Raffles Hotel Le Royal, one of the most elegant colonial hotels in South-East Asia.
FURTHER INFORMATION
See tourismcambodia.com.
Source: The Sun-Herald
Sydney Morning Herald,Australia
Phnom Penh has a wealth of architectural treasures that cast new light on a ravaged city, writes Anthony Dennis.
Genocide sells. If you have any doubts, stroll along Phnom Penh's Sisowath Quay, the Cambodian capital's three-kilometre raucous riverfront thoroughfare extending along the confluence of the Mekong, Bassac and Tonle Sap. Dotted along the quay's footpaths, and outside shops and hotels, are signs touting day tours to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge at Choeung Ek - about 15 kilometres outside the city - where 8000 stacked skulls of murdered prisoners can, if you desire, be viewed.
Also on Sisowath Quay are regular screenings of documentaries about the grisly Pol Pot era, which you can pay to watch before or after your death-camp pilgrimage. It's a wonder they don't sell tickets to the interminable United Nations-backed trials, being held elsewhere in town, of surviving Pol Pot cadres who allegedly ran those camps in the 1970s.
Despite the Killing Fields touts, the frenetic Sisowath Quay, crazy as it is, is one of my favourite streets in South-East Asia. I keep walking, ignoring entreaties to take a tour. No disrespect intended; I know more than enough about Pol Pot's atrocities and the genocide that he engineered in just a few agonising years.
During my visit to this ravaged yet resilient city, I instead want to concentrate on a rare, seemingly positive period of Phnom Penh's modern history. From 1953 - when Cambodia declared independence from France - until 1970, hope, for once, seemed to triumph over hopelessness.
"Cambodia helps itself" was the post-colonial motto that propelled many building projects, some of which were funded, like today's counterparts, by foreign aid. Happily, some of the optimism that distinguished Cambodia's post-colonial era has returned, with a booming Phnom Penh beginning to attract the sort of foreign exchange that generates the boutique hotels and stylish Western-style restaurants and shops that typify prosperous cities elsewhere in the region.
An ambitious building program was undertaken in the years following independence, intended to create a bold, modern capital matching - or even eclipsing - what the French achieved and making Phnom Penh the envy of South-East Asia. The plans even included Olympic Stadium, part of the National Sports Complex, even though there never was, nor will be, the possibility of Phnom Penh - still a poor city where foreign aid and corruption seem to be the two chief industries - hosting such a costly event.
The extensive collection of buildings that emerged from this period is considered to rank among the most important of the developing world. And, because of the compact size of the riverside capital, they are easily viewed by visitors.
A non-profit organisation called Khmer Architecture Tours offers guided and self-guided tours that can be walked, cycled or taken via cyclos - motorbike-powered rickshaws with a driver. When I try to book one of the tours just before my visit, I'm out of luck as I'm told no guides are available. Undeterred, I simply download the self-guided walking-tour map from the collective's website. I'm looking forward to experiencing what is a surprising aspect of Phnom Penh.
Architecture lies at the soul of Cambodia. Its national flag features a silhouette of Angkor, the World Heritage-listed temple complex to Cambodia's north that was the centrepiece of the ancient Khmer civilisation. Indeed, of all the nations, Cambodia's ensign is the only one that features a building. Independence gave expression to a building style, "New Khmer Architecture", with its emphasis on "integrating an international style with local tradition, materials and climate".
I kept the phone number of an affable cyclo driver from the previous day and arrange for him to meet me at my base, Raffles Hotel Le Royal, itself one of Phnom Penh's most splendid French colonial buildings.
My tour, which takes in pre-1953 colonial architecture as well as that up to the 1970s, begins at what is listed on my map as "Public Toilet, 1959, one of a pair; modern structure, French manners". The French-era loos are near a park just across from the National Museum of Cambodia and were designed by French architect Georges Groslier. I wonder whether the cyclo driver thinks I'm mad, though with most Cambodians earning as little as a few dollars a day, his fee of $US15 ($16.30) is good money for an afternoon's work, even to entertain a strange Westerner's interest in what must seem to him to be mundane buildings.
Next, passing through the city along streets flanked by faded French-style apartments, it's off to the nearby Capitol Cinema, which was designed by internationally acclaimed, French-trained architect Vann Molyvann, the now 83-year-old Cambodian who is suitably regarded as a national treasure - a South-East Asian Joern Utzon of sorts. No longer used as a cinema, the building's concrete lattice-style facade is still largely intact.
