Saigon's earliest city plan: Lieutenant-Colonel Coffyn's 1862 design for half a million people. Every colonial plan for Saigon and Chợ Lớn that followed starts here.
Coffyn, of the engineers, drew it for a city of 500,000 to 600,000, joining Bến Nghé in the east to Saigon — today's Chợ Lớn — in the west. It sets an administrative quarter around the Gia Định citadel, holding the governor's residence, the barracks, the military hospital and the shipyard, against a commercial quarter over the rest. Its main proposals were a defensive canal to the west, begun in November 1862 and 6 km long, later the Vành Đai; a central lake 426 m across that was never dug; the half-moon Primauguet square on the river, now Công trường Mê Linh; and keeping the Kinh Lớn and eight old roads intact.
Summarised from the caption at Trung tâm Lưu trữ quốc gia II, nac2.gov.vn/csdl/bando/5.html. The original is held at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM).
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https://allmaps.xyz/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftrioykjhhwrruwjsklfo.supabase.co%2Fstorage%2Fv1%2Fobject%2Fpublic%2Fannotations%2Ff9b3c9b2-5a11-4e8a-8b11-c988b28ae6d3.json- Year
- 1862
- Original title
- 03. 1862
- Rights
- Public domain
- Collection
- Vietnam Map Archive
- Place
- Saigon-HCMC
- Type
- plan