The banking ward, and its old name

If you look up almost any café within a few streets of ours, the address will tell you it is in Quận 1 — District 1. Some will say Phường Nguyễn Thái Bình. Both were correct until 1 July 2025, and neither is an administrative fact any more.

This is the short version of what changed, because the addresses around here have not caught up and it is worth knowing why they disagree with each other.

What changed on 1 July 2025?

On 1 July 2025 Vietnam consolidated 63 provinces and cities into 34 and eliminated the district level entirely. Not renamed — removed. Ho Chi Minh City went from districts to 168 ward-level units reporting directly to the city.

“Quận 1” stopped being an administrative unit that day. The area it used to cover is now four wards: Sài Gòn, Tân Định, Bến Thành, and Cầu Ông Lãnh.

Old Nguyễn Thái Bình was split, not merged

This is the part that catches people, and it caught us.

Bến Thành ward was not simply the old Bến Thành ward with a bigger boundary. By the ward’s own constituting text — Nghị quyết 168/NQ-UBTVQH15, published on phuongbenthanh.gov.vn — it was formed from all of the former Bến Thành ward, all of Phạm Ngũ Lão ward, two neighbourhood blocks of Cầu Ông Lãnh, and eight of the neighbourhood blocks of the former Nguyễn Thái Bình ward.

The rest of old Nguyễn Thái Bình went to Sài Gòn ward.

So a street called Nguyễn Thái Bình now runs through two different wards, and “which ward is this address in” had two possible answers that had to be checked rather than assumed.

Ours is on the Bến Thành side

We checked it two ways rather than picking the answer we preferred.

The same government page lists the ward’s Fatherland Front office at 40–42 Phó Đức Chính, phường Bến Thành, and notes that this was the former Nguyễn Thái Bình ward People’s Committee headquarters. That address is roughly 150 metres from our door, and it now carries a Bến Thành address.

A commercial listing on Lê Thị Hồng Gấm — the parallel street one block over — agreed.

So: 42 Nguyễn Thái Bình, Bến Thành Ward. That is the legally correct form and it is the one in our schema and on every form we fill in.

Why we still write “District 1”

Because you are still searching for it.

Every unit of real demand is still phrased the old way — “cafe District 1”, “quán cà phê quận 1” — and Google Maps still labels the area that way. A search term does not stop existing because a decree changed.

So we write both. The ward makes the address correct; the district makes it findable. What we do not do is drop the ward to save space, which is the mistake almost every listing in this ward is currently making.

Why any of this matters to you

Mostly it does not. You are looking for coffee, not a boundary map.

It matters in exactly one situation: when an address you have been given does not match the one on the map, and you are standing in the heat wondering which is wrong. Around here, the usual answer is that neither is wrong — one of them is simply from before July 2025.

The street itself has a page of its own, and the six places worth walking to from it are set out in walking order.