The small Laogai Museum sits on a peaceful Dupont residential street, so it's jarring to enter and confront the roomful of harrowing exhibits about Chinese labor camps. Red and white placards fill the walls telling the stories of people – mostly political dissidents – sentenced to the camps and the harsh treatment they face. Artifacts like prisoners' tattered clothing and everyday products made in the camps (black tea, toys, plastic bags) add to the haunting effect.
Exhibit space is also given to Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps and the Khmer Rouge's forced-labor camps in Cambodia.
