“The origins of a special regime for political prisoners in Indochina dates from the mass arrests of reformist scholars who spearheaded anti-tax riots in Annam during 1908. Following the restoration of order, hundreds of scholars who participated in the movements were deported to Poulo Condore and Lao Bao. Huynh Thuc Khang, a reformist Confucian scholar who worked as a prisoner clerk on Poulo Condore in the early twentieth century and became the great chronicler of the Poulo Condore deportees, describes how, during the first two years on the island, he and his fellow political prisoners were subjected to the same arduous penal regime as common criminals. Even Indochina’s most famous political prisoner was subjected to forced labor: Phan Chu Trinh’s well-known poem “Breaking Rocks on Con Lon” dates from this period. Khang reported that approximately sixty scholar-gentry activists were deported to Poulo Condore in late 1908 and early 1909. Khang describes fellow political prisoners involved in masonry, carpentry, rock breaking, wood gathering, and unloading cargo from ships.
In 1910, Huynh Thuc Khang and his fellow political prisoners successfully petitioned Director Cudenet to isolate them from the common-law prisoners and to grant them a special, more lenient penal regime. Khang reports that “ “From from then on we began to have a more interesting life and turned dormitory B into a school and a poetry club [thi dan]. The study of science in this natural school begins from this point”. Thereafter, political prisoners on the island were kept segregated from the general population, served better food, and allowed to engage in less onerous work, such as gardening and mat-making. This continued until the late 1920s and early 1930s. Activists arrested for their role in the Reform Society and the Restoration Society, students jailed for activities connected with Phan Boi Chau’s trial in 1925 and Phan Chau Trinh’s funeral in 1926, and individuals prosecuted for their membership in proto-revolutionary parties such as the Revolutionary Youth League (Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Menh Dong Chi Hoi) and the New Viet Revolutionary Party (Tan Viet Cach Mang Dang) were granted mattresses, special visitation and mail privileges, larger rations, and access to paper, pens, newspapers, and books. In the early 1930s, however, massive overcrowding, brought on by the Yen-Bay Uprising and the Nghe-Tinh soviet movement, plus a new, hardline reticence by courts to grant political sentences to violent revolutionaries led to an erosion of the benefits afforded political prisoners. Tran Huy Lieu, who served a six-month political sentence in 1927 and a six-year sentence during the 1930s, expressed dismay at how conditions for political prisoners had deteriorated by the time of his second incarceration. In 1927, Lieu was not forced to shave his head like the common-law prisoners or confined during the day. Instead of the light blue prison uniform worn by most inmates, he was allowed to wear white cotton clothes sent by his family. He could also receive mail and reading material. By 1930, however, all of these petty privileges had been rolled back. “The lone thing that distinguished political and nonpolitical regimes after 1930,” Lieu explained, “was that the prisoners were kept physically separate.” Only following aggressive agitation in the colonial press during the mid-1930s was a more lenient regime for political prisoners reintroduced into Indochina.” - Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. pp. 110-111.
