In 1869, the French built Hanoï’s local Maison Centrale (a generic term for a prison that holds dangerous and long sentence criminals) on “stove street", or Hỏa Lò. The prison is most familiar to Americans like me as the “Hanoi Hilton,” where American fighter pilots who survived bailing out in Northern Vietnam (during the Vietnam War) were held and tortured.
As anyone who’s seen the movie Papillon knows, French colonial prisons were barbaric. In addition to those I was aware of (including rotten starvation rations, complete indifference to hygiene and its resultant diseases, chain gang labor, and nightly ankle shackling), I learned of several new tortures during my visit: misbehaving prisoners were locked in waste-filled latrines, and the sides of the metal barrels beaten until they went deaf; pregnant women were forced to give birth with no medical care, and if they had no family nearby their babies were imprisoned with them, but given neither food nor clothing; etc. . .
I don’t wish to list all the atrocities described, and I’m sure there were others (rape etc.) that were not described by the audio guide either.
The prison (and the rest of Indochine) was briefly seized from the French by the Japanese in 1945, but returned later the same year (when the Japanese surrendered to the Allies, ending World War 2). Though Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence in 1945 (beginning the First Indochina War), the prison was held by the French until that independence was actually achieved, with the Geneva Accords signed in 1954.
From 1954 onwards, Hỏa Lò was used to hold local criminals; from 1964, American prisoners of the Vietnam War as well. The last American prisoners were released from Hỏa Lò in 1973; after that it was used for Republic of Vietnam POWs and (particularly after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976) political dissidents. The last prisoners were relocated from Hỏa Lò to more modern prisons by the late ‘80s.
The bulk of the building was actually demolished in 1993-1996 to make way for Hanoi Towers, an hotel and apartment building complex. The preserved buildings are the most historically significant: the entry gatehouse; two examples of men’s and women’s quarters; the dungeon; death row; the blue room where American pilots were tortured. There are related artifacts on display in each area.
There’s also a memorial with golden plaques commemorating the Vietnamese political prisoners, and outside there’s a shrine for those who passed away at Hỏa Lò, and a commemorative garden honoring countries with dedicated protest movements against the Vietnam War.
There are a few “alternative facts” you need to know before you step foot in Hỏa Lò:
Those who committed violent crimes in the name of Vietnamese nationalism were patriots and heroes justified in their actions. Poisoning the food of an entire garrison of 200 French troops with the intent of killing them (Hà Thành plot), or wiping out a third of Vietnamese Christians for fear they would ally with the Catholic French (Cần Vương movement) were not crimes, they were necessary protests against the enemy oppressors. NO criminals were held at Hỏa Lò, just patriots running an honorable revolutionary school, OK!?
French jailers were brutal, sadistic, and culturally insensitive, but Vietnamese jailers using the same methods in the same setting were providing humane care consistent with the Geneva Convention. American POWs specifically were never tortured. In fact, they were treated to candy, cigarettes and recreational fun, and should be thankful for the opportunity to have known their gracious Vietnamese hosts. So what if we are all quite familiar with (among dozens of others) John McCain’s account of torture and attempted suicide, and saw the damage to his arm and hand? There’s a picture of him smiling while receiving care for that arm from the prison medic, OK!?
Political dissidents during French occupation were patriots and heroes who should not have been jailed and tortured, but those who oppose the Communist Party of Vietnam are traitors and/or puppets who deserve to be jailed and tortured. Perhaps Amnesty International considers the 97 “prisoners of conscience” still currently imprisoned in 2019 sufficient to qualify Vietnam as “Southeast Asia’s most prolific jailer of peaceful activists” but that’s nothing compared to the thousands imprisoned by the French oppressors, OK!?
To be clear, I am anti-war, anti-torture, anti-hypocrisy, and against rewriting history even with the best intentions. I believe the sole role of government is to serve the physical and practical needs of its citizens. To my mind, governments and politicians should neither legally impose morality beyond ‘do no harm’ extrapolated in its infinite iterations, nor offer any rubric for self-identification beyond the purely obvious and necessary. I don’t believe unity requires conformity, or even consensus.
I don’t think anyone who’s visited would need me to explain myself, but I also don’t want to be discounted as jingoistic or hyperbolic. I consider myself American by default, not by choice, and certainly not with purpose. By any accounting, the displays, brochure and audio guide in this museum are propagandist. This museum is a classic case of history being written by the victors, so just know before you go.
When you first enter, there’s a small room explaining how the French expropriated the former Phu Khanh village (an ancient craft village specializing in the manufacture of earthenware cooking appliances that had been subsumed into Hanoi proper), relocating its communal house and demolishing its temples, to build the large prison. There are some examples of pots and tiles manufactured in Phu Khanh.
Down a nice enough hallway paved with intact, original (and ubiquitous) French colonial black and white floor tile, you enter a room housing the very torture and execution implements used in the prison, including shackles, clubs, and the guillotine.
One important thing to understand about the guillotine is that while many Westerners find it the least vicious tool on display, Easterners nevertheless consider it the least humane. In Buddhism the head is the highest and most sacred part of the body, and even touching someone else’s head is considered extremely rude. Therefore, mechanically slicing off a person’s head and displaying it on a pike or in a basket is considered not just a murder, but a spiritual desecration and personal affront.
