The Thousand-Year Awakening — a film for Vietnam's National Day, 2 September

There are mornings when you wake and realise the country around you has changed. National infrastructure is being built at a pace never seen before: expressways linking the economic regions, airports and seaports expanding, the North–South high-speed railway entering its implementation phase. Vietnam now has its name in the global semiconductor supply chain, with data centres and artificial intelligence research centres standing on its own soil. Innovation is no longer a slogan for conferences; for a great many young people, it has become daily work.

Our ancestors named that aspiration early. Choosing where to found a capital for all the generations to come, they gave the city a name that stated their will plainly: Thăng Long — the dragon ascending.

The will to rise is not something that arrived only now. It has lain in the name of the capital for a thousand years, waiting for the day the country would have all it needed to act on it.

Some generations were born into upheaval, and a lifetime was only long enough to hold on to what they had. Some were born when the country was still poor, and a lifetime was only long enough to build it up again from nothing. The young people of today, though, have the good fortune to stand at the very moment their nation takes flight — the nation's era of rising.

Not every generation is granted such fortune, and it has never come without a duty: each of us gives our part through the very trade we work in. Those who build the infrastructure, those who write the software, those who stand before a class, those who put out to sea.

And we, who work in the creative trade, offer our part in our own way. Our ancestors carved the dragon into stone with chisel and hammer; today we wake that same dragon with the tools of the digital age. The material is still theirs — only the way of calling it awake belongs to our time.

And today that thousand-year-old dragon rises once more against the red of the flag.

Happy National Day this second of September — in celebration of a people who have come through season upon season of storms to stand upright today in an age of their own. May our country fly as high as the name our ancestors chose for it, and may every son and daughter of Vietnam hold firm in faith on the road ahead.

We bring Vietnamese heritage into the brands of today.