Royal Museum for Central Africa

This guide to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels follows seven Congolese people who died in this park in the cold summer of 1897, brought to Belgium by Leopold II and put on display behind fences for over a million visitors to gawk at. It traces the church's refusal to bury them in consecrated ground and the decades their remains spent unmarked before being moved to a proper churchyard in 1953. The grand colonial palace behind you, designed by architect Charles Girault, opened in 1910 to tell Leopold's version of that story.