Rainy season has started, and the city’s not wearing it well. Water washes off newly paved streets and into drainage that no longer copes. It coughs up the deluge, and the streets fill quickly with water stained by excrement, oil and mud.
Phnom Penh has always been subject to flooding. Built on a fragile wetland at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers, the city knows water as both its life force and its greatest threat. Phnom Penh’s original architects – the country’s French colonial masters – understood the complex hydrology of the site and compensated with a network of canals and drains flowing into the lakes and ponds that caught the rivers’ overspill. But with development comes concrete, and in recent years some of the canals have been filled, as have the lakes. The floods, I’m told, are getting worse.
In colder climes rain can be unremittingly grim – a reason to stay in bed – but in the tropics it carries the effervescence of spring. I have been in Cambodia for half a year now, working for newspapers here and around the region, and after a long impossibly hot dry season, when only the flies are dim-witted enough to move at haste, the rain is welcomed, despite the floods.
Water animates Cambodia: it gave the ancient Angkorian culture riches enough to conquer Southeast Asia, and today still, as clouds ink out the sun, the countryside comes alive. Soon the Mekong will become so bloated its sheer weight will force the smaller Tonle Sap to reverse its flow and return to whence it came, the Boeng Tonle Sap – Southeast Asia’s largest lake. As the river reverses, the lake floods land bleached by months of fierce sun, returning it to a fertile state when the waters recede.
But in the rain Phnom Penh struggles. The city once known as the Pearl of Asia and the Paris of the East, because of its orderly tree-lined avenues and French colonial architecture, is still unquestionably charming. Situated as it is on the river, the city was built on a low-rise scale that makes it seem more human than its regional neighbours, while the frangipanis and flame trees that line the streets give off a gloriously pungent tropical fragrance. But the growing slums and decrepit decaying colonial villas, with peeling paint and caved-in roofs, betray the tragedy and horror of the country’s recent past and the privations and poverty of the present.
Until it was caught up in the conflagration engulfing neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia had enjoyed relative peace and prosperity after gaining independence in 1953. But between 1969 and 1973 the US dropped more than half a million tonnes of high explosives on eastern Cambodia: more than three times the quantity dropped on Japan during the Second World War. Out of that inferno emerged the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, who defeated the American-backed government in 1975. When they entered Phnom Penh, French missionary François Ponchaud said the soldiers marched silently through the city as if it were a forest. ‘I had a sinking sensation that a slab of lead had suddenly fallen onto the city,’ he later wrote.
For the Khmer Rouge leadership, these boys and girls from the country, who didn’t know what money was and had never seen a car, were the purest, most authentic expression of the Khmer gene pool – carrying on their worn, expressionless faces an almost primal virtuosity. They were to be the mould into which Khmer society would be pressed. The soldiers ate toothpaste and drank from toilet bowls, thinking them wells; some tried to drink from cans of motor oil. They refused to eat from tin cans, threw money to the waters of the Mekong, and stripped vehicles of their tyres to make rubber sandals. At the airport they pulled bombers apart with their bare hands. ‘They would have eaten them if they could,’ one resident wrote.
For the soldiers, the city dwellers were the enemy: the vile bourgeoisie, who had lived in comfort and disinterest while the rural population suffered under American bombs and fought against the ‘imperialists and reactionaries’. The city itself was despised. ‘The city is bad because there is money in the city,’ a Khmer Rouge cadre told Ponchaud. ‘People can be reformed, but not cities.’
After a brutal five-year civil war in which half a million people died and tremendous atrocities were committed by both sides, the fall of Phnom Penh was marked not by mass killings – that came later – but a forced exodus. On the pretext the city was to be bombed, the soldiers ordered the residents to leave, and no one was spared. Hospitals were emptied. The sick, crippled, elderly and infirm joined the mass of humanity marching out into the countryside in the ghastly April heat. Two and a half million people were expelled with no more than a few hours’ notice. The cortege would become a mosaic of misery and death, and the empty capital was left to decay: boulevards were dug up by the soldiers and put to use as gardens; the jungle began to reclaim abandoned villas, which were used to house animals. The city – like the people – still bears the scars of this period and of the abject poverty and intermittent warfare of the decades that followed the Vietnamese victory over the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
When more than a fifth of a population perishes, a part of everyone is dead. It’s impossible to experience Phnom Penh and not feel the brooding weight of the recent past: here the nightmare of history is keenly felt.
