Qualla: Long Xuyên

Long Xuyên: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên at Vietnamese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The city lost an argument with its own marketplace. In 1789 a party of settlers cut an outpost into the bank of the Tam Khe canal and called it Đông Xuyên; the formal name on the paperwork was Thủ Đông Xuyên. Then somebody opened a market nearby and called it Long Xuyên, and by the 1860s boatmen coming up the Hậu River were asking for the market, not the post. The market won. Long Xuyên spent another 133 years growing into the name before Vietnam got around to designating it a city in 1999 — by which point it had been the working heart of the upper delta for the better part of two centuries.

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên at Vietnamese Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Xuyên: Water Where Roads Would Be

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pimnl, CC0. Long Xuyên sits on the Hậu River, the western of the two great Mekong branches that split Vietnam's delta, roughly 190 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City and 45 from the Cambodian border. Its 115 square kilometers hold something near 286,000 people across thirteen commune-level sub...

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Image: Pimnl | CC0

Long Xuyên: Snakehead, Tamarind, Palm Sugar

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. Order bún cá in Long Xuyên and you get the city's argument for itself in a bowl: snakehead fish poached and flaked, a broth soured with tamarind and stained yellow with turmeric, rice noodles, and a fistful of herbs and shredded banana blossom you tear in yourself. Vendors sell i...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Xuyên: The Rice School

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. An Giang University enrolls more than 10,000 students, making it the second-largest university in the Mekong Delta, and for years its rector was Võ Tòng Xuân — an agronomist whose reputation rested on getting new rice varieties out of research plots and into the hands of farmers ...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Xuyên: Two Men from One City

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thuydaonguyen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tôn Đức Thắng was born on 20 August 1888 on Mỹ Hòa Hưng, the river island opposite the city that everyone calls Cù Lao Ông Hổ, Tiger Island. He trained as a mechanic, went to sea, and later described taking part in a 1919 mutiny in the Black Sea aboard a French cruiser — an episo...

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Image: Thuydaonguyen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Xuyên: A City of Several Faiths

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long Xuyên's skyline is a survey of southern Vietnamese religion. There is a Cao Đài temple, one of relatively few this far into the delta, with the all-seeing Divine Eye above its doors. The Catholic diocese of Long Xuyên counted some 230,000 members when it marked its sixtieth ...

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Image: Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên | CC BY-SA 3.0