Ho Chi Minh Read online

  The city that they had returned to had changed considerably since they last lived there. The imperial palace, with its imposing gray walls and massive flag tower, still dominated the northern bank of the placid Perfume River, which wound its way down from the lavender hills of the Annamite cordillera to the west. From the sampans on the river, lissome prostitutes with the flowing black hair so admired by Vietnamese everywhere called out to prospective customers on the riverbank. But there were some visible changes. A massive typhoon, that periodic scourge of the entire central coast, had battered the region two summers previously, destroying vegetation and leaving a mossy residue along the riverbanks. Along the south bank, directly across the river from the imperial city, the nondescript shops in the old commercial section of town were rapidly being replaced by white stucco European-style buildings to house the offices of the French advisers.

  On their arrival in Hué, Sac and his two sons lived briefly in the house of a friend, but were eventually assigned a small apartment near the Dong Ba gate on the east wall of the imperial city. The building, constructed of wood with a tile roof, had once been an infantry barracks, but was now subdivided for the living quarters of junior officials at court. Sac’s apartment was small, just big enough for a bed and a table. There was no separate kitchen or running water, so the family members had to go to the local well or a nearby canal located just outside the Dong Ba gate. They ate simply. Their meals consisting primarily of salted fish, vegetables, roasted sesame seeds, and cheap rice. Young Thanh did much of the cooking. While such conditions were better than those of most of their rural compatriots, they were undoubtedly much more primitive than the accommodations enjoyed by more affluent officials at court.12

  Shortly after his arrival in Hué, Sac talked with his longtime patron Cao Xuan Duc, an official at the Institute of History who had given him assistance during his first period of residency in the imperial capital. Through Duc’s intervention at court, Sac was appointed to work as an inspector in the Board of Rites (Bo Le), with responsibility for supervising students at the Imperial Academy. It was not an especially prestigious position for someone of his academic rank, since most of the pho bang in the class of 1901 had by now moved on to become district magistrates or to assume more senior positions in the bureaucracy. But Nguyen Sinh Sac’s long refusal to accept an official appointment had undoubtedly drawn attention at court and perhaps triggered suspicion of his loyalty to the imperial house.13

  For Sac, in any event, the experience of working at court was evidently an exceedingly unpleasant one. He had become increasingly uneasy about the morality of serving a monarchy that was only a puppet in the hands of a foreign ruler. What, he wondered, was the contemporary meaning of the traditional phrase “loyalty to the king, love of country” (trung quan ai quoc)? He had begun to speak to friends about the need for the reform of the old system, which in his view had become increasingly corrupt and irrelevant, and he advised his students against pursuing an official career. Mandarins, in his view, existed only to oppress the people.

  Nguyen Sinh Sac’s despair about the decrepitude of the traditional system was only too justified. The Confucian bureaucratic model had always depended upon the effectiveness of moral suasion as a means of maintaining the competence and the integrity of officials selected through the civil service examination system. In theory, local mandarins, indoctrinated since childhood into a system of social ethics based on service to the community, personal rectitude, and benevolence, would adopt such principles in applying their authority to those in their charge. Familiar tendencies toward bureaucratic arrogance and self-seeking conduct could be kept under control by the actions of a humane and energetic ruler at the apex of the system. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the weakness at court had led to a general breakdown in the effectiveness of Confucian institutions in Vietnamese society, and in the prestige and authority of the emperor himself. Lacking a sense of direction from Hué, mandarins found it all too easy to use their authority to line their own pockets, or those of their friends and relatives. Communal lands traditionally made available to poor families were now seized by the wealthy, who were often able to obtain exemptions from the taxes paid annually to the government by each village.

  Sac was by no means the only Confucian scholar to hold the imperial court in contempt. It was at this time that the voice of the imperial official Phan Chu Trinh first came to public attention. Trinh had received a pho bang degree in the same year as Nguyen Sinh Sac. Born in the province of Quang Nam in 1872, Trinh was the youngest of three children. His father was a military officer who had taken the civil service examination but had failed to earn a degree. Convinced that the old ways were useless, Trinh’s father had joined the ranks of the Can Vuong, but he was eventually suspected of treason by his fellow rebels and executed. Trinh himself accepted an assignment at the Board of Rites in 1903, but he was disturbed by the corruption and incompetence of court officials and the mandarins who maintained government authority in the countryside. He publicly raised the issue to students preparing for the 1904 imperial examinations. He began to read the writings of the Chinese reformists, and in 1905 he resigned from office in order to travel around the country and consult with other scholars on the future course of action.

  Eventually, Trinh crossed paths with Phan Boi Chau in Hong Kong and followed Chau to Japan, where he approved of Chau’s efforts to train a new generation of Vietnamese intellectuals to save the country from extinction, but not of his friend’s decision to rely on the support of a member of the imperial family. In Trinh’s view, it made more sense to cooperate with the French in the hope that they would launch reforms to transform traditional Vietnamese society. In August 1906 he penned a public letter to Governor-General Paul Beau, pointing out what he considered the “extremely critical situation” in the country.

