Vietnam
The full moon of the seventh lunar month is two festivals at once in Vietnam: Buddhist Vu Lan and the folk day for wandering souls. Families set three altars, and in Chợ Lớn shop owners throw banknotes into the street for people to grab.
Vietnam
Vietnam retained the ASEAN Cup on August 26 and, minutes later, the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were a sea of red flags and motorbikes. This is đi bão.
Vietnam
Phở 10, Bánh mì 25, Bún mắm 444, Bánh mì 362. The numbers on Vietnamese shop signs are mostly house numbers, sometimes years, sometimes lucky digits. They are easy to remember, easy to find, and easy to copy.
Vietnam
Vietnam has amended its Customs Law to bring cross-border e-commerce under formal oversight from March 2027, with buyers and sellers required to pass electronic ID checks and platforms required to link data to customs. Key details still depend on future decrees.
Vietnam
Left-Handed Girl went from Cannes to the Oscar shortlist to two more Taiwanese awards in July 2026. The Vietnamese woman working the noodle stall on screen is Chen Chiu-liu, born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1983, a shoe-factory worker who married into Taiwan in 2003.
Vietnam
The "$1,000 a month in Vietnam" era is over. A comfortable life in Saigon's expat bubble now runs about $2,500 a month. And for anyone planning to stay, money is not even the hard part — the visa is.
Vietnam
A selfie video in seven languages made Khánh Vy famous in 2016. A decade later, she is the youngest-ever host of Vietnam's flagship quiz show and runs a media business followed by millions.
In-depth analysis of Vietnam's politics, economy, business, technology, and culture.
In mid-2023, all of Ho Chi Minh City had a few hundred pickleball players. Two years later Vietnam has a national federation, nearly VND 1 trillion in 10-month equipment sales online, and the Pickleball World Cup opening in Da Nang on August 30 — here is why the sport took off.
US tariffs on Vietnam changed four times in eighteen months. Nike's Vietnam share of footwear went from 44% to 52% anyway. The reason has less to do with tariffs than with who actually owns the factories.
Vietnam usually requires experts to have a degree plus relevant experience; fresh graduates and factory-based exemptions depend on the legal category.
In a country where 5G already covers 92% of the population, Starlink is a backup service, not a challenger. The clue to its real ambitions is a job ad SpaceX posted in Hanoi two days before launch.
Vietnam's high deposit rates are a symptom of a banking liquidity gap. If the currency gain ever arrives, the 7% interest won't still be there.
VinSpace has secured a SpaceX launch contract for 2027. It still has to build its satellites, prove them in orbit and turn their capabilities into services people pay for.
Grab's financial services arm has racked up over $1.2 billion in losses since its 2021 IPO, and of its three digital banks only Indonesia's Superbank makes money — while in Vietnam, Grab has exited payments entirely.
WeChat Pay went live in Vietnam on August 6, the third Chinese payment platform to plug into VietQRGlobal in just over eight months.
Before renting in Vietnam, Gen Z types a street name into Threads and asks people who live there. The answers reveal an information gap the housing market has never filled.
November 24 is now a paid public holiday in Vietnam, taking the annual total to 12 days. The legal basis is a National Assembly resolution, not the Labour Code — which still lists 11.
Vietnam's southwestern seaport did not arrive by conquest. A Cantonese exile who had spent a decade as a Siamese captive handed it over in 1708, and kept the right to run it himself.
A record-setting cable car on Vietnam's highest peak was built with picks, shovels and the backs of 400 to 500 Hmong and Thái workers.