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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Poulo Condore (Con Dao), the archipelago you'll never come back from!

Poulo Condore (Con Dao), the archipelago you'll never come back from!

Paperback

General World History

ISBN10: 620248599X
ISBN13: 9786202485999
Publisher: Our Knowledge Publishing
Published: Jun 27 2025
Pages: 332
Weight: 0.98
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Nicknamed the penal colony from which there is no return, the penitentiary on the Poulo Condore archipelago in the China Sea opened its doors in 1861 and didn't close until 1993, almost forty years after the end of the Indochina War. It was France's second largest penal colony, after French Guiana, where 40,000 prisoners were held throughout the colonial period. Half of them died in atrocious conditions: lack of food, forced labor, epidemics... Officially reserved for pirates, members of secret societies and opium traffickers, Poulo Condore was in reality a tool of political repression, designed to wipe out opponents of French authority, who accounted for more than two-thirds of the inmates.In the period following the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the archipelago, renamed Con Dao, was used, with US support, to imprison the heroes of revolutionary reunification. Vietnam's full independence in 1975 did not lead to the closure of the penitentiary, where the last opponents of the new regime were sent for two decades.

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General World History