Remembered as a catastrophic saga and humbling reckoning in American history, the Vietnam war is considered by the Vietnamese as the final chapter in a century-long struggle for independence, first from France, then the United States. The conflict ended when the Viet Cong’s Soviet T-54 tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975, a city then triumphantly renamed after Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who had been dead six years by the time his long-held dream of a united and independent country was realised. Ho Chi Minh – “Ho, the bringer of light” – was the last of the 50 or so pseudonyms the leader used and lived under as he propagated his ideas on political struggle and military strategy over decades, not just in his native tongue but also in his fluent French, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), English and Russian. Born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in Vietnam, which his father believed to be a lost country, Ho would find his raison d’être as he travelled the world in his 20s, mixing with itinerant labourers in greasy kitchens and dank flophouses, beneath the high noses of European elites, among what historian Tim Harper calls “the village abroad”, a community of like-minded people created by migration and exile. It was in those places, under those conditions, thousands of kilometres from home, toiling away in the nerve centres of the colonial world, that Ho crystallised the philosophies that would embolden him to confront two great powers, facing down imperial France once the Japanese departed in 1945, and later the third occupying force of his lifetime, the US, against which his forces would eventually accomplish the unthinkable: to defeat and embarrass the American war machine. Aged 21 and travelling as Seaman Ba, Ho would later recall waves as big as mountains crashing on the decks on his first voyage to Europe. When the waters were calm he spent the hours between kitchen shifts helping fellow crew members write letters. Many were illiterate while Ho was well born and well educated, the son of a Mandarin, and no obvious candidate for a life at sea. But he had been shaped by the great age of maritime exploration and its dark accompanying shadow, imperial exploitation. Although the French believed their colonial mission in Southeast Asia to be a civilising one, many Vietnamese, including Ho’s father, deeply resented their presence, and the roots of this animosity stretched back centuries. Unlike Cambodia, which viewed France as a protective presence – or even Laos, its modern borders a colonial construct – when the French showed up in Da Nang in 1843, the “Little Dragon” was a regional powerhouse that had shaken off northern domination from China. The mysterious Chinese beauty caught smuggling drugs to the US Growing up, Ho witnessed first-hand how French conscription of peasant labour could ruin the health of his compatriots while they were indentured. Some of those made to serve their white masters succumbed to disease, or the violence to which insubordinate coolies were subjected. Ho was left to wonder what ideals such as “ Liberté, égalité, fraternité ” – the national motto of France – actually meant. Although he began his education in the Confucian tradition, Ho soon opted to study French, the language and culture of the coloniser. He was reportedly a good student until his education was cut short, in 1908, after he translated the demands of some protesting farmers for colonial officials. This led to him being expelled from the National Academy in the central city of Hue, and earned him a record with the infamous Sûreté , the French secret police. Ho drifted south into Cochin-China, the southern region of Vietnam during the French colonisation, and eventually joined the rank and file aboard the Amiral Latouche-Tréville in Saigon, setting sail in June 1911. His first glimpse of France would be the following month when he sailed between the island fortress Chateau d’If – which features in Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo – and the twin medieval forts of St Nicolas and St Jean that guard the Old Port, to dock in Marseilles-Fos. Much of the waterfront we see today would be familiar to Ho; France’s second largest city is also her oldest. Founded by the Greeks some two-and-a-half millennia ago, it is dotted with antique buildings such as the Abbey of St Victor, founded in the fifth century, as well as weathered battlements from various epochs, the earliest of which were standing when Julius Caesar claimed the city for Rome in 49BC. Towering over the yacht-studded waters of the Old Port, the hilltop basilica Notre-Dame de la Garde, crowned by a golden statue of the Virgin Mary, is the highest point of the city. By the early 20th century, Marseilles’ prestige as the “gate of Empire” saw as many as 18,000 merchant ships dock in its harbour annually. But even as a key French city, it maintained a strong Mediterranean identity, its trade links bringing with them people from North Africa, Turkey, Spain and Italy. After Ho came ashore he soon gravitated to the Old Port. He walked wide-eyed through the crowds onto La Canebière, the city’s main thoroughfare linked by tramways, or “running houses” as he described them. Strolling along this broad, commercial boulevard, one cannot help but contemplate what young Ho would have made of the wine-rouged cheeks of the native Marseillais, the robed traders from the Sahel or the mint-tea-sipping Arabs. Perhaps he elicited some