Long before Angkor, the lower Mekong basin was already a land of kingdoms. The first one the sources mention —above all Chinese chronicles of the period— is Funan, which flourished roughly between the 1st and 6th centuries AD in the delta, in what is now southern Cambodia and Vietnam. Funan lived off maritime trade between India and China: its port of Oc Eo was a stop on the routes linking the West with the Far East, and Roman coins, Indian goods and Chinese objects have turned up there.
From India came something more lasting than merchandise: religion, writing and the idea of kingship. The process historians call 'Indianisation' brought Hinduism and Buddhism, Sanskrit, the concept of the god-king (devaraja) and models of art and architecture that the Khmer would make their own and take to an unmatched scale. It was not a conquest but a selective adoption by local elites.
Around the 6th century, Funan lost ground to a group of inland principalities that the Chinese chronicles grouped under the name Chenla, located upstream, in present-day Cambodia and southern Laos. Chenla was never a firm, unified state: by the 8th century it was split into rival factions, the so-called 'Land Chenla' and 'Water Chenla'. From that fragmentation, and from the ambition of a young prince, the greatest empire the region ever saw was about to be born.
The founding year of the Khmer Empire is 802 AD. That year, according to a later inscription, Prince Jayavarman II had himself consecrated on the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen, north of the future Angkor, as chakravartin, 'universal monarch', in a ritual that declared him absolute sovereign, free of all vassalage —in particular to Java, from where some traditions say he had returned—. With that symbolic gesture he unified the scattered Khmer principalities and set in motion what is known as the Angkor period.
Jayavarman II (who reigned around 802-850) institutionalised the cult of the devaraja, the 'god-king', which linked the person of the monarch to Shiva and made his power sacred. He moved his capital several times around the region north of the great Tonlé Sap lake, on the fertile plain where water and rice could sustain an enormous population. That mastery of water —reservoirs, canals, dykes— would be the material key to the future empire.
His successors consolidated the work. Around 900, Yasovarman I founded the first great capital city in the area, Yasodharapura, the seed of Angkor, and had the East Baray dug, a colossal reservoir. The hydraulic and political machinery was being assembled that, at its height, would support close to a million people in the Angkor region, at a time when no city in Europe came anywhere near.
The empire reached its first peak under Suryavarman II, who reigned from 1113 to 1150. A warrior and a builder, he reunified the kingdom after a period of strife, extended his influence over much of mainland Southeast Asia and sent embassies to Song China. But his name was tied forever to a single work: Angkor Wat.
Dedicated to Vishnu —unlike the earlier Shaivite temples— and conceived partly as the king's own funerary temple, Angkor Wat was built over some thirty-seven years. It is the largest religious monument in the world: a compound surrounded by a moat almost two hundred metres wide, with lotus-bud towers representing the peaks of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain of Hindu mythology. Its galleries hold hundreds of metres of bas-reliefs —the battle of Kurukshetra, the churning of the ocean of milk, the armies of Suryavarman— and thousands of figures of apsaras, the celestial dancers.
Angkor Wat's orientation is unusual: it faces west, towards the setting sun, which reinforces its funerary character. Its five-tower silhouette is today Cambodia's national symbol and the only ancient ruin to appear on a national flag anywhere in the world. That a society without machines moved and carved millions of sandstone blocks with such precision, brought from quarries dozens of kilometres away, still astonishes engineers and archaeologists.
After Suryavarman II's death, the empire fell into crisis and in 1177 suffered a humiliation: the Cham, the people of the neighbouring kingdom of Champa (in today's central Vietnam), sailed a fleet up the Tonlé Sap and sacked the capital. From that defeat emerged the last of Angkor's great kings. Jayavarman VII drove out the invaders, was crowned around 1181 and launched the largest building programme in all of Khmer history.
Jayavarman VII was a Mahayana Buddhist, not a Hindu, and that changed the face of the empire. He built a new walled capital, Angkor Thom ('the great city'), and at its centre the Bayon, a temple covered in towers bearing enormous stone faces —more than two hundred— usually identified with the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, compassion made image, and which many also see as an idealised portrait of the king himself. He built Ta Prohm in memory of his mother and Preah Khan in memory of his father, as well as Banteay Kdei, Neak Pean and the Srah Srang reservoir.
His reign was not just stone. Inscriptions credit him with a network of roads with rest houses for travellers and a system of 102 'hospitals' spread across the empire, the expression of a Buddhist ethic of service. It was Angkor's greatest splendour. After him, no king ever built on that scale again, and the long decline began almost imperceptibly.
