Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda: Dress Code, Hours and What You Can Actually See

The Royal Palace has been the residence of the Cambodian king since 1866, when the capital moved back to Phnom Penh, and it is still lived in. That single fact governs the whole visit.

The royal apartments are closed and always will be. The Throne Hall, the building on every postcard, is seen from the outside; you walk the terrace and look in, rather than through. That disappoints people who arrive expecting Bangkok's Grand Palace, and it is worth knowing before you pay rather than after.

What you do get is a compound that is calm, well kept and genuinely beautiful, with a coronation hall, a pavilion Napoleon III shipped over in pieces, and gardens that are still gardens rather than a queue management system. It is smaller and quieter than its Thai equivalent, and a lot of people prefer it for exactly that.

The Silver Pagoda, inside the same walls, is the reason to come. Its name comes from the five thousand silver tiles of its floor, more than five tonnes of them, most now covered with carpet to protect them - a corner is left exposed so you can see. Inside is the Emerald Buddha of Cambodia, in baccarat crystal, and in front of it a life-size Maitreya Buddha of 90 kilograms of gold set with more than two thousand diamonds, the largest of them around 25 carats. Around the courtyard runs a mural of the Reamker, the Khmer Ramayana, painted in the 1900s and slowly being restored.

Shoulders and knees covered, for everyone, men included, and it is enforced at the gate rather than apologetically suggested. No vests, no shorts above the knee, no strappy tops, nothing see-through. There is a place to buy or borrow a cover-up and there is a queue for it in the middle of the day, which will cost you exactly the cool morning you got up for.

The practical answer is light long trousers and a sleeved shirt. You want them anyway - the compound is open and there is very little shade.

Shoes come off at the Silver Pagoda. Wear something you can slip out of.

Hours: the palace opens in the morning, closes over the middle of the day, and reopens in the afternoon; it also shuts entirely for royal ceremonies and state occasions, sometimes at short notice. Check on the day rather than assuming.

Photography is fine in the grounds and not permitted inside the Silver Pagoda. This is enforced.

Tickets are bought at the gate. An audio guide and licensed guides are available at the entrance; the guides are worth it here because almost nothing is labelled in any depth and the Reamker mural in particular means nothing without someone to read it to you.

Go in the morning. The palace and the National Museum next door are a single unit in practice, and the museum closes for lunch, so an early start gets you both before the heat.

A hundred metres from the palace gate is the National Museum of Cambodia, and if you only have time for one, a lot of people would tell you to make it this one.

It holds the best collection of Khmer sculpture anywhere in the world: pre-Angkorian pieces from the 6th century onwards, the great Angkorian bronzes and stone figures, and a reclining Vishnu from the West Mebon that is the single finest bronze to survive from the empire. The building itself, a terracotta pavilion around an open courtyard built in 1920, is worth the ticket on its own.

What makes it land is the order you see it in. If you come to Phnom Penh after Siem Reap, you will have spent days looking at these figures in situ - eroded, in place, often with their heads gone. Indoors, lit, at eye level, with the carving intact, they finally read as sculpture rather than as architecture. That is an argument for doing Siem Reap first on a two-city trip.

It closes for lunch, so pair it with the palace in the morning rather than the afternoon. Photography is not allowed inside the galleries but is fine in the courtyard.

The two together are about three hours. With the riverfront a five-minute walk away, that is a complete and unhurried morning.

Wat Phnom is a fifteen-minute tuk-tuk north and is where the city gets its name: the hill (*phnom*) of Lady Penh, who according to the legend found four Buddha statues in a floating koki tree in the river around 1372 and raised the mound to house them. It is a working temple, busy with people praying for specific outcomes, and it is the one place in central Phnom Penh with genuine shade.

Sisowath Quay runs along the front, and the promenade is where the city walks in the evening. Phnom Penh sits at the confluence of the Mekong, the Tonle Sap and the Bassac, which is unusual enough to be worth standing and looking at for a while.

The Central Market, Psar Thmei, is a ten-minute ride and its art deco dome opened in 1937 - it was briefly one of the largest domed buildings in Asia. It is bright, it is cool under the dome, and it is mostly watches and electronics now.

The Russian Market, properly Psar Toul Tom Poung, is further south and is the one for silver, silk and knock-offs. It got its name from Soviet expatriates shopping there in the 1980s and nobody has bothered to change it. The food stalls in the middle are good and the whole thing is hot and cramped by eleven, so go early.

Independence Monument, at the centre of a roundabout, is worth a look at night when it is lit - a 1958 lotus-shaped tower by Vann Molyvann, the architect of New Khmer Architecture, whose buildings are scattered across the city and are a whole separate walk.