About 3.6 million people (1996) live in Ho Chi Minh City. The city grew rapidly with the influx of refugees during the Vietnam War (1959-1975), but after the war the government urged more than 1 million people to leave the city for so-called new economic areas in the countryside. Rapid population growth resumed, however, and in the mid-1990s the city was one of the most densely populated in the world, with an average of 20,000 persons per sq km (52,000 per sq mi). The vast majority are ethnic Vietnamese, but there are an estimated 500,000 ethnic Chinese, most of them living in the commercial suburb of Cholon. Most Vietnamese who express a religious preference are Buddhist, but several hundred thousand Catholics live in the metropolitan area. Many of the Catholics were refugees who, fearing persecution by the Communists, fled North Vietnam when that state was created in 1954.
