In the fifteenth century, Cambodia’s conventional capital at Angkor was under unvarying threat from the growing might of neighbouring Siam. The Khmers were enforced to lift up and move south, first to Longvek, later to Udong, and lastly to Phnom Penh. 

This position better allowed Cambodia to take advantage of the country’s vast watercourses. Located at the convergence of three rivers, ships could sail southeast from Phnom Penh on either the Mekong or Bassac to Vietnam and the South China Sea, or north on the Mekong to Laos and China, or northwest on the Tonle Sap (the river) to the Tonle Sap (the lake) and the provinces bordering Thailand.

This wonderful location allowed Phnom Penh to burgeon for some time as a major trading hub, but the threat from nearest Thailand and Vietnam never abated. It was to argue against this threat, especially from the Vietnamese, that another strange power, France, was welcomed into the Kingdom.

Fearing Vietnamese violent behavior, King Norodom signed a treaty of protectorate with France in the 1860s. This granted Cambodia some gauge of defense from its neighbors, but it eventually led to Cambodia becoming a colony in 1884. For the next eighty years, the French successfully ruled over the kingdom. Most agree that it left the Khmers with a insufficient inheritance.

When the Japanese occupied Cambodia during W.W.II, the French gone. At the war’s end, Cambodia became an state under French regulation. In 1953, Cambodia lastly gained sovereignty from the French, guided by the wily King Sihanouk, who had been specially selected for the throne as a young man by French officials eager to have a accommodating monarch.

Independence manifested the start of a brief Golden Age for Phnom Penh. As its neighbors began to swirl with revolt, Cambodia was calm and well-off. But at the start of the Vietnam War, King Sihanouk, who had subjugated politics in the country for almost two decades, estranged both the left and right with exploitive policies. He was ousted by General Lon Nol and went into exile in Beijing, China.

The Vietnam War again brought disorder to Cambodia. Although the country was officially neutral, the Americans secretly bombed the country’s border regions in a misguided attempt to get at North Vietnamese fighters. The anguish of villagers affected by the bombing, along with the belief that Lon Nol’s government was prevalent with bribery, fuelled disaffection among the peasantry. The Khmer Rouge faction was born, and fighting stretch across the country.

The capital finally fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17th, 1975. Almost no one had foreseen what would happen next. The Khmer Rouge warned the city’s denizens of an impending American air strike and strained them to escape into the countryside. This was the commencement of a radical social experiment to turn Cambodia into an agrarian society by banishing all the city’s inhabitants.

While Phnom Penh was basically a ghost town for the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, not all bustle in the capital came to an end. One school in central Phnom Penh became the  most infamous prison, Toul Sleng, codenamed S-21.

The Khmer Rouge was driven from control at the start of 1979 by the Vietnamese. This was precipitated by a number of Khmer Rouge border raids on Vietnam. The Vietnamese set up a new administration headed by Khmer Rouge members who had previously defected to Vietnam together with then Foreign Minister and current Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The country’s first elections took place in 1993. The two main parties vying for power in this election were Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the royalist National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Co-operative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), which had been formed in 1982 by the exiled King Sihanouk and was headed by his son Prince Ranariddh.

The frontrunner of this election by a contracted periphery was FUNCINPEC, but Hun Sen refused to turn down muscle. The king had returned from exile, and he stepped in to negotiator a deal between the two sides. They would split control, and there would be a First and a Second Prime Minister. Yet, all this accord did was to holdup the predictable confrontation.

Again, the Khmer Rouge came into play. While they had lost the country to the Vietnamese, they had managed to hold onto border regions such as Pailin and Anlong Veng with support from Thailand and China. Now that Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh were locked in a contest of wills, the Khmer Rouge suddenly became very important again. The Khmer Rouge in Pailin, led by Ieng Sary, cut amnesty for surrender deals for their territories. Those in the north entertained overtures from FUNCINPEC.

Rumours of a coup d’etat swirled in the capital. Boats carrying arms destined for supporters of Prince Ranariddh were stopped by Hun Sen’s gunships en route to Sihanoukville. Fearing that the remaining Khmer Rouge in the north could be used as a counter to CPP power if allowed to ally themselves with Prince Ranariddh, forces loyal to Hun Sen led a bloody coup d’etat in July 1997.

The prince fled the country. So too did Sam Rainsy, a former FUNCINPEC member kicked out of the party in 1995 for criticising the government, who had started a his own political party. Scores of opposition lawmakers were murdered in the struggle.

Cambodia’s next elections were held in 1998. Both leaders of the opposition parties returned to enter the fray, but Hun Sen finally won control of the country. Yet, the fairness of these elections was questioned by many people, and so this was only the beginning of a messy political saga that continues to this day.