Vietnamese history is really long as they were one of the first people to start farming and forming city states. Borne in the Red River Delta the ancient culture had plenty of time, protection, space, and fertile farm land to grow. The Dong Son people started bronze metallurgy at 1000 BC thus advancing the culture and expanded into the southern Truong Son mountains and Canton in the east.

The Han Dynasty invaded and took control of what was then called Nam Viet and made it its territory. For a millennia Chinese culture was assimilated, which was important as Chinese political system proved to be much more effective than what the Vienamese's neighbors had at the time. 900 AD rolls around, it's been 1,000 year of Chinese rule and non stop uprising coupled with China's 5 dynasty 10 kingdoms drama meant that the Viets were left to themselves for a bit.

From 960AD and on Vietnam had their own kings and undergo many different dynasties. They still pay tribute to China but this is a point where their dominion has pretty much ended. Now a smaller country (china absorbed the Guangdong[canton] province) the viet began to expand southward. They fully invaded and wiped the Champa people (a malayic culture, they were much more peaceful and seagoing so they kept retreating) off the map and went as south as the Mekong delta by 15th century.

Most of this time 10th-17th century vietnam changes through many different dynasties. The country itself was relatively peaceful as they adopted the Chinese system and fared better than their neighbors. The king was not often disputed and the only time of instability was between dynasty changes. They were known to be quite a warlike people and adept at fighting. What started out as a very small city state expanded, constantly fought and upraised against china's millennial dominion, defended against 3 separate mongol invasions, and pushed champa off the continent. Only to come under dominion again under the french....

Contacts with western civilization goes back to the ancient roman and traders. An important year is 1651 when missionary French Alexandre de Rhodes gave vietnamese the western alphabet. Up until then vietnam used chu han, similar to chinese characters. By late 18th century vietnam became pretty much a french protectorate and was used as an exotic playground for the french. Sadly a lot of the jungles were poached as games, much of the elephants and tigers were killed or left for deeper jungles in laos and kampuchea. Any big animals left in the jungle were cleared by the vietnam war.

This is no way detailed. Vietnamese history is 4,000 years long and full of important dates and names to remember. A lot of great kings, lots of lousy rulers, many men and women rebels who fought the dominions, and a lot of lore and legends mixed in. Medieval vietnam did not change much from when the Chinese left them to when the french arrive, so much of the culture were alike to the East asian culture (china, japan, korea).

Sadly I left vietnam before I started to take history lessons. But most (i think..) vietnamese or at least the people in my family known the main points because we use them as stories to remember and also to learn from. Some of them are quite clever, a famous one comes from Tran Hung Dao who defended the country from the third mongol invasion of 1287. Vastly outnumbered, he knows the Mongolian will be coming from ship and taunted them to attack. When he draw them into the mouth of the river he turned with fireships and timed the attack with the outgoing low tide. At the bottom of the river he already planted hundreds of steel tipped stakes. This effectively ended Mongol's dream of invading vietnam. Of course, he learned this trick from another viet general from 300 years prior, in the same river, against the same invasion from the north. Only this time it was the Han Dynasty, and this earlier victory in the same river with the same tactic ended the Chinese dominion in 938ad.

If you have more questions feel free to msg me, hopefully I can answer with my limited knowledge haha