When Sar was growing up in the 1930s, Phnom Penh was a sleepy, sundrenched town that had been established as the capital of a French protectorate in 1866. As far as Europe and America were concerned, Phnom Penh was at the back of the world. The city had the form of a rectangle, running north-south along the western bank of the Tonle Sap River, which flowed into the much larger Mekong River at that point. Many public buildings, such as the post office, the library, and the railroad station, were reminiscent of their counterparts in provincial France. So were the tree-lined avenues radiating from the public gardens to the north and the shaded promenades along the river. In 1936, roughly half of its population of 100,000 were immigrant Chinese and Vietnamese, who dominated the commercial sector. Its 45,000 Cambodians lived around the palace, as monks in the monasteries or as bureaucrats, farmers, artisans, and petty traders in the southern and western sectors of the city. There, the Cambodians’ bamboo and wooden houses—raised on stilts and surrounded by mango and banana trees, with domestic animals roaming underneath—were indistinguishable from rural dwellings. In those days, most Cambodians chose or drifted into careers in government, farming, or religion, leaving commercial affairs to the Chinese and Vietnamese. Vietnamese immigration into Cambodia was encouraged by the French, who found them more “vigorous” and better educated (in French) than the Khmer and welcomed them into the middle ranks of the colonial civil service.6

The center of Phnom Penh contained a bustling commercial quarter of Chinese shops, warehouses, eating stalls, and markets. To the west, parallel to the river, ran shaded streets and boulevards lined with the stucco-covered villas of French civil servants, Chinese businessmen, and the French-educated Cambodian elite. At the northern edge of the city, the small hill (phnom) that gave the city its name was crowned by a seventeenth-century monastery and several Buddhist reliquaries (chedi). The area had been landscaped by the French into a 25-acre park, with a small zoo, a floral clock, some statuary, a bandstand, and several outdoor cafés.7

Roughly half a mile south of the phnom, facing the river, was the Royal Palace, whose main buildings had been designed by French architects in a Thai-Cambodian style in the early 1900s. Set back from the foreshore behind manicured lawns, the white and cream buildings, with their green-andorange-tiled roofs glittering in the sun, resembled the Buddhist temples scattered throughout the city and gave passersby a glimpse of a resplendent, ethereal world.