Career
Xuân was an ethnic Nùng from Cao Bằng Province. Hồ Chí Minh reportedly met Xuân in Pác Bó, Cao Bằng Province during his 7-month stay in Pác Bó Cave from February 8 to March, 1941, after 30 years of exile in southern China. Hồ also renamed the stream by the cave to "Lenin stream" ("suối Lênin"), and the mountain encompassing the cave as "Mount Karl Marx" ("núi Các Mác") while there.
The North Vietnamese communist government kept Hồ"s relationship with her and others firmly secretive to preserve the cult of personality that was created around Hồ Chí Minh, of his image as "the father of the revolution" and of a "celibate married only to the cause of revolution".
In 1957, Xuân was killed near Hồ Tây (West Lake), Hà Nội under the communist party"s orders to stop them from marrying, but there"s two accounts about how she died, both involving intentional vehicular collision. The first account was that when she asked one of Hồ"s associates to have her relationship be publicly acknowledged by the government, expressing her desire to be Hồ"s wife and North Vietnam"s First Lady, Hồ Chí Minh and the Communist Party objected it and ordered Trần Quốc Hoàn (Head Director General of the Ministry of Security - Bộ Công an) to eliminate her.
Trần Quốc Hoàn raped her repeatedly and then clubbed her to death, with her body dumped on a road to disguise the murder as a vehicle accident. Other accounts of her murder said that she was simply murdered by collision in a premeditated car accident.
Communist party officials later attempted to erase all traces of the romance from the public.
Ho Chi Minh was also married to Tăng Tuyết Minh, a southern Chinese midwife, and formerly to Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, a Vietnamese communist revolutionary from Hồ"s home province of Nghệ An.
