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Guillotine used to execute prisoners in the Maison Centrale or Central Prison in Hanoi. Built by the French beginning in 1886, it was used to imprison Vietnamese political prisoners and later by the Vietnamese to hold mostly US pilots during the Vietnamese War. It was referred to sarcastically as the "Hanoi Hilton" by US POWs and later in the US press. The prison was torn down in the mid-1990s and only the Gate House remains.