attention as well. In the years before World War I, the Indochinese population in Europe numbered just a few hundred, making Ho a rarity, even among the multicultural denizens of Marseilles. His height, less than five feet (1.5m) – short even by Vietnamese standards – might have earned him a glance or two. Although he would later lambast Marseilles as the hypocrite host city of the colonial exposition, what we do know is that it was in one of La Canebière’s cafes that Ho was addressed as monsieur for the first time, leading him to conclude that “the French in France are better and more polite than those in Indochina”. From Shinto to cults and Jesus’ secret mission, Japan’s history of religion Ho’s seafaring years also took him to the great ports of Africa and South America, where again and again he is said to have witnessed the cruelty and inequity of the colonial system. They took him too to London, in 1913, where he found himself in the nerve centre of an even larger colonial empire. At the time, London was the grandest city in the world. What impressions it must have made on a young man from a country still several decades away from its own industrial revolution one can only guess. At the Carlton Hotel, with its regal domes and palm-tree-fringed court, where members of high society gathered and clinked glasses, Ho trained as a pastry chef, a fact commemorated by a blue plaque on the current, rather drab edifice, that reads: “Ho Chi Minh 1890-1969, founder of modern Vietnam, worked in 1913 at the Carlton Hotel which stood on this site.” This was not his first job in London. By his own accounts, Ho endured a miserable introduction to the city, working for a time shovelling snow at a school, and then as a boiler operator, before he found his way into the kitchens that offered reliable, if arduous work. At the Carlton Hotel, Ho worked under the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier. A notoriously hard taskmaster, Escoffier liked Ho, not least because the young man could speak French, and promoted him to assistant pastry chef. But young Ho was busy baking grander plans and, like the legions of students who come to master the global lingua franca today, he spent much of his spare time studying English, often in Hyde Park. Ho worked for a time at The Drayton Court Hotel, too, a West London pub and guest house nowadays operated by Fuller’s Brewery. Although he would recognise little of the nearby brand new West Ealing station today, the yellowing brick exterior of The Drayton Court looks like a set from a Victorian period film. According to its website, the hotel is “one of the oldest pubs in Ealing, and probably the only establishment in London to have one of their cleaners go on to become a world leader”. In contrast with the plethora of streets, parks and public buildings that bear the names of France’s war heroes, there is little to commemorate Ho’s time in Paris beyond a small statue located in Montreuil, in the eastern suburbs. No tour company offers a trail through the back alleys of the city’s southern Montparnasse area, where Asian revolutionary cells were cooking up a postcolonial future. Ho is estimated to have returned to France sometime between 1917 and 1918 and initially rented a room in the old bohemian quarter of Montmartre. But as France emerged from a world war that had cut short its belle époque , the city’s Left Bank was where young, radical intellectuals now gravitated, and Ho soon moved there to soak up the discourse. Ho was no longer the ethnic novelty he had been in Marseilles. Paris was now home to a substantial Vietnamese expatriate community, many of whom had been conscripted for World War I, as he would later angrily write about in T he Case Against French Colonization (1925): “In all, 700,000 Vietnamese natives came to France, and of this number, 80,000 will never again see the sun in their country!” This made it much easier to blend into the crowd. Working in a kitchen, and later touching up photos at a shop on Rue Froidevaux – a leafy street opposite Montparnasse Cemetery, where the poet Charles Baudelaire is buried – Ho spent much of his spare time in the reading room of the French National Library. It was in 1919, when the Allies gathered in Versailles to settle the post-war peace, that Ho emerged from obscurity to make a brand new name for himself. He was about to turn 30 – an age at which Confucius said men must “firmly take a stand” – and first appears to the world as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen “The Patriot”), a pseudonym he would use for the next three decades. It was from the Gare de Nord that Ho departed France, employing a cloak-and-dagger manoeuvre exemplary of a man now accustomed to living in the shadows Nguyen was the credited author of “The Demands of the Annamite [Vietnamese] People”. Some historians record that he donned a top hat and took the pamphlet to Versailles in person, a brave move to lay bare such grievances in France’s premier palace. Other accounts say he took the treatise on Vietnamese independence to the Hôtel de Crillon, where US president Woodrow Wilson was staying. Wilson had advocated self-determination for European colonies, stating, “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” Ho did receive a letter of acknowledgement from an adviser to Wilson, but his protestations fell on deaf ears. The reaction Ho sought came not from politicians but from the police, who soon figured out that he was the same troublemaker who had translated on behalf