No single event explains why Angkor stopped being the centre of the Khmer world; it was the sum of many. On the religious side, the spread of Theravada Buddhism —more austere, with no great temple-states or god-king to fund— took the purpose away from the monumental machinery. On the political side, the rise of the Tai kingdoms was pressing from the west, above all Ayutthaya, which took and sacked Angkor in 1431.
Recent research has added a decisive cause: water. Studies of Angkor's enormous hydraulic system —the barays, canals and dykes that sustained the farming of a huge population— show that in the 14th and 15th centuries the region suffered brutal climate swings, with prolonged droughts followed by torrential monsoons that damaged an infrastructure that was already hard to maintain. A city that depended entirely on managing water became vulnerable just as the climate went out of control.
The centre of gravity then shifted south-east, towards the confluence of the rivers, closer to maritime trade with China and to the delta. Around 1434, King Ponhea Yat established the capital at Phnom Penh, where legend has it that a woman, Lady Penh, had built a temple on a hill to house some Buddha images found in the river: the Wat Phnom that gave the city its name. Angkor was never entirely abandoned, but the great imperial period was over.
The four centuries between the fall of Angkor and the arrival of the French are, in Khmer memory, a long era of retreat. Reduced to a middling kingdom, Cambodia was caught between two expanding neighbours: Siam (present-day Thailand) to the west and north-west, and the Vietnamese kingdoms to the east. Cambodian courts, weakened by dynastic disputes, often sought the backing of one to defend themselves against the other, and ended up paying dearly for it.
Siam seized the north-western provinces —Battambang, Siem Reap, Angkor itself— and kept them under its control for more than a century. Vietnam, for its part, advanced over the Mekong Delta: Cochinchina, with the future Saigon, had been Khmer land (Cambodians still call it Kampuchea Krom, 'Lower Cambodia') and was absorbed by Vietnam's southward expansion. In the 19th century, the pressure on what was left of the kingdom was such that Cambodians spoke of a country on the verge of disappearing, effectively divided between the two powers.
The lowest point came around 1830-1840, when the Vietnamese court tried to rule Cambodia directly, reorganise its administration and impose Vietnamese customs, which sparked rebellions and a devastating war with Siam on Cambodian soil. Much of the historical Khmer mistrust of both neighbours stems from that trauma. When in 1863 a third power appeared offering 'protection', the Cambodian king saw a way out of the pincer.
In 1863, King Norodom signed a treaty placing Cambodia under a French protectorate. The monarch's logic was clear: he preferred the distant umbrella of a European power to the suffocating embrace of Siam and Vietnam, which threatened to carve the country up between them. France, for its part, wanted to secure the Mekong flank and its route to China. In 1887, Cambodia was incorporated into the Union of French Indochina, together with the three regions of Vietnam and, later, Laos.
The protectorate had a concrete and contradictory face. On one hand, France kept the monarchy as a façade and stripped the kings of almost all real power; it imposed taxes and forced labour that provoked revolts, and exploited the economy for the benefit of the metropole. On the other, European fascination with Angkor —whose ruins French explorers 'rediscovered' for the West in the mid-19th century— had an unexpected consequence: in the Franco-Siamese treaty of 1907, France got Siam to return the north-western provinces to Cambodia, Battambang and Siem Reap with Angkor itself included. The country thus recovered its greatest symbol.
The French restored the temples, laid out the avenues and colonial buildings of Phnom Penh, Battambang and Kampot, and organised the administration. But economic and educational development was meagre, and only a very small elite gained access to higher education. From that elite, partly educated in Paris, would come both the future nationalist leaders and, in time, the cadres of the Khmer Rouge.
The architect of independence was a young and shrewd king. Norodom Sihanouk, crowned in 1941 when the French thought him easy to manage, turned out to be quite the opposite. Taking advantage of France's weakness after the Second World War and its exhaustion in the Indochina War against the Viet Minh, in 1953 he launched a 'royal crusade for independence': he toured capitals, pressured Paris and got France to give way. On 9 November 1953, Cambodia declared itself fully independent, without the war that bled Vietnam dry.
In 1955, Sihanouk made a masterstroke: he abdicated the throne in favour of his father so he could enter party politics while remaining the country's strongman. He founded his own movement, the Sangkum, won every election and governed as head of state with overwhelming charisma. These were years of relative stability and remarkable cultural ferment —Sihanouk made films, composed songs and championed a golden age of Khmer music and cinema—, but also of a heavy hand against the opposition, on both the right and the left.
