Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh spent thirty years abroad organising for Vietnamese independence and did not live to see the country united. Born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in Nghe An province, the son of a Confucian scholar who lost his official post, he left Vietnam in 1911 as a galley hand on a French steamer and spent the next three decades in Marseille, London, Paris, Moscow, Canton, Hong Kong and Thailand under an estimated fifty aliases. In 1919 he presented a petition at the Versailles conference asking that Wilson's principle of self-determination be applied to Indochina. It was ignored, and he joined the French Communist Party the following year on the reasoning that the communists were the only people addressing colonies at all. He trained in Moscow, founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, and was sentenced to death in absentia. He returned to Vietnam in 1941 after thirty years, founded the Viet Minh, and organised resistance to the Japanese occupation, receiving American OSS support. On 2 September 1945 he declared independence in Hanoi, opening with a quotation from the American Declaration of Independence. France refused to accept it, and the first Indochina war ran until Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva settlement partitioned the country pending elections that were never held. He was head of state of the north through the escalating war with the United States, though by the mid-1960s policy was largely directed by Le Duan and the party leadership. He died in September 1969, six years before Saigon fell.
- Lived: 1890 CE – 1969 CE
- Nationality: Vietnamese
- Roles: head_of_state, revolutionary, military_leader
