Talk:Provisional Central Government of Vietnam

Capital city
The current article (for smaller screens) lists "Saigon" as its capital city, but this makes no sense, as French Cochinchina wasn't even a part of this Vietnamese country until 1949. According to this letter from this government dated 15 October 1948 it was composed by the Ministry of Information its government was stationed in Hanoi. Now I'm not sure if this chronologically checks out as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam also occupied Hanoi around this time, but it simply seems anachronistic to list Saigon as its capital city, especially since Hanoi was also the capital city of French Indochina.

Of course, the letter could be propaganda and while the official capital would then be in Hanoi its actual government could be located in Saigon or Haiphong, kind of how Nanjing is the capital city of Taiwan, but because the Taiwanese government doesn't occupy Nanjing its government is temporarily located in Taibei. As of yet I haven't been able to find any sources that actually name the capital city of the Provisional Central Government of Vietnam, but it likely was in Saigon as its cabinet was made up of mostly French Cochinchinese politicians. --Donald Trung (talk) 16:47, 19 April 2021 (UTC)


 * this webpage states that the capital city was Huế. Of course this isn't a reliable source by itself, but it's the only reference I could actually find about its capital city. This also makes sense as Huế was the capital city of the previous Vietnamese government. --Donald Trung (talk) 09:39, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Titles
I used the term "President" rather than "Prime minister" because that is what all the official government sources state (though a translation may not also be literal, for example the President of Spain is called the "Prime minister of Spain" because Spain is a Kingdom). In Vietnamese the title is "Thủ tướng" which usually gets translated as "Prime minister", but the French term is "Président", meanwhile the other terms "Tổng thống" or "Chủ tịch" are used to translate the word "President".

Bảo Đại seems to be referred to as the "Emperor" (Hoàng đế) in most issues of the official government bulletin and the "Ex-Emperor" (cựu Hoàng đế) in the earliest issue. According to these bulletins he still seemed to be the head of state, regarding translating the title there seem to be multiple ways of doing it. I wouldn't have any issue with anyone changing it back to "Prime minister". --Donald Trung (talk) 17:04, 2 December 2022 (UTC)