Well why wouldn’t there be a connection between Michelin and Vietnam? After all it was the French who colonised Indochina from 1883 to the 1950s.
Ho Chi Minh – at the time just plain old Nguyễn Sinh Cun – trained as a pastry chef with Escoffier in the Carlton Hotel in London. Later he moved to Paris and founded the French Communist Party.
And it was the French who trained the Vietnamese to make wonderful baguettes, paté and coffee (believe me it is the best most chocolately coffee you will ever taste, especially the Civet poo variety. But more of that later.)
Michelin built its business through the rubber plantations of Indochina (Vietnam together with Cambodia and Laos). Up to 200,000 Vietnamese worked for rubber plantations and it was the Michelin ones that were dubbed the slaughterhouses.
In one Michelin plantation the workers were treated so badly that 12,000 out of 45,000 died between 1917 and 1944.
The wealth created from these operations allowed André Michelin to launch the Michelin guide in 1900 with a print run of 35,000. The rest is history.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jeez – you think they’d at least give them one maccaron!
This is so interesting! I never realised Ho Chi Minh was a pastry chef! Brilliant!
Obviously bad things happened on both sides but Uncle Ho was pretty much an all round good guy. He really was a man of the people and still is a national hero with his face plastered everywhere. I really want to find out more about him. We saw his pickled body but apprarently he didn’t want all the hoopla.