In foreign policy he bet on neutrality and non-alignment in the middle of the Cold War, trying to keep Cambodia out of the war raging in Vietnam. It was an impossible balance: he effectively tolerated the passage of communist supplies through Cambodian territory —the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail'— and the setting up of North Vietnamese bases near the border, which infuriated the United States and the right wing of the Cambodian army. That balance would shatter abruptly in 1970.
In March 1970, while Sihanouk was travelling abroad, his prime minister and general Lon Nol, backed by the pro-American right, overthrew him in a coup and proclaimed the Khmer Republic. The country, neutral until then, openly joined the side of the United States and South Vietnam in the Indochina War. Sihanouk, from exile in Beijing, did the unthinkable: he allied himself with his former enemies, the Cambodian communists he himself had contemptuously dubbed the 'Khmer Rouge', and called on the people to rise up against Lon Nol.
So began a brutal civil war that lasted from 1970 to 1975. The Khmer Rouge, supported by North Vietnam and China and using the deposed king's banner as a rallying cry, grew rapidly in the countryside. At the same time, Cambodia was caught up in the Vietnam War: between 1969 and 1973, the US Air Force unleashed on Cambodian territory a massive and largely secret bombing campaign to strike communist sanctuaries. Estimates of the tonnage and civilian casualties vary widely among historians, but there is consensus that the bombing was enormous, caused great loss of life and displacement, and that —according to a widespread, though debated, interpretation— it drove furious and desperate peasants into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.
Lon Nol's Republic, corrupt and overwhelmed, was gradually reduced to the cities. On 17 April 1975, after a final siege, Khmer Rouge columns entered Phnom Penh. Many people greeted them with relief, believing peace had arrived. The opposite had arrived.
What followed was one of the most radical and lethal experiments of the 20th century. The regime of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, led by Pol Pot —whose real name was Saloth Sar—, set out to rebuild society from scratch, wiping out the city, money, school, religion, property and family. On the very day they took Phnom Penh, they ordered the forced evacuation of the entire capital —close to two million people— to the countryside, the sick and elderly included. They repeated the operation in every city in the country. They renamed the calendar: 1975 would be 'Year Zero'.
The population was turned into slave labour on agricultural cooperatives, working gruelling days on starvation rations to meet absurd rice quotas. People died from forced labour, famine and untreated disease. On top of that came deliberate terror: the regime systematically executed those it considered class enemies or traitors —officials and soldiers of the previous regime, educated people, Buddhist monks, minorities such as the Muslim Cham and the Vietnamese—, and in its final years it devoured itself in paranoid purges. The main torture centre, Phnom Penh's S-21 prison, set up in a former school called Tuol Sleng, processed some 15,000 people: almost none came out alive. Prisoners were taken to be executed at mass graves such as those of Choeung Ek, one of the country's many 'killing fields'.
The figures are still being researched, but the most widely accepted estimates put the death toll at between 1.7 and 2.2 million people, around a quarter of the population at the time. Justice came late and in limited form: a UN-backed tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), set up in 2006, convicted only three senior leaders —Kaing Guek Eav, alias 'Duch', head of S-21; Nuon Chea, the ideologue; and Khieu Samphan, the regime's head of state—; Pol Pot died in 1998 without ever being tried. Visiting Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek today is not morbid tourism: it is the way Cambodia, and those who visit it, refuse to forget.
The Khmer Rouge regime did not fall to an internal revolt or to Western pressure, but to war with its neighbour. Border provocations, massacres of Vietnamese civilians and the nationalist delusions of Pol Pot, who dreamed of reclaiming the old Khmer delta, led Vietnam to invade Cambodia at the end of 1978. On 7 January 1979, Vietnamese troops entered Phnom Penh and toppled the regime, putting an end to the genocide. They installed an allied government, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, made up largely of former Khmer Rouge cadres who had fled the purges, among them a young man called Hun Sen.
Liberation did not bring peace. The Khmer Rouge, far from disappearing, withdrew to the Thai border and kept fighting as a guerrilla force for more than a decade. In a bitter twist of the Cold War, they kept Cambodia's seat at the UN and received indirect support from China, Thailand and the West, who preferred not to recognise a government imposed by Vietnam and its Soviet ally. The ruined country was trapped in a new civil war and under Vietnamese occupation until, exhausted and under international pressure, Vietnam withdrew its troops in 1989.
