From 1895, he grew up in his paternal hometown of Kim Liên Village, Nam Đàn District, Nghệ An Province, Vietnam. He had three siblings: his sister Bạch Liên (or Nguyễn Thị Thanh), a clerk in the French Army; his brother Nguyễn Sinh Khiêm (or Nguyễn Tất Đạt), a geomancer and traditional herbalist; and another brother (Nguyễn Sinh Nhuận) who died in his infancy. As a young child, Minh studied with his father before more formal classes with a scholar named Vuong Thuc Do. Cung quickly mastered Chinese writing, a requisite for any serious study of Confucianism, while honing his colloquial Vietnamese writing. In addition to his studious endeavors, he was fond of adventure, loved to fly kites and go fishing. Following Confucian tradition, at the age of 10 his father gave him a new name: Nguyễn Tất Thành (阮必成) "Nguyễn the Accomplished".
Cung's father, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc, was a Confucian scholar, a teacher on a small scale, and later an imperial magistrate in the small remote district of Binh Khe (Qui Nhơn). He was demoted for abuse of power after an influential local figure died several days after receiving 100 strokes of the cane as punishment. In deference to his father, Cung received a French education, attended lycée in Huế, the alma mater of his later disciples, Phạm Văn Đồng and Võ Nguyên Giáp. He later left his studies and chose to teach at Dục Thanh school in Phan Thiết.
In 1912, working as the cook's helper on a ship, Cung traveled to the United States. From 1912 to 1913, he lived in New York (Harlem) and Boston, where he worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel. Among a series of menial jobs, he claimed to have worked for a wealthy family in Brooklyn between 1917 and 1918; during this time he was influenced by Marcus Garvey in Harlem. It is believed that while in the United States he made contact with Korean nationalists, an experience that developed his political outlook.
Between 1913 and 1919, Cung lived in West Ealing, west London, and later in Crouch End, Hornsey, north London. He is reported to have worked as a chef at the Drayton Court Hotel, on The Avenue, West Ealing. It is claimed that Ho trained as a pastry chef under the legendary French master, Escoffier, at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, Westminster, but there is no evidence to support this. However, the wall of New Zealand House, home of the New Zealand High Commission, which now stands on the site of the Carlton Hotel, displays a Blue Plaque, stating that Cung worked there in 1913 as a waiter.
From 1919–1923, while living in France, Nguy?n Sinh Cung embraced communism, through his friend Marcel Cachin (SFIO).[citation needed] Cung claimed to have arrived in Paris from London in 1917 but French police only have documents of his arrival in June 1919. Following World War I, under the name of Nguy?n Ái Qu?c (Nguyen the Patriot), he petitioned for recognition of the civil rights of the Vietnamese people in French Indochina to the Western powers at the Versailles peace talks, but was ignored. Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Qu?c petitioned U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for help to remove the French from Vietnam and replace it with a new, nationalist government. His request was ignored.
In 1921, during the Congress of Tours, France, Nguy?n Ái Qu?c became a founding member of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party) and spent much of his time in Moscow afterwards, becoming the Comintern's Asia hand and the principal theorist on colonial warfare. During the Indochina War, the PCF would be involved with anti-war propaganda, sabotage and support for the revolutionary effort.
In May 1922, Qu?c wrote an article for a French magazine criticizing the use of English words by French sportswriters. The article implores Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to outlaw such Franglais as le manager, le round and le knock-out. While living in Paris, he had a relationship with dressmaker Marie Brière.
In 1923, Qu?c left Paris for Moscow, where he was employed by the Comintern, and participated in the Fifth Comintern Congress in June 1924, before arriving in Canton (present day Guangzhou), China, in November 1924. In June 1925, Hoang Van Chi says he betrayed Phan B?i Châu, head of a rival revolutionary faction, to French police in Shanghai for 100,000 piastres. H? later claimed that he did this because he expected Chau's trial to stir up anti-French resentment and because he needed the money to establish a communist organization. But in Ho Chi Minh: A life, Duikers denied this hypothesis. Châu never denounced Qu?c.
During 1925-26 he organized 'Youth Education Classes' and occasionally gave lectures at the Whampoa Military Academy on the revolutionary movement in Indochina. He married a Chinese woman, Tang Tuy?t Minh (Zeng Xueming), on 18 October 1926. When his comrades objected to the match, he told them, "I will get married despite your disapproval because I need a woman to teach me the language and keep house." She was 21 and he was 36. They married in the same place where Zhou Enlai had married earlier and then lived together at the residence of Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin.
