SPECIAL ISSUE
THE CREATORS OF SOUTH VIETNAM:
AT HOME AND ABROAD

NGÔ THẾ VINH, Author / ERIC HENRY, Translator

THE YEARS OF DREAMING IN VAIN
Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ and the Flora of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ (1929–2017), a botanical researcher who grew up in the Mekong River delta area and received his scientific training in Paris, devoted much of his life to a monumentally comprehensive work filled with his own line drawings on the trees and plants of Vietnam. He also did work on oceanic seaweed while at the Institute of Oceanography at Nha Trang. He was the founder and first president of the University of Cần Thơ. He remained in Vietnam after the fall of the South in 1975, but finally in 1984, accepted an academic position in France to escape the impediments to his work that existed in his own country. Though trained and eventually employed in France, he used Vietnamese rather than French as the language of all his scientific work, feeling that this would ultimately prove to be more beneficial for Vietnam. This study details the many difficulties he faced and overcame in the accomplishment of his life’s work. — Eric Henry.

KEYWORDS
The botany of Vietnam, botanical specimens, botanical line drawings; the Mekong River, Cần Thơ Uníversity

Figure 1. Portrait of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, from the back cover of his book.

Peter Shaw Ashton, the Charles Bullard Professor of Forestology at Harvard University, had the following to say about Phạm Hoàng Hộ:

With its notes in English, together with its finely executed line drawings of more than 10,500 species, The Illustrated Flora of Vietnam, by Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ has for the first time supplied English readers with an up-to-date body of research on a topic that few of us have known anything about. This work will stand as a monument to the determination, self-sacrifice, and encyclopedic knowledge, as well as the courage of the author. Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ with virtually no assistance brought this vast project, a scientific exposition of plant biology, to fruition at the University of Saigon in a period of months and years when he was beset with every conceivable difficulty. In these challenging circumstances, he collected the materials he needed for this outstanding work, and undertook journeys to collect specimens on which to base his illustrations. And now that this work has been published, it will serve as an inspiration for young botanists, both in Vietnam and in other countries.

The Flora of Vietnam has data on perhaps as many as 12,000 different plant species. Because the region described lies next to the tropical Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean, it is a corridor for the periodic, endlessly rich, north-south migration of vegetation from South China, and for the even richer migration of vegetation from equatorial Malaysia. On mountain spurs there still remain conifers and flowering plants—angiosperms—of incomparable importance, while on level plains traces remain as well that link these regions with the islands of the Philippines, Borneo, and Indonesia. This richness is now on the verge of disappearing. The work of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, which is like a database of all surviving plants, will act as a support to the efforts of the Vietnamese government in its campaign to replant, restore, and preserve the botanical heritage of the land.

In his “Summary of Scientific Activities,” Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ tells us the following:

Perhaps because, when I was little, I lived among gardens and green fields in the lush area nourished by the Mekong River, I formed an attachment to trees and plants from an early age. I will never be able to forget such images as that of water lilies in fields or lakes, glistening beneath the sun’s rays in the early morning, or the image of Longan blossoms sunning themselves at the edges of fields. So botany and tropical biology attracted me until it became time to go abroad to study. And while studying at the Institute of Science in Paris, I began to seek an understanding of the flora of Southeast Asia. My first scientific contact with plant life took place in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. When I was just beginning to study Natural Science, I entered the greenhouse of the museum to see if there were any of our plants there. And so, it was there that I made some of my first drawings! I remember a few types of orchids that I drew right in that greenhouse. Those are the most “ancient” of the drawings in my book on Vietnamese flora. And later, when I did my thesis, also at that institute, I had my first opportunity to pay attention to their Botany Collection, and saw a number of images, especially those pertaining to the species Ficus, that were difficult, because not many types had as yet been drawn, and I was reluctant to face the challenge. Later, after returning home, I found that this type of plant was difficult to find. Actually, at that time, my ambitions were modest. Later, when I learned about the types of Ficus to be found in Vietnam, I was overjoyed.

After I passed the examination for the Agrégation, in which I came out sixth, ahead of three hundred other candidates, and among only thirty who passed, I returned home.

(Author’s Note: This degree must be distinguished from the “thác sĩ” or master’s degree now current in Vietnam. To obtain the Agrégé degree in France you had to pass a very rigorous examination, and were then entitled to be a titular professor at a lycée (middle school), or at any institution of higher learning in such fields as Science, Medicine, or Law).

