Abstract The 900-km-long Red River shear zone (RRSZ) lends a compelling support to the continental extrusion model for the tectonic evolution of southeastern Asia, but has been challenged by many of views, as some new records mainly from northern Vietnam, suspecting the dimensions of RRSZ neither in depth nor in displacement are as large as we expected before. However, compared to the northwestern half of the RRSZ in Yunnan province better studied by many fields, the southeastern half in northern Vietnam is relatively poorly constrained by seismic study, due to insufficient stations and data in the past. This study, using a newly deployed portable broadband seismic network, obtained the first local seismic tomography with a stepwise inversion using P and P n phases. Surface geology, major structures, and rock properties are well correlated and identified in our model, suggesting the RRSZ is a lithospheric structure at least penetrating to the uppermost mantle with mantle thermal anomalies. In general, the crust of northern Vietnam appears to be weak and sits on a relatively hot uppermost mantle, showing a long and complex thermo tectonic history. A mid-lower crustal segmentation of RRSZ is also proposed to compromise the discrepancies recently observed between Yunnan province and northern Vietnam.