Growing Ties of Friendship

Near the end of a three-hour flight, Ho Chi Minh City comes into view. The bustling Saigon River murkily snakes its way through the city. Buildings are densely packed, with low residences—long and narrow, resembling Lego blocks—interspersed among high rises.

Familiar yet exotic

In Taiwan, Vietnam has been called at once the most familiar and the most exotic of Southeast-Asian neighbors. Much like in Taiwan, a series of regime changes and foreign powers left their marks: China came for a millennium, India for four centuries, France for a century, and the United States for two decades. Elements of foreign cultures merged with the local. It’s a milieu that Taiwanese can identify with.

The rivers of traffic on Ho Chi Minh City’s streets and alleys seem to possess a method to their madness. Often more than 20 meters tall, the luxuriant century-old dipterocarp trees that line the city’s grander thoroughfares are a legacy of the French era. Like the French, the Vietnamese enjoy sitting in their shade and drinking coffee or beer.

Under shop signs written in the Roman alphabet, you typically find a small shrine. Locals believe shrines at ground level are more “down-to-earth.” If you look closely, you can see the Chinese characters for the Earth God. It turns out that in Vietnam, like in Korea and Japan, written Chinese used to be the language of the governing class. The Roman alphabet wasn’t widely used before French colonization, and one can still find Chinese characters in certain places and in old books.

Growing closer

With its historically rooted cultural resonance with Taiwan, Vietnam has become an important economic and trading partner and is the second-largest destination for ROC overseas investment. Currently, there are about 90,000 Taiwanese in Vietnam, including both businesspeople on long-term visas with their families as well as those who have come for shorter stays. In southern Vietnam, which developed earlier, there is a particularly high concentration of Taiwanese businesses. The Council of Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce in Vietnam (CTCVN) has 14 branches. The branch in Binh Duong Province boasts more than 600 members, the highest of any Taiwanese chamber of commerce anywhere in the world. “For their gatherings, they’re split into five divisions that meet separately,” explains Hank Han, director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Ho Chi Minh City. In Taiwan, meanwhile, there are 110,000 Vietnamese spouses of Taiwan natives, 100,000 children of such spouses, 250,000 Vietnamese on foreign worker visas, and more than 20,000 Vietnamese students, making them a prominent part of the immigrant community.

It is clear to see that Taiwan and Vietnam enjoy close ties and are important to each other. According to the Tourism Administration, Vietnam ranked fifth in terms of visitors to Taiwan from January to July of 2023. Taiwan, meanwhile, ranks fourth in terms of visitors to Vietnam.

Much rice and many vegetables are grown in Vietnam. Common foods include Vietnamese-style spring rolls, pho and banh xeo.

Traversing Ho Chi Minh City on top of a double-decker tourist bus, Hank Han, director general of TECO Ho Chi Minh City, invites Vietnamese to visit Taiwan.

Since prehistoric times

Ties between Taiwan and Vietnam have been growing stronger in recent years, but exchanges between them started long before the ROC government announced its “Go South” and “New Southbound” policies.

Hung Hsiao-chun, a senior research fellow in the Archaeology and Natural History Department of Australian National University, was on a team that unearthed earrings in southern Vietnam made from jade that originated from Fengtian in Hualien County’s Shoufeng Township. These demonstrate that links between Taiwan and Vietnam extend back more than 2,000 years.

Chiung Wi-vun, a professor of Taiwanese literature at National Cheng Kung University, is a specialist in Taiwanese–­Vietnamese comparative literature who is well versed in Vietnamese history. He recounts some important moments in Taiwanese–Vietnamese relations:

In the 17th century the Dutch East India Company came to the Far East to trade. The company brought Vietnamese laborers to northern Taiwan, where they took part in the construction of Fort Antonio (built from the ruins of the Spanish Fort San Domingo). Vietnamese also served as soldiers in Taiwan under the command of the Dutch.

Chen Shangchuan (Tran Thuong Xuyen), a Ming loyalist and one-time subordinate of Zheng Chenggong, led 3,000 soldiers to join the Nguyen Dynasty in northern Vietnam as part of an effort to resist the Qing. Known as the “Minh Huong people,” some were offered government appointments by the Nguyen ruler, and they assisted in bringing areas of southern Vietnam under cultivation. Consequently, Chen Shangchuan came to be posthumously honored as a “first-class deity.” Today you can still find statues of him in the Minh Huong Gia Thanh Temple in Ho Chi Minh City, as well as in the Ong Pagoda and the Tan Lan Temple in Bien Hoa City. Grand processions and religious ceremonies are held to honor him in the tenth month of the lunar calendar.

