Until Phan was five, his father was typically away from home, teaching in other villages, so his mother raised him and taught him to recite passages from the Classic of Poetry, from which he absorbed Confucian ethics and virtues.

In his autobiography, Phan admitted he did not understand the meaning of the text in great detail at the time, but by age six, he was skillful enough to write a variant of the Analects that parodied his classmates, which earned him a caning from his father.

In 1885, the Cần Vương movement began its uprising against French rule, hoping to install the boy Emperor Hàm Nghi as the ruler of an independent Vietnam by expelling colonial forces.

The scholar gentry of the province rose up, and Phan attempted to rally approximately 60 classmates who were prospective examination candidates to join in the uprising.

Phan called his new unit the Sĩ tử Cần Vương Đội (Army of Loyalist Examination Candidates) and convinced an older cử nhân graduate to act as its commander.

They had just begun to collect money and raw materials to make ad hoc weapons when a French patrol attacked the village and scattered the students.

[8]: 78  The European and Chinese works, which had only entered Vietnamese circles a few years later,[4]: 98–99  opened Phan's mind to more expansive thought regarding the struggle for freedom of his people.

[4]: 99 Kang, one of the major thinkers that influenced Phan, took the idea of Social Darwinism and discussed the survival of the fittest concept as it applied to nations and ethnic groups.

He believed that reforms made by Peter the Great and Emperor Meiji were excellent examples of the political restructuring that needed to take place to save China.

[8]: 78–79  Phan had moved to Huế, claiming that he was preparing for the metropolitan imperial examinations, but in actuality, he planned on drumming up support among the various factions of royal family.

Phan traveled to Quảng Nam to meet with Nguyễn Thành, also known by courtesy name Tiểu La, a contemporary anti-colonial revolutionary activist who was involved in the Cần Vương movement.

[4]: 101  Phan rejected the offer, but took Tiểu La's advice to seek support from direct descendants of Emperor Gia Long, the founder of the Nguyễn dynasty.

These direct descendants were still highly respected by wealthy Mekong Delta landowners who Phan hoped would raise the bulk of the money needed to finance the revolution.

Cường Để's father was personally sought by Phan Đình Phùng to take Hàm Nghi's place and lead a popular revolt against the French in the 1880s, but he declined.

Cường Để changed the course of his life and began studying history, economics and geography and thought admiringly of the heroic achievements of Trần Hưng Đạo, Zhuge Liang, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Saigō Takamori, Cavour, Otto von Bismarck, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.

[10] After getting Cường Để to support the revolutionary cause, Phan wrote his first significant work, Lưu Cầu Huyết lệ Tân thư (Letter from the Ryukyu written in Tears of Blood).

The book was moderately successful amongst the Vietnamese populaces and received attention from other nationalists like Trần Quý Cáp and Phan Châu Trinh.

Phan had hoped to obtain financial assistance from China, but the country was forced to abandon its suzerain relationship with Vietnam after the 1884–85 Sino-French War.

[4]: 98 [7]: 55  Phan and Cường Để decided to seek aid from Japan, which had recently won a war against Russia, had successfully imposed reforms and seemed more inclined to help out revolutionaries in a nearby Asian country.

[2]: 47–48  After failing to meet Cen Chunxuan, viceroy of Liangguang at the time , Phan switched to seek help from Liang Qichao, who was living in Japan since being exiled years earlier.

[2]: 49–50 Liang introduced Phan to many prominent politicians, including Ōkuma Shigenobu, a well-liked statesman who had previously served as Prime Minister of Japan for a few months in 1898.

Phan's revolutionary network practiced this extensively; additionally, Chinese merchants also married Vietnamese women, and provided funds and help.

Phan wanted to rally people to support the cause for Vietnamese independence; the work is regarded as one of the most important books in the history of Vietnam's anticolonialism movement.

In the book, Phan argues for the establishment of a nationwide pro-independence front with seven factions or interested groups with a specific motivation to fight the French colonial authorities.

[4]: 115 The book created a reaction in China, sparking follow-up essays by Chinese writers who were taken aback by the Phan's description of Vietnamese life under French colonial rule.

Phan's direct writing style, without the use of allegories, upset traditionalists but made the book more accessible to literate people who had not been trained in classical literature.

However, Phan soon realized that Japanese military aid would not be possible, and turned his attention to using Japan as a base to train and educate young Vietnamese students, by starting the Đông Du (Visit the East) Society.

[14][15][16][17] This is disputed by Sophie Quinn-Judge and Duncan McCargo, who argued that this is likely propaganda invented by anti-communist authors, considering that Lâm Đức Thụ's reports showed that the French already had all the information they needed from their own spies.

[23]: 5 After Phan's death, with support from compatriots throughout the country, Huỳnh Thúc Kháng - one of his closest companions - led the effort to build his tomb and temple between late 1940 and early 1941.

[30] The Phan Bội Châu memorial site in Huế, which comprises his house, tomb and temple with around 150 artifacts and documents about his life and revolutionary activities, became a national relic in 1990.