A century before today's bulldozers, colonial planners were already wrestling with the same congested waterfront corridor — and the same promises of transformation.
Nguyễn Tất Thành Street pictured in 2025, running alongisde land prepared fro a public park. Photo via VNExpress/Quynh Tran.
In 2026, Ho Chi Minh City is finally moving forward with one of its most long-anticipated infrastructure projects: the widening of Nguyễn Tất Thành Street, the perpetually gridlocked artery threading through the former District 4 between Khánh Hội and Tân Thuận bridges. The plan calls for expanding the road from its current four lanes to six or eight, at a projected cost of nearly 3,000 billion VND, while the adjacent Nhà Rồng–Khánh Hội port area — some 32 hectares of prime Saigon riverfront — is set to become a public park. Construction is targeted for September 2, 2026, timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the city bearing Hồ Chí Minh's name.
It reads like a story of long-overdue progress. But open the colonial archives in the Vietnamese National Archive Centre No. 2 on Lê Duẩn (the Government of Cochinchina files, thereafter GouCoch), and the sensation is uncanny: urban planners have been trying to sort out this exact corridor for over a century.
A canal that made an island
The story begins not with a road, but with a waterway.
On 6 February 1904, a French development company called the Société Française Industrielle d'Extrême-Orient was awarded an eight-year concession to maintain and improve Saigon's waterways. Among its tasks was the construction of a canal de dérivation — a diversion canal — planned to ease the chronic congestion of fluvial traffic between Chợ Lớn and Saigon's port on the Arroyo Chinois (nowadays Bến Nghé). The waterway linking Chợ Lớn to the hinterland and the Mekong Delta rice trade was simply too narrow, too shallow, and too crowded with junks to function efficiently as a commercial artery. The solution: dig a parallel canal to the south.
1906 map of Saigon and Cholon with canal and territorial annexation projects. (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753)
That canal is today's Kênh Tẻ.
The engineers got their waterway. But in doing so, they created an unexpected problem: they turned the village of Khánh Hội into an island. The canal would eventually become the boundary line between what residents knew as District 4 (now the Khánh Hội, Vĩnh Hội, and Xóm Chiếu wards since the city's July 2025 administrative reorganisation), to the north, and Districts 7 and 8 (now Tân Hưng, Tân Thuận and Chánh Hưng wards respectively) to the south and southwest — a division that persists in the city's geography to this day.
Magnification of the above 1906 map to focus on the Khánh Hội and Chánh Hưng village territories to be annexed to Saigon (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753).
The village that became a bargaining chip
Khánh Hội had existed long before French colonization — a fluvial settlement on the southern bank of the Bến Nghé, close enough to Saigon's port to serve later as a logistical buffer zone, and legally part of Chợ Lớn province. Much of its southern reaches were swampland and rice paddies, considered unhealthy and largely undeveloped — a landscape that would take the better part of a century to fully urbanise. Once the new canal was dug to its south, the village was physically severed from its administrative parent. It sat, marooned between two waterways, on a strip of land that colonial planners quickly identified as valuable real estate.
Focus on areas set to be annexed: Khánh Hội (indicated with an 'A') and Chánh Hưng ('B') to be annexed to Saigon (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753).
In October 1906, M. Bos, the administrator of Chợ Lớn, wrote to the Lieutenant Governor of Cochinchina recommending that Khánh Hội be transferred to Saigon's municipal authority. The reasoning was pragmatic: a part of the area had factories, a dense population, and part of its northern waterfront was already registered under Saigon's cadastre. The famous Nhà Rồng Wharf — headquarters of the Messageries Maritimes shipping company, the same jetty from which a young man named Nguyễn Tất Thành would depart in 1911 to begin his decades-long journey toward becoming Hồ Chí Minh — sat in this disputed borderland.
The Saigon Municipal Commission accepted the annexation project on 7 November 1906. A map produced the following month, titled "Project for the expansion of the city of Saigon," visualized what the administrators had in mind: not just a tidy administrative transfer, but an industrial island, an îlot industriel, stitched into Saigon's logistical network.
Ten notables, one letter
The annexation was not without friction. Vietnamese village notables were formally consulted — a procedural requirement under colonial regulations governing commune reorganization. The council of neighbouring Chánh Hưng raised no objections to ceding a small portion of its territory. The representatives of Khánh Hội did.
Letter from Khánh Hội village representatives dated 12 November 1906 (left) and Public Notice of the factory project in Khánh Hội, 1909 (GouCoch, TDNK, 16753 and 20665)
On 12 November 1906, ten notables of Khánh Hội addressed a letter to the municipal administration of Chợ Lớn. The document, preserved in folder GouCoch TDNK 16753, raises concerns that feel strikingly human across the distance of 120 years: they worried that Saigon's municipal authorities would not tolerate their maisons en paillotes — traditional straw-and-timber dwellings — standing alongside the brick buildings of an industrial zone. Since 1878, Saigon had decrees prohibiting such structures in urban areas. To be absorbed by the city meant risking eviction from their own homes.