But if there is one place in the city that seems removed, it is Independence Monument. The imposing ochre monolith at the intersection of two major boulevards stands serenely, seemingly untouched by the chaos that Cambodia has witnessed since the monument was completed in 1960. Adorned with a profusion of nagas, the protective serpents of Hindu mythology, the structure pays homage to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, as well as to ’the jewel of Khmer architecture’, the Angkorian temple at Banteay Srei. Designed by Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann, Independence Monument is an example of what’s become known as New Khmer Architecture: a unique synthesis of post-war European modernism and Angkorian vernacular.
Vann, the first Cambodian architect to be trained in Europe, was the leading figure in this short-lived movement, which emerged in the years following independence and expired with the onset of war. In a kind of Asian Bauhaus, the designers and architects of this period worked together in an attempt to adapt international styles to the heat and humidity of their homes.
Patronized by his monarch, King Sihanouk, Vann spearheaded a campaign of urban development that was the envy of Asia. From universities to sports facilities, the architect created more than a hundred public projects throughout Cambodia, including the 1964 National Sports Centre, constructed before Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. Vann’s complex still stands today, although it is being encircled by commercial developments at an ever-increasing rate. The large ornamental pools of the Sports Centre imitate the reservoirs around Angkorian temples, while the zigzag roofline – a Vann motif – enables the flow of air and filters the light.
Vann’s major influence was Le Corbusier. ‘His buildings are like sculptures in the way they celebrate depth and space, as well as light and darkness,’ he said of the Swiss architect. His Institute of Foreign Languages is a small circular building with an indented concrete roof that seems to almost float in a circular glass wall. The careful location of windows filters the light, infusing the interior with a soft ambience. The form of the building was inspired by the traditional Khmer woven palm-leaf hat still worn throughout the countryside.
Vann was one of the few architects of the period to survive the Khmer Rouge, but despite increasing international admiration, the 80-year-old architect is largely shunned by today’s autocratic rulers, while his buildings, unprotected, face demolition. The Preah Suramarit Theatre was a masterpiece of concrete plasticity, with staircases suspended over shallow pools of water. Commissioned by Sihanouk in 1966 to promote Cambodia's performing arts, the theatre was gutted by fire in 1994 and remained in a ruined state for more than a decade. Despite talk of refurbishment, the theatre has been sold and awaits the bulldozers. It is likely to be replaced by a conference hall and TV tower.
Almost everywhere you look, there are bulldozers and lorries edging out the old and bringing forth the new. Wooden scaffolds rise around steel and concrete frames as the new Phnom Penh begins to mimic the growth of its Asian neighbours: cookie-cutter glass and concrete development, built cheap and fast. In a youthful society, so desperate to emerge from its 20th-century nightmare, old is ugly. It takes a special set of experiences to find these nondescript edifices beautiful, but many Khmer see them as such. Glass and concrete evoke progress and solidity, which give the Khmer good cause to rejoice. Given the horrors of the past, it is hard to begrudge them this sense of satisfaction.
Last year Cambodia enjoyed its third year of double-digit economic growth, and signs of wealth abound in the capital: not just modern apartment buildings, but new shopping centres that trade in luxury goods. Even the odd Hummer can be seen parked and heavily guarded outside nightclubs popular with the nouveau riche – those families who have profiteered from the last decade of economic growth, corruption, or both.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that 35 per cent of the population live on less than US$0.45 a day, mainly because 92 per cent of the poor live in rural areas – along rugged, poorly maintained roads where Hummers rarely go. Since 1993, half the government’s budget has been underwrittenone is not
by foreign aid – now amounting to billions of dollars – but exactly where that money has g clear as the city still struggles to provide its inhabitants with even the most basic services. The city of around 1.5 million (no one is exactly sure) is served by a paltry eight fire engines, all antiquated, and an ageing fire service that hasn’t been reinforced since it was formed in 1993. Like all civil servants, firemen are paid around $35 a month, not enough to support a family. When called to a fire, they turn on the hoses only if occupants can afford to pay – otherwise the building burns.
