Sihanoukville

Sihanoukville is younger than almost any other city in Cambodia. When the Mekong delta passed out of Cambodian hands, the country's trade depended on Vietnamese and Thai ports or on the shallow river harbour at Kampot. After independence in 1953, the government chose a fishing settlement at Kampong Som, on a headland between deep bays, for a new deep-water port, and construction began in 1955 with French assistance; the port opened at the end of the decade and the growing town took the name of King Norodom Sihanouk. A highway was cut through to Phnom Penh and an oil refinery and rail line followed.

The 1960s brought modernist hotels on the beaches and a brief run as a seaside resort, cut short by war. The port was a strategic prize in the conflicts of the early 1970s; in May 1975 the seizure of the American cargo ship Mayaguez in nearby waters led to fighting on Koh Tang island offshore. The Khmer Rouge years emptied the town, and it recovered slowly through the 1980s and 1990s as the port reopened and fishing resumed.

From the late 1990s the beaches drew backpackers, and a low-rise town of guesthouses, bars and bungalows grew behind them. That ended abruptly in the late 2010s, when large-scale Chinese investment in casinos, hotels and apartment towers remade the city at speed; the government banned online gambling in 2019 and much of the construction stopped, leaving unfinished towers across the skyline. The expressway from Phnom Penh, the expanded airport and the port's growth have continued since, and parts of the city have been linked to online-scam compounds.

The city's culture is that of a port and a boom town rather than an old Khmer settlement. Its population came from elsewhere — fishing families, dock and factory workers, traders, hotel staff from the provinces — and it has never had the settled village rhythm of Kampot or Kep. Pagodas on the hills above the beaches, Wat Leu and Wat Krom among them, anchor Buddhist life, and the shrine to Yeay Mao, a southern Cambodian ancestral spirit, is visited by fishers and drivers before journeys.

Since the late 2010s a large Chinese-speaking community has become part of the city, with restaurants, shops, signage and schools of its own, and the relationship between that community and long-established Khmer residents is one of the city's live subjects. Cambodian weekenders from Phnom Penh form another population, arriving for seafood and a swim, and a smaller foreign resident community remains from the backpacker years.

Customs are Cambodian and largely conservative away from the beaches: modest dress in town, palms-together greetings, shoes off indoors, quiet voices and respect for monks and elders. Visitors are expected to keep swimwear to the sand, to ask before photographing people, and to be discreet around casinos and construction sites. Locals speak frankly about what the boom brought and took away, and the subject is best approached by listening rather than judging.

The city had roughly 90,000 residents at the last published census, with a much larger floating population of workers and visitors that has risen and fallen sharply in recent years. It is a working city: the deep-water port handles most of Cambodia's container trade, and the special economic zone beside it holds garment and light-manufacturing factories that employ thousands, many of them women from rural provinces.

Fishing remains important, with boats landing squid, crab and fish for the markets and for the islands' restaurants, and tourism supports hotels, bars, ferries, tour operators and drivers. Casino and property investment reshaped the labour market and the skyline in the late 2010s, and unfinished towers, half-built roads and abandoned sites are still visible parts of the landscape, alongside new hotels and completed developments.

Daily life is divided by geography. The centre and the markets around Ekareach Street work Khmer hours — early mornings, a slow midday, busy evenings — while the beach strips run on a visitor timetable and the port and factories on shifts. Traffic, dust, flooding in heavy rain, waste management and the cost of housing are the recurring local complaints, and the city's reputation, damaged by the scam-compound reporting of recent years, is a matter of open debate among residents who depend on tourism.

Seafood is the city's obvious strength. Squid, prawns, blue crab, snapper and mackerel come in on local boats and are grilled over charcoal on the beaches or cooked to order at restaurants near the market. Crab stir-fried with fresh green Kampot pepper, the dish of the coast to the east, is on most menus here, and grilled fish is eaten with tuk meric, a dipping sauce of lime, salt and crushed black pepper.

The Khmer standards are all present: amok trey, fish steamed with coconut milk, lemongrass and kroeung spice paste in banana leaf; beef lok lak in a peppery sauce; sour soups with tamarind; samlor korko, the thick mixed-vegetable soup with prahok; and num banh chok, rice noodles under a fish gravy, sold from baskets in the morning. Breakfast is kuy teav noodle soup or bai sach chrouk, grilled pork over rice with pickled vegetables, and baguettes remain a French inheritance in the bakeries.

What makes the city's food distinctive now is how much of it is Chinese. Hotpot restaurants, northern dumpling houses, Sichuan kitchens and barbecue places opened in numbers during the investment boom and have stayed, giving a Cambodian port city one of the widest ranges of regional Chinese cooking in the country. Thai and Vietnamese dishes appear as well, a reflection of the coastal trade. Iced coffee with condensed milk, fresh coconuts, sugar-cane juice and Cambodian beer are the everyday drinks.