it needed, the last American combat troops went home, and South Vietnam was left to fight on with money and equipment but no army beside it. The money dried up too.
When the North launched its final offensive in early 1975, it moved faster than anyone expected. Cities in the highlands fell in days. The retreat turned into a rout. By late April, North Vietnamese divisions were on the edge of Saigon and the war had about a week left in it.
The fall of Saigon, 30 April 1975
The last two days of the war happened within a few square kilometres of where you are probably standing.
With the airport shelled and closed, the Americans launched Operation Frequent Wind, the largest helicopter evacuation in history, lifting people off rooftops and out of the embassy compound and flying them to carriers waiting offshore. On 29 April, a Dutch photographer named Hubert van Es leaned out of a window four blocks away and photographed a queue of people climbing a ladder to a helicopter perched on a rooftop. It became the defining image of the war’s end.
The next morning, 30 April, North Vietnamese tanks reached the Independence Palace and drove through the front gates. The last president of South Vietnam surrendered in the building. By noon it was over. The fall of Saigon had taken less than two days.
What came after
The city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The south was reorganised, hundreds of thousands of people connected to the old regime were sent to re-education camps, and over the years that followed more than a million people left the country by sea. The boat people are a part of this story that most visitors never hear about, and they are the reason 30 April is not remembered the same way in every Vietnamese family.
And the fighting was not over. Within four years Vietnam had invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge, and then fought off a Chinese invasion of its northern border. Two more wars, back to back, in a country that had just finished thirty years of them. Almost no visitor arrives knowing that.
The country you are travelling in today is young, fast, and remarkably unbothered by all of it. Which brings us to what is actually left to see.
Best Vietnam War sights in Ho Chi Minh City
The remarkable thing about the Vietnam War sights in Ho Chi Minh City is how ordinary most of them look. There is no memorial park, no preserved battlefield, no signposted trail. There is a palace, a few pagodas, some hotels that are still hotels, and a handful of unmarked doorways that happen to have bunkers behind them. You could spend a week here and walk past nearly all of it.
The list below runs from the obvious to the almost invisible. Several of these are not tourist attractions in any real sense, and two of them are private buildings you talk your way into. That is exactly why they are worth the trouble.
1. Reunification Palace
This is where the war ended, and it is the one sight nobody should skip.
The Reunification Palace was the home and office of the president of South Vietnam, and on the morning of 30 April 1975 a North Vietnamese tank drove through its front gates and the war was over. The building was left almost exactly as it was found. Walking through it is less like visiting a museum than walking into a house where everyone left in a hurry in 1975 and nobody has redecorated since: rotary phones, wood panelling, a cabinet room with a green baize table, a cinema, and a rooftop helipad.
The best part is underground. Beneath the palace is the command bunker, a warren of low concrete corridors with war rooms, radio equipment, maps still on the walls, and the president’s emergency quarters. It is cool, dim, and genuinely atmospheric, and it is where the last hours of the Republic of Vietnam were spent.
One honest note. The two tanks parked on the front lawn are not the ones that came through the gate. The originals are in Hanoi. It is the right spot, the wrong tanks.
2. The rooftop from the photograph
Address: 22 Ly Tu Trong, District 1, opposite the Vincom mall.
You know the photograph even if you do not know you know it. A helicopter balanced on a rooftop, a ladder, and a line of people climbing towards it while a man in a white shirt reaches down to pull them up. It is the image of the end of the Vietnam War, reprinted every April for fifty years.
Almost everything most people believe about it is wrong. This is not the US Embassy. It never was. The building is the old Pittman Apartments, which housed CIA and USAID staff, and it sits four blocks from where the embassy actually stood. Hubert van Es photographed it on 29 April 1975 from the UPI office down the road with a 300mm lens, and somewhere between Saigon and the newsroom the caption got it wrong. It has been wrong ever since.
