Located in a large garden at the
back of the Presidential Palace is a
nice road covered with pebbles and
bordered with mango trees that lead to a
stilt house, Uncle Ho's residence and
office from May 1958 until his death.
The perfume of jasmine flowers and roses
is omnipresent.
At the back is a garden of fruit trees,
where the luxuriant milk fruit tree
donated to Uncle Ho by his southern
compatriots in 1954 stands between two
lines of Hai Hung orange trees. Other
valuable trees belonging to more than 30
species supplied by the Ministry of
Agriculture, the Ministry of Forestry,
and several provinces represent the wide
variety of trees growing in Vietnam.
There are also trees imported from
foreign countries, such as Ngan Hoa
trees, miniature rose bushes, areca
trees from the Caribbean, Buddhist
bamboo trees, etc. Dozens of varieties
of beautifully hang from the trees which
blossom all year round.
Many people know the story of how Uncle
Ho came to live in a small stilt-house
rather than a grand palace. But it is
worth retelling. Ho Chi Minh was never
one for large houses and comfortable
living. He was just 21 when, in 1911, he
set out to travel "the five continents
and the four oceans" to seek ways of
saving his country. For 30 years he
lived a nomadic life, changing addresses
constantly. When he came back to Vietnam
in 1941, he led the revolution against
colonial rule and read the country’s
historic Declaration of Independence at
Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi on September 2,
1945. Not long afterwards, the French
attempted to reassert control of their
former dominion, and Ho Chi Minh and his
generals were forced into the
north-western mountains.
During the resistance war of 1946-54,
Uncle Ho reverted to his nomadic ways,
for the only means of avoiding detection
and capture was to live life constantly
on the run. He moved from one hide-out
to another several times a month, and
only lived in stilt-houses. When the war
was won in 1954, the Party, Government
and Ho Chi Minh came back to
Hanoi. But Uncle Ho eschewed the
trappings of authority. A true
egalitarian, he chose to live a simple
life: he wore brown cotton garments and
rubber sandals made from car tyros, and
lived in a worker’s cottage out the back
of the Presidential Palace. In 1958,
Uncle Ho revisited the former resistance
base in the north-west and saw some of
the stilt-houses where he had spent the
war years.
When he got back to Hanoi, he said he
wanted a similar stilt-house built on
the grounds of the Presidential Palace
itself. The Party commissioned an
architect from the Department for Army
Barracks to design the house, but told
him to submit his plans to Uncle Ho for
comment before work began. The initial
design had three rooms, including a
toilet. But Uncle Ho wanted the house to
remain faithful to the real thing. "The
stilt-house must have only one or two
rooms, small rooms at that, and
definitely no toilet," he said. The
architect amended the designs, and the
stilt-house that Ho Chi Minh moved into
on May 17, 1958, had two rooms of just
10sq.m each. He lived and worked there
for the remaining 11 years of his life.
Today, the stilt-house and its
furnishings have been preserved must as
they were in the 1960s. In the area
under the house, Ho Chi Minh would
receive visitors and meet members of the
Political Bureau. In the centre of the
floor is a long table, with wooden and
bamboo chairs around it. Uncle Ho used a
rattan armchair in the left-hand corner
to sit and read, or rest. In another
corner are three telephones that he used
to talk to the Political Bureau, the
Operations Department and others, and a
steel helmet that he wore during the
years of the American War. In the
right-hand corner, he kept an aquarium
with goldfish to amuse visiting
children. The two rooms of the
stilt-house are sparsely furnished. One,
the bedroom, contains only a bed and
wardrobe. The other, the study, houses a
table, chair and bookshelf.
His appliances were just the bare
necessities: a palm-leaf fan, a brown
paper fan, a bamboo mosquito catcher, a
little thermos-flask, a bottle of water,
a radio-set given by Vietnamese
nationals in Thailand, and a small
electric fan – a gift from the Communist
Party of Japan. A little brass bell used
to hang on the door. In the stilt-house,
Uncle Ho received top cadres, children
and his close friends. He spent most of
his time writing letters, revolutionary
articles encouraging "good people, good
deeds," and documents of great
historical value on important political
tasks such as his 1966 Call against US
Imperialism, for National Salvation.
Plants and trees were grown in the area
around the stilt-house, as Uncle Ho was
a poet with a great love for nature and
pet animals. The garden is bordered with
hibiscus, and the gate of climbing
plants is typical of rural Vietnam.
The front garden is decorated with
little bushes of fragrant jasmines and
eglantines, while at the rear is a stand
of star-fruit trees from the country’s
south. Spring sends the garden into a
colorful riot of mangoes, white
blossoms, and orchids. Uncle Ho
regularly practiced martial arts and
taichi with the guards in the garden,
also the place where he once conducted
people singing the famous song Unity,
like a real orchestra conductor. In
front of the stilt-house is his
fish-pond, teeming with fish that he fed
with great care. He only had to clap his
hands and they came in shoals for food.
The house clearly reveals his humility,
his erudition and his love of simplicity
and nature. As late Prime Minister Pham
Van Dong once wrote: "It is not merely a
landscape, but a way of life; it speaks
of a priceless joy that the current
civilization seems deprived of, with its
polluted mega-cities and cluttered
high-rise apartments. Today, visitors
flock to the stilt-house to remember
what kind of a man Uncle Ho was, and to
celebrate his memory - a man of
sophisticated intellect yet simple
pleasures, of revolutionary ideas yet of
peaceful disposition. |
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