Phnom Penh stacks 15th-century royal monasteries, French colonial commerce and the city emptied in April 1975 within a few riverside blocks. Three days take them in order: Ponhea Yat's temples, Vann Molyvann's concrete republic, and the lanes that outlived both.
Founded in 1443, Wat Ounalom is the seat of Cambodian Buddhism — its patriarch was murdered and its library of palm-leaf manuscripts thrown into the river in 1975. The rear stupa holds an eyebrow hair of the Buddha. Open 06:00–18:00.
A 1930s colonial villa on Street 174 run as a training restaurant by Mith Samlanh. The kitchen revives pre-war Khmer recipes — samlor korko, num banh chok, char kroeung — using the herb lists recorded before the 1975 evacuation broke the cooking lineage.
One of five monasteries founded in 1442 by King Ponhea Yat after the court left Angkor. The grounds are a field of royal stupas, including King Ang Duong's, plus a 1970s memorial to the monks killed under Democratic Kampuchea.
Another 1442 Ponhea Yat foundation, named for the Sri Lankan (Langka) monks who exchanged scripture here. The Khmer Rouge used it as a rice storehouse, which is why the 19th-century murals of the Jataka tales survived largely intact.
Chao Ponhea Yat High School became Security Prison 21 in 1976; of roughly 18,000 people registered here, twelve are known to have survived. Building A keeps the iron beds and the final photographs exactly as Vietnamese troops found them in January 1979.
Vann Molyvann's 1958 tower marks the 1953 end of the French protectorate — a 37m lotus modelled on Angkor-era prasat towers, its five tiers carrying 100 nagas. Sihanouk lit the memorial flame inside; it burns again on 9 November each year.
A former Chinese cemetery and orchard where S-21 prisoners were trucked out at night. Excavations opened 129 of the pits and recovered 8,985 bodies; the 1988 memorial stupa holds more than 5,000 skulls sorted by age and injury. Open 08:00–17:30.
Vann Molyvann's 1961 riverside hall fans open like a palm leaf, its concrete ribs calculated for cross-ventilation without air conditioning. In August 1979 it hosted the People's Revolutionary Tribunal that sentenced Pol Pot in absentia.
Opened in 1937 on a drained lake, its 26m ochre Art Deco dome by Jean Desbois and Louis Chauchon was briefly the largest covered market in Asia. Abandoned and bomb-damaged in the 1970s, it was restored with French funding in 2011.
The city's oldest working market sits among two-storey Sino-Khmer shophouses from the 1890s, when Teochew and Hokkien traders controlled the rice and dried-fish business. Streets 13 and 19 still show shuttered timber upper floors above the noodle counters.
The 1890s post office anchors the finest square of the French quarter, flanked by the 1908 Banque de l'Indochine (now Van's Restaurant) and the shell of the Hotel Manolis, where Cambodia's first cinema screenings were held in 1909.
Opened in 1929 in the French colonial-Khmer hybrid style, Le Royal sheltered foreign correspondents through the 1975 siege — the reporting behind The Killing Fields began in its lobby. The Elephant Bar still keeps the guest ledgers on display.