Understanding Vietnamese Culture
If you are starting from scratch and want the clearest possible introduction to how Vietnamese people live and think, these two books are the right place to begin.
A Guide to Vietnamese Culture is a collection of essays covering customs, values, arts, daily life, and regional differences across Vietnam. It is wide rather than deep, which is exactly what you need at the beginning. After reading it you will have a working map of Vietnamese cultural life that makes everything else easier to understand. At 271 pages it is approachable rather than overwhelming, and because it is organized as separate essays you can read it in any order depending on what interests you most.
Viet Nam: Tradition and Change by Huu Ngoc goes a level deeper. Huu Ngoc spent decades as one of Vietnam's most respected cultural scholars, and this book collects his reflections on Vietnamese identity and how it has changed across different historical periods. Where A Guide to Vietnamese Culture gives you a broad picture of what Vietnamese culture looks like today, Huu Ngoc helps you understand why it looks that way and what historical forces shaped it. Reading both books together gives you a genuinely solid foundation.
Understanding Vietnamese History
You cannot fully understand Vietnamese culture without understanding Vietnamese history, and Vietnam has a lot of it. A country that spent a thousand years under Chinese rule, then a century under French colonialism, then fought several major wars, carries all of that experience in its culture, its values, and the way its people relate to the world. These three books give you the history at different levels of depth.
Viet Nam: A Long History by Nguyễn Khắc Viện is the most important book in this category. Written originally in French by a Vietnamese scholar and translated into five languages including English, it covers Vietnam from prehistoric times all the way through to 1975. It is the most thorough single-volume Vietnamese history written from a Vietnamese point of view that is available in English, and it has been republished many times over fifty years because readers keep coming back to it. If you only read one history book about Vietnam, this is the one.
History of Viet Nam: Questions and Answers compiled by Mai Lý Quảng takes a completely different approach. Instead of a continuous narrative, it organizes everything as direct questions and answers covering the major events, dynasties, and turning points in Vietnamese history. It is the most accessible option for readers who find traditional history books slow going. You can open it at any point and find what you need without reading from the beginning.
The Vietnamese Dynasties: Historical Stories makes the same history feel more alive by telling it through the individual rulers and the periods they shaped. Rather than dates and political events, you get people and stories, which makes the long arc of Vietnamese history much easier to follow and remember. It works particularly well alongside A Long History as a companion that adds human texture to the broader narrative.
Understanding Folk Culture and Traditional Knowledge
Official history is only one layer of any culture. Underneath it sits something older and often more persistent from the folk stories that have been passed down across generations, the healing knowledge that developed over centuries, to the physical structures that communities built to mark what mattered to them. These three books document that deeper layer of Vietnamese culture.
Legends from Serene Lands by Phạm Duy Khiêm is one of the most interesting books in this entire collection. Phạm Duy Khiêm was the first Vietnamese person to graduate from a French university and later became Vietnam's Ambassador to France. In 1942 he compiled 26 classical Vietnamese folk tales and wrote them in French so Western readers could access them. Australian translator Harry Aveling brought the collection into English in 2011 and The Gioi Publishers published it in Vietnam in 2015. The stories cover love, loyalty, war, magic, and the Vietnamese understanding of the relationship between people and the natural world. Reading them gives you something no history book can offer: a direct window into how Vietnamese people have understood life and meaning across centuries.
Vietnamese Traditional Medicine covers the foundations of Vietnam's traditional healing system, including medicinal plants, acupuncture as practiced in Vietnam, and the dưỡng sinh method of maintaining health and vitality. Traditional medicine is still very much a living part of Vietnamese daily life rather than a historical curiosity, and this book explains the logic and philosophy behind it clearly enough that even readers with no background in the subject can follow it. It is genuinely useful whether you are visiting Vietnam and want to understand what you see at a traditional medicine clinic or pharmacy, or whether you simply want to understand one of the most distinctive and enduring aspects of Vietnamese culture.
Old Citadels of Việt Nam introduces Vietnam's ancient fortresses, including the UNESCO-recognized ones like the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long in Hanoi, the citadels of Hoa Lư and Huế, and the Hồ Dynasty Citadel, as well as many lesser-known ones that most visitors never hear about. These structures are not just military ruins. They are physical evidence of Vietnamese civilization across different eras, and understanding what they are and why they were built changes how you experience them when you visit.
Understanding the Cities
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City both have histories that go back centuries, and the layers of that history are still visible in their streets, buildings, and neighborhoods if you know what you are looking at. These three books give you that knowledge in very different ways.
Hanoi of a Thousand Years by Carol Howland is exactly what the title says. Carol Howland is a British journalist who fell so deeply in love with Vietnam that she left her career to spend a year living there and kept going back for years afterward. This book traces how Hanoi grew from a small trading settlement on the Red River into an imperial capital, then a colonial city, then a modern capital, walking readers through the old quarter street by street and explaining the history that each one carries. It is the most personal and readable English-language portrait of Hanoi's history that exists.
Dragons on the Roof: A Year in Vietnam, also by Carol Howland, is less about history and more about daily life. It documents the year she spent actually living inside Vietnamese culture rather than visiting it, and it covers the aspects of Vietnamese social life, humor, hospitality, family relationships, and daily rhythms that guidebooks almost never talk about. If Hanoi of a Thousand Years tells you what the city is made of, Dragons on the Roof tells you what it feels like to live in it.
Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn: Vanishing Heritage of Hồ Chí Minh City by Tim Doling is the most comprehensive book in this collection by a significant margin. At over 680 pages it documents the full architectural and historical heritage of Ho Chi Minh City, from its origins as a Khmer and Chinese trading settlement through the French colonial period to the present. Tim Doling is a historian who has spent decades in Vietnam specifically researching buildings and neighborhoods that are being demolished faster than anyone can document them, and the urgency of that work is present throughout the book. It includes 21 self-guided walking tours so readers can explore what still remains. Whether you are planning a visit to Ho Chi Minh City or simply want to understand one of Southeast Asia's most layered and fascinating cities, this is the book to read.
You do not need to read all of these books to get value from them. The best approach is to start with what draws you most and let that lead you to the next book naturally. Each book in this collection is a complete experience on its own. But read together, they give you something that no single visit to Vietnam can have - a genuine and lasting understanding of one of the most culturally rich countries in the world.
All of these titles are available at Viet Bookstore at vietbookstore.com. If you want some other books that are currently not in stock, please send us an email at xinchao@vietbookstore.com.
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