For the poor then, who inhabit the sprawling slums, the rains carry a dividend: whether accidental or deliberate (the authorities are known to use fire as a means to clear sites for development), rainwater dampens the threat of fire. But rain doesn’t wash away corruption, which remains a way of life, and, as always, it’s those at the bottom who suffer its most deleterious effects. ‘The marrow has pips: why has man no heart?’ asks a Khmer proverb. Buddhist detachment, in the form of indifference, pervades Cambodian life. But the indifference of the richest 20 per cent, which today own 70 per cent of Cambodia’s land, is more like blindness.
The rain is pelting the surface of the lake by which I sit and finish this letter. Some 5000 families live around this lake in the heart of Phnom Penh, but last month the land was sold from beneath them for a fraction of its market value to one of the country’s more powerful women. Most of the families have lived around the lake since the Khmer Rouge were defeated. Then there was no property, and when the broken people returned to their abandoned city, they grabbed a home where they could. Now, without ownership papers, most of the city’s residents are effectively squatters, and officials use this historical anomaly as cause for eviction. They take the land, sell it to developers, and share the profits.
When the lake people are evicted they will likely be removed to sites at the city’s edge, which are far from schools and markets and lack all but the most basic amenities. It will be the largest eviction since the Khmer Rouge compelled everyone to leave.
The rain pelts on, and the lake rises. Change is coming quickly to Phnom Penh, but its charm is being muted, and in the flood of riches, too few are benefiting.
Best regards,
Allister Hayman
With thanks to Kunthea Yem, Sam Rith, Dan Poynton – and all those Cambodians who, with great generosity, shared their time and thoughts.
This article first appeared in Mark Magazine
Phnom Penh has always been subject to flooding. Built on a fragile wetland at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers, the city knows water as both its life force and its greatest threat. Phnom Penh’s original architects – the country’s French colonial masters – understood the complex hydrology of the site and compensated with a network of canals and drains flowing into the lakes and ponds that caught the rivers’ overspill. But with development comes concrete, and in recent years some of the canals have been filled, as have the lakes. The floods, I’m told, are getting worse.
In colder climes rain can be unremittingly grim – a reason to stay in bed – but in the tropics it carries the effervescence of spring. I have been in Cambodia for half a year now, working for newspapers here and around the region, and after a long impossibly hot dry season, when only the flies are dim-witted enough to move at haste, the rain is welcomed, despite the floods.
Water animates Cambodia: it gave the ancient Angkorian culture riches enough to conquer Southeast Asia, and today still, as clouds ink out the sun, the countryside comes alive. Soon the Mekong will become so bloated its sheer weight will force the smaller Tonle Sap to reverse its flow and return to whence it came, the Boeng Tonle Sap – Southeast Asia’s largest lake. As the river reverses, the lake floods land bleached by months of fierce sun, returning it to a fertile state when the waters recede.But in the rain Phnom Penh struggles. The city once known as the Pearl of Asia and the Paris of the East, because of its orderly tree-lined avenues and French colonial architecture, is still unquestionably charming. Situated as it is on the river, the city was built on a low-rise scale that makes it seem more human than its regional neighbours, while the frangipanis and flame trees that line the streets give off a gloriously pungent tropical fragrance. But the growing slums and decrepit decaying colonial villas, with peeling paint and caved-in roofs, betray the tragedy and horror of the country’s recent past and the privations and poverty of the present.
