Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum - Discovery

In 1979, H�" Văn Tây, a Vietnamese combat photographer, was the first journalist to document Tuol Sleng to the world. H�" and his colleagues followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. The photos of H�" documenting what he saw when he entered the site are exhibited in Tuol Sleng today.

The Khmer Rouge required that the prison staff make a detailed dossier for each prisoner. Included in the documentation was a photograph. Since the original negatives and photographs were separated from the dossiers in the 1979�"1980 period, most of the photographs remain anonymous to this day.

Canister: A projectile, shot from a cannon, filled with about 35 iron balls the size of marbles that scattered like the pellets of a shotgun.

Artillery: Cannon or other large caliber firearms; a branch of the army armed with cannon.

Coup de Main: (pronounced koo-duh-mahn) A French term used to describe a quick, vigorous attack that surprises the enemy.

Mason-Dixon line: A boundary surveyed in the 1760s that ran between Pennsylvania to the North and Delaware, Maryland and (West) Virginia to the South. It became a symbolic division between free states and slave states.

Reinforcements: Troops sent to strengthen a fighting force by adding an additional number of fresh soldiers.