Kampot

Kampot's importance came from geography. When the Mekong delta passed out of Cambodian control in the 18th and 19th centuries, the country lost its access to the sea, and the small port on the Praek Tuek Chhu became its main outlet. Under King Ang Duong in the mid-19th century it handled trade with Singapore and the Gulf ports, and Chinese and Vietnamese merchants settled along the river, shipping out pepper, salt, timber and fish.

Under the French protectorate from the 1860s, Kampot became a provincial capital and was rebuilt with a grid of shophouses, a governor's residence, a bank and administrative buildings, many of which survive. Pepper had been grown in the hills for centuries, and the French developed it into an export crop. In the 1920s a road was cut up to the Bokor plateau and a hill station built there for colonial officials.

The town's fortunes fell when the deep-water port at Sihanoukville opened from the mid-1950s and took the sea trade. The Khmer Rouge years emptied Kampot, the pepper farms were abandoned and their vines destroyed, and fighting continued in the hills near the town into the 1990s. Recovery was slow. Pepper planting resumed, and Kampot pepper won geographical indication status in Cambodia in 2010 and protection in the European Union in 2016; the shophouses were restored one by one as guesthouses and cafés, and the town became a place people stop for several days rather than pass through. A modern resort has since been built on the plateau above, and salt production continues on the flats outside.

Kampot is a trading town, and its population shows it: Khmer families alongside long-settled Chinese-Khmer merchant households, a significant Cham Muslim community with its own mosques and fishing boats, and Vietnamese-Cambodian families along the river. Buddhist practice sets the calendar, with pagodas around the town, monks collecting alms at dawn and the national festivals observed in full, but the mix of communities is unusually visible for a place this size.

Since the 2000s the town has attracted artists, writers, musicians and retirees from abroad, drawn by the cheap shophouses and the river. The result is a small cultural scene out of proportion to the population — live music in riverside bars, galleries, a bookshop or two, film nights and small festivals — running alongside, rather than instead of, ordinary provincial life. Weekend visitors from Phnom Penh add a third layer, filling the waterfront restaurants on Saturday nights.

Local identity rests on pepper and salt. Farming families in the hills speak of the crop with the pride of a wine region, and the salt workers' season, ending when the rains come, is a fixture of the year. Manners are Cambodian and unhurried: voices stay low, disagreements are not aired in public, hats and shoes come off in pagodas, and elders are greeted first. Visitors who ask before photographing and who dress modestly away from the riverside are treated warmly.

The municipality has close to 50,000 people and the province around 630,000, and Kampot works at a pace that surprises anyone arriving from Phnom Penh. The morning belongs to the market and the river: fish landed, salt and pepper traded, students on bicycles, coffee drunk on plastic stools. The middle of the day is hot and quiet, and life returns to the riverside promenade in the late afternoon, when families, joggers and food carts take over the embankment.

The economy rests on farming and fishing more than tourism. Rice, durian, fruit and above all pepper come from the surrounding communes; the salt fields employ many people seasonally; and boats work the estuary and the gulf. Government offices, schools and the hospital are significant employers, and tourism supports guesthouses, cafés, boat operators and drivers. Remittances from relatives working in Phnom Penh, Thailand and South Korea matter to many households.

Development has begun to change the town. Land prices along the river have risen, new hotels and roads have been built, and improved highways have brought Phnom Penh within a few hours. Flooding in the wet season, water supply and the pressure of construction on the old shophouse quarter are recurring local concerns, as is the future of the salt flats, which are worth more as building land than as salt.

Pepper is the first thing to eat here, and the best way is kdam chaa mrech Kampot — crab stir-fried with whole stems of fresh green peppercorns, pulled from the vine days earlier and still soft enough to chew. The crabs mostly come from Kep along the coast, but the pepper is local, graded green, black, red and white, and sold in the market by the handful. Black pepper goes into beef lok lak, the diced steak with a pepper-and-lime dipping sauce that appears on every menu in town.

The rest is Cambodian coastal cooking. Amok trey, fish steamed with coconut, lemongrass and kroeung spice paste in banana leaf, is the standard; sour soups with tamarind, samlor korko with mixed vegetables and prahok, grilled squid and prawns, and freshwater fish from the Praek Tuek Chhu all follow. Breakfast is kuy teav, rice-noodle soup with pork, or bai sach chrouk, grilled pork over rice with pickles, eaten before the heat. Num banh chok, rice noodles under a fish gravy, is sold from baskets in the morning.

Kampot is also durian country — the fruit is one of the things the town is known for — and the orchards inland supply mangosteen, rambutan and jackfruit. Salt from the flats seasons everything and makes the fish sauce and prahok of the region. In the old town, bakeries, cafés roasting Cambodian coffee and riverside bars serve the visitor trade, and iced coffee with condensed milk is the drink of the afternoon everywhere else.