“The city was neatly planned, with broad avenues of flame of the forest trees, elegant official residences standing in gardens scented with tropical blooms, narrower streets bordered with crowded rows of native dwellings where banana trees sprout untidily in back yards, and a commercial centre where imposing European shops rose from the pavement cluttered with open-air stalls - all gathered around the little hill with it’s Buddhist temple among graceful coconut palms”

That was how an English writer romantically described the Phnom Penh of 1948, the under the administration of French Indochine. Then it was thought to be one of the most charming cities in Southeast Asia. In the early 1970s the population of the capital had almost double with the large influx of refugees from the Vietnam War only to be nearly emptied the cruel atrocities of The Khmer Rouge. They may have cleared the city of it’s population the majority of it’s building except for the Cathedral and National Bank.

The royal court was transferred to Phnom Penh in 1435 after the fall of Angkor to the Thais, but only become the capital when the French in their imperial wisdom felt it more appropriate for the monarch to reside in Phnom Penh and took it upon themselves to build the Royal Palace.

Not only did they build the palace but also sent furnishing they no longer required. For example, the two storey French villa beside the throne hall. It was sent a gift from Emperor Napoleon III, but started life on the banks of the Suez Canal as accommodation for Empress Eugene during the canal’s opening ceremony. It was later dismantled and shipped out to Phnom Penh with an Equestrian Statue of King Norodom, well actually it was of Napoleon III with his head removed and replaced with one bearing the noble features of the Cambodian monarch. The generosity of the Colonial French with their second hand gifts knew no limits.

If there is one must see in Phnom Penh then it has to be the National Museum “The traveller before be leaves Phnom Penh” wrote Somerset Maughan, a writer who didn’t like to travel by the guide book, “will be well advised to visit, the museum, since here, probably for the first time in his life, he will ……. examples of a school of sculpture that will give him a good deal to think about. He will see at least one statue that is as beautiful as anything that the Mayans or the archaic Greeks ever wrought from stone.”

Phnom Penh owes it’s architecture to Colonial France and it’s business ethos to the Chinese. While the major ethnic group in Cambodia is Khmer, during the French administration, Chinese and Vietnamese immigration was encouraged, and Phnom Penh owes much of it’s past prosperity to the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit.

Walking along the banks of the Mekong in the late afternoon one can feel the nostalgia of a bygone era, of what life was like then with its boulevards and colonial style villas. Sadly more people think of Phnom Penh as the site of the Killing Fields rather than as a delightful city of enduring charm. Since the elections of July 1998 the city has enjoyed periods of relatively few incidents and is now ready to receive overseas visitors.