Con Dao History

Occupied at various times by the Khmer, Malays and Vietnamese, Con Son Island also served as an early base for European commercial ventures in the region. The first recorded European arrival was a ship of Portuguese mariners in 1560. The British East India Company maintained a fortified trading post here from 1702 to 1705 – an experiment that ended when the English on the island were massacred in a revolt by the Macassar soldiers they had recruited on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Con Son Island has a strong political and cultural history, and an all-star line-up of Viet­namese revolutionary heroes (many streets are named after them) were incarcerated here.

In 1861, the French colonial government established a prison on the island to house political prisoners. In 1954, it was turned over to the South Vietnamese government, who continued to use it for the same purpose. Notable prisoners held at Côn Sơn in the 1930s included Phạm Văn Đồng and Lê Ðức Thọ. Not far from the prison is Hang Duong Cemetery, where some of the prisoners were buried.

During the Vietnam War, prisoners who had been held at the prison in the 1960s said they were abused and tortured. In July 1970, two U.S. Congressional representatives, Augustus Hawkins and William Anderson, visited the prison. They were accompanied by Tom Harkin (then an aide), translator Don Luce, and USAID Office of Public Safety Director Frank Walton. When the delegation arrived at the prison, they departed from the planned tour, guided by a map drawn by a former detainee. The map led to the door of a building, which was opened from the inside by a guard when he heard the people outside the door talking. Inside they found prisoners were being shackled within cramped “tiger cages”. Prisoners began crying out for water when the delegation walked in. They had sores and bruises, and some were mutilated. Harkin took photos of the scene. The photos were published in Life magazine on July 17, 1970.

Côn Lôn, largest of the islands in the Côn Đảo Archipelago (Quần Đảo Côn Đảo), became a French penal colony in 1862. Thereafter the prison became known as the ‘Hell of South East Asia’ where a total of over 200,000 prisoners were jailed and approximately 20,000 died in atrocious conditions. Those incarcerated in the prison’s infamous ‘tiger cages’ and ‘cow cages’ by the French and South Vietnamese regimes respectively included several leading Vietnamese revolutionaries. Today the many cells and punishment areas of the prison’s eight main barracks are preserved in memory of the country’s national heroes.