The development of libraries in Việt Nam may be traced back to the first millennium BCE, when cabinets were created in Buddhist pagodas to store scriptures carved into stone, bronze, clay or wood or incised onto palm leaf. With the subsequent emergence of strong kingship modelled on the Chinese pattern, historical and hagiographical narratives were commissioned by the Việt kings and placed in dedicated repositories. Unfortunately due to the combined effects of high humidity, insect infestation and recurrent warfare, virtually all extant material of this kind dates from post 1802, when the Nguyễn dynasty (1802-1945) reunited the country after decades of dynastic strife. The Nguyễn kings constructed a large state library in Huế, which was placed under the control of a state office for libraries and archives.

Numerous western-style libraries were established by the French during the late 19th century, including the library of the Société des études Indochinoises (now the Việt Nam History Museum Library, Hồ Chí Minh City), and the library of the École Française d’extrême-orient (EFEO). By the 1920s the latter had built up a substantial collection comprising 25,000 volumes in English, 4,000 in Vietnamese and 9,500 in Japanese, plus 1,600 maps and manuscripts in various Asian languages. Pride of place, however, was given to a priceless collection of some 17,000 chữ Hán (classical Han Chinese) and chữ nôm documents, which resides today in the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies.

In 1917 the Directorate des archives et bibliothèques (Nha Lưu trữ và Thư viện Đông Dương) was established by the colonial government to oversee the development of archives and libraries in Indochina, and in the same year the Central Archives and Library of Indochina was opened at 31 Tràng Thi in central Hà Nội as the principal library for all of the French Indochinese territories. Copyright legislation of 1922 provided for the legal deposit of material published in French and Vietnamese, both at the Central Archives and Library of Indochina in Hà Nội and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. In 1935 the Central Archives and Library of Indochina was renamed the Bibliothèque Pierre Pasquier, in honour of a former French Governor-General who had taken a particular interest in the development of the institution.

A National Library with similar powers was established in Sài Gòn in 1968 by the government of the Republic of South Việt Nam and opened to the public in 1972.

Today’s network of provincial and municipal public libraries began to develop simultaneously in the north and south during the 1950s and 1960s. After Reunification in 1976 the National Library in Hà Nội was entrusted with responsibility for co-ordinating and developing this growing network under the overall management and supervision of the Library Department (Vụ Thư viện) of the Ministry of Culture. In the same year the former National Library of South Việt Nam became the National Library II (Thư viện Quốc gia II), but in 1978 it was transferred to the management of the Hồ Chí Minh City People’s Committee and renamed the Hồ Chí Minh City General Science Library (Thư viện Khoa học Tổng hợp Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh).

In 2001 the National Library underwent a substantial upgrade with the completion of a new US$6 million extension to the old colonial-era buildings which extended the available space to a total area of 2,000 square metres, creating many new reading rooms, and greatly expanded climatised storage space for more than three million documents.