There are 54 different groups of people living in Vietnam,
the majority of the population are the Viet people. Of the 78 million
people living in the country, 85 percent are what we refer to as
Vietnamese.
They live primarily in the lowlands of Vietnam. Three-quarters of the
population of Vietnam live in rural villages. A vast majority of the
citizens are rice farmers, and live in the lowlands where there is
fertile, easily irrigated soil. Where the ancestors of the Viet people
came from is not completely known. They were probably farmers that moved
gradually into the northern part of Vietnam from China, and slowly
moved south, pushing other native people like the Champa out or up into
the mountains as they migrated along the coast.
One of the larger minority groups in Vietnam are the Chinese. They
immigrated to the lowlands of Vietnam during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Before the war between North and South Vietnam,
they were involved in foreign and rice trade, and remained somewhat
independent from the Vietnamese people. Later, however; new laws and regulations forced most to abandon their ways of life, and many fled the country.
Two other minorities living in the lowlands include the Cham and the
Khmer. The Cham are descendants of the Champa kingdom that existed along
the central coast for thousands of years. Now there are only about
50,000 of their people left living as fishermen and farmers in scattered
villages along the coast. The Khmer, of Cambodian decent, live and have
lived for a long time in the swampy Mekong Delta, south of Ho Chi Minh City. They are more numerous than the Cham people. mountain girl
The other residents of Vietnam live in the mountainous regions of the
country. They, as a group, are commonly called the Montagnards. In the
northern mountains, along the Chinese border, live tribes that have
migrated there in the last several centuries. Some of the more common of
these include the Tai, Nung, Meo, Yao, Muong, and the Tay. The Tay are
by far the most numerous of the northern people. To the south, in the
central highlands, are the Rhade and the Jarai peoples. They are
descendants of nomads who came to the central coast in the third or
second millennia BC, and have since been pushed up into the highlands.
Now they live mainly by slash and burn agriculture. For centuries, the
mountain people lived in isolation and were suspicious of lowlanders.
They maintained only limited communication and trade with the
Vietnamese. In the last fifty or so years, the Vietnamese have tried
both peacefully and forcefully to integrate them into their society, and
they have found themselves in the middle of several wars. Now the
Vietnamese government is implementing programs to improve and develop
communities, bring lowland Vietnamese people into the mountains, and
educate the children of these Montagnards, while still allowing them to
maintain their heritage.
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