Both Poland and Vietnam have had a long history of struggles against powerful foreign invaders such as Russia and Germany for the Polish, China and Japan for the Vietnamese.

In their long historical struggles for independence, the Poles and the Vietnamese had to fight against larger empires, with Poland rising up against Russia and Germany while Vietnam fought China and France.

Poland launched the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation and the Vietnamese started the August Revolution to fight against the colonial rule of the French and the Japanese.

[2] In 1946, the future founder of Israel, a Polish Jew, David Ben-Gurion, met Hồ Chí Minh in Paris.

[citation needed] Some Poles have fought for Vietnam's independence, with the most well-known and only historically confirmed example being Stefan Kubiak – a Polish soldier of the People's Army of Vietnam, who became a decorated veteran due to his exploits during the First Indochina War and was eventually adopted by Hồ Chí Minh under the name "Hồ Chí Toán".

A celebrated war hero by the time of the conflict with the US, he eventually succumbed to injuries sustained during his years as a combatant and died after suffering from malaria.

[8] Janusz Lewandowski, representative of Polish delegation during the Geneva Accords at 1954, had protested the idea of separating Vietnam into two parts that was proposed by the Government of the newly-established People's Republic of China.

To monitor the Geneva Accords, the International Control Commission (ICC) consisting of diplomats and soldiers from Poland, India, and Canada was set up.

[9] Poland–Vietnam relations grew from the student exchange programmes that ran from the 1950s to the 1980s, during which time both Poland and Vietnam were one-party states and members of the Eastern Bloc under Soviet Russian influence.

[13][14][15] Many Vietnamese university students took part in student exchanges with Poland; after returning to their home country, Vietnamese graduates of Polish universities often became leading specialists in key areas of the country's developing economy, including mining and shipbuilding.

[21] During a meeting with Poland's ambassador to Vietnam Wojciech Gerwel, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bùi Thanh Sơn expressed gratitude for the donation, also stressing the long-standing traditional friendship between the nations.

[21] In January 2025, Vietnamese prime minister Phạm Minh Chính attended a conference in Warsaw, where he announced that Polish citizens wishing to visit Vietnam for up to 45 days would no longer need to apply for a visa from March of the same year.

Both Chính and Polish prime minister Donald Tusk spoke about the historical and ongoing friendly relations between their two countries, as well as the desire for continued cooperation to bring them even closer together economically and in other aspects.

[27][28] He played a minor role, yet facilitated an unofficial link on the ongoing normalisation in Holy See–Vietnam relations,[29] which was seen with the direct result of the Vatican's decision to establish a permanent representative in Vietnam and accepted by the Vietnamese regime,[30] moving further to possible future establishment of official ties between the two entities and lax of suppression on Catholicism in Vietnam by the Vietnamese government.

[11][full citation needed][41] Many began as vendors in the open air market bazaar at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium selling clothes or cheap food; as of 2005[update], there were between 1,100 and 1,200 Vietnamese-owned stands in the area.