Getting a Handle on How Big Vietnam Really Is

The Skinny S

As I attempt to describe and understand the physical size and population of Vietnam I would like to apologize for appearing Americacentric.  I confess that, in order to get my thoughts across, I need to use the United States for comparison.  I simply do not know of a nation or region where I can slice and dice the statistics and geography to tell the story as well as it can be told using the USA as a model.

The long and skinny S shape of Vietnam gives it a 2135 mile long sea coast.  It is also around 130,000 square miles in size and has a population of 87.5 million or so.  Now, if you are like most people you read or hear numbers like that and you say, ”That’s nice” or something.  The numbers don’t mean a thing because there is no way to understand what a 2135 mile long sea coast means or looks like or do you even care.  Well, try this:  We Americans know that the West Coast is a pretty long strip of real estate.  Yep, It’s a long way from Seattle to San Diego.  True, but that stretch of prime beachfront property is only half as long as the 2135 miles of Vietnamese coast.  Vietnam has a coastline twice as long as the distance from San Diego to Seattle.

When it comes to a square mile, however big or small that may be, we don’t have a clue.  If figuring how big a square mile is a problem, how about getting your arms around Eighty Seven Million, Five Hundred Thousand People?  Starting to count "one" and ending up with 87,500,000 might give one a sense for how large a number that is but when it comes to 87,500,000 people, what does that mean?  Let’s put both of those numbers, size and population, together and try to get an idea of Vietnam in American terms.

Okay.  Vietnam’s 130,000 square miles is a bit larger than the US State of New Mexico which has around 121,600 square miles.  Now, New Mexico is not too heavily populated, only around 2 million folks so we ought to throw in a few more states to get up to that 87.5 million population figure for Vietnam.  California is America's most populous state according to the 2010 census. It has 37.25 million people.  Let’s add #2, the Lone Star State of Texas with 25.15 Million Good Ol Boys and Girls.  That only comes to 62.4 million so we need to throw a few more states to get up to the Vietnamese number.  All right.  Let’s add Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.   Yep, It would take all of the population of our two states with the highest population and all of the states from the 31st largest in population right down to Wyoming at #50.

That  surely dazzles you, it does me.  What it means is that Vietnam, just a bit bigger than New Mexico, which none of us ever thought was overly large if we thought about it at all, has as many people as our two largest states and twenty more, 22 states all together.  Makes you wonder how they all get along without spending all of their time stepping on each others’ feet.  Great.  This kind of analysis forces us to think about what such a high population density of relatively poor, literate and driven people are like and what kind of momentum such a concentrated batch of humanity can achieve if they are all focused on a common goal.

The Morning Commute