It has a near-intact, colonial-era core of mottled, yellow-ochre buildings shaded by sinuous banyan trees. Between the bay and a verdant mountain range sits the island’s only town. The bay is bisected by a colonial-era stone wharf called Pier 914, named after the number of prisoners worked to death during its construction. My hotel overlooks a wide bay where low black clouds roll in over a dark choppy sea. But on Con Son, a different weather pattern brings tinplate skies and strong winds that force the local fishing fleet into harbour. The onset of the dry season late in the year delivers perfect beach weather to the southern Vietnamese mainland. Hang Duong contains almost 2000 tombs and only 713 bear a nameplate, though all anonymous graves are marked with the five-pointed gold star of Vietnam’s national flag and a vase of pink lotus flowers. Unlike Vo Thi Sau, who was posthumously named a Hero of the People’s Armed Forces and became an object of mass veneration, the remains of most inmates are unidentified or yet to be discovered. They were prisoners of the French colonial authorities and later, during the Vietnam War, of the government of South Vietnam, which was backed by the United States and allies including Australia. Vo Thi Sau’s is the most visited tomb in Hang Duong Cemetery, a carefully tended memorial to about 21,000 political prisoners and combatants who died in Con Son’s seven jails. Looking down on the iron-bar ceilings of the tiger cages. Worried that news of her death would spark a riot, the French authorities secretly shipped her to Con Son, about 100 kilometres off Vietnam’s southern coast, where she was shot by firing squad the day after disembarking. She became eligible for execution when she turned 18, in 1952. In jail, the “older sisters” of the independence struggle reportedly taught her embroidery and “how to deal with enemies in prison”. She was captured at age 16 while attempting to assassinate a notorious collaborator and sentenced to death. Two years later, as France fought to hold on to its colony, she killed a French soldier with a hand grenade. The daughter of a labourer and a noodle-seller, Sau was 12 when the communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh declared independence in 1945. Her name was Vo Thi Sau and her tomb draws hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese every year. These pilgrims, however, have come to a graveyard on Con Son, a former prison island of sombre beauty, to commune with the spirit of a long-dead schoolgirl assassin. The ritual is commonplace throughout Vietnam, a country liberally sown with shrines and tombs, and the scene could be a family altar, temple or community house dedicated to a neighbourhood guardian spirit. Men and women murmur prayers and bow before an altar they have decorated with flowers, fruit and offerings made of paper. Sweet-scented smoke rises from burning incense sticks, carrying mortal messages to the afterlife.
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