Đe Tham was, until his assassination in 1913, a fighter of the Tonkinese rebellion against the French colonial presence. After his death, French authorities feared that his daughter, Hoang Thi The, would become the new standard-bearer of the armed patriotic movement of the Annam Empire. It was therefore decided to remove the latter from her country and send her to France where she received a bourgeois education in Catholic institutions. After which her life course took her from the Parisian jet set to the most tragic misery. It is difficult to know what is history and what is fiction because the facts mentioned in this book are largely unverified.