Ho Chi Minh: A Life - Softcover

Duiker, William J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 078688701X ISBN 13: 9780786887019

Publisher: Hyperion, 2002

Synopsis

The magisterial and authoritative biography of one of the towering and mysterious figures of the twentieth century. Ho Chi Minh's epic life helped shape the twentieth century. But never before has he been the subject of a major biography. Now William Duiker has compiled an astonishing work of history that fills this immense void. A New York Times Notable Book and one of the Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2000--now in paperback!

About this title

About the Author

William J. Duiker is Liberal Arts Professor of East Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. A former foreign service officer with the Department of State, he is the author of several books on the Vietnam War.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ho Chi Minh

By William J. Duiker

Theia

Copyright © 2001 William J. Duiker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780786887019

Chapter One

IN A LOST LAND

He entered the city quietly, with no fanfare. While his followersroamed the streets, celebrating their victory or accepting thesurrender of enemy troops, he settled in a nondescript two-storycommercial building in the Chinese section of town. There he spentseveral days in virtual seclusion, huddled over the battered typewriterthat he had carried with him during a decade of travels from Moscowto south China and finally, in the first weeks of 1941, back to his homeland,which he had left thirty years before.

    By the end of the month he had completed the speech that heplanned to make to his people announcing the creation of a new nation.Shortly after 2:00 P.M. on September 2, he mounted the rostrum of amakeshift platform hastily erected in a spacious park soon to be knownas Ba Dinh Square on the western edge of the city. He was dressed in afaded khaki suit that amply encased his spare emaciated body, and hewore a pair of rubber thongs. Thousands had gathered since the earlymorning hours to hear him speak. In a high-pitched voice that clearlyreflected his regional origins, he announced the independence of hiscountry and read the text of its new constitution. To the few Americanswho happened to be in the audience, his first words were startling: "Allmen are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certainunalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness."

    The time was the late summer of 1945, shortly after the surrenderof Japanese imperial forces throughout Asia. The place was Hanoi,onetime capital of the Vietnamese empire, now a sleepy colonial cityin the heart of the Red River delta in what was then generally knownas French Indochina. For two decades, Nguyen the Patriot had arouseddevotion, fear, and hatred among his compatriots and the French colonialofficials who ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introducedhimself to the Vietnamese people as the first president of a newcountry.

    At the time, the name Ho Chi Minh was unknown to all but ahandful of his compatriots. Few in the audience, or throughout the country,knew of his previous identity as an agent of the Comintern (therevolutionary organization, also known as the Third International,founded by the Bolshevik leader Lenin twenty-six years before) and thefounder in 1930 of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Now he describedhimself simply as "a patriot who has long served his country." For thenext quarter of a century, the Vietnamese people and the world at largewould try to take the measure of the man.

    The forces that initiated his long journey to Ba Dinh Square hadbegun to germinate in the late summer of 1858, when a small flotillaof French warships, joined by a small contingent from Spain, launcheda sudden attack on the city of Da Nang, a commercial seaport of mediumsize on the central coast of Vietnam. The action was not totally unexpected.For decades covetous French eyes had periodically focused theirgaze on Vietnam: missionaries on the lookout for souls to save, merchantsscouring the globe for new consumer markets and a river route to theriches of China, politicians convinced that only the acquisition of coloniesin Asia would guarantee the survival of France as a great power. Untilmidcentury, the French government had sought to establish a presencein Vietnam by diplomatic means and had even sent a mission to theimperial capital at Hué, about fifty miles north of Da Nang, in an effortto persuade the Vietnamese emperor to open his country to French influence.When the negotiations stalled, the government of Emperor LouisNapoleon decided to resort to force.

    The country that French warships had attacked was no stranger towar or foreign invasion. Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelledto fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate andindependent state than had the Vietnamese. A paramount fact in thehistory of the country is its long and frequently bitter struggle againstthe expansionist tendencies of its northern neighbor, China. In the secondcentury B.C., at a time when the Roman republic was still in its infancy,the Chinese empire had conquered Vietnam and exposed it to an intensiveprogram of political, cultural, and economic assimilation. Althoughthe Vietnamese managed to restore their independence in the tenth centuryA.D., it took several hundred years for Chinese emperors to acceptthe reality of Vietnam's separate existence; in fact, this happened onlyafter Vietnam's reluctant acceptance of a tributary relationship with theimperial dynasty in China.

