4
FROM ANGKOR’S
END TO THE
FRENCH
PROTECTORATE

Although the Angkorean system was in decline some centuries before 1431, when the Siamese burned the city, the sack was probably a turning point in Cambodia’s history. There was a sharp discontinuity between the civilisation of Angkor and that of its successor state, when a different kind of economic and social order evolved in the country. According to the 16th century Iberian visitor Diego do Couto, the Khmers had forgotten Angkor’s existence, although we should be cautious about accepting such evidence. The pre-Angkorean scholar Michael Vickery argues that the decision to shift the capital to the Quatre Bras region was prompted by an expansion of Cambodia’s trading relationship with China rather than because of Angkor’s collapse. Other writers assert that the country was plunged into a downward spiral and transformed seamlessly from a mighty empire into a vassal state. On the other hand, David Chandler has claimed that Cambodia’s misfortunes during this period were episodic rather than perpetual. The evidence for either side is tantalisingly thin, but what is clear is that Cambodia did suffer a longterm decline relative to its own former power, and to the growing strength of its rivals. From the 17th century, internal political strife often weakened the vitality of the kingdom, and external enemies were quick to take advantage. The French had their own motives when they set up their Cambodian protectorate in 1863, but there can be little doubt that they prevented the final absorption of the kingdom by its neighbours.

By the 15th century the Siamese, former vassals of the Angkorean kings, had become deadly rivals, and another menace was growing as the Vietnamese were slowly but inexorably drawn southwards down the coast of Annam. Between them, these neighbours would come to so dominate Cambodia’s fortunes that by the late 18th century the Khmers would dub them the Tiger and the Crocodile. At times, Cambodia almost ceased to exist and for much of the time it was a tributary state of one or another of its powerful neighbours.

Ironically, Cambodia’s long-time Cham rivals were the first to suffer from Vietnamese expansionism. The Cham kingdom extended between what is today northern Cochin-China and the Danang region of Annam, and when Marco Polo visited in 1288 it was still powerful. While Champa held out, the Khmers were reasonably safe from Vietnamese incursions. In 1471, however, the Vietnamese sacked the Cham capital and reduced the kingdom to a tiny rump vassal state before they destroyed it entirely in 1693. Over 70 years earlier, the Vietnamese had moved into the adjacent Khmer littoral and in the process had begun to strangle Cambodia’s maritime trade. By 1780, they had expanded more or less to the current border between the two states and turned the Khmer population of the region into a minority in their own country. By the late 18th century, a terrible Dark Age had descended on the country.

The coming of the Europeans

When the first Europeans came to Cambodia in the early 16th century, they could have had no inkling that they were walking on the soil of what had once been the most powerful empire in Southeast Asia, centred on the largest city of antiquity. The ruins of Angkor, while impressive, were only the ‘skeleton’ of the former city. Cambodia had also been territorially truncated, stripped of her outer provinces, which had once stretched clear to the Andaman Sea and the boundaries of Burma, and northwards into what is now Laos. The Siamese had occupied much of the western part of the Khmer srok (see Glossary) including Angkor, and the Vietnamese would soon nibble at its eastern flank.

Yet, if the sack and occupation of Angkor in 1431 had bloodied the nose of the Khmer king, it did not signify the total collapse of his kingdom. The Cambodians fought back fiercely against the Siamese occupiers. When the Siamese king Paramaraja II put his own son, Indrapath, on the Khmer throne in 1431, the Khmers assassinated the young man. In 1432 the new Khmer king, Ponhea Yat, moved his capital first to Srei Santhor and then to Phnom Penh. There are a number of hypotheses to explain the move: perhaps it occurred because Srei Santhor was less accessible to raiding Siamese forces; perhaps it was to take advantage of burgeoning trade links with China; perhaps it was to escape the effects of the ecological degradation of the Angkor region. It is possible that the Siamese attacks only sped up the implementation of a decision that would have been taken regardless. Ironically, over 600 years earlier another Khmer king, Jayavarman II, had moved his capital in the opposite direction, in part to escape pressure from hostile Champa.

The wars continued and by the early 16th century the Khmers had managed to expel the Siamese from much of the older Khmer heartlands occupied around 1430. Around 1510, the Khmer king, Ang Chan, regained control of the province of Angkor. Fifty years later, after a confused period of attacks and counterattacks by Siamese and Khmer forces about which we have only sketchy information, Chan’s son, Barom Rachea I, made the region a springboard for an invasion of Siam. According to an inscription at Angkor, Barom Rachea’s own son, King Satha, partially rebuilt the capital after he came to the throne in 1576. It was still a bustling society when the Iberian friar, Gabriel de Quiroga, visited in 1570 and found it to be ‘very densely populated’. In contrast, later travellers would comment on the melancholy vistas of a sparsely populated land. One can only wonder at what had become of the million or so people who had inhabited the city.

