Choeung Ek Killing Fields, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The Columbarium of Choeung Ek where thousands of skulls are kept
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhist_Stupa_at_Choeung_Ek_killing_fields,_Cambodia.JPG
Author: Timgray200
photo licensing

Please be advised that some of the photographs on this page may be disturbing to some viewers.

Choeung Ek is the best known site of the Killing Fields, the place where the Khmer Rouge regime executed about 17,000 people, between 1975 and 1979. Choeung Ek was formerly a longan orchard and a Chinese graveyard. It is located 17km south of Phnom Penh. I visited it with some friends in 2002, a few months before I founded the AsiaExplorers travel club. In 2008 I revisited the site. We visited the mass graves where the bodies of over eight thousand victims of the Khmer Rouge atrocities were discovered. Many of them were inmates from the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh.

There is a strange memorial in Choeung Ek. It is in the form of a memorial stupa, and what makes it unique is that it houses more than five thousand human skulls. You can view the skulls neatly arranged by age, through the acrylic glass display of the stupa. Walking through the mass grave site, we could easily come across bone fragments. The place feels surreally serene, and I was more overwhelmed with curiosity than a sense of death and horror. I did take some photographs in Cheong Ek, and am showing them here, with the ulmost respect to the victims, but feel the necessity to showcase this particularly brutal chapter of Cambodian history, that we may all learn never to repeat history.

Hut with bone fragments of mass grave at Choeung Ek (3 March, 2008)
Tim's stock photos

Bone fragments on the ground near my shoe at Choeung Ek (3 March, 2008)
Tim's stock photos

Skulls of those killed at Choeung Ek
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheung_Ek_-_Killing_Fields_Site_-_Cambodia_-_01.JPG
Author: Adam Jones
photo licensing

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