Ho Chi Minh City: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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The French took Saigon in 1859 and held it for almost a century, and they built the kind of city centre that was meant to be looked at: a cathedral, a post office, an opera house and a town hall within six hundred metres of one another, all facing the same two streets. What makes it worth walking is that none of it was preserved as a museum — the post office still sells stamps, the opera house still sells tickets, and the grandest apartment block on the main street is now thirty cafes. Ninety minutes. Do it from four in the afternoon: before that the heat on Nguyen Hue is punishing, and the buildings are lit from six.

A short history of Ho Chi Minh City

On this site stood a Khmer settlement called Prey Nokor. In 1698 the Vietnamese Nguyễn lords took control of it, and the city that grew up here was called Saigon. In 1859 the French captured it and made it the capital of Cochinchina, with a cathedral, a post office and an opera house that still stand today. From 1955 it was the capital of South Vietnam. On 30 April 1975 tanks of the North Vietnamese army entered the city, and in 1976 it was given the name of Ho Chi Minh. Since the 1990s it has been the main economic centre of Vietnam.

The ten best sights in Ho Chi Minh City

1
Independence Palace
Two tanks came through this gate on 30 April 1975; the basement war room is the reason to go in. 40,000 dong for the palace, 80,000 with the exhibition. Verified 10/2026
2
War Remnants Museum
Hard, one-sided and essential. 40,000 dong, open 07:30–17:30 daily but the ticket desk shuts 11:00–13:00. Verified 10/2026
3
Notre-Dame Cathedral
Every brick was shipped from Marseille. In restoration for years — assume you see it from outside
4
Central Post Office
Not Eiffel, whatever the guide says — Gustave Foulhoux, 1891. Still a working post office
5
City Hall
Closed to the public; come at nightfall when it is lit, from the walking street
6
Saigon Opera House
Was the South Vietnamese parliament from 1955 to 1975; the A O Show plays here most nights
7
22 Ly Tu Trong
The famous helicopter photo of April 1975 was taken on this roof, not the embassy. A plain block today
8
Ho Chi Minh Museum — Dragon House
The wharf he sailed from in 1911 as a galley hand, aged twenty-one
9
Fine Arts Museum
Go for the 1929 house as much as the art — it has the first lift in Saigon, built of wood
10
History Museum
The Dong Son bronze drums and the Oc Eo finds; next to the zoo gate, half an hour is enough

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The colonial spine

Notre-Dame Cathedral · Built 1863 to 1880, and every single brick was shipped from Marseille because the colonists did not trust local ones to hold the colour — they never needed plastering and they have not faded. The two 58-metre towers were added only in 1895, fifteen years after the church opened. It has been wrapped in scaffolding since 2017 and the work keeps being extended, so expect to see it from the square.
Central Post Office · Every second guide here will tell you Gustave Eiffel designed it. He did not: the architect was Gustave Foulhoux, and the building went up between 1886 and 1891. Go inside and look up at the two painted maps on the end walls — one is the telegraph lines of southern Vietnam and Cambodia in 1892, the other is Saigon itself. Duong Van Ngo sat at the desk by the window writing and translating letters for other people for more than seventy years, until he retired at ninety; he died in 2023.
Book Street · The lane along the side of the post office was closed to traffic in 2016 and given to publishers — around twenty of them, each with a stall, under old tamarind trees. It is the one place in the centre where the shade is continuous, and almost everything for sale is in Vietnamese, which tells you it was not built for you.
Saigon Opera House · Finished in 1900 and modelled on the Petit Palais in Paris, which had gone up for the exhibition the year before. Between 1955 and 1975 it was not a theatre at all: it housed the Lower House of the South Vietnamese National Assembly, and the stage was the floor of parliament. It went back to being an opera house in 1975 and the facade was restored for the city tricentenary in 1998.
City Hall · Built between 1902 and 1908 as the Hôtel de Ville, and it is still the seat of the city government, which is why you cannot go in — this is one of very few colonial buildings in Saigon that never changed its use. Stand at the top of Nguyen Hue and look back along the street: the whole walking promenade was laid out as the view from this balcony.
The Cafe Apartments · Number 42 was built in the sixties as housing for government staff, nine floors of identical flats with a balcony each. In the 2010s the flats were taken one by one by small cafes and shops, and the balconies became their signs — the whole front of the building is now a stack of logos. There is a lift and a small fee for it, and the floor to aim for is any one whose balcony faces up the street.

