Bombed and looted ancient Cambodian city poised for rebirth
sambor prei kuk (Cambodia) — It has survived centuries of monsoon rains, a US bombing campaign and rampant looting.
Now the ancient temple city of Sambor Prei Kuk in Cambodia is finally ready for a renaissance — and is teasing tourists to its forestcocooned ruins.
Cloistered by trees and linked by winding dirt trails, the site has played second fiddle to its much bigger cousin to the west — Angkor Wat — Cambodia’s top tourist destination.
But in July it gained a listing by the Unesco World Heritage, promising a tourist bonanza that could breathe new life into a once-thriving 6th and 7th century metropolis.
“We have already seen more and more local and foreign tourists flocking to visit our site,” said Hang Than, an official who manages the compound, as he strolled towards one of several temples spectacularly wrapped in tree roots.
For now the tourist infrastructure is basic.
The ancient city in central Kampong Thom province lies down a pot-holed road where a few food hawkers cluster beneath umbrellas in the dusty parking lot.
Several tour guides lounge around a small booth servicing a growing fleet of tour buses that arrive, for now, mainly on weekends.
“We are very happy and we were so surprised that this site has been listed,” said 45-year-old Mao Sambath, who has been making the hour-long motorcycle ride to sell a spread of tropical fruits to backpackers and Chinese tour groups. “Today we have even more vendors than yesterday.”
Sambor Prei Kuk, which means “the temple in the richness of the forest”, boasts nearly 300 brick temples and heaps of ruins across a 25sq km compound.
The city, some 200km from Phnom Penh, was once the seat of the Chenla kingdom that flourished in the 6th and 7th centuries before the height of the Khmer Empire that raised the mega-city of Angkor.
The temples were rediscovered by French scholars in the 1880s when Cambodia was part of France’s Indochina empire. —