The building is still there, still lived in, and completely unmarked. There are no signs, no ticket desk, and no acknowledgement of any kind that anything happened here. Walk in, take the lift to the ninth floor, and go up the last flight of stairs to the roof. The guard will usually let you up for around 100,000 dong. The rooftop and the lift shaft the helicopter perched on are still there, and the city has grown up around them in a way that makes the whole thing feel oddly small.
If you would rather not go in, you can see the roof from the street. Stand between the cathedral and the Central Post Office and look towards it. The angle is almost the same as the photograph.
Go soon. This building will not survive the next round of development.
3. The secret weapons bunker
Address: 287/70 Nguyen Dinh Chieu, District 3.
The best sight in this guide, and one that hardly any visitor sees.
In 1966 a man named Tran Van Lai bought an ordinary house down an ordinary alley. To his neighbours he was a wealthy contractor who did interior work for the presidential palace, which he genuinely did. He was also a Viet Cong commando. He sent his family away, and over several months, working alone at night, he dug a bunker under the floor of his own house. He told anyone who asked that he was fixing the septic tank, and he carried the excavated soil out in boxes in the back of his car, a little at a time, and dumped it across the city.
Into that bunker went more than two tonnes of weapons: explosives, C4, detonators, rocket launchers, rifles and grenades, smuggled in hidden inside furniture and rolled up in rugs. On the night of the Tet Offensive in 1968, they came back out again, and the commandos who attacked the Independence Palace were armed from this house.
The palace they attacked is about a ten minute walk away. That is the thing that lands hardest when you stand there.
It is a national heritage site now, and you can go inside and climb down into the bunker itself, which is exactly as cramped and airless as you would expect. The house is small, the alley is narrow, and it is easy to walk past the entrance. Go early, because the space only holds a handful of people at a time.
4. Cafe Do Phu, the commando coffee house
Address: 113A Dang Dung, District 1.
A working coffee shop that used to be a secret base.
Before 1975 this wooden house sold coffee and com tam to the neighbourhood, including, cheerfully, to Korean soldiers stationed nearby. What none of those customers knew was that the family running it were part of the same commando network as the bunker above, and that the house was a safe house and a message drop. There are still hidden compartments in it, including a concealed space where documents were passed and a bunker beneath the floor.
Today it is a cafe again. You order a Vietnamese coffee, sit in a room full of old photographs, and the hidden compartments are simply there, part of the furniture. It is a strange and rather wonderful place, and it costs you the price of a coffee.
5. The Cu Chi Tunnels
The most famous war site in the region, and the only one on this list that needs a full day.
The Cu Chi Tunnels are what the bunker on Nguyen Dinh Chieu was a fragment of: an underground network of hundreds of kilometres, dug by hand, where an entire guerrilla infrastructure lived, cooked, treated its wounded, and fought, directly beneath an American base. A short section has been opened up and widened, and you can crawl through it.
There are two sites. Ben Dinh is closer to the city and much busier. Ben Duoc is further out, quieter, and the better visit if you have the time.
Be prepared for the shooting range, where visitors fire live rifles for a fee. You will hear it across the whole site, and it is jarring.
6. Thich Quang Duc Memorial
Address: corner of Cach Mang Thang Tam and Nguyen Dinh Chieu, District 3.
This is the intersection where the monk burned.
On 11 June 1963, Thich Quang Duc was driven to this junction, sat down in the lotus position in the middle of the road, and was set alight by a fellow monk while several hundred people watched. He did not move, and he did not make a sound. Malcolm Browne’s photograph of it is one of the most famous images ever taken, and it changed how the world saw the Diem regime overnight.
The corner is now a small memorial park with a bronze statue that recreates the photograph almost exactly: the seated monk, the flames, the car behind him. It is a busy intersection with traffic going past on all sides, and it takes ten minutes to visit. Standing there and looking at the road is the whole point.
7. Xa Loi Pagoda
A short walk from the memorial, and part of the same story.
Xa Loi Pagoda was the centre of Buddhist resistance to Ngo Dinh Diem, and in August 1963 his special forces raided it, beating and arresting hundreds of monks and looting the building. It was the moment the Americans decided he could not be saved, and his generals killed him three months later.