In a country whose reputation was besmirched by absolute evil, Vann is one of the few internationally recognised Cambodian heroes. He was the architect of the hard-to-miss, and strangely beautiful, dung-coloured Independence Monument from 1958 at the crossroads of Norodom and Sihanouk boulevards.
The towering structure, reminiscent of the lotus-like domes of Angkor, has been described as a "magnificent reinterpretation of ancient Khmer architecture"; Cambodia's answer to the Arc de Triomphe. Vann, possibly accidentally by virtue of economic necessity, was a pioneer of what are now known as "green technologies", with his buildings featuring measures such as cross-ventilation, indirect lighting, evaporative cooling and the use of local materials.
Unfortunately, some of his buildings, such as the Preah Suramarit National Theatre, are being torn down, repeating the mistakes that have occurred in other Asian cities.
So revered is his work that a group of US and Cambodian architects has established The Vann Molyvann Project. The group's objective is to save his buildings, which, while having done well to survive US bombings, the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese occupation, are now endangered by Phnom Penh's zeal for development.
As the cyclo weaves its way through the city and the driver tries to decipher the directions on my map, I soon realise that even without the self-guided tour, it would be easy to miss buildings such as the elegant Peugeot garage, a legacy of French rule from the mid-1930s.
Next, we pull up outside the crumbling Old International Hotel from the 1900s, which, though no longer operating as lodgings, still bears its old signage. Elsewhere is the imposing art deco-style 1937 French-designed Phsar Thom Thmei Central Market building, which more or less signifies the centre of the city. The centrepiece of the market is a massive rotunda, from which stall-laden wings fan in four directions.
Later, when the cyclo draws into the forecourt of the Olympic Stadium - one of Vann's most famous works - the young guard, sans uniform, waves us in but not before he asks for a few US dollars from the Westerner.
Except for a lone soft-drink seller under the shade of the grandstand, there's barely anyone else about. The strident, streamlined concrete stadium was built for the Games of the New Emerging Forces - established in 1962 by the then-reactionary Indonesian regime to emphasise a belief that in some countries, sport and politics are inseparable - held in Phnom Penh in 1966.
That year French leader Charles de Gaulle, hosted by the eccentric Prince Norodom Sihanouk, also visited the stadium for an event attended by 100,000 Cambodians and 1000 monks, who chanted prayers for him.
The following year, another VIP, Jacqueline Kennedy, visited Phnom Penh - after three days touring the temples of Angkor in Siem Reap - where Time magazine reported that she received an audience with the Prince's mother in the royal throne room, "a fairytale chamber of nine tiered parasols that shield a great gold throne".
The Olympic Stadium returned to international prominence early last year, when it was again packed for the 30th-anniversary commemorations of the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
The anniversary, it was said by the Cambodian regime (notorious for its connections to the Khmer Rouge), marked the end of Cambodia's mourning of the about 2 million people who died during Pol Pot's reign.
My tour ends where it began, at Raffles Hotel Le Royal, designed by the French architect Ernest Hebrard and opened in 1929. It's one of the most elegant colonial hotels in South-East Asia, a sister property to Raffles' equally appealing Grand Hotel d'Angkor in Siem Reap. Although management prefers not to highlight it, Hotel Le Royal was commandeered by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot's regime. It wasn't until 1996 that Raffles fully restored it.
During that work, the glass from which Jacqueline Kennedy drank while at the hotel - complete with lipstick smudge - was reputedly found. A cocktail, Femme Fatale, was named in her honour and is now served in the Elephant Bar.
After such a nostalgia-tinged day, I relax in the restrained, air-conditioned cool of Raffles and make a private toast to Jackie O - as she was, of course, later to become known - and Phnom Penh, a city that deserves the bright future it once fashioned for itself but never received.
TRIP NOTES
GETTING THERE
Thai Airways flies from Sydney to Bangkok with regular connections to Phomn Penh. See www.thaiair.com.
WHERE TO STAY
The Quay, located on Sisowath Quay, is Phnom Penh's coolest, best-located boutique-style hotel; doubles from about $186. Phone +855 239 92284 or +855 2322 4894, see thequayhotel.com.
Raffles Hotel Le Royal, 92 Rukhak Vithei Daun Penh, off Monivong Boulevard, Sangkat Wat; doubles from about $197. Phone +855 2398 1888, see raffles.com.
