Battambang is the Cambodia many travellers are looking for without knowing it: a slow-paced city on the banks of a quiet river, with streets of pastel-coloured colonial houses, bustling markets, charming cafés and an art scene that's surprising for its size. The country's second city and capital of one of its most fertile provinces (Cambodia's rice bowl), it escaped mass tourism and keeps an authenticity that wins people over. It's the perfect place to slow down between the temples of Angkor and the coast.
But Battambang isn't just about stillness. Around it you'll find some of the most memorable experiences in the country: the famous bamboo train, those motorised platforms that hurtle along the old tracks; Phnom Sampeau mountain, where millions of bats stream out of a cave every evening in an endless column, and which also holds a 'cave of remembrance' tied to the horror of the Khmer Rouge; and rural temples surrounded by rice paddies. Few cities combine beauty, history and an honest look at the past quite like this one.
This guide explains how to make the most of Battambang: what to see in the city and the countryside, how to get around by tuk-tuk, what the bamboo train and admissions cost, where to eat well and cheaply, and how to get there from Siem Reap or Phnom Penh. With its colonial architecture, its art, its food and its warmth, Battambang offers one of the most human and genuine portraits of Cambodia. Its history, shaped by centuries of rivalry between Cambodia and Siam, is told on our history page.
Battambang has an unusual history within Cambodia: for more than a century, between the late 18th and early 20th centuries (roughly 1795-1907), the province was under the control of the kingdom of Siam (Thailand), ruled by a dynasty of local governors loyal to Siam. That long period left a distinct cultural mark and partly explains its character. In 1907, France, which ran Cambodia as a protectorate, got Siam to return Battambang and Siem Reap to Cambodia, and that's when the city went through its great expansion: the elegant colonial houses and buildings that make it famous today were built, and it prospered as the capital of a rich rice-growing region. In the 20th century, like the whole country, it suffered the tragedy of war and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), whose scars can still be seen in places such as the 'killing cave' at Phnom Sampeau. Today it's a calm, cultured and artistic city, proud of its heritage. Its full history, from the legend of the 'lost stick' that gives it its name to the present day, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The archaeological heart of Cambodia: the plain north of the Tonlé Sap where the Khmer empire built Angkor, its capitals lost in the jungle and the colonial towns that surround them.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities have an origin as legendary as Battambang's. In Khmer, its name means roughly 'loss of the stick' or 'the lost stick', and it points to a folk tale every Cambodian knows. According to the legend, a humble cowherd called Ta Dambong found a black magic stick that gave him enormous strength. With that power he overthrew the king and seized the throne, ruling as a usurper. But a young prince destined to win back the kingdom stood up to him, and during the chase Ta Dambong threw or lost his magic stick and was left without his power. Hence 'the lost stick'.
It is a legend, of course, but it captures something of the city's character: today a large statue of the legendary Ta Dambong, gripping his stick, welcomes visitors to Battambang and has become its popular symbol. Beyond the myth, the area has been inhabited since ancient times and was part of the Khmer Empire's sphere of influence, as shown by the 11th- and 12th-century temples dotted around the outskirts, such as Wat Banan and Wat Ek Phnom.
Set on a highly fertile plain watered by the Sangker River and close to the great Tonlé Sap lake, Battambang was always a land rich in rice and fish, which made it a coveted prize. That farming wealth explains much of its later history: for centuries, the province was a territory fought over by its two great neighbouring kingdoms, Cambodia and Siam.
The most unusual feature of Battambang's history is that, for more than a century, it was ruled not from Cambodia but from Siam (present-day Thailand). Towards the end of the 18th century, at a time when the Cambodian kingdom was weak and Siam was expanding, the province of Battambang (along with Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor) came under Siamese control. From roughly 1795 until 1907, the region was run by a local dynasty of governors loyal to Siam, the Aphaiwong family, who governed it almost autonomously but under Bangkok's sovereignty.
That long period left a deep mark. For more than a hundred years, Battambang looked more towards Bangkok than towards the Cambodian court, and it absorbed Siamese cultural, administrative and commercial influences that set it apart from the rest of Cambodia. The city thrived as the centre of a key farming region, exporting its rice and other produce.