It is a working pagoda today, calm and largely empty of tourists, and there is very little to tell you what happened here. Which is, in its way, the point.
8. Cha Tam Church
The last place Ngo Dinh Diem was alive.
On the night of the coup in November 1963, Diem and his brother escaped the palace, crossed the city to Cholon, and spent their final night hiding in Cha Tam Church. In the morning they telephoned the generals and surrendered, on the promise of safe passage. An armoured personnel carrier was sent to collect them. They were both shot dead inside it before it reached the city centre.
The church is still a working parish church in Chinatown, quiet and pretty and almost entirely unvisited. You can sit in the pew where he waited. There is a small plaque. Most people in the building have no idea.
9. The hotels of the war correspondents
Four hotels, all still open, all still serving drinks on the roof.
The Rex is where the American military briefed the press every afternoon at five, sessions the journalists christened the Five O’Clock Follies because so little of what was announced resembled what they had seen in the field. Its rooftop bar was where officers and reporters drank together afterwards.
The Caravelle was the American press headquarters. NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post all had bureaus in the building, and the rooftop bar, now called Saigon Saigon, was the unofficial press club. Walter Cronkite drank there. From that roof you could watch the war on the horizon.
The Continental, opposite the Opera House, is the older, more literary one. Graham Greene wrote much of The Quiet American here, and the hotel appears in the book.
The Majestic, down on the river, had the other famous rooftop, with a view straight across the water to where the fighting sometimes was.
You do not need to stay in any of them. Go up, buy one overpriced drink, and look out at the city. It is the cheapest time travel available in Saigon.
10. The former US Embassy
Address: 4 Le Duan, District 1.
Included so that you do not waste your time.
This is the real US Embassy site, the one attacked during the Tet Offensive when a Viet Cong sapper team blew through the perimeter wall and fought inside the compound for six hours while American television watched. It was one of the most consequential firefights of the entire war.
There is nothing to see. The old building was demolished in 1998, and the site is now the US Consulate: a wall, a fence, guards, and a queue of people applying for visas. You cannot go in, you cannot photograph much, and there is a small memorial plaque on the wall that most people never notice.
Go and look at it if you are walking past. Do not make a trip.
11. Dan Sinh Market
The old war surplus market, and a genuinely strange place.
For decades Dan Sinh Market was where the physical debris of the American war ended up: helmets, dog tags, canteens, boots, jackets, Zippo lighters, ammunition boxes. Americans left an enormous amount of equipment behind in 1975 and a lot of it was sold here.
Be honest with yourself about what you are buying. The genuine stock ran out a long time ago, and most of what is now sold as authentic war surplus is reproduction, including the engraved Zippos, which are made by the crate. Some of it is convincing. None of it is what the seller says it is.
Go for the atmosphere and the browsing, not for a relic. It is mostly a working hardware and workwear market now, with the war stuff in one corner.
12. The gold shop that funded the commandos
Address: 368 Hai Ba Trung, District 1.
A three-storey house on one of the most expensive streets in the city, shuttered and quiet while shops trade all around it, with a Viet Cong flag hanging above the door.
This was the Phu Xuan gold leaf shop, opened in 1930, and it became an intelligence hub and the financial engine behind the Saigon commandos. There are underground bunkers inside it, both horizontal and vertical, used to hide documents, gold, cash and people through both the French and American wars.
It is being restored as a historical site. Check whether it has opened before you make the walk, because at the time of writing you can look at the outside and that is all.
Museums about the Vietnam War in Ho Chi Minh City
Ho Chi Minh City has a lot of museums, and travellers regularly lose a morning to one that turns out to have nothing to do with the war at all. Only one museum here is genuinely about the Vietnam War. Two others cover it in part, and both are worth your time for different reasons. The rest do not, and it is worth knowing which is which before you set out.
War Remnants Museum
This is the one, and you should go.
