Central Market

From its sublime palaces and museums to its divine art deco markets, the city’s glorious architecture is lovingly captured in a thrilling new book. But can it survive a tidal wave of foreign investment?

Hovering like a banana-coloured flying saucer above the dusty, congested streets of scooters and cyclo taxis, the central market of Phnom Penh is a remarkable thing. Its enormous concrete dome rises in sharply serrated steps, perforated with screens of chevron tiles, above four long streamlined arms that stretch out like the wings of a benevolent mothership, sheltering the chaotic labyrinth of market stalls below. Built in the 1930s, as a futuristic fusion of French art deco and Khmer temple motifs, it featured the second largest concrete dome in the world at the time (trumped only by the Pantheon in Rome), a fitting symbol of the Cambodian capital’s status as the “Pearl of Asia”.