Zeng Xueming

Zeng Xueming
Zeng Xueming in the 1920s
Born	Zeng Xueming October 1905 Guangzhou, China
Died	14 November 1991 (1991-11-15) (aged 86) China
Other names	Tăng Tuyết Minh
Spouse(s)	Hồ Chí Minh (m. 1926–69)

Zeng Xueming (Chinese: ; pinyin: Zēng Xuěmíng; Jyutping: Zang1 Syut3ming4, 1905–1991), known in Vietnamese as Tăng Tuyết Minh, was a Chinese midwife who married Vietnamese leader Hồ Chí Minh. She was a Catholic from Guangzhou and married Ho in October 1926. They lived together until April 1927, when Ho fled China following an anti-communist coup. Ho returned to Vietnam in 1940 to lead the pro-Communist Viet Minh, the communist rebels against the French colonial authorities. He became president of North Vietnam in 1954. Despite several attempts to renew contact by both Zeng and Ho, the couple was never reunited. Ho and Zeng were never legally divorced nor was their marriage ever annulled. Her existence has never been acknowledged by the Vietnamese government.

Zeng was born into a Catholic family in Guangzhou in October 1905. She was the youngest daughter in a family of ten children, including seven girls. Her mother's surname was Liang (). Her father, a businessman from Meixian, Guangdong named Zeng Kaihua (), died in 1915. As the daughter of a concubine, she was expelled from her father's house when he died. In these difficult circumstances, she was befriended by the wife of Vietnamese communist Lam Duc Thu. She learned to be a midwife at a school in Guangzhou and graduated in 1925 at the age of 20.

At this time, Vietnam was part of French Indochina, with communist and nationalist political activity targeted by the Sûreté, or French national police. Ho arrived in Guangzhou in November 1924 on a boat from Vladivostok. He posed as a Chinese citizen named Li Shui (Ly Thuy) and worked as a translator for Comintern agent and Soviet arms dealer Mikhail Borodin. In May 1925, Ho participated in the founding of Thanh Nien, or Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association. This group was a forerunner of today's Vietnamese Communist Party.