The colonial council dismissed these protests on 27 April 1907, characterising them as driven by personal interest rather than legitimate concern. The administrative transfer was formalised on 31 December 1907, handing over Khánh Hội's archives, tax registers, and land tenure records from Chợ Lớn to Saigon.
Yet the archives tell a more ambiguous story than that official dismissal implies. Documents from the 1920s — lease requests for marshy plots in Khánh Hội containing straw huts and family tombs — confirm that paillotes were still standing, unremarked upon, well into the decade after the transfer. Colonial authorities, it turned out, were far more interested in developing the northern waterfront for industrial use than in policing the housing of the people living further inland. The industrial programme took precedence; the social regulation never quite caught up.
Renovation-Prolongation project of Jean Eudel Street (in red), 1925 (GouCoch, TDNK, 29240)
The street that planners kept deferring
Scene from Khánh Hội in the 1930s that offers a glimpse into the industrial appearance of Khánh Hội. Photo via Flickr user Minhchan Le.
By the 1920s, Khánh Hội had taken on the industrial character that colonial administrators had always envisioned for it. Archives document an oxygen factory (1910), a tannery (1909–1914), a silk-spinning operation dating to the 1860s, a colonial distillery, and buffalo hide warehouses belonging to Maison Denis Frères. A 1925 master plan for urban redevelopment proposed improving tramway connections, reorganising industrial zones, and extending port facilities along the Khánh Hội waterfront. A report that same year by the Chief Architect of Civil Buildings outlined several infrastructural upgrades for the area.
Among them was the question of the street running along the riverbank.
Folder GouCoch TDNK 29240, dated 1931–1933, is titled "Dossier relatif au prolongement de la rue Jean Eudel à Khánh Hội" — the file on extending Jean Eudel Street. A renovation and prolongation project appears in the archive drawings in red ink, tracing the same corridor that would eventually become Nguyễn Tất Thành Street. The colonial engineers sketched their improvements; the files record the deliberations; the project was, apparently, partially implemented and partially deferred.
Map illustrating the renovation of Jean Eudel Street, c. 1931–1933; the dotted lines show the areas concerned by the project (GouCoch 29240).
By 1941, Admiral Decoux, making an official visit to the Pont en Y at Chợ Quán, was still publicly lamenting the poor connectivity between Khánh Hội and the rest of the city. The Tribune Indochinoise recorded his remarks in September that year. More infrastructure was needed. The links were insufficient. Something had to be done.
The Japanese occupation began shortly after. The interwar colonial development phase ended. The plans stayed on paper.
A century of deferral, one September deadline
What is striking, reading across these archival layers, is not the failure of any single plan but the persistence of the problem — and the repetition of its proposed solutions. Widen the artery. Improve the connections. Develop the port land. Make the industrial island legible and accessible within the city's broader logic.
The Kênh Tẻ Canal transformed Khánh Hội in 1906–1907 by isolating it and then absorbing it. Jean Eudel Street — named after a French colonial official, later renamed to honour the man who left from Nhà Rồng Wharf to change the country's history — became the corridor through which that absorption would, eventually, be made real. It has been chronically under-built ever since: four lanes where the traffic demands eight, a waterfront of rusting port infrastructure where city planners have imagined parks for decades.
After years of chronic gridlock, Nguyễn Tất Thành Street — connecting the former Districts 7 and 4 with downtown — is now set to be widened, and Nhà Rồng Wharf is to be transformed into a riverside park. The proposed expansion would bring the road to a minimum of eight lanes with a 30–40 metre cross-section, with the total estimated investment at approximately 2,950 billion VND. Construction is expected to begin on September 2nd, tied to the expansion of the Hồ Chí Minh Museum area and the Nguyễn Tất Thành road project.
AI-rendered plan for the widening of Nguyễn Tất Thành Street with adjacent park space. Photo via VNExpress
The village notables of Khánh Hội who wrote their anxious letter in November 1906 could not have imagined the city that would grow around their straw huts. But they understood, with perfect clarity, what it meant when administrators started drawing new lines on maps of the place where you lived. They knew that infrastructure is never just about roads and canals. It is always also about who gets to stay, and on what terms.
As the bulldozers prepare for September, the archive suggests a gentle corrective to triumphalist narratives of urban transformation: this particular bend in the river has been waiting for its redesign for a very long time. And the people who lived there, long before the planners arrived, were asking reasonable questions that the plans still rarely think to answer.
The archival research for this article was conducted at the Vietnamese National Archive Centre No. 2, Ho Chi Minh City, drawing primarily on the Cochinchina Government Collection (GouCoch), in particular folders TDNK 16753, 29240, and 29345. The research is part of a broader project on colonial urban planning in Saigon-Chợ Lớn at RMIT Vietnam, School of Communication and Design.
