Abstract
ABSTRACTDuring the French colonization of Indochina (1863–1954), approximately 8,000 prisoners – many of them convicted of political crimes – were exiled to twelve different geographical locations throughout the French empire. Many of these prisoners came from a Chinese background or a culturally Chinese world, and the sites to which they were exiled (even the penal colonies themselves) contained diasporic Chinese communities. Knowing Chinese might be their greatest asset, or being able to “pass” as Chinese the most valuable tool to facilitate escape. This article explores a group of political prisoners sent from French Indochina to French Guiana in 1913 and their subsequent escape, with the aid of Chinese residents. If exile is, in one sense, the ultimate exercise of colonial power – capable of moving bodies to distant locales – examining these lives through a Vietnamese lens reveals a very different story than the colonial archival record reflects.
Highlights
After leaving St Joseph’s College, Lý studied at a Centre for English Studies in Hong Kong, while helping students clandestinely arriving from Vietnam and assisting with the broader anti-colonial effort directed by Vietnamese nationalists in various South East- and East Asian countries
70,000 prisoners were sent to French Guiana and it operated as a penal colony until 1952, with the last convicts arriving from France in 1937
As mentioned above, convict ships arriving from St Martin de Ré did not dock at the harbour of Cayenne; they sailed to St Laurent du Maroni in western French Guiana, which was the main processing centre for prisoners arriving at the penal colony
Summary
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 led to Lý Liễu’s double life in Trinidad. For Vietnam, a shared intellectual history with China meant that locations in southern China were the logical sites of such interactions It was at St Joseph’s College that Lý met anti-French activists, and by the time he was fifteen he had joined a group with the innocuous name of “Khuyến Du Học Hội” (“The Society for the Encouragement of Learning”), hereafter KDHH.[9] After leaving St Joseph’s College, Lý studied at a Centre for English Studies in Hong Kong, while helping students clandestinely arriving from Vietnam and assisting with the broader anti-colonial effort directed by Vietnamese nationalists in various South East- and East Asian countries. See Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Colonial Vietnam 1862–1940 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), p. 188
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