The road to peace was sealed in the Paris Peace Agreements of 23 October 1991, signed by all the factions and guaranteed by the international community. They placed the country under a transitional UN administration —UNTAC, one of the largest peace operations in its history— tasked with organising elections. In 1993, those elections restored the constitutional monarchy: Sihanouk was once again king of a devastated country that was, at last, beginning to rebuild.
From the ashes of the seventies and eighties emerged a Cambodia that, in barely a generation, went from hunger and war to sustained economic growth. Tourism —led by the millions of visitors who come to Angkor—, the textile industry and construction drove a remarkable recovery, and life expectancy and poverty improved considerably compared with that shattered country. A large share of the population is now under thirty: they were born after the horror and are looking ahead.
But the democratic transition promised by the 1991 agreements was left half-finished. The dominant figure of recent decades has been Hun Sen, who governed as prime minister from 1985 for almost thirty-eight years —one of the longest tenures in the world— until handing power in 2023 to his son Hun Manet. His Cambodian People's Party consolidated almost absolute power: the main opposition force was dissolved by the courts before the 2018 elections, and human rights organisations systematically denounce restrictions on the press and on dissent. Deforestation, corruption and a heavy economic dependence on China are the other shadows of the present.
Over all of this still hangs the memory of the genocide. Cambodia lives with a trauma that runs through families, with memorials such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek turned into places of mourning and teaching, and with the still unfinished task of teaching that history to the young. It is a country that carries both the glory of Angkor and the wound of the killing fields, and that is still working out, between those two memories, who it wants to be.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Phnom Penh was born from the fall of Angkor. When the centre of the Khmer kingdom shifted southeast, towards river and maritime trade, King Ponhea Yat established the capital here around 1434, at a privileged spot: the Chaktomuk, the 'place of the four faces', where the Mekong, the Bassac and the remarkable Tonlé Sap meet — the river that changes direction with the seasons. Legend attributes the name to Lady Penh, a woman who built a shrine on a hill — Wat Phnom, 'Penh's hill' — to keep some sacred images the river had brought her.
The city was capital on and off for centuries and was established as such under the French protectorate, which made it the urban jewel of Indochina: the French laid out its boulevards and built the Art Deco central market, the administrative buildings and the villas that earned it the nickname 'the pearl of Asia'. The Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda, from the monarchic period, remain its symbolic heart.
But Phnom Penh also carries the most terrible episode in Cambodian history. On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took the city and within hours emptied it completely, forcibly driving its nearly two million inhabitants into the countryside. For almost four years the capital became a ghost town. When Vietnam liberated it in 1979, it had to be repopulated from scratch.
No place in Cambodia explains better what the Khmer Rouge were than two sites in Phnom Penh. The first is Tuol Sleng, a former secondary school that the regime turned into its main interrogation and torture centre, the secret prison S-21. Around 15,000 people — men, women and children — passed through its classrooms-turned-cells, forced to sign false confessions before being killed. Only a handful survived. Today it is the Genocide Museum: the cells and instruments are preserved and, above all, the thousands of photographs the jailers themselves took of each victim, a gallery of faces that looks back at the visitor.
The second is Choeung Ek, about 15 kilometres from the city, the best known of the country's many 'killing fields': the place where S-21 prisoners were taken to be executed. The remains of thousands of people were found in its mass graves. A memorial stupa, a glass-sided tower, now holds more than five thousand of the victims' skulls, arranged as silent testimony.
These memorials are not just another attraction. They are visited with respect, in silence, because they are both tomb and evidence. They were central to the trial at the UN-backed tribunal that convicted the head of S-21, 'Duch', of crimes against humanity. For Cambodians, and for those who visit, they are the guarantee that what happened here will be neither denied nor forgotten.
The Phnom Penh you visit today is a city that reinvented itself from emptiness. Repopulated after 1979 by people returning from the countryside and by newcomers from other provinces, it went through difficult decades of post-war hardship until the peace of the 1990s and economic opening relaunched it. In just a few decades it has seen dizzying growth, with towers, traffic and an urban life that contrasts with the silence of the Khmer Rouge years.
The layers of Cambodian history live side by side in its streets: the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda with its floor of solid silver tiles; the National Museum, in Khmer style, which holds the finest collection of Angkorian sculpture; the French colonial buildings and the central market; and the so-called 'New Khmer' architecture of the 1960s, the optimistic modernism of the Sihanouk era, largely the work of architect Vann Molyvann.