    Vietnam's long association with China had enduring consequences.Over a millennium, Chinese political institutions, literature, art and music,religion and philosophy, and even the Chinese language sank deeproots into Vietnamese soil. The result was a "Confucianized" Vietnamthat to the untutored observer effectively transformed the country intoa miniature China, a "smaller dragon" imitating its powerful and brilliantnorthern neighbor. The Vietnamese monarch himself set the pace,taking on the trappings of a smaller and less august Son of Heaven, asthe emperor was styled in China. The Vietnamese ruling elite was graduallytransformed into a meritocracy in the Chinese mold, its members(frequently known as mandarins) selected (at least in theory) on the basisof their ability to pass stiff examinations on their knowledge of theConfucian classics. Generations of young Vietnamese males were educatedin the very classical texts studied—and often memorized—by theircounterparts in China. Their sisters, prohibited by rigidly patriarchalConfucian mores from pursuing official careers—or indeed almost anyprofession—were secluded within the confines of the family homesteadand admonished to direct their ambitions to becoming good wives andmothers.

    Vietnam's passage into the Chinese cultural universe was probablynot an especially wrenching experience, for the social and economic conditionsthat had helped to produce Confucian civilization in China existedto a considerable degree in Vietnam as well. Like its counterpartto the north, Vietnamese society was fundamentally agrarian. Almostnine of every ten Vietnamese were rice farmers, living in tiny villagesscattered throughout the marshy delta of the Red River as it wound itsway languidly to the Gulf of Tonkin. Hard work, the subordination ofthe desires of the individual to the needs of the group, and a stable socialand political hierarchy were of utmost importance. The existence of atrained bureaucracy to maintain the irrigation system and the road networkwas considered essential, but there was relatively little need forcommerce and manufacturing. Although indigenous elements were nevereliminated in Vietnamese culture, to untutored eyes the country appearedto be a mirror image in microcosm of its giant neighbor to the north.

    But if the Vietnamese people appeared willing to absorb almostwhole the great tradition of powerful China, they proved adamant onthe issue of self-rule. The heroic figures of traditional Vietnam—rebelleaders such as the Trung sisters (who resisted Chinese rule in the firstcentury A.D.), the emperor Le Loi, and his brilliant strategist NguyenTrai, who fought against the Ming dynasty 1400 years later—were allclosely identified with resistance to Chinese domination. Out of the crucibleof this effort emerged a people with a tenacious sense of theirnational identity and a willingness to defend their homeland againstoutside invasion.

    One of the lasting consequences of the Vietnamese struggle for nationalsurvival was undoubtedly the emergence of a strong military traditionand a willingness to use force to secure and protect nationalinterests. In the centuries after the restoration of national independencefrom China in A.D. 939, the new Vietnamese state, which called itselfDai Viet (Great Viet), engaged in a lengthy conflict with its neighborto the south, the trading state of Champa. Eventually the Vietnamesegained the upper hand, and beginning in the thirteenth century theypushed southward along the coast. By the seventeenth century, Champahad been conquered and the territory of Dai Viet had been extended tothe Ca Mau Peninsula on the Gulf of Siam. Vietnamese settlers, manyof them ex-soldiers, migrated southward to create new rice-farming communitiesin the fertile lands of the Mekong River delta. Dai Viet hadbecome one of the most powerful states in mainland Southeast Asia, andthe Vietnamese monarch in his relations with neighboring rulers beganto style himself not simply as a king but as an emperor.

    But there was a price to pay for the nation's military success, asterritorial expansion led to a growing cultural and political split betweenthe traditional-minded population in the heartland provinces of the RedRiver delta and the more independent-minded settlers in the newly acquiredfrontier regions to the south. For two centuries, the country wasrent by civil war between ruling families in the north and the south. Inthe early nineteenth century the empire was reunified under a descendantof the southern ruling family bearing the name of Nguyen Anh, whoadopted the reign title Gia Long. At first the new Nguyen dynastyattempted to address the enduring legacy of civil strife, but by midcenturyregional frictions began to multiply, supplemented by growing economicproblems such as the concentration of farmlands in the hands ofthe wealthy, and exacerbated by incompetent leadership in the imperialcapital of Hué.

