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Bến Nghé · The city's historic and administrative core

District 1

For two centuries this stretch of riverbank was called Bến Nghé, while the name "Sài Gòn" belonged to the Chinese trading town a few kilometers west — today's Chợ Lớn. In 1865 the French swapped the two names for good. District 1 has been living under a borrowed name ever since.

A night view of Ho Chi Minh City's skyline across the Saigon River, buildings lit up and reflected in the water
A wide sunset view of the Ho Chi Minh City skyline from an overgrown rooftop, the Bitexco tower at center

History

Before it was the political and financial heart of Vietnam, this land had a name of its own — one that most visitors, and plenty of residents, have never actually heard.

Origins of "Bến Nghé"

The old name for this stretch of riverbank has two competing explanations: a Vietnamized version of the Khmer Kompong Krabei ("buffalo wharf"), where locals once brought cattle to bathe, or — per 19th-century scholar Nguyễn Văn Siêu — a nod to the roar of crocodiles once common on the river, which sounded to early settlers like the bellow of a calf (nghé).

1698

Lord Nguyễn's official Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh formally establishes Gia Định prefecture. Bến Nghé, already a bustling river port, becomes its administrative seat — a role this small patch of riverbank keeps, under one name or another, for the next three centuries.

18th–19th century

Two separate market towns grow up a few kilometers apart: Bến Nghé, the port town near today's District 1, and Sài Gòn, the Chinese trading town to the west that would later become Chợ Lớn. For most of this period, "Sài Gòn" refers to that second town — not to the area that carries the name today.

1859

French forces capture the Gia Định citadel; retreating Vietnamese troops set fire to the city rather than leave it intact, destroying Bến Thành market along with much of the settlement.

1861

Admiral Charner's decree defines the boundaries of a new "Ville de Saigon," covering both the old Bến Nghé and Sài Gòn areas — 25 km² in total, an administrative unit that doesn't yet correspond to either historic name.

1865

A second decree narrows the city of "Saigon" down to just 3 km² — the old Bến Nghé core — while formally naming the western trading town "Cholon" (Chợ Lớn). The two names effectively swap territory: the place actually called Sài Gòn for two centuries becomes Chợ Lớn, and Bến Nghé inherits the Sài Gòn name it still carries.

1860s–1890s

In barely three decades, French administrators fill in canals, pave streets, and replace thatch and timber with brick, building most of the landmarks the district is still known for today.

1948

District 1 is formally established as an administrative unit within the joint Saigon–Chợ Lớn municipality.

2025

A citywide ward reform dissolves the district as an administrative unit — its central wards, including Bến Nghé itself, are folded into new, larger ward boundaries, though the district's landmarks and street grid remain unchanged.

A canal that became the city's living room

No single street in the district has changed identity as many times as the one now known as Nguyễn Huệ — and its layered history reads almost like a core sample of the district itself.

1790 — Kinh Lớn

A canal for a citadel

Lord Nguyễn Ánh has a canal dug to bring water from the Sài Gòn River into the Gia Định citadel. Locals soon nickname it kênh Chợ Vải — "cloth market canal" — after the Chinese and Indian textile merchants who set up shop along its banks.

1861 — Kênh Charner

The same canal, a new name

French administrators rename the waterway after Admiral Charner. Trade along its banks intensifies — until pollution and traffic make the open canal increasingly impractical.

1887 — Đại lộ Charner

"Đường Kinh Lấp," the filled-in canal street

The canal is filled in entirely to make way for a boulevard — one locals nickname đường Kinh Lấp, "filled-canal street," even after it officially becomes Đại lộ Charner. Vietnam's first wooden cathedral, built in 1863 on the canal's bank near today's Sun Wah building, had already been demolished by this point, replaced by the stone cathedral now known as Notre-Dame.

1955 → 2015

From Charner to a pedestrian square

The boulevard is renamed Nguyễn Huệ, and remains the district's busiest commercial street for another six decades — until 2015, when it's redeveloped into Vietnam's first pedestrian plaza, 670 meters of granite paving where a canal once carried cloth merchants' boats.

A palace rebuilt after an assassination attempt

From Norodom Palace to Independence Palace

The original Norodom Palace, completed in 1873 as the residence of French Indochina's governors, stood on this site for nearly a century. On 27 February 1962, two Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots — Nguyễn Văn Cử and Phạm Phú Quốc, both aligned with a coup faction opposed to President Ngô Đình Diệm — flew AD-6 Skyraiders over the palace and bombed its left wing, attempting to assassinate Diệm. He survived; the wing did not, and engineers judged the rest of the building beyond reliable repair.

