Nguyễn Lộc
Vietnamese founder of the martial art Vovinam, which he publicly unveiled in 1938; in 1954 he relocated with his students to Saigon and trained the police there.
Quick Facts
VietnamBiography
Nguyễn Lộc was born on April 8, 1912 in the village of Hữu Bằng in Thạch Thất district, then Sơn Tây province, today part of Hanoi, as the eldest of five siblings; his parents were named Nguyễn Đình Xuyến and Nguyễn Thị Hòa. He is the founder of the Vietnamese martial art Vovinam. He died on April 29, 1960, at the age of 47, of an illness.
From childhood he learned traditional Vietnamese martial arts, with instruction arranged by his father. We have not been able to verify the names of his teachers in the sources.
He publicly unveiled Vovinam in 1938. A public demonstration in Hanoi in 1939 led to the rapid spread of the style at home and abroad, and in the spring of 1940 he led the first formal public lesson at the Hanoi National Pedagogical University. French authorities banned the movement in 1942. In 1946, during the First Indochina War, he organized a student resistance group; due to disagreement with the Viet Minh he disbanded it.
In 1954 he emigrated to South Vietnam, settled with his loyal students in Saigon, and that same year was invited to train the South Vietnamese police in Thủ Đức. Due to illness he handed leadership of instruction to his senior student Lê Sáng, who then led the development and international spread of Vovinam until his death on September 27, 2010.