Penh's hill city that replaced Angkor as capital
Phnom Penh is Cambodia's capital and primate city since 1865, though founded in 1372 and first serving as capital from 1434 after Angkor Thom fell until 1497. The name points to Wat Phnom—'Penh's hill'—or older Funan echoes. Former royal titles called it the city of Brahma's faces.
Kilns unearthed at Choeung Ek in the 2000s suggest people were making pottery here by the fifth century AD, making it one of Cambodia's earliest known kiln centres. The founding legend, first written down a century later, tells of a widow named Penh gathering firewood at Chaktomuk in 1372, when the Khmer capital still stood at Angkor 350 kilometres north. She pulled a koki tree from the river after a storm and found four Buddha statues and a Vishnu figure inside. Taking it as a divine sign, she heaped up a mound beside the river's western shore and crowned it with a shrine, later called Wat Phnom.
After Siam sacked Angkor Thom, King Ponhea Yat moved the court here in the 1430s and gave it a long ceremonial name shortened to Krong Chaktomuk, city of four faces. Succession feuds drove later kings to Longvek, Oudong and other seats, and the city was left without a monarch for about 360 years; the rebel king Kaev Hua II used it as a stronghold in 1673 and 1674. Japanese migrants settled on the outskirts in the seventeenth century, and a Portuguese trading community lasted until that century too. The French restored it as capital in 1865.
After independence, French colonial, New Khmer and Art Deco buildings earned it the title Pearl of Asia. War refugees swelled the population to 2 to 3 million by 1975, and after a year-long siege and shelling, the Khmer Rouge took the city on 17 April 1975 and marched everyone out into forced labour and genocide. It stayed nearly empty until Vietnamese-backed forces arrived in 1979. Aid from France, Australia and Japan and loans from the Asian Development Bank and World Bank restored water and roads, and the 1998 census counted 862,000 people.
Encircled by Kandal province where the Tonle Sap, Mekong and Bassac meet, the autonomous municipality covers about 678 square kilometres in 14 khans and held about 2.13 million people in 2019, around 95 percent Khmer and 4 percent Cham. It has 12 National Assembly seats, the largest constituency, and its economy leans on garments, trade, property and tourism.
Source: Phnom Penh
