A Short History of Cambodia

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The modern Khmers are the inheritors of an ancient tradition, the most noteworthy signs of which are the ruins of Angkor. Although other archaeological sites are widely spread across the country, from the Mekong delta to the vicinity of Battambang, the Dangrek Mountains and even into countries which are today separate states, most tourists come to visit Angkor. Some, indeed, fly in and out of nearby Siem Reap airport from Thailand or Vietnam and remain ignorant of the rest of this fascinating country. Its fascination is not lessened by the fact that Cambodia is among the poorest countries in Asia. While it has made much progress since the end of the destructive Pol Pot regime in 1979, there are disturbing recent signs of retrogression within underdevelopment, with rising infant mortality rates and declining economic growth. On the other hand, the literacy rate of rural women, who are the poorest and most downtrodden of the poor, increased from 52.7 per cent in 1998 to 65.3 per cent in 2004, according to the United Nations-assisted National Institute of Statistics at Phnom Penh. (Some of the problems of underdevelopment are discussed in Chapter 9.)

The land of Cambodia

During the Angkorean period Cambodia stretched between the South China and Andaman Seas, but today it comprises a little over 181 000 square kilometres: not a large country, but not a tiny one either. It is roughly half the size of Germany and three times as large as Belgium. It has a tropical climate: warm the whole year round, with a six-month dry season with frequent drought, and a monsoon of astonishingly intense rains.

Physically, Cambodia is a vast, shallow bowl with the edges rising steeply to the north, the east and the south into wild, jungle-cloaked mountains and plateaux. These jungles are home to a variety of birds and animals, including tigers, wild cats, wild buffaloes, monkeys, elephants and rhinoceros, various kinds of snakes including the cobra, and the Siamese crocodile. Their numbers, however, are falling steadily due to logging, hunting and the encroachment of human settlement. The Siamese crocodile was thought to be extinct, but zoologists recently found small numbers of them living in the remote Cardamom Mountains, protected by the people of a nearby village. That tigers still exist is attested to by my friend Mathieu Guérin, who was stalked by one in the isolated mountains of Mondulkiri province while doing fieldwork in the late 1990s.

On the west and the south-east of the great central basin of Cambodia, the flatlands stretch across into Thailand and Vietnam, forming ‘gates’ as it were into the kingdom, through which throughout the centuries invading armies have often poured. The central basin is dominated by an intriguing natural hydraulic system, on which the prosperity of the kingdom has long depended. At the centre of it is a vast cocoa-coloured sheet of water, Lake Tonlé Sap (the Great Lake), the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. In the north of the country, the Mekong, one of the largest rivers of the world, rushes from Laos over a series of spectacular rapids and falls. Then, at a more sedate pace, it courses into the Cambodian basin, past the towns of Stung Treng, Kratie and Kompong Cham, to the capital city of Phnom Penh, where the waters form a giant St Andrews shaped cross known to the French as the Quatre Bras, or ‘Four Arms’. Here, the main river splits into two channels, the Mekong proper and the Bassac, the first of the many distributaries of the Mekong delta, through which the waters pour through Vietnamese territory into the South China Sea. Another river, known as the Tonlé Sap, which most of the time is a tributary of the Mekong, forms the fourth arm of the cross, winding upstream from Phnom Penh.

A remarkable ecosystem

The Mekong, the world’s 12th longest river, rises thousands of kilometres away on the Tibetan plateau and every year, after the spring thaw in the mountains, the snow-fed waters surge downstream in a mighty flood. In fact, so great is the volume of water that it is unable to drain through the delta and backs up into the Tonlé Sap past the capital, reversing the flow so that the water flows upstream, past the old capital at Udong and into the lake of the same name as the river. When this happens, the surface area of the lake expands enormously, forming an immense inland sea of over 13 000 square kilometres and attaining a depth of up to 10 metres. In October or November, the direction of flow changes and the waters are carried away to the sea. The enormous volumes of water, silt and nutrients give rise to a teeming population of over 200 varieties of fish, and these form the major source of protein for the people of Cambodia. Over one million people earn their living directly from fishing and some three million live around the lake, some by flood retreat farming.

Contrary to popular perception, not all of Cambodia’s soils are fertile, but the most fertile tend to be in the vicinity of Lake Tonlé Sap and the Mekong, and it is here that the densest concentrations of people are found. This invaluable ecosystem, sadly, is under threat from both logging and pollution from chemicals and sewage. Already, many species of fish, birds, turtles, snakes and crocodiles have disappeared. During Sihanouk’s time, signs warned people (roughly translated): ‘Don’t waste our national patrimony, the forest’ and ‘If we degrade the soil, we will perish’. The message was ignored.

