LETTER FROM VIETNAM Chapter 6

THE SIX MOST DANGEROUS WORDS (while travelling)
Friday 7th March 2009

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We decided to take in two must see sights the next morning, the Hoa Lo prison (better know to the West as the Hanoi Hilton) and the Temple of Literature. Both, in their own way, are extremely key in understanding this ancient culture and the recent colonial history of the past 150 years.

We started with the Hoa Lo Prison (I refuse in retrospect to call it the Hanoi Hilton).

Prior to going, I had the misguided impression that this was going to be a see-I-told-you-so exercise in this-is-what-happens-if-you-try-to-bomb-our-country chest thumping.

Here is where we kept our captured US airmen.

This could not be further from the truth.

Americans (even famous ones like John McCain) are given very short shrift in this museum of oppression. In fact, this is not about foreign prisoners at all.

This prison is entirely about the yoke of French oppression during their colonial past. It is a sad place, and it is the French, not the Americans or anyone else, who come off rather badly.

Against protests by many groups, the whole prison no longer stands.

The site was sold to a Singaporean Chinese development company to turn into a mall and high rise flats.

Stipulated in the contract however was that at least part of the prison should be preserved, and then ochre coloured (what else) building stands in stark contrast to the modern high rise towering over it.

Deprived of light, a tree struggles to grow leaves (see picture) somehow appropriate for the courtyard of a horror house.

The machinery of repression usually starts with a dry memo written by a bureaucrat.

The genesis of this prison begins with a memo headed Protectorat de l'Annam et du Tonkin, Direction des Travaux Publics, Service des Batiments Civils. 

It is entitled: Construction d'une Prison Centrale a Hanoi et des voies projetées y accédant, and is followed by a table (Tableau Parcellaire), detailing how the land will be acquired and the occupants annamites indemnified for the expropriation of their land and houses.

 The date of this table is 30 June 1896, and it is signed by the governor and has the Chops of Le Huyen de Cho Xuong, the chef du quartier, and the chefs du village...all co-opted into acquiescence.

The amount seems to be 12,908, though it doesn't say what.

There are also parts of a steel beam (Marseillaise Acier) and bricks stamped Made in Hanoi.

So nothing more that a civil engineering project, duly stamped, signed and certified and providing work for both French exporters and local factories.

But what they built was very nasty indeed.

Further on in the prison are memos written by the cadres of the Vietnamese Communist Party. themselves prisoners, planning their future exploits.

From the text of these highly structured (and equally bureaucratic) documents obtained by the french agents of the Sureté, it is very clear that this was not a revolution planned by a bunch of hotheads.

This was a long term intellectual reaction against the exploitation of the land for its resources, both natural and human.

The tone is equally as dry as the arid memos of their french counterparts, but it is clear, cogent, well-thought out, and organised as only fonctionnaires can be.

The people incarcerated here were the intelligentsia, dangerous for the French precisely because of their ideas (attractive and obvious to all those under the yoke.)

They were the elite, who came out tops in the French established educational system but were not allowed power they felt was due to them, and they proposed to take it.

And the methods the French used were equally organised: separate stockades for men and women, subdivided into those with or without child.

There is a guillotine along with pictures of heads in baskets (horrific...Steens prevailed upon me not to include them, but I think they should be seen).

There are also sample rooms of communal cells where the prisoner were shackled together side by side, and a sample cell for solitary confinement and torture.

All these methods were later employed to good effect on other prisoners who ventured between these walls, as the mastered later became the masters.

There are also pictures of how the French literally yoked their charges, making them wear mini ladders around their necks to which their hands could be affixed if need be.

All pretty gruesome.

There is also a memo by Marechal Pétain issued from Vichy. Pétain negotiated with the Japanese in order to carry on administering its protectorate (ironic word, that) throughout WWII .

The French allowed garrisons of Japanese troops (or rather the Japanese allowed the French to allow them) and naval bases and refueling depots to attack Allied interests in Southeast Asia.

Somehow you don't see this emphasised in Sarkozy's grand pronouncements of the French role in world affairs.

As PJ O'Rourke once famously said: "The French come from the-dog-ate-my-homework school of foreign policy."

Then again, so do all great powers, if truth be known.

All of this puts Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese people's struggle in their proper context, and demonstrates why both sides (French and Vietnamese) were implacable.

It also explains how when the US blundered into Vietnam due to its fear of world communism spreading throughout the region, it had no real idea or understanding of the depth of feeling, the hatred and the shame that Vietnamese felt towards their colonial past.

Yes, there are baguettes and croissants and grand boulevards (in the French quarter), but all this came at a price, a price which is there for all to see in this prison.

The current powers that be, in spite of selling out to real estate developers, did well to preserve it, even though many people (like myself) are attracted to it for entirely the wrong reasons.

