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A wooden residence of King Norodom I located inside the royal palace in Phnom Penh built in 1866.

Source: Koh Santepheap newspaper
By Khmerization

The Phnom Penh Municipal Authority has announced that it will hold a public photo exhibition of the city from its inception in 1372 to present day.

The organisers said 136 photos, slides and drawings of the city, from its birth to present day, will be on public display at a newly-built exhibition hall at Wat Phnom in December.

In December, the city authority will also hold a very big celebration to celebrate the 575th birthday of the founding of Phnom Penh City.

The history of Phnom Penh is a bit patchy. Legend has it that in 1372, a nun named Penh went to a fetch a water from the Mekong River at the location of present day Wat Phnom. She found a dead Koki tree floating downstream. She brought the Koki log overland and found five statues of Buddha embedded inside the log. She then ordered the villagers to build a small hill to keep and honour those five statues and they called it Phnom Daun Penh (Mount Grandmother Penh). Since then the place has been abbreviated to Phnom Penh (Mount Penh) and the hill where the five Buddha statues were kept was called Wat Phnom (Temple Mount) until today.

Although Phnom Penh was founded in 1372, it has not become a royal capital until 1432 when King Ponhea Yat moved his capital from Toul Bassan in Kampong Cham to present day Phnom Penh. But in 1505, subsequent Khmer kings had abandoned Phnom Penh as their royal capital due to civil wars among royal pretenders.

Phnom Penh has again become Cambodia's royal capital in 1865 when King Norodom I ordered 10,000 of his subjects to move out of the old royal capital of Oudong into present day Phnom Penh.