"I remember when only a handful of people came, " says Tran Hong Chi, a guide for the somewhat grisly tours into the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ, a heavily bombed and severely poisoned territory that served as the boundary between north and south Vietnam.

CNN: Stops and Starts

And when France's Bourbon Group opened the country's largest supermarket, in a town just south of Ho Chi Minh City, it was flooded by shoppers unfamiliar with capitalistic mores.

ECONOMIST: Foreign direct investment