Haiphong was mainland Southeast Asia's first electrified city
Vietnam's third-largest city guards the Cấm River mouth on the Gulf of Tonkin, administering Cát Bà and Bạch Long Vĩ islands across some 3,195 square kilometres. Historically it claimed the first electrification in Vietnam and mainland Southeast Asia, and French planners once eyed it as Indochina's economic capital.
Humid subtropical rains dump about 1,700 millimetres yearly, ninety percent from April through October. January highs average near 20 °C with lows around 14 °C; June and July highs near 33 °C with lows near 26 °C. Sea temperatures swing from about 21 °C in February to 30 °C in midsummer. Legend ties the coast to Lê Chân, a woman general under the Trưng Sisters' AD 40 revolt, who organized "Defenced Sea-coast" against Han general Ma Yuan. Nineteenth-century Nguyễn administration seated An Dương District at Hang Kenh communal house in what became Lê Chân District.
After World War II, clashes as French forces returned helped ignite the First Indochina War following naval shelling that set the city ablaze. In the later American war, Admiral Thomas Moorer ordered the harbour mined on 8 May 1972, sealing the port without recorded casualties from the mines while a US no-strike zone largely spared the urban fabric. Industry rebounded afterward: food processing, textiles, cement, steel pipes, shipbuilding, and software. Between 2000 and 2007 some 112,600 industrial jobs appeared among 270,600 industrial workers.
Agriculture still used about one-third of land (52,300 hectares) in 2007, with rice on roughly eighty percent yielding 463,100 tons; fishery output hit 79,705 tons as aquaculture grew to sixty percent of that catch. Budget revenues climbed from 34,000 billion dong in 2009 toward planned higher targets. Ranking fifteenth of sixty-three provinces on 2013 competitiveness indices, the port city trades with more than forty countries—retaining the northern industrial gateway role French administrators once imagined for Indochina.
Source: Haiphong
