Tuol Sleng Museum

Tuol Sleng Museum, also known as the Museum of Genocidal Crimes is located in Phnom Penh and was the infamous S-21 prison of the Khmer Rouge.

The regime kept extensive records, including thousands of photographs, and much of the buildings are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. Several rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of the estimated 200,000 prisoners who passed through the prison. Only seven survived.

Other rooms contain only a rusting iron bedframe, beneath a black and white photograph showing the room as it was found by the invading Vietnamese who displaced the Khmer Rouge in January 1979. In each photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was overrun by the Vietnamese.

The museum is perhaps best known for housing the skull map that had been composed of 300 skulls and other bones by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at S-21 prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but apparently the skulls of victims are still on display in shelves in the museum.

Today, the museum is still open to the public, and along with the Choeung Ek Memorial (The Killing Fields), is included as a point of interest for those visiting Cambodia.