Vietnam is a nation in Southeast Asia that is officially known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It has a land area of 311,699 square kilometres and is located on the eastern boundary of mainland Southeast Asia. It is the fifteenth-most populated nation in the world, with a population of more than 96 million people. Besides sharing marine borders with Thailand and the Philippines via the Gulf of Thailand as well as with Indonesia and Malaysia through the South China Sea, Vietnam also has land borders with China to the north, Laos to the west, and Cambodia to the east. Ho Chi Minh Metropolis is the country's biggest city, and its capital is Hanoi.
Vietnam has been inhabited since at least the Paleolithic period. The Red River Delta, which is situated in modern-day northern Vietnam, was the site of the earliest known Vietnamese country, which existed during the first millennium BC. From 111 BC to 939 AD, the Han dynasty conquered and subjugated the Vietnamese people, bringing them under Chinese control for the first time. Through Confucianism and Buddhism, successive imperial dynasties were able to absorb Chinese influences, which they then spread southward to include the Mekong Delta. The Nguyen dynasty, Vietnam's final imperial dynasty, was defeated by French colonisation in 1887. Viet Minh, a nationalist group led by communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, declared independence from France in 1945 as a result of the August Revolution.