Increasing numbers of Europeans arrived in Southeast Asia by sea following the voyages of Diaz and Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope in the late 15th century. The Spanish and Portuguese, it is often said, came with a sword in one hand and a crucifix in the other. In 1511, the Portuguese annexed the strategic Straits seaport of Malacca, and the Spanish conquered the Philippines after 1565. Covetous of souls and gold, they cast their eyes to the mainland and Cambodia did not escape their notice. In a letter published in 1513, the Spanish King Manuel informed Pope Leo X that Cambodia was a strategically important and powerful kingdom in the Far East. The first European account of Cambodia, the Suma Oriental of the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, dates from the years between 1512 and 1515, although it was based on hearsay. Pires’ book casts doubt on the idea that Cambodia had collapsed as a military power, and perhaps it helped restrain his countrymen from precipitate imperialist action against the kingdom. Pires noted that the Khmers were a warlike people and none more so than the king, who was ‘a heathen and knightly’ and who was ‘at war with the people of Burma and with Siam, and sometimes with Champa, and he does not obey anyone’. Cambodia had not yet been reduced to vassal status.

Nevertheless, by the last decades of the 16th century (during the period of the Iberian dual monarchy over Spain and Portugal between 1580 and 1640) the Spanish had pacified most of the Philippines and had converted much of the population to Christianity. Fired by religious zeal and the baser passions of greed, they turned their eyes to the Asian mainland. Tomé Pires had already noted Cambodia’s riches, remarking that the Khmers produced large quantities of rice, meat and ‘wines of their own kind’, together with gold, sticklack (see Glossary), ivory and large quantities of dried fish. In 1584, the Catholic bishop of Malacca produced detailed plans for the invasion of the Southeast Asian mainland, after which the conquistadors would turn their attentions to the glittering prize of China. In the event, King Philip II refused to endorse the bishop’s plans, viewing them as a distraction from his own designs for the sea-borne invasion of England (the doomed Spanish Armada).

In any case, Iberian missionaries were disheartened by the indifference of most Cambodians to the gospels, an attitude the wandering Portuguese friar Gaspar da Cruz put down to the malevolent influence of the Buddhist monks, whom he described as ‘wizards’. Nevertheless, Lisbon and Madrid were a long way from Goa and Manila, and the local authorities had a great deal of autonomy. They were perhaps also worried about the possible designs of their archrivals, the Dutch and the English, on the Southeast Asian mainland. Indeed, the English queen, Elizabeth I, authorised the setting up of the East India Company in 1600, and shortly afterwards the directors petitioned her to allow them to trade with, among other places, ‘the Kingdome of Camboia’. For his part, the Dutch adventurer Jan van Linschoten displayed a keen interest in the possibilities of trade with Southeast Asia in his book Voyages into Ye Easte and Weste Indies, which included an account of his visit to Cambodia, Siam and Champa in the 1570s. Soon afterwards, the Dutch East India Company was set up in Amsterdam with a charter for trade and conquest in the Far East. European imperialist rivalry had begun in earnest.

Conquistadors in Cambodia

As it turned out, the Iberians were never to gain more than the most precarious of toeholds in Cambodia. Although today in Cambodia there are still a number of influential families of Portuguese descent, Iberian imperial ambitions for direct conquest were to founder during an invasion by a handful of desperadoes and religious fanatics in the closing years of the 16th century. This curious affair began in 1593, when King Satha of Cambodia dispatched an embassy to Manila, with promises of friendship and trade if the Spanish would send military forces to help fight off an impending Siamese invasion. Satha had gained a high opinion of the Iberians because of his friendship with Diogo Veloso, a Portuguese adventurer who had settled in the country in 1583, learned the language and married a Khmer princess. The Governor of Manila was politely non-committal and in the meantime the Siamese invaded Cambodia and occupied the capital at Lovek. Satha fled into exile in Laos, never, it seems, to return. The Jesuits in Manila were righteously indignant. Satha had a reputation for friendliness towards Christians, so the priests declared that the Spanish should send soldiers to throw back the Siamese in what would be a ‘just war’. They proposed that in effect, Cambodia would become an Iberian protectorate, and vowed that her rivals, including Champa and Siam, would be put down in ‘a war of fire and blood’ as part of the wider conquest of all of Indochina. The French would act on a similar pretext some two and a half centuries later, when they subjugated Vietnam and set up a protectorate in Cambodia. History repeated itself, but the first time as farce, as it turned out.

Although the Governor of Manila was reluctant to dispatch a large force to Cambodia (there being no more than 1500 Spaniards in the Philippines, exclusive of priests and monks at the end of the 16th century), he sent what the historian C.R. Boxer described as a ‘motley group of soldiers, vagabonds, Filipinos and Japanese’ under the command of the Portuguese swashbucklers Diogo Veloso and Blaz Ruiz. The little army sailed away in a fleet of ill-matched ships, ostensibly to assist Satha, but with the desire for colonial conquest in their hearts. After a number of setbacks, including the dispersal of the fleet in a typhoon and Veloso’s temporary capture by the Siamese, the expedition managed to drive out the Siamese, suppress an uprising by a Khmer usurper named Chung Prei, and clamp down on anti-Iberian intrigues at the royal court. They were able to do all this because of their superior weaponry, which included muskets and cannon. Forgetting their earlier pledges of friendship to Satha, Ruiz and Veloso placed the king’s youngest son on the throne, perhaps believing he would be pliable, for Ruiz declared that the young man was ‘a child and addicted to drink more than was his father . . . he thinks only of sport and hunting and cares nothing for the kingdom’, although he worried that the young man ‘fears the Spanish even while he loves them, for he dreads lest they deprive him of his kingdom’. (French officials were to make similar estimates of their royal protégés in 19th and 20th century Cambodia.)

