His father was a district magistrate in the nearby province of Vĩnh Long before coming home to serve as the governor of Ha Tien in the last years of the Nguyễn dynasty before French colonization.

However, southern Vietnam had been colonized by France in 1867, so his participation exams would not have had any relevance unless he was prepared to leave the south to live in the capital Huế, or some other place in the north of the country.

[1] Thus, Hien accepted an appointment to a local colonial commission, before resigning to tend a plantation in Ha Tien, which grew pepper.

He later relocated his family to Cần Thơ, the main town in the Mekong Delta, where he expanded rice fields to eventually encompass three districts and ten hamlets.

[2] Despite his over involvement in working for the French colonial regime, Hien retained a fiercely anti-colonial ideology and remained a supporter of the Nguyễn Dynasty.

[4] Hien later went to Canton with Chau for a meeting of expatriate revolutionaries, where the Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội (Vietnam Restoration League) was formed.