Where did Hồ Chí Minh grow up and live?

📍Kim Lien, Nghe An, Vietnam

1890 – 1969

“I was born Nguyễn Sinh Cung on the 19th of May 1890 in Kim Liên village, Nghệ An province, in central Vietnam. I took the name Hồ Chí Minh — He Who Enlightens — and spent thirty years in exile working as a pastry chef in London, a photo retoucher in Paris, a Comintern agent in Moscow and China, before returning to lead the Vietnamese independence movement. I declared Vietnamese independence from France in 1945, quoting the American Declaration of Independence. The French war lasted nine years and ended at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954. The American war lasted twenty years after that. I died in 1969 before it ended. Hanoi's Ba Đình Square, where I read the declaration, and the Kim Liên village of my birth were the beginning and the centre of everything.”

👍 LovedThe independence declaration of September 2, 1945. The defeat of France at Điện Biên Phủ. The extraordinary tenacity of a movement that outlasted every power that tried to crush it.

👎 DislikedThe decades of exile before the revolution. The deaths of millions of Vietnamese in the wars for independence. The death before seeing the country unified.

Map showing where Hồ Chí Minh lived — Kim Lien, Nghe An, Vietnam

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Duiker, W. Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000), Hyperion; Lacouture, J. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (1968, translated Peter Wiles), Random House