Vietnam's Communist Party is mourning the death of a man officially described as its 'greatest intellectual'.
Tran Dai Nghia was neither a philosopher nor a poet, but an engineer who fashioned bazookas and mortars from old railway tracks to bombard French colonialists.
He was 84 when he died in Ho Chi Minh City last week after a long battle with cancer.
State newspapers have been filled with obituaries and eulogies, reflecting a strong desire in the party to keep the earliest flames of the revolution alive despite years of open doors and reforms.
Nghia spent 11 years studying civil engineering in France, where, in his spare time, he also secretly researched military strategy and technology.
He sailed home shortly after World War II with thousands of books and papers culled from the vast libraries of Paris loaded into a crate.
