Indeed, by the fall of 1907, the political situation had grown increasingly tense. Emperor Thanh Thai, who had originally been placed on the throne by the French in 1889, was forced to abdicate on suspicion of involvement in rebel activities. But rumors flew throughout the capital that his eight-year-old successor, the emperor Duy Tan, was even more anti-French. As if to signal his youthful determination to bring reforms to his country, his choice of a reign title was a Vietnamese word for “modernization,” an act that seemed to proclaim his spiritual kinship with the Emperor Meiji in Japan.
For many progressive Vietnamese, however, it was probably too late to link the royal family to patriotic activities. Nguyen Quyen, a scholar at the Hanoi Free School, had recently written a poem calling on all Vietnamese to cut their hair in a symbolic rejection of the feudal past (at the time, many Vietnamese wore their hair in a bun, the traditional manner favored for centuries). Thanh, who had now begun to cut his classes, joined with friends to circulate among the crowds, giving haircuts, not always on request, to local passersby. Years later, Ho Chi Minh still remembered their chant:
Comb in the left hand,
Scissors in the right,
Snip! Snip!
Cut out the ignorance,
Do away with stupidity,
Snip! Snip!18
Such behavior undoubtedly contributed to the anxiety of French officials and led to the decision by the government in Tonkin to order the Hanoi Free School to close its doors.
Up until now, most of the discontent had been centered among intellectuals. In the early months of 1908 it began to spread to rural areas, where peasants in the provinces along the central coast began to voice discontent at rising taxes, forced labor requirements, and official corruption. In his letter to Beau, Phan Chu Trinh had warned that the mass of the population, crushed by the exactions of local authorities, lived in “black misery.” In some areas near the coast, forced labor requirements were especially onerous; for instance, peasants were ordered to spend substantial time clearing sand from harbors after a recent typhoon. In mid-March, large crowds congregated at the office of the district magistrate in Quang Nam province and then marched to the provincial capital of Hoi An, a once thriving seaport a few miles south of Da Nang. The protest movement was actively supported by progressive intellectuals, who had begun to open schools and commercial establishments throughout central Vietnam to educate the young in modern ideas and to raise money for their activities. Now they began to incite peasants to withhold tax payments to the authorities.
As word of the first demonstrations got out, the movement quickly spread from Quang Nam to nearby provinces. In some cases, the demonstrations became violent, as protesters occupied official buildings or the residences of local mandarins. In turn, the imperial authorities ordered soldiers to disperse rioters, which led to several deaths and hundreds of arrests. Occasionally, peasants forcibly cut the hair of passersby, thus inducing French observers to label the movement “the revolt of the short hairs.”
By spring, the wave of peasant unrest began to lap at the gates of the imperial capital of Hué. In the first week of May, peasants in the suburban village of Cong Luong demonstrated against high taxes. When a local mandarin arrived with a contingent of troops, riots broke out and the official was seized. The next day a large crowd led him in a bamboo cage to the capital, where they gathered in front of the office of the French résident supérieur to demand a reduction of taxes and corvée labor requirements.
The incident was the occasion for Thanh’s first direct involvement in political action, although he had undoubtedly followed events closely through the local rumor network. When on May 9 a group of students gathered on the riverbank in front of the National Academy to watch the large groups of peasants who were flooding into town from the suburbs, Thanh suddenly collared two friends and suggested that they join the crowd to serve as interpreters for the peasants in their protest to the French authorities. On the way into the city, he turned his latania hat upside down as a sign of the need to overthrow the status quo. By the time they arrived at the office of Levecque, the résident supérieur, the situation was already tense, with angry peasants confronting local officials and nervous troops. Suddenly the officer in charge ordered his militia unit to rush the crowd and drive it back with batons. Thanh, who had moved to the front in an effort to translate the peasants’ demands to the authorities, was struck several times.