    The Vietnamese civil war had occurred at a momentous period inthe history of Southeast Asia, as fleets from Europe, sailing in the wakeof the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, began to prowl along thecoast of the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam in search of spices,precious metals, and heathen souls to save. Among the Europeans mostinterested in the area were the French, and when in the nineteenth centurytheir bitter rivals, the British, began to consolidate their hold onIndia and Burma, French leaders turned covetous eyes toward Vietnam.

    In 1853 the third emperor of the Nguyen dynasty died, and theVietnamese throne passed into the hands of a new ruler, the young andinexperienced Tu Duc. It was his misfortune, and that of his people,that on his shoulders was placed the responsibility of repulsing the firstserious threat to Vietnamese independence in several centuries. Althoughwell-meaning and intelligent, he was often indecisive and nagged by illhealth. When French troops landed at Da Nang harbor in the summerof 1858, Tu Duc's first instinct was to fight. Contemptuously rejectingan offer to negotiate, he massed imperial troops just beyond French defenseson the outskirts of the city. Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly,the French commander, had been assured by French missionaries operatingin the area that a native uprising against imperial authority wouldtake place, but it failed to materialize. At first, the admiral hoped towait out his adversary, but when cholera and dysentery began to thinout the European ranks, he decided to abandon the city and seek a morevulnerable spot farther to the south. Early the following year the Frenchresumed their attack at Saigon, a small but growing commercial port ona small river a few miles north of the Mekong River delta. Imperialtroops in the area attempted to counterattack, but their outdated weaponswere no match for the invaders, and after two weeks Vietnameseresistance collapsed.

    Although the first reaction of the emperor had been to fend off theaggressors with military force, the defeat in the south left him disheartened.Despite appeals from advisers at court for a policy of continuingdefiance, Tu Duc decided to negotiate, and in 1862 he agreed to cedethree provinces in the Mekong delta to the French, eventually to beknown (with the addition of three more provinces a few years later) asthe French colony of Cochin China. The first round had gone to Paris.

    For a few years the imperial court at Hué maintained a precariousgrip on independence, but when the French resumed their advance inthe early 1880s, launching an attack on the citadel at Hanoi and occupyingseveral major cities in the Red River delta, the court seemedparalyzed. The sickly Tu Duc had died just before the reopening ofhostilities, and in the subsequent leadership crisis the court split intoopposing factions. Over the next few months several new monarchs, mostof them children, were enthroned and unseated in rapid succession. Ultimately,power was seized by the influential regent Ton That Thuyet,who put his own protégé, Ham Nghi, on the throne in hopes of continuingthe resistance. In response to a Vietnamese request, the Qing dynastyin China sent imperial troops to aid its vassal, but the Vietnamesewere nonetheless unable to prevail. In 1885 China withdrew its armedforces and signed a treaty with France expressly abandoning its longstandingtributary relationship with Vietnam. In Hué, a more pliantemperor was placed on the throne to replace the young Ham Nghi, whofled with his recalcitrant adviser Ton That Tuyet into the mountains inthe interior to continue the struggle. In the meantime, the now dominantpeace faction at court concluded a new treaty with France conceding tothe latter political influence throughout the entire remaining territory ofVietnam. The French transformed their new possession into the protectoratesof Tonkin (comprising the provinces in the Red River delta andthe surrounding mountains) and Annam (consisting of the coastal provincesdown to the colony of Cochin China far to the south). In Annam,the French allowed the puppet emperor and his bureaucracy to retainthe tattered remnants of their once august authority. In Tonkin, colonialrule reigned virtually supreme. For all intents and purposes, Vietnamhad become a French possession.

    The French conquest of Vietnam was a manifestation of a process ofEuropean colonial expansion which had begun after the Napoleonic Warsand accelerated during the remainder of the nineteenth century as advancedWestern states began to enter the industrial age. Driven by adesperate search for cheap raw materials and consumer markets for theirown manufactured goods, the capitalist nations of the West turned tomilitary force to establish their hegemony throughout the region. By theend of the century, all of the countries of South and Southeast Asia exceptthe kingdom of Siam—later to be known as Thailand—were under someform of colonial rule.

