Vietnam has an age-old and special culture that is closely attached to the history of the formation and development of the nation.

Historians have shared a common view that Vietnam has a fairly large cultural community that was formed around the first half of the first millenium B.C. and flourished in the middle of this millenium. That was Dong Son cultural community. This culture attained a degree of development higher than that of others at that time in the region and had its own characteristics but still bore the features of Southeast Asian culture because of the common South Asian racial root (Southern Mongoloid) and the wet rice culture. Different development routes of local cultures in various areas (in the deltas of Red River, Ma River, Ca River and so on) joined together to form the Dong Son culture. This was also the period of the very "embryonic" state of Vietnam in the form of inter- and super-village community, which came into being and existed in order to resist invaders and to build and maintain dykes for rice cultivation. From this pattern of "embryo" state, primitive tribes grew into nations

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