The land and its people

A river that runs backwards, an empire, the years after it, and the country you will arrive in

Cambodia is a small country with an outsized history, and nearly all of it is explained by water. The Mekong crosses it from north to south, the Tonle Sap sits in the middle of it, and between them they made the floodplain that fed the largest city in the pre-industrial world.

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A traveller standing beside a giant carved stone face at the Bayon temple

The land

Land area

181,035 km²

About the size of England and Wales together.

Coastline

440 km

On the Gulf of Thailand, with the islands offshore.

Highest point

Phnom Aural

1,813 m, in the Cardamom Mountains.

Neighbours

Three

Thailand and Laos to the west and north, Vietnam to the east.

Most of the country is a low, flat basin around the Tonle Sap and the Mekong, ringed by higher ground: the Cardamom Mountains in the south-west, rising past 1,500 m, the Elephant Range beside them, and the Dangrek escarpment along the Thai border in the north. It lies entirely within the tropics. Administratively it divides into twenty-four provinces plus the capital, Phnom Penh.

The river that reverses

The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia, and it is the reason Angkor could exist. For most of the year the Tonle Sap river drains the lake south into the Mekong. When the monsoon raises the Mekong far enough, the flow turns around and pushes back up into the lake, which swells from roughly 2,600 km² to several times that and rises by around seven metres.

When the water falls again it leaves behind a flooded forest that is one of the most productive fish nurseries on earth, and silt across the floodplain. That annual cycle fed the Khmer empire, and it still feeds the country: the Water Festival in November celebrates precisely the moment the river changes its mind.

The people

Cambodia's population is about 17.8 million (2025 estimate) — a figure worth stating carefully, because it has grown by several million in the time most travel pages about Cambodia have gone unedited. Between 90 and 95 per cent are ethnic Khmer, which makes Cambodia one of the more homogeneous countries in the region.

The largest minorities are the Cham, Muslim descendants of the kingdom of Champa, long settled along the rivers and traditionally fishermen, weavers and metalworkers; Chinese-Khmer families, long established in commerce and largely urban; ethnic Vietnamese, concentrated in the south-east and around Phnom Penh; and the Khmer Loeu, the highland peoples of the north-east — Kuy, Phnong, Brao, Jarai, Rade and others — in Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, Stung Treng and Kratie, farming upland rice.

The country remains mostly rural. Villages cluster along the water in the Tonle Sap basin and the Mekong lowlands, and that is where most Cambodians still live and work, though Phnom Penh has grown quickly.

A very short history

Before Angkor. The kingdoms of Funan and then Chenla, trading along the lower Mekong from the first centuries CE, Indian in religion and writing.

The Khmer empire, 9th to 15th centuries. Centred on Angkor and at its height the dominant power of mainland South East Asia. Angkor Wat was built in the twelfth century; the Bayon and the walled city of Angkor Thom followed under Jayavarman VII.

Decline and the French. The court moved south; Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1863 and regained full independence in 1953.

1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and abolished money, schools and religion. Around 1.7 to 2 million people died — a quarter of the population. Nearly every Cambodian family you meet lost someone.

Since. Vietnamese intervention ended the regime in 1979; a UN-supervised settlement and elections followed in the early 1990s, and the last Khmer Rouge holdouts gave up at the end of that decade. Angkor reopened to visitors, and tourism became one of the country's largest industries.

The recent history is not hidden here, and it is not something visitors should route around. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Phnom Penh are difficult and they are among the most important places in the country. Our guides will tell you their own families' stories if you ask, and will not if you would rather they did not.

Cambodia today

The economy runs mainly on garment and footwear manufacturing, agriculture — rice above all — construction, and tourism. It is a young country: the median age is in the twenties, a direct consequence of the 1970s. The currency is the riel, used alongside the US dollar, and Phnom Penh has changed almost beyond recognition in twenty years while much of the countryside has not.

For a visitor that combination is the appeal: a capital with a serious restaurant scene an hour's drive from villages doing what they have done for generations, and the largest religious monument on earth in between.