Phan Bội Châu
Vietnamese nationalist who sought independence from French rule.
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Phan Bội Châu (26 December 1867 – 29 October 1940) was a Vietnamese revolutionary and nationalist. He founded the Duy Tân Hội (Modernization Association) in 1904 and launched the Đông Du movement. Between 1905 and 1908, he lived in Japan, where he wrote political works urging Vietnam’s independence from French colonial rule. Forced to leave Japan, he went to China and came under the influence of Sun Yat-sen, gradually moving from a monarchist to a democratic stance.
In 1912, he dissolved Duy Tân Hội and established the Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội (Vietnamese Restoration League), modeled on Sun Yat-sen’s republican party. French agents captured him in Shanghai in 1925. He was found guilty of treason and remained under house arrest in Huế for the rest of his life.
Lore & Background
Phan Bội Châu was born as Phan Văn San in the village of Sa Nam, Nam Đàn District of the northern central province of Nghệ An. His father, Phan Văn Phổ, descended from a poor family of scholars. Until Phan was five, his father was typically away teaching, so his mother raised him and taught him to recite passages from the Classic of Poetry.
When Phan was five, his father returned and he began attending his father's classes, studying the Chinese classics such as the Three Character Classic, which he memorized in just three days. By age six, he wrote a variant of the Analects that parodied his classmates, earning a caning from his father. At age seven, he played a "Bình Tây" (Pacify the French) game with classmates using bamboo guns and lychee bullets.
In 1883, when the French finished colonizing Vietnam, Phan drafted an appeal for "pacifying the French and retrieving the North" (bình Tây thu Bắc), posting it along the main road, but there were no responses. In 1885, he rallied about 60 classmates for the Cần Vương movement, forming the Sĩ tử Cần Vương Đội (Army of Loyalist Examination Candidates), but a French patrol scattered them. After his father died in 1900, Phan passed the regional mandarin exams with the highest possible honors, using the qualification only to increase his gravitas for anti-colonial action.
Reader's Guide
Phan Bội Châu's significance comes from his early organization of modern Vietnamese nationalism. In 1904, he formed the Duy Tân Hội and initiated the Đông Du movement, living in Japan from 1905 to 1908 to write political tracts for independence. After leaving Japan, he moved to China, where Sun Yat-sen influenced him to shift from monarchist to democrat.
In 1912, he disbanded Duy Tân Hội to form Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội, modeled after Sun Yat-sen's republican party. In 1925, French agents seized him in Shanghai. He was convicted of treason and spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Huế until his death on 29 October 1940. During his career, he used several pen names, including Sào Nam, Thị Hán, Độc Tỉnh Tử, Việt Điểu, and Hàn Mãn Tử.
His early activism included a three-step plan: organize remnants of the Cần Vương movement, attain support from the Vietnamese imperial family and bureaucracy, and obtain foreign aid from Chinese or Japanese revolutionaries. He was influenced by European thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Darwin, as well as Chinese Confucianists Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. Liang's Hsin-min ts'ung-pao and Kang's ideas on Social Darwinism shaped his revolutionary beliefs.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Phan Bội Châu (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Word definitions: the Codexery glossary, each quoted from its Wikipedia article.
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