by Peter Church
Jayavarman VII, also a triumphant warrior‐king, became the most prolific of all Angkor's royal builders. His greatest monument is the massive Angkor Thom and Bayon, but he also established numerous other temples, all in an apparent attempt to promote a form of Mahayana Buddhism. He also initiated a road‐building programme and other public works such as hospitals and rest‐houses. The mobilization of labour and resources for warfare and building during the reign of Jayavarman VII must have been enormous. Following his death early in the 13th century, no more temples were built and the incising of inscriptions also ceased. Most commentators suggest that his fearsome energies brought social exhaustion. Nevertheless, the next major insight into Angkor available to us—the account of a Chinese visitor, Chou Ta‐kuan, in 1296—suggests a state still of great power and opulence.
By then, however, the principal religious focus of Khmer society had altered. Varieties of Buddhism had long coexisted with the Hindu Devaraj cults but, during the 13th century, Theravada Buddhism won general allegiance. This form of Buddhism, originally defined in Sri Lanka and possibly Burma, was organised by its sangha (order of monks) and clear about what constituted Buddhist orthodoxy, while also being able to subsume Hindu and animist elements. It was rapidly becoming the dominant religion in mainland South‐East Asia. The concept of Devaraj, celebrated by Brahmanic officiants, would persist in Khmer society, but a godly king would now demonstrate his virtue primarily through patronage of Theravada Buddhist temples, monasteries, and schools. As a consequence, perhaps, interest in the temple‐mausoleums of former rulers declined.
In the 1440s, the Khmer ruling class abandoned the Angkor region. Besides the impact of Theravada Buddhism there are other possible reasons for this shift. Court factionalism may have weakened the firm government needed for such an intricately connected “hydraulic society” to work, and hastened ecological deterioration of a region which had been intensively exploited for centuries. The general population of the area may have drifted away as the irrigation system silted up. Malaria has also been suggested as a factor in Angkor's abandonment. The best established factor in the transfer of the kingdom is the rise, from 1351, of the ambitious Thai state of Ayudhya. The Thais insistently attacked Angkor, looting it of wealth and people. A Khmer capital to the south‐east (variously in later centuries Phnom Penh, Udong, and Lovek) may have seemed more defensible than Angkor. Such cities were also nearer the sea and the booming maritime trade of 15th‐century South‐East Asia.
THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA, 15TH–18TH CENTURIES
Until late in the 16th century the translated Khmer kingdom appears to have been quite strong, an equal of neighbours like Ayudhya, Lan Xang (Laos), and Vietnam. Intermittent warfare with the Thais continued, but also peaceful trade and cultural exchange. In religion, polity, and culture, the Thai and Khmer kingdoms had much in common. In 1593, however, the Thai king Narasuen attacked Cambodia as part of his strategy to reaffirm the power of Ayudhya after a devastating assault on his city by the Burmese. From this time, Cambodia slipped decisively—at least in Thai eyes—to the status of a Thai vassal state.
Shortly after Narasuen's attack, Cambodia demonstrated vividly a feature that would darken its history in the centuries ahead—ruling class attempts to harness foreign assistance in ruling‐class rivalries. In the 1590s, aid was sought from the Spanish, by then ensconced at Manila, against the Thais. Spanish adventurers and missionaries briefly held great influence at the Cambodian court but, in 1599, most were massacred. The king who had favoured them was also assassinated. In 1603, after further upheavals at court, a Cambodian prince aligned with the Thais came to the throne.
Meanwhile, the Vietnamese had long been advancing southward from their original homeland in the Tonkin delta, overwhelming Champa in the process. In the 1620s, the next Cambodian king turned to the Vietnamese for help against the Thais, permitting the Vietnamese to settle along his kingdom's south‐east coast. There the Vietnamese port and stronghold of Saigon would develop. Vietnamese and Chinese adventurers and traders began to dominate other Cambodian ports. European accounts of Cambodia in the late 16th century and first half of the 17th century suggest a cosmopolitan trading life involving Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Arab, and other traders, but from the mid‐17th century Cambodia became increasingly isolated from the sea, caught in the pincer movement of Thai and Vietnamese expansionism.