Professor Hộ added the following:

At that time my ambition was simply to return and teach at a middle school, and use my leisure hours to seek to understand the flora of the six southern provinces (lục tỉnh) only, but the College of Saigon and the Nha Trang Institute of Oceanography “yanked” me forth to teach and lecture and look after the Oceanography Institute. While working in Nha Trang, I took an academic interest in ocean seaweed, regarding this as a duty. After a few more years of research under the direction of Professor J. Feldmann, I completed my PhD thesis and submitted it to the Institute of Science in Paris in 1961. This project was recorded in the Yearbook of the Institute of Science on Saigon Street and in the volume, The Seaweeds of Vietnam (Rong Biển Việt Nam), as well as a few articles in scientific journals.

In Saigon, my main duty was teaching Botany and Botanical Biology (replacing the French professor Roger, a specialist in mushrooms that cause diseases in plants) for students in general and specialized curricula. It was because I wished to teach well, and in a manner well adapted to the tropical conditions prevailing in Vietnam, that the objects of my research were all things that belonged to my life’s work, and would later be included in The Flora of South Vietnam (Excerpted from “Academic Degrees and Scientific Career of Phạm Hoàng Hộ, Professor of Botany,” materials in the family archives of Professor Phạm).

In the years 1959-1960, I (the author of this article), then merely a pre-med student in the PCB (Physique Chimie Biologie) division of the College of Saigon, got to study under Professor Hộ, who had just returned from France after obtaining a Master’s degree and was teaching a course in plant biology. Though I only got to study under him for a year, he left an indelible impression on me, as well as all his other students. After entering the School of Medicine, I could no longer study under him, but I still held him in deep regard, followed the steps in his career, and collected the books containing the results of his research.

Figure 2. The two volumes of The Flora of South Vietnam, Center for Pedagogical Materials, Ministry of Education, Republic of Vietnam, 1970. (Source: Internet: Sách Xưa).

In the early 1990s, the scientific community both within and outside the country were overjoyed when Professor Hô’s Flora of Vietnam began to be published in stages. According to Professor Thái Công Tụng, now settled in Montréal, the books of Professor Hộ are all collected in the Bibliothèque Jardin Botanique Montréal, Canada, and, of course, may be found in mаny large libraries throughout the world.

The Flora of Vietnam consists in its entirety of three sections, each of which is in three volumes, amounting in all to 3,600 pages, not counting the glossaries listing all the Vietnamese names and all the Latin names of the species dealt with, lists that he began in the years and months of his sojourn in France and continued conscientiously to expand subsequently.

I myself came into early possession of the six volumes of The Flora of Vietnam when my elder colleague, Dr. Phạm Văn Hoàng, a student of Professor Hộ’s who was formerly the director of the Cần Thơ Center for Rehabilitation Medicine, sent the work to me as a gift.

It seems I should also mention here that before 1975, Professor Hộ served as environmental advisor to the Mekong River Committee and that, around the year 1974, he and Professor Thái Công Tụng published a book detailing the results of a joint research project in this area: The Mekong River: Its Environment, Its Problems, published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Republic of Vietnam in 1974. When I sought to track down and obtain this historically meaningful material, Professor Thái Công Tụng informed me with sadness that it had been utterly destroyed in a fire.  

Why were the scientific works of Professor Hộ published in Vietnamese, though the language he relied on throughout his research and teaching career was French?

In the preface to his book The Seaweeds of Vietnam, published in 1969, he wrote:

This book started out as a work in French, when I was working at the Institute and Museum of Oceanology in Nha Trang, because I cherished the hope that, if published in that language, the results of our research would be displayed to all the world—I had silently promised this to myself when I submitted my dissertation.

But now I have changed my mind and published it in Vietnamese. This is to demonstrate that any language, if used with exactitude, can be used to convey information at any level. I know many people hold the view that publishing something in a language that is not international is a waste of time—how can other researchers know what it contains? But I believe that this scruple is unnecessary. It is of more value for the book to be known and used by a few million Vietnamese than for the book to be appreciated by a few thousand specialists. I have discarded the vainglorious ambition to compete with foreigners so that I may gain a name for myself and shed reflected glory on the people of Vietnam. I believe that such an ambition is impractical—the existence of one skilled Vietnamese is not as desirable as the existence of many Vietnamese of more moderate attainments. To hold a torch to illuminate the streets of foreigners does not meet the needs of the time when one’s own land is still in darkness. The vainglory alluded to above is actually just a way of evading responsibility; it is to cast aside, in an unforgivable manner, one’s duty to the rising generations.  

