When Ho Chi Minh visited China in the 1940s, he was trying to gain support from Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government for his struggle against French colonialists. But Ho was a communist and distrusted by the Chinese generalissimo, who had Ho imprisoned for 18 months. In that time, Ho wrote the now famous Notebook from Prison, a collection of melancholic and stoic poems written in Chinese that call for revolution. Ho would go on to liberate Vietnam from the French in 1954, paving the way for the foundation of a socialist state in the country's north.