RSS
Also Phnom Penh Sorya Transport Co. offers bus service to several provincial destinations along the National Routes as well as Ho Chi Minh City. Motorcycles are a popular form of quick travel in the city streets.
Although the city is 290 km (180 miles) from the sea, it is a major port on the Mekong River valley, and it is linked to the South China Sea via a channel of the Mekong delta in Vietnam. Local means of public transportation within the city most often include the cycle rickshaw, known in Khmer as “cyclo” and motorcycle taxis. Private forms of transportation include bicycles and automobiles.
History
Phnom Penh first became the capital of Cambodia after Ponhea Yat, king of the Khmer Empire, moved the capital from Angkor Thom after it was captured by Siam a few years earlier. There are stupa behind Wat Phnom that house the remains of Ponhea Yat and the royal family as well as the remaining Buddhist statues from the Angkorean era. There is a legend that tells how Phnom Penh was created.
It was not until 1866 that the reign of King Norodom I, that Phnom Penh became the permanent seat of government and the current Royal Palace was built. This marked the beginning of the transformation of what was essentially a riverside village into a city with the French Colonialists expanding the canal system to control the wetlands, filling in lakes, constructing roads and building a port.
By the 1920s, Phnom Penh was known as the Pearl of Asia, and over the next four decades continued to experience growth with the building of a railway to Sihanoukville and the Pochentong International Airport (now Phnom Penh International Airport).
During the Vietnam War, Cambodia was used as a base by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, and thousands of refugees from across the country flooded the city to escape the fighting between their own government troops, the NVA/NLF, the South Vietnamese and its allies and the Khmer Rouge. By 1975, the population was 2,000,000, the bulk of them refugees from the fighting. The city fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17. Many of its residents, those who were wealthy and educated, were forced to do labor on rural farms as “new people”. Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot’s forces and was turned into the S-21 prison camp, where Cambodians were detained and tortured. Pol Pot sought a return to an agrarian economy and therefore killed many people perceived as educated, “lazy” or political enemies. Many others starved to death as a result of failure of the agrarian society and the sale of Cambodia’s rice to China in exchange for bullets and weaponry. The former high school is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum where Khmer Rouge torture devices and photos of their victims are displayed. Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields), 15 kilometers (9 mi) away, where the Khmer Rouge marched prisoners from Tuol Sleng to be murdered and buried in shallow pits, is also now a memorial to those who were killed by the regime.
The Khmer Rouge was driven out of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese in 1979 and people began to return to the city. Vietnam is historically a state with which Cambodia has had many conflicts; therefore this liberation was and is viewed with mixed emotions by the Cambodians. A period of reconstruction began, spurred by continuing stability of government, attracting new foreign investment and aid by countries including France, Australia, and Japan. Loans were made from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank to reinstate a clean water supply, roads and other infrastructure. The 1998 Census put Phnom Penh’s population at 862,000; by the next census in 2008 it was 1.3 million.