The river is still the centre of life, as it was in 1434. The Sisowath Quay promenade, along the Tonlé Sap, fills up at sunset, and every November the city celebrates Bon Om Touk, the water festival marking the moment the Tonlé Sap River reverses its course, one of the most unusual hydrological phenomena on the planet and the basis of the country's extraordinary fishing wealth.
Upstream from the capital, on the bank of the Mekong, Kratie is a quiet provincial town that feels frozen in time, with French colonial houses facing the river and long sunsets over the water. Its fame, however, lies not in the town but in what swims in the river: it is the best place in the country to spot the Irrawaddy dolphin, a round-headed freshwater dolphin with a smiling look that survives on a stretch of the Mekong between Kratie and the Lao border.
These dolphins are critically endangered. Only a few dozen remain in the river, threatened for years by fishing nets, hunting and dam projects. For Cambodians they are an almost sacred animal, the subject of legends, and today the focus of a conservation effort that aims to protect them and has turned dolphin watching into the main source of income for riverside villages.
The Kratie region, on the middle Mekong, was also hit hard by the war: it was one of the first areas to fall under Khmer Rouge control, as early as the start of the 1970s, because of its strategic position by the river and the supply routes. Today that past coexists with slow, eco-minded tourism centred on the river, nature and the unhurried pace of life along the Mekong.
This central region is organised entirely around the Mekong, the great river that flows down from Tibet and crosses the country from north to south before reaching the sea through the Vietnamese delta. For Cambodia, the Mekong and its sibling the Tonlé Sap are not scenery: they are the very foundation of civilisation. It was mastery of water — floods, canals, fishing — that allowed the Khmers to feed the population that built Angkor, and it is still what feeds millions of Cambodians.
The key phenomenon is the great Tonlé Sap lake and the river of the same name, which reverses its flow every year: during the monsoon, the Mekong rises so much that it pushes water upstream and makes the lake expand to several times its size, flooding entire forests that become an unrivalled fish nursery. When the waters recede, they leave fertilised land and the fish that sustain the national diet. It is one of the most productive river systems in the world.
That is why the fate of this region is so closely tied to the river's. The large dams built upstream, in China and Laos, and climate change now threaten that age-old cycle, with direct consequences for Cambodian fishing and farming. Travelling the central Mekong — from Phnom Penh to Kratie — means journeying along the artery that has given the country life since before Angkor and on which its future depends.
Northeastern Cambodia, made up of the provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, looks very little like the country of rice paddies and temples. Here, close to the borders with Laos and Vietnam, the landscape turns into rolling hills, volcanic plateaus, dense jungle and waterfalls. For centuries it was a fringe region for the Khmer rulers of the valley, culturally closer to the mountains of inland Indochina than to the courts of Angkor or Phnom Penh.
What really sets it apart is its people. These highlands are home to most of Cambodia's Indigenous peoples, the hill tribes (known as Khmer Loeu, 'upland Khmer') who are not ethnically Khmer and who keep their own languages, animist beliefs and ways of life, very different from those of Buddhist lowland Cambodia.
For much of history, this remoteness kept them fairly sheltered. But in the 20th century the region paid dearly for its border location: part of the communist supply route ran through here during the Vietnam War, the area was bombed, and it was also one of the first strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, who recruited among the hill peoples. Today, that same remoteness is what draws travellers looking for a more natural, less visited Cambodia.
Mondulkiri is Cambodia's least populated province: a huge area of green hills, upland grasslands, forests and waterfalls, with a cooler climate than the rest of the country. Its capital, Sen Monorom, is little more than a quiet town that serves as a base for exploring the region.
The majority people here are not Khmer but Bunong (also spelled Phnong), the largest Indigenous group in the Cambodian highlands. The Bunong have traditionally lived from slash-and-burn farming and hunting, and from a very close bond with the elephant: for generations they captured and tamed elephants for work, and in their animist culture the forest and the spirits play a central role. Their language belongs to the Mon-Khmer family but is distinct from Khmer, and their traditional religion is not Buddhism but the worship of nature spirits.
In recent decades, Mondulkiri has become known for a different kind of tourism: ethical elephant sanctuaries, where instead of riding the animals you watch and walk alongside them in semi-freedom, a model that aims both to protect the elephants and to support Bunong communities. The other side of the present is the pressure on its forests: deforestation and plantations have pushed hard into the ancestral lands of these peoples, one of the country's biggest environmental conflicts.
