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

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.