The name is literal. Hàng Dương means a row of casuarinas, the salt-tolerant trees that grow along this coast and still line the twenty-hectare site on the northern edge of Côn Sơn town, a few minutes' walk from the prison camps that filled it. For most of its existence it was not a cemetery in any organised sense — bodies went into the sand, and the sand moved. Serious restoration began on 19 December 1992, when Vietnam set out to locate, exhume where possible, and formally mark what could be found. The result is what visitors see today: ordered rows, numbered plots, a paved approach, and constant incense smoke. It is a memorial built almost fifty years after the last burial, working from records that the people who kept them had no interest in preserving.

The cemetery is divided into four sections, and the division is chronological. Zone A holds 688 graves, seven of them collective, from the years before 1945; ninety-one are identified and 597 are not. Zone B holds 695 graves, seventeen collective, covering roughly 1945 to 1960, with 276 named against 419 unknown. Zone C holds 373 graves from 1960 to 1975 and is the outlier: 332 identified, only 41 anonymous. Zone D holds 157 graves, of which just fourteen have names, gathered here when remains were moved in from the older burial grounds at Hòn Cau and Hàng Keo. Read the ratios in order and a pattern emerges — thirteen percent named, then forty, then eighty-nine. That curve does not describe a prison growing gentler. It describes paperwork improving, and it describes how much of the first eighty years was simply lost.

Lê Hồng Phong was born in Nghệ An on 6 September 1902 and rose to lead the Indochinese Communist Party through its most battered years, elected General Secretary at the party congress in Macau in 1935 and sent to Moscow that July for the Comintern. The French arrested him twice, the second time in February 1940, and sent him here on a five-year sentence. He died in these camps on 6 September 1942 — his fortieth birthday. He left a wife, Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, also a party leader, and a daughter. A short distance away lies Nguyễn An Ninh, who was not a communist at all but an anarchist, a journalist who founded the Saigon paper La Cloche Fêlée in December 1923 and edited, typeset and hawked it in the street himself. He died on 14 August 1943, aged forty-two, and his jailers are widely thought to have decided the timing rather than left it to the fever.

Võ Thị Sáu was born in 1933 in Phước Thọ, in Đất Đỏ, and joined the resistance as a child, running messages before she was old enough to be trusted with anything heavier. On 14 July 1949 she threw a grenade into a Bastille Day gathering, killing a French officer. She was captured, tried by a French military tribunal in April 1950, and sentenced to death despite being a minor at the time of the offence. She was shipped to Côn Đảo and shot at around seven in the morning on 23 January 1952. She refused the blindfold. The French administration recorded her in a ledger line that survives in the archives: Võ Thị Sáu dite CAM mort 23/1/1952 7h P.Condor Par balles. She was eighteen or nineteen. Vietnam named her a Hero of the People's Armed Forces in 1993, four decades after the fact.

Her grave in Zone B is the reason many of those flights land. The custom here is to come after dark — the cemetery keeps a midnight visitation, and the queue at that hour is longer than at noon — and to arrive with offerings, which accumulate around the plot in quantities that have to be cleared regularly. What draws people is not quite the official story of the national martyr. Võ Thị Sáu is petitioned like a spirit who listens, by visitors who ask her for specific things and come back to thank her. Around them, in the dark, sit twelve hundred headstones with no name on them. Dress covers shoulders and knees; nobody rides between the rows. The etiquette is not tourist-board politeness but the ordinary manners of a country visiting its own dead, which is what this island, more than any other place in Vietnam, is for.