In the end the arrogance, greed and general bad behaviour of the conquistadors led to their deaths in a massacre at Phnom Penh in 1599 at the hands of an outraged mob stiffened by Tagals, the Cham and Malay palace guards, who would have been equipped with firearms. Ruiz and Veloso died with their dubious cohort and with them perished Spanish hopes of carving out God’s Empire in Indochina. Afterwards, French missionaries took over the work the Iberian Church Militant had initiated, albeit with no greater success, at least in Cambodia. But for their avarice, incompetence and casual brutality, Veloso’s conquistadors might well have established a European colony in Indochina and changed the course of history. We should not jump to the conclusion, however, that Cambodia was weaker than it was because a small number of Europeans almost managed to annex it to their empire. Small numbers of determined men could defeat much larger numbers of soldiers because of cannon and gunpowder, as the Aztecs and Incas learned to their cost.

The post-Angkorean social and
economic system

It is impossible to say how the Iberians might have fared against Angkor at the apogee of its power, for it seems that a different kind of social and economic system had supplanted the old model. Political power was less centralised, the old political and religious institutions were waning, and perhaps this less organised society was less capable of responding swiftly to the Iberian threat than Angkor might have been.

There were many similarities between late and post-Angkorean Cambodia, but several key differences. Theravada Buddhism had already implanted itself firmly before the fall of Angkor, and the monument mania had ebbed. The people spoke the same language and had many of the customs and beliefs of their Angkorean ancestors. Yet even in the domain of language there were some big changes, in part because of cultural cross-fertilisation with Siam. This led to Angkorean syntax being supplanted by that of Siamese. This shift paralleled the emergence of a different kind of economy and society in Cambodia from the 15th century onwards.

If the economic base of a society helps shape its political and social system, then the decision to shift the capital from Angkor to the Quatre Bras region must have led to, or been accompanied by, huge social changes. If, as was argued in the last chapter, Angkorean Cambodia exemplified some aspects of Marx’s so-called Asiatic Mode of Production, with large state-directed public works and dependence on an elaborate hydraulic system for food production, then the shift would have meant an enormous break with the past. Irrigation plays only a minor part in modern Cambodian food production and although European visitors commented on the continuing existence of hydraulic agriculture in the 16th century, it must have fallen into decline. If, as the archaeologists believe, Angkor’s population was over one million, it is puzzling to consider where they went. Were there mass migrations? Perhaps as the hydraulic system fell into disrepair as a result of the ecological crisis and possible sabotage by the Siamese, the population would have had to relocate as a matter of survival. How many perished during the Siamese invasions? Did the apparent ecological crisis lead to famine and disease? Or did the population decline more gradually? Cambodia twice suffered demographic catastrophe during the 19th century—during the incessant wars of the ‘Dark Age’ and after the Great Rebellion of the 1880s—so perhaps something similar happened in the 15th century. Unless fresh archaeological or documentary evidence emerges, we may never know.

Not all Khmers had lived in the enormous dispersed city of Angkor. Large tracts of the countryside were owned and worked by the religious orders, with both free and slave labour. Many other Khmers lived in villages distant from the city, growing rain-fed rice. This lifestyle, or something like it, became the norm for most of Cambodia’s post-Angkorean population and perhaps they also found a less regimented existence more congenial and more in conformity with Theravadist exhortations to spurn worldly vanity and greed. King Satha refurbished the city in the late 16th century, but he abandoned it again shortly afterwards. Angkor Thom was deserted in the mid-17th century and although King Ponhea Sor partly rebuilt the city in 1747 this did not arrest the general decline of state power, and the centre of gravity of Cambodian political life and population had shifted downstream to the lower Mekong Valley. Angkor was to remain crucial to Khmer identity, and was emblazoned on the country’s currrency, but it belonged to the past.

The era of gigantic monument building had ceased forever. The irrigation channels were blocked with silt. At least one of the massive barays disappeared from sight and the advancing jungle overwhelmed the mighty feeder canal that had carried water from the mountains. Roland Fletcher’s ‘gigantic, low density, dispersed urban complex’ had vanished. The Angkorean road system gradually fell into disrepair, so that by the time the French came, large tracts of the countryside were linked only by dusty tracks that became impassable in the wet season. The centralised, bureaucratic state gradually withered away. In some ways, the changes were probably so slow as to be imperceptible. In the words of J.A. Spender, ‘All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, forgetting the vast tracts between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.’

At Angkor, people had lived in ‘a highly structured anthropogenic wetland’, criss-crossed with canals and embankment-cum-roads and capable of supporting the largest concentration of people in the pre-industrial world. After Angkor, the Khmers lived an altogether different style of life which, by the 16th and 17th centuries, had crystallised into a pattern still seen today outside the major towns and cities of Cambodia. Cambodia became an overwhelmingly rural country, very different from the dispersed city of Angkor.

