When I started researching prisoners and exiles from French Indochina, over fifteen years ago, one of the most haunting prisoners I encountered was a young scholar named Lý Liễu. He had gone to Hong Kong to study at the age of twelve and ended up becoming involved in anti-colonial politics. Lý’s education led to a prison sentence in the jungles of French Guiana, an audacious escape to British Trinidad, and an eventual clandestine return to southern Vietnam where, ironically, he ended up in another prison, Poulo Condore, where he died in 1940. In 2016, I published a blog for the Carceral Archipelago project at the University of Leicester which narrated Lý’s life story – according to the sources then available to me.[1]
However, one of the fascinating aspects of our current project has been to trace otherwise unknown afterlives of prisoners and exiles. These afterlives take many forms. During my research, I have found historical figures from both Vietnam and Cambodia whose life did not end in French Indochina itself but in a penal site in a distant territory of the French empire. Sometimes, what these prisoners did in New Caledonia or French Guiana – or any other exilic location – related to the occupations of their pre-sentencing lives. Sometimes they met an untimely death. Sometimes they stayed in the penal site and have descendants there. Sometimes, but more rarely, they were repatriated at the end of their sentence. Lives often did not end as previous historical accounts have suggested they did. And recently, much to my own surprise, I have learned that Lý Liễu’s life also did not end as I believed it did either.
From the Mekong Delta to Hong Kong
The leafy campus of St Joseph’s College, an elite Catholic secondary school in Hong Kong founded in 1875 and still enrolling students today, seems an unlikely place for a meeting that ultimately led to Lý Liễu’s fascinating exilic life. He was sent there from Tam Bình, Cần Thơ, southern Vietnam in 1905 at the age of 12, by a forward-looking father who determined his son should benefit from a cosmopolitan education. However, as well as a more cosmopolitan education, Lý encountered anti-colonial activists and by the time he was 15 had joined a group named the “Khuyến Du Học Hội” (“The Society for the Encouragement of Learning.”)
Image 1: St Joseph’s School, Hong Kong
After leaving St Joseph’s school, Lý studied at a Centre for English Studies while helping students clandestinely arriving from Vietnam. He also assisted in broader anti-colonial efforts directed by Vietnamese nationalists from East and Southeast Asia. However, all these activities came to an end on June 16, 1913, when British authorities in Hong Kong received a tipoff and Lý and his Society associates were arrested at the house of a supporter of the movement.
A criminal tribunal in Hanoi subsequently sentenced four members of The Society for the Encouragement of Learning on September 5, 1913. Only one deportation dossier still exists in the French colonial archives (for a member of the Society called Đinh Hữu Thuật) and it cites his crime as “criminal association.”
Image 2. Dossier of Đinh Hữu Thuật, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer
Such lack of documentation makes it difficult to determine why the length of sentence varied dramatically between different prisoners: all were given exile to French Guiana with sentences varying from perpetual to five years’ labour (Lý Liễu’s own sentence, perhaps because of his youth?) These prisoners joined a stream of over 9000 others – both common-law and political – from French Indochina, all sent to various places in the French empire during the period of French colonization.
Dense Jungle Toil
When they arrived in French Guiana, the group of four Society prisoners was assigned to a work unit to cut wood in an inland region and Lý Liễu was placed as a guard in charge of his fellow prisoners. Placing Vietnamese prisoners in charge of other Vietnamese prisoners was also a feature of the prison system in Indochina where “caplans” who were half prisoner and half guard occupied this role.[2] His many years of education in Hong Kong meant that even though he was the youngest member of the four, Lý spoke English, Cantonese, and French.
Due to this position, Lý could slip away from the camp and was able to go to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, at night to mix with the Chinese community. Indeed, he was able to get medicine, non-prison clothing, and send and receive letters clandestinely.[3] Convicts were dressed in distinctive grey clothing that made escape harder; medicine was also vitally important because of the rampant diseases of the penal colony.
Through these contacts in the Chinese community in 1915 Lý was – amazingly enough –able to organize the group’s escape to Trinidad, seventeen days’ voyage by boat. There he and his compatriots passed themselves off as Chinese – or Hong Kong – businessmen. In Trinidad Lý’s life took an additional turn when he married an English-Chinese woman from a trading family in Port of Spain, with whom he had three children.