    The surrender of the imperial court did not end the Vietnamesedesire for independence. Centuries of resistance to China had instilled inthe Vietnamese elite class a tradition of service to king and country asthe most fundamental of Confucian duties. Many civilian and militaryofficials refused to accept the court's decision to capitulate to superiormilitary force and attempted to organize local armed forces to restoreHam Nghi to power. In Ha Tinh province, along the central coast ofAnnam, the scholar-official Phan Dinh Phung launched a Can Vuong(Save the King) movement to rally support for the deposed ruler anddrive the French from his native land. When his friend Hoang Cao Khai,a childhood acquaintance who had decided to accommodate himself tothe new situation, remonstrated with Phung to abandon his futile effortand prevent useless bloodshed, the latter replied in the lofty tones of theprincipled Confucian patriot:

I have concluded that if our country has survived these past thousand years when its territory was not large, its wealth not great, it was because the relations between king and subjects, fathers and children, have always been regulated by the five moral obligations. In the past, the Han, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming [four of the most powerful of past Chinese dynasties] time and again dreamt of annexing our country and of dividing it up into prefectures and districts within the Chinese administrative system. But never were they able to realize their dream. Ah! If even China, which shares a common border with our territory and is a thousand times more powerful than Vietnam, could not rely upon her strength to swallow us, it was surely because the destiny of our country had been willed by Heaven itself.

    But the existence of two claimants to the throne created a seriousdilemma for all those Vietnamese who were animated by loyalty to themonarchy. Should they obey the new emperor Dong Khanh, dulyanointed with French approval at Hué? Or should they heed the appealof the dethroned ruler Ham Nghi, who from his mountain hideout hadissued a call for the support of all patriotic elements in a desperatestruggle against the barbarians? The dilemma of choosing between resistanceand accommodation was a cruel one and created a division inthe traditional ruling class that would not heal for over half a century.

At the heart of the anti-French resistance movement was the centralVietnamese province of Nghe An. A land of placid beaches andpurple mountains, of apple green rice fields and dark green forests, NgheAn lies in the Vietnamese panhandle between the South China Sea andthe mountains of the Annamite cordillera along the Laotian border tothe west. It is a land of hot dry winds and of torrential autumn rainsthat flatten the rice stalks and flood the paddy fields of the peasants. Itis paradoxical that this land, so beautiful to the eye, has often been cruelto its inhabitants. Crowded into a narrow waist between the coast andthe mountains, the Vietnamese who lived in this land, over 90 percentof whom were peasants scratching out their living from the soil, foundlife, at best, a struggle. The soil is thin in depth and weak in nutrients,and frequently the land is flooded by seawater. The threat of disaster isnever far away, and when it occurs, it sometimes drives the farmer todesperate measures.

    Perhaps that explains why the inhabitants of Nghe An have historicallybeen known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese,richly earning their traditional sobriquet among their compatriots as "thebuffalos of Nghe An." Throughout history, the province has often takenthe lead in resisting invaders, and in raising the cry of rebellion againstunpopular rulers. In the final two decades of the nineteenth century,Nghe An became one of the centers of the anti-French resistance movement.Many of the province's elites fought and died under the bannerof Phan Dinh Phung and his Can Vuong movement.

    The village of Kim Lien is located in Nam Dan district, in the heartof Nghe An province, about ten miles west of the provincial capital ofVinh. The district lies along the northern bank of the Ca, the main riverin Nghe An province. Much of the land is flat, with rice fields washedby a subtropical sun stretching to the sea a few miles to the east, but afew hillocks crowned by leafy dark-green vegetation rise above the surroundingplain. Clumps of palm trees dot the landscape and provideshade for the tiny thatch huts of the peasants huddled in their tinyhamlets. Within each individual hamlet, banana trees, citrus, and standsof bamboo provide sustenance in times of need and materials for localconstruction. Still, the farmers of the district were mostly poor in thenineteenth century, for it was a densely populated region, and there wasinadequate land to feed the population.

