Xuân Thuỷ

Xuân Thủy (September 2, 1912 – June 20, 1985) was a North Vietnamese political figure. He was the Foreign Minister of North Vietnam from 1963 to 1965 and then chief negotiator of the North Vietnamese at the Paris Peace talks.

Thủy was born in Hà Đông Province in Northern Vietnam on September 2, 1912. His name means "spring water". He was educated at a French school in Hanoi. Becoming interested in nationalist politics in his early teens, the fourteen-year-old Thuỷ entered the Revolutionary Youth League of the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. At sixteen, he was arrested for the first time. When he was eighteen, he was sent to the penal colony on Côn Sơn Island in the South China Sea. Two further jail terms followed. In 1938, Thuỷ became a member of the Indochina Communist Party. After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he was imprisoned in Sơn La, being held there for six years until the end of the war in 1945. However, he used his internment to edit the underground communist newspaper Suoi Reo.