More recently, in one of the central districts of Hanoi, there was a prison building built by French colonialists at the end of the XIX century. In 1993, the prison was closed. Part of the wall of the prison premises was preserved, restored and turned into a museum for public viewing. A multi-storey complex "Hanoi Tau era" was built on the rest of the territory, including hotel rooms, executive rooms, conference rooms, shops and restaurants. But if the fashionable "Hanoi Towers" hardly gets customers (now there are many hotels of this class in the Vietnamese capital), then the modest museum is constantly visited by both Vietnamese and foreigners.
The French named Indochina's largest prison "Maison Central" ("Central House"), and the Vietnamese prisoners christened it "Hoa lo" - "Hellhole", which probably corresponded more to the feelings of a person trapped in gloomy, cramped casemates, where instead of the usual 450, more than two thousand were sometimes held in prison prisoners. Prisoners were often shackled, and some of them were waiting for the French innovation of "civilization" - the guillotine.
With prison, the colonialists tried to pacify the recalcitrant. But more often it was the other way around. The most determined fighters for national independence, who were ready to go to death, but not to bow their heads before foreign oppressors, were put in prison. After the formation of the Communist Party of Indochina in 1930, the Communists turned Hoa Lo into a training school for party cadres. A handwritten magazine was published in the prison, and the "red days" of revolutionary holidays were celebrated. Many leaders of the Communist Party of Vietnam, including Truong Tinh, Le Duan, Nguyen Van Linh, and Do Myoi, have passed its "universities".
In 1954, after the victory over the French colonialists, the prison gates opened.
But with the liberation from the colonial yoke, the history of Hoa Lo did not end. There was still a place reserved for criminals. And in A ...
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