    It was here, in 1863, that Ha Thy Hy, the second wife of the well-to-dofarmer Nguyen Sinh Vuong (sometimes called Nguyen Sinh Nham),gave birth to a son, who was given the name Nguyen Sinh Sac. Vuong'sfirst wife had died a few years earlier, after bearing her husband's firstson, Nguyen Sinh Tro. To raise his child, Vuong married Ha Thy Hy,the daughter of a peasant family in a neighboring village. By the timeSac was four, his mother and father had both died, and he was broughtup by his half brother Tro, who had already taken up farming on hisfather's land. The farmer's life was difficult for Tro and his neighbors.When a typhoon struck, the land was flooded, destroying the entireharvest; times of drought produced stunted rice plants. As a result, manyfarmers in the village worked at other tasks as a sideline, such as carpentry,bricklaying, weaving, or metalworking. Yet there was a longtradition of respect for learning in the area. A number of local scholarshad taken the Confucian civil service examinations, and several offeredclasses in the classics as a means of supplementing their meager income.

    At first, the young Nguyen Sinh Sac had little opportunity to embarkon his own career as a scholar. Although the family history, carefullycarved in Chinese characters on wooden tablets placed, in accordance withtradition, beside the family altar, recorded that many members had successfullytaken the civil service examinations in earlier times, apparentlynone had done so in recent generations. Sac's half brother Tro had littleinterest in learning. Yet it soon became clear that Sac was eager foreducation. After leading his brother's water buffalo back from the fieldsin the late morning, he often stopped off at the school of the localConfucian scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, where he tied up the animal andlingered outside the classroom, listening to the teacher conduct his lessons.In his spare time, young Sac attempted to learn Chinese charactersby writing them on the bare earth or on the leaf of a persimmon tree.

    By the time he was an adolescent, Nguyen Sinh Sac's love of learninghad become common knowledge throughout the village and came to theattention of Hoang Duong (also known as Hoang Xuan Duong), a Confucianscholar from the nearby hamlet of Hoang Tru who often walkedover the mud-packed footpaths to Kim Lien to visit his friend VuongThuc Mau. Noticing the young lad on the back of a water buffalo absorbedin reading a book while his friends played in the fields, HoangDuong spoke with Nguyen Sinh Tro and volunteered to raise the boy,offering him an education through the classes that he taught in his ownhome. Tro agreed, and in 1878, at age fifteen, Nguyen Sinh Sac movedto Hoang Tru village, where he began formal study in the Confucianclassics with his new foster father and sponsor. The event was hardly anunusual one, since it was customary for the talented sons of poor farmersto be taken under the wing of more affluent relatives or neighbors andprovided with a Confucian education in a local school. Should the childsucceed in his studies and rise to the level of a scholar or governmentofficial, relatives and neighbors alike could all bask in the glow of therecipient's prestige and influence.

    Like many other scholars in the area, Master Duong (as he was knownlocally) was part teacher, part farmer. The roots of the Hoang familywere in Hai Hung province, just to the southeast of Hanoi in the RedRiver delta, where many members were renowned for their learning.After moving to Nghe An in the fifteenth century, Hoang Duong's forebearscontinued the tradition of scholarship. His father had taken thecivil service examination three times, eventually receiving the grade oftu tai ("cultivated talent," the lowest level of achievement in the examinationand the Confucian equivalent of a bachelor's degree in the UnitedStates today).

    While Hoang Duong taught his students in two outer rooms of hissmall house, his wife, Nguyen Thi Kep, and their two daughters, HoangThi Loan and Hoang Thi An, tilled the fields and weaved to supplementthe family income. Like their counterparts in villages throughout thecountry, none of the women in Master Duong's family had any formaleducation, since the arts of scholarship and governing—reflecting timewornConfucian principles introduced from China—were restricted exclusivelyto males. In Vietnam, as in China, it was a woman's traditionalduty to play the role of mother and housekeeper, and to serve the needsof her husband. This had not always been the case, since Vietnamesewomen had historically possessed more legal rights than their Chinesecounterparts, but as Confucianism became increasingly dominant afterthe fifteenth century, their position in Vietnamese society became increasinglyrestricted. Within the family, they were clearly subordinateto their husbands, who possessed exclusive property rights and were permittedto take an additional wife if the first failed to produce a son.

    Within these constraints, Nguyen Thi Kep and her daughters wereprobably better off than most of their neighbors, since they had absorbeda little literary knowledge. Kep's own family also had a tradition ofscholarship. Her father had passed the first level of civil service examinationjust like her father-in-law had. As the wife of a local scholar, Kepwas a respected and envied member of the local community. In mostrespects, however, her life, and that of her daughters, differed little fromtheir less fortunate neighbors, who spent their days knee-deep in themuddy fields beyond the village hedgerow, painstakingly nursing therice seedlings through the annual harvest cycle.