The Khmers now lived in small villages, of which David Chandler describes three broad types. The largest, the kompongs (from the Malay kampong), stood on navigable waterways and were sometimes home to a few hundred inhabitants, including local officials known as chauvai srok. They might be enclosed behind a palisade for defence against bandits, the armed followers of millenarian rebels or foreign marauders. The second type were the rice-growing villages, which were less permanent than the kompongs, although they might contain a Buddhist wat and perhaps some government officials if they were large enough. Lastly, there were remote villages located on the ambiguous margins; maybe many days’ travel from the rice-growing villages and sometimes with no organic links to the Khmer state, and perhaps inhabited by ethnic minorities practising animist rites.

Unlike the Vietnamese villages, the Khmer villages lacked formal authority structures; disputes were settled informally and the remoter the village, the more inwards looking and tradition-bound its inhabitants became. Perhaps an analogy might be made between post-Angkorean rural society and that of 19th century Haiti. After the French were driven out of their West Indian slave colony of Sainte-Domingue, the plantation system was replaced by private peasant agriculture. The revolted slaves spontaneously reincarnated a society, based on the traditional African village, on the ruins of the hated plantations. In both cases there was a change from highly efficient, large-scale, directed agriculture to small-scale subsistence farming, mirroring a privatisation of life. Cambodia had no civil society, with no stable groups between the family and the state, which was often remote from the agglomerations of families that made up the villages. As David Chandler has observed, such non-state and non-family organisations as existed tended to be of a temporary nature, as when villagers would band together to fight off the ubiquitous bandits or to organise festivals. This is not to say that the villages were anarchic. Religion acted as a social glue; as the American-Asian scholar Theodore De Bary noted,

The [Buddhist] ideal is a society in which each individual respects the other’s personality, an intricate network of warm and happy human relationships: mutual respect and affection between parent and child, teacher and student, husband and wife, master and servant, friend and friend, each helping each other upwards in the scale of being.

There were also patronage networks, in which the powerless would attach themselves to local notables and others with more power. Indeed, the anthropologist May Ebihara claims that at the time ‘All free men had to be registered as clients of a particular patron’, who could be an official, royal family member or local grandee. Slavery, too, persisted as an integral part of Khmer society and was not eliminated until the time of the French Protectorate.

Death and taxes were as certain in Cambodia as Benjamin Franklin later observed of human life in general. Taxation was paid on demand and in kind, generally one-tenth of the rice crop, give or take what the peasants could conceal from the eyes of the tax gatherers. The peasants were also liable for conscription into the army in times of war and the state bureaucrats could call upon them to perform unpaid labour, or corvée, on ‘official’ projects. There was little expectation that government officials would be anything other than corrupt and brutal, nor that they would organise much for ‘the general good’, although it is doubtful that any such concept existed in the peculiarly Cambodian variant of feudalism that replaced the Angkorean system. Many officials abused their power to enrich themselves and Cambodian proverbs exhort the peasants to be wary of the officials, who are portrayed as wild beasts and venomous snakes. The proverbs also preach the wisdom of resignation to one’s lot in life, although some peasants took to a life of banditry, some of it perhaps of a ‘social’ nature, to survive. (Social banditry, a term coined by the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his classic book Bandits, suggests a quasi-political dimension of resistance against tyrannical rule.) The peasants had also inherited the religiosity of their Angkorean forebears and it gave them consolation in an often harsh and unjust world. The head of state, the king, was venerated and seen as occupying a special place above the hierarchy of officials. Nor was he held accountable for their misdeeds. Most villagers stayed close to their homes and fields and never saw him in their lives. He was, as Chandler puts it, ‘at once as real (and as unreal) as the Lord Buddha’, an unearthly being with supernatural powers.

The shift of the capital to the Quatre Bras region had freed up Cambodia’s sea-borne trade with the outside world, particularly China, and indeed as Vickery argues this might have been a reason for the move. By the first half of the 17th century, Cambodia was conducting a thriving trade with China via ports on the lower Mekong. In the 16th century, King Satha told the Spanish in Manila that he was keen to trade with them. In 1702, another king permitted Allan Ketchpole to set up a trading post for the English East India Company on the island of Poulo Condore (then part of Cambodia), although it did not prosper. Shortly afterwards, the Scottish sea captain Alexander Hamilton published an account of two Cambodian seaports on the Gulf littoral. He described the town of ‘Cupangsoap’ (Kompong Som, or today’s Sihanoukville) as a place that ‘affords elephants teeth, sticklack and the gum Cambouge or Cambodia . . .’ and its neighbour ‘Ponteamass’ (Banteay Meas) as being located on ‘a pretty deep but narrow river, which, in the rainy seasons of the Southwest Monsoons, has communication with [the] Bansack [Bassac] or Cambodia River . . .’. Other products traded with the outside world included 21 carat gold, and ‘raw silk at 120 dollars per Pecul’ (see Glossary), ‘elephant’s teeth at 50 to 55 dollars’, sandalwood, agala-wood ‘and many sorts of physical drugs, and Lack for japanning’. Despite widespread subsistence agriculture, we know that Cambodia exported a variety of other products, including rice, cotton, hemp, probably fish and fish products, also pepper and cardamom. There was also a big enough social surplus product to feed not only the thousands of state officials, but also a startling number of Buddhist monks. Gaspar da Cruz claimed that at the time of his visit in the 16th century a third of the population were monks, and that there were 1500 of them in Phnom Penh alone. The gradual settlement of the lower Mekong delta by Vietnamese did, however, block a major trading artery and this contributed to Cambodia’s later decline.

