Return to Vietnamese Buddhism, Vietnam, Vietnamese, Asia, History, Asian History (Chinese History, Japanese History, Korean History, Mongolian History, Thai History, Cambodian History, Malaysian History, Indian History, Burmese History, Sri Lankan History, Tibetan History)
Vietnam, with its coastal strip, rugged mountainous interior, and two major deltas, became home to numerous cultures throughout history. Its strategic geographical position in Southeast Asia also made it a crossroads of trade and a focal point of conflict, contributing to its complex and eventful past. The first Ancient East Eurasian hunter-gatherers arrived at least 40,000 years ago. Around 4,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, Southern East Asian populations, particularly Austroasiatic and Austronesian peoples, began migrating from Southern China into Southeast Asia, bringing with them rice-cultivation knowledge, languages, and much of the genetic basis of the modern population of Vietnam. In the first millennium BCE the Đông Sơn culture emerged, based on rice cultivation and focused on the indigenous chiefdoms of Văn Lang and Âu Lạc.
Following the 111 BCE Han conquest of Nanyue, much of Vietnam came under Chinese dominance for a thousand years. The period nonetheless saw numerous uprisings, and Vietnamese kingdoms occasionally enjoyed de-facto independence. Buddhism and Hinduism arrived by the 2nd century CE, making Vietnam the first place which shared influences of both Chinese and Indian cultures.
Independence was regained when the Ngô dynasty was established in 939, and the next millennium saw a succession of local dynasties: Ngô, Đinh, Early Lê, Lý, Trần, Hồ, Later Lê, Mạc, Revival Lê, Tây Sơn, and finally Nguyễn. During this period, Vietnam was periodically divided by civil wars, most notably the Trịnh–Nguyễn War of the 17th and 18th centuries, and subjected to foreign interventions by the Song, Yuan, Cham, Ming, Siamese, Qing, and finally the French. In their turn Vietnamese colonizers moved into the Mekong Delta and parts of today's Cambodia between the 15th and 18th centuries.
Leveraging its military support for the ascendant Nguyễn dynasty and using the pretexts of protecting religious freedom and trading rights, France conquered Vietnam, dividing its territory into three separate regions, integrating them into French Indochina in 1887. The Second World War brought a 5-year occupation by Imperial Japan. In 1945 Vietnam was proclaimed a republic, but a three-way conflict immediately broke out between communists, anti-communists, and France. In 1949 Vietnam was officially reunified as a partially autonomous member of the French Union. In practice, a communist insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh had established a rival state which exercised authority over most of the country.
In June 1954 Vietnam won full independence. Following the French defeat, the country was divided into two states in July. As part of the Cold War, a civil war quickly broke out between a North Vietnam supported by China and the Soviet Union, and a South Vietnam aided by the United States. It ended with the defeat of the South in 1975 and unification under a communist government in 1976. Vietnam then fought a war with China in 1979 and was bogged down in Cambodia from 1978 to 1989, along with a socio-economic disaster that led to Đổi Mới in late 1986. Vietnam normalized relations with China in 1991 and the United States in 1995.
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