Figure 3. An autobiographical account by Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ that appears with words by Peter Shaw Ashton and Professor Charles Bullard, a forestologist at Harvard, that appear on the back cover of his book, The Flora of Vietnam (Second Section, Vol. 2), published 1993 in Montréal. (Professor Phạm Biểu Tâm family archives).

In the preface to his book The Seaweeds of Vietnam, he added the following:

Creating a scientific culture that we can call our own is an endlessly immense task. Many scholars, feeling that the task is simply too big, are inclined to accept the easiest solution: to study directly from the scientific literature in foreign languages, a literature that is endlessly rich, and teeming with content. This mode of study would produce many skillful people, but we must not forget that the current basis of our civilization is the culture of our people as a whole, not that of a few people of unusual accomplishment within this whole. We must not allow the richness of foreign cultures to crush our own culture. Did not the Japanese, a century ago, remain undismayed by the overwhelming strength of the scientific accomplishments of foreign countries? And now have they not  created a scientific culture of their own that in the near future shall be superior to that of those very countries?

Above all, I hear resounding in my ears at all times something said by Nguyễn Văn Vinh [early twentieth century reformer and activist]: “Whether Vietnam, this land of ours, turns out well, or ill, will depend entirely on our adoption of the national script (chữ quốc ngữ). In the world that is to come, cultural subservience, especially in the realm of science, will be the principal form taken by subservience” (from the preface to The Seaweeds of Vietnam, Educational Materials Center, Ministry of Education, published 1969).

Figure 4. The covers of some volumes in the vast work, The Flora of Vietnam, comprising two divisions and six volumes, published overseas. (Source: Ngô Thế Vinh).

A Difficult Phase

The image of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ in the years following 1975 is emblematic of the bitter experiences of a whole generation of Southern intellectuals, of whom he was a typical example.

According to Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, The Flora of Vietnam came into being in four phases:

— First phase of research: With collaborative input from Professor Nguyễn Văn Dương on those parts of the work that involved pharmaceutical plants, The Flora of South Vietnam, published by the Ministry of Education in 1960, described 1,650 species commonly found in the South. “That was the groping, exploratory phase, comprising studies of plant specimens not yet familiar to a student who had just returned to his native land after graduating from a program of study in a remote place.”

— Second research phase: When The Flora of South Vietnam was published again in 1970, the number of species described had grown to 5,328. “That phase I regard as a golden era for a botanist working in our land of Vietnam. Compared with conditions that now prevail, it was a time when I could work peacefully and when I enjoyed many conveniences, some personal and some supplied by the country, and, above all, I enjoyed encouragement from all sides, both from friends and from the government.”   

— Third research phase: “Continuing my endeavors beyond the year 1975, I introduced 2,500 more species’ descriptions and expanded the scope of the work to include the entire territory of Vietnam.”

After the upheaval of 1975, Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, like his friend and scientific colleague Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, chose to remain behind, so as to build up the country after years of warfare had culminated in unification, but this came at a very heavy price: As he wrote later, “In those years I lived in the vain fantasy that I would see the country improve. It was the phase of traveling by bicycle, eating moldy rice, and imagining that flowers would bloom by the roads in my native land.”

Though Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ still held the title “assistant department chair” (phó khoa trưởng) at the Institute of Science, the regime used left-over intellectuals, of which he was one, for purposes of display alone; he was given no educational role that matched his title. Because he was not a party member, he could never participate in the meetings of those who were. Whenever a problem arose, the party members would meet to resolve the issue; he was never informed as to what took place at these meetings. In 1977, after experiencing a few days of political study in what was to be an eighteen-month course in “scientific socialism,” reserved for Southern intellectuals in Hồ Chí Minh City, Professor Hồ protested right away to the introduction into the curriculum of so many hours of political study, warning his superiors that “if political studies are enforced too strongly, scientists will no longer be equipped with the basics” (Huy Đức, The Winning Side [Bên Thắng Cuộc]).

