Vietnam

A country defined by a thousand years of resisting China and thirty of fighting European and American armies, and by winning both. Chinese rule lasted from 111 BCE to 938 CE and left the bureaucracy, the script and the Confucian examination system while producing a national identity built explicitly against it - the Trung sisters' revolt of 40 CE is still commemorated. Later dynasties expanded south at the expense of Champa and the Khmer. France took the country piece by piece from 1858 and ruled it as part of Indochina, running rubber plantations and an opium monopoly. Ho Chi Minh declared independence in September 1945 quoting the American Declaration; France returned, and the war ended with Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where a supposedly unreachable valley was surrounded by artillery hauled over mountains by hand. Partition at the seventeenth parallel was meant to be temporary. The American war that followed killed perhaps three million Vietnamese, dropped more bomb tonnage than all of the Second World War, and ended with Saigon's fall in April 1975. Reunification, then economic reforms from 1986 turned the country into a major manufacturer. It fought China in 1979. Hanoi is the capital. The country has about a hundred million people and a coastline of over three thousand kilometres. Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, is the largest. Ha Long Bay and Hoi An are World Heritage sites. Vietnam is the world's second largest coffee exporter after Brazil. Its written language uses a Latin alphabet devised by missionaries.

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