The thirtieth of April

The war did not end in a battle in Saigon; it ended in a morning. On 30 April 1975 two North Vietnamese tanks drove through the gate of the presidential palace and by midday the flag was on the balcony, and the walk below joins six places where the last twelve years of the Republic of Vietnam were actually decided — a palace, a pagoda, a rooftop, a museum and two tunnels under government buildings. Two and a half hours with the museums, and one request: the War Remnants Museum is one-sided by design and it is also the only place in the city that shows you what the chemical defoliants did. Take it as testimony, not as balance, and do not bring young children to the second floor.

Independence Palace · The building you see was finished in 1966 by the Vietnamese architect Ngo Viet Thu, after the previous palace was bombed by two of its own air force pilots in 1962. Go down to the basement: the command bunker is intact, with the 1975 maps still on the walls and the telex machines on the desks, and it is far more affecting than the reception rooms above. On the roof, a white circle marks where a bomb was dropped on 8 April 1975 by a South Vietnamese pilot who was a communist agent — three weeks before the tanks.
War Remnants Museum · It opened in September 1975, four months after the city fell, under the name Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes; the name was softened twice, in 1990 and in 1995, as Vietnam normalised relations with Washington. The room that justifies the visit is Requiem: photographs taken by 134 photographers from both sides who were killed covering this war, assembled by two of the men who survived it. The aircraft and tanks in the yard are American and were captured here.
Xa Loi Pagoda · Built in 1956 to hold a relic of the Buddha, and in 1963 it became the headquarters of the Buddhist protest against President Diem, a Catholic ruling a Buddhist country. On the night of 21 August 1963 his brother sent special forces into this compound, and into pagodas across the country, arresting hundreds of monks; Washington read it as the end of the regime and Diem was overthrown ten weeks later. The bell tower here is the tallest in Vietnam.
22 Ly Tu Trong · The photograph everyone knows from April 1975 — a queue of people climbing a ladder to a helicopter on a rooftop — was not taken at the American embassy, though it is captioned that way almost everywhere. It was taken by Hubert van Es on the roof of this apartment block, then 22 Gia Long Street, which housed CIA staff; the lift housing was the only flat surface strong enough. The building is still there and still ordinary, and nothing marks it.
Ho Chi Minh City Museum · The Gia Long palace of 1890, which has served as a commercial museum, a governor’s residence, a supreme court and a presidential office. President Diem was working from this building on 1 November 1963 when the coup began, and he and his brother escaped through a tunnel under it; the tunnel entrance is in the grounds and you can look down it. They got as far as Cholon, and no further.
Dragon House Wharf · The 1863 headquarters of the Messageries Maritimes shipping line, and the place the whole story starts rather than ends: on 5 June 1911 a twenty-one-year-old called Nguyen Tat Thanh signed on here as a kitchen hand on the Amiral Latouche-Treville and left Vietnam for thirty years. He came back as Ho Chi Minh. The building is now his museum, and it is worth it for the wharf itself and the view back at the skyline that grew up opposite.

Cholon: the big market

Cholon means big market, and that is all it ever was called: a Chinese city two and a half kilometres west of the French one, founded by refugees from the Qing conquest who had been pushed out of Bien Hoa in 1778. For two centuries it was the richest commercial quarter in Indochina, and then in 1978 and 1979 some three hundred thousand of its people left in one wave, most of them by boat. The quarter stayed; it is poorer, denser and far more interesting than District 1, and nothing in it is arranged for visitors. Two hours. Go in the morning, wear something with sleeves for the temples, and take a taxi there rather than walking it from the centre.

