Red River Delta

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Vietnamese. (May 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Vietnamese Wikipedia article at [[:vi:Đồng bằng sông Hồng]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|vi|Đồng bằng sông Hồng}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Red River Delta Đồng bằng sông Hồng
Location of the Red River Delta region in Vietnam
Country	Vietnam
Area [1][2]
• Total	15,070.70 km2 (5,818.83 sq mi)
Population  (2022)[1]
• Total	22,091,250
• Density	1,500/km2 (3,800/sq mi)
GDP
• Total	VND 1,753 trillion US$ 77.0 billion (2021)
Time zone	UTC+7 (UTC +7)
HDI (2022)	0.768[3] high · 1st

The Red River Delta or Hong River Delta (Vietnamese: Đồng bằng sông Hồng) is the flat low-lying plain formed by the Red River and its distributaries merging with the Thái Bình River in Northern Vietnam. Hồng (紅) is a Sino-Vietnamese word for "red" or "crimson". The delta has the smallest area but highest population and population density of all regions. The region, measuring some 15,000 square kilometres (6,000 sq mi) is well protected by a network of dikes. It is an agriculturally rich and densely populated area. Most of the land is devoted to rice cultivation.^[4]

Eight provinces, together with two municipalities (the capital Hanoi, and the port of Haiphong) form the delta. It had a population of almost 23 million in 2019.

In 2021, Paul Sidwell proposed that the locus of Proto-Austroasiatic languages was in this area about 4,000–4,500 years before present.^[5] The Hong River Delta is the cradle of the Vietnamese nation. Water puppetry originated in the rice paddies here. The region was bombed by United States warplanes during the Vietnam War. The region was designated as the Red River Delta Biosphere Reserve as part of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme in 2004.^[6]