About Vietnam Factbook
Vietnam Factbook is an English-language reference to the whole of Vietnam, built as a structured database rather than a collection of articles. Every subject — a province, a beach, a train route, a visa rule, a dish, a festival, an industry — is a record, and the connections between them are stored as data rather than typed into prose.
Who it is for
Travellers planning a trip and travellers already here; people considering moving to Vietnam, working remotely from it, or retiring in it; and companies researching manufacturing, sourcing, investment or expansion. The same underlying records serve all of them, which is why a province page carries both what there is to see and what the place makes.
Why a database rather than articles
Travel information rots. A fare that was right last year is wrong this year, and an article that does not say when it was written gives you no way to tell. Holding every page as a record means each figure can carry its own observation date and producer, related pages link to each other automatically, and anything unverified is flagged rather than quietly published.
Geography that survives a reorganisation
On 1 July 2025 Vietnam merged its provincial-level units and abolished the district tier entirely, moving to a two-tier structure of province and commune. Almost every guidebook, map and booking site still describes the old arrangement.
Rather than replacing one fixed list with another, this site models administrative geography as dated records. Each unit has a start and an end; each reorganisation is an event with the legal instrument behind it and members on each side. Nothing here hard-codes how many provinces Vietnam has — the figure of 34 shown across the site is a query, and the next reorganisation will be absorbed by adding records rather than rebuilding the system. You can ask the site what the map looked like on any past date.
An administrative unit is not a destination
These are separate things and the database keeps them separate. Ha Giang stopped being a province on 1 July 2025; the Ha Giang Loop did not stop being one of the best motorbike routes in Asia. Sapa is a destination that happens to sit inside a provincial unit whose name and extent have changed more than once. So destination pages carry on under the names people actually use and search for, while the administrative record underneath them is dated and precise — and each says plainly what the other is.
What this site is not
It is a reference, not an adviser. It reports what rules, prices and conditions are, with their dates and sources. It does not tell you what to do, and nothing here is immigration, medical, legal, tax or financial advice. For anything touching a visa or your health, the official source is the authority and this page is only a map to it.
Corrections are welcome — every page carries a date precisely so that you can tell us when it has gone stale.