Vietnam Map Archive was featured in Saigoneer on January 15, 2026. If you're reading this because of that article: welcome. Here's the short version of what we're doing and why.
The problem
Most of the world's mental image of Vietnam is the war. Napalm, jungle, helicopters. But Saigon in 1900 was a modernizing colonial metropolis — grand boulevards, a cathedral, an opera house, a postcard industry producing tens of thousands of images. That city is almost entirely absent from digital public memory. The maps exist, scattered across French national archives, American military repositories, and private collections. They're just disconnected from each other, from modern geography, and from the people whose families lived there.
What we're doing
We're connecting the maps to each other (georeferencing), to documents (knowledge graph), and eventually to three-dimensional space (3D reconstruction from archival photos). The method is HITL — Human-in-the-Loop — where community contributors trace buildings and tag photos, which trains AI that accelerates future contributions, which produces better data, which trains better AI. The community builds the data. The AI accelerates the community. The output is open and permanent.
The 1880–1930 focus is deliberate. This is the period when the French colonial administration physically remade Saigon — filling in canals to build boulevards, moving Chinese merchant communities to control land, building public monuments to assert cultural dominance. Understanding this period is not just historical curiosity. It's the origin of the city's current geography and the root of debates about public space, heritage, and memory that are active right now in Ho Chi Minh City.
How to help
Right now, the most useful thing is to find historical photos of Saigon buildings and tag them to locations. No technical skill required. If you recognize a street, a building, a neighborhood from your family's history — that knowledge is irreplaceable and we need it. The Photo Hunter tier is designed for exactly this: zero barrier, mobile-friendly, immediately meaningful.
If you're a researcher, a GIS mapper, a Blender artist, or a foundation program officer — there's a specific role for you. The strategy and roadmap documents are public. Read them and reach out.