TOURING THERE
Khmer Architecture Tours, see ka-tours.org, cost about $13 for a 2½- to three-hour-long tour of central Phnom Penh. The tours start at 8.30am. Bookings can be made by email via the website but be prepared to resort to the free self-guided tour should a guide be unavailable.
Genocide sells. If you have any doubts, stroll along Phnom Penh's Sisowath Quay, the Cambodian capital's three-kilometre raucous riverfront thoroughfare extending along the confluence of the Mekong, Bassac and Tonle Sap. Dotted along the quay's footpaths, and outside shops and hotels, are signs touting day tours to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge at Choeung Ek - about 15 kilometres outside the city - where 8000 stacked skulls of murdered prisoners can, if you desire, be viewed.
Also on Sisowath Quay are regular screenings of documentaries about the grisly Pol Pot era, which you can pay to watch before or after your death-camp pilgrimage. It's a wonder they don't sell tickets to the interminable United Nations-backed trials, being held elsewhere in town, of surviving Pol Pot cadres who allegedly ran those camps in the 1970s.
Despite the Killing Fields touts, the frenetic Sisowath Quay, crazy as it is, is one of my favourite streets in South-East Asia. I keep walking, ignoring entreaties to take a tour. No disrespect intended; I know more than enough about Pol Pot's atrocities and the genocide that he engineered in just a few agonising years.
During my visit to this ravaged yet resilient city, I instead want to concentrate on a rare, seemingly positive period of Phnom Penh's modern history. From 1953 - when Cambodia declared independence from France - until 1970, hope, for once, seemed to triumph over hopelessness.
"Cambodia helps itself" was the post-colonial motto that propelled many building projects, some of which were funded, like today's counterparts, by foreign aid. Happily, some of the optimism that distinguished Cambodia's post-colonial era has returned, with a booming Phnom Penh beginning to attract the sort of foreign exchange that generates the boutique hotels and stylish Western-style restaurants and shops that typify prosperous cities elsewhere in the region.
An ambitious building program was undertaken in the years following independence, intended to create a bold, modern capital matching - or even eclipsing - what the French achieved and making Phnom Penh the envy of South-East Asia. The plans even included Olympic Stadium, part of the National Sports Complex, even though there never was, nor will be, the possibility of Phnom Penh - still a poor city where foreign aid and corruption seem to be the two chief industries - hosting such a costly event.
The extensive collection of buildings that emerged from this period is considered to rank among the most important of the developing world. And, because of the compact size of the riverside capital, they are easily viewed by visitors.
A non-profit organisation called Khmer Architecture Tours offers guided and self-guided tours that can be walked, cycled or taken via cyclos - motorbike-powered rickshaws with a driver. When I try to book one of the tours just before my visit, I'm out of luck as I'm told no guides are available. Undeterred, I simply download the self-guided walking-tour map from the collective's website. I'm looking forward to experiencing what is a surprising aspect of Phnom Penh.
Architecture lies at the soul of Cambodia. Its national flag features a silhouette of Angkor, the World Heritage-listed temple complex to Cambodia's north that was the centrepiece of the ancient Khmer civilisation. Indeed, of all the nations, Cambodia's ensign is the only one that features a building. Independence gave expression to a building style, "New Khmer Architecture", with its emphasis on "integrating an international style with local tradition, materials and climate".
I kept the phone number of an affable cyclo driver from the previous day and arrange for him to meet me at my base, Raffles Hotel Le Royal, itself one of Phnom Penh's most splendid French colonial buildings.
My tour, which takes in pre-1953 colonial architecture as well as that up to the 1970s, begins at what is listed on my map as "Public Toilet, 1959, one of a pair; modern structure, French manners". The French-era loos are near a park just across from the National Museum of Cambodia and were designed by French architect Georges Groslier. I wonder whether the cyclo driver thinks I'm mad, though with most Cambodians earning as little as a few dollars a day, his fee of $US15 ($16.30) is good money for an afternoon's work, even to entertain a strange Westerner's interest in what must seem to him to be mundane buildings.
Next, passing through the city along streets flanked by faded French-style apartments, it's off to the nearby Capitol Cinema, which was designed by internationally acclaimed, French-trained architect Vann Molyvann, the now 83-year-old Cambodian who is suitably regarded as a national treasure - a South-East Asian Joern Utzon of sorts. No longer used as a cinema, the building's concrete lattice-style facade is still largely intact.
In a country whose reputation was besmirched by absolute evil, Vann is one of the few internationally recognised Cambodian heroes. He was the architect of the hard-to-miss, and strangely beautiful, dung-coloured Independence Monument from 1958 at the crossroads of Norodom and Sihanouk boulevards.
