Tuol Sleng

This is a memorial to the victims of a genocide. Go, but go for that reason.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum sits in the heart of Phnom Penh, in what was once Tuol Svay Prey High School, named for a royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. In March or April 1976 the Khmer Rouge converted the five buildings of the school into Security Prison 21, S-21: the classrooms were divided into small cells and interrogation rooms, the windows covered with iron bars and barbed wire, and the whole complex enclosed in electrified wire.

From 1976 to 1979 an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned here. The precise number is not known. The prison held between 1,000 and 1,500 people at any one time, and it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centres the Khmer Rouge and their secret police ran across the country. Prisoners were tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were then arrested in turn.

On 26 July 2010 the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died in 2020 while serving a life sentence.

The museum states its own purpose clearly: it preserves a tragic period in history with the aim of encouraging visitors to become messengers of peace. Alongside the permanent exhibition there are temporary ones, including displays remembering S-21 victims through their clothes, and short films shown in the wooden room of building E from Monday to Friday.

It is one of the most important historical sites in Southeast Asia and one of the hardest to walk through. Give it a full morning, read the panels, and treat the photographs of the people who were held here as what they are: portraits of the dead, kept by the country that lost them.