When the crowd continued to press forward, Levecque agreed to permit a representative from among the demonstrators to enter his office to negotiate conditions for the crowd’s withdrawal. Thanh served as interpreter. But the talks failed to resolve the dispute and the people outside refused to disperse, even after Emperor Duy Tan attempted to intervene. Eventually French troops arrived and opened fire on the demonstrators occupying the new bridge over the Perfume River, causing numerous casualties.19
That night, Thanh went into hiding at the house of a friend. The next day his fellow students at the National Academy, many of whom had undoubtedly heard about his activities the day before, assumed that Thanh would be absent, but when the bell rang twice to announce the start of classes, Thanh suddenly arrived and took his assigned seat. At 9:00 A.M. a French police official arrived at the school with a detachment of troops and demanded the “tall dark student” who had taken part in the demonstration the day before. When he saw Thanh sitting in the back of his class, he recognized him and said, “I have orders to request that this troublemaker be dismissed from school,” It was Thanh’s last day at the academy.
In the weeks after the events in Hué, the political crisis intensified. In late June, followers of Phan Boi Chau attempted to stage a coup by poisoning French officials attending a banquet in Hanoi. The instigators hoped that rebel forces in the area could promote a general uprising during the ensuing disorder and seize key installations in the city. But the dosage was too weak to achieve its purpose, and none of the French guests at the banquet died, although a number were temporarily disabled. In the meantime, the plot was inadvertently divulged by one of the perpetrators, provoking the French authorities to declare martial law throughout the area. In the ensuing confusion, Chau’s troops in the suburbs scattered, while others were seized by government forces. Thirteen Vietnamese involved in the plot were executed, and others received lengthy prison sentences. Panicky officials rounded up all scholar-intellectuals who were suspected of being in sympathy with the movement, and even Phan Chu Trinh was arrested in Hanoi and transferred to Hué to be put on trial. Prosecutors wanted him executed, but the résident supérieur intervened; he was given a life sentence and imprisoned on the island of Poulo Condore, off the coast of Cochin China. In early 1911 he was released and permitted to live in exile in France.
After the riots, Nguyen Sinh Sac was reprimanded for “the behavior of his two sons at the Quoc Hoc school,” As a pho bang from the same class as Phan Chu Trinh, Sac was watched closely by the court, but the authorities found nothing specific to connect him with the disturbances. As a stratagem to remove him from Hué, in the summer of 1909 he was appointed district magistrate in the district of Binh Khe, in Binh Dinh province about 200 miles to the south of the capital. Although a relatively prosperous region, it had once been the site of a major rebellion against the Nguyen royal house and was now used to detain vagabonds and other undesirables, Thanh’s brother, Khiem, was also placed under surveillance, and in 1914 he was convicted of treasonous activities and spent several years in jail. Even his sister, who was still living in Kim Lien, was interrogated on suspicion that she had harbored individuals suspected of complicity in the riots.
After his dismissal from school, Thanh disappeared for a few months. There were reports that a friend tried to find him a job at a limestone plant but was unable to do so because his name was on a police blacklist. Presumably he found some employment or lived with friends, but he did not return to his home village because it was now being watched by the authorities.