The towering structure, reminiscent of the lotus-like domes of Angkor, has been described as a "magnificent reinterpretation of ancient Khmer architecture"; Cambodia's answer to the Arc de Triomphe. Vann, possibly accidentally by virtue of economic necessity, was a pioneer of what are now known as "green technologies", with his buildings featuring measures such as cross-ventilation, indirect lighting, evaporative cooling and the use of local materials.
Unfortunately, some of his buildings, such as the Preah Suramarit National Theatre, are being torn down, repeating the mistakes that have occurred in other Asian cities.
So revered is his work that a group of US and Cambodian architects has established The Vann Molyvann Project. The group's objective is to save his buildings, which, while having done well to survive US bombings, the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese occupation, are now endangered by Phnom Penh's zeal for development.
As the cyclo weaves its way through the city and the driver tries to decipher the directions on my map, I soon realise that even without the self-guided tour, it would be easy to miss buildings such as the elegant Peugeot garage, a legacy of French rule from the mid-1930s.
Next, we pull up outside the crumbling Old International Hotel from the 1900s, which, though no longer operating as lodgings, still bears its old signage. Elsewhere is the imposing art deco-style 1937 French-designed Phsar Thom Thmei Central Market building, which more or less signifies the centre of the city. The centrepiece of the market is a massive rotunda, from which stall-laden wings fan in four directions.
Later, when the cyclo draws into the forecourt of the Olympic Stadium - one of Vann's most famous works - the young guard, sans uniform, waves us in but not before he asks for a few US dollars from the Westerner.
Except for a lone soft-drink seller under the shade of the grandstand, there's barely anyone else about. The strident, streamlined concrete stadium was built for the Games of the New Emerging Forces - established in 1962 by the then-reactionary Indonesian regime to emphasise a belief that in some countries, sport and politics are inseparable - held in Phnom Penh in 1966.
That year French leader Charles de Gaulle, hosted by the eccentric Prince Norodom Sihanouk, also visited the stadium for an event attended by 100,000 Cambodians and 1000 monks, who chanted prayers for him.
The following year, another VIP, Jacqueline Kennedy, visited Phnom Penh - after three days touring the temples of Angkor in Siem Reap - where Time magazine reported that she received an audience with the Prince's mother in the royal throne room, "a fairytale chamber of nine tiered parasols that shield a great gold throne".
The Olympic Stadium returned to international prominence early last year, when it was again packed for the 30th-anniversary commemorations of the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
The anniversary, it was said by the Cambodian regime (notorious for its connections to the Khmer Rouge), marked the end of Cambodia's mourning of the about 2 million people who died during Pol Pot's reign.
My tour ends where it began, at Raffles Hotel Le Royal, designed by the French architect Ernest Hebrard and opened in 1929. It's one of the most elegant colonial hotels in South-East Asia, a sister property to Raffles' equally appealing Grand Hotel d'Angkor in Siem Reap. Although management prefers not to highlight it, Hotel Le Royal was commandeered by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot's regime. It wasn't until 1996 that Raffles fully restored it.
During that work, the glass from which Jacqueline Kennedy drank while at the hotel - complete with lipstick smudge - was reputedly found. A cocktail, Femme Fatale, was named in her honour and is now served in the Elephant Bar.
After such a nostalgia-tinged day, I relax in the restrained, air-conditioned cool of Raffles and make a private toast to Jackie O - as she was, of course, later to become known - and Phnom Penh, a city that deserves the bright future it once fashioned for itself but never received.
TRIP NOTES
GETTING THERE
Thai Airways flies from Sydney to Bangkok with regular connections to Phomn Penh. See www.thaiair.com.
WHERE TO STAY
The Quay, located on Sisowath Quay, is Phnom Penh's coolest, best-located boutique-style hotel; doubles from about $186. Phone +855 239 92284 or +855 2322 4894, see thequayhotel.com.
Raffles Hotel Le Royal, 92 Rukhak Vithei Daun Penh, off Monivong Boulevard, Sangkat Wat; doubles from about $197. Phone +855 2398 1888, see raffles.com.
TOURING THERE
Khmer Architecture Tours, see ka-tours.org, cost about $13 for a 2½- to three-hour-long tour of central Phnom Penh. The tours start at 8.30am. Bookings can be made by email via the website but be prepared to resort to the free self-guided tour should a guide be unavailable.
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