info The Land of Vietnam

Vietnam

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Jun 28, 2020
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Vietnam is a long thin country stretching 3260km (2037 miles) along the eastern coast of the Indo-Chinese penin¬sula on the South China Sea. The Vietnamese visualize their country as a long thin carrying pole with two rice baskets: in the north the Red River Valley, in the south the Mekong Delta. At its narrowest it measures only 50km (30 miles) wide. It covers an area of 330,363km: (127,520 square miles), roughly the size of Italy.
Vietnam divides into three distinct areas: the high¬lands and Red River Delta of the north; the Truong Son Mountains and coastal plains linking north to south; and the Mekong Delta in the south. These divisions are known as Bac Bo, Trung Bo and Nam Bo, which correspond to the former French colonial districts of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina.
In the north, running from northwest to southeast, is the area's most important valley. Known as Song Hong in Vietnamese, the Red River rises in China's Yunnan province and flows through northern Vietnam, where the delta, a flat triangular region of some 3000km; (1158 square miles), which was once an inlet of the Gulf of Tonkin, has filled up over the millennia with alluvial deposits. A lush and fertile region, it is the ancestral home of the ethnic Vietnamese and location of the nation's capital, Hanoi.
In its central region, Vietnam forms a long thin crescent, fringed by a narrow coastal plain and backed by the Truong Son Mountains running from north to south. These mountains, which have several plateaux, are broken by west-east spurs that divide the coastal strip into valleys. In the southern part of the area are the Central Highlands (Tay Nguyen), some 51,800km: (20,000 square miles) of rugged mountain peaks, extensive forests and fertile red soil.