Vietnam

Quick facts

How to spot Vietnam from satellite imagery

Vietnam stretches roughly 1,650 kilometres from the Chinese border in the north to the Cà Mau peninsula in the south — but at its narrowest point near Đồng Hới in the centre, the country is only 50 kilometres wide between the South China Sea and the Laotian border. That long thin S-curve, hugging the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, is one of the most distinctive national shapes on Earth. If you can see enough of it in a satellite frame, the silhouette alone is a giveaway. But most frames show only a small patch of land, so this guide walks through the internal aerial signatures that lock Vietnam in.

Vietnam covers roughly 331,000 square kilometres and contains 98 million people, making it one of the densest large countries in Asia. Most of that population lives in the two rice deltas — the Red River Delta in the north around Hanoi, and the Mekong Delta in the south around Hồ Chí Minh City — with a thin strip of agriculture along the central coast and a much sparser population in the mountainous interior. Each region has a distinctive aerial signature.