Phnom Penh Audio Tours

Phnom Penh sits at the confluence of the Mekong, the Tonle Sap, and the Bassac rivers -- a geography that made it a trading hub and Cambodia's capital from 1434. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge expelled the entire population. A city of roughly two and a half million people was emptied in days, its residents marched into the countryside on a forced agrarian revolution that killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians over four years. Vietnam liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979, and reconstruction began almost from zero.

The decades after 1979 rebuilt a city physically but not entirely psychologically.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, inside the high school the Khmer Rouge converted into the S-21 prison where at least 14,000 people were processed and killed, is difficult to enter and impossible to forget. A few kilometers south, the Choeung Ek killing fields hold mass graves and a stupa containing 8,000 skulls. These are not peripheral to the city but central to understanding what it is -- and Phnom Penh engages with this period directly, which is part of why the city does not feel permanently shadowed by it.