Cochinchina , French Cochinchine , the southern region Vietnam during French colonial times, known in pre-colonial times as Nam Ky ("Southern Administrative Division"), the name given to the Vietnamese continued to use.
Cochinchina was bordered on the northeast by that part of central Vietnam which the French Annam ( see there ) named , to the southeast of South China Sea , to the southwest of Gulf of Thailand and to the northwest of Cambodia . The capital was Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City).
Cochinchina stock mostly off a flat, deltaic plane created by the Mekong's historically alternating canals, and stretched from the canal-plaid Ca Mau Peninsula to North through the Mekong Canals and the swampy Dong Thap Muoi ("Plain of the Reeds") west of Saigon. At the northwestern and western ends, the outliers of the Plateau du Mnong and the Cambodian Dâmrei Mountains (formerly Elephant Mountains; French:Chaîne de l'Éléphant) rose to over 700 m.
Remaining one of the richest rice regions in the world, Ca Mau is predominantly Vietnamese overall, with Khmer (Cambodian) and (until 1975) Chinese minorities, the latter mainly in Cho Lon Sector of Ho Chi Minh City.
For centuries divided between the Champa and Khmer kingdom, Cochinchina was occupied by the Vietnamese Emperor in 1471 Le Thanh Tong (reigned 1460-1497); After two centuries of dynastic rivalry, the Nguyen family in Hue at the expense of the Khmer piecewise annexed . After the French occupation of Saigon in 1859, it became an in 1862 France ceded and joined the French Indochinese Union in 1887. Cochinchina was a French overseas territory from 1946 to 1949 when it officially merged with Vietnam.