Phnom Penh Postmarks Part 3: 1975-1991

By Graham Shaw

The Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, fell completely under the control of the Khmer Rouge forces on 17 April 1975. The postal service of Cambodia, both domestically and internationally, fell silent whilst the ravages of the Democratic Kampuchea regime took hold and decimated much of Cambodian society.

Little appears to be known about postal use – either formal or informal – during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Was there really a set issued on April 1, 1980, as suggested in the Michel Catalogue? I have also not been able to find any type of postmark from the Khmer Rouge period.

The Khmer Rouge forces were removal by the Vietnamese army beginning in late December 1978 resulting in the taking of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. As might be expected, the priority at this time was not reestablishing postal services within the country or with the international community; basis survival was uppermost in most people’s mind.

The following review does not include specialized postmarks used on virtually all of the First Day Cover’s (FDC’s) during the period 1980 to 1991, of which there are many; the below overview only refers to the standard postmarks used on a day-to-day basis at the Central Post Office (CPO) in central Phnom Penh and its sub-offices around the capital.

The first post-Khmer Rouge postmark comes with the first issue of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (RPK) on 10 April 1980, as seen at Figure 1. The major difference between this new postmark and that most often used during the 1960’s is that the name of the country is shown as ‘Kampuchea’, a more literal translation of the Khmer-language name of the country. However, the name ‘Kampuchea’ does not appear in the Khmer language at the top of the new postmark. In addition, the date format now uses numerals throughout and the year is abbreviated to two numbers once again. Dots rather than dashes are now used to separate the day, month and year in the new version of the postmark. This postmark continued to be used throughout the 1980’s during the isolation of the country by the so-called ‘western powers’, whilst the country did receive assistance from the ‘eastern block’ countries led by the USSR.

Fig. 1: Postmark on the first FDC of the RPK

Fig. 2: Pre-1975 postmark used from April 1980

However, there is evidence that the old Khmer Republic postmark used from mid-1970 to April 1975 continued to be used by the CPO in Phnom Penh in combination with the new ‘Kampuchea’ postmark; this is likely as all known examples of the 1970-1975 postmark never included the country name.

Although the date is illegible, the postmark shown in Figure 2 is clearly of the same format as the Khmer Republic postmark; all it would take is to change the date on the mark from 1975 (when it was last used) to 1980.

The stamps that were cancelled as shown in Fig. 2 are of the first issue of April 10, 1980 by the RPK. A clearer example of the old Khmer Republic postmark used during the RPK regime is at Figure 3 and was in use throughout the 1980 and into the early 1990’s as can be seen in Figure 4 from 1991.


Fig. 5: an example of the RP 2 postmark from 1991

A variation on the new RPK postmark appeared in 1991, as shown in Figure 5. This is an example of the Phnom Penh RP. 2 postmark and differs from the other postmark formats used through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. The first example of a postmark from the Boeung Pralit post office in the south of the city in 1989 can be seen at Figure 6, with ‘Phnom Penh 3’ shown at the bottom, although it is possible that sub-post offices in the city were operational before this time.

Fig. 6: Boeung Pralit sub post office in the south of the capital

Consequently, for the period 1979 to 1991 – a period of isolation for Cambodia from the ‘western’ world – there were really only two basic types of postmark apparently in use as exemplified in figures 1and 3, above.

This was soon to change following the Paris Peace Accords of late 1991 and the introduction of the United Nations Advanced Mission in Cambodia (UNAMIC) followed shortly thereafter in 1992 with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

Part 4 in this series will review the Phnom Penh postmarks for the period 1992 to 2008.