Until it was caught up in the conflagration engulfing neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia had enjoyed relative peace and prosperity after gaining independence in 1953. But between 1969 and 1973 the US dropped more than half a million tonnes of high explosives on eastern Cambodia: more than three times the quantity dropped on Japan during the Second World War. Out of that inferno emerged the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, who defeated the American-backed government in 1975. When they entered Phnom Penh, French missionary François Ponchaud said the soldiers marched silently through the city as if it were a forest. ‘I had a sinking sensation that a slab of lead had suddenly fallen onto the city,’ he later wrote.
For the Khmer Rouge leadership, these boys and girls from the country, who didn’t know what money was and had never seen a car, were the purest, most authentic expression of the Khmer gene pool – carrying on their worn, expressionless faces an almost primal virtuosity. They were to be the mould into which Khmer society would be pressed. The soldiers ate toothpaste and drank from toilet bowls, thinking them wells; some tried to drink from cans of motor oil. They refused to eat from tin cans, threw money to the waters of the Mekong, and stripped vehicles of their tyres to make rubber sandals. At the airport they pulled bombers apart with their bare hands. ‘They would have eaten them if they could,’ one resident wrote.
For the soldiers, the city dwellers were the enemy: the vile bourgeoisie, who had lived in comfort and disinterest while the rural population suffered under American bombs and fought against the ‘imperialists and reactionaries’. The city itself was despised. ‘The city is bad because there is money in the city,’ a Khmer Rouge cadre told Ponchaud. ‘People can be reformed, but not cities.’After a brutal five-year civil war in which half a million people died and tremendous atrocities were committed by both sides, the fall of Phnom Penh was marked not by mass killings – that came later – but a forced exodus. On the pretext the city was to be bombed, the soldiers ordered the residents to leave, and no one was spared. Hospitals were emptied. The sick, crippled, elderly and infirm joined the mass of humanity marching out into the countryside in the ghastly April heat. Two and a half million people were expelled with no more than a few hours’ notice. The cortege would become a mosaic of misery and death, and the empty capital was left to decay: boulevards were dug up by the soldiers and put to use as gardens; the jungle began to reclaim abandoned villas, which were used to house animals. The city – like the people – still bears the scars of this period and of the abject poverty and intermittent warfare of the decades that followed the Vietnamese victory over the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
When more than a fifth of a population perishes, a part of everyone is dead. It’s impossible to experience Phnom Penh and not feel the brooding weight of the recent past: here the nightmare of history is keenly felt.
But if there is one place in the city that seems removed, it is Independence Monument. The imposing ochre monolith at the intersection of two major boulevards stands serenely, seemingly untouched by the chaos that Cambodia has witnessed since the monument was completed in 1960. Adorned with a profusion of nagas, the protective serpents of Hindu mythology, the structure pays homage to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, as well as to ’the jewel of Khmer architecture’, the Angkorian temple at Banteay Srei. Designed by Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann, Independence Monument is an example of what’s become known as New Khmer Architecture: a unique synthesis of post-war European modernism and Angkorian vernacular.Vann, the first Cambodian architect to be trained in Europe, was the leading figure in this short-lived movement, which emerged in the years following independence and expired with the onset of war. In a kind of Asian Bauhaus, the designers and architects of this period worked together in an attempt to adapt international styles to the heat and humidity of their homes.
Patronized by his monarch, King Sihanouk, Vann spearheaded a campaign of urban development that was the envy of Asia. From universities to sports facilities, the architect created more than a hundred public projects throughout Cambodia, including the 1964 National Sports Centre, constructed before Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. Vann’s complex still stands today, although it is being encircled by commercial developments at an ever-increasing rate. The large ornamental pools of the Sports Centre imitate the reservoirs around Angkorian temples, while the zigzag roofline – a Vann motif – enables the flow of air and filters the light.
Vann’s major influence was Le Corbusier. ‘His buildings are like sculptures in the way they celebrate depth and space, as well as light and darkness,’ he said of the Swiss architect. His Institute of Foreign Languages is a small circular building with an indented concrete roof that seems to almost float in a circular glass wall. The careful location of windows filters the light, infusing the interior with a soft ambience. The form of the building was inspired by the traditional Khmer woven palm-leaf hat still worn throughout the countryside.
