Word: quang
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Helping Ho. Tri Quang is his adopted name, and it means "brilliant mind." He was born Pham Bong on Dec. 31, 1923, in Diem Dien, a village in central Viet Nam now under Hanoi's rule. One of three sons of a well-to-do farmer, he was sent at the age of 13 to the Bao Quoc pagoda in Hué to train for monkhood. Wild and fond of practical jokes at first, he was expelled, then given a second chance. He matured into a student with a photographic memory and a searching intellect. His teacher at Bao Quoc, Thich...
...Minh front. They once jailed him for ten days on suspicion that he was a Communist, but they could not prove it?nor has anyone since, despite the taint of suspicion that still lingers in many quarters. More probably, like many a loyal South Vietnamese of that day, Tri Quang aided Ho's campaign not for love of Communism but for hatred of colonialism...
...Perfect Conspirator." When the French were thrown out and President Ngo Dinh Diem took over in 1955, Tri Quang, in common with many of his brother monks, was hardly over joyed. For 80 years under the French, Catholicism had been nurtured at the expense of Buddhism, and a Catholic church occupied the choice site in every town. Catholic schools provided education that the Buddhists could not afford to match, and Catholic merchants and civil servants, thus equipped, inevitably prospered. To Tri Quang, the Catholic Diem was merely an extension of the worst ills of French rule. In the monk...
...Hué, all during the Diem years, Tri Quang was building up a Buddhist movement modeled after the Communist organizations that he had seen Ho employ against the French. To combat Diem's police, he organized special teams of young monks with flit guns filled with vinegar and red pepper. He had spies tucked neatly inside every fold of the Diem administration. He penetrated the regime's elite Cong Hoa youth, often got possession of top secret documents within 24 hours after they had been issued. One such paper was by Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu: Communiqu?...
...Quang's conspiracy against Diem finally flowered in blood in the spring of 1963. When the government refused to let the Buddhists in Hué fly the Buddhist flag on Gautama's birthday, Tri Quang led a demonstration to the radio station. He delivered a spellbinding speech, the crowds surged toward the station and Diem's troops replied with grenades?giving Tri Quang both the martyrs and momentum he needed. Soon Buddhists were immolating themselves on street corners, the protesting crowds grew in number and violence, and on Nov. 1, Diem and Nhu were overthrown and shot in the rear...