![\"Map](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/files\/2016\/02\/Map-of-Brazil-300x212.png\")
<\/a>Map showing the location of French Guiana and Trinidad in relation to each other.<\/p><\/div>\n
In 1923 in the British colony of Trinidad, a young English woman returned from visiting her family in a suburb of the capital, Port of Spain, to find that her Chinese husband of six years, L\u00fd Li\u1ec5u, had packed up his possessions and left her and their two small children. A Chinese trader originally from Hong Kong, L\u00fd had been working at a Chinese import\/export company when this woman had met and married him. Now, without warning or explanation, he had vanished, presumably to return to Hong Kong. Indeed, he never returned to Trinidad or saw her, or their children, again.<\/p>\n
In his later reminisces, L\u00fd Li\u1ec5u did not refer to his wife or children by name, but conveyed his terrible guilt at having abandoned them. In a less predictable regret, L\u00fd expressed sadness that his wife would forever assume he was racially Chinese and would never know his real race and identity.[1] \u00a0For despite his appearance, his fluency in Cantonese, his position at a Chinese company, and his years spent in Hong Kong, he was not the overseas Chinese businessman he pretended to be. In fact, he was an escaped Vietnamese political prisoner from the notoriously harsh penal colony of French Guiana, about seventeen days away from Port of Spain by boat.<\/p>\n
Such a story goes against the stereotype of the penal colony of French Guiana, usually positioned as a hellish prison from which escape was nigh on impossible. Its horrific reputation was encapsulated by its name amongst prisoners: la<\/em>\u00a0guillotine seche<\/em>, “the dry guillotine;\u201d it killed slowly, but just as surely, as a guillotine.[2] Films like Papillion (1973) depict the extraordinary lengths to which prisoners had to go to escape; impersonating a Chinese businessman was not one of them.<\/p>\n The Society for the Encouragement of Learning<\/strong> After leaving St Joseph\u2019s School, L\u00fd studied at a Centre for English Studies in Hong Kong while helping students clandestinely arriving from Vietnam and he also assisted in the broader anti-colonial effort directed by Vietnamese nationalists from various Southeast and East Asian locales.<\/p>\n However, all of these activities came to an end on June 16, 1913, when British authorities in Hong Kong received a tipoff and L\u00fd and his Society associates were arrested at the house of a supporter of the movement. Some reports indicated that bomb making equipment was discovered in the house, which may be factual given British willingness to arrest them. (British reticence in arresting Vietnamese in Hong Kong without material evidence of criminal involvement often infuriated the French colonial administration of Indochina.)<\/p>\n This is the file of \u0110inh H\u1eefu Th\u1eadt from the French colonial archives – the only extant penal dossier on a member of the Society to Encourage Learning.<\/p><\/div>\n A criminal tribunal in Hanoi subsequently sentenced four of the group on September 5, 1913. Only one deportation dossier still exists in the French colonial archives, (a member of the Society by the name of \u0110inh H\u1eefu Th\u1eadt) and it cites his crime as \u201ccriminal association.\u201d Such lack of documentation makes it difficult to determine why the length of sentence varied dramatically between different people: all had exile to French Guiana but the\u00a0sentences varied from perpetual hard labour to five years of hard labour (which was L\u00fd Li\u1ec5u\u2019s sentence, perhaps on account of\u00a0his youth?) These prisoners joined a stream of over 7000 prisoners – both common-law and political – from Indochina to various points within the French empire during the period of French colonization.<\/p>\n Dense Jungle Toil<\/strong>
\nThe leafy campus of St Joseph\u2019s 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 L\u00fd Li\u1ec5u\u2019s double life in Trinidad. He was sent there in 1905 at the age of 12, by a forward-looking father determined he should benefit from a cosmopolitan education. At the time, Vietnam was a French colony and colonial rule was greatly resented by many colonial subjects who sought East Asian milieus in which to organize anti-colonial activities. Indeed, it was at St Joseph\u2019s College that L\u00fd met anti-French activists and by the time he was 15 had joined a group named the \u201cKhuy\u1ebfn Du H\u1ecdc H\u1ed9i\u201d (\u201cThe Society for the Encouragement of Learning.\u201d)<\/p>\n![\"This](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/files\/2016\/02\/Ministere-de-Colonies-225x300.png\")
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\nWhen they arrived in French Guiana, the group of four was assigned to a work unit to cut wood in an inland region and L\u00fd Li\u1ec5u 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 \u201ccaplans\u201d who were half prisoner and half guard occupied this role. [3] His many years of education in Hong Kong meant that even though he was the youngest member of the four, L\u00fd spoke English, Cantonese, and French fluently.<\/p>\n
![\"Map](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/files\/2016\/02\/Map-of-French-Guiana-300x268.png\")
<\/a>![\"The](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/files\/2016\/02\/neuf-neuf-300x165.png\")
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