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The Columbarium of Choeung Ek where thousands of skulls are keptSource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhist_Stupa_at_Choeung_Ek_killing_fields,_Cambodia.JPG
Author: Timgray200
Author: Timgray200
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)
Bone fragments on the ground near my shoe at Choeung Ek (3 March, 2008)
Skulls of those killed at Choeung EkSource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheung_Ek_-_Killing_Fields_Site_-_Cambodia_-_01.JPG
Author: Adam Jones
Author: Adam Jones
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Dear visitor, thank you so much for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye and my hobby is to find out about places, write about them and share the information with you on this website. I have been writing this site since 5 January 2003. Originally (from 2003 until 2009, the site was called AsiaExplorers. I changed the name to Penang Travel Tips in 2009, even though I describe more than just Penang but everywhere I go (I often need to tell people that "Penang Travel Tips" is not just information about Penang, but information written in Penang), especially places in Malaysia and Singapore, and in all the years since 2003, I have described over 20,000 places.
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