of protesting peasants all those years ago in Hue. Ho was followed, his mail intercepted and he was periodically shaken down after attending rallies or protests. Yet as authorities pursued him through Paris, their dossier reveals a man for whom every waking hour was dedicated to the singular goal of liberating his country. Ho was soon penning articles for radical publications such as L’Humanité , Le Libertaire , Le Journal du Peuple and Le Paria ; the latter he founded in 1922 with fellow malcontents, and he was often its lead writer, chief editor and principal distributor. How US scheme to catch Chinese spies is enabling what it tries to prevent As France’s most-wanted Indochinese rabble-rouser, he kept on the move, and would know several addresses as he attempted to stay one step ahead of the police. Many in today’s Vietnamese community in Paris’ 13th arrondissement arrived in the 1970s, fleeing, ironically, the regime Ho’s successors established. But in the early 20s, the Asian Quarter was a hub of political radicalism, with plenty of notable inhabitants including Zhou Enlai, future premier of China, who lived just off Place d’Italie at the Hotel Neptune, and who is said to have first met Ho in Paris. Ten minutes north of Place d’Italie is Villa des Gobelins, a quaint cul-de-sac ending at an antique water well fashioned in the shape of a goblin. The Vietnamese nationalist Phan Chu Trinh (1872-1926) rented a spacious apartment at number six, which was made the headquarters of the Association of Annamite Patriots, where “The Demands of the Annamite People” was likely drafted. For a time, Phan was Ho’s mentor and they lived together until political differences provoked a split. Phan was a moderate but Ho was already drifting to the left, in part due to his snub at Versailles. From Villa des Gobelins, Ho moved in with his friend Vo Van Toan at 12 Rue Buot, a sloping street located a short walk from the Gobelins that appears to have changed little in a century. After that, Ho found a small apartment in northwestern Paris where he lived a spartan life, with his political activities taking him all over France as a member of the newly formed French Communist Party. Ho revisited Marseilles in 1921, a decade after arriving there as a young and impressionable sailor, this time to make a speech at the French Communist Party’s first congress. It would not be a trip without incident, as biographer William J. Duiker writes in Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000): “Shortly after Quoc arrived in Marseilles to attend the congress, two plainclothesmen tried to seize him, but he managed to elude their grasp and enter the building where the meeting was to convene. At the end of the congress he was escorted by delegates through police patrols to a secret location until he could return to Paris.” By 1923, Ho was living on Rue du Marché-des-Patriarches, an unremarkable street just west of Paris Austerlitz station. But he was growing disenchanted with French Communists, who he felt did not take the colonial question seriously. To Ho’s mind, the issue of liberating oppressed peoples abroad was no different from that of liberating oppressed workers in France. All were victims of the same exploitative system. This led to accusations that he was more a nationalist than a socialist, a bias he would be accused of for the rest of his life. From porn stars and party animals to the mafia, Russian trouble in paradise While he failed to convert his Parisian comrades to the Vietnamese cause, Ho impressed a Russian named Dmitry Manuilsky, a member of Comintern, an organisation that advocated world communism, who invited him to address the Comintern Congress in Moscow. This was the exit strategy Ho needed. The enormous Gare du Nord is located in Paris’ 10th arrondissement and, despite its modern trimmings, there is much of the old railway station that would be recognisable to commuters who passed through it in the Roaring Twenties. It was from this station that Ho departed France, employing a cloak-and-dagger manoeuvre exemplary of a man now accustomed to living in the shadows. Telling friends he was heading south on holiday, he went to see a film, changed clothes inside the cinema and ran to Gare du Nord, where a confidant handed him his luggage before he hopped on a train for Berlin, his first stop en route to the USSR. The agents who had so doggedly pursued him suddenly drew a blank. With the same infuriating stealth Viet Minh soldiers would later demonstrate when disappearing into the Vietnamese jungle, Ho was gone. But the game of cat and mouse would continue across the USSR, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand and back in Indochina. Returning home, and decades later masterminding one of the most notorious independence struggles of the 20th century, it was his philosophies that also came full circle, congealed and hardened in the great cities of the oppressors. Inside China’s ‘ghost cities’ where some thrive, others barely survive As historian Harper writes in Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020): “Over the coming months and years, the French authorities continued to search for him. They never wavered in their belief that he was important in some way. “This surveillance and notoriety was the making of Nguyen Ai Quoc [Ho Chi Minh]. The police of other imperial powers were enlisted to follow the man’s every move for the next fifty years as he roamed across an imperial underground in which the fate of Asia was ultimately decided.”