Phnom Penh is a city that can't be summed up in a postcard. Cambodia's capital, at the confluence of three rivers, it mixes the golden elegance of the Royal Palace, the heritage of the French colonial era that earned it the nickname 'pearl of Asia', the bustle of its markets and a modernity that is growing at full speed. It is a vibrant, hot city full of life, with a lively riverfront, Buddhist temples, charming cafés and an energy that draws you in. But above all, it is the key to understanding Cambodia, with its lights and its shadows.
Because Phnom Penh also holds the memory of the darkest chapter in the country's history: the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. Visiting the former Tuol Sleng detention centre (S-21) and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields is a harrowing experience, but it is an essential act of respect and understanding: it helps you grasp what the Cambodian people suffered and appreciate their resilience. This guide treats these places with the restraint and rigour they deserve.
Here you'll find how to plan your visit: what to see in the city, how to get around, how much admission costs, where to eat well and cheaply, and how to get in and out to the rest of the country. Phnom Penh rewards travellers who give it time: what seems chaotic at first reveals itself as a city of enormous humanity and warmth. Its full history, from the Khmer empire to the present, including a serious look at the years of terror, is on our history page.
According to legend, Phnom Penh was born when an old woman named Penh found some Buddha images in the river and had a hill (phnom) and a temple built to keep them: hence 'Phnom Penh', 'Penh's hill'. The city gained importance in the 15th century, when the Khmer court moved its capital here after the decline of Angkor, taking advantage of its strategic position at the meeting of the rivers for trade. It was the capital on and off, and permanently from the mid-19th century, when Cambodia became a French protectorate (1863) and the French turned it into an elegant colonial city. After independence in 1953, it enjoyed a golden age under King Norodom Sihanouk. But in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took the city and emptied it completely, deporting its entire population to the countryside at the start of a regime that would cause the deaths of around 1,7 to 2 million Cambodians. After the fall of the regime in 1979 and difficult years, Phnom Penh was reborn and today is once again a thriving capital. Its full history, told in detail and with restraint, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The country's river axis: the capital, Phnom Penh, at the confluence of the great rivers, and the lands of the middle Mekong where the last freshwater dolphins survive.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The city's name holds a charming legend. The story goes that in the late 14th century, a wealthy and devout old woman named Penh (Daun Penh, 'Grandmother Penh') found a tree trunk floating in the river after a flood, with four Buddha images and one bronze one inside it. Seeing it as a sacred sign, she had an artificial hill built and, on its summit, a temple to keep the statues safe. That hill was Lady Penh's 'Phnom' (mountain, in Khmer): hence 'Phnom Penh', Penh's hill. The temple, today Wat Phnom, still stands and symbolically marks the city's birthplace.
Beyond the myth, Phnom Penh's location is no accident: it sits at an exceptional crossroads of waterways, where the Tonlé Sap river flows into the Mekong and the Bassac river also branches off from it. This is the so-called 'Chaktomuk', 'the four faces', a strategic river junction for trade and control of the territory, in the heart of the fertile Mekong plain.
For centuries, however, the centre of Cambodian power was at Angkor, to the north-west. Phnom Penh only came to the fore when that great empire went into decline and the Khmer court needed a new home that was safer and better connected to the southern trade routes.
After Angkor was sacked by the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1431 and the old empire weakened, the Khmer court moved its capital south. Phnom Penh became the royal capital for the first time in the mid-15th century, making the most of its position at the confluence of the rivers for trade with China and the rest of the region. It was an intermittent period: the capital moved several times over the following centuries (Lovek, Oudong), while an increasingly weak Cambodia was caught between the pressure of its two powerful neighbours, Siam (Thailand) to the west and Vietnam to the east, who fought for control of it.
That long decline of the kingdom changed course in the 19th century with the arrival of a new power. In 1863, King Norodom accepted a French protectorate over Cambodia, seeking protection from the Siamese and the Vietnamese. The French set up their administration and, in 1866, made Phnom Penh the country's stable and permanent capital. From then on, they transformed the city: they laid out wide boulevards and built administrative buildings, markets —such as the splendid art deco Central Market—, villas and the Royal Palace itself in its current form. The city grew and became more beautiful until it earned the nickname 'the pearl of Asia'.
