Ho Chi Minh
Politician — born 1890
Ho Chi Minh was one of the revolutionaries who led the Vietnamese nationalistic movement and served as the President of North Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese revolutionary, politician, and statesman whose 30-year revolutionary leadership produced his 1945 founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and his subsequent 24-year service as the founding President of North Vietnam across 1945–1969 — making him one of the defining 20th-century Asian revolutionary figures. He was born Nguyễn Sinh Cung on May 19, 1890, in Hoàng Trù village, Nghệ An Province, French Indochina. His father Nguyễn Sinh Sắc was a Confucian-tradition Vietnamese Imperial-court scholar and provincial magistrate, and his mother Hoàng Thị Loan was a homemaker.
His 1908 expulsion from the National Academy school in Huế (for his participation in the 1908 Vietnamese tax-protest demonstrations) launched his early-career international travel. His 1911 departure from Saigon as a galley assistant on the French steamship Amiral de Latouche-Tréville launched his subsequent 1911–1941 30-year international travel — across France (1911–1923), the United States (1912–1913), the United Kingdom (1913–1917), the Soviet Union (1923–1924), and China (1924–1941).
His 1920 founding membership in the French Communist Party — and his subsequent 1923–1924 Comintern training in Moscow under Bolshevik leaders — launched his international Communist Party career. His 1930 founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party (in Hong Kong, in February 1930) and his subsequent 1941 return to Vietnam after 30 years of international exile launched his 1941–1945 Việt Minh Vietnamese-independence guerrilla-warfare career across French Indochina.
His September 2, 1945 declaration of Vietnamese independence — at the Ba Đình Square in Hanoi, before approximately 500,000 Vietnamese citizens, with the speech opening with the American Declaration of Independence — produced his founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. His subsequent 1945–1954 First Indochina War (against French colonial rule), 1954 Geneva Accords (which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel), and 1955–1969 Vietnam War leadership (against South Vietnam and the United States) produced his 20th-century Cold War-era Asian revolutionary public profile. He died on September 2, 1969, at age 79, in Hanoi.
His name Ho began as a 1942 underground revolutionary alias (shortened from "Hồ Chí Minh" meaning "He who has been enlightened"). Ho has been a rare but enduring boys' name across Vietnamese-tradition American naming.