Names of Ho Chi Minh City conquest in the 1860s, when the occupying force adopted the name "Saïgon" for the city, a westernized form of the traditional Vietnamese name. The current name was given after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and honors Hồ Chí Minh, the first leader of North Vietnam. Even today, however, the informal name of "Sài Gòn" remains in daily speech both domestically and internationally, especially among the Vietnamese diaspora and local southern Vietnamese. The area where present-day Ho Chi Minh City is located was likely inhabited long since prehistory; the empire of Funan and later Chenla maintained a presence in the
Ho Chi Minh Thought Ho Chi Minh Thought Ho Chi Minh Thought (; literally "Thoughts of Ho Chi Minh") is the political philosophy of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Since 1991, the contents of Ho Chi Minh's thought were formed and developed in association with the periods of Ho Chi Minh's activities in the revolutionary movement of Vietnam and internationally as integral to the curriculum of fundamental instruction for civil servants in Vietnam. At the beginning and the middle of the 20th century, Ho Chi Minh thought was the crystallization of Vietnamese culture, French revolutionary ideas, liberal ideas, Marxist–Leninist communist ideals and Ho Chi