  In this letter, Trinh conceded that the French presence had brought a number of advantages to the Vietnamese people, including the first stages of a modern system of transport and communications. But by tolerating the continuing existence of the imperial bureaucracy in central Vietnam, he argued, the colonial regime perpetuated a corrupt and decrepit system, and then compounded the problem by treating the Vietnamese people with condescension and contempt, thus arousing considerable public hostility, Trinh pleaded with Governor-General Beau to launch legal and educational reforms to bring an end to the old system and introduce modern political institutions and the Western concept of democracy. In doing so, he would earn the lasting gratitude of the Vietnamese people.

  It is with a heart filled with anguish and because there is no one with whom I may speak freely that I have decided to take up the pen to express my feelings to you very frankly. If the French government is really determined to treat the Annamite people more liberally, it cannot but approve my initiative and adopt my advice. It will invite me to present myself before its representatives to explain my case at ease. And on that day I will open my whole heart. I will show what we suffer and what we lack. And I dare to hope that this will mark the awakening, the resurrection of our nation.14

  Phan Chu Trinh’s public letter aroused a commotion in educated circles throughout the country, where resentment against the colonial authority was growing. Behind the mask of the “civilizing mission,” French efforts to exploit the economic resources of Indochina and introduce foreign ways had aroused discontent in all strata of Vietnamese society. Traditional scholar-elites were angered at French attacks on Confucian institutions. Peasants chafed at new taxes on alcohol, salt, and opium, which the government had imposed as a means of making Indochina a self-supporting enterprise. The tax on alcohol was especially onerous, as the Vietnamese, forbidden from distilling the rice wine that had been used in family rituals for centuries, were now forced to purchase expensive wines imported from France. For those peasants who left their native village to seek employment elsewhere, a new environment often did not result in improved circumstances. Conditions in the rubber plantati
ons in Cochin China were harsh and frequently led to disease or the death of the worker. Although recruitment was voluntary in principle, in practice it was often coercive and carried out by violence. The situation for factory workers or coal miners was little better, because salaries were low, working hours were long, and living conditions were abysmal.

  Still, it was Phan Chu Trinh’s hope that the French could be brought to realize their responsibility to carry out their civilizing mission in Indochina. He was not alone in seeking answers in the West to the plight of his nation. Early in 1907, a group of progressive intellectuals in Hanoi formed the Hanoi Free School (Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc). Patterned after an academy recently established by the Japanese reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi in Japan, the school was an independent institution aimed at promoting progressive Western and Chinese ideas to the next generation of Vietnamese. By midsummer, the school had opened over forty classes and enrolled one thousand students. In the meantime, Phan Boi Chau continued to be active in Japan, attracting young Vietnamese to his training program and writing inflammatory tracts that were sent back to Indochina to arouse the patriotic spirit of his people. Among them was Viet Nam vong quoc su (Vietnam: History of a Lost Land). Ironically, it was written in Chinese characters.

  For a few months, the activities of the Hanoi Free School were tolerated by French officials in Tonkin, but eventually they began to suspect that its goals were not limited to education, and the school was ordered to close its doors in December. But the French could do nothing to silence the growing debate among concerned Vietnamese over how to guarantee the survival of their country. Nguyen Sinh Sac himself was increasingly angry, remarking in a lecture at the Imperial Academy that working in the bureaucracy was the worst kind of slavery—officials were nothing but slaves working at the behest of a slave society. But Sac found it difficult to come up with a solution. Many years later Ho Chi Minh would recall that his father frequently asked rhetorically where the Vietnamese could turn—to England, to Japan, or to the United States—for assistance.15

  Shortly after his return to Hué, on the advice of Cao Xuan Due, Sac enrolled his two sons in the Dong Ba upper-level elementary school. The school was part of the new Franco-Vietnamese educational system and was conveniently located just outside the citadel walls in front of Dong Ba gate. It had originally been part of a market that occupied the area, but when the market moved to a new location in 1899, the building was transformed into a school. It contained five rooms, four used as classrooms and the other for an office. Technically, young Thanh did not possess the academic credentials to enroll in the school, since he had not yet received any Western-style educational training; however, because he had learned a little French from his tutor in Kim Lien and performed well in his interview, he was admitted as an entry-level student. He apparently was not sufficiently proficient in French to read the sign, attached to the wall in front of the school, with the famous words of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

  Classes at the school were taught in three languages: Vietnamese, French, and Chinese. At the higher levels, use of the Chinese language was reduced. Some conservatives were opposed to the relatively limited role assigned to Chinese, but Thanh and his father were probably pleased at the decision. Thanh’s French tutor in Kim Lien had already advised him: “If you want to defeat the French, you must understand them. To understand the French, you must study the French language.”16

  With his wooden shoes, brown trousers and shirt, and long hair, Thanh undoubtedly cut a rustic figure among his more sophisticated schoolmates—many of whom wore the traditional tunic and trousers of the scholar or wore Western-style uniforms available for purchase at the school—so he soon decided to cut his hair in the fashionable square-cut style and dress like the others to avoid ridicule. He discarded the conical bamboo hat worn by peasants in favor of the preferred hat of woven latania leaves. A friend recollected many years later that Thanh studied hard and played little. He asked permission to write his exercises after classes at an instructor’s home and reviewed his lessons with friends at night. One of those friends recalled that he often remarked to friends who became discouraged, “Only through hardship can we succeed.” He worked especially hard on the French language, practicing his accent with his friends and writing the French and Chinese equivalents to Vietnamese words in his notebook. The hard work apparently paid off: He needed only one year to finish a two-year course.