And then we must note as well a certain minority of intellectuals who, adapting to the times, began at once to collaborate with the new regime and, paying no regard to personal honor, were prepared to offer up “scientific” programs in order to help celebrate national holidays such as February 3 or May 19, and promulgated such sayings as “eating a few kilos of potatoes is as fortifying as eating a kilo of beef,” or “cassava root is even more nutritious than rice . . .” Such specimens of pseudoscience rapidly became the stuff of satirical anecdotes that spread throughout the labor reform camps, where prisoners from the South all suffered from hunger and malnutrition, subsisting as they did on such rations as moldy “đại mễ” rice from China, or cassava tubers (called “bo bo” in the South and “sắn” in the North).  

Professor Hộ, like a number of other principled Southern scientists who had remained behind, saw that he could not continue to live in such a dishonest and corrupt society, and that he would be unable to avoid putting an end to his years of living in a “vain fantasy.” And then the opportunity he needed arrived. When the government of France invited him in 1984 to come and teach in that country, he resolved to live there as an exile.  

— Fourth research phase: This was the phase that Professor Hộ characterized as “the most precious and the most pain-filled.” Writing further about this period, he said, “It was pain-filled because I was far from my native land and had no hope of returning. It was pain-filled because I was far from my dear family and because I had bade a final farewell to my kind mother, who had dedicated her whole life to her children. It was pain-filled because I saw that my dear country was in an unutterably sad, miserable, and hopeless situation.”

But then he gallantly rose above that pain, patiently immersing himself in the Paris Museum of Natural History, where he worked with ceaseless energy for six years. The National Museum of Natural History (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle; MNHN), belonging to the Sorbonne University system and situated on the left bank of the Seine, was established around the time of the French Revolution in the eighteenth century.

Professor Hộ once observed,

There has rarely been a botanist, especially one from Vietnam, who after collecting specimens in his own country, got to continue his research in France’s National Museum of Natural History, which has the richest collection in the world, comprising eight million to ten million specimens. For Vietnam particularly, this is an irreplaceable treasure, because it includes more than ten thousand plants collected in our country. During the six years that I spent working there, no day ever passed, whether cold and humid or dry and hot, when, upon my return, I would not shout “What  a great day this has been!” because I had learned at least one thing rare, or strange, or new about Vietnam.

In this last phase, he added about three thousand more specimens to The Botany of Vietnam, raising the total to about ten thousand five hundred.  

Figure 5. The French Museum of Natural History in Paris, the place where Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ worked continuously for six years to complete The Flora of Vietnam.
(Source: Internet).

In France, when he met a former student, now a member of the faculty of the Institute of Science in Saigon, who was also working in the National Museum of Natural History (in the Ichthyology Laboratory) Professor Hộ made the following comments to him:

I do my best to get better all the time as I work. The collections in France are rich and managed with full scientific rigor. Because their specimens were collected twenty to forty years ago, many of them have aged, so we cannot work hurriedly, for fear that our efforts might go to waste. . . Many Chinese from the mainland, Taiwan, and Singapore also come here to study collections made in Southeast Asia by France. I don’t know what their principal aims are. One must know what natural resources one’s own country has. If you yourself don’t know, and others do, then those others will use all their knowledge for their own people. This is true no matter what area of research is involved. If the activities of others go unchecked, then they will be in control—they will sit on a throne, while you grovel in the dust. This is called “independence,” but it is actually a form of subservience worse than that which existed in the French colonial period!

Upon completing The Flora of Vietnam, Professor Hộ acknowledged the great debt he owed to The National Museum of Natural History and to his French colleagues. With utter sincerity, he said,

I have completed things that I could not have imagined in my maddest dreams when I was little—a slave in a colonized land, a pupil in an ordinary elementary school in a small province—how could I ever have dreamed that I would author a book, however insignificant? I may have adored the plants and trees around me, but how could I have dreamed that I would seek to become familiar with the flora of the entire country!

And so, the “suffering intellectual,” Phạm Hoàng Hộ, raised himself up and completed the “mad dream” that had once seemed impossible, and became the pillar of botanical science in Vietnam, and one of the main pillars of that science in the world.