Binh Tay Market · Built in 1928 and paid for in full by Quach Dam, a Teochew immigrant who had arrived in Saigon with nothing and made a fortune in scrap and hides; he gave the city the market on condition his statue stand in the courtyard. It did until 1975, and it is now in the Fine Arts Museum. The building is a square around an open court with a clock tower, and despite being the symbol of Cholon it is technically in District 6, not District 5.
Thien Hau Temple · Founded around 1760 by Cantonese merchants from Guangzhou and dedicated to Thien Hau, the sea goddess who protects sailors — which tells you how these people arrived. The painted ceramic friezes along the roof ridges were fired in kilns in Guangdong and shipped here in pieces in the 1890s; look for the miniature streets with hundreds of figures in them. The spiral coils hanging overhead are incense that burns for a month.
Nghia An Assembly Hall · The Teochew community’s hall, two streets from Thien Hau and usually almost empty. Inside the door stands a life-size red horse: it is the mount of Guan Yu, the general deified as a god of loyalty, and worshippers rub its flank and pass under its neck for luck. The courtyard is one of the few places in Cholon where you can sit down.
Cha Tam Church · A small Catholic church of 1900, built for Cholon’s Chinese Catholics and named after the priest who founded it. On the night of 1 November 1963 President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, having escaped the palace by tunnel, hid here and telephoned the generals to surrender. They were collected the next morning, put into an armoured personnel carrier, and shot inside it before it reached the city centre. The pew they waited in is marked.
An Dong Market · Four floors of wholesale clothing on the edge of Cholon, and the basement is a food court that serves the traders rather than visitors — which is the reason to come at noon. This is where Saigon tailors buy, and where a bargain actually means a bargain: the opening price is routinely three times what the stall will take.
Binh Dong Wharf · The quay along the Tau Hu canal, which is how Cholon was built in the first place — rice came up from the delta by boat and left Saigon by ship, and these warehouses are what is left of that trade. Boats still unload here. In the week before the lunar new year the canal fills with flower boats from Ben Tre and Dong Thap selling kumquat trees off the deck, and the whole city comes down to buy them.

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Getting to Ho Chi Minh City and getting around

Tan Son Nhat Airport · Seven kilometres from District 1 — the closest airport to a city centre in Asia, and a former US air base
Ben Thanh Metro Station · Line 1 opened in December 2024 after twelve years of works; Ben Thanh to Suoi Tien in half an hour
Saigon Railway Station · The Reunification Express to Hanoi leaves from here; 33 hours and worth one night of it
Mien Dong Bus Station · Everything north — Dalat, Nha Trang, Hue. Buses are sleepers with bunks, not seats
Mien Tay Bus Station · Everything into the Mekong Delta; the delta starts an hour out of town
Bach Dang Wharf · The river boats and the speedboat to Vung Tau leave here; also the cheapest river view in town

Cheap eats in Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon eats standing up, sitting on a plastic stool, or off the back of a motorbike, and the food here is not Hanoi’s. The south had sugar, coconut, French colonial bread and a hundred years of Chinese and Cambodian neighbours, and the result is sweeter, richer and far more mixed. Most of these are single-dish shops that have made one thing for decades. Thirty-five thousand to eighty thousand dong a plate — one and a half to three and a half dollars — and the good ones sell out.

Banh mi · A dollar and a half; the queue at Huynh Hoa on Le Thi Rieng is twenty minutes and worth it
Com tam · Broken rice with grilled pork, two dollars; a Saigon dish and nowhere else’s
Pho — the southern version · Pho Hoa on Pasteur has been open since 1968; three dollars
Hu tieu Nam Vang · “Phnom Penh noodles”, two and a half dollars; ask for it dry, with the broth on the side
Banh xeo · The sizzling crepe; 46A Dinh Cong Trang is the address people name. Three dollars
Oc — snails · An evening thing, never lunch; order three or four kinds and a beer. Two dollars a plate
Banh cuon · Steamed rice rolls, a dollar and a half; a morning dish and gone by eleven
Bun thit nuong · Cold noodles, grilled pork, herbs and a sweet fish sauce poured over. Two dollars
Bun bo Hue · The spicy central-Vietnamese beef soup; thicker noodles and far hotter than pho. Three dollars
The alley at 177 Ly Tu Trong · A hem — a residential alley — full of stalls at lunchtime, two minutes off the main street

Museums in Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon’s museums split cleanly in two: the ones about the war, which are the reason most people come and which are state-told and one-sided, and the ones in colonial mansions, which are quieter and often better. Two of the best are not about history at all — the Fine Arts Museum is worth it for the house, and the Women’s Museum tells the half of the war nobody else tells. Most close at five and several still shut for a lunch hour.

War Remnants Museum · An hour and a half minimum; the Agent Orange floor is not for children
Fine Arts Museum · Three buildings around a courtyard; the lacquer paintings upstairs are the real collection
Southern Women’s Museum · Free, almost empty, and the best ao dai collection in the city is on the top floor
History Museum · Half an hour, beside the zoo gate; go for the Dong Son bronze drums and the Oc Eo room
Ho Chi Minh City Museum · The 1890 palace itself is the exhibit; the escape tunnel entrance is out in the grounds
Ho Chi Minh Museum — Dragon House · The 1863 shipping office on the wharf he sailed from in 1911
Ao Dai Museum · Seventeen kilometres out in a garden; founded by the designer Si Hoang and worth the taxi

Holy places in Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon holds more religions in less space than anywhere else in Vietnam, and they are not in competition: a Cantonese sea-goddess temple, a Teochew assembly hall, a Tamil Hindu shrine, two French Catholic churches and a Mahayana pagoda all sit within a few kilometres, and the same people visit several of them. Dress covers shoulders and knees everywhere; shoes come off in the pagodas and stay on in the churches; and incense is bought at the gate, not brought in.

