Historical background
State archives were established from an early date by the kings of Đại Việt, so that by the time of the Nguyễn (1802-1945) there existed a substantial repository for official documents under the administrative control of a full-blown state office for libraries and archives. This repository housed both manuscripts and printed materials in
chữ Hán (classical Chinese, the official language of the court until the early years of the twentieth century) and later the ideographic
chữ nôm and romanised
quốc ngữ scripts, including land records and official court documents known collectively as
châu bản.
Western ideas of record keeping were introduced from the 1860s by the French colonial authorities, who enacted legislation to archive documents of national importance. During the early years of the colonial period French government documents were stored in a variety of different government offices throughout the country, but following the establishment of the Direction des archives et bibliothèques (1917), a Central Archives and Library of Indochina was set up in Hà Nội, with satellite archives in Sài Gòn, Huế, Phnom Penh and Vientiane. After 1954 the depositories in Hà Nội and Sài Gòn were to become, respectively, the state archives of North and South Việt Nam.
The current system of state archives dates from 1945, when the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam issued a Decree establishing a National Service of Archives, Official Documents and Libraries (
Sở Lưu trữ Công văn và Thư viện Toàn quốc) under the Ministry of Education. In the following year President Hồ Chí Minh signed Circular 1C-VP, which emphasised the special values of archival materials in the task of national construction and prohibited any destruction of records without the consent of competent authority.
Prior to 1962 the northern archives operated as a branch of the National Library, but Decree 102/CP of that year set up a separate National Archives Department (
Cục Lưu trữ Nhà nước) within the Prime Minister’s Office. In that same year the Department was relocated to a new building in the western suburbs of Hà Nội and the older colonial records office in the grounds of the National Library became an annex known as
National Archives Centre 1. Following Reunification in 1975 the public records office in Sài Gòn (now Hồ Chí Minh City) became
National Archives Centre 2. Today all of the older holdings of the Vietnamese National Archives are stored in these two repositories. A state-of-the-art new repository –
National Archives Centre 3 – was opened in April 2002 to house the records of national, regional and inter-regional agencies and institutions of the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam (1945-1976) and the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam (1976-present).