    In this bucolic atmosphere, young Sac grew to adulthood. He quicklyshowed himself adept at Confucian learning, and when he displayed aromantic interest in Master Duong's attractive daughter Hoang ThiLoan, the family eventually consented to arrange a marriage, althoughKep was apparently initially reluctant because of Sac's status as an orphan.The wedding ceremony took place in 1883. As a wedding gift,Master Duong provided his new son-in-law with a small three-roomthatch hut on a small plot of land next to his own house. A one-roomstructure nearby served as the family altar, where the males in the familywere expected to pay fealty to the family ancestors. The house built forthe newlyweds was cozy and clean, with the living space in the frontroom, the kitchen in the rear, and an outside room for Sac's study. Thefamily was somewhat more affluent than most in the village but did nothire laborers for their rice fields or the small vegetable garden. Duringthe next seven years, while her husband continued his studies, HoangThi Loan bore three children—a daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, born in1884; a son, Nguyen Sinh Khiem, in 1888; and then, on May 19, 1890,a second son, Nguyen Sinh Cung, who would later be known as Ho ChiMinh. (In Vietnam, children are given a "milk name" at birth. Whenthey reach adolescence, a new name is assigned to reflect the parents'aspiration for their child).

    While Nguyen Sinh Sac studied in preparation for taking the civilservice examinations, his wife, Loan, as was the custom, tended the ricefields and raised the children. According to the recollections of her contemporaries,she was diligent and family oriented, both traditional Confucianvirtues, but she was also gifted and intellectually curious. She hadsome acquaintance with Vietnamese literature and often lulled her childrento sleep with traditional folk songs or by reciting passages fromNguyen Du's famous verse classic Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu), apoignant story of two lovers caught in the web of traditional morality.

    In 1891, Nguyen Sinh Sac traveled to the provincial capital of Vinhto sit in candidacy for the tu tai, but he failed to pass. His performancewas sufficiently encouraging, however, for him to continue his studiesafter his return home, and to teach classes to local children in his hometo help support the family. When his father-in-law, Master Duong, diedin 1893, adding to the family's financial burdens, Sac was forced to delayhis preparations for retaking the examination. While his older sisterhelped with the household chores, little Nguyen Sinh Cung enjoyedhimself, playing in the fields or roaming around his father's school. Atnight, before being placed in his hammock, his grandmother read himlocal tales of heroism. Cung was intelligent and curious, quick to absorbknowledge.

    In May 1894, Sac took the examinations in Vinh a second time andreceived the grade of cu nhan, or "recommended man," a level higherthan the tu tai and the equivalent of a master of arts degree. The achievementwas unusual for a local scholar, and on his return to Hoang Truvillage he was offered a small plot of land as a traditional reward givenby the community to successful candidates in the civil service examinations.Since he had only three acres of rice land as part of his wife'sdowry, Sac accepted, but he refused offers to arrange an expensive banquetin his honor, preferring instead to distribute water buffalo meat topoor villagers.

    It was commonplace for recipients of the prestigious cu nhan degreeto seek an official position in the imperial bureaucracy, thus "honoringthe self and enriching the family" (vinh thanh phi gia), but Nguyen SinhSac preferred to continue his studies while earning a modest income asa local instructor of the classics. In the hallowed Confucian tradition ofwifely sacrifice—in the expressive Vietnamese phrase, vong anh di truoc,vong nang theo sau, or "the carriage of the husband goes before, that ofhis wife after"—Hoang Thi Loan continued to work in the family's ricefields while raising the family.

    In the spring of 1895, Nguyen Sinh Sac traveled to Hué to take theimperial examinations (thi hoi), the highest level of academic achievementin the Confucian educational system. He did not pass but decided toremain in the city in order to enter the Imperial Academy (Quoc tuGiam) in preparation for a second effort. The academy, whose originsdated back to the early years of national independence in Hanoi, servedas a training place sponsored by the court for aspiring candidates for theimperial bureaucracy. Sac had no funds to pay his tuition or room andboard, but fortunately the school offered a few modest scholarships tohelp defray living costs and with the assistance of a friend he was ableto obtain one. Sac returned briefly to Nghe An to bring Loan and theirtwo sons back to Hué, so that his wife could seek work to help thefamily meet expenses.

