"When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out" comes from Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary, the collection of poems he wrote in classical Chinese while held without charge in prisons in southern China in 1942 and 1943. The line closes a poem of wordplay built on Chinese characters. In the original, taking certain strokes away from or adding them to one character turns it into another: the character for prisoner becomes the character for nation, worry becomes excellence, and the character for cage, stripped of its bamboo radical, becomes the character for dragon. The poem's argument is carried in the writing itself: suffering and captivity, endured with loyalty to the cause, are transformed into the strength that builds a nation. The cage becomes the dragon.

The dragon holds deep meaning for the Vietnamese. In the national origin story, the Vietnamese people descend from the union of the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the fairy Âu Cơ, and they call themselves the children of the dragon. In Ho's poem, the dragon stands for both the revolutionary steeled by prison and the Vietnamese nation itself, caged for eighty years under French colonialism and soon to break free. Ho wrote these lines as he was preparing to return to Vietnam to lead the Viet Minh, and within three years the nation he imagined declared its independence.

The poem also reflects Ho's theory of revolution. He understood national liberation as a long and patient struggle in which setbacks, imprisonment, and repression become schools that temper the people and their leaders. He believed in building the broadest possible unity of the nation against the colonizer, rooted in the peasantry and guided by a disciplined revolutionary party, and in drawing strength from the people's history and culture. His later conviction that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom grew from the same faith. Prisons can confine revolutionaries but cannot destroy a cause that lives in the people, and when the doors open, the dragon flies.

• 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*