Vietnam Review recently talked with Vu Ky, former secretary to Uncle Ho, about his memories of Uncle Ho and the house-on-stilts. Our talk started with Uncle Ho's young years. In 1911, at the age of 21, Uncle Ho set off to travel across "the five continents and the four oceans" to seek ways of salvaging the nation. He changed his addresses continually. Thirty years later, in 1941, he returned to the country and directly led the revolution. And four years later, on September 2, 1945, at the historic square of Ba Dinh in Hanoi, he solemnly read the Declaration of Independence, giving birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, to the people of Vietnam and the world. In 1946, the French colonialists staged a comeback. He left Hanoi for a resistance base in the North West of Vietnam, to launch the resistance war. There in 1946-1954, to keep secret his routine work and daily life was really a problem. He only dwelled in houses-on-stilts and changed his lodgings several times a month.

Uncle Ho & the house-on-stilts

In 1954, when the resistance war was brought to a victorious end, the Party, Government and Uncle Ho came back to Hanoi. He still led a simple life with brown cotton garments and rubber sandals. He chose to live and work in the little house of "the electrician", in the former French Governor General's Palace.
In 1958, Uncle Ho revisited the former resistance base and his unforgettable houses-on-stilts. Upon his arrival in Hanoi, he wished to have a house-on-stilts erected in the Presidential Palace itself. In response to his aspirations, the Party and Government entrusted an architect from the Department for Army Barracks with the designing of the house. The Uncle told the architect to present the design to him for consideration and comments before its construction.

According to the initial design, the house-on-stilts had three rooms including a toilet. Uncle Ho had a look at it and commented in a serious manner: "The house-on-stilts must have only one or two rooms, small rooms at that, and definitely without a toilet." And so, on May 17, 1958, a house-on-stilts with two rooms, 10 sq.m. each, was unveiled. For his life and work, the historic house became his working place for 11 years, till the end of his life.

Uncle Ho used the ground floor as a sitting-room to receive visitors and to meet with the Political Bureau members. A long table is set in the middle with wooden and bamboo chairs around. A rattan arm-chair is set in the left-hand corner, in which he used to sit and read or take a rest. In another corner are found 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 US war of destruction against the North. In a right-hand corner, he placed an aquarium with gold fish that could amuse and entertain the children, when they visited him.

The first floor was divided in two for his necessaries, i.e. in one a bed and a wardrobe (click here to see the photo), in the other a table and a chair, and a bookshelf (click here to see the photo. His appliances included a palm-leaf fan, a brown paper fan, a bamboo mosquito catcher, a little thermos-flash, 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 was hung on the door.

In this house-on-stilts, Uncle Ho received responsible cadres, children and his intimate friends, such as Loseby, the lawyer, his wife and daughter, who successfully defended him in Hong Kong and helped him secretly escape from the clutches of the enemy. He spent most of his time writing revolutionary articles, encouraging "good people, good deeds", writing documents of great historical value on important political tasks such as his "Call against US imperialism, for national salvation" in 1966, his letters and his Testament from 1965 to 1969.

Plants and trees were grown in the area around the house-on-stilts, as Uncle Ho was a poet, with a great love for nature and pet animals. Around the garden you can find a hedge of hibiscus, with a gate made of climbing plants, very popular in rural Vietnam. The little front garden is decorated with little bushes of fragrant jasmines and eglantines. The star apple from the fellow-countrymen in the South was planted at the back of the house, always with a verdant green expressing his attachment to the South. Along the two sides of the pebble path leading to the house-on-stilts are two lines of mangos, with two bauhinias at the two ends, giving white blossoms when Spring comes. Dozens of varieties of orchids in turn bloom during the four seasons, on the barks of the trees at the edge of the fish-pond.

Uncle Ho regularly practised martial art and did physical exercises with the guards, right in his garden, where he had once conducted people singing the famous song "Unity", like a real orchestra conductor.

In front of the house-on-stilts, "Uncle Ho's fish-pond" is teeming with fish that he fed with great care. He was so familiar to them that he only had to clap his hands and they came in shoals for the food. As former Prime Minister Pham Van Dong put it in his work "Fundamental perception of Ho Chi Minh's thoughts", "the house-on-stilts, that has for many years impressed visitors at home and abroad, was the lodging home where Ho Chi Minh lived with nature. This is not merely a landscape, but a way of life as well, that brings man priceless joy, that the current civilization seems deprived of, with mega-cities and well-furnished high-rises, sometimes with unnecessary appliances or furniture, polluted environment and spoiled nature, quite detrimental to man himself."

Today, the house-on-stilts constitutes an integral component of the architectural complex in memory of Uncle Ho, including the House-on-Stilts, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Museum. It is not only a historic-cultural relic of Vietnam, but it is of international significance, because Ho Chi Minh was not only the father and mentor of the Vietnamese nation but a Man of Culture of the world as well.

By Nguyen Long - Quang Phung