No room at the Hilton

The site of the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" is now mostly covered by a large Vietnam/Singapore joint venture hotel. Quite how the residents of the hotel can sleep soundly at night after countless horrors on the site over a hundred years of history is beyond me.

Originally the site of a small village, the French soon moved out all the villagers and built the infamous "Maison Locale" there. It was built to house the local population who objected to French colonial rule and used extensively until the French left in the 1950's. The Vietnamese regime that took over wasted little time in using the prison for their own purposes and even used the 2 guillotines in the prison for many years after the French left! The prison gained international notoriety (and the nick-name the "Hanoi Hilton") during the "American War" (as the the Vietnam War is called in Vietnam) when shot down American pilots were held there as POWs.

I don't think the room service was up to the standards of an international Hilton Hotel today!

There is a small corner of the original prison set up as a museum and it was quite interesting to read the history from a Vietnam perspective. Little reference was made about the torture and killing of the Vietnamese by their own people but lots was made (and none of it in a good way) about the French colonists and the American "terrorists" as they were described.

It was very sobering to see a real guillotine that actually beheaded a significant number of people over the years in "Maison Locale". It is obvious that the Vietnamese curators of museums are not squeamish about showing gruesome photographs of detached heads from a execution session in the 1930s! Thankfully the guillotine has not been used in Vietnam since 1960. Readers might be surprised to learn that the guillotine was last used in France in 1977!