Con Dao Prison

Con Lon, the largest of the islands in the Con Dao Archipelago, 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 Vietnam’s national heroes.