Country on the east coast of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. It is bordered by China to the north and by Cambodia and Laos to the west (see fig.). The capital is Hanoi, and other population centres are Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and Hue. Vietnam’s present frontiers date from 1802, when it was unified after almost 200 years of disunity (see §I, 2 below). In 1954 the country was partitioned, with the Communist north being separated from the American-backed south, but it was reunified in 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Philip Stott Vietnam stretches more than 1800 km from the mountainous plateau on the border with Yunnan Province, China, to the tropical delta of the Mekong River in the south, one of the great rice-growing areas of Asia. The backbone of this long thin country comprises the central mountains of the Annam Cordillera. Major settlement has generally been confined to the narrow strip of coastal lowlands, especially the wide valleys of the Song Hong (Red River) and Song Da (Black River). The country’s climate is governed by monsoons, and the seasons are much more marked in the north than in the south. Vietnam is rich in reserves of coal, oil and iron ore, but its economic development at the end of the 20th century continued to be hampered by problems of integration. The population in the 1990s was ...