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Khánh Hội · An island district between two canals

District 4

For a century, this was the toughest address in Saigon — dockworkers, gangs gathering under a bridge before crossing into District 1 to fight. Today its old wharves are lined with seafood stalls instead, and the port where a young man once left the country to change its history sits quietly a few streets away.

History

District 4 is bounded on nearly every side by water — the Sài Gòn River, the Bến Nghé canal, the Tẻ canal — a geography that shaped both its economy and its reputation for a century and a half.

1698

Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh establishes Gia Định prefecture. The hamlets that will become District 4 — Khánh Hội, Vĩnh Hội, Cây Bàng, Xóm Chiếu, and the islet of Nguyễn Kiệu — already exist under a string of older names: Tam Hội, Khánh Hòa, Khánh Bình, Bình Ý, Tân Vĩnh.

1863

Construction begins on the headquarters of the Messageries Impériales shipping line at the mouth of the Bến Nghé canal — a building whose dragon-topped roofline will earn it the name Bến Nhà Rồng, "Dragon House Wharf." It's completed the following year.

Late 19th century

As the Port of Saigon grows into the busiest in French Indochina, Khánh Hội fills with hamlets of dockworkers and shipyard laborers — the beginning of a working-class identity that will define the district for the next hundred years.

5 June 1911

A young man calling himself Văn Ba boards the French steamer Amiral Latouche-Tréville at Bến Nhà Rồng, working as a galley hand. His name was Nguyễn Tất Thành — he would later be known as Hồ Chí Minh. See Anecdotes, below.

1959

The name "District 4" (Quận 4) is formally adopted for the area, after decades in which it was known mainly by its constituent neighborhoods — Xóm Chiếu and Khánh Hội above all.

1990

Khánh Hội street is cut through the district after the clearance of riverside slum housing, becoming one of District 4's three main arteries.

2018

District authorities formally launch Vĩnh Khánh food street, turning what was already an organic cluster of seafood stalls into an official destination — see Where to eat, below.

2025

A citywide ward reform merges District 4's ten wards into three: Vĩnh Hội, Khánh Hội and Xóm Chiếu — names lifted directly from the district's oldest hamlets.

Four hamlets, one waterfront

District 4's identity was assembled from a handful of riverside hamlets that predate French rule by nearly two centuries — three of which have now returned as official ward names.

Khánh Hội

The name that swallowed the rest

Originally a single village founded under Emperor Gia Long, Khánh Hội's name gradually expanded to cover the entire port district as the old hamlets were absorbed into greater Saigon in the early 20th century — a linguistic takeover so complete that most residents today use "Khánh Hội" to mean District 4 itself.

Xóm Chiếu

The mat-weavers' hamlet

Named for a traditional craft — chiếu means sleeping mat — this hamlet's name survived intact into the present, one of the district's three new 2025 wards.

Vĩnh Hội & Cây Bàng

The other founding pair

Vĩnh Hội, another of the district's oldest names, likewise survives as a 2025 ward. Cây Bàng — "almond tree" — was one of two wards split off from the old Bến Xà Lan ward in 1962, part of the district's mid-century administrative reshuffling.

A dragon-roofed warehouse and an Eiffel bridge

Bến Nhà Rồng, 1863

1 Nguyễn Tất Thành street

Built as the Saigon headquarters of the Messageries Impériales shipping company, this riverside warehouse and office building was designed in a French colonial style topped, unusually, with a pair of ceramic dragons flanking the roofline — a decorative flourish that gave the building its enduring Vietnamese name, "Dragon House." After 1975, the building was converted into the Ho Chi Minh Museum's Ho Chi Minh City branch, its original architecture preserved around the exhibits.

Cầu Mống, 1882

Spanning the Bến Nghé canal between District 1 and District 4

Built by the firm Levallois-Perret — Gustave Eiffel's own company — for the Messageries Maritimes shipping line, this arched steel footbridge is among the oldest surviving structures of its kind in the city. Fully dismantled in 2005 during construction of the Sài Gòn River Tunnel, it was rebuilt to its original design and now carries pedestrians only.

