It was named by the U.S. after the North Vietnamese president Hồ Chí Minh. The origin of the name is presumed to have come from the First Indochina War, when there was a Viet Minh maritime logistics line called the "Route of Ho Chi Minh",: 126 and shortly after late 1960, as the present trail developed, Agence France-Presse (AFP) announced that a north–south trail had opened, and they named the corridor La Piste de Hồ Chí Minh, the 'Hồ Chí Minh Trail'.: 202 The trail ran mostly in Laos, and was called the Trường Sơn Strategic Supply Route (Đường Trường Sơn) by the communists, after the Vietnamese name for the Annamite Range mountains in central Vietnam.: 28 They further identified the trail as either West Trường Sơn (Laos) or East Trường Sơn (Vietnam).: 202 According to the U.S. National Security Agency's official history of the war, the trail system was "one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century". The trail was able to effectively supply troops fighting in the south, an unparalleled military feat, given it was the site of the single most intense air interdiction campaign in history. (Full article...)
Image 11Water puppetry, lit. "Making puppets dance on water") is a tradition that dates back as far as the 11th century when it originated in the villages of the Red River Delta area of northern Vietnam.
Image 13Hồ Chí Minh attended French Communist Congress in Marseilles in 1921 under the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc.
Image 14Dong Ho painting is a line of Vietnamese folk painting originating in Đông Hồ village (Song Hồ commune, Thuận Thành District, Bắc Ninh Province.
... that Charles Larson became one of the first Americans to teach African literature, after working in Nigeria for the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft?
... that Trần Lập was involved in Vietnam's first internet copyright lawsuit?
... that Don Luce led a group of Americans to a secret part of a South Vietnamese prison where inmates were kept in squalor in what were called "tiger cages"?
... that a proposed footbridge connecting the Asian Garden Mall to another Vietnamese-American shopping center met opposition because it was deemed "too Chinese"?
Image 13A trio of Vietnamese musicians performing together. The man on the far left plays kèn đám ma, the man in the middle plays the đàn nhị and the man on the right plays the trống chầu. (from Culture of Vietnam)
Image 1519th-century manuscript of "Mysterious tales of the Southern Realm" (Lĩnh Nam chích quái), a copy of 15th-century original tale. (from Culture of Vietnam)