Everything changed at the start of the 20th century. Since 1863 Cambodia had been a French protectorate, part of French Indochina, and Paris pushed to recover the territories Siam controlled. In 1907, under a Franco-Siamese treaty, Siam returned the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap to Cambodia. After more than a century, Battambang was once again part of Cambodia, this time under French colonial rule. Its era of greatest urban splendour was about to begin.
Battambang's return to Cambodia in 1907, under French administration, opened the period that shapes the city's image today. The French, together with a prosperous local middle class of Cambodian, Chinese and other merchants, reshaped the town centre over the first decades of the 20th century. Streets were laid out, administrative buildings went up and, above all, the elegant 'shophouses' were built: two-storey houses with a shop downstairs and living quarters upstairs, painted in the pastel shades that are now Battambang's trademark.
Thanks to the province's rice wealth, the city flourished as Cambodia's second major urban centre after Phnom Penh. A railway line was even built to link it with the capital, and Battambang earned a reputation as a cultured, prosperous and orderly city. Much of that colonial heritage has survived, which today makes Battambang the city with the best-preserved French architecture in the country: walking through its centre is like stepping into that tropical 'belle époque'.
Cambodia won its independence from France in 1953, under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Battambang remained an important and fairly peaceful city, the country's rice bowl and a regional hub. But the peace would not last: the Vietnam War, which spilled across the borders, and the Cambodian Civil War also dragged this region into one of the darkest chapters of its history.
Like the rest of Cambodia, Battambang and its province lived through the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge regime. The radical communist guerrilla movement led by Pol Pot seized power in April 1975 and put the country through one of the most brutal experiments of the 20th century: the forced emptying of the cities, the abolition of money, religion and property, slave labour in the countryside, and the persecution and execution of anyone deemed an 'enemy', whether intellectuals, professionals, minorities or simply people under suspicion. In just three years and eight months (1975-1979), around 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians died from hunger, disease, exhaustion and executions: close to a quarter of the population.
Battambang, a wealthy and educated city, was emptied, and its people were deported to labour camps in the surrounding countryside. Some places nearby became scenes of horror. The best known is the Killing Cave on Phnom Sampeau hill: there, the regime's executioners threw their victims through an opening in the cave roof, killing thousands of people. Today a small memorial inside, a stupa holding skulls and bones beside a Buddha image, remembers the dead and makes visitors stop and take in the scale of the crime.
The fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, after the Vietnamese invasion, did not bring immediate peace to this region. North-west Cambodia, near the Thai border, remained a war zone through the 1980s and much of the 1990s: it was one of the guerrillas' last strongholds and was left strewn with anti-personnel mines, which still claim victims. More than many others, the Battambang region bore the long tail of the war.
Battambang has come back from those terrible decades in its own way: through art. In the refugee camps on the border, where thousands of Cambodians fled during the war, a group of young people discovered how drawing and artistic expression could help heal trauma. Back in Battambang in the early 1990s, they founded Phare Ponleu Selpak, a school and NGO that gives children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds free education and arts training in circus, music, dance and the visual arts. That project gave rise to the famous Cambodian circus that now moves audiences around the world. Almost out of necessity, Battambang became Cambodia's arts capital.
That creative streak runs through the city today: galleries, workshops, specialty coffee shops in colonial houses and a community of artists give it a bohemian, unhurried feel, very different from the tourist bustle of Siem Reap. At the same time, the city is still the heart of a key farming region, the country's rice bowl, with its markets, rice paddies and rural temples.
In short, Battambang is a city that carries a heavy history of disputed borders, colonial splendour and recent horror, but it carries it with dignity and a healing calm. For travellers, it offers one of the most authentic and human sides of Cambodia: the frozen-in-time beauty of its pastel houses, the thrill of the bamboo train, the shock of the cave of memory, the emotion of the circus and the kindness of its people. A place where past and present live side by side without fuss, on the banks of the gentle Sangker River.
