Beneath a fascinating large stadium lies a feeling of inferiority complex - Cambodia and its neighbours' unfriendly coexistence
When Cambodia was announced as host of the 2023 Southeast Asian Games (potentially moved to 2025 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), the first thing Cambodia wanted to do was to build a massive stadium that must rival some of the world's finest. It is not a secret that the Cambodian government announced that the new stadium, replacing the outdated Phnom Penh Olympics Stadium, have to reflect the prideful past. In the end, a Chinese firm won and built the stadium. With 75,000 capacity, it has already become the largest stadium in mainland Southeast Asia, surpassing even Thailand's Rajamangala that holds only 50,000. For relatively 15 million people with a quite low-income economy, the building of this stadium was enormous both by cost and by personnel. More than 500 people were involved in the projects, with the Chinese nearly 350; while thousands of workers worked days and nights; the Chinese designation was to be an expression of long, ancient Sino-Cambodian relations. An even smal...