Hỏa Lò Prison (Maison Centrale)

In front of you is the gate of Hỏa Lò, one of the most feared prisons in Indochina. Its name means "furnace" or "stove": wood and charcoal stoves were once sold on this street.

1The Maison Centrale

The French built it between 1896 and 1901 and called it the Maison Centrale, like France's long-sentence prisons. Designed for around 460 inmates, by 1933 it held more than 1,400, many of them political prisoners. Several future leaders of communist Vietnam passed through its cells.

2The great escape of 1945

On the night of 9 March 1945, Japan staged a coup against the French administration and took over the prison. In the chaos of the following days, around a hundred political prisoners escaped over the walls and more than a hundred others crawled out through the sewers.

This is documented history, not legend: many of the escapees went back to the struggle months before the August Revolution.

3The "Hanoi Hilton"

Between 1964 and 1973 the prison held American pilots who had been shot down, and they ironically nicknamed it the "Hanoi Hilton". Among them was John McCain, later a US senator. The prisoners reported torture and solitary confinement, something the official Vietnamese account played down for years. In the 1990s most of the jail was demolished; only the entrance block remains, now a museum.

4What to look for

• The words «MAISON CENTRALE» above the entrance arch.
• The stone wall, about four metres high, that once enclosed the whole compound.
• The contrast between the old prison and the modern towers built on its site.