About Vietnam Factbook

Vietnam is not a difficult country. It is a badly explained one.

Ask five guidebooks how to get from Hanoi to Sapa and you will get five answers, two of them from 2016, one describing a train that does not go where it says it goes. Ask which province Sapa sits in and most of them will tell you something that stopped being true on 1 July 2025. That gap is the reason this site exists.

Vietnam Factbook is a reference to the whole country, in English, built as a database instead of a pile of articles. A province, a beach, a rail line, a visa rule, a bowl of pho, a festival, an industrial park: each one is a record. The connections between them are stored as data, so a page about Sapa also knows the road that gets you there, the people who farm the valleys below it and the province that administers it this year.

Who it is for

Four sorts of reader, all wanting different things from the same facts.

The traveller planning a trip, and the traveller already sitting on a plastic stool in the Old Quarter working out how to reach Ninh Binh before dark. The person weighing up a move here, or already here on the wrong visa and quietly anxious about it. The remote worker who wants to know what a month in Da Nang costs now, not what a blog guessed in 2019. And the company looking at Bac Ninh for a factory, who needs that same province page to talk about electronics, labour and power supply rather than beaches.

One set of records serves all four, on purpose. A province is somewhere you visit and somewhere that makes things. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with two thin websites instead of one useful one.

Why a database rather than articles

Travel writing rots. A fare that was right last year is wrong today, and an article that never says when it was written gives you no way to tell which.

So every figure here carries the date it was observed and the name of whoever published it. Every page says when a person last checked it. Pages about things that change quickly, visas above all, age four times faster than the rest: a visa page nobody has looked at for four months says so at the top, in red, rather than sitting there looking confident.

The 2025 reorganisation

On 1 July 2025 Vietnam merged its provinces and cities into 34 units and abolished the district tier outright. Two levels now, province and commune, where there used to be three.

Most of the internet has not caught up. Guidebooks still count 63 provinces. Booking sites still file hotels under districts that stopped governing anything a year ago.

This site keeps both. The 34 units in force today, the 63 that came before them, and the roughly 700 former districts underneath, each saying plainly what it used to be and what covers that ground now. Search Ha Giang and you will land on Ha Giang, because the loop road, the limestone and every reason you typed it are exactly where they were. Only the paperwork moved.

How a page is made

Facts first. Geography comes from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, statistics from Vietnam's General Statistics Office. When two sources disagree, the page says they disagree instead of quietly picking a winner. Four provinces are currently having an argument about where their administrative centre is. You will find that argument on the page, not hidden behind a confident sentence.

Then it gets written, sourced and checked. Nothing reaches the public site without a map, at least two sources, links to related pages and a verification date. Anything that fails sits in the queue until somebody fixes it. That is why some sections here are thinner than others: we would rather show you 30 pages worth reading than 3,000 worth ignoring.

What this is not

It is not advice. We can tell you what the electronic visa fee was on the day we checked it, and exactly where the official portal lives. We cannot tell you whether you will be granted one. For anything touching immigration, your health, your taxes or your company registration, the authority is the authority and this site is a map to its front door.

How it pays for itself

Affiliate links, always marked, and display advertising later. If a route is poor value the page says so whether or not a partner sells tickets for it. That rule is worth more to us than the commission.

Corrections are genuinely the most useful thing you can send us. Every page carries a date for exactly that reason: so you can tell us when it has gone stale. Say hello.