Kampot Durian: The King of Fruits

If you’re in Kampot around May or June, you might notice the pungent smell of durian lingering around town. The smell is at best divisive, at worst repelling. Richard Sterling, an American food writer, described the odor as “pig-excrement, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.”

But, if you can get past the smell, the experience of eating durian is unlike any other fruit.

Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote that durian is “like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory.” Anthony Bourdain described it as “French kissing your dead grandmother.”

However, not everyone is a critic. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace called the flesh “a rich butter-like custard highly flavored with almonds,” and “a new sensation, worth a voyage to the East to experience.”

While tourists might know Kampot for pepper, to the Cambodians, Kampot is famous for durian. It’s often called The King of Fruit and Kampot durian was made famous, in part, by the king.

Dominating Kampot’s skyline are the Elephant Mountains. They stretch from the sea, along the Bokor ridge, and north to the Kamchay valley. There, the tropical rains drain from the jungle mountains into the valley, feeding the Kampot River.

Today, the foothills in this region are still lined with orchards. The drainage, soil, and climate of the region have created one of the best fruit-growing areas in Cambodia, a reputation it’s had for centuries.

In the mid 1800s, Kampot had been taken back from the Vietnamese, and King Ang Duong took a particular interest in Kampot, working on securing it as Cambodia’s principal trading port. In 1859, accompanied by dozens of elephants and servants, he made a royal visit.

During his stay, the king praised the local fruit so much that the local people offered him some land of his own. This land became the royal orchards.

The Colonial Period

The royal orchards were still well known when the French arrived in Kampot. In the 1880s, almost all the durian produced in the region was sent to the royal court. Back then, durian would sell for one to five francs each. A plantation worker of the time earned about a franc a day, so a single durian cost anywhere from a day’s wages to most of a week’s.

In 1918, Kampot’s French resident, A. Rousseau, described the area up the river as “…nothing but gardens, orchards and plantations of every kind, where fruit of all sorts abounds.” A few years later, another French writer, Ménétrier, called it “an immense orchard where the most varied and most flavorful fruits grow in abundance.” Among those fruits, he singled out durian. The area was, he claimed, one of the few places in Cambodia where the tree grew well.

While Kampot pepper didn’t have the same royal attention, it was also going through a boom. Thousands of Chinese migrants, mostly Hainanese, came to Kampot in the late 19th century and started pepper plantations. But in the early 1900s the pepper harvest outran the market and prices collapsed. The situation was so bad that in April of 1909, more than a hundred unemployed pepper-plantation workers revolted and attacked Kampot town in what became known as the Pepper Revolt.

In the 1930s a French botanist noted that pepper farms had begun planting durian trees among their pepper vines, letting the vines die off over time.

Independence

Cambodia gained its independence from France in 1953, and by the 1960s Kampot’s orchards were booming. In 1971, Roland Pourtier, a French geographer, wrote about the Kampot farms:

“Durian fruit is the object of a genuine craze among Cambodians and sells for a great deal,” he explained. “One fruit often represents a peasant family’s daily income.” It was so popular that even wealthy officials got involved, sometimes setting up “weekend orchards.”

At the same time, pepper was once again on the decline. The district’s vines had fallen from more than a million in 1927 to under 200,000 in 1967. Pourtier noted that Cambodian growers were planting rambutan and durian between the rows as insurance against the vines dying, even though the plants competed and gave poor harvests.

The orchards were doing well, but Pourtier worried about how much durian most Cambodians could afford. For now, he explained, durian was scarce enough to fetch a good price, and growers weren’t worrying much about producing more than they could sell.

Less than a decade later, Kampot’s growers would face a far greater threat: the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge years

Under the Khmer Rouge, almost all of the farms around Kampot were destroyed to make way for rice. But pepper and durian production weren’t eliminated completely.

A man interviewed by the Documentation Center of Cambodia recalls that in late 1975 the Khmer Rouge assigned him to a children’s work gang at a durian farm along the Kampot River. They loaded the durians onto boats to send down the river, and were told they were for soldiers on the islands.

He was later transferred to guard Kampot’s old airport (near The Hideaway today), where he was also made to tend to the durian and pepper plantations nearby.

Even Pol Pot used Kampot durian as a showpiece for his communist utopia. In December 1977, Chen Yonggui, a Chinese vice-premier, came to Cambodia as the regime’s guest and Pol Pot accompanied him on a tour of the country. In Kampot, Khmer Rouge state radio reported that thousands of people lined the streets and that red flags and banners hung in the town. A durian farm in Tuek Chhu was among the sites Pol Pot brought Yonggui to visit.

