Memorial in Northeast honours late Ho Chi Minh

 Today marks the birth anniversary of the late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Representatives of Thai and Vietnamese governments, together with local authorities and Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese), officially opened a memorial complex for the leader in the Northeastern province of Nakhon Phanom.
The memorial for the revered founder of modern Vietnam also commemorates the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Thailand.
Nguyen Van Nen, chief of the Party Central Committee’s Office, led a Vietnamese delegation from Hanoi to jointly preside over the ceremony.
Uncle Ho is no stranger to Thai society, as he used to spend his life here in the late 1920s while struggling for Vietnam’s independence. He had a safe house in Nakhon Phanom’s Ban Na Chok and lived there from 1928-1929.
The Vietnamese community in Thailand preserved the house as his memorial and built a Friendship village there as an attractive site years ago – but these were not grand enough.
The idea to have a memorial complex for Uncle Ho became a fact when Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong visited the Friendship village during his official trip to Thailand in June 2013 and offered Bt45 million  to the Thailand-Vietnam Association. The Thai government also donated 5 rai (11,200 square metres) of land for the complex.
The construction work, overseen by the association, took two years beginning March 2014.
“The Ho Chi Minh Memorial Complex in Nakhon Phanom is the world’s largest overseas memorial to honour the beloved Vietnamese leader,” said Wisarut Chinthanasathien, president of Nakhon Phanom’s Thailand-Vietnam Association and vice president of the Vietnamese Association of Thailand. “This reflects how much we love Bac Ho [uncle Ho] and the strong relations between the people of the two countries,” he said.
There are other memorial sites to Ho Chi Minh, such as in Phichit and Udon Thani, to mark locations where the Vietnamese nation’s founder lived in Thailand, he said. People in Laos, France, other places in Europe and Latin America also have memorial sites for Uncle Ho – but none compared with the newly built complex in Nakhon Phanom, he said.
The Ho Chi Minh memorial complex comprises three buildings, displaying pictures and archives of Ho Chi Minh’s independence struggle for Vietnam and wax figures to show his life style. The Nakhon Phanom provincial authority wanted to use the memorial as a symbol of long relations between Thailand and Vietnam as well as an attractive site.
There would be also a centre for Otop (One Tambon, One product) goods from Thailand and Vietnam in the complex, Wisarut said.
Waves of Vietnamese migrants fled from difficulties at home to settle in Thailand over generations. A large number took refuge in Thailand during the first and second Indochina wars in the 1940s and 1970s. Viet kieu assimilated and lived mostly in the Northeastern provinces, including Loei, Mukdahan, Nakhon Phanom, Ubon Ratchatani and Udon Thani. There are 1,600 Vietnamese households in Nakhon Phanom alone. They have played significant roles in the local community and made an essential contribution to the provincial economy.