Patrimony & Phnom Penh: The Ghost of the Post Office Squar
- Editorial team
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Standing since 1892, the old Central Police Commissariat of Phnom Penh is silently disintegrating opposite the restored Post Office. Within its gutted walls, one hundred and thirty years of Cambodia’s history—colonial, Khmer Rouge, cinematic—await a verdict.
There is a building in Phnom Penh that resists everything—people, time, the monsoon. Not through strength, but through inertia. Wedged between Street 13 and Street 98, at the northern corner of the block the French once called Place de la Poste, the former Central Commissariat decays in the open air, its turmeric-yellow façade streaked with black cracks, its blind windows opening onto emptiness like sightless eye sockets. Strangler fig trees have taken over the roof. Their roots descend along the walls like patient fingers. Here, vegetation does not decorate: it devours.
Opposite, separated by a two-lane road, the Central Post Office gleams, cream and gold, restored in 2004, with the Cambodian flag at its peak. The contrast is striking, almost cruel. Both buildings were born in the same era, from the same momentum of French colonial urban planning. One has survived into the 21st century. The other barely survives, in the most literal sense of the term.
“Strangler fig trees have taken over the roof. Their roots descend along the walls like patient fingers. Here, vegetation does not decorate: it devours.”
1892: A French police station in the tropics
Phnom Penh was then a city under construction. The French Protectorate over Cambodia, established in 1863, took thirty years to transform this riverside town into an administrative capital. Engineers of French Indochina laid out straight avenues, planted flamboyant trees, and built public buildings according to metropolitan codes. It was in this context that the Central Commissariat was created, completed in 1892, serving as headquarters for colonial police forces. In its first life, it was a modest building—two stories, a right-angle plan at a street intersection—a silhouette that, according to specialists in Protectorate-era architecture, “could have stood in the French countryside, without any architectural adaptation to the tropical climate.”
This reflects a common paradox in the early decades of French colonialism in Southeast Asia: architects from the metropole replicated their designs without adapting them to humid heat, monsoon rains, or the low-angle light of the 11th parallel. Loggias, covered galleries, and louvered shutters would come later, in a second generation of colonial buildings better suited to their environment.
CHRONOLOGICAL LANDMARKS – 1863 — Establishment of the French Protectorate over Cambodia – 1892 — Construction of the Central Commissariat, two stories, Place de la Poste – 1920s–30s — Complete renovation, addition of a third floor, Art Deco windows, ventilated galleries – 1953 — Independence of Cambodia; end of the Protectorate – April 17, 1975 — Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh; the city is evacuated – 1979 — Liberation by Vietnamese forces; gradual return of the population – 1994 — The Commissariat reportedly still functions as a police station – 2002 — Filming of City of Ghosts, directed by Matt Dillon – 2013 — Royal Group owns the building; no declared plans – Today — The building is closed, surrounded by advertising hoardings, in advanced decay |
The great transformation: Art Deco arrives in Phnom Penh
Everything changed in the 1920s. French Indochina experienced a period of relative prosperity, driven by rubber, rice, and opium. Phnom Penh modernized again. The Commissariat was completely redesigned between the late 1920s and early 1930s: a third floor crowned the structure, and the façade was reshaped in an Art Deco style with tropical accents. Large windows with wooden shutters, openwork balustrades allowing air circulation, a grand central staircase leading to shaded exterior galleries—these elements reflect a long-overdue adaptation to geography and climate.
The triangular shape of the building, dictated by the intersection, gives it a strong scenographic presence: it can be seen from afar, from the boulevard along the Tonlé Sap, like a yellow prow anchored in the colonial fabric.
This renovated Commissariat formed part of a remarkable architectural ensemble. Place de la Poste—designed by French planners, perhaps inspired by Austrian Camillo Sitte’s theories of irregular and picturesque urban spaces—was then bordered by several important institutional buildings: the Central Post Office, the former Grand Hôtel Manolis (the city’s only luxury hotel at the time), and the Banque de l’Indochine. A hub of power and representation at the heart of the French quarter.
Year Zero: 1975 and the silence of stone
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Within days, two million inhabitants were driven into the countryside. The city became a ghost. Institutions collapsed, banks were blown up, religious monuments were devastated. The French Catholic cathedral was dismantled stone by stone. In this maelstrom of ideological destruction, what became of the Commissariat? History does not say precisely. But its walls, visibly, survived the four years of the regime—from 1975 to 1979—when the Cambodian capital was a desert inhabited only by a few regime cadres. Buildings do not know what they have seen. Their scars, however, bear witness.
