Kept secret for many years, the Khmer Rouge airport is located near Kampong Chhnang and Tonle Sap Lake in a green valley bordered in the west by Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains. Now abandoned, the airport site covers 300 hectares and features two massive 2.4 km-long runways flanked by two giant moats, a control tower, administrative buildings, a quarry, a former prison camp, seven enormous cisterns, and tunnel-prisons. Construction began on the airport in 1976 under the supervision of Chinese engineers, but was abandoned in 1979.
Aeroport centre
During the Khmer Rouge era, the site was used to purge and “reeducate” the Kampuchea Democratic Army (ARK). It became a concentration camp where tens of thousands of people died. While exact figures are unknown due to the secrecy of the location, the estimates range from 10,000 to 350,000 souls who died from starvation, exhaustion, or were killed in the tunnel-prison complexes and then buried in mass graves. Today, green rice fields cover the once blood-soaked earth.
Romduol flower
On the way to Battambang, Phnom Penh or Phat Sanday – Secret Indochina’s floating house project – you have the option to discover this clandestine Khmer Rouge site. Meet a local family and learn about the local area, then start your tour of the site with the quarry, continuing on to the airport, runway and western moat. End your visit with a walk down the southern hill towards the entrance of a tunnel-prison.
Pol Pot Airport tank
Pol Pot Airport quarry