The later 17th and 18th centuries saw repeated Thai and Vietnamese incursions, usually connected with rivalries for the throne within the Cambodian ruling class. The 18th century ended with the Thais dominant. From 1771 until the early 19th century the Vietnamese were preoccupied with domestic rebellion and civil war. The Thai general Taksin and the Thai ruler Rama I, the founder of Bangkok, took the opportunity to impose their authority firmly over Cambodia. The north‐western provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap were added to Thai territory. The Cambodian kings had their subordinate status made plain by being crowned at Bangkok amidst Thai‐dictated ceremonial.
But Thai‐Vietnamese rivalry was still to climax. The Cambodian ruler Ang Chan (reigned 1806–35) thought it wise to pay homage not only to the Thais but also to the Vietnamese, by now reunited under a strong new dynasty ruling from the city of Hué. In 1811–12 Thai forces attempted to replace Ang Chan with one of his brothers, but Vietnamese troops repelled the Thais, and Vietnam assumed ascendancy over Cambodia. Ang Chan continued, however, to send tribute to Bangkok as well as to Hué.
In 1833, the Thais staged a major invasion, taking Phnom Penh, but they were again repelled by Vietnamese forces. When Ang Chan died in 1834 the Vietnamese emperor, Minh Mang, decided on a policy of complete absorption of Cambodia within his realm. As a first step, he passed over two male heirs of the late king and appointed their sister, Ang Mei, as a figurehead monarch. Vietnamese officials ran the kingdom, Vietnamese people were encouraged to colonise Cambodia, and Vietnamese language and law, and even Vietnamese costumes and hairstyles, were increasingly insisted upon.
A country‐wide rebellion broke out in 1840, and the Thais responded readily to calls for help from Ang Mei's brothers. For five nightmarish years, Thai and Vietnamese forces, and also Cambodian factions, fought an inconclusive war, ravishing the countryside. Finally, in 1845, the Thais and Vietnamese agreed to compromise, placing on the throne Ang Duang, son of Ang Chan, who would pay homage to both Bangkok and Hué. In this uneasy peace, Ang Duang was encouraged by French missions (which had been operating in Cambodia since the previous century) to appeal for French support. In 1853, he sent feelers to the French diplomatic mission in Singapore, but King Mongkut of Thailand made clear his displeasure and the French backed off for the time being.
THE COLONIAL ERA, 1863–1940
The French began their attack on Vietnam in 1859 and by 1862 had established the colony of Cochin China around Saigon. Cambodia, their new colony's hinterland, naturally interested them. They envisaged the Mekong as a mighty trade route, perhaps even offering access to China. At the same time a new Cambodian king, Norodom (reigned 1860–1904), was seeking allies to support him against the Thais and against domestic rivals for his throne. In August 1863, he signed a “treaty of protection” which established a French Resident at Phnom Penh, gave France control of Cambodia's foreign relations, and opened the country to French commercial interests. King Mongkut protested but in 1867 reluctantly recognised the French protectorate. The Thais retained Cambodia's north‐western provinces, however; these would only be restored to Cambodia in 1907 at the insistence of the French.
For two decades the protectorate meant little change within Cambodia. The French soon realised that the country could offer no rapid economic return, and focussed their development energies on Cochin China. Equally, Norodom proved adept at turning aside French suggestions for administrative or social reform, as he would throughout his long reign.
In 1884 the French forced Norodom—under threat of being deposed and replaced—to sign an agreement intended to increase the number of French
officials in the kingdom, give policy control to the French over all administrative, financial, judicial, and commercial matters, initiate a land‐titling system, and abolish slavery. The Cambodian ruling class was alarmed at its potential loss of power over taxation, trade, land, and labour, and initiated a country‐wide revolt. By 1886 the French were willing to acknowledge respect for Cambodian customs and for another two decades change was minimal and cautiously introduced.
