Pursat

Pursat's name comes from a kind of tree, and the town stands on the Pursat river, which drains much of the Cardamom chain into the Tonlé Sap. The province lies on the old route between the lake and the mountains, within the Khmer kingdom's western provinces, close to the frontier where Cambodian and Siamese influence met, and for long periods trade, timber and forest products moved through it towards the coast and the Gulf of Thailand.

Under the French protectorate Pursat became a provincial seat on the road between Phnom Penh and Battambang, and the railway of the 1930s, built to link the capital with the north-west and the Thai border, gave the town a station and a modest amount of industry. Marble from the foothills, timber from the Cardamoms, rice from the plain and fish from the lake were its trade. Unlike Battambang, it stayed small and functional.

The Khmer Rouge period was severe here, as across the country: the towns were emptied and large numbers of people were moved to work in the rice fields and on irrigation schemes. After 1979 the Cardamom foothills and the western districts remained unsafe for years, with fighting, mines and displacement lasting until the late 1990s, when the last Khmer Rouge strongholds in the north-west gave up. Since then the rebuilding of Highway 5, the growth of rice milling and plantations and the road links towards the coast have shaped a town that now lives mainly from passing traffic, farming and fishing.

Pursat is a conventional Khmer provincial town, and its life turns on the pagoda, the market and the farming year. Stone is its best-known craft: marble is cut and carved in family workshops around the town into Buddha images, animals, pestles and mortars. The town is bound up too with Khleang Moeung, a mythical-historical military leader of the sixteenth century revered as a neak ta, a guardian spirit whose protection is held to reach across the whole west of the Tonlé Sap.

Festivals follow the national calendar. Khmer New Year in April empties the offices and fills the pagodas and the river island; Pchum Ben in the autumn brings families to the wats with offerings for the ancestors; and the Water Festival at the end of the rains is marked on the river. Wat Bakan, in the countryside of Bakan district, is one of the oldest active pagodas in the country and draws pilgrims from well beyond the province.

On the lake, most people at Kampong Luong are Vietnamese-speaking, alongside Khmer families, many of them afloat for generations, with shops, schools and places of worship built on the water. Their status, language and livelihoods have been the subject of long-running debate in Cambodia. Visitors are expected to dress modestly in the town, to greet with the sampeah, and to ask before photographing people, in the floating village above all, where houses are open to the water.

Pursat is the fourth largest province of Cambodia in area but ranks only fourteenth in population, and the town's rhythm is that of a small highway centre: the market opens before dawn, offices and schools run through the morning, the heat of early afternoon empties the streets, and the river island and the food stalls fill again in the cool of the evening. Buses and freight lorries pass through at all hours, and the town is quiet by comparison once the highway is left behind.

Agriculture supports most households: rice on the plain, maize and cassava, orchards of oranges and other fruit, and cattle. Fishing on the Tonlé Sap employs a large number of families in the eastern districts, and the falling catches of recent years, blamed on dams upstream, drought and overfishing, have hit them hard. Marble carving, rice milling, plantations and construction on the improved highways provide most of the remaining work, and many young people migrate to Phnom Penh, to garment factories or to Thailand.

Newer housing and shops spread along the highway and out towards Krakor, while the older streets by the river keep their shophouses and gardens. The province's continuing issues are those of rural Cambodia: land disputes and forest clearance in the Cardamom foothills, household debt, seasonal flooding and the slow arrival of services in the remote western districts.

Pursat eats from the lake and the plain. Freshwater fish is the centre of most meals — grilled whole over charcoal, fried, dried, or fermented into prahok, the pungent paste that seasons Khmer cooking — served with rice and a dish of raw herbs and vegetables. Trey riel, the small silvery fish popularly said to have given the riel its name and running in vast numbers in the Tonlé Sap system, are salted, dried and made into prahok in the villages by the lake.

The everyday dishes are those of the north-west: nom banh chok, rice noodles with a green fish gravy of lemongrass and turmeric, eaten at breakfast; kuy teav, a clear pork and rice-noodle soup; samlor korko, the thick country soup of fish or pork with green papaya, jackfruit and roasted ground rice; and samlor machu, sour with tamarind. Restaurant menus add beef lok lak with a lime and pepper dip, Khmer curries with coconut milk, and fish amok steamed in banana leaf.

Fruit from the orchards inland, oranges among it, is sold along the highway in season, with palm sugar and palm juice from the sugar palms standing in the rice fields. Kralan, sticky rice with coconut and beans roasted in bamboo tubes, is a common roadside snack. Drinks are iced coffee with condensed milk, sugarcane juice, coconut water and beer over ice.