Vann was one of the few architects of the period to survive the Khmer Rouge, but despite increasing international admiration, the 80-year-old architect is largely shunned by today’s autocratic rulers, while his buildings, unprotected, face demolition. The Preah Suramarit Theatre was a masterpiece of concrete plasticity, with staircases suspended over shallow pools of water. Commissioned by Sihanouk in 1966 to promote Cambodia's performing arts, the theatre was gutted by fire in 1994 and remained in a ruined state for more than a decade. Despite talk of refurbishment, the theatre has been sold and awaits the bulldozers. It is likely to be replaced by a conference hall and TV tower.
Almost everywhere you look, there are bulldozers and lorries edging out the old and bringing forth the new. Wooden scaffolds rise around steel and concrete frames as the new Phnom Penh begins to mimic the growth of its Asian neighbours: cookie-cutter glass and concrete development, built cheap and fast. In a youthful society, so desperate to emerge from its 20th-century nightmare, old is ugly. It takes a special set of experiences to find these nondescript edifices beautiful, but many Khmer see them as such. Glass and concrete evoke progress and solidity, which give the Khmer good cause to rejoice. Given the horrors of the past, it is hard to begrudge them this sense of satisfaction.
Last year Cambodia enjoyed its third year of double-digit economic growth, and signs of wealth abound in the capital: not just modern apartment buildings, but new shopping centres that trade in luxury goods. Even the odd Hummer can be seen parked and heavily guarded outside nightclubs popular with the nouveau riche – those families who have profiteered from the last decade of economic growth, corruption, or both.It’s sometimes easy to forget that 35 per cent of the population live on less than US$0.45 a day, mainly because 92 per cent of the poor live in rural areas – along rugged, poorly maintained roads where Hummers rarely go. Since 1993, half the government’s budget has been underwrittenone is not
by foreign aid – now amounting to billions of dollars – but exactly where that money has g clear as the city still struggles to provide its inhabitants with even the most basic services. The city of around 1.5 million (no one is exactly sure) is served by a paltry eight fire engines, all antiquated, and an ageing fire service that hasn’t been reinforced since it was formed in 1993. Like all civil servants, firemen are paid around $35 a month, not enough to support a family. When called to a fire, they turn on the hoses only if occupants can afford to pay – otherwise the building burns.
For the poor then, who inhabit the sprawling slums, the rains carry a dividend: whether accidental or deliberate (the authorities are known to use fire as a means to clear sites for development), rainwater dampens the threat of fire. But rain doesn’t wash away corruption, which remains a way of life, and, as always, it’s those at the bottom who suffer its most deleterious effects. ‘The marrow has pips: why has man no heart?’ asks a Khmer proverb. Buddhist detachment, in the form of indifference, pervades Cambodian life. But the indifference of the richest 20 per cent, which today own 70 per cent of Cambodia’s land, is more like blindness.The rain is pelting the surface of the lake by which I sit and finish this letter. Some 5000 families live around this lake in the heart of Phnom Penh, but last month the land was sold from beneath them for a fraction of its market value to one of the country’s more powerful women. Most of the families have lived around the lake since the Khmer Rouge were defeated. Then there was no property, and when the broken people returned to their abandoned city, they grabbed a home where they could. Now, without ownership papers, most of the city’s residents are effectively squatters, and officials use this historical anomaly as cause for eviction. They take the land, sell it to developers, and share the profits.
When the lake people are evicted they will likely be removed to sites at the city’s edge, which are far from schools and markets and lack all but the most basic amenities. It will be the largest eviction since the Khmer Rouge compelled everyone to leave.The rain pelts on, and the lake rises. Change is coming quickly to Phnom Penh, but its charm is being muted, and in the flood of riches, too few are benefiting.
Best regards,
Allister Hayman
With thanks to Kunthea Yem, Sam Rith, Dan Poynton – and all those Cambodians who, with great generosity, shared their time and thoughts.
This article first appeared in Mark Magazine
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