Cambodia: Temples, Tragedy, and Triumph in the Heart of Southeast Asia

Introduction

There are places in the world that reach out and take hold of a traveler, places that refuse to let go long after the journey has ended. Cambodia is one such place. Squeezed between Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam on the Southeast Asian mainland, this small nation of roughly seventeen million people carries within it one of the most extraordinary stories in all of human civilization: the rise of the greatest empire Asia has ever known, a centuries-long decline into obscurity, the horror of one of the twentieth century's worst genocides, and then, against every reasonable expectation, a recovery so tenacious and so full of life that it leaves visitors astonished and moved in equal measure.

To come to Cambodia is to stand before Angkor Wat at sunrise and watch the five lotus-bud towers rise from the mist above their reflection pool, shimmering in the early light like a vision from another world. It is to understand, looking at those towers, that you are standing before the largest religious monument ever constructed by human hands anywhere on Earth, a temple complex so vast and so intricately carved that even the most seasoned travelers find themselves reaching for superlatives that fall short. The Khmer Empire that built Angkor was not merely a great civilization but arguably the greatest pre-industrial civilization in the world, a society that at its twelfth-century peak sustained a capital city of perhaps one million people at a time when London held perhaps thirty thousand.

But Cambodia is also Tuol Sleng, the former high school in Phnom Penh where the Khmer Rouge ran their most feared interrogation and torture center, processing seventeen thousand human beings through its barbed-wire gates between 1975 and 1979, of whom fewer than a dozen survived. It is Choeung Ek, twelve kilometers from the capital, where the bones of thousands still emerge from the earth after every rain, where a towering stupa contains the skulls of those who died there, and where visitors walk in near-total silence past the mass graves, struggling to absorb a horror that the mind resists accepting. These dark tourism sites are among the most haunting in all of Asia, places that demand to be visited, that demand to be understood, even as they resist comprehension.

Cambodia is, too, the extraordinary resilience of the Khmer people themselves, a population that lost between a quarter and a third of its total numbers in four years of systematic murder and starvation, and yet within a generation rebuilt a culture, a tourism industry, a civil society, and a sense of national identity rooted in the ancient glories of Angkor. The warm, open-hearted character of Cambodians is not naive innocence but something far more remarkable: a conscious choice to look forward, to engage with the world, to welcome strangers with a generosity that has not been broken by suffering that would have destroyed most societies entirely.

Cambodia is the Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, a body of water so extraordinary in its behavior that it actually reverses the direction of its outflow river for half the year, swelling from roughly twenty-five hundred square kilometers in the dry season to as much as sixteen thousand square kilometers during the monsoon, flooding the surrounding forest and creating the most productive freshwater fishery on Earth. The fish that breed in the Tonle Sap's flooded forests provide the primary source of protein for most Cambodians, and the floating villages that rise and fall with the lake's waters offer one of the most remarkable spectacles of human adaptation anywhere in the world.

Cambodia is the pepper plantations of Kampot, where the world's most prestigious peppercorns grow on climbing vines in the shadow of jungle-covered hills, where a charming river town preserves French colonial architecture along quiet streets, and where the nearby Bokor Hill Station — an abandoned French resort at the edge of a cliff shrouded in cloud — is among the most atmospheric and melancholy places in all of Southeast Asia. Cambodia is the beaches of Koh Rong, where white sand and turquoise water offer a beauty that rivals anything in Thailand or the Philippines but still feels relatively undiscovered. Cambodia is Sambor Prei Kuk, the pre-Angkor city buried in jungle that reveals the origins of Khmer civilization centuries before Angkor Wat was imagined.