Cambodia’s Swinging Sixties: Architecture, The Arts, and a Lost Society

The brave new world of 1960s Cambodia was an extraordinary but short period of peace and prosperity, a period many older Cambodians fondly refer to as the ‘Golden Period’. French rule, which had lasted from 1863 until 1953 when Cambodia gained independence, had left an indelible mark on the country, especially its infrastructure and building works. Under the guidance of Cambodia’s new post-colonial prime minister, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country’s cultural, artistic and architectural modernity flourished, becoming the envy of its neighbours. Peace, however, was to be disrupted in the late 1960s when Cambodia was drawn into the Vietnam War, followed in 1975 by the takeover of the country by the communist Khmer Rouge. Many of the artistes—dancers, singers, musicians, artists and film-makers—who are described in this book, were among the more than 1.5 million Cambodians who died of malnutrition, disease, overwork and execution during the Khmer Rouge era. Since 1993, when Cambodia became a constitutional monarchy ruled by a coalition government, concerted efforts have been made to rebuild the economy and civil society and to restore the traditional forms of the country’s famed culture and artistic expression.

The genesis of this book was a meeting with a charming French woman in Phnom Penh in 2019. She had lived in the capital, that city of tree-lined boulevards, cafés and Indochine chic, throughout the 1960s, a city now her paradis perdu, her paradise lost, and had spent holidays at the seaside escape, Kep-sur-Mer. This book attempts to bring that period back to life, to describe society of the time in all its glory and then to show its loss in all its forms, not only physical destruction but the annihilation of an entire social and economic infrastructure, of a settled way of life, almost as if the Cambodia of the ‘then’ had been expunged from history. For this French woman and for many others, the opening line in L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, is definitely applicable to Cambodia in the 1960s.

About the Author

Stephen Simmons is a former British Army Officer who served for sixteen years from Berlin to Belize and from the Home Counties of England to Hong Kong. On leaving the army he returned with his family to Hong Kong where he spent over twenty years broking equity markets in Hong Kong, Thailand and London and working in private equity in Cambodia. Married with two grown-up children, he now lives in East Sussex for two-thirds of the year and in Bangkok for the remainder, where he carried out much of the research for his book, Cambodia’s Swinging Sixties: Architecture, The Arts, and a Lost Society. He is also the co-author with Valerie Ho of Club Class in Asia Pacific: The Insiders’ Guide to Private Members’ Clubs (Editions Didier Millet, Singapore, 2007). He is also the author of Maymyo Days, Forgotten Lives of a Burma Hill Station. (River Books, 2003). He is a member of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in Bangkok, the Army and Navy Club in London and The Pilgrims in London and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.