Between tiger and crocodile

In his account of his visit to Cambodia, Captain Alexander Hamilton remarked that the seaport of Banteay Meas had ‘flourished’ until it was burned by a Siamese fleet in 1717 and that he had also gazed upon the burnt ruins of ‘Cupangsoap’. The two towns had suffered what was all too common a fate for Cambodian settlements from the 17th century. The Siamese, perennial enemies of the Khmers, had emerged as a formidable, rich and martial people. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French Huguenot who visited Siam sometime during the 1640s, recorded that there were ‘masses of gold’ at the royal court and that the king travelled between gilded pagodas in an enormous boat propelled by 400 oarsmen. A century later, Captain Hamilton described the Siamese capital as a fine city built of stone and brick, with many canals, and about 16 kilometres in circumference. There were ‘steeples gilded in gold’ which, ‘at two or three miles distance . . . disturb the eye when look’d upon’. The captain also wrote of Vietnam as ‘a country far larger than Cambodia, and much richer, and the inhabitants [are] more couragious [sic] and hardier . . . than the Cambodians, but are not so conversable and civil to strangers’. The Italian Christoforo Borri, who visited Vietnam during the first decades of the 17th century, had a high regard for the Vietnamese, whose culture he adjudged to be little different to that of China. The people were strong, agile and brave, with ‘good intelligence’ and open to foreign ideas. Technologically they were on a far higher plane than the Khmers and their system of government was much more centralised, with government power operating down to village level.

The first independent Vietnamese state had been established in 939 AD and afterwards their expansion southwards was inexorable. They began to annex the Cham lands as early as 1069, and after sacking the Cham capital in 1471 they forcibly assimilated their new subjects. The road was also clear for them to begin to move into Cambodian territory. In the 1620s, they began to move into the Khmer lands adjacent to Champa north of the Mekong delta. Their task was made easier by the disarray of the Cambodian government, which one historian has described as ‘faction-ridden and under Siamese influence’. Vietnamese influence at the Cambodian court was also growing during this period. Borri mentions that in 1620 the ‘king of Cambogia’ (Jayajetta II) married a Vietnamese princess in order to cement an alliance against the Siamese. Jayajetta’s marriage was part of what was to become an ongoing process in which the Cambodian state sought to play off its powerful neighbours against one another in order to maintain some measure of sovereignty; King Sihanouk would play a similar game during the 1950s and 1960s. Given Cambodia’s increasing weakness vis-à-vis its neighbours, it was probably the best diplomatic option down through the centuries to the international Realpolitik of the 20th century.

In 1623, King Jayajetta II granted Vietnamese traders and settlers permission to live and work near the Khmer town of Prey Nokor, situated on a distributary of the Mekong delta, and the largest town in that sparsely settled region of Cambodia. This was probably part of the price of the king’s marriage to the Nguyen princess. The settlers’ numbers steadily increased and in 1698 they set up a Vietnamese vice-royalty in the district and renamed the town Saigon. Earlier, in 1658, a Vietnamese army had penetrated deep into Cambodia-proper, only withdrawing the following year. By 1780, the Vietnamese controlled almost the whole of the lower delta region and the Camau Peninsula. In the delta, the Vietnamese had carried out a process similar to that of the Israelis in the present-day Occupied Territories of Palestine, of ‘creating political facts on the ground’ by populating the region with settlers. It was a slow-motion annexation in which the hapless Khmers were pushed over the de facto border, or onto marginal lands. The 19th century French historian Adhémard Leclère claimed that the Vietnamese settlers provoked border incidents so as to be able to demand indemnities in land from the Khmers.

Although almost half a million Khmer Krom still live in the Vietnamese lower delta today, it is probable, as the distinguished archaeologist and writer Louis Malleret has argued, that only the coming of the French saved them from assimilation or extinction. The Khmers’ religion taught them resignation in the face of seemingly inevitable misfortune and they would need every ounce of faith in a ‘historical amphitheatre’ that, as Albert Camus reminds us, ‘has always contained the martyr and the lion’ and where the ‘former relied on eternal consolation and the latter on raw historical meat’. For their part, metaphorically speaking, the Siamese tiger and the Vietnamese crocodile had voracious appetites for Cambodian flesh. However, the designs of Cambodia’s external enemies were assisted by periodic bouts of dynastic feuding within the country itself and by the late 1770s, during which decade the Siamese burned Phnom Penh, the country’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb.

From the 18th century onwards, Cambodia became a tributary state of its neighbours, a common form of foreign relations in Southeast Asia and one originally developed by the Chinese. The Cambodian kings were expected to pay annual tribute in ritual ceremonies in Hué or Bangkok. Gifts and letters would be exchanged, underlining the dependent status of the vassal monarch at Phnom Penh. In its turn, Vietnam was expected to acknowledge its own tributary status with regard to China. There were differences in the relationships between Cambodia and its neighbours. There was a sharp cultural divide between Cambodia and Vietnam; although both countries were based economically on wet rice cultivation, Vietnam was a Sinitic society and shared much of its powerful northern neighbour’s cultural, social and political institutions. Vietnam, like China, based its system of government and administration on the principles of Confucius. The Vietnamese also shared the cult of ancestor worship, Chinese calligraphy and many aspects of family life. Like China, Vietnam was a bureaucratised state with a high degree of centralisation and social stratification. Its people generally ascribed to the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, although French missionaries had been rather more successful in Vietnam than in Cambodia.

