Talk:State of Vietnam

prime minister chart
Is there a reason the chart has yellow and red rows? I know it looks clever since it's the flag, but it's a little unprofessional. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.165.225.107 (talk) 06:17, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

turning point
It's short, well done and worth a further development of this turning point, from a French colonial war to a civil war. It may be a template of ensuing colonial war in politology.

Takima 16:15, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
 * with the chinese sending 2 artillery battalions and the US sending CIA pilots at the battle of dien bien phu you can call it cold war too. Paris By Night 10:15, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Official language
I think the official name of this country was l'Etat du Vietnam and the official language was French and not Vietnamese. 207.178.224.50 22:53, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
 * dunno about that. Paris By Night 21:27, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

politics
Why is Ngo Dinh Diem listed as Prime Minister? He was the last Prime Minister, but not the only one. Is it the rule in these cases to only list the last? Nguyen Van Xuan was the first Prime Minister so he should be mentioned I would think. 216.183.34.167 09:45, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * actually the article deserves a complete section about politics and a list of its governments like in the viet version. Paris By Night 21:27, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

government chart

 * can anyone could translate this? who is the first one ("lam thoi"?), I believe bao is entitled emperor (whats "Kiem Nhiem"?), about the others they are probably prime ministers ("Thu tuong"?). Paris By Night 21:32, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
 * done, thanks to myself. Paris By Night 15:43, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

actual map
the current map was imported from the republic of vietnam article and is not the actual map of the 1949-1954 state of vietnam which ruled over the united vietnam pet the Halong Bay Agreements. a new map is requested, as simple as the cureent vietnam map with another color than red. Paris By Night 15:43, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * done. Paris By Night 19:06, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * actually a 2 frames animated GIF should be produced, first frame (about whole vietnam) with "1949-1954 borders" as caption and a second one (about south vietnam) with "1954-1955 boders". i have no time to do it by now. Paris By Night 20:07, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

What does "derouted" mean?
Can't find a definition, anywhere of "derouted", as in the phrase used in this article "... The derouted Việt Minh partisans were forced to retreat..." Perhaps this is some technical term used only by the military? I can only guess that "derouted" means not a "rout" but possibly an organized and temporary retreat? 71.207.224.57 (talk) 16:42, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * "Derouted" is a non-word. I just removed it from the article.TH1980 (talk) 00:00, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Suggested split
I'd say we need a separate page about the 1948-1949 Provisional Central Government of Vietnam (currently a redirect). It was a transitional period, but it existed for over a year since it was created on 27 may 1948 by the merger of Annam and Tonkin, with Cochinchina being added on 20 may 1949 : the State of Vietnam was officially proclaimed on 14 June 1949, after Cochinchina had been merged with the other two parts. Jean-Jacques Georges (talk) 14:53, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Done. Jean-Jacques Georges (talk) 11:24, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Coat of arms


The passports issued by the State of Vietnam showed its coat of arms depicted like the image here, what is odd is that if I look for information about the coat of arms online I mostly see them use the one "from Wikipedia", and I mean literally this one, but passports don't necessarily have to show the official coat of arms, later South Vietnamese passports showed the same shield design with bamboo in the middle, which as far as I know wasn't ever used anywhere else, French passports use their unofficial emblem, American passports show their coat of arms which was made for the 1790's and largely ignored (and forgotten) afterwards as Americans use seals and almost never any coats of arms (though this one has official status), Dutch passports used to use a heavily stylised and "modernised" version (very pointy) their coat of arms that did not really resemble their coat of arms, the Republic of South Vietnam (The Việt Cộng State) used their flag on their passports despite having a coat of arms. So there is quite a lot of precedent to believe that the passport design could have uses a variant that wasn't the national one.

That aside, where can I find the laws relating to the design of the emblem that specify how it looked? To confirm that the one where the dragon looks to the left is the official one. --Donald Trung (talk) 19:45, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Comment copied from: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileDiff/540244529&type=revision

, an issue that I did not have on the screen when I did research on that topic years ago. On our image of the 1954-1955 shield, the dragon looks to the left, on the passport to the right. Is there any source that indicates that our image is correct?--Antemister 13:27, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I added your comment here to have a centralised discussion. I will list some points later. --Donald Trung (talk)


 * Well, I am still researching this topic, my expertise is usually from the period 500 BCE ~ 1950 CE, so this is a new field for me, but as I was importing historical documents from South Vietnam and the State of Vietnam to Wikimedia Commons I came across the passport, then I started researching the coat of arms of the State of Vietnam as the blazon and dragon were so different. Online I mostly find people just blatantly using the Wikipedia image without alterations, primarily the one that still used the old Qing Dynasty dragon, I found this being used on Vietnamese websites and a Dutch website that is usually quite trustworthy. So I wasn't absolutely sure that the passport image was the official one, but then researching further I noticed that I couldn't find any direct references to either the blazon's shape or the Chinese Dragon's direction. I still want to find if I can find any direct laws pertaining to it, as I had noted above, passport coats of arms and emblems can be variants, even the later South Vietnamese passports kept using a variant of the Ngô period bamboo blazon (shield), that wasn't mentioned anywhere else, until 1975. --Donald Trung (talk) 14:44, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

