Cần Vương movement
Thành had come from a scholarly family, as his father was a high-ranking mandarin under Emperor Tự Đức. Thanh had registered to participate in the regional imperial examinations in 1885, when fighting broke out in the capital of Huế. This had come when the regent Tôn Thất Thuyết had smuggled the boy Emperor Hàm Nghi out of the city and attempted to start an uprising to expel the French colonial authorities as part of the Cần Vương movement. Thành dropped his studies and joined a local resistance group. Later in the year, he was appointed as one of the military heads for the Can Vuong in the Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi area in central Vietnam and after several years of guerrilla fighting, he gained the respect of the French and the Vietnamese collaborators. He was eventually allowed to return to his home village by Nguyen Than, the infamous collaborator official who had disposed of the remains of Phan Đình Phùng, the leading anti-colonial revolutionary of the time.