Independence Palace (Dinh Độc Lập)

In front of you is the Dinh Độc Lập, the Independence Palace, also known as Reunification Palace. In these grounds, in 1975, the Vietnam War came to an end.

1Two palaces on one site

The first building here was Norodom Palace, residence of the French governors, built between 1868 and 1873. In 1954, after the French defeat, it passed to the government of South Vietnam. On 27 February 1962 two pilots from the country's own air force bombed it in an attempt to kill President Ngô Đình Diệm, who survived. Diệm had it pulled down and commissioned a new one from the architect Ngô Viết Thụ, winner of the Grand Prix de Rome in 1955. Work began on 1 July 1962; Diệm was assassinated in a coup in November 1963 and never saw it finished. It was inaugurated on 31 October 1966.

230 April 1975

On 8 April 1975 a South Vietnamese pilot who was secretly a communist agent, Nguyễn Thành Trung, bombed the palace from an F-5E. Three weeks later, around noon on the 30th, tanks of the North Vietnamese army's 203rd Brigade reached these gates: tank 843 rammed the side gate and tank 390 smashed through the main one. Inside, General Dương Văn Minh, president for just two days, was waiting; he announced the surrender on the radio that same afternoon.

3What to look for

• The stone lattice on the façade, which evokes bamboo stems.
• The two tanks in the grounds, of the same types as those of 1975; the originals are in museums in Hanoi.
• The main gate, the one tank 390 drove through.