Cambodia Emoji & Symbols

The Cambodia flag emoji 🇰🇭 has three horizontal bands, blue, a red band twice as tall, and blue again, with a white drawing of Angkor Wat in the middle. It is one of the very few national flags with a building on it. The usual reading follows the national motto, ជាតិ សាសនា ព្រះមហាក្សត្រ, Nation, Religion, King: red for the nation, white for religion, the Buddhism of the temple, and blue for the monarchy. The design dates from 1948; other flags were used between 1970 and 1993, and the Angkor Wat flag came back with the restored kingdom in 1993.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇰🇭 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇰 and 🇭, for the country code KH. Phones, Macs and most browsers join them into the flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the two letters instead. Search "Cambodia" in the emoji keyboard of your phone, or copy it from the grid above.

Angkor Wat emoji and Cambodia's national symbols 🛕 🪷 🐍 💃

There is no Angkor Wat emoji, so people build it: 🛕, the Hindu temple emoji, fits better than it looks, because Angkor Wat was built in the early 12th century under King Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple to Vishnu, and only later became Buddhist. 🌅 is the sunrise everyone gets up at four in the morning for, the five towers dark against the sky and reflected in the pond, and 🪷 belongs to it too: the towers are shaped like lotus buds and stand for the peaks of Mount Meru. The site, near Siem Reap, is often called the largest religious monument in the world, and Angkor has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992. For a stupa, the symbol 🛓 exists as a plain character.

Around it lie hundreds of other temples. The Bayon, built for King Jayavarman VII, has more than 200 huge stone faces smiling from its towers; 🗿 is the stand-in people use. At Ta Prohm the roots of giant trees 🌳 grip the walls, and the Terrace of the Elephants 🐘 in Angkor Thom is lined with carved elephants. The causeways are guarded by the naga 🐍, the many-headed serpent of Khmer legend, and the walls are covered with apsaras, celestial dancers. Their dance lives on in the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, so 💃🪷 is the usual way to write it.

The other national symbols mostly have no emoji. The national flower is the rumdul, a small, sweet-scented yellow flower (🌼 is the nearest); the national tree is the sugar palm 🌴, whose sap is boiled into palm sugar and which stands in rice fields across the country; the national bird is the giant ibis and the national animal the kouprey, a wild ox that has not been seen for decades. 🙏 is the sampeah, the greeting with palms pressed together: the higher the hands, the more respect, highest for monks and the king 👑.

Khmer New Year emoji, Pchum Ben and the Water Festival

Khmer New Year, Choul Chnam Thmey (ចូលឆ្នាំថ្មី), falls on 13 or 14 April, at the hottest time of the year, and lasts three days. Families go to the pagoda with food for the monks, build little mounds of sand, and spend the rest of the time throwing water and talcum powder at each other in the streets, which is why the Khmer New Year emoji are 💦 🔫 🎉. Villages play the old New Year games, such as chol chhoung, in which a knotted krama 🧣 is thrown between two lines of young men and women, and tug of war. The greeting is សួស្តីឆ្នាំថ្មី, Suosdei Chhnam Thmei, Happy New Year.

Pchum Ben, in September or October, is fifteen days for the ancestors. Before dawn people bring rice balls 🍙 and other food to the pagoda 🛕, light candles and incense 🕯️, and the monks pray for the spirits of the dead; the last day is a national holiday and much of Phnom Penh empties as people go home to their provinces.

Bon Om Touk, the Water Festival, comes at the full moon 🌕 of October or November, when the Tonle Sap river turns and flows back towards the Mekong. Hundreds of long racing boats with dozens of rowers each race in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh (🚣 🛶), lit floats drift past at night, there are fireworks 🎆, and people eat ak ambok, flattened young rice, while they salute the moon. Independence Day on 9 November, for independence from France in 1953, sometimes falls in the same week, and 🎉🇰🇭 does for both. In May the Royal Ploughing Ceremony opens the rice season: the royal oxen 🐂 are offered trays of rice, corn, beans, grass, water and wine, and what they eat is read as a forecast for the harvest. In the dry season, from about December, Khmer kites 🪁 called khleng ek are flown with a bow that hums in the wind.

Cambodian food emoji: fish amok 🐟🥥, kuy teav 🍜 and lok lak 🥩

Fish amok, fish steamed in coconut milk 🥥 with a paste of lemongrass, turmeric and kaffir lime, served in a cup of banana leaf 🍌, is the dish most often called Cambodia's national one, so 🐟🥥🍌 or 🍛 stands for it. Behind most Khmer cooking is prahok, a strong fermented fish paste, and fish 🐟 from the Tonle Sap and the Mekong is the everyday protein. Rice 🍚 is the base of every meal, and the paddies 🌾 cover the lowlands; Cambodian jasmine rice has won the World's Best Rice award several times.