Next are the stockades for male political prisoners. Unfortunately, the dummy prisoners don’t adequately express the disgusting reality of overcrowding: though the prison was only meant to hold around 600 prisoners, there were over 2000 confined to Hỏa Lò by 1954, creating conditions unsanitary enough to kill off roughly 10% of the prison population each year via disease.
The cachot (English: dungeon), reserved for misbehaving prisoners, was more horrifying than I was prepared for. For a minimum of 15 hours and a maximum of 30 days, prisoners were shackled by their ankles in a reclining position on a 45 degree declining slope, and left to rot. Unable to eat without engaging their core in a tense situp-like position, forced to urinate and defecate in situ, unable to lie back without blood rushing to their head, unable to prop themselves up on their arms without their arms going numb, unable to retain feeling in their legs, most prisoners came out either temporarily or permanently blind, deaf, lame, edematous, and spiritually broken.
Redirected outside, visitors pass an inconspicuous tree, the tropical almond tree. This tree is the sole present living witness of those times, not a replant, and was used by prisoners to make pens, chopsticks, paper, bandages, cups, and other essentials not supplied in jail. Equally as important, its roots were used as a mailbox to pass items between prisoners, and eventually to the outside world.
Before the assigned path funnels you through the gift shop, you pass two grates and tunnels saved from the original sewer system. Using smuggled acid and metal files, several lucky prisoners actually managed to escape through these impossibly small, unfathomably filthy tubes.
Back inside, you pass into the women’s stockades, 5 small rooms with high ceilings and individual windows. Each of the first four features a portrait of a female Vietnamese nationalist agitator with an absolutely heart rending story.
This is the first place in the jail where the lingering sadness really hit me. Quietly listening to the audio guide while gazing at the single decades old portrait in each of the damp, narrow, cement cells (alongside the only one or two similarly silent visitors who could fit inside) felt like paying respects in a tomb. Though only some women physically died there, such large parts of their lives, dreams, families, innocence, health and potential perished there. The desperation is still palpable.
The fifth room in the women’s stockade is for women with children. Denied clothing and food, mothers had to provide for their babies out of their own meager rations. Malnourishment, disease, developmental disability and death were the unfair sentences given to children just for surviving. I can’t imagine having to decide whether to turn my extremely young child out on the streets to fend for itself or whether to keep it tortured and jailed alongside me.
The next large open room is another gallery of brutality. At one end Death Row is preserved, and the thought of more than four men sharing these dark, damp cells (with barely room for two and no bathroom) was so appalling I felt like I could still smell lingering filth. The hall is so narrow tourists take turns to enter single file, and peek through the little barred peep doors. It’s sad to think the presently empty cells receive far more attention than when actual humans with needs waited there, fearful and despondent.
From death row visitors are directed out into much needed fresh air. There are two attached courtyards; the first is a sort of patio strung with origami doves, wallpapered with waterproof displays summarizing anti-Vietnam War protests in many nations all around the world. Though for practical reasons these are not original artifacts as in the rest of the museum, the imagery is moving nonetheless.
The second courtyard is a carved monument and shrine to honor those who died at Hỏa Lò. The space is open, sunbaked, and austere. I wonder if any relatives of former prisoners ever return here.
The final round of exhibits in the main gatehouse takes us back inside, but this time into administrative rooms rather than cells. In two adjoining rooms, artifacts from American POWs are displayed alongside TVs playing old newsreels of Ho Chi Minh’s wartime speeches (with English subtitles). Though acute torture, deprivation, and suicide attempts are discussed by dozens of American POWs in their postwar memoirs and interviews, what is presented here is a rosy picture of inmates playing basketball, smiling through windows, etc., happy to learn more about their Vietnamese hosts. It’s implied that had American servicemen known more about the Vietnamese cause, they would have never fought against it.
While we know the smiling photos were made under extreme duress, just like the signed confessions of “air piracy,” the intent here is clearly to abdicate responsibility for abuse. Does it add insult to injury that John McCain’s flight suit and parachute are displayed in the notorious Blue Room where he was tortured, with no mention of that torture?
In day to day life in Vietnam, calling other people out on their shit is simply not done. No one airs their grievances; the Vietnamese either comply and endure, or don’t and are ostracized. At least I have no doubt McCain knew establishing diplomatic ties with Vietnam required letting them float lies without public questioning and criticism.
The exhibits wind up on the second floor of a second building, another old administrative building. First, there are two rooms lined with golden plaques engraved with the names of Hỏa Lò revolutionary prisoners, fitted out with folding chairs and “educational” films playing on another TV.
More interesting is the next room, which holds artifacts belonging to prisoners who were members of the prison’s Communist Party Cell, people the Vietnamese respect the way Americans regard signers of the Declaration of Independence. Each object is attached to a significant historic event or has a very moving story: the basket used to smuggle out a list of prisoners retained by the French to execute despite the Geneva Convention; a very early one star flag made out of a dyed blanket and piece of parchment paper.
So is Hỏa Lò Prison a must-see in Hanoi? I think so. We are rarely reminded of the atrocities perpetrated during war, and torture is certainly still happening today. It’s easy to not sympathize with “the enemy” until you are “the enemy.”
On a lighter note, Hỏa Lò inexplicably has one of the best museum bookstores I’ve come across in Hanoi. So if you would like to learn some context for your visit to Vietnam, and are in the market for brief, Vietnamese-authored guides in English summarizing Vietnamese history, the life of Ho Chi Minh, etc., you can pick them up here for less than $5 each.