Tran Cao Van

Trần Cao Vân (陳高雲, 1866–1916) was a mandarin of the Nguyễn dynasty who was best known for his activities in attempting to expel the French colonial powers in Vietnam. He orchestrated an attempt to expel the French and install Emperor Duy Tân as the boy ruler of an independent Vietnam, but the uprising failed. Vân was executed while Duy Tân was exiled by the French.

Early life Vân was born in the village of Phu Cu, Go Noi Island in the prefecture of Điện Bàn in Quảng Nam Province in central Vietnam. The prefecture was also the home area of General Hoàng Diệu, who commanded the garrison Citadel of Hanoi when it fell to France in 1882 and then committed suicide, marking the start of colonisation.

Imprisonment As a result, Vân was held in jail in Hội An for a year while his activities in the past in Bình Định were investigated. After this, he was jailed for six years in Côn Lôn Island.

However, by 1913, Vân had been transferred back to the mainland and was returned to Hội An. Two of his mandarin friends at the court in Huế managed to get Vân released so that he could be reunited with his dying father. Soon, Vân was again involved in anti-colonial activities. He joined a group in Quảng Ngãi Province that maintained contacts with the Quang Phục Hội, a leading overseas revolutionary activist group of the time, mainly in southern China near the Vietnamese border. His group briefly contemplated orchestrating their own military ambushes in central Vietnam, to coincided with cross-border raids by the Quang Phục Hội in the north, but nothing materialised in central Vietnam.

However, the French got wind of the plan. A mandarin in Quảng Ngãi sensed a plot was brewing and he forced one of the low level participants to confessing to what he knew. The intelligence was passed to resident superieur in Huế, who then realised that there was a very large number of Vietnamese soldiers’ families evacuating from Huế. In Quảng Nam, information was found indicating that seizures of several local forts was planned. Most cities in Vietnam have named major streets after him.