But the fruit wasn’t for ordinary Cambodians.

Prince Sihanouk, the former king, was under house arrest in Phnom Penh. On September 28, 1978, he was surprised by a lavish meal put on by the Khmer Rouge leadership. The Khmer Rouge were typically fairly austere but, perhaps, knowing their regime was near its end, they decided to indulge themselves.

Sihanouk described his host, sitting at the head of the table, as behaving “like a very rich man,” and said they were served “the best fruit from our country,” which included Kampot durian.

“Abundance,” he said, “seems to be on the comeback for the privileged ones within the regime … but not for the people enslaved by the Angkar and suffering more than ever from famine.”

The regime would fall only three months later.

Amid the chaos of the civil war that followed, Kampot farmers began rebuilding and replanting their orchards. Today, Kampot grows around 18,000 to 24,000 tons of durian a year, making it one of Cambodia’s top durian provinces.

How it grows

In the wild, durian trees can grow up to 40 meters tall and take up to 10 years to produce fruit. Farmers now grow shorter varieties and use grafting to bring that wait down to five years. Even then, a tree won’t produce its biggest harvests until it’s 15 years old.

The trees begin to flower in the dry season, usually around December or January. Once pollinated, the fruit takes three or four months to ripen, just in time for the rainy season, around late April or May. Farmers then climb the trees, tapping the fruit with a bamboo stick, listening for the perfect sound. Once the fruit sounds right, it gets harvested.

Once harvested, a durian might only last a week before spoiling. That helps explain why it can be hard to get and expensive to buy, and why it’s worth buying close to where it grows. Although you can find durian out of season, locals are less inclined to buy it, wary of where it came from, and how it’s been handled.

A king’s ransom

Durian spoils quickly, making it hard to transport far from the orchards. For a long time, you needed money or a farm nearby to enjoy it fresh. If you could give durian as a gift, that was a sign of wealth and privilege.

When more people want durian, farmers can’t simply grow more straight away. Newly planted trees take years to bear fruit, so prices often stay high while growers try to catch up.

More recently, better transport meant fresh durian could reach places further away, and many more people could buy it. As a result, a durian craze swept across China around 2018

“Durian Freedom” became a meme on Chinese social media, and celebrities were posting videos of themselves eating durian as social proof of their success. Durian ‘unboxing’ videos became a thing, and durian posts filled the top spots on Weibo.

During one promotion, Alibaba sold 80,000 durians in just sixty seconds. Meanwhile, the CEO of Yum China, which runs Pizza Hut in China, said the chain’s best-selling pizza was durian topped with cheese. One in four pizzas it sold was a durian pizza.

Demand went crazy, and supply couldn’t meet it. The price tripled in only a few years. By 2024, China accounted for 93% of the world’s durian imports.

Trying Kampot durian

Durian season runs from around late April to June, and there are plenty of places to buy it. Choosing a good one takes a little more care.

While you can get durian in the market, to be sure of the freshness and quality, it’s better to buy it directly from the farmers. If you head north from Kampot, along the Tuek Chhu road, near the rapids, you’ll soon see the foothills covered in orchards, and the road will be lined with farmers selling their fruit.

With fruit this expensive, people have all sorts of ways to decide whether a durian is worth buying. I asked some local farmers what they look for:

A well-shaped durian with no patches of missing spikes is the first thing you should notice. When you pick up a durian, the spikes should be strong and sharp; it should almost hurt to hold. That’s a good sign it’s fresh from the tree, and hasn’t been sitting around.

Smell is also important: A durian that smells of fermentation is too old. One that doesn’t smell strongly was harvested too early.

The farmers also recommended choosing a durian with a long stem, although they gave different reasons. Some pointed to the variety, others to harvesting methods. They also said short-stemmed fruit was sometimes imported. Whatever the explanation, they all agreed that a long stem was a good sign.

Some people will shake the fruit and listen to it, but the farmers I spoke to weren’t convinced this tells you much.

Another common warning is that you should never drink alcohol while eating durian. When I mentioned this to the farmers, they laughed. They’d heard the story before, but assured me they’d eaten durian while drinking plenty of times and never had a problem.

The durian roundabout

Even if you aren’t in Kampot during durian season, you can’t miss the durian roundabout in the middle of town.

It was unveiled for Khmer New Year in 2011 to celebrate the region’s fruit. The monument features the fruits that once filled the royal orchards: rambutan, pomelo, pineapple, coconut, and even pepper. But standing above them all is Kampot’s favorite: The durian.