Visiting Hue's Nationalist Shrines

In the middle of one of the rainiest days I have ever experienced in Vietnam--it must have rained more than 5 inches in 24 hrs--I went ahead with the regularly scheduled tour of two historic sites for Vietnamese nationalism. The first is a simple house in the city where Phan Boi Chau, a generation before Ho Chi Minh and a founding member of the Vietnam Nationalist Party, lived under house arrest from 1925-1940. Will the true nerd please raise his or her hand? That's me. The students quickly rushed through the rather plain room of mildewed photographs highighting moments in this man's life. I took a little more time and took pictures of mounted photographs I have not seen reproduced elsewhere. This much lesser known Vietnamese nationalist is I think a very interesting figure for his alternative vision of a modern Vietnam, one that local histories typically dismiss as just a stepping stone to the more revolutionary brand of nationalism envisioned by Ho Chi Minh. These days, with Vietnam's rapid opening up to commercial ventures and the rush to build industrial zones etc., I think Mr. Chau deserves some reassesment.

After an hour there, we loaded back into the van and traveled across town to a little village just beyond Hue to one of many little homes where Ho Chi Minh stayed as a youth as he followed his dad around with his brothers as a teenager. Mr. Cung, that was hcm's real first name, lived in a little thatch house with his dad and brother from 1906-08 while he attended the elite National Academy (same highschool Ngo Dinh Diem attended as well as To and David Ly decades later). Cung was expelled after helping organize a protest of the crazy taxes imposed on Vietnamese people by the French at the time, so he moved south and then to Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Hong Kong, and thirty years later back to Hanoi where he became Vietnam's first President in 1954.

Hong-Anh poses for the last of these rain shots peaking out of the kitchen door from Ho Chi Minh's home for a few years. While I first thought such a place would be really special and important home because of its significant guest, I soon learned that Ho Chi Minh stayed in many homes, so there is a little bit of an effort to preserve all of them perhaps in the manner of the "George Washington slept here" homes and campsites one finds throughout the former 13 American colonies.