🧧 Culture of Vietnam

The culture of Vietnam is highly multicultural. The early culture in Vietnam started with the Bronze Age Đông Sơn culture considered to be one of its most important progenitors for its Ancient history.^[1][2] Vietnamese culture was heavily influenced by Chinese culture due to the 1000 years of Northern rule. In this period of time Vietnamese was written with Chữ Hán, a Chinese script, and afterward a Vietnamese script (Chữ Nôm) that was based on Chinese, but which included invented characters to represent native Vietnamese words. This large impact on Vietnamese culture means that Vietnam is often considered to be part of the East Asian cultural sphere (with China, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, and Japan).^[3]

Following independence from China in the 10th century, Vietnam began a southward expansion and annexed territories formerly belonging to Champa and Khmer, resulting in various influences on the Vietnamese. During the French colonial period, Catholicism and a Latin alphabet (the Vietnamese alphabet), called Chữ Quốc Ngữ (National Language Script) or Tiếng Việt Latinh (Latin Vietnamese), romanizing the Vietnamese language, was introduced in Vietnam.^[4]

Some elements considered to be characteristic of Vietnamese culture include ancestor veneration, respect for community and family, manual labour and living in harmony with nature.