    In those days, the trip from the Nghe An provincial capital of Vinhto Hué was both arduous and dangerous. The journey lasted about amonth, and the road wound through dense forest and over mountainsinfested by bandits. It was quicker and more comfortable to travel bysea, but to poor villagers like Nguyen Sinh Sac, the cost of passage byship was prohibitive. The family thus decided to make the trip on foot,covering at most about thirty kilometers a day and walking in groupswith several other travelers for protection against bandits and wild animals.With his short legs, the five-year-old Cung found it difficult tokeep up the pace, so his father sometimes carried him, entertaining himwith stories of mythical creatures and the heroic figures of the Vietnamesepast.

    Hué, originally known as Phu Xuan, had once been the headquartersof the Nguyen lords who had ruled the southern half of the countryduring the two centuries of civil war. After the founding of the Nguyendynasty in 1802, Emperor Gia Long had decided to transfer the capitalthere from its traditional location in the Red River valley as a means ofdemonstrating his determination to reunify the entire country underNguyen rule. A small market town nestled on the banks of the PerfumeRiver about midway between the two major river deltas, it had becomean administrative center after becoming the seat of the imperial court,but was still much smaller in size than the traditional capital of Hanoi(then known as Thang Long), and probably contained a population offewer than ten thousand inhabitants.

    After arriving, undoubtedly exhausted, in Hué, Nguyen Sinh Sac wasable to arrange temporary lodgings at the house of a friend. Eventually,however, the family moved into a small apartment located on Mai ThucLoan Street, not far from the eastern wall of the imperial city, on thenorthern bank of the Perfume River. The Imperial Academy was locatedon the southern bank, about seven kilometers west of the city. But Sacseldom attended school, spending most of his time studying at home.In his spare time he taught the classics to his own boys and the childrenof local officials. Reflecting the intense respect for education that characterizedConfucian societies, he put extra pressure on his sons, admonishingthem to study hard and pay strict attention to their calligraphy.According to the accounts of neighbors, little Cung had already begunto display a lively interest in the world around him, joining his brotherto watch the imperial troops perform their drills and trying to sneakinto the imperial city for a closer look inside. Observing a royal processionas it left the palace on one ceremonial occasion, he returned hometo ask his mother whether the emperor had injured his leg. When askedwhy he had posed the question, Cung replied that he had just seen theruler being carried by bearers in a sedan chair.

    In 1898, Sac failed in his second attempt to pass the metropolitanexamination and decided to accept temporary employment as a teacherat a neighborhood school in the hamlet of Duong No, just east of thecity. His wife, Loan, remained in the apartment in Hué to supplementthe family's meager income by weaving and taking in washing. Theschool at Duong No had been founded by a well-to-do local farmer, whogave permission for Sac's own two sons to attend the classes. It wasapparently at that time that the boys were first exposed to the Confucianclassics in the Chinese language.

    In August 1900, Sac was appointed by the imperial court to serveas a clerk for the provincial examinations in Thanh Hoa, a provincialcapital almost five hundred kilometers north of the imperial capital. Theassignment was considered an honor, since cu nhan were not usually allowedto serve as proctors. Sac's elder son, Khiem, went with him; Cungremained with his mother in Hué. On his return from Thanh Hoa toHué, Sac stopped briefly in his home village of Kim Lien to build atomb for his parents.

    The decision was costly. Back in Hué, his wife had given birth toher fourth child, a boy named Nguyen Sinh Xin (from xin, meaningliterally "to beg"). But the ordeal weakened her already fragile constitution,and despite the help of a local doctor she became ill and died onFebruary 10, 1901. Neighbors later recalled that during the Têt (thelocal version of the lunar new year) holidays, the young Cung ran cryingfrom house to house asking for milk to feed the baby, and that for weekshis normally sunny disposition turned somber.

