First recorded a century after it is said to have taken place, the legend of the founding of Phnom Penh tells of a local woman,
Penh (commonly referred to as
Daun Penh (
Grandmother Penh/
Old Lady Penh) in
Khmer),
living at the chaktomuk, the future Phnom Penh. It was the late 14th
century and the Khmer capital was still at Angkor near Siem Reap 350 km
(220 mi) to the west. Gathering firewood along the banks of the river,
Lady Penh spied a floating koki tree in the river and fished it from the
water. Inside the tree she found four Buddha statues and one of Vishnu
(the numbers vary on different tellings.)
The discovery was taken as a divine blessing, and to some a sign that
the Khmer capital was to be brought to Phnom Penh from Angkor. To house
the new found sacred objects, Penh raised a small hill on the west bank
of the Tonle Sap River and crowned it with a shrine, now known as Wat
Phnom at the north end of central Phnom Penh. 'Phnom' is Khmer for
'hill' and Penh's hill took on the name of the founder, i.e. Phnom Duan
Penh, and the area around it became known after the hill - Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh first became the capital of Cambodia after
Ponhea Yat, king of the
Khmer Empire, moved the capital from
Angkor Thom after it was captured and destroyed by
Siam a few years earlier. There is a
stupa behind Wat Phnom that house the remains of Ponhea Yat and the royal family as well as the remaining
Buddhist statues from the Angkorean era. In the 17th century,
Japanese immigrants also settled on the outskirts of present-day Phnom Penh.
[8] A small
Portuguese community survived in Phnom Penh until the 17th century, undertaking commercial and religious activity in the country.
Phnom Penh remained the royal capital for 73 years—from 1432 to 1505.
It was abandoned for 360 years—from 1505 to 1865—by subsequent kings
due to internal fighting between the royal
pretenders. Later kings moved the capital several times and established their royal capitals at various locations in Tuol Basan (
Srey Santhor),
Pursat,
Longvek, Lavear Em and
Oudong.
It was not until 1866, under the reign of King
Norodom I (1860–1904) the eldest son of King
Ang Duong,
who ruled on behalf of Siam, that Phnom Penh became the permanent seat
of government and capital of Cambodia, and also where the current
Royal Palace was built. Beginning in 1870, the
French Colonialists
turned a riverside village into a city where they built hotels,
schools, prisons, barracks, banks, public works offices, telegraph
offices, law courts, and health services buildings. In 1872, the first
glimpse of a modern city took shape when the colonial administration
employed the services of a French contractor Le Faucheur, to construct
the first 300 concrete houses for sale and rental to the
Chinese traders.
By the 1920s, Phnom Penh was known as the
Pearl of Asia, and over the next four decades Phnom Penh continued to experience rapid growth with the building of railways to
Sihanoukville and Pochentong International Airport (now
Phnom Penh International Airport). Phnom Penh's infrastructure saw major modernisation under the rule of
Sihanouk.
[9]
During the
Vietnam War, Cambodia was used as a base by the
North Vietnamese Army and the
Viet Cong,
and thousands of refugees from across the country flooded the city to
escape the fighting between their own government troops, the NVA/NLF,
the
South Vietnamese and its allies, and the
Khmer Rouge. By 1975, the population was 2-3 million, the bulk of whom were refugees from the fighting.
[10] The Khmer Rouge cut off supplies to the city for more than a year before it fell on April 17, 1975.
[6]
Reports from journalists stated that the Khmer Rouge shelling "tortured
the capital almost continuously," inflicting "random death and
mutilation" on millions of trapped civilians.
[11] The Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the entire city after taking it, in what has been described as a
death march:
Francois Ponchaud wrote that "I shall never forget one cripple who had
neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm,
or a weeping father carrying his ten-year old daughter wrapped in a
sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot
dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but
skin";
[12]
John Swain recalled that the Khmer Rouge were "tipping out patients
from the hospitals like garbage into the streets....In five years of
war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen."
[13]
All of its residents, including the wealthy and educated, were
evacuated from the city and forced to do difficult labour on rural farms
as "
new people".
[14] Tuol Sleng High School was taken over by
Pol Pot's forces and was turned into the
S-21
prison camp, where people were detained and tortured. Pol Pot sought a
return to an agrarian economy and therefore killed many people perceived
as educated, "lazy", or political enemies. Many others starved to death
as a result of failure of the agrarian society and the sale of
Cambodia's rice to China in exchange for bullets and weaponry. The
former high school is now the
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where Khmer Rouge torture devices and photos of their victims are displayed. Choeung Ek (
The Killing Fields),
15 kilometers (9 mi) away, where the Khmer Rouge marched prisoners from
Tuol Sleng to be murdered and buried in shallow pits, is also now a
memorial to those who were killed by the regime.
The
Khmer Rouge were driven out of Phnom Penh by the
Vietnamese in 1979,
[15]
and people began to return to the city. Vietnam is historically a state
with which Cambodia has had many conflicts, therefore this liberation
was and is viewed with mixed emotions by the Cambodians. A period of
reconstruction began, spurred by the continuing stability of government,
attracting new foreign investment and aid by countries including
France, Australia, and Japan. Loans were made from the
Asian Development Bank and the
World Bank to reinstate a clean water supply, roads and other infrastructure. The 1998 Census put Phnom Penh's population at 862,000;
[16] and the 2008 census was 1.3 million.