Diệm ordered the old palace demolished entirely and commissioned Ngô Viết Thụ — the first Vietnamese architect to win the Prix de Rome — to design an entirely new building on the same 4,500 m² site. Construction began in July 1962. Thụ's design is said to trace, in plan, the Chinese character 吉 (cát) — "good fortune" — an architectural detail invisible from the ground but well known to anyone who studies the building's floor plan. Diệm did not live to see it finished: he was killed during a coup in November 1963. The building was completed and inaugurated in 1966 as Independence Palace, the name it still carries today.

Places to discover

Little Japan

Lê Thánh Tôn street (between Tôn Đức Thắng and Hai Bà Trưng), extending onto Thái Văn Lung, Thi Sách and Ngô Văn Năm streets

Twenty years ago this was a single alley, số 15B on Lê Thánh Tôn street, with a handful of Japanese restaurants serving the businessmen and expatriates who lived in the apartment blocks across the street. As Ho Chi Minh City's Japanese community grew through the 2000s, the restaurants, bars, cafes, konbini-style convenience stores and izakaya multiplied along with it, spilling out into a roughly 300-meter stretch of streets now informally known as "Little Japan." It's one of the more unexpected pockets of the district: neon signage in Japanese, karaoke bars, and a concentration of Japanese speakers you won't find anywhere else in the city center.

Chùa Ngọc Hoàng, the temple Obama chose to visit

73 Mai Thị Lựu street, Đa Kao ward

Built between 1892 and 1900 by a Chinese immigrant named Lưu Minh, this temple began as a private shrine to the Jade Emperor — and, according to some accounts, doubled as a meeting place for a secret society plotting against the Qing dynasty back in China. Officially renamed Phước Hải Tự in 1984 but still universally known by its older name, the temple's Chinese-style yin-yang tiled roof and more than 300 intricately carved statues earned it national heritage status in 1994. Two ponds crowded with turtles and fish sit in the courtyard, and the temple's reputation as one of the city's best places to pray for children or good fortune in love drew a very different kind of visitor in May 2016: U.S. President Barack Obama, on his first trip to Ho Chi Minh City.

Two stories the guidebooks skim past

The city that traded names with its neighbor

For most of the 18th and early 19th centuries, "Sài Gòn" was the name of the Chinese trading town west of here — the settlement that today, under the name Chợ Lớn, sits inside District 5. This district's stretch of riverbank was known instead as Bến Nghé. When French administrators redrew the city's boundaries in 1865, they formally attached "Saigon" to the smaller, 3 km² Bến Nghé core and reserved "Cholon" for the original Sài Gòn. The swap stuck. Two centuries on, the district that grew up under a name borrowed from its neighbor is now the one everyone recognizes, while the place that was Sài Gòn first has to share its old identity with the city built beside it.

The pilots who bombed the palace weren't who most people assume

The 1962 attack on Norodom Palace is often remembered simply as an assassination attempt on President Diệm — but the detail that surprises people is who carried it out. Nguyễn Văn Cử and Phạm Phú Quốc were South Vietnamese Air Force officers aligned with an internal coup faction, not foreign agents or communist infiltrators, as some later accounts mistakenly claimed. Quốc was captured shortly afterward near Nhà Bè; Cử fled into exile in Cambodia. The palace they damaged no longer exists in any form — Diệm's decision to demolish rather than repair it produced the very different building that stands on the site today.

Four addresses across two very different price points

Súp cua Nhà Thờ Đức Bà

~15,000–30,000 VND

Alley off Nguyễn Du street, near the cathedral

Crab and quail-egg soup served from a pushcart that's operated in the same spot for close to 30 years — arrive at odd hours and expect to queue at busier ones.

Ốc Đào

~100,000–300,000 VND

Nguyễn Trãi street

A snail and shellfish restaurant tucked down a small alley, popular with locals for years before a Michelin Guide mention brought a new wave of visitors.

Cục Gạch Quán

~150,000–350,000 VND

10 Đặng Tất street, Tân Định

A restaurant deliberately styled after an old countryside home — reclaimed wood, low stools, garden courtyard — serving home-style Vietnamese dishes in the middle of the district's busiest quarter.

Hẻm ăn vặt Hai Bà Trưng

~15,000–40,000 VND / dish

76 Hai Bà Trưng street

An alley so densely packed with street-food stalls — snails, fried rice cakes, grilled corn, sweet soups — that locals have nicknamed it a snack food paradise; open afternoons only.

Getting there

District 1 is, almost by definition, the reference point every other page on this site measures distance from — "15 minutes from District 1 by scooter or taxi" appears throughout. Its own core, roughly the area between Bến Thành market, Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street, is compact enough to explore entirely on foot.

Metro Line 1 runs directly beneath much of the district, with Bến Thành station serving as its western terminus — the single most direct way to reach the district from Thủ Đức and points east.

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