Image 3: Map showing the location of French Guiana in relation to Trinidad
However, during this time in Port of Spain, Lý decided to return to Vietnam. In 1929, he did so by a circuitous route which may have gone through the United States. Ironically, this ultimately led to his re-arrest in the city of Vinh Long in southern Vietnam four years later. In 1933, a colonial tribunal found him guilty of fomenting rebellion and sentenced him to fifteen years’ hard labor on the notorious prison island of Poulo Condore. Until recently, Vietnamese historians believed he had died there in 1940.
Image 4: The penitentiary of Poulo Condore [on Côn Sơn Island today]
Based on limited archival and Vietnamese sources, I believed Lý Liễu’s life ended in the prison of Poulo Condore too. For Vietnamese historians, one of Lý’s greatest tragedies was an unmarked grave, an unmourned death by his half-English children and a “hungry ghost” forced to wander the Vietnamese terrain without a proper burial. However, in recent years, as Vietnamese historians started to research the members of the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, one local historian realized that Lý Liễu had not died in Poulo Condore after all. This historian, Phan Lương Minh, like me had been similarly haunted by a young man who led a life of exile and imprisonment. Phan travelled to the area of Bến Tre in the Mekong Delta, where Lý Liễu’s ancestors had lived, and was astonished to find local descendants of Lý Liễu himself. Phan discovered that in 1945 Lý Liễu had returned from Poulo Condore and assumed a new name, Lý Phùng Xuân, joined the Communist Party of Vietnam in the 1950s, and died in 1964 at the age of 71.[4]
Figure 5: Grave of Lý Phùng Xuân with a family member tending to it
From the reminiscences of Lý Liễu’s family, we get extraordinary – and rare – insights of life as a Vietnamese prisoner in the penal colony of French Guiana. One of his descendants stated: “his fellow prisoners called him Old English because he knew both Cantonese and English. He taught English to the prisoners. There was no writing paper, so he wrote on cement or on the wall. … He ate brown rice, which had sand in it and was dry and rotten, so he could easily have died from dysentery.”[5][6] Amongst the family members, the stories of Lý’s time in the penal colony of French Guiana and indeed the family left behind in Trinidad, were passed down.
I have come to understand, through my research for this project, that there are many similar prisoners from French Indochina who lived a life beyond what previous narratives told us. Prisoners who supposedly died heroic deaths by suicide, or during colonial interrogations, but who were actually deported to penal colonies where they lived an alternative afterlife. They may have ultimately settled there. Or they may have organized anticolonial insurrections, fled like maroons to the mountains or jungles or worked in prison workshops, small factories or sugar plantations, or many other forms of labour. Lý Liễu’s descendants, and the work of local historians in southern Vietnam, bring one story full circle to give us a fascinating – and unexpected – account of an exile’s afterlife. This was a path that led all the way from the Mekong Delta to Hong Kong to French Guiana to Trinidad to Poulo Condore and ultimately right back to Lý Liễu’s hometown in the Mekong Delta.
Lorraine M. Paterson.
[1] https://staffblogs.le.ac.uk/carchipelago/2016/02/11/empires-exile-the-story-of-ly-lieu/
[2] Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A Social History of Imprisonment in Colonial Viet Nam 1862-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; 111, 112.
[3] Nguyễn Văn Hầu, Chí sĩ Nguyễn Quang Diệu: Một lãnh tụ trọng yếu trong phong trào Đông Du miền Nam [Revolutionary Nguyễn Quang Diệu: A Key Leader in the Đông Du Movement in Cochinchina]. Tựa của Nguyễn Hiển Lê [Preface by Nguyễn-Hiển Lê]. Sài Gòn: Xây dựng, 1964, 56.
[4] https://baocantho.com.vn/tinh-yeu-dat-nuoc-cua-cu-ly-lieu-a90424.html. Tình yêu đất nước của cụ Lý Liễu, [Lý Liễu’s love of country,] Nguyễn Ngọc. Cần Thơ Online newspaper.
[5] https://baocantho.com.vn/tinh-yeu-dat-nuoc-cua-cu-ly-lieu-a90424.html. Tình yêu đất nước của cụ Lý Liễu, [Lý Liễu’s love of country,] Nguyễn Ngọc. Cần Thơ Online newspaper.