Phan Bội Châu (; 26 December 1867 – 29 October 1940),ộiChâ born Phan Văn San, courtesy name Hải Thụ (later changed to Sào Nam), was a pioneer of Vietnamese 20th century nationalism. In 1904, he formed a revolutionary organization called Duy Tân Hội ("Modernization Association"). From 1905 to 1908, he lived in Japan where he wrote political tracts calling for the independence of Vietnam from French colonial rule. After being forced to leave Japan, he moved to China where he was influenced by Sun Yat-sen. He formed a new group called Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội (“Vietnamese Restoration League”), 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.
Aliases
During his career, Phan used several pen names, including Sào Nam (巢南), Thị Hán (是漢), Độc Tỉnh Tử (獨醒子), Việt Điểu, and Hàn Mãn Tử.
Early years
Phan was born as Phan Văn San (潘文珊) 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, who had always excelled academically. He spent his first three years in Sa Nam, his mother's village, before the family moved to another village, Đan Nhiệm, his father's home village, also in Nam Đàn District. Until Phan was five, his father was typically away from home, teaching in other villages, so his mother raised him and taught him to recite passages from the Classic of Poetry, from which he absorbed Confucian ethics and virtues.
When Phan was five, his father returned home and he began attending his father's classes, where he studied the Chinese classics, such as the Three Character Classic, which took him just three days to memorize. As a result of his ability to learn quickly, his father decided to move him to further Confucian texts, such as the Analects, which he practiced on banana leaves. In his autobiography, Phan admitted he did not understand the meaning of the text in great detail at the time, but by age six, he was skillful enough to write a variant of the Analects that parodied his classmates, which earned him a caning from his father.
At the time, the central region of Vietnam where his family lived was still under the sovereignty of Emperor Tự Đức, but the southern region had gradually been colonized by Cochinchina campaign in the 1860s. In 1862, Nguyễn dynasty was forced to sign the first Treaty of Saigon that ceded the three east provinces. In 1874, Nguyễn dynasty continued to sign the second Treaty of Saigon that ceded the three west provinces to the French, the whole Nam Kỳ lục-tỉnh (Southern six provinces) became French Cochinchina. In Nghệ-Tĩnh, the Văn Thân movement sprung among the local scholar-gentry with their motto Bình Tây (Pacify the French), and Phan responded at the age of seven by playing Bình Tây game with his classmates, using bamboo guns and lychee bullets. The unrest was enough to prompt the imperial court to bring in troops to quell the opposition to the treaties. Phan's family was not affected by the crackdown, but the movement had a deep impact on him.
When Phan was thirteen, his father sent him to another teacher with a better reputation. Since the family lacked the money for Phan to travel far away, he studied with a local cử nhân graduate who was able to borrow a range of books from wealthier families in the area. In 1883, the French finished the colonization of Vietnam by conquering the northern part of Vietnam, and the country was incorporated into French Indochina. Phan drafted an appeal for "pacifying the French and retrieving the North" (bình Tây thu Bắc). He posted the anonymous appeal calling for the formation of local resistance units at intervals along the main road, but there were no responses and the proclamations were soon torn down. Phan realized no one would listen to a person without the social status ensured by passing mandarin examinations.
