The French called it Tourane, a garbled version of a river-mouth name
Da Nang is Vietnam's fourth-largest city by population and second-largest by area, a port and road-rail hub on the central coast that hosted APEC in 2017. Almost every name it has carried, from the Cham original to the French Tourane, refers to its place at the mouth of the Hàn River.
Linguists have several candidates for the name's origin. Many accept a Vietnamese adaptation of the Cham da nak, an opening of a large river. The Champa scholar Inrasara prefers daknan, big water, while another researcher, Sakaya, links it to the Raglai word danang, a river's source. In the Đại Việt era the small settlement was Cửa Hàn, the mouth of the Han, spelled Cua han on Alexandre de Rhodes's maps of 1650, and the French name Tourane, used during colonial rule from 1884 to 1945, is said to be a rough rendering of it. Other names include Kean for the land below the Hải Vân Pass, the folk name Vũng Thùng, literary names used by Confucian scholars, a Chinese name derived from clam harbour, and, after the 1945 August Revolution, Thái Phiên, honouring a leader of the 1916 Duy Tân revolt.
Administratively the city has been reshaped repeatedly. It belonged to Quang Nam-Da Nang province until 1 January 1997, when it became one of Vietnam's centrally governed municipalities and a first-class city. Under a plan announced in April 2025 and effective from 1 July that year, Quảng Nam was folded back into a new, larger Da Nang. The city's Human Development Index of 0.800 ranks fifth in the country.
Mountains close in from the west and the South China Sea from the east, with the Han River dividing the centre. Hải Vân Pass separates it from Huế to the north. Hanoi lies 764 kilometres north and Ho Chi Minh City 964 kilometres south, and the city covers about 1,283 square kilometres. Geologically it sits at the edge of the Truong Son fold belt, deformed mainly in the Carboniferous, with Annamite peaks of 700 to 1,500 metres to the north and northwest and sandy coastal plains to the south and east.
The climate is tropical monsoon. Typhoons and heavy rain arrive from September to December, while January to August is drier. The yearly mean is about 26°C, peaking at 28 to 30°C in summer and falling to 18 to 23°C in winter; the Ba Na Hills average 20°C. Rainfall totals about 2,205 millimetres, with 550 to 1,000 falling between September and November.
Source: Da Nang