Event
ually Thanh decided to leave Annam and travel south to the French colony of Cochin China, where he might hope to evade the watchful eyes of the imperial authorities. It may be that he had already decided to go abroad in order to find the secret of Western success at its source, in which case the safest port of departure would be the thriving commercial port of Saigon, which was under French control rather than that of the imperial government. In July 1909 Thanh stopped en route at Binh Khe, where his father had just taken up his post as district magistrate. To avoid arrest Thanh had walked the entire distance from Hué, performing odd jobs to obtain food. By some accounts, however, the meeting with his father was apparently not very successful, for Sac had become increasingly morose and had taken to drink. Sac scolded his son for his recent actions and caned him.20
After a brief stay at Binh Khe, Thanh went on to the nearby coastal city of Qui Nhon, where he stayed at the home of Pham Ngoc Tho, an old friend of his father, Thanh studied briefly at a local school there and then, at his host’s suggestion, took an examination for a position as a teacher at a local school, using his milk name, Nguyen Sinh Cung, to avoid disclosing his identity. The chairman of the examination board had taught Thanh while he was at the Dong Ba school in Hué and was undoubtedly sympathetic to him, but the provincial governor somehow discovered the ruse and removed his name from the list of candidates for the position.21
Frustrated in finding employment in Qui Nhon, Thanh continued south to the port city of Phan Rang. There he sought out the scholar Truong Gia Mo, who had worked at court with Nguyen Sinh Sac in Hué and was also a friend of Phan Chu Trinh. Thanh was apparently anxious to leave the country as soon as possible, but his host persuaded him to accept a job as instructor at the Duc Thanh school in Phan Thiet, about seventy miles further down the coast and just north of the border between Annam and Cochin China. Because Thanh had run out of travel money, he agreed. Before leaving for Phan Thiet, however, he had an emotional experience. When another typhoon battered the port of Phan Rang, French officials ordered Vietnamese dockworkers to dive into the water to salvage ships. According to Ho Chi Minh’s later account, many Vietnamese died in the process, to the apparent amusement of Europeans watching from the shore.
The Duc Thanh school had been founded in 1907 by patriotic local scholars who hoped to imitate the success of the Hanoi Free School. The school building was located on the south bank of the Phan Thiet River, about three miles from the South China Sea. The main building was a brick house on the property of a poet who had recently died. The school was now run by his two sons, and a bookstore was established nearby to support the school and to sell works that promoted the new reformist ideas. On the storefront was the slogan: “Get rid of the old, introduce the new and the modern.” Classes at the school were taught in quoc ngu, but there were courses in the French and the Chinese languages, as well as in the social and natural sciences, art, and physical education.22
Still on the run from imperial security forces, Thanh arrived in Phan Thiet before the lunar new year (Têt) holiday early in 1910 and began employment as an instructor of Chinese and quoc ngu. As the youngest member of the Duc Thanh school faculty, he was also assigned other duties, including instructor of martial arts. According to recollections of students from the school, Thanh was a very popular teacher, treating his charges with respect and advising fellow instructors not to beat or frighten them. Dressed in the white pajamas and wooden sandals popular at the time, he used the Socratic method to encourage students to think and express their own ideas. He introduced his students to the ideas of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, the writings of whom he had absorbed during his schooling at the National Academy in Hué. Outside the classroom he was very accessible, eating with students and teachers in a temple located on the school grounds. He boarded at the school and lived like a student. He frequently took his pupils on historical and nature walks in the woods and along the shoreline in the vicinity. It was a bucolic environment, but contemporaries recalled that the noxious smell emanating from the local fish-sauce factory was sometimes quite strong, providing a distinct distraction to the learning process.
The curriculum at the school had a nationalist agenda. Every morning, each class elected a student to sing a patriotic song, which was then discussed by all in attendance. Thanh introduced topics connected with Vietnamese history in his lectures and recited verses from popular works such as “the haircut song” (ca hot toc) and Phan Boi Chau’s poem “A-te-a.” To open his classes he called on students to recite from poems from the anthology of the Hanoi Free School:
Oh, Heaven! Can’t you see our suffering?