Cambodia, on the other hand, shared an Indianised cultural tradition with its other neighbour, Siam, and both countries practised the Theravada brand of Buddhism, leavened with residual Hindu and animist influences. Government and administration was looser and these dissimilarities were reflected in the differences in relations between the three countries. For the Vietnamese, the Khmers were by definition barbarians to be punished, patronised or civilised, depending on the situation. The Siamese, who shared much of the culture of Cambodia, were often more tolerant and tended to view the Khmers as children, albeit unruly and disobedient ones. This would explain the frequent resort to stern measures, as for instance when they burned down Phnom Penh in 1772, and invaded the country in 1811, 1833 and again in the 1840s. However, it is clear they also felt some sense of responsibility for the fate of their Theravadist neighbour, whose capital lay much closer to Vietnam than to Siam.

Until the 19th century the actions of Siam and Vietnam in Cambodia were usually constrained by the desire on both sides to avoid an all-out military collision with each other. Although they continually intrigued and jockeyed for power and influence in the kingdom, they both understood that it was in their interests to allow Cambodia to exist as a semi-independent buffer state. This did not stop them from pushing home the advantage when the other was preoccupied with other problems, as when the Nguyen dynasty was confronted with the Tay Son rebellion in Vietnam, or when the Siamese were distracted by wars with Burma. The situation changed in the early 19th century when the Vietnamese decided on a policy of territorial and cultural assimilation. The resulting chaos and instability almost destroyed Cambodia.

The Cambodian Dark Age

Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia until his retirement in 2004, has described the history of Cambodia in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as ‘an immense, painful tragedy’. Most painful of all were the years between the 1780s and the coronation of Ang Duang in 1848, during which time the Khmer monarchy and national sovereignty almost vanished. Perhaps the only darker period for Khmers was during the 1970s, the decade of civil war, carpet-bombing and genocide. As David Chandler reminds us, the Siamese burned down the Khmer capital three times in the first half of the 19th century and the Cambodian Royal Chronicles lament a succession of plagues, famines, floods and other natural and man-made calamities. It was a grim era in which rival states fought over the carcass of Cambodia and in which peace was only a time of recuperation from the last war and preparation for the next.

The Dark Age began around 1778, when the Siamese invaded Cambodia only six years after an earlier incursion. When the Siamese withdrew, the country exploded into a civil war that pitted rival bureaucratic factions and court intriguers against one another, while behind the scenes Vietnamese agents plotted in the murk. A rebellion in southern Vietnam had spilled over the border into Cambodia and at the other end of the country, in the vicinity of the Angkor ruins, a local Cambodian official, or oknya, called Ben or Baen, of the Apheuvongs family, suppressed dissidents and carved out a power base for himself in the north-west provinces. Later, Ben set himself up as a kind of viceroy, under Siamese patronage at the royal capital of Udong. Still later, he retreated to his north-west bastion and, with Siamese blessing, set up what amounted to a breakaway Khmer state—a de facto partition of Cambodia that was to last until 1908 when the French negotiated the return of Battambang and Angkor provinces from Siam.

During the course of these disturbances, the Cambodian king Ang Non was killed and in 1783 his nine-year-old son, Prince Eng, sought sanctuary at the court of King Rama I in Bangkok. It was a fateful flight, for it was to re-establish Siamese suzerainty over Cambodia after it had lapsed following a Burmese military victory over Bangkok in 1767. For over a decade following Non’s death, the Cambodian throne was vacant, with power in the hands of a pro-Siamese regent. Ang Eng came of age and was crowned in a ceremony in Bangkok, but he died shortly thereafter, in 1797 at the age of 23 years, possibly as a baptised Catholic. His eldest son, Prince Chan, was only six years old at the time and the country was placed once again into the hands of a regent.

The Siamese king, Rama I, allowed Chan to ascend to the Khmer throne in 1803, at the age of 16 years. Although Rama might have considered the new king’s youth would make him tractable, he was more independent minded than his father and seems to have brooded on slights and to have resented Siamese domination. Intrigues broke out again at court between pro-Siamese and pro-Vietnamese factions, with Chan’s own brothers aligning themselves with the former. Ang Chan’s writ did not run far into the provinces, and not at all into Ben’s juristiction around Battambang and Angkor. When Ben died, the Siamese appointed his nephew to succeed him and the districts became a semi-independent part of Siam, under a family of hereditary viceroys. Chan was so angry that he refused to travel to Bangkok for Rama’s funeral. Meanwhile, the internal intrigues had escalated so far that there was danger of civil war. Perhaps sensing that the Siamese might intervene to aid his enemies, Chan appealed to the Vietnamese for help and they responded by sending ships and troops up the Mekong to guard his palace at Udong. Whether he acted out of pique or calculation is difficult to say, but the results were disastrous for Cambodia. The Vietnamese were to stay for over thirty years and almost succeeded in turning the country into a province of Vietnam.