Places to discover

Cầu Khánh Hội, the rotating bridge

Spanning the Bến Nghé canal, connecting to District 1

Designed to swing open and let river traffic pass beneath it, the century-old Khánh Hội bridge was rebuilt twice over its lifetime to keep pace with growing water and road traffic between Saigon's port and its markets. In its early decades, the area beneath the bridge — quiet, sheltered, out of sight — became an informal gathering point for homeless men and, by extension, for the gangs that gave the district its rough reputation before crossing into District 1 looking for trouble.

A district shaped like an island

Bounded by the Bến Nghé canal, the Tẻ canal, and the Sài Gòn River

Look at a map and District 4 is nearly surrounded by water on every side — the Bến Nghé canal separating it from District 1 to the north, the Tẻ canal from District 7 to the south, and the Sài Gòn River itself to the east. Locals often describe it simply as "hòn đảo giữa lòng thành phố" — an island in the middle of the city — connected to the rest of Ho Chi Minh City only by its bridges.

Two stories the guidebooks skim past

The galley hand who left from Dragon House

On the morning of 5 June 1911, a 21-year-old man using the name Văn Ba boarded the French steamship Amiral Latouche-Tréville at Bến Nhà Rồng, having taken a job as a kitchen hand to secure passage abroad. He would spend the next three decades traveling — France, the United States, England, the Soviet Union — before returning to Vietnam under the name by which the world would come to know him: Hồ Chí Minh. The date is now marked annually across Vietnam, and the building he departed from has been preserved as a museum in his honor, one of the country's most visited historical sites.

The bridge where gangs gathered before crossing into District 1

For much of the 20th century, District 4 carried a reputation that had less to do with commerce than with its underworld: dockworkers displaced by mechanization, homeless men sheltering under the Khánh Hội bridge, and gangs who used the area's tangle of narrow lanes and canal-front hideouts to organize before crossing the water into District 1 to establish territory through violence. The reputation outlasted the conditions that created it by decades — even as the district gentrified around its seafood streets and waterfront towers, "Quận 4" remained shorthand in Saigon slang for toughness long after the gangs themselves had faded.

Four addresses along the old wharves

Vĩnh Khánh food street

~60,000–200,000 VND / dish

Vĩnh Khánh street, Khánh Hội ward

A roughly one-kilometer stretch officially launched by district authorities in 2018 to formalize what was already Saigon's densest cluster of snail and shellfish restaurants — grilled, stir-fried and steamed seafood spills out onto the sidewalk from dusk until well past midnight.

Ốc Oanh

~80,000–200,000 VND / dish

534 Vĩnh Khánh street

One of the street's longest-running snail restaurants, consistently packed from mid-afternoon on — a reliable starting point for anyone new to Vĩnh Khánh's dizzying menu of shellfish preparations.

Ốc Thảo

~60,000–180,000 VND / dish

383 Vĩnh Khánh street

A slightly quieter alternative a few doors down, popular for its charcoal-grilled scallops and butter-fried garlic snails.

Bún đậu mắm tôm Tiến Hải

~50,000–90,000 VND

District 4

A northern Vietnamese specialty — rice noodles, fried tofu and cold cuts dipped in fermented shrimp paste — brought south and kept alive by a district with a long history of migrants from every part of the country.

Getting there

District 4 sits directly across the Bến Nghé canal from District 1, reachable in a few minutes by Cầu Mống or Cầu Khánh Hội — genuinely one of the most central and easily walkable districts on this site once you've crossed the water. Bến Nhà Rồng and the Vĩnh Khánh food street sit at opposite ends of the district, roughly a 15-minute scooter ride apart.

Vĩnh Khánh street is best visited after dark, when the food stalls are in full swing and the sidewalk tables fill with groups sharing plates of grilled shellfish over beer.

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