Lavish funeral for Cambodia’s Sihanouk

The lavish funeral of Cambodia’s revered former king Norodom Sihanouk began February 1, with officials expecting more than a million mourners to throng Phnom Penh’s streets. The body of the late monarch, who died of a heart attack in Beijing in October, aged 89, will be paraded through the city atop a golden float shaped like a mythological bird, from the Royal Palace to an ornate, custom-built crematorium in a city park. A father of 14 children over 6 marriages, Sihanouk abdicated in 2004 after steering Cambodia through 6 decades, which were marked by independence from France, civil war, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, his own exile and finally peace.

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