Around 1940, Nguy?n Ái Qu?c began regularly using the name "H? Chí Minh", a Vietnamese name combining a common Vietnamese surname (H?, ?) with a given name meaning "enlightened will" (from Sino-Vietnamese ??; Chí meaning 'will' (or spirit), and Minh meaning 'light'), in essence, meaning "bringer of light".
In 1941, H? returned to Vietnam to lead the Vi?t Minh independence movement. The "men in black" were a 10,000 member guerilla force that operated with the Viet Minh. He oversaw many successful military actions against the Vichy French and Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, supported closely but clandestinely by the United States Office of Strategic Services, and also later against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946–1954). He was also jailed in China for many months by Chiang Kai-shek's local authorities. After his release in 1943, he again returned to Vietnam. He was treated for malaria and dysentery by American OSS doctors. In the highlands in 1944, he lived with Do Thi Lac, a woman of Tay ethnicity. Lac had a son in 1956.
In 1945, in a power struggle, the Viet Minh killed members of rival groups, such as the leader of the Constitutional Party, the head of the Party for Independence, and Ngo Dinh Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Khoi. Purges and killings of Trotskyists, the rival anti-Stalinist communists, have also been documented. In 1946, when H? traveled outside of the country, his subordinates imprisoned 25,000 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. Hundreds of political opponents were also killed in July that same year, notably members of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang and the Dai Viet Quoc Dan Dang. All rival political parties were banned and local governments purged to minimise opposition later on.
Becoming president
At the end of 1959, Lê Du?n was appointed acting party boss and began sending aid to the Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam. This represented a loss of power by H?, who is said to have preferred the more moderate Giáp for the position. The so called Hochiminh Trail was built in 1959 to allow aid to be sent to the Vietcong through Laos and Cambodia, thus escalating the war. Du?n was named permanent party boss in 1960, leaving H? a figurehead president and symbol of Vietnamese Communism.
In 1963, H? corresponded with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in the hope of achieving a negotiated peace. This correspondence was a factor in the U.S. decision to tacitly support a coup against Diem later that year.
In late 1964, North Vietnamese combat troops were sent southwest into neutral Laos. During the mid to late 1960s, Lê Du?n permitted 320,000 Chinese volunteers into northern North Vietnam to help build infrastructure for the country, thereby freeing a similar number of North Vietnamese forces to go south.
By early 1965, U.S. combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam to counter the threat imposed by both the local Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops in the border areas. As the fighting escalated, widespread bombing of North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force and Navy escalated as Operation Rolling Thunder. H? remained in Hanoi for most of the duration of his final years, stubbornly refusing to negotiate with the Americans and demanded nothing but an unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops in South Vietnam. By July, 1967, H? and most of the Politburo of North Vietnam met in a high-level conference where they concluded that the war was not going well for them since the American military blunted every attempt by the Peoples Army of Vietnam to make gains, and inflicted heavy casualties. But H? and the rest his government knew that there were one weakness, that American public opinion was not wholeheartedly in favor of the war. With H?'s permission, the North Vietnamese army and politicians planned to execute the Tet Offensive as a gamble to take the South by force and defeat the U.S. military.
Although the offensive was a huge tactical failure which resulted in the decimation of whole units of Viet Cong, the end result was a moral victory. It broke the U.S. will to fight the war and public opinion in the U.S. turned against the government. The bombing of North Vietnam was halted, and negotiations with U.S. officials opened to discuss how to end the war.
By 1969, with negotiations still dragging on, H?'s health began to deteriorate from multiple health problems, including diabetes among other ailments, which prevented him from participating in further active politics. However, he insisted that his forces in South Vietnam continue fighting until all of Vietnam was reunited under his government, regardless of the length of time that it might take, believing that time and politics were on his side.
Death
With the outcome of the Vietnam War still in question, H? Chí Minh died on the morning of 2 September 1969, at his home in Hanoi at age 79 from heart failure.
News of his death was withheld from the North Vietnamese public for nearly 48 hours due to not wanting to announce his death on the anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was not initially replaced as president, but a "collective leadership" composed of several ministers and military leaders took over. They took control of North Vietnam to continue H?'s goal of conquering South Vietnam and to unite it under his founding government.
Six years after his death, when the communists were successful in conquering South Vietnam, several North Vietnamese tanks in Saigon displayed a poster with the following quote; "You are always marching with us, Uncle H?".
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