Siem Reap is located about 10 km northeast of the Tonle Sap lake, the largest lake in Southeast Asia and one of the most productive inland waters of the earth on both sides of the Siem Reap River (Stung Seam Reap) and about 6 miles south of Angkor Wat. Like many other small towns in Cambodia - Siem Reap has about 60,000 inhabitants - it evolved as a merger of a number of villages that had sprung up around the many Wats (Buddhist temples and monasteries). The city center is the Old Market, which is surrounded by houses in the French colonial style.
The area around Siem Reap for centuries belonged to Siam and the Siamese kings were tributary. During the colonial era, France took possession of large areas in Southeast Asia. For that "French Indochina" included not only Cambodia and Laos, and Vietnam. With the Treaty of 25 March 1907 consumed the colonial government also Siem Reap, Battambang and Sisophon with a total of more than 20,000 square kilometers.
In the years of the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 were the inhabitants of Siem Reap, like those of all other cities in the country, trafficked for forced labor in the fields. Only after the victory of the Vietnamese troops in January 1979, they returned to their city, which was even until the beginning of the 1990s, the target of attacks by the Red displaced in the surrounding forests Khmer. For years, residents had to protect the city center with barricades. The last attack by a battalion of the city and the camp of the UNTAC peace-keeping force (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) in 1993.