The War Remnants Museum is entirely about the war, and it is the most affecting hour you will spend in this city. The ground floor and the courtyard are the easy part: tanks, helicopters, fighter jets and artillery parked outside, and a room of historical context inside. Upstairs is where it gets hard. There is an extraordinary exhibition of war photography, much of it taken by photographers who died doing it, and a floor dedicated to the consequences of chemical weapons, with photographs of the deformities caused by Agent Orange that are genuinely difficult to look at. There is a reconstruction of the tiger cages used to hold prisoners, and a room on the My Lai massacre.
Two honest things need saying.
The first is that this museum is one-sided, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is the Vietnamese account of the war, told by the winners, and there is very little here about atrocities committed by the other side or about what happened after 1975. If you come expecting a balanced international history, you will not get one. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to know what you are reading.
The second is that it is not a comfortable visit, and you should not treat it as a box to tick between lunch and a coffee. Give it two hours and give yourself a quiet walk afterwards.
Ho Chi Minh City Museum
Partly about the war, and worth visiting for a reason almost nobody mentions.
On the surface, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum is a general city museum in a beautiful colonial building, with rooms on archaeology, trade, and the city’s development. Some of it is dry.
The building itself is the point. This was Gia Long Palace, and Ngo Dinh Diem used it as his residence. Underneath it is a bunker and a network of tunnels he had built, and on the night of the coup in November 1963, this is where he was when the shooting started, and this is where he escaped from. He went down into that bunker, out through the tunnels, and across the city to a church in Cholon, where he spent the last night of his life.
So the story runs: the bunker here, then Cha Tam Church, then the back of an armoured car. You can visit both ends of it in an afternoon.
Access to the underground section has come and gone over the years, so check on arrival rather than assuming.
Southern Women’s Museum
The underrated one, and the museum most likely to surprise you.
The Southern Women’s Museum is only partly about the war, but the war section is substantial and it is unlike anything at the War Remnants Museum. It covers the women who fought: the female guerrillas, the intelligence agents, the messengers, the prisoners who went through Con Dao, and the so-called Long Hair Army of women who organised political resistance across the Mekong Delta.
It is a side of the war that is almost entirely absent from Western accounts, where Vietnamese women appear mostly as victims or as background. Here they are the story. The museum is quiet, rarely busy, and free of the crowds you get elsewhere, and it makes a good, calmer counterpart to a heavy morning at the War Remnants.
What the war left behind in Ho Chi Minh City
The war is not kept in the museums. It is in the street names, in the calendar, in the language people use, and in the fact that this city is called Ho Chi Minh City at all. Most of it you will walk past without noticing. Once you know it is there, you cannot stop seeing it.
Reunification Day, 30 April
The biggest national holiday in Vietnam, and it happened here.
Every year on 30 April the country marks the day the war ended, and because it ended in this city, Saigon gets the largest events. In big anniversary years the celebrations are enormous: military parades down Le Duan with tanks and troops, aircraft overhead, and crowds packing the streets around the palace from before dawn.
Practically, it is worth planning around. The city fills up, hotels are booked out, prices rise, and central streets close, often for days beforehand while rehearsals run. Combined with Labour Day on 1 May it becomes a long public holiday and the whole country travels at once. If you are here for it, it is a genuine spectacle. If you are not interested, avoid these dates entirely. There is more on what happens and how the day is marked in our guide to Reunification Day.
One honest note. It is called Reunification Day officially, and Liberation Day informally, but it is not a day of celebration in every Vietnamese family. For many people in the south, and for the Vietnamese communities abroad who left as boat people in the years afterwards, 30 April is remembered as a loss. Both things are true at the same time, in the same city.
The street names are a history lesson
This is the best free thing in this guide, and you can do it while walking to lunch.
Almost every street in central Ho Chi Minh City is named after someone or something from the country’s wars, and once you know that, the map turns into a memorial. The CIA rooftop stands on Ly Tu Trong, named after a teenage revolutionary the French executed in 1931. The Thich Quang Duc memorial sits on the corner of Cach Mang Thang Tam, which simply means “August Revolution”. You will walk down Le Duan, the man who ran the war from Hanoi, and Vo Thi Sau, a young woman executed by the French at nineteen, and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, and dozens more.