At Norodom's death in 1904, however, the French appointed from amongst the possible heirs a king willing to comply with French policies. He was the first of three kings chosen by the French on the basis of their apparent compliancy. The third would be Norodom Sihanouk, who ascended the throne as a shy 19‐year‐old in 1941. From 1904, therefore, the French were able to establish complete authority over their protectorate. Prior to 1940 they encountered little further opposition. In 1925, the murder of a French official, Felix Bardez, caused a sensation, but only because it seemed an isolated and uncharacteristic challenge to French rule.
Cambodia's economic resources proved to be scanty, even its human resources. In 1921 the population was assessed at about 2.5 million. The main crop was rice, and a Chinese‐controlled rice export industry developed, purchasing rice from Khmer farmers, but Cambodian rice was generally considered to be inferior and less efficiently produced than that of Cochin China. Small Chinese timber and pepper industries, and French‐financed rubber estates using Vietnamese labour, added to Cambodia's limited exports. Other minor exports included maize, kapok, and dried fish from the Tonle Sap region. The French slowly developed road and rail communications—by 1941 a railway linked Phnom Penh and the Thai border—but the Mekong remained, as it had always been, Cambodia's main trade route. The port of Saigon in Vietnam dominated this riverine trade.
Around 95 percent of Khmers remained subsistence farmers. They were characterised by the French—and also by the Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, and often their own elite—as “lazy,” “ignorant,” “lacking initiative,” “fatalistic,” and “childlike.” Western observers dismissed them as a “decadent race,” compared with their ancestors of Angkor. The peasants' options were extremely limited, however. French taxation levels were harsh. In addition, there is evidence that the peasants' social superiors demanded their traditional obligatory dues of product and labour, despite French abolition of formal slavery. In remoter regions, endemic petty violence still made life insecure.
There were further factors deterring any change or development in peasant life. Cambodia was a country where commercial instincts had long been smothered by isolation, war, and a ruling class which despised trade, other than as a source of taxation. Under French rule, Chinese and Vietnamese entrepreneurs quickly assumed dominance over trade and money‐lending. In colonial Cambodia, no industries of consequence were developed. The country's towns remained small (by the 1930s Phnom Penh's population was about 100,000; Battambang's 20,000) and dominated by aliens—French, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Cambodia's elite acquired a French‐language education from private tutors or abroad, but for the general population a meagre and essentially traditional education in Buddhist temple schools was all that was available. The first Khmer‐language newspaper only appeared in 1938.
Until the 1970s, observers usually saw the lot of Cambodia's peasantry during the colonial era as a relatively happy one. The traumatic events in Cambodia since then have suggested that the countryside harboured much bitter frustration and resentment, waiting to be tapped.
WORLD WAR II, 1940–1945
Such feelings were yet to be coherently expressed, much less given an outlet. In Cambodia politicisation really only began during World War II, and then it was cautious and involved limited numbers. By the 1940s, a tiny Khmer intelligentsia had begun to form, focused around three institutions—the scholarly Buddhist Institute, Cambodia's sole French‐language high school in Phnom Penh, and the Khmer newspaper Nagara Vatta (Angkor Wat). Cambodian feelings were outraged in 1940 by the transfer back to Thailand, under Japanese auspices, of the north‐western provinces (these would be returned once more to Cambodia in 1947).
Nationalist stirrings could be tightly controlled by the French, however. The French reached an agreement with the Japanese which allowed them to continue to administer Indochina in exchange for the free movement of Japanese forces. Nagara Vatta was strictly censored, and suppressed in mid‐1942 following a protest march in Phnom Penh by monks and nationalist‐intellectuals over the arrest of a monk implicated in an anti‐French plot. A key figure amongst the nationalists, Son Ngoc Thanh, escaped a roundup at this point and went to Japan.