In the far northeast of the country, bordering Laos and Vietnam, Ratanakiri is one of Cambodia's most remote and wild regions. Its name means 'mountain of precious stones', a reference to the gem deposits (sapphires, zircons) that have been mined from its volcanic soil. It is a land of thick jungle, rivers, waterfalls and ancient volcanoes.
Its natural gem is Yeak Laom lake, an almost perfectly round lake sitting in the crater of an extinct volcano, with clear water and surrounded by forest, and considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. Like Mondulkiri, Ratanakiri is home to several hill peoples (Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brao and others) who keep their own languages, traditional villages, cemeteries with wooden carvings, and an animist worldview far removed from Buddhist lowland Cambodia.
Ratanakiri's recent history is marked by war. Its border location made it a corridor of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and a target for bombing, and it was precisely in this remote area that Khmer Rouge cadres, Pol Pot among them, hid and built their movement in the 1960s, recruiting among the Indigenous peoples. The same remoteness that once sheltered the guerrillas now draws travellers looking for nature and ancestral cultures.
Banlung is the capital of Ratanakiri province and the natural starting point for exploring the northeast. It's a frontier town, dusty in the dry season and red from the volcanic earth of its roads, which grew mainly in the second half of the 20th century as the administrative and trading hub of a region that had barely been urbanised. In fact, the provincial capital moved to Banlung in the 1970s from the old town of Lumphat, which had been badly damaged by wartime bombing.
Banlung is where trips to the area's main sights are organised: the crater lake of Yeak Laom, a few kilometres away; the Katieng, Ka Chanh and Chaa Ong waterfalls; the rubber plantations, a legacy of the French colonial era that brought this crop to the region; and the villages of the Indigenous peoples further inland.
The town reflects both faces of today's northeast. On one side, it's the gateway to a growing nature and culture tourism. On the other, it's the centre from which the province's economic exploitation is run (logging, rubber, industrial plantations), putting pressure on the forests and lands of Indigenous communities. In Banlung, as in few other places, the Cambodia that wants to protect its last green frontiers meets the Cambodia that wants to exploit them.
What ties this whole region together is that it represents non-Khmer Cambodia, the Cambodia of the original mountain peoples. The country's Indigenous minorities are estimated at around a couple of hundred thousand people, concentrated mostly in Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, and they include some twenty different groups (Bunong, Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brao, Kachok and others), each with its own language and traditions. Most practise animist religions, farm in rotation, and hold land and forest communally rather than individually.
That difference is also the root of their vulnerability. In recent decades, the ancestral lands of these peoples have been handed out as economic concessions for rubber, cashew and other plantations, and hit by both legal and illegal logging. This has led to conflicts, displacement and a rapid loss of forest in what was once one of the most intact regions of Southeast Asia.
That's why the northeast offers travellers an experience unlike anything else in Cambodia: not great monuments, but a world of jungle, waterfalls and ancestral cultures that survive outside the national Khmer story. Travelling through it with respect, by supporting community tourism and remembering that you are visiting other people's homes, gives you a glimpse of the most diverse and fragile part of the country.
The name Siem Reap has a historical edge: according to the traditional reading, it means 'Siam defeated', a reference to the wars between Khmers and Siamese that shaped these centuries, although its exact origin is debated. For more than a hundred years, until 1907, this whole region — Siem Reap included, and with it the ruins of Angkor — was under Siamese control, and it only returned to Cambodia thanks to the Franco-Siamese treaty of that year.
Until the early 20th century, Siem Reap was little more than a handful of villages by the river. Its transformation began when the French, fascinated by Angkor, organised the restoration of the temples and opened the area to the first travellers: the legendary Grand Hotel d'Angkor opened its doors in 1932 to welcome the pioneers of tourism. The French Quarter and the old market still keep the colonial and Chinese architecture of that era.
After decades of war and isolation, Siem Reap was reborn with the peace of the 1990s and the inscription of Angkor on the World Heritage List. Today it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, the essential base for exploring the archaeological park, with its night markets, its Pub Street and accommodation ranging from backpacker to luxury. Everything revolves, as it did a thousand years ago, around the temples next door.
The Angkor Archaeological Park, inscribed by UNESCO in 1992, covers some 400 square kilometres and contains the remains of the successive capitals of the Khmer empire between the 9th and 15th centuries. It is not a single temple but an entire city: at its peak, greater Angkor may have been home to nearly a million people, which makes it, according to the latest studies based on remote sensing, the most extensive pre-industrial city known.