A Little Scholarly Anecdote

In his book, A Rose Presented in Gratitude, the writer Nguyễn Đình Toàn recorded the following memories of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ:

In the years prior to 1975, Professor Hộ’s work was still entitled The Flora of South Vietnam. The division of the country limited the scope of his book. Nevertheless this work by Professor Hộ was valued not only by botanical specialists but, as the writer Võ Phiến recounts in his Literature of the South, written after 1975, many writers (including Nguyễn Đình Toàn, the undersigned) sought out The Flora of South Vietnam to learn more about the vegetation surrounding them, so that they could introduce this information into their own work when needed. It is possible that even Professor Hồ never knew anything of this observation.

Note by the Editor: Phạm Hoàng Hộ’s botanical compendium went through a series of editions during his lifetime, each more inclusive than the earlier ones. In the earlier editions Professor Hộ was not able to include information about flora in North Vietnam, so it was at first entitled The Flora of South Vietnam. When this information was added to the work, the title was changed to The Flora of Vietnam.

Establishing the University of Cần Thơ

Due to the advocacy of a number of Cần Thơ intellectuals in the 1960s, chief among whom were Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ and Doctor Lê Văn Thuấn, permission was given on March 31, 1966 for the University of Cần Thơ to be established. This was the first university to be founded in the Mekong River delta area. Professor Hộ was its first president, serving in that capacity from 1966 to 1970.

Due to the wide and deep respect he inspired, due both to his research and to his personal character, Professor Hộ was able to attract “gray matter” of the highest quality then existing in the South; in the realm of agriculture alone, he obtained the services of such famed scholars as Professor Tôn Thất Trình, Professor Thái Công Tụng, Dr. Nguyễn Viết Trương, and Dr. Trần Đăng Hồng, due to whose contributions high yield rice began to be introduced to the delta region for the first time.

And then one must take note of the faculty as a whole, which was so full of ability that the University of Cần Thơ swiftly became a highly reputable center of research and education in the midst of a vast region rich in natural resources that had not yet been exploited. To appreciate the results of the first phase of this institution in its founding years, one has only to look at the activities of its first students who graduated from there four years later.

Professor Đỗ Bá Khê, a member of Professor Hộ’s “think tank,” was one such student—his graduation date was forty-seven years ago. In his college graduation speech, he gave expression to a comprehensive view of the role of the college in the future of the delta region:

Today (December 19, 1970), in this age of science and technology, the provinces of the Mekong River Delta are hopefully awaiting a light that will illuminate the way shone by the University of Cần Thơ, and are dreaming of the appearance of a new horizon adorned with drooping yellow rice plants, gardens, and orchards full of trees, in which people will exist at ease, in a prosperous community and a just society.  

His Friend and Colleague Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân

In 1970, the first stage in the establishment of the University of Cần Thơ was complete. In that year, in order to be able to return to Saigon and continue his research and teaching activities, Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ extended a formal invitation to Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân to take his place and become the second president of the University of Cần Thơ.

Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân was also from Cần Thơ.  He was four years older than Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, having been born in 1925. He obtained a PhD in economics at Vanderbilt University in the United States and returned to Vietnam in 1963 as a law professor. Having received the presidency from Professor Hộ, Professor Xuân energetically developed all aspects of the University of Cần Thơ, from programs of instruction to faculty training, built new lecture halls and laboratories, and established new dormitories, so as to welcome students from all parts of the Western Region. He was a pioneer in setting up a system of credit-hours (instead of the previous certificate system) such as were used in U.S. colleges. He also sent a group of faculty members to study abroad. An outstanding member of this group was Trần Phước Đường, who obtained a PhD from the University of Michigan and afterwards returned to Cần Thơ University as a member of the biology department. Professor Đường later, from 1989 to 1997, became president of the university.

In 1972, he also extended a personal invitation to Võ Tòng Xuân, then a young student in agricultural studies working on assignment at the International Rice Horticulture Institute at Los Banos, Philippines, to come and teach at Cần Thơ University. Võ Tòng Xuân later recounted that when he received the letter of invitation from Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, he said in the letter that “the Mekong River Delta was the rice-basket of the region, so there was a great need there for agricultural scientists. That was among the reasons that caused me to return to Cần Thơ University.” Doctor Võ Tòng Xuân later became a famous professor of agricultural science, known as “Doctor Rice.” His name came to be attached to the development of high-yield rice, and he later became the president of the University of An Giang, the second largest university in the region after Cần Thơ University.

