In this next article, Laura Lam traces Ho Chi Minh's life further back, to where he left Viet Nam for France to find a way to rescue his country.

My paternal grandmother used to say that French troops had captured Emperor Ham Nghi and sent him into exile in Algeria the year she was born, 1888. She was told by her parents how the colonial army burned the villages and suppressed the Can Vuong resistance movements. Many of the leaders were tortured and executed. The century struggle against the French ended at the great battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Nguyen Ai Quoc, born in 1890, was a man of destiny.

Entrance to St. Genevieve library.

In central Paris, I often pass by the St Genevieve Library – a great public facility heavily used by students and staff from the surrounding schools and the Sorbonne. Eighty years ago it was also the favorite place of Nguyen Ai Quoc, who lived within walking distance. Like Karl Marx spending all his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum Library, Viet Nam’s liberator spent his time at the St Genevieve. On its long and elegant facade, facing the Pantheon, is carved a list of famous writers. I had wondered what Nguyen Ai Quoc would have read while he was there, so I set about finding the answer.

Nguyen Ai Quoc was born as Nguyen Sinh Cung. When he reached age 11, his father was proud of the child's intellectual ability and Cung was given a new name, Nguyen Tat Thanh, meaning "he will be successful". Thanh was educated at the distinguished National Academy of Hue (Truong Quoc Hoc Hue). His learning included a strong emphasis on Confucian philosophy. As a child, he had a lot of admiration for the West. Thanh once said, “When I was 13 years old, I heard for the first time about Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity… I wanted to make myself acquainted with French culture, to find out what was behind those concepts.”

Contrary to the rules in the Mother country, there was no freedom, equality, or fraternity in Indochina. France’s exploitation was painfully summed up in Phan Chu Trinh’s own words, “Caught in the net, snagged from a hundred angles, what’s left when you peel off the skin and clean the bones?”

To suppress a growing reform movement, the colonial regime clamped down on the only free school, Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc, in 1907, and arrested its founders and other progressive intellectuals. Being the first institution giving women equal rights to education, the free school had also advocated political and social reforms.

Photo of carving on library’s wall

At age 21, Thanh began teaching Quoc Ngu and Chinese at the prestigious Duc Thanh School in Phan Thiet. Each day he would arrive at school wearing a white cotton outfit, tied around his waist with a belt, and wooden shoes. Students also wore white uniforms. The school was located on the beautiful south bank of Phan Thiet River. Often the young teacher would bring his students to a beach for classes and a picnic. Sometimes they sat on the rocks and sang patriotic songs composed by themselves. He became a very popular teacher. In such settings, Thanh would introduce the young minds to Western civilization, human rights, equality, individual freedom, and the great thinking of JJ Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire…

At the Paris library, he would have gone beyond such works. And there were plenty of other great writings to attract his attention. Examples included Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Emile Zola.

While Thanh was still teaching, the French became suspicious of Duc Thanh School, thinking it would become another Dong Kinh. They were aware of the bookstore right next door, selling works by leading Vietnamese writers promoting reforms, with the slogan, “Leave behind the old and the obsolete. Embrace the new and the modern.”
The colonial regime felt this was a criticism of their governing policies in Indochina.

Thanh was restless and thought of abandoning his teaching. He had often witnessed the cruel treatment of the local people by the French and felt deeply humiliated. In one incident, when a typhoon damaged the port of Phan Rang, French officials patrolling the seaside ordered Vietnamese port workers to dive into the water during the storm to rescue ships. Many Vietnamese drowned and there are stories of the French watching them in amusement.

In early 1911 Thanh went to Sai Gon and changed his name to Van Ba. He was soon hired as a kitchen assistant for a merchant ship, the Admiral Latouche Treville. He would work from the early hours to midnight each day. When accepting the job, he was told that they would pay him 45 francs a month. However, before the ship arrived in Marseille in June 1911, he was given a total salary of 10 francs.

Disembarked with a friend from the ship, they went to a sidewalk café on Rue Cannebiere. A waiter there greeted Thanh, “Bonjour Monsieur!” He was most amused and said to his friend, “French people here are better and more polite than those French in Indochina.”

For several decades that followed, young Thanh would be living in various countries as a fugitive, escaping imprisonment, and a probable death sentence imposed by the French. He worked non-stop trying to mobilize support from fellow Vietnamese to help bring an end to colonialism.

He was constantly on the move, and would adopt at least 45 names and pseudonyms for his identity. By 1939, the name Nguyen Ai Quoc had become too well known. While traveling along the Pearl River in south-west China, he took the identity of a French-speaking journalist with a Chinese background and the name Ho Chi Minh. It would be with this name that he made Viet Nam’s first declaration of independence at Ba Dinh in 1945.

Eight years later at Dien Bien Phu, that declaration would be fulfilled. The declaration itself owed much to what he had learned about freedom in the great library of Paris.