NORTH VIETNAM 1 dong 1946

Description

Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from France in 1945. Nine years of war ensued, but finally the French left. There was supposed to be a plebiscite about the future but the south, which was run by a French puppet government, refused to participate. Another twenty years of war, involving the USA, until 1975, when unification was attained.

Vietnam is proud of its thousand year history of resisting the Chinese. In the later 19th century, when Europeans with their modern weapons were marauding all over the world taking stuff, the French moved in on Vietnam and the other nations of Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese never stopped resisting, and after World War II continued fighting until the French gave up and left.

The big player in East Asia is China, of course. Then there is Japan and Korea, throw in Mongolia. South of China and east of India, but not including, for the most part, the islands to the east, is what we call Southeast Asia. From Burma to Malaya there have been a series of local kingdoms for about 2000 years. Russia, with its Asian Siberia, doesn’t count. We consider it part of Europe.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.