For more than a century Saigon has played coy mistress to a series of foreign masters. Seemingly pliant, she has been occupied by Chinese conquerors, French colonialists, Japanese invaders and American troops. When the French arrived in 1862, Saigon was an unprepossessing village of palm trees and straw shacks. Then homesick planners dreaming of Paris remade her to suit their own visions. Narrow, winding streets were rearranged into the neat geometry of spacious public squares and broad boulevards. A twin-spired cathedral, an opera house, a palace were built to grace the squares. But if Saigon was kept in style by many, she was ultimately possessed by none. Now her latest masters seem intent on making an honest woman of Saigon. They have banned prostitution, dance halls and "acting like Americans." They have also given her a new name: Ho Chi Minh city.
With mixed feelings, a group of current and former TIME correspondents whose collective experience of Saigon spans the length of Indochina's Thirty Years' War pay their tribute:
1945: A Euphoric Few Weeks
I first reached Saigon with a small OSS detachment in August 1945. For a few weeks, the city lived in the euphoria of liberation from the Japanese. Saigon's Cercle Sportif bubbled with the dansant in the hot evenings. Ladies fashioned new gowns from their liberators' parachutes. The Vietnamese seemed happy, justly proud that they had fought the Japanese while their French overlords capitulated. The exhilaration faded when French troops began reoccupying their old garrisons in September and a French high commissioner arrived proclaiming that he had "not come out from France to turn Indochina over to the Indochinese."
In December 1945, I spent several weeks in Hanoi with instructions to make contact with Ho Chi Minh, then head of a provisional government in North Indochina. The last time we talked was after the French had landed a major force in Haiphong. We sipped Scotch (his) and smoked cigarettes (mine) long into the night. He was certain, he said, that there would be a long war and that he would fight "whomever and wherever" for as long as it took. Within months, Ho had left for the jungle, and the long war had begun.
—Frank White, former TIME correspondent
1956-59: Weekends with Diem
From late 1956 to mid-1959, Saigon was still a haunting, lethargic beauty exuding an undertone of wicked excitement. The French, lately humiliated by Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu, skulked about, bitter and distrustful of the new top-dog foreigners from the U.S. You heard stories about district chiefs being garroted by the Communists, but the violence seemed isolated and distant. More immediate was the prospect of an interview with President Ngo Dinh Diem, which meant that you had to visit the bathroom beforehand because he sometimes kept you six straight hours. The thing was to be Diem's weekend guest at Cap St-Jacques, where his sister-in-law, the lissome Mme. Nhu, led giggling moonlight hunts for crustaceans to put in Sunday's bouillabaisse.