  In the fall of 1907, Thanh and his brother passed the entrance examinations and were enrolled in the Quoc Hoc (National Academy), the highest level Franco-Vietnamese school in Hué. The academy had been established by decree of Emperor Thanh Thai in 1896 and was placed under the authority of the French résident supérieur (the equivalent of regional governor) of central Vietnam. It consisted of seven levels, four of them primary, and culminated in a final level reserved for advanced students. By setting up the school, the court hoped to replace the Imperial Academy and produce Western-educated candidates for the imperial bureaucracy, so the curriculum was focused on French language and culture. Locals dubbed it “the heavenly school.”

  Living and learning conditions at the school, which was located on the south bank of the river across from the main gate into the imperial palace, hardly corresponded to its prestigious reputation. The main building, which had once served as an infantry barracks, was dilapidated and had a thatch roof, which leaked when it rained. It contained several classrooms, a large lecture hall, and an office. Surrounding the building were several bamboo and thatch huts. The entryway to the school opened on Avenue Jules Ferry, a major thoroughfare that ran along the riverbank into the city, and was marked by a two-story wooden portico in the Chinese style, with the name of the school inscribed in Chinese characters.

  The student body at the school was highly diverse. Some, like Thanh and his brother, were scholarship students who had to walk to school. Others came from wealthy families and boarded at the school or arrived every morning in horse-drawn carriages. In the tradition of the time, students were treated harshly, sometimes even brutally. The first director was an entrepreneur by the name of Nordemann, who was married to a Vietnamese woman and spoke the Vietnamese language. His successor, a Monsieur Logiou, had once been a member of the French Foreign Legion.

  Although in later years Thanh would comment in highly critical terms about the school and the brutal behavior of some of its teachers, he continued to work hard and prospered through the experience, taking classes in history, geography, literature, and science, while improving his knowledge of the French language. His classmates would recall that he always sat in the back of the room and often did not pay attention to what was going on in the classroom. But he was notorious for asking questions in class and was quite adept at foreign languages, so most of his instructors liked him. Classmates also recalled that some of his questions were quite provocative, as he sought to probe the meaning behind the classical writings of the French enlightenment philosophers. One of his favorite teachers was Le Van Mien, a recent graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Although Mien was frequently critical of the policies of the colonial regime, his familiarity with French culture had earned him a favorable reputation among French residents in the imperial capital and protected him from official censure. At the National Academy he informed his students that the French people behaved in a more courteous manner at home than did their counterparts in Indochina, and he regaled Nguyen Tat Thanh with his accounts of the great city of Paris, with its libraries, its museums, and its books on various subjects, which could be read by anyone without official restrictions. Such accounts spurted the young man on to greater achievements, leading one of his instructors to praise Thanh as “an intelligent and truly distinguished student.”

  Still, Thanh’s outspoken demeanor and rustic manners caused problems with some of his more sophisticated fellow students, who teased him as a bumpkin because of his heavy regional accent. At first, Thanh did not react, but on one occasion he lost
his temper and struck one of his tormentors in anger. A teacher scolded him for losing his patience and advised him to turn his energy to more useful purposes such as the study of world affairs. Indeed, Thanh had become increasingly interested in politics, and after class he would frequently go down to the river, where crowds gathered to discuss the latest news about Phan Boi Chau and recite together his poem “A-te-a,” which described a future Asia free of white rule and appealed to the reader to mobilize for national independence.

  A major source in stimulating Thanh’s patriotic instincts was his Chinese-language instructor, Hoang Thong, whose anti-French views had become widely known at the school. Thong warned students in his classes that losing one’s country (mat nuoc) was more serious than losing one’s family, since in the former case the entire race would disappear. Thanh visited Thong at his home and avidly read books from his library, including collections of reformist writings by French, Chinese, and Vietnamese authors. According to some accounts, Hoang Thong was involved in clandestine political activities and put Thanh in touch with local resistance groups opposed to the imperial court and the French colonial regime.

  While the degree of Thanh’s involvement in such activities cannot be substantiated, it is clear that he was becoming increasingly vocal in his criticism of authority. On several occasions he spoke publicly before a crowd of students in the school courtyard, criticizing the servile behavior of the imperial court and calling for a reduction in the onerous agricultural taxes that had been imposed on local farmers. When one student reported his behavior to the authorities, Thanh was called to the office of the school superintendent and given a severe reprimand.17