The people of Cambodia

According to Cambodia’s National Institute of Statistics, there are today over 13 million people living within the frontiers of the Kingdom of Cambodia. Some hundreds of thousands of other ethnic Khmers live outside of the country in the Vietnamese-administered lower Mekong delta, and in Thailand, particularly to the north of the Dangrek Mountains but even to the west of Bangkok. The overwhelming majority of the population is rural and the only real city is the capital, Phnom Penh, which is home to over one million people and is more than eight times the size of the largest town, Battambang, which has around 125 000 inhabitants.

Phnom Penh is a sprawling tropical city running along the Tonlé Sap and Bassac rivers and contains an intriguing mix of architectural styles, from the crassly modern and the jerry-built to the elegant cream and lemon-painted French colonial buildings. The central market is a fine example of Art Deco architecture, although its lines are partially obscured by the tarpaulin-draped stalls of the traders outside. The city took its name from the Khmer word for hill, phnom, and the hill in question, which is surmounted by a large bell-shaped stone stupa, is situated in the northern outskirts of the central city. Although Phnom Penh is over 500 years old, until the coming of the French in 1863 it was little more than a collection of ramshackle brick and wooden shops and houses close to the river. By the early 20th century, their efforts had transformed it into what the French writer Rose Quaintenne described as ‘a very picturesque town . . . [which was] very pretty and seductive’.

Alongside the dominant Khmers, there are large minorities of Chams, Vietnamese, Chinese and hill peoples. The Chinese, who have been present in the country since pre-Angkorean times, are primarily city dwellers, as are many Vietnamese, although the latter also make their living as fishermen on the Tonlé Sap, the Great Lake of central Cambodia. The Chinese and Vietnamese have provided a disproportionate number of the country’s traders, businessmen and skilled workers. The Chams, who speak their own language and practise the Sunni variant of Islam, are the descendents of the once mighty empire of Champa, sacked by the Vietnamese in 1471, mixed with more recent Muslim Malay immigrants. They have been renowned as cartwrights and woodworkers. Although their number fell by around 36 per cent under Pol Pot, there are today about half a million Chams in Cambodia. They live in their own villages, replete with mosques, to which they are summoned to prayer not by the cries of a muezzin as elsewhere in Darul Islam, but by drums and gongs.

The hill peoples (known politely as Khmer Loeu by the Cambodians, but more generally by the derogatory Phnong, meaning ‘savage’ or ‘slave’) generally live in the remote uplands around the perimeter of the country and speak a variety of dialects and languages, some of which are related to Khmer. Many are animist and traditionally they have been non-state peoples who have paid little regard to frontiers. Traditionally they have practised swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture and live a semi-nomadic communal life. There are also smaller minorities of Lao, Thais and Shans, the latter once well known as workers on the Pailin gem fields near the Thai border. With the probable exception of the hill peoples, all of the minorities suffered cruel discrimination during the Pol Pot period (the Cham mosques were defiled as pigsties) and there is still widespread animosity towards the Vietnamese.

Most Khmers are peasants, steeped in traditional ways of life, and it is arguably this tenacity of tradition that has enabled them to survive their country’s appalling catastrophes. In many respects, the countryside has not changed much since ancient times. The wooden buffalo carts and ploughs are timeless, sugar palms still dot the landscape above the intense green of the ripening rice in paddy fields that are too irregular in shape and size to belong to the more orderly Vietnamese countryside. This contrast hints at what is one of the sharpest cultural divides in Asia, between Indianised Cambodia and Sinitic Vietnam. Many rural Khmers live in the same kinds of houses as their remote ancestors: palm thatch huts with bamboo frames raised on stilts against floods and reptiles, with a few modest possessions and frugal diets based on rice, fruit, vegetables and prahoc (a pungent, fermented fish paste that provides the bulk of their protein). Many still wear the dress of their ancestors, simple black garments enlivened by the colourful checked scarf known as the krama, and at times the ornate sampot, the ankle-length skirt of the women. The rural folk are mostly burned almost black by the sun, but the better-off urban dwellers, particularly the women, are often of a lighter complexion.

Khmers are devoutly religious, practising the Theravada strain of Buddhism, mixed with elements of folk religion, superstition and remnants of Hinduism, or more accurately Sivaism (see Chapter 3). The central focus of village life is always the Buddhist temple, or wat, and the saffron-clad monks beg for alms as they have done for many hundreds of years. For many Khmers, religion and life are inseparable and one of the greatest horrors of the Pol Pot period was the government’s attempt to stamp religion out. Theravadism is so closely interwoven with Khmer life that 600 years of Christian missionary activity has been a dismal failure, unlike in some neighbouring countries. Iberian Catholic priests lamented the hold of Buddhist ‘wizards’ over the people and subsequent American Protestant missions secured few converts despite vigorous proselytism. What remains a mystery is why the Khmers rejected their earlier Sivaism and Mahayana Buddhism and embraced the Theravada doctrines with such fervour in the 13th century, although scholars such as George Coedès have made educated guesses, as is discussed in the chapter on Angkor. Whatever the reason, it has been a lasting element of Khmer culture, and has enabled them to endure what has too often been a melancholy history.