In 1010 the first Vietnamese emperor who was independent from China situated himself near present-day Hanoi. For the 1,000 years prior to that the Vietnamese land was a Chinese province. The foundations of Vietnamese government and culture are based upon the teachings of Confucius. Vietnamese dynasties and emperor's courts followed the structure of the Chinese.

In the 18^th century Vietnam expanded farther south into the Mekong delta. They pushed the inhabitants the Khmers west into roughly present-day Cambodia. During the 19^th century the Vietnamese began to persecute Christians living in their empire. Between 1848 and 1860, 25 European priests, 3,000 Vietnamese priests and over 30,000 Vietnamese Catholics were executed. This resulted in a French intervention, the capture of Saigon and in 1862 the surrender of South Vietnam to the French.

September 1940 brought Japanese troops to occupy Indochina, after the conquest of France by the Germans. They remained until Japan surrendered in 1945. After that France tried to reestablish itself as a power in Vietnam.

On September 2, 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent of France from his enclave in Hanoi, North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese engaged the French in a guerilla war. Minh later decided to negotiate with France since he felt unable to conduct warfare with the French and also the more than 180,000 nationalist Chinese troops on Vietnamese soil.

In 1946 after the French had rebuilt their colonial administration in Vietnam, the Chinese agreed to withdraw from Vietnam. After that, the Vietnamese forces increased their attacks on the French in the South and also spread the conflict to the North. The French were able to maintain control of the cities, but the countryside fell to the Vietnamese.

During the early 1950s French forces installed a garrison a broad valley in the mountains between North Vietnam and Northern Laos. From this valley in Dien Bien Phu the French sought to control the movement of arms from the Laotian communists into Vietnam. The French believed this position to be safe from attacks, however the Vietnamese were able to bring heavy artillery into the valley. In May of 1954 French troops suffered one of the gravest defeats in their history.

By July of 1954 negotiators in Geneva agreed to divide the country into two states. Thus, North and South Vietnam were created. The communist government of North Vietnam continued to escalate military confrontations by having over 40,000 of their troops infiltrate the south and by providing arms. The guerilla conflict continued into the 1960s.

In August of 1964 the North Vietnamese fired at two American cruisers in the Bay of Tonkin. US officials insisted that the cruisers were in international waters, but they used this incident as an excuse to bomb North Vietnam for the first time and start full-scale operations there with the war reaching its peak in 1968. The US then had about half a million troops in Vietnam along with those of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand. The opposition communist National Liberation Front called the Vietcong by the US had about 400,000 troops.

In February of 1968 the Vietcong launched their largest operation up to that point when they began the Tet offensive against over 100 cities in South Vietnam. The Vietcong were turned back everywhere except Hue and experienced huge losses. This was considered the turning point of the war.

After the Tet offensive the US government experienced a change of attitude and were no longer interested in winning the war, but simply in finding a way out of it without losing its reputation as a military power. The US began to withdraw troops from the area. In Paris in 1969 full-scale negotiations began to bring about an end to the war. By 1972 the US had fewer than 100,000 troops remaining in Vietnam. In January of 1973 a cease-fire agreement was signed in Paris and in March of that year the last American troops left Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese and Southern communists began a large-scale offensive in 1975. Their goal was a total victory over the South Vietnamese state. On April 30, 1975 North Vietnamese troops occupied Saigon and brought about an end to three decades of war.

The area was fairly calm until December 1978 when there was an outbreak of hostilities along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. The Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and by January 1979 their troops occupied Phnom Penh where they remained until 1989. At that time Hanoi recalled the Vietnamese troops from Cambodia.

At its 6^th party congress in 1986 after a decade of economic problems the Communist Party of Vietnam introduced a program of reforms attempting to create a more liberal economy. Since then the economy of Vietnam has become more capitalistic though still retaining the Communist Party as the sole political party.

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