The Rise and Fall of South Vietnam’s Second Republic, 1967-1975: A new exhibition for the Independence Palace Museum in Ho Chi Minh City

Since 2019, Dr Sean Fear has been working by invitation as a historical advisor for the Independence Palace Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where his research is the principal source for a new permanent exhibition on the history of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Here, Sean speaks about the project. 

Dr Fear with the Museum Director and Curatorial Team in front of the Independence Palace Museum, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The museum is housed in the former headquarters of the South Vietnamese government, the main subject of my historical research. With 92 rooms and over 1.3 million annual visitors, the museum is one of the most significant historical sites in Southeast Asia. We’ve partnered with Thincdesign, a history-focused design firm whose previous projects include the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York and the Freedom Park Apartheid Heritage Site in South Africa.  

Communist forces seize the Palace, the seat of the South Vietnamese government, bringing the Vietnam War to a close on 30 April 1975. Image used by permission of the Independence Palace Museum

The project in Vietnam is particularly exciting because we’ve been able to take advantage of relaxed state restrictions on sensitive historical topics, including the history of South Vietnam – the losing side in the Vietnam War. Our exhibition will provide the most detailed, balanced, and rigorous overview of wartime South Vietnam to date by any museum in post-war Vietnam. We hope it will represent a landmark contribution to public history in Vietnam, and expect it to attract substantial regional media coverage and to stimulate unprecedented public discussion on the history and legacies of the war. 

Dr Fear working with the Curatorial Team to prepare the exhibit

Funding from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures and Research and Innovation Service in spring 2024 allowed me to be present in Vietnam at a critical phase in the project’s development, as we prepare to implement the physical exhibits which I’ve helped design in collaboration with the design and curatorial teams. Contributing on-site on a day-to-day basis is vital given the scale of the project. And it’s exciting and tremendously rewarding to witness my research with Vietnamese-language archives, historical newspapers, memoirs and oral history, now taking shape in the form of groundbreaking new exhibition at perhaps the most renowned museum in Vietnam.