The first travelog of Taiwanese literature, South Sea Miscellania by Cai Tinglan (1801–1859), is also noteworthy. In 1835 Cai traveled to Fuzhou to take the provincial-level imperial exams. After leaving Fuzhou, he boarded a boat in Kinmen’s Liaoluo Bay bound for home. Blown off course by a typhoon, Cai ended up spending three months in central Vietnam before returning to Penghu. He turned his remarkable adventure in Vietnam into South Sea Miscellania. Reflecting Cai’s prodigious literary talent, the work was republished multiple times and translated into Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese and other languages. He was among the first of Taiwan’s writers to garner international attention and would later become Penghu’s first native son ever to pass the national-level imperial exams.

The statue of Ming loyalist general Chen Shangchuan at Tan Lan Temple in Bien Hoa City bears witness to the historical connections between Taiwan and Vietnam. (courtesy of Chiung Wi-vun)

Thanks in part to the efforts at promotion and matchmaking by Chiung Wi-vun, a professor of Taiwanese literature at National Cheng Kung University, many books on Vietnamese themes have been published in Taiwan in recent years.

Chiung Wi-vun (center) led a delegation from the Taiwanese Pen to Vietnam for a conference promoting Vietnamese literature.

Recent Taiwan–Vietnam history

At one point amid the ever-changing international political landscape of the 20th century, Taiwan and Vietnam enjoyed close relations.

In 1966, with the Vietnam War raging, China Air chose Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) for its first international route. The painter Max Qiwei Liu, the “military poet” Luo Fu, and writers Yaxian, Zhang Mo, Guan Guan and others served in Saigon as members of the ROC military and created works related to Vietnam. Active on the local literary scene, they also influenced Chinese-language poets there.

In Chengqing Lake in Kaohsiung, there is an artificial island named Fuguo. On it stands a monument commemorating the ROC forces that decamped from Guangxi to Vietnam’s Phu Quoc Island in 1949 before eventually ending up in Taiwan.

In 1939 Prince Cuong De, who by the rule of primogeniture was heir to the Nguyen dynasty, came to Taiwan in 1939 under the sponsorship of the Japanese.

A strong proponent of Vietnam’s independence from France, the prince, who lived in a lane off today’s Zhongshan North Road Section 2 near what is now the Tsai Jui-Yueh Dance Research Institute, organized a group of his compatriots in Taiwan. He opened an office in one of the Japanese houses now preserved near Qidong Street and made radio broadcasts from the Taipei Broadcasting Corporation building (now the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum) on today’s Nanhai Road. He dined at the renowned Penglai Pavilion restaurant and enjoyed the hot springs at the hotel that has become the Beitou Museum. A photography aficionado, he grew close to the Taiwanese photographer Peng Ruilin, who took several important photographs of the prince. Little was known about their relationship until Hong Te Ching, who spent two and a half years living in Ho Chi Minh City with her diplomat husband, shined a spotlight on it in her book When the Vietnamese Prince Walked into Peng Ruilin’s Photography Studio.

In 1941 Prince Cuong De (front, second left) and his wife (front, right), along with Taiwanese photographer Peng Ruilin (back, right), Peng’s wife (back, center) and others, were photographed after dining at the Penglai Pavilion Restaurant in Taipei’s Dadaocheng. Rich with meaning for the history of Taiwan’s politics and foreign relations in WWII, the image inspired Hong Te Ching (below) to write When the Vietnamese Prince Walked into Peng Ruilin’s Photography Studio. (courtesy of Owl Publishing House)

Rapid road to prosperity

In 1976, North and South Vietnam were reunified, and in 1986 Vietnam launched economic reforms, attracting foreign investment that has spurred rapid development. A member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Vietnam has also become a party to free-trade agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Enjoying numerous advantages for development, including its proximity to China, Vietnam is a popular destination for Taiwanese entrepreneurs looking to Southeast Asia for business opportunities. Currently, Taiwan ranks as the fourth-largest investor in Vietnam, behind Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. Yet people in the local Taiwanese business community say that many Taiwanese invest there indirectly, via overseas channels. In actuality, they argue, Taiwan’s total investment in Vietnam probably ranks even higher, possibly among the top two.