In the space of only nine years (1966–1975), under the energetic direction of its first two presidents, Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ and Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, the university of Cần Thơ became a beacon of scholarship in the Western Region, becoming a center of scientific training and research, and was important especially for developing the two areas of pedagogy and agriculture. It came to be entirely comparable to the older universities that had existed in the South and contributed greatly to the improvement of conditions in the Mekong River Delta.

From Vain Fantasy to Tragedy

Only a few days prior to the upheaval of April 30, 1975, Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, a committed intellectual like Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, decided to remain in the deadly circumstances that surrounded him. He also courageously agreed to accept the position of Minister of Culture and Education, becoming the last holder of that post under the Southern Republic. Before a week more had passed, the government of the South collapsed, and President Dương Văn Minh surrendered to the conquerers.

Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân was put into a labor reform camp, and after that was conducted to the North and imprisoned in the Hà Nam Ninh labor camp with no prospect of return. Võ Tòng Xuân recounts that in the course of a trip he made to attend a conference in Hanoi in 1983, he went to the Ba Sao (“three stars”) labor camp in Hà Nam Ninh to visit the man who had been the president when he attended Cần Thơ University. Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân was delighted to meet his colleague and, though suffering the privations of a prisoner, questioned him eagerly about the state of affairs at Cần Thơ University, the place that he and Professor Hộ had founded and built up.

I, the author of this piece, cannot refrain from asking myself: if it had not been for the cruel and useless eleven-year imprisonment imposed by the Communist victors—if Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, a talented and patriotic man with a doctorate in economics, had remained where he was and continued to build up Cần Thơ University to the same degree that he and his predecessor had done in the years 1966 to 1975, how far might that university have advanced?

1983 was the first year that the two professors surnamed Xuân got to meet each other, and that meeting also proved to be their last. Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân continued to be imprisoned there for another three years, making a total of eleven, and he at length died there on November 10, 1986 in circumstances of hunger and disease for which there was no medicine. He was buried in a shallow grave in the camp cemetery in a mountainous area behind the camp.

Figure 6. The Ba Sao labor reform camp in Hà Nam Ninh. The line of mountains behind the camp is the burial place of many prisoners from the South after 1975.
(Source: Professor Võ Tòng Xuân, personal archives.)

It was only in 2015, almost twenty years later, when Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân’s remains were recovered by his daughter, Nguyễn Thị Nguyệt Nga, who came from France for the purpose and moved his remains to a permanent site in Thiên Hưng Temple, in Binh Thành District, Saigon. Aside from members of his family, the people who attended the Buddhist rites accompanying the reburial included former faculty members at the university, and people who had graduated there before 1975, like Professor Võ Tòng Xuân, Doctor Nguyễn Tăng Tôn, Dr. Nguyễn Văn Mận, K.S. Minh, and Ông Hòa (a former administrator at the university).

Figure 7. From the left: Professor Võ Tòng Xuân, Ms. Nguyễn Thị Nguyệt Nga, the daughter of Nguyễn Duy Xuân, holding a container with her father’s remains, her boyfriend Alan, and a close friend. (Võ Tòng Xuân, personal archives).

Cần Thơ University after 1975

The replacement for Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân as president of the university was Mr. Phạm Sơn Khai, a Southerner who had joined the party. His academic specialty was “the history of the party.” He was raised to the presidency and led Cần Thơ University for thirteen years from 1976 to 1989.

From 1975 on, the new government advocated an educational system in which “being a communist” was more important than having specialized skills, so the curriculum of Cần Thơ University, like those of all the universities in the South, had a new and compulsory course, “Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Hồ Chí Minh,” a course that “teachers were unwilling to teach and students were unwilling to study,” but which nevertheless was preserved up to the present day. For forty-two years—almost half a century—there was not a single privately established university in the whole territory of Vietnam. It is too early to talk about “the democratization of Vietnam” when all of her universities and “think tanks” remain under the direction of Communist Party branch organizations

In an email message to me, Võ Tòng Xuân wrote as follows: “I shall always remember that when Professor Hộ travelled there, he was particularly careful with regard to food and drink—he would always bring his own food and thermoses containing his own water.”

Figure 8. In March, 1981 Professor Võ Tòng Xuân invited Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ to participate in a Cần Thơ University research expedition to Đồng Tháp Mười. From left: Doctor Trần Thượng Tuấn, Doctor Nguyễn Thị Thu Cúc (half-hidden), Đỗ Thanh Ren, Professor Võ Tòng Xuân, Professor Trần Phước Đường, a staff member of the Quy Hoạch Branch-University, Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, and a staff-member of the Đồng Tháp government. (Võ Tòng Xuân, personal archives).

