VIETNAM 1 dong 1976

Description

The French decided they couldn’t afford to maintain their colonies in Southeast Asia. Their place was taken by the Americans, who attempted to “resist Communism” by setting up a puppet regime in South Vietnam and fighting what we call the “Vietnam War.” After the Americans left the government in the north conquered the south. Since unification the country has developed its economy and has resumed its traditional role as a permanent opponent of China.

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.