"Champa Battambang" (ចំប៉ាបាត់ដំបង, which means "The Frangipani of Battambang”) is a popular song of the 1960s composed by Sinn Sisamouth, which has become part of Cambodian heritage.^[1]

The title which literally translates as the frangipani of Battambang refers to a flower commonly seen in this city of Cambodia.

In 1965, Sin Sisamouth's song "Champa Battambang" was the first content played on Khmer Republic Television as part of his Album Chlangden Vol. 125.^[2] By the 1970s, it had become part of the repertoire of the upcoming scene of Cambodian rock music. It rapidly became a classic, as Khmer Rouge Khieu Samphan remembers his Communist friend Hou Yuon singing it with a certain nostalgia before his death in 1975.^[3]

For the Khmer musicians who managed to escape the ruthless persecution of the Khmers Rouges who forbade any foreign influence and almost every form of music apart from propaganda, the refugee camps in Thailand were a safe haven where listening to "Champa Battambang" or the Khmer version of The House of the Rising Sun and others pieces of Cambodian rock music was a certain consolation in their desolation: "Khaodang was a dream encoded in music."^[4]

In 2012, "Champa Battambang" was still "one favourite amongst new musical students" in Phnom Penh.^[5]

Champa Battambang has become a Cambodian classic uniting several generations. It is the link that connects three generations in the 2018 Khmer drama In the Life of Music.^[6] The track was covered by Sin Setsochhata, the granddaughter of the "legendary Sin Sisamouth, perhaps Cambodia’s most celebrated singer from its pre-war period of cultural renaissance."^[7]

This 1960s song-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e