Prime Minister in 1945, and again in 1972: on paper, Son Ngoc Thanh's career looks like a political summit. In practice, he never held power for more than a few weeks at a stretch, caught between his open admiration for imperial Japan, a later alliance with the CIA, and a lifelong, structuring hostility toward Norodom Sihanouk. A portrait of a Khmer nationalist as consequential as he is uncomfortable to celebrate without nuance.

Off the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, a teardrop-shaped island holds centuries of rivalry, colonial line-drawing, and quiet diplomacy. Today a Vietnamese tourist paradise, Phú Quốc still carries, beneath its white-sand beaches, the layered history of a territory once claimed by two nations.

July 1942: a professor of Pali is arrested, without even his religious superiors being warned. He doesn't know it yet, but he has just set off the first major anti-colonial demonstration in modern Cambodian history. Dead in detention a year later, Achar Hem Chieu would go on to become a reference that generations of Cambodians would keep invoking — sometimes for causes that sit uneasily together.

November 1911. A steamship, the Armand-Béhic, glides up the brown waters of the Saigon River and docks in the sticky heat of the coming dry season. Down the gangway steps a thirty-nine-year-old man, a lawyer by training and a journalist by temperament, arriving to take charge of one of the largest and most coveted territories in the French colonial empire. His name is Albert Sarraut.

Beneath the stalactites of Laang Spean, in Battambang province, archaeologists have spent more than sixty years digging through a memory that stretches back several millennia. What the earth reveals there upends the idea of a fixed Khmer identity: Cambodia's first inhabitants did not all spring from the same soil. They arrived in successive waves, from the forests of Sundaland, the rice fields of southern China, and eventually the shores of India.

Long before Jayavarman II proclaimed Cambodia's independence on Mount Kulen in 802 and laid the first stone of the Khmer Empire, the Mekong Delta and surrounding plains had already given rise to powerful kingdoms, largely forgotten by the general public today. Funan, then Chenla, spent nearly seven centuries shaping the political, religious, and commercial foundations on which Angkor would later rise.

Born in 1944 in Battambang province under the name Pol Sarann, Mao Sareth grew up in a family of musicians. In an interview she once gave to journalist and singer Huoy Meas, she mentioned having three sisters and coming from a household where music held a central place.

In collaboration with the magazine "Searching for the Truth," initiated by DC-Cam, Cambodge Mag brings you a series of raw testimonies from those who lived through the Khmer Rouge regime. Today, the story of Heng Sokphanna's husband.

How an interpreter from Siem Reap, who became the guide and friend of American journalist Sydney Schanberg, survived four years of hell under the Khmer Rouge before forging, out of the silence of his own survival, the phrase that would forever name one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes.

Montier-en-Der, Haute-Marne. Winter, 1862. A country priest sits in his presbytery reading dispatches arriving from Paris: a certain Henri Mouhot, a naturalist dead in Laos, whose posthumously published journals have set the capital ablaze.

French gunboats steam up the Tonlé Sap and drop anchor facing the royal palace. Their guns do not fire. They do not need to. Inside the palace, Cochinchina's governor Charles Thomson hands King Norodom I a document to sign: a convention transferring control of the kingdom's internal affairs to the French.

Inscribed on palm-leaf manuscripts in the Pali language, encoded in the stonework of Angkor's temples, passed down from generation to generation by the Kru Khmer healers, traditional Khmer medicine stands as one of the great medical traditions of Southeast Asia.

Born in 1958, the eldest child of a Cambodian farming family, Hang Nget was sixteen years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975. Over four years, she lost her father, four brothers, and nearly everything that had constituted her life. Her testimony, collected in 2010 by TPO Cambodia and preserved in the DC-Cam archives in Phnom Penh, stands as one of the most shattering documents in the memory of the Cambodian genocide.

He entered the Cambodian forest with two elephants, an interpreter, and theories about rubber. Eight days later, he stumbled out without a shirt or shoes, gaunt and dishevelled, utterly spent — having walked two hundred kilometres without food.

On Sunday morning, behind the wrought-iron gate of the former Bank of Indochina, frangipani trees filtered a still-soft light over an unusually protocol-heavy crowd — ambassadors, ministers, researchers.

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia and plunged the country into one of the darkest periods of the twentieth century. For Sorithy Sor, a fifteen-year-old boy living peacefully with his six siblings in Battambang, everything collapsed within hours.

While Cambodia inaugurated the Phnom Penh War Memorial in 2023, in 1914 the first dispatches arriving in Phnom Penh from France requested that 4,500 Cambodians join the French war effort.

C'est à l'Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille, en 1922, que se noue l'épisode le plus saisissant de la carrière de René Piot. Dans le pavillon de l'Indochine, sur le boulevard Michelet, une troupe de danseuses du ballet royal cambodgien se produit devant un public fasciné.

Norng Chan Phal was one of four surviving children found within the grounds of the S-21 prison after the Khmer Rouge abandoned the capital in 1979. Mr. Chan Phal and the other children were hiding under a pile of clothes behind the prison and were discovered by Vietnamese soldiers.

Le silence s’installe lentement dans la salle du Centre de documentation de Prey Veng. À l’extérieur, la vie suit son cours — le bruit lointain des motos, la chaleur dense de l’après-midi cambodgien — mais ici, le temps semble suspendu.

In September 1928, National Geographic published twenty-seven color photographs of a Cambodia almost unknown to the Western world. Signed by a French adventurer-photographer, a convert to Islam, companion of Pierre Loti, and pioneer of autochrome—these images resurface today with undiminished power. A dive into the lens of a forgotten visionary.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, amid the turmoil of colonial conquests and the exploration of distant lands, a remarkable figure emerged, who was in turn a soldier, linguist, explorer and scholar: Étienne François Aymonier (1844-1929). A man of many talents, he was the first scientist to methodically survey the ruins and decipher the inscriptions of the ancient Khmer kingdom—now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam—and to study the little-known Cham civil

Captain Van Nay’s journey began as a "Khmer Rouge child," leaving his hometown in Takeo province to serve as a messenger for the Region 5, Northwest Zone during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979). He later served as a Khmer Rouge soldier in the Malai region from 1981 until 1996.

This research draws from Zhou Daguan's Memoirs on Angkorian society at the end of the 13th century and their contribution to social and cultural anthropology.