The French role in the evolution of Cambodian nationalism was mixed. Recognising the need to deflect popular fascination with Japanese power, the French launched a quasi‐nationalist movement for young Cambodians, glorifying Cambodia's past and its future “in partnership” with France. They also took steps to raise the status and salaries of Cambodians in government service. Unwittingly, in 1943 they fuelled developing nationalist feelings further by launching a programme to replace Cambodia's Indian‐derived form of writing with a roman alphabet. (In Vietnam a comparable reform had been popularly accepted in the interests of simplicity, efficiency, and wider literacy.) The Buddhist sangha and the intelligentsia rebelled against what they viewed as an attack on Cambodia's traditional learning and cultural heritage. The Romanisation controversy kept up anti‐French feeling until March 1945, when the Japanese seized control of government, interned the French, and, amongst other measures, dropped the romanisation programme.
In April 1945 the Japanese, now anxious to harness Cambodian nationalism for themselves, prodded a hesitant Norodom Sihanouk to declare Cambodia “independent.” But when Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, there was no coherent view amongst Cambodia's hereditary or intelligentsia elites about the next step for Cambodia. Cambodia still had no mass anticolonial movement such as those that emerged in 1945 in Vietnam and Indonesia.
TOWARD INDEPENDENCE, 1945–1953
After the Japanese surrender, Cambodia drifted. French officials resumed authority and, in October 1945, arrested Son Ngoc Thanh, who had returned to Cambodia in April and had become the main figure trying to organise resistance to the French return. At the same time, the French opened discussions with King Sihanouk about limited Cambodian self‐government. Faced with revolution in Vietnam, they recognised that some gesture toward Cambodia's aroused national feelings would be wise. They also needed the collaboration of Cambodia's elite to restore order in the countryside, where armed bands were flourishing. Some of these armed groups affected a degree of nationalism, calling themselves Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer). Both the strongly anti‐French Thai government of the day and the Vietnamese communists were lending them tentative support.
The French, while retaining control of finance, defence, foreign affairs, and all key instruments of government, announced elections for a new National Assembly and permitted political parties to form. At the elections, held in September 1946, the winning party proved to be the Democratic Party, which took 50 of the Assembly's 67 seats. The Democrats, though headed by a prince, broadly represented Cambodia's “intelligentsia elite”—schoolteachers, minor government officials, politicised monks, and the like—and convincingly demonstrated their ability to organise a strong grassroots vote. Cambodia's traditional royal and aristocratic ruling class, headed by the king, was not amused. Subsequent Democratic attempts to win meaningful powers for the National Assembly and achieve independence would be frustrated not only by the French but also by Sihanouk and those who supported the traditional social order.
By the early 1950s, the lack of political progress was producing acute strains. The National Assembly had become a factionalised talkshop. A radical fringe of politicised Cambodians were contemplating revolution, some under Son Ngoc Thanh, who established an insurgent movement in the north‐west in 1952, and some under the communist, Vietnamese‐sponsored KPRP (Khmer People's Revolut
ionary Party, founded 1951), which was organising guerilla activity in outlying areas. In January 1953, martial law was declared and Sihanouk dissolved the National Assembly.
Sihanouk now executed a dazzling bid for command of his people. Beginning in February 1953 he toured France, the United States, and other countries demanding independence. In October 1953, the French—by this time with their backs to the wall in Vietnam—gave in to Sihanouk's campaign. Sihanouk returned to Cambodia a hero.
CAMBODIA UNDER SIHANOUK, 1953–1970
Independence defused most of the insurgency in the countryside. Son Ngoc Thanh dwindled into irrelevance in exile. The leaders of the KPRP retreated to Vietnam, though the party would continue surreptitious recruitment in Cambodia. In 1954, Sihanouk and the conservative elite regarded the Democratic Party as their main challenge, especially as they were obliged to hold national elections in September 1955 under agreements reached at the international Geneva Conference on Indochina in 1954.
Sihanouk responded to this challenge with more strategic brilliance. In March 1955, he abdicated (his father became figurehead king but would die in 1960) and established his own political party, Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People's Socialist Community). His newfound, if vague, commitment to socialism was perhaps designed to distance himself from his conservative background and woo the leftist‐inclined intelligentsia. In the same vein, he announced that Cambodia would be unaligned with either the communist or anti‐communist world blocs, though he continued to accept the US military and economic aid to Cambodia which had begun under the French.
