Image index

Colonization and foreign rule have kept Southeast Asia's national borders in flux for centuries. This map from 1886 shows present-day Vietnam and Cambodia under French colonial rule as well as the kingdom of Siam (now Thailand).

The city hall building in downtown Ho Chi Minh City is one of the best preserved French colonial era buildings left from old Saigon.

The red flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam flies over Ho Chi Minh City's city hall, but the architecture and statuary display French ideals.

Under French rule, Chinese characters were replaced by a system of writing based on the Latin alphabet.

The young women in this image from a tourism poster are wearing the national dress designed by Vietnamese nationalists in the 1920s.

The borders of modern Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were drawn when the French relinquished colonial rule in the 1950s.

The central court of the Imperial City at Hué, badly damaged during the Vietnam War, is now topped with vegetation and surrounded by grassy fields.

A statue at My Lai memorializes Communist resistance to the United States during the Vietnam War.

A monument marks the location where a family was killed by U.S. soldiers at My Lai on March 16, 1968.

Mortar shells and a grenade remain in the former Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam. Land mines left from the war have continued to injure and maim residents since the war ended in 1975.

The DMZ was the target of U.S. bombing and defoliant spraying intended to destroy potential cover for the Vietcong.

During the 1960s, Communist guerillas dug these narrow tunnels that ran for about seventy-five miles from the countryside in Cu Chi west of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.

The former United States Embassy in Saigon, a multi-story building sided with reinforced white grillwork, was the site of the final U.S. helicopter evacuation at the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975.

A stone monument with a carved text detailing United States crimes in the Vietnam War stands outside the former U.S. Embassy building.

A North Vietnamese tank has become a monument in front of the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City.

Military badges and other artifacts from the Vietnam wars are for sale in the former Demilitarized Zone.

A wall map shows the locations of Vietcong tunnels that have been restored and opened to tourists.