The nation is in chains, languishing in grief,
Foreigners have doomed it to hunger,
They’ve robbed it of everything it had.23
As in the country at large, however, it was not the goal of national independence, but the means to that end that was the most controversial subject for debate. The faculty at the school was divided between advocates of Phan Chu Trinh’s reformist approach and Phan Boi Chau’s program of violent resistance. Nguyen Tat Thanh was one of the few who did not choose sides, preferring, he later wrote, to travel abroad to understand the situation first. According to one Vietnamese source, he respected both Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Boi Chau, but had reservations about both approaches, dismissing the former’s trust in French goodwill as naïve and the latter’s reliance on Japan and members of the royal family as misguided.24
Early in 1911, before the end of the school term, Nguyen Tat Thanh disappeared. The precise reasons for his sudden departure are not clear, although it may have been connected with news of the projected arrival of his father in Cochin China. Sometime in early 1910, Sac had been recalled from his post at Binh Khe. After his posting there the previous summer he had initially been popular with the local population, releasing prisoners who had been arrested for taking part in demonstrations, protecting peasants from demands by rapacious landlords, and punishing local bullies. He was lenient in his treatment of those accused of petty crimes, remarking that it was ridiculous to spend time on such matters when the entire country had been lost. But he was stern in his judgments of the rich and the powerful. On one occasion in January 1910, he sentenced an influential local figure to 100 strokes of the cane. When the man died a few days later, his relatives complained to friends at court, and Sac was summoned to Hué for trial. On May 19, the regency council charged him with abuse of office and sentenced him to caning and a four-grade demotion in rank. In August the sentence was changed to demotion in rank and formal dismissal from office. To support himself, Sac taught school briefly in Hué. To friends he did not appear to be bitter at his dismissal; he remarked to one acquaintance, “When the country is lost, how can you have a home?” In January 1911, he submitted to French authorities a request to travel to Cochin China, probably hoping to see his son. The request, however, was rejected by the authorities, perhaps because of a lingering suspicion that he was involved in rebellious activities. According to one French police report written at the time:
Nguyen Sinh [Sac] … is strongly suspected of complicity with Phan Boi Chau, Phan Chu Trinh and others. His son, who two years ago was a student at Dong Ba, has suddenly disappeared. He is believed to be in Cochin China. Nguyen Sinh [Sac] may intend to rejoin him and confer with Phan Chu Trinh.25
Sac ignored the refusal, and on February 26, 1911, he went to Tour-ane (the new French name for Da Nang) and embarked on a ship for Saigon, where he found employment giving Chinese-language lessons and selling medicinal herbs.26
Was Nguyen Tat Thanh aware of his father’s decision to go to Cochin China, thus persuading him to leave Phan Thiet for Saigon in the hopes of finding Sac there? One of his colleagues at the school later recalled that Thanh had said that he was going to celebrate the Têt holidays with his father. Or did he fear that his real identity had been uncovered by local authorities, who had already placed the school under surveillance? Whether or not they became aware that Nguyen Tat T
hanh was teaching at the school is not known for certain, but shortly after Thanh’s disappearance, a French official arrived at the school to ask about his whereabouts. Thanh, however, had given no hint of his departure to his students, leaving only a short note asking that his books be given to a fellow teacher. Friends at the school later speculated that he may have left Phan Thiet on a boat carrying fermented fish sauce to Saigon. Shortly thereafter, the school was temporarily forced by the authorities to shut its doors.27
A few days after leaving Phan Thiet, Nguyen Tat Thanh arrived in Saigon. The city was undoubtedly an eye-opening experience for the young man from rustic Nghe An province. Once a small trading post on the Saigon River, after the French conquest it was named the capital of the new colony of Cochin China. As the colony grew steadily in population—by 1910 Cochin China contained about one quarter of the total population of 12 million settled throughout the three regions of Vietnam—the city of Saigon grew with it, and by 1900 it had become after Hanoi the largest city in French Indochina. Soon it would surpass the ancient capital in size, with a population of several hundred thousand people.
The growth of the city was based above all on its nearby economic advantages. In the years since the French conquest, Cochin China had become the source of wealth for a new entrepreneurial class composed of Europeans and Vietnamese, as well as of ethnic Chinese, whose ancestors had settled in the area in previous centuries. Much of the profit came from the opening of rubber plantations along the Cambodian border (rubber tree seedlings had been brought to Indochina from Brazil during the last quarter of the nineteenth century), and from the expansion of rice cultivation as a consequence of French efforts to drain marshlands in the Mekong River delta. Purchased by wealthy absentee landlords, these virgin lands were then leased to sharecroppers (many of them immigrants from the densely populated provinces in the north) at exorbitant rents. The rice paid by the tenants to the owners was then processed in Chinese-owned rice mills and shipped to the northern provinces or exported. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, Cochin China was the third largest exporter of rice in the entire world.
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