,, I would like to present the argument that both coat of arms are most likely correct, this is because laws which dictate heraldic symbols allow for different interpretations by different artists and authors and will allow for different depictions to occur. Let's look at what the English-language Wikipedia article "Great Seal of the United States" says:

"

"

Now, this law comes from the 1780's and essentially afterwards the government of the United States of America exclusively uses seals, all State and County governments use seals, American universities use seals, Etc. Plus the armourial itself completely breaks English tradition and is considered to be "a bad coat of arms" because of it. In fact Americans basically only think of coat of arms or see them when they attend Renaissance fairs or look at Hollywood movies or documentaries about Medieval Europe. And they likely will only see their coat of arms on their passports, in fact, even Wikipedia didn't list the United States coat of arms on the article about the country for over a decade. So passports aren't always right.

Now if we look at Dutch passports from the 21st (twenty-first) century we will see this:

It is quite clear that the shield used on the passports of South Vietnam was radically different from the official emblem of the first Republic. Yet the blazon used during the Second Vietnamese Republic is identical to the one that was used earlier on this article as well.

Regarding the State of Vietnam coat of arms I found this quote: "" This explains that the dragon is used to symbolise the Nguyễn Dynasty, the State of Vietnam in a way was meant to be a continuation of the Nguyễn Dynasty, so it would be logical to think that the dragon would be in the same style as was typically used by the earlier Nguyễn regime. Typically we can tell how official government state emblems look(ed) through money, unfortunately the coat of arms never appeared on any coins or banknotes, if looking at earlier silver coins issued by the Nguyễn Dynasty then the Chinese dragon is still very much open to interpretation.

Personally, I don't think that the earlier interpretation is wrong, but the only contemporary evidence of the coat of arms I could find is on the passport. --Donald Trung (talk) 20:40, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I have also done research on that topic years ago, not as deep as you, and then also Goran tek-en then drawed the images. What I found then was that the emblem usage of South Vietnam was rather haphazard, with frequent changes and many variants can be found. So we do not need to stick on tiny details here, discussing if this or that is correct or not, or the exact shape of the shield. But for the mentioned 1954-1955 arms, I have never seen a primary source so far, only redrawn images. OK, the blazon does not state in which direction the dragon is looking, but I would prefer to have an image drawn according to an offical document and not only to a blazon.--Antemister (talk) 22:26, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree, which is why I commissioned the image, as it is the only image I have seen from a contemporary government issued document. Unfortunately not a lot of documents issued by the State of Vietnam are published online, usually they are sold at auction websites and then you should be lucky enough to have them archived at a more permanent website (like the passport). I recently came across a variant emblem of the First Vietnamese Republic showing the bamboo is a blazon akin to the coat of arms first used on this article (can't find the image), despite the coat of arms being clearly wrong it's also the only photograph I've ever seen of it (I believe it was at a military academy and in the picture you see a Mandarin walking next to South Vietnamese soldiers). (this image (archive from this (blog) article).


 * Just curious, but where did you find a description of the coat of arms? --Donald Trung (talk) 06:28, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * What exactly do you mean? The 1954-55 one? The description I mentioned is in Neue und veränderte Staatswappen seit 1945. IIa. Die Wappen der Staaten, 1968, bei Ottfried Neubecker. The article has depictions of the other arms, but not the 1954-55 one.--Antemister (talk) 22:59, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, thank you. That's what I meant. The thing about heraldic descriptions is that any depiction is correct if properly followed. I did see references to that source before, so it's a reliable source, just unfortunate that it didn't include an illustration. --Donald Trung (talk) 23:26, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Further findings
I found another contemporary badge depicting the coat of arms of the State of Vietnam here:


 * http://web.archive.org/web/20140626215802im_/https://www.ttxva.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Qu%E1%BB%91c-huy-Qu%E1%BB%91c-gia-Vi%E1%BB%87t-Nam-600x449.jpg

So other than the coat of arms reference book mentioned above all known contemporary depictions of this coat of arms show the dragon facing to the viewer's right, note that the shape of the shield is different. --Donald Trung (talk) 10:26, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Capital city
Was Saigon-Cholon the only capital city or was Dalat also a capital? As "the Cabinet of His Majesty Bảo Đại" was located in Dalat, and as far as I can tell this doesn't just refer to the Domain of the Crown but to the State of Vietnam as a whole (example). According to the 2nd Conference of Dalat, the city of Dalat would become the federal capital city of French Indochina (though this never happened) but Chief of State Bảo Đại did move his cabinet there, does this refer to the old cabinet of the Nguyễn Dynasty or to the Cabinet of the State of Vietnam? -- — Donald Trung (talk) 21:28, 25 October 2022 (UTC)