Most people know that 'father of modern China', Sun Yat-sen, spent more than a decade in Hong Kong, where he earned his licence to practise medicine, briefly worked as a doctor and led a failed revolution. The British banished him from the colony in 1895 at the request of the mainland government.
Yet few are aware that the city also gave refuge to another revolutionary leader: Ho Chi Minh, who came to the colony to organise the Vietnamese communists. The police arrested him in 1931 at the request of the French government.
The Fringe Club is putting this nearly forgotten piece of local history on stage this week. The English-language monologue, Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong: His Persecution and the Triumph of the Glorious Rule of Law, recounts Ho's detention, legal battle and unlikely friendship with British lawyer Frank Loseby. Before each performance, the audience will be taken on a tour of neighbouring Central Police Station, where Ho was imprisoned.
'Staging Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong is our attempt to look at a very interesting piece of Hong Kong's legal history,' says Benny Chia Chun-heng, director of the Fringe Club, who commissioned and produced the play, which is expected to tour Asia.
'He was detained in Hong Kong because of collaboration between the British and French governments, and he would surely have been given a death sentence if he had been extradited.
'It also showed an irony of the rule of law. In the eyes of the colonial power, he was a dangerous man, but in the end, this 'guilty' person was set free. Ho used the rule of law to his advantage before he changed the course of Asian history.'
