Phnom Penh

On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and emptied it. Within 48 hours, the entire population of two million was forced into the countryside at gunpoint. Hospitals were evacuated mid-surgery. Patients wheeled their own IV drips down highways. The regime declared it 'Year Zero' and attempted to erase urban civilization entirely—abolishing money, closing schools, and converting the city into a ghost town. When Vietnamese forces liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979, they found a capital inhabited by a few thousand cadres. The population of Cambodia had been reduced by an estimated 1.5 to 2 million—roughly 25% of the total—through execution, starvation, and forced labor.

Phnom Penh exists because four rivers converge here. The Tonlé Sap, Mekong, and Bassac rivers meet at the Chaktomuk ('Four Faces'), creating a hydrological junction that reverses flow seasonally: during monsoon, the Mekong's floodwaters push the Tonlé Sap backwards, filling Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake. This annual reversal—one of the world's most dramatic hydrological events—supported the Khmer Empire's rice surplus that built Angkor. Legend says a woman named Penh found four Buddha statues floating in the river and built a hill (phnom) to house them; the city grew around that hill.

The French made Phnom Penh the capital of their Cambodian protectorate in 1865, building a colonial city of boulevards, villas, and the Royal Palace. Independence in 1953 under King Sihanouk brought modernist architecture—Vann Molyvann's New Khmer Architecture combined Angkorian motifs with Corbusian forms, producing buildings now recognized as masterworks of tropical modernism. The Khmer Rouge years (1975–1979) and the subsequent civil conflict left the city depopulated and its institutions destroyed. Tuol Sleng (Security Prison 21), a former high school converted into a torture center where an estimated 18,000 people were killed, is now a genocide museum.

Phnom Penh's population has recovered to approximately 2.3 million, with Cambodia's GDP growing at 6–7% annually in recent decades. The garment industry employs over 700,000 workers nationally, many of them in factories surrounding the capital. Chinese investment has transformed the skyline—massive development projects are reshaping the riverfront—while also raising concerns about sovereignty and debt dependency. The city's trajectory from Year Zero to construction boom in under fifty years is one of the most extreme urban recoveries in modern history, though the speed of development has outpaced infrastructure, creating flooding, traffic congestion, and displacement of communities that rebuilt from nothing.