Hỏa Lò Prison

June 09, 2010 11:24 AM GMT+7

VGP - Euphemistically called by the French, the Maison Centrale, this is another infamous hostelry, known to American GIs as the “Hà Nội Hilton”. Hỏa Lò Prison was designed by Auguste-Henri Vildieu and built by the French in 1899.

Hỏa Lò Prison. Its background is part of a multi-storey hotel

Originally much larger and planned to hold 450 prisoners, records show that at one time in the thirties under the French, it held nearly 2,000 in what must have been desperately cramped and miserable conditions. Many Vietnamese nationalist leaders were incarcerated here, no fewer than five future General Secretaries of the Vietnamese Communist Party and later, numerous American POWs. One of them, Pete Peterson, later became the first American Ambassador to Việt Nam in 1997; also held there, John McCain. It was used as a prison right up to 1994.

When the tower and hotel were built next door, only a very small part of the prison was retained as a museum, preserving a few cells, their rusty shackles and instruments of torture. Among them is a guillotine, used to behead Vietnamese resistance fighters during the colonial period. Considered a swift, compassionate means of execution by the French, the guillotine was used in France until 1977!