By the sea, three old villas built for a governor, a relative of the king and a senior customs official tell, between them, the whole fate of Kep: colonial splendour, the war that swallowed everything, then a patient rebirth carried by lovers of Khmer heritage. This is the story of Knai Bang Chatt.

As American bombs rained relentlessly on neighboring Vietnam, an old general in uniform, Charles de Gaulle, came to remind the world's powers that Asia belongs to no one.

Hunted by anti-Christian repression in Cochinchina, driven out of Battambang by a princely revolt, confidant of King Ang Duong at the court of Oudong: the life of Jean-Claude Miche, a missionary from the Vosges who became bishop of Cambodia, reads like an adventure novel. He was also, quietly, one of the most decisive architects behind the birth of the French protectorate in 1863.

In 1866, a patchwork army of Khmer peasants, Vietnamese, Muslim Chams and Stieng hill fighters stormed the old royal capital of Oudong. Leading them was a Buddhist monk with a near-messianic hold over his followers: Pou Kombo. His uprising, one of the largest Cambodia saw in the 19th century, came close to toppling both the throne and the fledgling French protectorate.

He was a monk before he was a boxer, a prisoner before he was a bestselling author, and a nationalist before any of it. Bunchan Mol spent five decades fighting — in the ring, in print, and in politics — for an idea of Cambodia he believed in. In April 1975, that idea, and the man who wrote it down, were among the first things the Khmer Rouge destroyed.

« Mais aujourd'hui, je pense amèrement à leurs applaudissements parce qu'ils n'avaient pas d'autre choix et que leur vie était difficile...

At the beginning of the 20th century, Pierre Loti's travelogue ‘Un pèlerin d'Angkor’ (A Pilgrim at Angkor) played a major role in the French imagination, offering a poetic and melancholic immersion into the mystery of the ruins of Angkor.

Since we published our first article on this portrait, a controversy has erupted online: several Thai commenters have disputed our conclusions, claiming the woman in the photograph was in fact Siamese, not Khmer. After a fresh review of every available source — the museum's own archive, genealogical research, an independent encyclopedia entry, and costume scholarship — the conclusion holds: this claim simply isn't supportable.

A grave face, a carefully knotted sampot, a gaze that doesn't flinch from the lens. For a century and a half, this portrait taken around 1866-1870 by French photographer Émile Gsell has circulated through books, auction houses and online forums — where it has been mistaken, in turn, for a Siamese lady-in-waiting, a Vietnamese woman, or the anonymous concubine of a colonial officer. She was none of those things.

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.