Ho Chi Minh is Districtless

Intro

I am on the back of a scooter, sitting at the traffic lights somewhere between a Bánh xèo and a plate of bánh tráng nướng, when my guide - Tracy, a tourism student; energetic; and eager to practice her English - explained that the districts were gone. Big government changes last year; a reform. The districts, I had thought I had been walking through, don’t exist anymore.

We had been in, out and around the districts for almost a week now. District 1 for the hotel and the landmarks. District 5 for Chợ Lớn. Internet research lumped District 3 as “relaxed”, District 4 “gritty” and District 7 as “cleaner”. These felt like the city’s organic groupings, the way locals of any city end up dividing and defining it; Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid, SoHo in New York, or London’s West End.

She couldn’t give me much more information — in English, at least. The government changed things and it was complicated. The lights changed, and we continued zipping around while I pretended not to be scared of the traffic on every side of me. That one conversation — of 100’s that night — sat with me. I couldn’t quite understand what she meant, but it seemed to have layers and layers of meaning.

Districts

Districts, it turns out, were not areas based on a developed “feel” of the city, they were precisely defined boundaries in a much larger system.

Vietnam’s old local government ladder

Before the 2025 reform, Vietnam’s local government had a middle tier:

Central state → Province-level unit → District-level unit → Commune-level unit

In Ho Chi Minh City, that meant:

Vietnam → Ho Chi Minh City → District 1 → Ward

Ho Chi Minh City was a province-level unit — a centrally governed city sitting directly beneath the national government. Below it sat the districts. Below the districts were the wards.

The Districts were part of an administrative order that reached from the national government down to wards, streets, households and all the adjacent paperwork. The Districts of HCMC — and of all of Vietnam — were full layers of government.

• Its own People’s Committee (an executive body that made and implemented local decisions)

• Its own People’s Council (elected representatives, a mini-parliament)

• Its own budget and taxation administration

• Its own courts and prosecutors

• Its own police and security apparatus

• Its own land management office

• Its own hospitals and schools under its jurisdiction

• Its own civil registration (where you’d go to register a business, marriage, or property)

HCMC alone had 22 urban districts — some numbered, some named — and each district was itself subdivided into wards. Some of the wards in HCMC were small enough to be covering just a few streets, and again: each ward had its own local office and chairman, handling stuff like birth registrations, death certificates and household registration. It’s government all the way down!

This all felt so.. granular. But these hyper local governmental layers were part of a system almost two centuries old. So, of course, the answer to “why is the government here so hyper local?” starts well before modern Ho Chi Minh City, and is really the story of how Vietnam became Vietnam.

From Village to State

Vietnamese history has long carried a tension between authority from above and community from below. There is an old saying, phép vua thua lệ làng: the king’s law yields to village custom. The state still counted people, collected taxes, demanded labour and sent orders. But for most people, the government was closer to home: the village, the commune, the ward, the local office; an official who knew them.

That is why Ho Chi Minh City’s old districts and wards could feel so granular. They were modern administrative units, but they also sat inside a much older Vietnamese habit: governing through layers small enough to know, record and manage everyday life.

Vietnam was not, of course, born as a single strip of land stretching from north to south. Early Vietnamese statehood was centred in the Red River Delta, what we now see as northern Vietnam.

For centuries, the region sat — uncomfortably — under Chinese imperial rule. Come the year 938, and the Vietnamese leader Ngô Quyền defeated the Southern Han fleet on the Bạch Đằng River, cleverly using stakes to trap and destroy the invading ships. The kingdom that developed from that independence was Đại Việt (“Great Việt”). It was not born a blank slate.

After a thousand years of Chinese rule, the new kingdom had internalised many of the ideas and structures about how a state functions: hierarchy, written records, taxation, land registration, and a Confucian theory of government in which order flows through proper relationships between ruler, official, family, and village.

The budding Đại Việt kingdom developed with a strong central state sitting above the village and commune life below.

The Vietnamese làng, or village was land, family, ritual, memory and local rules. The xã, or commune, was not necessarily a physically separate place, but one of the basic units through which village life and state administration convened. If the làng was the community as people lived it, the xã was the community as the state could recognise it.

