Who ruled Phnom Penh?

Phnom Penh stands at the Chaktomuk, the "four faces", where the Tonle Sap river meets the Mekong and the Mekong divides into its lower course and the Bassac. Rivers here carry trade from the great lake of the Tonle Sap down to the delta and the sea, which made the site valuable to Khmer kings. The city's history falls into sharp chapters: a brief royal capital in the fifteenth century, a French-built colonial capital, a lively post-independence city, and then the catastrophe of 1975, when the Khmer Rouge emptied it of its people.

The riverbanks were settled long before the city had a name. Archaeologists have found a large pottery-making centre at Choeung Ek, on the southern edge of today's city, that worked from about the fifth to the thirteenth century, when the region belonged first to Funan and then to Chenla and the Khmer Empire. A later legend tells how a wealthy woman, Daun Penh (Grandmother or Lady Penh), found Buddha images in a tree floating down the river in the fourteenth century and built a small hill with a shrine to house them. The hill, or phnom, and its temple, Wat Phnom, gave the city its name.

After armies of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya captured Angkor around 1431, the Khmer court moved south, and King Ponhea Yat made Phnom Penh his capital in the 1430s. It held that role for several decades, but by the early sixteenth century later kings had moved to other sites, among them Longvek and later Oudong. For more than three centuries Phnom Penh was a river port where Chinese, Malay, Japanese and Portuguese traders lived alongside Khmers, while Cambodia itself was squeezed between the growing power of Siam and Vietnam.

In 1863 King Norodom accepted a French protectorate, hoping for protection from his neighbours, and in 1865 he moved the royal capital back to Phnom Penh. The French made the city the seat of their administration in Cambodia, which became part of French Indochina in 1887. They filled in canals, laid out boulevards and a European quarter around Wat Phnom, while the royal palace and Silver Pagoda rose by the river. Japan occupied the region during World War II, and Cambodia gained full independence from France on 9 November 1953.

Under Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s Phnom Penh grew quickly. The architect Vann Molyvann and his colleagues designed modernist public buildings, schools and a national stadium in what became known as New Khmer Architecture. After Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970, the country was drawn into the Vietnam War. Bombing and civil war drove hundreds of thousands of refugees into the city, and by 1975 its population had swollen to perhaps two million.

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and within days forced the entire population into the countryside. Under the regime of Pol Pot the capital stood almost empty for nearly four years; a former high school became the S-21 prison, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where thousands were interrogated before being killed at Choeung Ek. Vietnamese forces took the city on 7 January 1979, and residents slowly returned. A United Nations transitional authority oversaw elections in 1993 after the peace agreements of 1991. Rapid growth since the 2000s, driven by garment factories, construction and foreign investment, has made Phnom Penh the political and economic centre of Cambodia, with more than two million people.