When W Somerset Maugham passed through Burma, Siam and Indochina in 1923 — a journey documented in The Gentleman in the Parlour — he described Phnom Penh’s riverside Grand Hotel as “large, dirty and pretentious.”

Maugham visited long before the city’s glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, when writers began throwing “Paris of the East” accolades at Cambodia’s capital. Maugham’s Phnom Penh was a backwater stopover en-route to the recently “discovered” ruins of Angkor, and the hotel he disapproved of is now branch of the KFC franchise, which it is difficult to imagine Maugham would approve of either.

Sadly, this is the Phnom Penh story. Largely vilified in its early days; two decades of restoration under Norodom Sihanouk (who abdicated as king in 1955  and was variously prime minister and head of state  until 1970); emptied of its inhabitants and left to decay by the Khmer Rouge; reconstituted ad-hoc with massive inflows of foreign aid that lined the pockets   of Cambodia’s political elites; followed by the current flood of mostly foreign, last-frontier, sky-scraping speculation.

• Tags: Cambodia, Chris Taylor, Issue 2