The Siamese had not forgotten Chan’s calculated snub to the memory of their ruler, which in their opinion transgressed the rules of the client–tributary relationship. The Siamese invaded, perhaps with the design of planting Chan’s brother Snguon on the throne, and Chan fled into exile at Saigon. Ominously, his two other brothers, Im and Duang, sided with Siam. Neither Vietnam nor Siam were prepared to risk open war at this stage, as the former was weakened by internal revolt and the latter was waging war against their Burmese neighbour. In 1813 the Siamese withdrew, taking Snguon, Im and Duang into exile at Bangkok after burning the citadels of Udong and Phnom Penh. Chan returned with a permanent garrison of Vietnamese troops and shifted his capital downstream from Udong to Phnom Penh, presumably as it was closer to his patrons. Cambodia had become a vassal of Vietnam, although large parts of the west of the country remained within the Siamese sphere of influence. Weakened by their wars with Burma, the Siamese bided their time, grooming Im and Duang at Bangkok and waiting for better days.

Vietnam, the only Sinitic state in Southeast Asia, always regarded the Khmers as barbarians. When Chan died in 1835 they adopted the policy of ‘civilising’ the barbarians, attempting to introduce a Vietnamese-style taxation system and bullying the Khmer mandarins to wear Vietnamese-style bureaucratic dress. Later, they attempted to make the general population wear Vietnamese clothing and hairstyles. They also conscripted Khmer peasants to dig a canal from the Gulf of Siam to the Mekong delta, and behaved with great brutality. In 1820, the Khmers rose in revolt but it was a futile gesture in the face of a powerful occupier. The rising was put down with torture, public executions and the burning of villages in a grim fore-echo of what would be done to the Vietnamese themselves by the French colonialists.

In 1834, towards the end of Chan’s reign, the Siamese had recuperated enough from the Burmese wars to send an invading force deep into Cambodia via Pursat, one of the ‘four gates of Cambodia’, which lies to the south of the Great Lake. The exiled Khmer Princes Im and Duang rode with them. One can only wonder at what the pair thought of the behaviour of their patrons, who burned down Phnom Penh and looted it so systematically that ‘even the dogs were loaded onto wagons’, according to French missionaries. When they retreated after a Vietnamese counteroffensive, the Siamese troops forced thousands of peasants to accompany them into exile. So many others fled into the forests that the region south of the Great Lake, severely depopulated, became a melancholy wasteland.

The Vietnamese reinstalled Chan on the throne, but they were contemptuous of his ineffectuality in the face of the invasion and dismissive of Cambodia’s quasi-sovereignty. The gloom hanging over the kingdom deepened after Chan’s sudden death in 1835, at the age of 44. The Vietnamese pondered who would replace him. Chan had not left any sons, and the Vietnamese made a sharp break with tradition by putting his daughter, Mei, on the throne. The ill-starred Mei was the first and the last Cambodian queen. Even more than Chan, Mei was a puppet, dancing for her life to tunes sung by Vietnamese ‘advisors’. Meanwhile, the Siamese king, Rama III, was becoming more belligerent. In a chilling phrase, he threatened to ‘turn Cambodia into a forest’ if the Khmers resisted him when he launched a fresh invasion.

Rama III planned his new invasion for 1836. Im and Duang were to play starring roles, and one of them was to be placed on the throne if and when the Vietnamese were expelled. The Vietnamese responded by sending an envoy to meet with Duang, asking him to come to Phnom Penh to discuss his future. Duang declined, but Rama III got wind of the plot and imprisoned him at Bangkok, despite Duang’s protestations of loyalty. The invasion was postponed and in the meantime the Vietnamese mission civilisatrice proceeded apace. As David Chandler has observed, Queen Mei was ‘demoted to the status of a salaried Vietnamese civil servant’ and the Vietnamese replaced the Khmer seals of office with their own. The Phnom Penh region was given a Vietnamese administrative name and the aspect of the city became increasingly Sinitic, just as Prey Nokor had become Saigon. The region looked set for absorption into Vietnam, just as the lower delta or Kampuchea Krom had been during the previous century.

However, in 1840–41 the Khmers once again rose up in rebellion against the foreigners, this time with more effect. The revolt lasted for six months and although it was suppressed it did ensure the continued existence of the Khmer state. Seizing the opportunity, the Siamese assembled an army of over 50 000 men and prepared to invade. The Vietnamese deported Queen Mei to Vietnam, probably to a life of concubinage, and executed her pro-Siamese sister Baen for treason. On the Siamese side, Prince Duang swore an oath of loyalty to Rama, after which he was released from prison and travelled to Battambang, which was under the control of the Apheuvongs viceroy.

Siam and Vietnam were pretty evenly matched and the situation bogged down into a military stalemate that lasted until 1845. For the Khmers, there was no respite from the horrors of war. Both sides inflicted mass deportations and public executions on the populace. Farmland was laid waste and towns and villages razed as the rival armies attacked and counterattacked, looting, raping and burning their way across the countryside. The population fell dramatically to somewhere around half a million, according to the accounts of foreign visitors such as Sir John Bowring. Phnom Penh’s population was no more than 25 000 and that of Udong perhaps half as large. Famine and epidemics of disease stalked the land. Trade had almost completely dried up and literacy rates had fallen. The towns and villages were depopulated and much of the agricultural land had reverted to nature.

