Siem Reap

For most of its history this was a minor settlement beside an extraordinary one. The capitals of the Khmer Empire lay a few kilometres north from the 9th century onwards, at their height a vast complex of temples, reservoirs and wooden cities holding a population very large by the standards of the medieval world. After Ayutthaya's attacks in the 15th century the court moved south, and the temples, apart from Angkor Wat, which remained a place of worship, were left to the forest and to the villages around them.

The name Siem Reap is usually translated as the defeat of Siam, though the town spent much of the 18th and 19th centuries under Siamese rule, along with Battambang, and only returned to Cambodia by treaty in 1907. The French then made it the base for the clearing and restoration of Angkor: the École française d'Extrême-Orient began work on the temples, the Grand Hotel d'Angkor opened in 1932, and the first tourists arrived by road and river between the wars.

War closed all this. Fighting in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge years and the guerrilla conflict that followed left the province mined and the temples unvisited; Angkor was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 while still at risk. Peace in the late 1990s changed the town completely. Hotels, guesthouses and restaurants multiplied, visitor numbers rose into the millions, and Siem Reap became Cambodia's tourism capital — a growth that stopped abruptly when travel halted in 2020 and has been rebuilding since, alongside a new airport and widened roads.

Siem Reap lives with and from the temples, and that shapes its culture. Classical Khmer dance, the apsara style seen on Angkor's walls, is taught and performed here every evening; shadow puppetry, pinpeat music and stone and wood carving are kept up by workshops and schools, some of them set up to train young people from poor families. Phare Circus, whose performers come from the Phare Ponleu Selpak school in Battambang, founded in 1994 by Cambodians who had learned in the refugee camps that art can help people past trauma, performs in the town as well.

Religion is not a museum piece. Monks live at pagodas such as Wat Bo and Wat Damnak, shrines inside Angkor Wat receive offerings daily, and villagers come to the temples on holy days. Khmer New Year in April brings games, music and crowds of Cambodian visitors to the park, and Pchum Ben fills the pagodas before dawn in the autumn.

The town's other character comes from the visitors. Pub Street, the night markets and a large foreign resident population have made parts of the centre unlike anywhere else in the country, and much of the town works in hospitality in some form. Cambodians in Siem Reap are used to outsiders and tolerant of them, but the old courtesies still count: the sampeah greeting, modest dress away from the bars, shoes off at doorways, and care with photographs of people, monks and children.

Siem Reap is a mid-sized provincial city whose population has grown quickly with tourism; the municipality that surrounds it counted about 230,000 people at the 2008 census. Days start early: temple drivers wait outside hotels before dawn, markets trade from five, and the heat of the middle of the day empties the streets before the evening brings everyone out again.

Tourism dominates work here more than in any other Cambodian city — hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, masseuses, market traders, craft workshops — and the collapse in visitors during the pandemic was felt harder here than anywhere, closing businesses and sending many families back to the villages. Around the town, the province farms rice and vegetables and fishes the Tonlé Sap, and both are affected by the lake's falling water levels and catches.

The city has been rebuilt repeatedly in recent years: dozens of roads widened and drained, the airport moved east, hotels renovated. Growth has brought pressure on groundwater, which is monitored because of its effect on the temples' foundations, and on waste and drainage. Poverty remains close to the surface outside the tourist streets, and the gap between hotel districts and outlying villages is wide.

Siem Reap is where most visitors eat their first Khmer meal, and its restaurants serve the national dishes carefully: fish amok, steamed in banana leaf with coconut and kroeung, the lemongrass, galangal and turmeric paste at the base of the cuisine; beef lok lak, seared and served with a lime and black pepper dip made with Kampot pepper; samlor korko, the thick soup of fish and mixed vegetables; and Khmer curries that are gentler and more aromatic than their Thai neighbours.

Breakfast is bought on the street: kuy teav, the pork-broth rice-noodle soup with herbs and lime, num banh chok, cold rice noodles under a green fish gravy with raw vegetables, and bai sach chrouk, grilled marinated pork over broken rice. Prahok, fermented fish paste, flavours dips and stews, and grilled river fish, frogs, snails and insects are sold from stalls and markets in the evenings.

The local markets are the honest version of all this: Psar Chas by the river has cooked-food aisles among the souvenirs, while Psar Leu east of the centre is where the town shops for fish from the lake, herbs and palm sugar. Cambodian coffee, served strong and iced with condensed milk, is everywhere, and a coffee-house culture has grown up on the east bank; rice wine, palm juice and Cambodian lagers fill the evening, and cooking schools are a fixture of the town.