    On hearing the news of his wife's death, Sac returned immediatelyto Hué to pick up his children and take them back to Hoang Tru village,where he resumed his teaching. For a while, young Cung continued tostudy with his father, but eventually Sac sent him to a distant relativeon his mother's side, a scholar named Vuong Thuc Do. By then, littleCung had begun to make significant progress in his studies. He was ableto recognize quite a few Chinese characters—the essential medium for aConfucian education and still used to write the colloquial Vietnameselanguage—and enjoyed practicing them. It was clear that the boy wasquick-witted and curious, but his father was concerned that he sometimesneglected his studies and sought out other amusements. Cung's newinstructor may have been some help in that regard. Vuong Thuc Dogenuinely loved his students and reportedly never beat them—apparentlyquite unusual in his day—and he regaled his proteges with stories ofthe righteous heroes of the past, one of whom was his own older brother,who had fought with Phan Dinh Phung's Can Vuong movement againstthe French.

    After a few months in Hoang Tru, Sac returned to Hué; his mother-in-law,Nguyen Thi Kep, kept the children. Sac's daughter, Nguyen ThiThanh, who had stayed in the village with her grandmother when therest of the family moved to Hué, was now fully grown but had notmarried, so she remained at home to reduce the burden on the family.Cung helped out in the house and garden, but still had time to play. Insummertime he joined his friends in fishing in the local ponds, flyingkites (many years later, local residents would recall that when on windlessdays many of his friends quickly grew discouraged, Cung would still tryto keep his kite in the air), and climbing the many hills in the vicinity.The most memorable was Mount Chung, on the summit of which satthe temple of Nguyen Duc Du, a general of the thirteenth century whohad fought against an invading Mongol army. It was here, too, wherethe patriotic scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, at whose doorstep Sac had firstdiscovered his love of learning years before, had formed a band of rebelsin 1885 to fight under the banner of the Can Vuong movement. Fromthe heights of Mount Chung, climbers had a breathtaking view of ricefields, stands of bamboo and palm trees, and the long blue-gray line ofthe mountains to the west. There was only one sad interlude in this, thehappiest period of young Cung's childhood. His younger brother Xincontinued to be sickly, and died at the age of only one year.

    Back in Hué, Nguyen Sinh Sac applied to retake the imperial examinationsand this time he earned the degree of doctorate, second class(known in Vietnamese as pho bang). The news caused a sensation inHoang Tru, as well as in Sac's native village of Kim Lien. Since the mid-seventeenthcentury, the villages in their area had reportedly producedalmost two hundred bachelor's and master's degree holders, but he wasthe first to earn the pho bang degree. On his return, the residents ofHoang Tru planned a ceremonial entry into the village, but Sac, whosedislike of pomp and circumstance was now becoming pronounced, againdeclined the honor. Despite his protests, the village arranged a banquetto celebrate the occasion. At his request, however, some of the food wasdistributed to the poor.

    According to tradition, the honor of claiming a successful examinationcandidate went to the home village of the candidate's father. In Sac'scase, of course, this meant that the village that could now label itself "acivilized spot, a literary location" (dat van vat, chon thi tu) was his father'sbirthplace of Kim Lien, rather than Hoang Tru, where he now resided.To reward their native son, the local authorities of Kim Lien had usedpublic funds to erect a small wood and thatch house on public land toentice him to live there. Sac complied, using it as a new home for himselfand his three surviving children. It was slightly larger than his house inHoang Tru, consisting of three living rooms, with one room reserved forthe family water buffalo and a small room containing an altar for HoangThi Loan. A couple of acres of rice land were included with the house,as well as a small garden, where Sac planted sweet potatoes.

    The award of apho bang degree was a signal honor in traditionalVietnamese society and often brought the recipient both fame and fortune,usually in the form of an official career. Nguyen Sinh Sac, however,had no desire to pursue a career in the bureaucracy, especially in a timeof national humiliation. Refusing the offer of an official appointment atcourt on the grounds that he was still in mourning for the death of hiswife, Sac decided to stay in Kim Lien, where he opened a small schoolto teach the classics. The monetary rewards for such work were minimal,and Sac contributed to his financial difficulties by giving generously tothe poor residents in the village. Sac did adopt one concession to his newstatus, however, taking on the new name Nguyen Sinh Huy, or "bornto honor."

Continues...

Excerpted from Ho Chi Minhby William J. Duiker Copyright © 2001 by William J. Duiker. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 078688701X
• ISBN 13: 9780786887019
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 695