Thien Hau Temple · Around 1760; come when the hanging incense coils are lit, which is most mornings
Jade Emperor Pagoda · 1909; the carved Hall of Ten Hells at the back, and the turtle pond at the front
Giac Lam Pagoda · Founded 1744, the oldest in the city; a long way out and almost nobody there
Mariamman Hindu Temple · Tamil, five minutes from Ben Thanh; shoes off at the step and it is working, not a sight
Cha Tam Church · 1900, Cholon; the church where President Diem spent his last night
Tan Dinh Church · 1876, and pink since the nineties; usually locked outside service hours
Xa Loi Pagoda · 1956, and the pagoda the 1963 crisis was fought over

Nature and day trips near Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon sits on the flat alluvial edge of the Mekong delta, most of it between one and two metres above sea level, cut by the Saigon River and a web of canals that were the city’s original streets. There are no hills and there is very little shade, so the green here is either a colonial park in the centre or an hour out of town — and an hour out of town is where the delta actually begins. Everything below is best before nine in the morning.

Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens · Opened 1864; come for the hundred-and-sixty-year-old trees, not the enclosures
Can Gio Mangrove Forest · A full day and a boat; a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2000
Binh Quoi Peninsula · Eight kilometres out, a loop of the river; weekends it serves the delta as a buffet
Tao Dan Park · Six in the morning: the bird keepers hang their cages in the trees and drink coffee under them
Thu Thiem Park · The empty far bank; the whole skyline from across the water, and free
Gia Dinh Park · The biggest park in the city, out by the airport; local, not touristed, and it has grass

Things to do in Ho Chi Minh City with kids

Saigon is hard on small children in the middle of the day — the heat is relentless, the pavements are motorbike parking and crossing a road takes nerve. The answer is to split the day: something outdoors before nine, something air-conditioned from eleven to four, and the river or a park in the evening. The metro, which opened at the end of 2024, is itself an attraction for a six-year-old.

Metro Line 1 · Ben Thanh to Suoi Tien in half an hour, air conditioned, and a novelty for everyone on board
Suoi Tien Theme Park · At the end of the metro line; Buddhist-themed, enormous, and entirely unlike anywhere else
Dam Sen Park · Water slides and a lake; Vietnamese families, almost no tourists, and busy at weekends
Bitexco Skydeck · Floor 49; indoors, air conditioned, and the motorbike rivers below hold a child for ten minutes
Bach Dang river boats · The cheap local boats beat the dinner cruises; forty minutes and the wind is the point
Saigon Zoo · Shaded, central, cheap; go at opening time and be out by ten

Nightlife in Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon stays up later than Hanoi and always has — there is no real curfew here and the city has three separate night economies that barely overlap: the backpacker street, which is loud and cheap and aimed squarely at twenty-two-year-olds; the rooftop bars, which are expensive and worth it once for the view; and the pavement, where most of the city actually drinks, on plastic stools over a tray of snails. Beer is served over ice and nobody apologises for it.

Bui Vien Street · The backpacker street; loud until three, and the pavement is the bar
Vinh Khanh Street · District 4, the snail street; this is where Saigon goes out, and it starts at seven
The Cafe Apartments after dark · Nine floors of balconies over the lit walking street; the top floors have the view
Nguyen Hue at night · From eight it is families, skateboards and street performers; the city’s living room
Mong Bridge · The 1894 iron footbridge; people sit on it with a drink and watch the canal
Thao Dien · The expat riverside district; wine bars and quiet, and a different country from Bui Vien

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Frequently asked questions about Ho Chi Minh City

What is there to see in Ho Chi Minh City?

The top sights in Ho Chi Minh City are Independence Palace, War Remnants Museum and Notre-Dame Cathedral. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Ho Chi Minh City?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Ho Chi Minh City without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Ho Chi Minh City?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Ho Chi Minh City, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The colonial spine.

How do you get to Ho Chi Minh City and get around?

The main ways are Tan Son Nhat Airport, Ben Thanh Metro Station and Saigon Railway Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Ho Chi Minh City, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Ho Chi Minh City that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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