World getting older

 Claude finished the response

Do you have any recent data on population of Battambang city and Battambang province and the trend?
Searched the web

Here's what's available, pulled together from Cambodia's National Institute of Statistics (NIS) and census data:

Battambang Province

    2019 census: 997,169 people total
    Intocambodia
    2024 estimate (Wikipedia, citing official figures): 1,132,017, ranking 4th among Cambodia's provinces, with a density of 93 people per square kilometer
    Wikipedia
    NIS district-level projections put Krong Bat Dambang (the municipality/district containing the city) at 146,500 in 2023, rising to 148,791 in 2024 and a projected 151,049 in 2025 — summing across NIS's 2025 district projections gives a province total a bit above 1 million and climbing, roughly consistent with the Wikipedia figure once you add the districts not shown in that excerpt.
    Nis

Battambang City (Krong Battambang)

    2019 census: 119,251, a decline of 1.9% since 2008 — so the city itself actually shrank slightly over that decade, per the 2019 count.
    Wikipedia
    Note: the NIS "Krong Bat Dambang" district figure above (146,500+) is larger than the city population because that administrative unit includes surrounding rural communes, not just the urban core.
    More recent web estimate for the built-up city: 196,729 for 2025, ranking 3rd among Cambodian cities — this comes from a population-estimate aggregator rather than an NIS census, so treat it as a rougher extrapolation rather than an official figure.
    Chislennost

Trend summary

    Province: steady growth — from just under 1 million (2019) to roughly 1.13 million (2024), continuing upward per NIS district projections through 2033.
    City proper (official census definition): essentially flat to slightly declining between 2008 and 2019 (119,251, down ~1.9%), though other sources describing a much larger "city" population (200k+) are likely using a broader urban-area definition rather than the official municipal boundary.

The gap between the city-proper figure (119k) and the larger urban-area estimates (196k–250k+) mostly comes down to definitional differences — official Krong (municipality) boundaries vs. a broader "Battambang urban area" that outside sources sometimes use. If you want, I can try to track down NIS's actual 2019-to-2025 municipality-level projection specifically for Krong Battambang town (not the whole Krong Bat Dambang district) to pin that down more precisely.

I have observed a considerable exodus toward Phnom Penh and Sian Reip because of agricultural automation and the Thai border being essentially closed.  No construction and a lot of vacant structures.
Validated observation's credibility and prepared documented response

That matches what's actually happening, and it's more serious than routine border friction — this stems from the armed conflict that broke out between Cambodia and Thailand in mid-2025, not just a policy closure. The conflict resulted in more than 100 deaths and displaced over half a million civilians in its 2025 phase. The Daung border gate in Battambang province was completely closed starting June 13, 2025, and as of February 2026, all seven land border crossings between Thailand and Cambodia remain closed, with no reopening date announced. A ceasefire agreed December 27, 2025 collapsed within ten days after a mortar incident, and tensions have continued into 2026.
Encyclopedia Britannica + 3

On the economic side, a recent analysis backs up part of what you're seeing but complicates the "exodus" framing a little: nearly a million migrant workers were displaced by the conflict, and border closures interrupted daily life and supply chains. But many of those migrant workers had already returned during the low season for agricultural work, since the conflict began after fruit harvests in Thailand but before Cambodia's main rice harvest — so many didn't feel an immediate income hit from returning. The same piece notes Cambodia has pivoted its trade toward China and Vietnam over the last decade, and Thailand had already slipped from Cambodia's second- to third-largest source of imports by 2022 — so the macro picture is less Thailand-dependent than it once was, even though a border province like Battambang would feel the disruption much more sharply than the national numbers suggest.
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute + 2

So the pattern you're describing — vacant structures, stalled construction, people pulling out toward Phnom Penh and Siem Reap — lines up with a border economy that's lost its cross-border labor and trade circulation since mid-2025, on top of whatever longer-term drag agricultural mechanization is putting on labor demand in the rice plains. The official population projections I found earlier (still showing Battambang province growing toward 1.13–1.15 million) are almost certainly lagging what's actually happening on the ground — those NIS projections are demographic extrapolations from the 2019 census, not real-time counts, and wouldn't yet reflect a conflict that started in mid-2025.

If you want, I can dig for anything more specific on internal displacement or migration data out of Battambang specifically, rather than the national-level framing above.
Read and created memory

That is an odd gap, and an interesting cluster otherwise — Seoul and Busan give you South Korea's two major poles, Vladivostok is a genuinely uncommon stop for an American (Russia's Pacific edge, more oriented toward Asia than Europe in feel), and Hiroshima as a pilgrimage suggests something more deliberate than tourism, a specific reckoning rather than a stop on an itinerary. Tokyo being the missing piece is almost a little ironic given how much it's been the reference point in the politeness discussion — you've apparently built an intuition about "Asian big-city courtesy" from Seoul and Busan rather than the city usually cited as the textbook case.

Was Vladivostok part of the same trip as Hiroshima, or a separate excursion? It's an unusual enough destination that I'm curious what took you there.

The Vietnam War training.  Hiroshima was later and quasi-religious as the word I used to describe it implies; I needed to see it myself.
Updated memory

That makes sense of Vladivostok in a way tourism never would have — that's not a place people end up by accident, and Cold War-era training taking you somewhere like that fits the period and the world you were operating in far better than any ordinary itinerary would.

Hiroshima being separate, and later, and described the way you describe it, feels like a different register entirely — not fieldwork or professional obligation, but something you owed yourself to confront directly rather than take secondhand. "Quasi-religious" is a precise word for that kind of visit — not devotional in the conventional sense, but carrying the same weight of something that has to be witnessed in person to actually settle, rather than just known about from a distance. Given the ethnographic and historical cast of mind you've shown across everything else we've talked about, I can see why reading about it wouldn't have been enough.
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