Its landmarks are world-famous. Angkor Wat, from the 12th century, the largest religious monument in the world and a national symbol. Angkor Thom, the walled city of Jayavarman VII, with the Bayon and its stone faces at the centre. Ta Prohm, the temple swallowed by the jungle, with silk-cotton tree roots embracing its walls, also famous from the movies. And dozens of less-visited complexes — Banteay Srei, Preah Khan, Neak Pean — scattered across the plain.
Much of what can be visited today is owed to the conservation work begun by the École française d'Extrême-Orient in the early 20th century and dramatically interrupted by the war and the Khmer Rouge, when looting and neglect threatened the site. Since the 1990s, an international cooperation effort coordinated by UNESCO has protected it. Angkor is not a dead ruin: it is still a sacred place where monks pray and Cambodians come on pilgrimage.
Some 120 kilometres northeast of Siem Reap, hidden in the jungle, lies Koh Ker, one of the empire's lost capitals. For a brief period, between 928 and 944, King Jayavarman IV moved the centre of Khmer power there, away from the Angkor region, in an episode of dynastic rivalry. In barely two decades a city rose with more than thirty temples and monuments.
Its most impressive work is Prasat Thom, a stepped sandstone pyramid about 36 metres high, very different from the usual Angkor style and closer to the temple-pyramids of other cultures: a seven-tiered artificial mountain rising above the forest. Inscriptions tell that more than ten thousand people lived here during the years Koh Ker was capital. When power returned to Angkor, the city was left to the jungle.
For decades Koh Ker was almost inaccessible: the area was mined and controlled by the last Khmer Rouge holdouts until well into the 1990s, and many of its sculptures were looted and sold on the international antiquities market — several have been repatriated in recent years. Cleared of mines and opened to the public, the site was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2023. Its remoteness keeps it far quieter than Angkor.
Cambodia's second city, Battambang is the capital of the country's most fertile rice-growing plain, the national 'rice bowl'. Its recent history is marked, like Siem Reap's, by long Siamese rule: Battambang belonged to Siam from the late 18th century and only returned to Cambodian hands with the 1907 treaty. During that century the province was governed by a dynasty of local lords serving Bangkok.
Under the French protectorate, Battambang flourished as a commercial and agricultural centre, and that is where its charm comes from: a town centre on the banks of the Sangker River with one of the best collections of French colonial architecture in the country, Chinese-style shophouses and the unhurried feel of a provincial town that tourism has not overwhelmed.
In the surrounding area, history becomes both darker and older. There are the rural pre-Angkorian and Angkorian temples such as Wat Banan and Ek Phnom; the famous 'bamboo train' (norry), handmade platforms that ran along the old tracks; and also Phnom Sampeau, a hill with caves the Khmer Rouge used as an execution site, now turned into a memorial. Battambang thus sums up Cambodia's layers: Khmer temples, the French imprint and the wound of the genocide, all within a few kilometres.
This whole region shares a trait that goes beyond the temples: it is the borderland with Thailand, and for that reason it was for centuries a disputed zone and, in the 20th century, the last theatre of the war. Its proximity to Siam explains why Battambang, Siem Reap and their surroundings changed hands again and again between Bangkok and Phnom Penh.
In the 1970s and 1980s, that frontier position gave it a tragic role. When Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the remnants of Pol Pot's regime retreated precisely to this strip of the northwest, along the Thai border, from where they kept fighting as a guerrilla force for more than a decade. The area was left strewn with anti-personnel mines — Cambodia is still one of the most heavily mined countries in the world — and demining of these fields continues today.
Lasting peace came late: it was in this region, in Anlong Veng and its surroundings, that the last Khmer Rouge surrendered and where Pol Pot died in 1998. Travelling through the northwest therefore means crossing both the summit of the Khmer empire and its most recent and painful chapter, joined by the same border geography.
During the French protectorate, Kampot was Cambodia's main seaport, before Sihanoukville was built. From that era it keeps a quiet town centre on the riverbank, with remarkable French colonial architecture of shophouses and administrative buildings that give it a still, melancholy air.
Its worldwide fame, however, lies in a peppercorn. Kampot pepper is considered one of the finest on the planet: French gourmets discovered it in the 19th century and its cultivation became a major industry which, at its colonial peak, exported thousands of tonnes a year from plantations supported by hundreds of thousands of posts. The war and the Khmer Rouge — who wiped out commercial agriculture — nearly killed it off, but it has made a comeback since the 2000s and is now protected by a geographical indication that guarantees its origin.