The first Taiwanese companies to go there were primarily attracted by the low cost of land and labor. Firms in labor-intensive industries, such as footwear, textiles, furniture, and bicycles, comprised the bulk of them. They mostly set up in industrial zones near Ho Chi Minh City.

Some of those factories were massive, employing tens of thousands of workers each. Consequently David Yuan, founder of the Eternal Prowess Vietnam group and president of the Ho Chi Minh City branch of CTCVN, believes that Taiwanese firms collectively employ more workers than other foreign nations there. For instance, the Pou Chen Group, a leading Taiwanese footwear maker, employs several tens of thousands of workers in Vietnam. Its announcements of year-end bonuses or layoffs are big news.

Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s commercial center, developed first. But the Vietnamese government has also been actively pushing development of the capital, Hanoi. In 2006, Hanoi hosted the APEC summit, and that same year the government expanded the city by annexing parts of the neighboring provinces of Ha Tay, Vinh Phuc, and Hoa Binh. It has thus become the largest city in Vietnam by area.

Hung Chih Hua, chairman of Sheng Yu Construction and president of the Hanoi Branch of CTCVN, has a deep and lasting connection with Vietnam. As an ROC public servant, his final posting was to Hanoi in 2006, “just in time for the city’s transformation.” His positive impressions of Vietnam and the relationships he formed there led him to start a new chapter in his life in Hanoi after retiring from public service. Closely involved in the city’s transformation in the years since, his firm has built many factories there.

The traffic never ceases on the bustling streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

The Lawrence S. Ting School is steeped in the ethos of Taiwanese education.

The “sticky” land of Vietnam

A remarkable number of Taiwanese in Vietnam share similar stories. They may not have intended to become full-fledged transplants, but opportunities presented themselves, and they decided to stay. They have ended up flourishing there in various fields.

Thanks to Vietnam, Hung Te Ching began a new chapter in her life as a writer with Southward Footsteps, which has become a much-read work for Taiwanese wanting a deeper understanding of Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Prince Walked into Peng Ruilin’s Photography Studio, meanwhile, discusses photography, international politics, and diplomacy as it sheds light on an important historical relationship that had previously received scant attention.

Liao Yun-chan is a media professional who has long been concerned about Southeast-Asian issues. Wanting to understand letters from Vietnamese workers who had previously been employed by her family, she took time off from her career to study Vietnamese for a few months at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. Leaning into perspective as a woman, she turned her observations into a book titled Xin Chào Sài Gòn. The relationships she formed there have supported a focus on Southeast-Asian issues that has continued to the present day.

Chiung Wi-vun, who has been involved in cross-­border comparative research between Taiwan and Vietnam for over 20 years, initially became interested in Vietnam through linguistic research. He has discovered that despite strong foreign cultural influences, the Vietnamese have striven to maintain their national identity. Their national confidence and resilience are qualities that he believes Taiwan could learn from. In addition to his academic research, he actively promotes people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and Vietnam through organizations such as the Taiwan–Vietnam Cultural Association and the Taiwanese Pen. He organizes lectures, forums, and other activities that foster grassroots exchange between Taiwan and Vietnam.

The resilience and cohesion of the Taiwanese business community in Vietnam when confronted with financial crises or incidents of violence against ethnic Chinese is likewise remarkable. Rather than giving up and retreating, they have doubled down and persevered. Taiwanese business­people note that this attitude aligns with the flexible yet strong-willed nature of the Vietnamese people. The two cultures have a shared spirit of determination and resilience.

Coming from vastly different walks of life, Taiwanese transplants have found their own unique niches in Vietnam. Yet a common refrain of theirs is that “the land of Vietnam is a sticky one.” Their experiences and encounters are part of a rich tapestry of interactions and exchanges between Taiwan and Vietnam that extends beyond mere tourism. Its intricate threads give color to a relationship between two countries within a global context, a relationship that has endured from ancient times to the present day.

Vietnam has a great street-food culture, with irresistible downhome delicacies.

Rising from the chaos of war, Vietnam is full of charm and potential.