Ho Chi Minh City: Notre Dame Cathedral and the Book Cafe Street

When people in my and the past generation think about Vietnam, people right think about the Vietnam War and the American occupation. But before this, the Vietnamese also fought for their independence from the French during the French Indochina War.

Vietnamese girls in blue and white ao dai traditional dress waving the Vietnamese and South Korean flags just outside the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Vietnam was a colonial possession of France and like many of the European imperialists, they brought along with them their culture, their standards and values, a way of (political) governance, their arts and architecture, their education system, as well as their religion.

The Note Dame Cathedral in District 1 of then Saigon is one of the remaining important French colonial architectures and is a great testimony as well to the diversity of religion in Vietnam today. The current statistics point to about 8-9% Roman Catholics in the country. Not bad at all for the Catholics in a very religion fragmented society.

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~~~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~~~

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