The renaming was deliberate. After 1975 the old names went, and the new ones were a statement about who the city belonged to now. It is the quietest and most complete piece of war legacy in Saigon, and it is under your feet on every street.
It is not called the Vietnam War here
Worth knowing before you open your mouth.
To Vietnamese people this is the American War, or more formally the Resistance War Against America. The name tells you the whole perspective in three words: for them, this was not a war in Vietnam, it was a war against an invader, and it was one in a long series that includes the French, the Japanese, and the Chinese before them.
Nobody will correct you if you say Vietnam War. But using their name for it, once, in conversation, is a small courtesy that lands well.
How to talk about the war in Vietnam
There are two things to understand here, and they pull in different directions.
The first will surprise you. Vietnam is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, consistently and by a wide margin, and American travellers often arrive braced for a hostility that simply never comes. It can be disorienting. You spend an hour in the War Remnants Museum looking at photographs of what your country did, walk back out onto the street, and the man selling you a coffee could not be warmer. Part of the reason is arithmetic: around two thirds of the population was born after 1975, so for most people you meet the war is their grandparents’ story, not theirs. Part of it is that Vietnam has spent much of its history fighting somebody, and has developed a national habit of winning, moving on, and trading with the loser afterwards.
The second thing is the one to actually pay attention to. Vietnamese people are relaxed about Americans, but they are not relaxed about criticism of Vietnam. Speaking badly of the country, the government, or Ho Chi Minh himself is a different matter entirely, and it will land badly even with people who are being perfectly friendly with you. Ho Chi Minh in particular is not a figure people debate here. He is on the currency, in the schools, and in the name of the city, and he is treated with a respect that has no real Western equivalent.
So the practical advice is simple. Ask questions, be curious, and let people tell you what they think. Older people especially will often share a great deal if you show genuine interest. But do not offer your verdict on Vietnamese politics, do not make jokes about Ho Chi Minh, and do not go looking for an argument about the current government. Curiosity is welcome anywhere. Lecturing is not.
Seeing the war sights in one day
It all fits, and it fits comfortably, because almost everything is in District 1 and District 3.
Morning. Start at the War Remnants Museum, before the tour groups and the heat. Then walk ten minutes to the Reunification Palace and go through the building and the bunker.
Midday. Head into District 3, where three sights sit within a few blocks of each other: the secret weapons bunker on Nguyen Dinh Chieu, the Thich Quang Duc memorial at the intersection, and Xa Loi Pagoda. Eat somewhere around there.
Afternoon. Back into District 1 for the rooftop at 22 Ly Tu Trong. If you have energy, Cha Tam Church is out in Chinatown and needs a Grab, so it works better as a pairing with a Cholon afternoon.
Evening. A drink on the roof of the Caravelle or the Rex, which after a day like that is not a bad way to think about it.
Cu Chi needs its own day. Do not try to bolt it on.
War sights beyond Saigon
Saigon has the beginning and the end of the story, but not the middle.
The rest of it is spread across the country: the tunnels and battlefields of the centre, the DMZ and the old border at the seventeenth parallel, Khe Sanh, the Hue citadel, Con Dao and its prisons, and the traces of the Ho Chi Minh Trail running down the spine of Vietnam. If the war is the reason you are here, Saigon is where to start and not where to stop. Our full list of Vietnam War sights across the country covers where to go next.
What to read and watch first
You will get more out of every sight in this guide if you arrive with some of this already in your head.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene, written in the Continental Hotel and set in the streets you will be walking, and prophetic about the whole thing before the Americans had properly arrived. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which opens with the fall of Saigon and is the rare account written from a Vietnamese perspective that also happens to be a brilliant novel. And Dispatches by Michael Herr, for what the war actually felt like to the people covering it from the bars on Nguyen Hue.