Figure 9. The presidents of Cần Thơ University from the time of its founding until today: Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ (1966–1970), Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân (1970–1975), Mr. Phạm Sơn Khai (1976–1989), Professor Trần Phước Đường (1989–1997), Doctor Trần Thượng Tuấn (1997–2002), Doctor Lê Quang Minh (2002–2006), Professor Nguyễn Anh Tuấn (2007–2012), and Doctor Hà Thanh Toàn (2013–2023). (Lê Anh Tuấn, personal archives). 

Figure 10. Professor Phaạm Hoàng Hộ next to a portrait-bust created by the Canadian sculptor, Dr. Megerditch Tarakdjian, on the occasion of his 80th birthday celebration organized by a group of his students in Montréal, Canada.

The 80th Birthday of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ

In July of 2009, in Montréal, a number of his students organized a celebration of the eightieth birthday of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, where they presented him with a portrait-bust accompanied by a heart-felt inscription: “This bust is not only the image of an eminent professor of botany, but is also an emblem of an intellectual of the South, who offered up his whole life to science, a man whose modesty greatly exceeds his talent, and who loves his homeland with all his heart.”

An event, also full of meaning on that occasion, was the reading, by Dr. Tặng Quang Kiệt, of some words of tribute written by Professor Phùng Trung Nhân, then resident in California, the man who founded and served as the chair of the Department of Ecology at the Saigon Institute of Science in 1973–1975, a colleague and contemporary of Professor Hộ:

My dear friend Hộ, I sincerely thank your friends and family for allowing me to contribute some words to this solemn occasion. Having attained the age of eighty, you have made an immense contribution to the study of the flora of Vietnam, and at the same time have served as a guide to all the students who love the plant life and the natural world of Vietnam. As a person who worked closely with you in the enterprise of providing botanical education to the younger generation in Vietnam, I observed your total dedication to your field and the passion with which you pursued your research. The result was your immense work, The Flora of Vietnam, and, above all, the manner in which you supplemented our knowledge of the flora of the entire country with descriptions of all the precious specimens that had been placed unto the Botanical Museum of Paris only to be forgotten. Before 1975, you and I often led students to participate in on-site training in the Lâm Đông–Đà Lạt area, when we would have them go to the top of Lâm Viên, one of the mountains more than 2,000 meters high in the South. At such times we often shared the hope that, after the return of peace, we could go together to the North and conduct research on the flora of the Fan Xi Pan peak in the Hoàng Liên mountain range, more than 3,000 meters high. I am very sorry, at this late date, that this cherished hope of ours will probably never be realized. Nevertheless, on your own initiative, you communicated with those in the environs of Fan Xi Pan through the specimens in the Paris museum that you described, and added to The Flora of Vietnam for the advancement of science. I am very lucky to have been your close professional associate for many years, and to have been able to benefit by observing the care with which you pursued your work, your devotion to teaching and the passion with which you carried out your researches.

His Last Will and Testament: Keep the Motherland Green

In the last volume of The Flora of Vietnam (Section 2, volume 3), published in Montréal in 1993, on the two pages headed by the words, “By way of a Preface,” Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ left some words that can be regarded as his “Last Will and Testament for Vietnam”:

The plant species of Vietnam are perhaps about 12,000 in number. This accounts only for those species that have nutritive veins; in other words, it does not include seaweed, moss, and mushrooms.  

That is among the richest collections of botanical specimens in the world. This richness is a blessing for Vietnam. As I wrote in 1968, the natural world is a benefactor beyond compare for all of humanity. The natural world gives us our daily food. The natural world supplies us, and especially supplies Vietnam, with a place where we can peacefully exist. How many are the beautiful relationships that have begun with a few betel nuts, with a mouthful of areca leaves? How many of us have come into life without the assistance of a piece of bamboo to cut the umbilical cord that connects us to our mothers? In moments full of life and leisure, it is the natural world that supplies humanity with the delicious and healthy fluids that allow us to share in the drunken satisfaction of the universe. In moments of illness, it is also the natural world that supplies us with efficacious herbal medicines.

These observations apply even more to us Vietnamese, we who live in a culture that, in countless respects, is based upon vegetation.