Through the xã, people could be counted, land recorded, taxes collected, labour assigned and obligations enforced. The village did not simply report to the state from a distance. Nor did the state float somewhere above it, remote and abstract. It reached into local life through the village’s own structures: its records, officials, elders, customs and small routines of administration.

In effect: The state did not govern the village from the outside or from afar; it was embedded into the village itself.

How We Got To Vietnam: The Southern Advance

Over centuries, Vietnamese power moved south in a process called Nam tiến, or the “southward advance”. The downward movement lasted from the 11th century, into the 1700s.

Central Vietnam was far from empty. It was Champa — a Cham civilisation that had existed for over a thousand years, made up of coastal kingdoms running through what is now central and south-central Vietnam. The Cham had their own language, their own Hindu-influenced (and later Islamic) religion, active trade networks reaching across Southeast Asia, and cities that could rival Đại Việt.

Further south, the Mekong Delta and the area that would become Saigon belonged to the Khmer world — tied to Cambodian kingdoms, shaped by river and delta life, with its own settlements, temples and agricultural systems.

The expansion, like all expansions, was not one thing but many: war, settlement, migration, intermarriage, trade, displacement, land-taking, and administration.

The Cham resisted for centuries, but were eventually broken by the 1471 Vietnamese assault on the Cham capital. The Khmer south was absorbed slowly, through settlement and demographic pressure.

By the late eighteenth century, this long southward push initiated by the Lê dynasty had resulted in a country split by two competing families — the Trịnh lords in the north, the Nguyễn lords holding the south. The Vietnamese people living under this power structure were struggling to survive; facing natural disasters, severe corruption in the ruling system, economic distress and shifting power dynamics and violence in what was still the frontier of the southward movement.

In 1771 these pressures helped ignite the Tây Sơn rebellion. The ruling houses collapsed and the official imperial dynasty was displaced. The country was remade... briefly... The regime never really consolidated and out of the turmoil came Nguyễn Ánh, the last surviving Nguyễn claimant. The Tây Sơn rebellion was put down, and Nguyễn Ánh became Emperor Gia Long in 1802.

Enter Viet Nam

This is the moment when something close to the country we now recognise began to exist as a single political entity. Gia Long ruled from the Chinese border in the north down to the Mekong south. The name Việt Nam followed in 1804. Emperor Gia Long reunited the country, and governed it through large regional commands rather than fully centralised provinces.

His successor, Minh Mạng, found this too loose. In 1831 and 1832, the regional commands were abolished and the country divided into standardised provincial-level units directly under Huế. This was the first time Vietnam had been mapped into a regular, nationwide administrative grid.

Beneath the provinces sat smaller district-level units, and at the bottom, the xã. Province above, district-level in the middle, commune at the base.

The grid Minh Mạng standardised

Province above. District-level in the middle. Commune at the base. That ladder changed names under later regimes, but the basic idea kept coming back: a state made legible through nested local units.

French Colonial Period (1859–1954)

By the time Saigon fell in 1859, the Nguyễn state already had a province-district-commune logic in place. What changed under the French was the chain of command. Southern Vietnam became Cochinchina — a directly ruled French colony with Saigon as its capital. The lower units remained familiar: provinces, district-like units, communes, local Vietnamese officials. But they now answered upward into a French colonial state rather than the imperial court in Huế. The ladder stayed recognisable. The power at the top changed.

In practical terms, local administration was increasingly redirected toward colonial priorities: land records, taxation, labour, policing, ports and exports.

Two Vietnams

After the French period, Vietnam split into two rival states — the Communist north in Hanoi and the American-backed Republic of Vietnam in Saigon. Both governed through provinces, districts and communes. In Saigon, the Republic reorganised the capital as Đô thành Sài Gòn, dividing it into 8 numbered districts with defined ward boundaries. The District 1, District 3, District 5 that later travellers would navigate came from this time.

That division lasted until 1975, when North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon and the Republic of Vietnam collapsed. The following year, the two halves were formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The district-and-ward map of the South morphed with the completely different political system. People’s Committees replaced local councils at every level. The hộ khẩu household registration system, already embedded in the north, was extended across the south, tying residence and access to services tightly to local administration.