Under the protectorate, Phnom Penh became an elegant colonial capital, with a blend of Khmer and French architecture that still defines its historic centre. Cambodia regained its independence peacefully in 1953, under the leadership of Norodom Sihanouk, and during the fifties and sixties the city enjoyed a golden age of prosperity, culture and modernity, with its own architectural style (the 'New Khmer') that put it at the forefront of the region.
Phnom Penh's golden age shattered in the seventies, dragged down by the Vietnam War. Although Cambodia tried to stay neutral, the conflict spilled over its borders: North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops used the east of the country as a rear base, and the United States responded with a devastating secret bombing campaign over Cambodian territory, which killed tens of thousands of people and drove masses of peasants into the cities. In 1970, a coup d'état overthrew Prince Sihanouk and set up a pro-American republic, the Khmer Republic, led by Lon Nol.
Amid that chaos a radical communist guerrilla movement grew: the Khmer Rouge, led by a Paris-educated teacher whose nom de guerre would be Pol Pot. Backed by an impoverished peasantry and exploiting anger at the bombing and the corrupt government, the Khmer Rouge advanced and encircled the capital during a long and bloody civil war. Phnom Penh filled with refugees fleeing the countryside, and its population soared while the city was besieged and shelled.
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. At first, many exhausted residents welcomed them with relief, believing they were bringing an end to the war. But within hours one of the most atrocious tragedies of the 20th century began: the new authorities ordered the total and immediate evacuation of the city. On the pretext of a supposedly imminent bombing raid, they forced the entire population —including the sick, pulled out of hospitals— to march on foot to the countryside. Within a few days, the capital of almost two million people had become a ghost town.
This section deals with extremely grave events. They are approached with the restraint and rigour that respect for the victims demands. On taking power, the Khmer Rouge renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and proclaimed 'Year Zero': the starting point of a radical agrarian communist utopia that sought to rebuild society from nothing. To do so they abolished money, private property, markets, schools, religion and even the traditional family; they emptied the cities and forced the whole population to work in the countryside, in huge agricultural cooperatives, under a regime of slave labour, hunger and terror.
The regime persecuted and eliminated those it considered 'enemies' or incompatible with its project: intellectuals, professionals, officials of the previous regime, Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities (such as the Muslim Cham and the Vietnamese) and, with growing paranoia, its own cadres. Wearing glasses, speaking a foreign language or having hands that weren't calloused enough was enough to fall under suspicion. In Phnom Penh, the regime set up the secret prison S-21 (today the Tuol Sleng museum) in a former school, run by commander Kaing Guek Eav, alias 'Duch': thousands of detainees passed through it, where they were interrogated, tortured to extract 'confessions' and then taken away to be executed at sites such as Choeung Ek. Almost no one survived.
In three years, eight months and twenty days, an estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians died —about a quarter of the population— from execution, hunger, disease and exhaustion. It is one of the largest genocides of the 20th century in proportion to the total population. The Tuol Sleng and Killing Fields memorials in Phnom Penh preserve that memory today and are places of national mourning.
The Khmer Rouge regime fell through its own delusion and an external conflict. Its incursions and massacres along the border with Vietnam provoked a response from Hanoi: in late December 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and, on 7 January 1979, took a deserted and ruined Phnom Penh, putting an end to the nightmare. A new Vietnamese-backed government was installed, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, and survivors gradually began returning to an emptied city, with no services, no money and hardly any population.
The eighties were years of painful reconstruction and simmering war: the Khmer Rouge and other factions kept fighting from the jungle and the Thai border, while the country remained isolated and impoverished. Peace did not truly arrive until the 1991 Paris Agreements and the UN intervention, which organised elections in 1993 and restored the constitutional monarchy with Norodom Sihanouk once again as king. Only then could Phnom Penh really begin to recover.
Since then, the capital has bounced back strongly. Today it is a thriving city in full transformation, with new towers, frantic traffic, a growing middle class, an ever-richer scene of cafés, art and food, and tourism that is rediscovering its colonial charm and its energy. But Phnom Penh does not forget: the glitter of the Royal Palace and modernity sit naturally alongside the painful memory of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. That ability to look its most terrible past in the eye and, at the same time, move forward with dignity and warmth is perhaps the most admirable thing about this city and the whole Cambodian people. For the traveller, understanding it means understanding all of Cambodia.