But this great benefactor of ours is being secretly undermined, for the health of our mountains and waterways has subsided to a dangerous degree; the fertility of our soils has been depleted over a vast area, and areas subject to desertification are spreading rapidly. Things have reached a point where we can sing the lines “Do you hear, oh spirits? The mountains and rivers are in crisis. What deep forests still exist? They, day by day, recede. Where now are the thousand trees that have served us as a refuge?” [Author’s note: These lines are from the song, “The Diên Hồng Assembly” (“Hội Nghị Diên Hồng), music by Lưu Hữu Phước, lyrics by Huỳnh Văn Tiếng].

It is our duty to preserve this botanical treasure. The need to preserve and restore the natural world in our country is extremely urgent. It can be accomplished, because every one of us, whether big or little, can contribute to this preservation. Small actions performed every day can be as significant as great actions.

To refrain from casting aside matches and cigarette stubs is to contribute to the effort to avoid forest fires. To refrain from felling trees for no reason is to protect our natural world. Growing trees is a responsibility of the government and of companies that exploit forests. But around our own homes we can grow trees that are unusual, special, seldom seen in our own area, or which are native to Vietnam alone. Our people love to grow ornamental trees, but ordinary people can also grow unusual or special trees; this is an activity no less delightful and beautiful. Every small town should have a park or a botanical garden, if not large, then at least a little one, so as to display some of the local trees—they need not be especially useful or beautiful. What is unusual about a dó tree? But that is a tree that provides shade to people resting by the road. All our villages, districts, and provinces should form the habit of growing such attractive trees. We need not wait for forestry institutes or nature conservancies to protect our precious resources for future generations; we can contribute to this protection ourselves. Growing unusual and special trees can be an important means of attracting visiting tourists. Our tiên hưởng water orchid (dendrobium amabile) can be found only in a foreign botanical garden, and creators of that garden are so pleased with it that they have had it recorded in a Book of Famous World Sites.

We can bestow honors each year on people who have grown fine or unusual trees. Of course, those who grow trees only to receive honors cannot be compared with those who brought in rhizobiums [nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria] to increase our production of soybeans, those who grew dó trees to produce agarwood, or those who imported high-yield rice or grapes. But if as many as a thousand people, or a million people, make their own small contributions, the sum total of those actions will surely be significant.

I feel that great contributions are difficult to bring about. People of heroic resolve, it seems to me, are not limited to those who accomplish great deeds. Small daily contributions are also deeds proper to people of heroic resolve, though they may be nameless. Nameless heroes are no less splendid than those known to all. If you can make such small contributions, you surely will have no need to feel sorrowful or ashamed at having failed your ancestral land, your native hills and streams [excerpted from “By Way of a Preface,” in The Flora of Vietnam, Section 2, volume 3, Montréal 1993”].

With this “Last Will and Testament” of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, we can see that Plant Biology is not just an academic discipline, but something that must enter our lives. “Keeping the motherland green” must be regarded as a guiding principle behind every level of education and in popular education as well; it is an over-riding value that must pervade all forms of government and that must be observed by the entire world: “Keep this planet green.”

By Way of Conclusion

Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ regarded The Flora of Vietnam as his lifetime project, and dedicated the work as follows:

To all those who survive or who have died in prisons because they decided in April, 1975 to remain behind and continue serving their country.

To the memory of Professor Nguyễn Duy Xuân, the president of Cần Thơ University, who died on November 10, 1986 at the labor reform camp at Hà Nam Ninh.

To the still-fragrant souls of all those who drowned in the Eastern Sea.

I beg to send these words to the fragrant spirit of Professor Phạm Hoàng Hộ, a great scientist, a monument of integrity, and man of heroic resolve, whose spirit is emblematic of a whole class of intellectuals who endured every misery throughout their lives to serve their society in an endlessly dismal period. This short and hurried article, written in sorrowful remembrance, is like a stick of incense offered by a student who remembers his teacher with the words of the poet Nguyễn Du: “The soul is gone, the bright essence remains” (Thác là thể phách còn là tinh anh).

And I do this with the wish that one day “flowers will bloom by the homeland waysides,” and that there will be a statue of the professor on Mount Fan Si Pan, towering more than three thousand feet in the Hoàng Liên mountain range, so that generations of students may continue to be guided by him in conducting research on the Flora of Vietnam.