The Making of the Red River (Vietnam)

This international project aims to fill a significant gap in environmental history on the Asian continent. It attempts to reconstruct the regional history of the Red River in Vietnam from Hanoi downstream to the delta. The Red River is an unstable estuarine system whose geographical configuration has altered over the last thousand years. A critical part of this project will be the reconstruction of the former courses of the Red River and the palaeo Red River delta. An interdisciplinary research team consisting of historians, geographers, geologists and fluvial morphologists from several countries will contribute to the project. The GIS-based reconstruction of the historical river landscape will be conducted by the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (BOKU). In this work package, a series of GIS-maps will be compiled that shows the morphological changes of the Red River system downstream from Hanoi in the last 500 years. The maps will provide essential information for the interpretation of the river’s history from the environmental historical point of view.