What Phnom Penh keeps, and what it has chosen to remember

Phnom Penh sits at the point where the Tonle Sap, Mekong and Bassac rivers meet, a confluence significant enough that Cambodian legend places the city's founding here in the fourteenth century, and the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda that face the river today continue a line of Cambodian monarchy that, despite considerable interruption, still exists. It is a genuinely handsome river city. It is also a city that, within a few kilometres of the palace, holds two of the more direct memorials to mass atrocity anywhere in the world, and any honest account of Phnom Penh has to include both halves.

A school, repurposed

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a communist movement under Pol Pot, took control of Cambodia and immediately emptied its cities, forcing the entire urban population, Phnom Penh's included, into the countryside to work as agricultural labour under a programme intended to remake Cambodian society entirely from the ground up. Money, private property, religion and most forms of education were abolished. Over the following three years and eight months, an estimated one and a half to two million people, out of a national population of around seven or eight million, died from execution, starvation, disease and forced labour, a toll historians continue to refine but which is not seriously disputed in its broad scale.

Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek

A former secondary school in central Phnom Penh, requisitioned by the regime and known by the code name S-21, became its main interrogation and detention centre; an estimated fourteen thousand or more people were held there before being taken, in most cases, to Choeung Ek, a site on the city's outskirts now known simply as one of the "killing fields", for execution. Both sites operate today as memorials rather than working institutions: Tuol Sleng as the Genocide Museum, its classrooms largely left as they were found, and Choeung Ek as a memorial park centred on a stupa that holds, behind glass, thousands of recovered skulls, arranged as a form of remembrance rather than display for its own sake. Cambodia's museums present this history plainly, with testimony from survivors and former staff, and without the kind of narrative smoothing that can happen when a country would rather move past its own worst period than document it.

Accountability, slowly

The Khmer Rouge regime ended in January 1979, when Vietnamese forces invaded and removed it from power, though the movement itself continued a low-level insurgency from remote areas for close to two more decades. Formal legal accountability came later still: a hybrid Cambodian-United Nations tribunal, established in 2006, ultimately convicted a small number of senior Khmer Rouge leaders, including the head of S-21, of crimes against humanity, decades after the events themselves and after Pol Pot's own death in 1998 had placed him permanently beyond trial.

A city that also, simply, carried on

It would be a disservice to Phnom Penh to present it only through its worst years. The city has, over the decades since 1979, rebuilt itself into a genuinely functioning capital, its riverside promenade lined with restaurants and evening walkers, its central market, a striking Art Deco building from the French colonial period, still trading much as markets in Southeast Asian capitals generally do. Visitors who spend a full day or two here, rather than treating it purely as an overnight stop between the airport and Siem Reap, tend to come away with a fuller picture: a city that holds its history openly, without pretending it did not happen, while also getting on, visibly and unremarkably, with the ordinary business of being a capital.

Visiting with the right register

Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are not difficult to include on an itinerary logistically; they are difficult, appropriately, in a different sense, and worth visiting with some prior reading rather than none. Guides here are typically measured and factual rather than sensational, and the sites themselves are treated by Cambodians less as tourist attractions than as a form of ongoing public memory, a choice worth respecting by visiting quietly and without expecting, or requesting, more than the sites themselves offer.