Saigon grew from Prey Nokôr into Vietnam's giant
Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon in daily speech, is Vietnam's most populous centrally governed city, with more than 14 million people in 2025 along the Saigon River's canals. It generates roughly a quarter of national GDP as the country's largest financial and transport hub.
Cham settlers knew the site as Baigaur before Cambodians renamed the fishing village Prey Nokôr. Vietnamese expansion under the Nguyễn lords incorporated the area in 1698 as Gia Định through the southward Nam tiến. French conquest in the 1860s popularised Sài Gòn (Saïgon), though maps still showed the older characters. After reunification in 1976 the state renamed the municipality for Hồ Chí Minh; colloquially Saigon often means the central districts while the official name covers the whole city.
Toponym studies trace Sài Gòn to Sino-Vietnamese graphs attested by the late seventeenth century—Lê Quý Đôn noted Cambodian prince Ang Nan installed at 柴棍 in 1674. One proposal links the sound to a non-Sino-Vietnamese reading of characters meaning embankment. A Funan-period temple under today's Phụng Sơn site dates to the fourth century CE; Baigaur appears by the eleventh. Chinese refugees settled nearby from 1679; Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh organised Vietnamese administration in 1698. Adrien Launay's mission histories preserve eighteenth-century spellings such as Rai-gon for the same toponym cluster.
Nguyễn Ánh seized the city in 1788 as a base against the Tây Sơn and soon raised the Gia Định citadel with French engineer Victor Olivier de Puymanel. That southern capital trajectory, colonial port boom, and post-1976 megacity growth explain why a former Cambodian fishing shore now dominates Vietnam's economy while residents still answer to Saigon. Informal Saigon speech versus the official metropolitan name still maps onto how residents navigate centre and sprawl along the riverine canal grid.
Source: Ho Chi Minh City
