Скачать или смотреть BLACK PALACE [Urban Exploration - Cambodia 2015]

"Black Palace" (Damnak Sla Khmao) was a little summer palace of King Sihanouk, abandoned sometime in the late 1960's or early 1970's. It's located on Bokor Hill Station in southern Cambodia. The "Palace" itself is not on a grand scale, but the overall spectacular location and many outer buildings must have been fairly impressive in its day.

The hill station was built as a resort by colonial French settlers as an escape from the heat and humidity of Phnom Penh. Nine hundred lives were lost in the nine months during the construction of the resort in this remote mountain location.

The centre-piece of the resort was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel- inaugurated in 1925. See previous video- "ill Casino". It was used as the location for the final showdown of the excellent Matt Dillon 2002 movie, "City Of Ghosts".

Bokor Hill was abandoned first by the French in late 1940s, during the First Indochina War, because of local insurrections guided by the Khmer Issarak. It was only in 1962, for the reopening of the "Cité du Bokor", that a casino was established in the new hotels near the lake, (Hotels Sangkum and Kiri). Some buildings were added at this time: an annex for the palace, the mayor's office and a strange mushroomed concrete parasol.

The Bokor mountain was abandoned again in 1972, as Khmer Rouge took over the area. During the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, Khmer Rouge entrenched themselves and held on tightly for months. In the 1990s Bokor Hill was still one of the last strongholds of Khmer Rouge.