Breakfast is kuy teav 🍜, rice noodle soup with pork broth, or bai sach chrouk, grilled pork on rice, with a glass of iced coffee with condensed milk ☕🧊. Lok lak 🥩 is stir-fried beef with a dip of lime juice 🍋‍🟩, salt 🧂 and black pepper, ideally from Kampot, whose pepper has a protected geographical indication. French rule left the baguette 🥖: num pang is a baguette sandwich sold from street carts. On the coast at Kep the crab market cooks crab 🦀 with green Kampot pepper, and shrimp 🦐 come with it.

Fruit is everywhere: mango 🥭, often eaten green with salt and chilli, pineapple 🍍, coconuts 🥥 cut open at the roadside and fresh palm juice from the sugar palm 🌴. Angkor beer 🍺 is the best-known local beer. In the market town of Skuon, north of Phnom Penh, fried spiders 🕷️ are a roadside snack that travellers stop for.

Mekong, Tonle Sap, wildlife, sport and tuk-tuks

Cambodia lives by its water 🌊. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, and in the monsoon 🌧️ the Mekong pushes so much water up the Tonle Sap river that it flows backwards and the lake swells to several times its dry-season size, with floating villages rising and falling on it. In the Mekong near Kratie live about a hundred Irrawaddy dolphins 🐬, and boats take visitors out to see them. In the countryside water buffalo 🐃 and mostly yellow cattle 🐄 work the rice fields beside the farmers 🧑‍🌾; monkeys 🐒 roam the Angkor temples, the Siamese crocodile 🐊 survives in the Cardamom Mountains, and Phnom Kulen 🏞️, the sacred mountain north of Angkor, has waterfalls and river carvings. Off the south coast lie islands such as Koh Rong 🏝️.

Kun Khmer 🥊, Cambodian kickboxing, fills television screens on weekends, and the old martial art bokator 🥋 was added to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2022. Football ⚽ is the most followed sport, volleyball 🏐 is played on every patch of ground at dusk, and men gather on the pavement over ouk chaktrang ♟️, Khmer chess. The temple orchestra, the pinpeat, plays with xylophones, gongs and drums 🥁.

The way to get around is the remork 🛺, the tuk-tuk, a carriage pulled by a motorbike; a ride to the temples at Angkor is the classic one. Motorbikes 🏍️ carry whole families and their shopping, and near Battambang the bamboo train, the norry, a bamboo platform on wheels, runs along the rails 🛤️.

Khmer letters and the riel symbol ៛: how to type them

Cambodia's national language is Khmer, spoken by about 15 million of the country's roughly 17 million people (CLDR estimates). Its script has 33 consonants, taught in rows: ក ខ គ ឃ ង, ច ឆ ជ ឈ ញ and so on to ស ហ ឡ អ. Every consonant belongs to one of two series, and the series decides how a vowel after it is read, so ក is kâ but គ is kô. Vowels are written as signs around the consonant, before, after, above or below it, and a consonant written under another, with the invisible sign coeng ្, forms a cluster, as in ខ្មែរ, Khmer. Words are written without spaces; a space marks the end of a phrase, ។ (khan) ends a sentence, ៕ ends a text, and ៗ repeats the word before it. Khmer has its own digits ០ ១ ២ ៣ ៤ ៥ ៦ ៧ ៨ ៩, used in dates, on banknotes and on market price tags. Cambodia in Khmer is កម្ពុជា, Kampuchea. The full set of vowel signs and independent vowels is in the Khmer collection.

To type Khmer, add the Khmer keyboard: Windows and macOS include one, and phone keyboards such as Gboard offer it as well. Khmer also needs a font that can draw it; current phones and computers have one.

The currency is the riel (KHR), and its sign is ៛, the Khmer character U+17DB, written after the amount, as in 10,000៛. In Word type 17DB and press Alt+X; on a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and hold Option while typing 17DB; in HTML write ៛. In daily life Cambodia runs on two currencies: hotels, restaurants and many shops price in US dollars ($ 💵), cash machines give out dollars, and change below a dollar comes back in riel, at the rate shops commonly use of about 4,000 riel to the dollar.

Cambodia's minority languages include Western Cham, spoken by about 270,000 people, mostly the Muslim Cham community (☪️ 🕌), and Kuy, with about 19,000 speakers in the north, CLDR estimates; both have their own collections. Most Cambodians are Theravada Buddhists, the religion of the state, and ☸️ 📿 🧘 are the emoji for it, with 🕯️ for the candles of the pagoda. Cambodia's neighbours Thailand, Laos and Vietnam have their own collections too.