Nguyen Sin Cung or Ho Chi Minh as he is known today, was born on 19 May 1890 in the village of Kim Lien, Nam Dan district, Nghe An province in Annam in Central Viet Nam. Bornto a government official in the then-French colony of Viet Nam and a resourceful mother who was more of the family's bread winner, Ho was the youngest of three children.
He was introduced at a young age to the ideas of Vietnamaese modernists and French thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu. He first heard about the lofty principles of liberte, egalite, fraternite (English: liberty, equality and fraternity) as a boy of 13 and longed to see the France that pronounced it.
In 1911, at the age of 21, he left Viet Nam for Europe as a cook on board a French steamship. Over the next two years, he travelled to Europe, Africa, South America, and the United States where he witnessed the poverty, discrimination and injustices in these lands for himself. These episodes, together with his early introduction to revoluntionary thinking, fired him up with ideals of national self-determination.
Ho's convictions compelled him to participate in the establishment of the Association of Annamite Patriots in 1917 to seek redress for colonial injustices. At the Versailles Conference in June 1919, he presented his Demands of the Annamite People to the Allied Powers, seeking autonomy, equal rights and political freedom for Viet Nam. He signed off as Nguyen Ai Quoc. (Nquyen the Patriot).
In 1925, Ho wrote a book detailing the colonial exploitation of his homeland and travelled to parts of Asia with Vietnamese exiles to organise revolutionary movements. He stopped by Singapore briefly in May 1930.
In the same year, Ho founded the Communist Party of Viet Nam (Dong Cong San Viet Nam) in Hong Kong. For his revolutionary activities, he was jailed by the British from 1931, to 1933 when he was finally allowed to leave. He attempted to head to the Soviet Union via Singapore, sailing into Singapore in January 1933 but was immediately deported back to Hong Kong.
In 1941, Ho returned to Viet Nam for the first time in 30 years to form a new independence movement called for the Viet Minh. He also changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, (Bringer of Light). With the end of World War II in August 1945, the Viet Minh established the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, following the successful August 1945 Revolution led by the Communist Party of Viet Nam.
In 1945, Ho Chi Minh was elected as the first President of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, a post he held until he passed away on 2 September 1969. Six years later, the two parts of Viet nam were reunited as the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, thus fulfilling President Ho's dream.