Ondoung Rossei Pottery Village

Ondoung Rossei is only a five- to ten-minute drive up the hillside above central Kampong Chhnang. Rather than a single tidy settlement, it is a maze of dirt roads with pottery being worked beneath and beside the villagers’ stilted houses. Most potters now shape their wares on modern wheels, yet still gather clay by traditional methods, refine the forms with wooden paddles and sun-dry the finished pots beside their homes; an NGO-sponsored project maintains a large communal kiln beyond the first of the pottery houses.

The village can be tricky to find, and villagers may be genuinely surprised to see visitors arriving with cameras, but it makes an absorbing side-trip for anyone with an hour to spare and is a fine place to pick up an unusual souvenir, including piggy banks moulded into all sorts of shapes. Kampong Chhnang’s reputation for terracotta is centuries old: in the 14th century the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan noted the riverside town’s clay wares, referring to it as the “port of pots”.