Duong Van Minh

IN all its two thousand or more years of history, Viet Nam has never been fully in control of its own destiny. We have suffered invasion by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese and the French. We were administered as a protectorate of China for over a thousand years; we were a colony of France for nearly a century. We endured two and a half centuries of civil war between the Lords of the Trinh from the north and the Lords of the Nguyen from the south-a civil war in which the Dutch were heavily involved supporting the former and the Portuguese the latter.