When Vietnamese forces liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979, the city had barely one hundred thousand inhabitants, survivors of a genocide that killed between 1.7 and 2 million people. Reconstruction was slow, chaotic, and influenced by external forces. Colonial buildings were reused as needed: housing for displaced families, military quarters, improvised administrative offices. The Commissariat, according to testimonies collected by Phnom Penh Post journalists in the early 1990s, reportedly still functioned as an operational police station until at least 1994—a remnant of improvised institutional continuity, a strange echo of its original purpose.
“The building reportedly still functioned as a police station until 1994—a remnant of improvised institutional continuity, a strange echo of its original purpose.”
City of Ghosts: When Hollywood chose the ruins
In 2002, an American camera gave the Commissariat global visibility. Matt Dillon, a cult actor of the Outsiders generation, chose Phnom Penh for his first film as director. He had discovered Cambodia in 1993 during a personal trip and was captivated by its melancholic charm—“that dreamlike, almost nightmarish quality,” he said, “made of extreme poverty, crime, and a constant sense of danger.” City of Ghosts is a noir thriller in which Gérard Depardieu plays Emile, the manager of a rundown hotel and shady bar in a dubious city. This fictional hotel is the Commissariat. Its decaying façade, dark corridors, and already deteriorating orange tiles provided a setting no studio designer could have invented.
Critic Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun-Times review, praised the authenticity of the locations: Matt Dillon and cinematographer Jim Denault found places that do not look like sets; they have the disorder and random details of real places.
The film was largely shot on location in Phnom Penh—the first Western production to do so since Lord Jim in 1964. For a few weeks, the ruins of the Commissariat came back to life, filled with Khmer extras, American technicians, and the imposing figure of Depardieu moving through its corridors.
The Royal Group and the enigma of the future
Since then, the building has continued to deteriorate. For several years, surrounded by green fencing or advertising billboards—particularly for the telecom operator Cellcard, visible in recent aerial images—the Commissariat belongs to Royal Group, the powerful Cambodian conglomerate founded by Kith Meng. In 2013, a company spokesperson, David Pearson, told the Phnom Penh Post: “There are many ideas, but nothing concrete to announce.” That same year, an internal source mentioned the possibility of turning it into a hotel, preserving the façade, as part of an architectural competition organized by the French Institute of Cambodia. Since then, silence.
Sylvain Ulisse, head of the Heritage Mission under the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, summarized the situation bluntly in the same article: “The building is collapsing.” That was in 2013.
In 2025, it is collapsing even more. No binding law protects Phnom Penh’s colonial buildings from demolition or abandonment. Since 2008, the Preah Suramarit National Theater, built under Sihanouk, and the Colonial Vocational School have already disappeared. The Commissariat still stands—but not because of deliberate preservation.
WHAT REMAINS TO BE PRESERVED – Three-level Art Deco façade, unique in the French quarter – Original openwork balustrades, wooden shutter windows – White and terracotta checkerboard floor tiles, noted by visitors before closure – Central staircase and ventilated exterior galleries from the 1930s – Documented presence of strangler fig trees on the roof—an unintended vegetal heritage |
The Pearl of Asia and its ghosts
Phnom Penh was once called the “Pearl of Asia.” This nickname, born in the 1950s and 1960s during the golden age of independent Cambodia, captures the ambition of a city that aspired to beauty. Today, that beauty exists in constant tension with the real estate pressure of a rapidly growing Asian metropolis. Cranes stand alongside pagodas. Chinese towers pierce skylines that French colonial planners had carefully preserved.
In this context, the former Commissariat is not just a building. It is a test—a test of a city’s, a country’s ability to decide what it wants to preserve of itself. Place de la Poste still forms an urban ensemble of rare coherence in Southeast Asia: the restored Central Post Office, the repurposed Manolis Hotel, and this abandoned Commissariat. One of these three witnesses has been saved. Another survives as best it can. The third waits.
Its walls have seen French Protectorate officials, Indochinese police, the convulsions of the Khmer Rouge, the years of reconstruction, a Hollywood film crew, homeless Cambodian families, and improvised volleyball games in its courtyard. One hundred and thirty years of intertwined Khmer and French life, slowly reduced by time and indecision into yellow dust.
All it would take is will.
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