Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung on May 19, 1890, in a village in central Vietnam (then part of French Indochina). In 1911, he found work as a cook on a French steamer and spent the next several years at sea, traveling to Africa, the United States and Britain, among other locations. By 1919, he was living in France, where he organized a group of Vietnamese immigrants and petitioned delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference to demand that the French colonial government in Indochina grant the same rights to its subjects as it did to its rulers.