The references to the American war, as the Vietnamese call it, are pretty scant, confined to a few pictures of POWs coming back here post-war, and a picture of how the Vietnamese really won the war....not on the battlefield, but in the court of public opinion back in the US.

The US airman who were unlucky enough to spend time here continued to pay a price for a long and brutal history that was , in large part, not of their making.

Now of course, this prison is part propaganda and part history, but it is hard to argue with bricks and mortar, and one emerges from it with a better feeling for and an understanding of a people's long chapter of pain, misery, and defiance.

After this sobering "sight", we then went to the Temple of Literature in the west of the city.

This dates back to the year 1072, and is a park, for want of a better word, consisting of several sections honouring knowledge and the teachings of Confucious, whose philosophy dominated early Vietnamese history.

The most interesting part is a big section of big stone tablets called stelae, which are perched on the backs of stone tortoises, which along with the mythical bird the phoenix, and the fish and the dragon form the big four of Vietnamese mythical creatures.

Inscribed on these stelae are the names of those who passed the arduous examination to become mandarins in certain years.

By arduous, how about a pass rate of 8 in 3000, as was the case in 1742.

The examination took 35 days by which time those still left standing (intellectually, that is) became mandarins. Makes getting into Harvard or Oxbridge seem a stroll in the park. No wonder the successful are etched in stone.

For good luck in the exam of life one is supposed to rub the heads of the tortoises.

Following the basic lifetime rule of "it can't hurt", I duly complied then suggested to Steens that she do the same.

After that it was down to the Buddhist temple at the end, where in addition to enjoying a brief moment of solitude, you can engage in one of the most common events in any place of religion, namely giving a small donation.

Perhaps not for us tourists, but for the souls of the people who died in Hoa Lo.

After this, we adjourned to Little Hanoi, a foreigner haunt on Hang Gai for our first Western meal since leaving the UK, a croque monsieur.

Luckily we had just finished when Steens uttered those words which in the region of SARs, avian flu, and various random fevers (though not Ebola or swine flu) can make your blood run cold...the six most dangerous words while traveling:

"Look! The cook has a nosebleed!"

Sure enough, peering back over my shoulders into the tiny kitchen, said cook was doing the old look-I'm-a-walrus trick with rolled up sheets of bog roll.

No more food from there, then, though sitting in this restaurant is the perfect place to watch the street scenes as motos, lorries, rickshaws, bicycles, and pedestrians approach from all angles.

That night we decided to go to the Water Puppet Show, a so-called must see for foreign tourists. The theatre is right at the north end of the lake, and after dinner we strolled around the lake to catch the last show.

I would like to say that I really enjoyed the show, which consists of a fable involving the obligatory fish, dragons, tortoises, and phoenix, manipulated in the water by unseen puppeteers behind a curtain.

These figures cavort around the water accompanied by the discordant ping ping and wails of musicians located above.

I would like to say this, but I had trouble concentrating on this spectacle because I was distracted by three boorish Aussie dunderheads sitting in front of us.

Dunderhead #3 announced his presence to us, and indeed to the whole theatre two minutes before the show was due to start by walking across in front of the stage waving three cans of Foster's above his head and shouting "Score!" to his mates.

His other two friends, who also sported the Prison Break haircut (shaved head-five days and unshaven face-three days growth) were in the process of trying to score themselves with three dopey and slightly flabby American wenches directly in front of us.

This would have been mildly amusing as backpacker theatre had their banter ended when the show started. But no. Dunderhead #3 , who in addition to the close cropped hair sported no chin and buck teeth, kept on making asinine comments throughout the first 10 minutes of the show.

Dunderhead #1, when not laughing at #3's inane and puerile verbal effluence (mostly involving beer, small Vietnamese and other assorted ignorant and racist comments) was trying to put the moves on bovine AmLady#1, while the other two girls looked suitably embarrassed.

I got progressively hotter under the collar, while Steens kept shaking her head and telling me it wasn't worth it.

Eventually, Dunderhead#3 fell asleep for the remainder of the show, his head tilted back, and due to the aforementioned lack of chin, his mouth gaping way beyond fly-catching mode into small bird or rodent-catching mode. And wouldn't I have loved to jam one down his gullet.

If you have no respect or interest in another people's culture, you have no self respect. If the only barometer for visiting a country is how cheap the beer or food is, then just stay home on the cow station. Tossers.

Unfortunately, that was it for Hanoi, but this minor annoyance did not make a dent on the nice time we had there, or on the favourable impression of the people.

Friendly, industrious, and youthful. Impressions, of course, but good ones, and a good impression makes even grey skies and drizzle not only bearable, but irrelevant.


The day was a mixture of the horrors and the honours of the past mixed in a city trying to remember and maintain its history whilst changing for the future.

Go to Chapter 7

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