CHO LON

city, southern Vietnam, immediately west of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), from which it is separated by a small water channel. Founded in 1778 by Chinese emigrants, it later was unified commercially and physically by streetcars, roads, canals, and railways and in 1932 became one political unit; it became part of Ho Chi Minh City province-borough in 1976. Cho Lon is a marketing and distribution centre for rice and fish. It has timber mills, junk-building yards, tanneries, and crude dye works; brickworks and pottery works using local clays supply a huge demand for earthenware utensils. In 1978, with the nationalization of large-scale commerce and repatriation offers from the People's Republic of China, thousands of Vietnamese of Chinese descent left Cho Lon, disrupting the large commercial sector, which had been run mainly by them.