In the mountains overlooking Kampot lies Bokor National Park, another witness to history: in the 1920s the French built a hill station there, a summer retreat with a hotel-casino, church and villas where the colonial elite escaped the heat. Abandoned during the wars and wrapped in mist, the 'ghost town' of Bokor is today an eerie and much-photographed landscape, now in the midst of new tourist development.
Kep — Kep-sur-Mer to the French — was founded as a seaside resort in 1908, the first in Cambodia. During the protectorate and, above all, in the golden years of the Sihanouk era in the 1950s and 1960s, it became the fashionable summer destination of the Cambodian elite: ministers, artists and wealthy families built modernist seafront villas here, in the 'New Khmer' style, to enjoy the beach and the seafood.
The civil war and the Khmer Rouge brought that splendour to a brutal end. Pol Pot's regime, which hated anything that smacked of the bourgeoisie and Western modernity, looted and destroyed Kep's villas; many were reduced to concrete shells swallowed by vegetation, which still dot the town today like ghostly ruins of an interrupted paradise.
Kep came back slowly, with a quieter, more family-oriented profile than other places on the coast. Its emblem is the crab market, where the famous blue crabs caught in the waters just offshore are sold, served with the Kampot pepper grown next door: one of the country's most celebrated dishes. Off the coast, little Rabbit Island (Koh Tonsay) offers simple beaches and a lazy pace.
Unlike Kampot or Kep, Sihanoukville is a young city, a direct offspring of independence. Cambodia, newly freed from France in 1953, needed its own deep-water port so as not to depend on the Vietnamese port of Saigon, controlled by others. So in the late 1950s a modern port was built from scratch on the Gulf of Thailand, and the city that grew up around it was named after the architect of independence: Sihanoukville, in honour of Norodom Sihanouk.
During the Sihanouk era it was the showcase of national progress, and later the country's main commercial port, its outlet to the sea. With peace and opening up, its beaches made it Cambodia's big sun-and-backpacker destination, the departure point for the islands.
Over the last decade, Sihanoukville has undergone a transformation as fast as it was controversial: a flood of Chinese investment put up dozens of casinos, towers and complexes, many of them linked to gambling, which completely changed the face of the city in just a few years, with a boom and then a bust in the sector that left many buildings half-finished. Today it is the most visible example of the deep mark the Chinese economy has left on 21st-century Cambodia.
Off the coast of Sihanoukville, in the Gulf of Thailand, lies an archipelago of islands that for centuries were little more than fishing grounds with a sparse population. Koh Rong, the largest, and its neighbour Koh Rong Samloem stayed on the sidelines of the great Khmer story: with no temples or big cities, people lived off fishing and the jungle, and very few of them lived there at all.
It was tourism, well into the 21st century, that put them on the map. Their white-sand beaches and turquoise waters, among the best in Southeast Asia, drew backpackers first and then a much wider range of visitors. Koh Rong became famous for its lively atmosphere and beach life, and for a natural phenomenon that fascinates visitors: bioluminescent plankton, which makes the water sparkle with blue flashes when you move it at night.
Being islands 'without' ancient history is now their great appeal, but also their challenge. Tourism has arrived fast and raises the same questions as along the rest of the coast: how to grow without wrecking the reefs, the jungle and the simple life of the fishing communities who lived on these islands long before the first traveller arrived.
If Koh Rong is the island of buzz, Koh Rong Samloem is the island of silence. Smaller and less populated, it keeps an unhurried pace that has made it a refuge for people who really want to switch off. Its best-known bay, Saracen Bay, is a long crescent of white sand and clear water dotted with simple bungalows by the sea, with no roads and no big resorts.
Like the rest of the archipelago, Koh Rong Samloem has almost no written history before tourism: it was a place of fishermen and forest, with few people and nature that stayed largely untouched. Today it still has nearly unspoilt coves, a small colonial-era lighthouse at its southern tip, and coral reefs that make it popular with divers and snorkellers.
Together, Koh Rong and Koh Rong Samloem show the brightest, most carefree side of a country whose recent history was the exact opposite. On these islands, where life follows the rhythm of the tides and not that of empires or wars, many travellers find some rest after touring the temples of Angkor and the memorials of Phnom Penh. They are the calm counterpoint to an intense Cambodia.
Hardly anything that happened to Cambodia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
