Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese revolutionary and communist leader who guided his people through three decades of struggle against French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and US imperialism. Born in central Vietnam in 1890 under French rule, he left the country in 1911 working as a kitchen hand on a French ship. He spent the next thirty years abroad, working and organizing in the United States, London, and Paris. In 1919, under the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc, he petitioned the great powers at the Versailles peace conference for Vietnamese rights and was ignored. Reading Lenin's theses on the national and colonial question convinced him that the road to national liberation ran through socialism, and in 1920 he became a founding member of the French Communist Party.

Working with the Communist International, Ho organized across Asia and in 1930 founded the Indochinese Communist Party. During the Second World War he returned home and built the Viet Minh, a broad national front that fought the Japanese occupation and the French colonial administration that collaborated with it. While imprisoned in China in 1942 and 1943, he wrote the poems later collected as his Prison Diary. In August 1945 the Viet Minh seized power, and on September 2 Ho read Vietnam's Declaration of Independence in Hanoi, opening with words from the American declaration of 1776.

France refused to accept Vietnamese independence. After nine years of war, Vietnamese forces defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The United States then blocked the promised reunification elections and waged one of the most destructive wars of the century to keep Vietnam divided. Ho died in 1969, six years before Saigon was liberated and renamed in his honor. His legacy endures as proof that a poor, colonized nation, united in struggle, could defeat the most powerful empires on earth.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*