Saigon–Gia Định was renamed Ho Chi Minh City on 2 July 1976, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formally established. Nationally, the reunification government carried out a major wave of provincial mergers, reducing the country to 35 provinces and three centrally governed cities: Hanoi, Hải Phòng and Ho Chi Minh City.

Within HCMC, the district map was reorganised from scratch. In May 1976, the inner districts were consolidated into 12 urban districts, with 5 rural districts retained. Over the following decades, as the city grew, districts were split, upgraded and redrawn.

The layers stayed roughly the same. But they became deeper, more granular, more socialist, more centralised and more politically integrated than they had ever been before.

Modern HCMC — Pre-2025

From the Nguyễn dynasty through the French, South Vietnamese and socialist periods, the names and politics changed. The ladder remained surprisingly recognisable: a larger territorial unit above, a district-level unit in the middle, a village, commune or ward at the bottom.

Before 2025, Ho Chi Minh City sat at the top of its own local ladder. It was not inside a province — it was a centrally governed city, operating at province level, directly beneath the national government. Below it were 22 district-level units: 16 urban districts, 5 suburban districts, and Thủ Đức City, the “city within a city” created in 2021 by merging District 2, District 9 and Thủ Đức District. Below those were 273 commune-level units: 210 wards, 58 communes and 5 townships.

In everyday travel language, these places sounded like neighbourhoods. District 1 was “the tourist centre.” District 3 was “leafier and more local.” District 5 was “Chợ Lớn.” Bình Thạnh was “near Landmark 81.” But administratively, they were middle-layer government units sitting between the city and the wards — and that middle layer did real work.

District offices dealt with planning, land, local budgets, permits, civil administration, public services, schools, clinics, policing, construction control and the daily work of translating city-wide policy into actual streets. Below them, wards handled the closest level of government: household records, local confirmations, small-scale paperwork and the everyday interface between residents and the state.

HCMC Today, Tomorrow

Before 2025, local government had three levels beneath the central state: province, district and commune. From 1 July 2025, that became two: province and commune. The reform consolidated 63 provinces and municipalities into 34, abolished district administrations nationwide and dissolved two-thirds of all wards and communes. It required a constitutional amendment.

After the reform

After 1 July 2025, the ladder became shorter:

Vietnam → Ho Chi Minh City → wards, communes and one special zone

The names still matter on the street. They just no longer sit in the middle of the official government structure.

All 22 HCMC urban districts were replaced by 102 wards. District 1, District 3, Tân Bình — no longer government units. HCMC was also merged with Bình Dương and Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu, creating a larger metropolitan region with 113 wards, 54 communes and one special zone, Côn Đảo.

The stated reasons were speed and cost. Decisions that flowed

city --> district --> ward

now moved

city --> ward directly.

Around 70 per cent of the state budget was being consumed by administrative costs before the reform.

The district tier also sat at the centre of Vietnam’s land corruption problem, as it was responsible for controlling approvals and permits for one of the fastest-growing property markets in the region. Removing it reduces exposure to corruption.

The expanded city now covers what used to be three separate provinces — Saigon’s urban core, Bình Dương’s industrial north and the coastal port region of Vũng Tàu — all under one government instead of three neighbours that had to coordinate with each other.

The places still exist. You can still eat your way through what used to be District 5. You can still follow the old logic of District 1 for landmarks, District 3 for cafés and tree-lined streets, District 4 for its alleyways. The markets, temples, apartment blocks, food carts, schools, offices and morning coffee stools are still exactly where they were. The people remain.

But officially, the middle layer is gone. The offices have been dissolved. The People’s Committees have been folded away. The district, which once sat between the city and the ward, between the national state and the household, has been removed from the administrative system. What felt like a neighbourhood was, for a long time, something much more formal: a working unit of government, with its own paperwork, budgets, permissions and power.

That is what Tracy was trying to explain to me at the traffic lights. Not that the city had changed overnight in any visible way. But that somewhere beneath the noise of scooters the official map had changed.

And maybe that is why the conversation stayed with me. Travel has a way of turning a small practical confusion into a rabbithole You ask why a district has disappeared, and suddenly you are looking at villages, communes, emperors, colonial administrators, household registers, land offices, reform committees and the always shifting question off: how does a country makes itself governable.

The districts felt organic. They were anything but. And now Ho Chi Minh City is districtless — at least officially.