The suffering ended only when the Vietnamese withdrew from Phnom Penh and sued for negotiations with Siam. Both sides were weary after years of war and the Vietnamese were increasingly worried—not without foundation—about the designs of France on their kingdom. They agreed to allow Duang to stay in the capital and eventually they returned the royal regalia, without which the Khmers would not consider him a legitimate ruler. In effect, both sides agreed that Cambodia would become a neutral state, albeit a client of its neighbours. Both sides withdrew their troops (with the exception of the Siamese in the north-west provinces) after more than three decades of occupation.

Relative peace and stability under Ang Duang

Duang was finally crowned in 1848 and became the first king to sit on the Khmer throne since Chan had died in 1835. The unfortunate Mei had died in exile in Vietnam and had never been accepted as a legitimate monarch by the majority of Khmers. For the common people it was a time of celebration. The coronation was also a much-needed confirmation of the proverb ‘the Cambodian srok will never die’, because for much of the past period the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity had hung by the slimmest of threads.

Duang’s reign, in comparison with those before him and the interregnums between them, was peaceful and secure, and two revolts that flared were crushed with relative ease. He introduced some administrative reforms, replaced certain grades of officials (chau muong) with centrally appointed ones with the generic title of chauvai srok, and amalgamated some of the smaller provinces into larger units. Although it would take decades for the damage of war to heal, towns were gradually rebuilt, old wats refurbished and new ones built. The people who had fled to the forests returned and trade was revived to some degree. When the British diplomat Sir John Bowring visited in 1855, he reported that only one Cambodian seaport remained, the estuarine town of Kampot, but that it carried on a ‘considerable trade’. Square-rigged vessels regularly sailed to the Straits Settlements with cargoes of rice, gamboge, pepper and dyewoods. They brought back cotton goods, hardware and, less happily, opium from British India. The French missionary Monsignor Pallegoix described Kampot as a flourishing little town of 3000 people, with never less than 60 junks in the harbour.

Much of the king’s activities during this period consisted of giving out titles and seals of office to ministers and government officials, together with uniforms coloured according to rank. It would be easy to dismiss this as mere bureaucratic protocol or ritual hocus-pocus, but David Chandler has argued that it was in fact an essential part of the reconstitution of the Cambodian state. The king needed the royal regalia to confer legitimacy on his reign, and he also needed to dole out the symbols of office to confer legitimacy on Cambodian officials. It was also a purging of the alien bureaucratic customs that had been enforced by the Vietnamese during the dark decades. Cambodia was reborn as an Indianised, Buddhist state and the king acted as his subjects believed he ought to do.

However, the degree of independence Duang enjoyed during his reign should not be overstated. He reigned by courtesy of his powerful neighbours and he was crowned by both Khmer and Siamese Brahmans. The north-west provinces—which contained the great national symbol of the ruins of Angkor—had been severed from Cambodia, seemingly forever, and the boundary between the kingdom and Vietnam must have been a source of private grief for the new king. Siamese influence remained strong, although the soldiers were gone, and Duang’s sons lived as guests-cum-hostages at Bangkok to ensure their father’s good behaviour. An officer from the British Indian Army who spent some time in the country during Duang’s reign remarked that the king was a ‘vassal of the King of Siam, being not able to bring above thirty five thousand men into the field’.

On another level, lest we risk romanticising this king, the account of the ‘Madras Officer’, who was a guest at Duang’s court, should be considered. The king’s palace was a rambling wooden structure at Udong which he shared with 300 dancers or concubines and four ‘married wives’, wrote the officer. The shaven-headed sixty-year-old himself was ‘enormously fat’, reported the British officer, and ‘his appearance is not at all King-like or imposing, being dull-looking, with a heavy, stolid air about him, and his face and breast much pitted with smallpox’. He was arthritic and short-tempered; in one incident he struck

The Royal Palace at Udong, circa 1863.
(Courtesy of Cambodian National Archives, Phnom Penh)

one of his wives or concubines with a cane in the presence of guests because he thought she had taken some gold jewellery from him, although it was lesser stuff that the visitors had electroplated for her. Despite his age and ugliness, his women included ‘the best-looking girls we had seen in the country’. Most of them were the daughters of ministers and other dignitaries ‘who vie with each other for the honour of furnishing a fresh inmate for the royal harem’.

The Madras Officer had also brought intriguing examples of European technology to the royal court, including the electroplating equipment and batteries, and the king asked him to repair his coining machine, which was malfunctioning. Duang was an intelligent man and would have had an appreciation of European power relative to that of his Asian neighbours. Just as the British officer was scrutinising him, he was no doubt shrewdly sizing up his guest and he would have known that British influence was growing in Siam. Behind what the officer considered a bovine appearance lurked an agile mind. In 1853, Duang made diplomatic overtures to the French emperor, eager to find a patron to counterbalance the power of Hué and Bangkok, and possibly that of the British. However, other matters preoccupied Napoleon III, and two years elapsed before he sent the Montigny diplomatic mission to discuss Duang’s overtures. By this time, the Siamese had sniffed out what was happening and brought pressure to bear on Duang to let the matter drop.

Duang died in 1860, apparently depressed, leaving instructions that his body be left for the wild beasts to devour. (This somewhat bizarre order—which, however, followed a custom common in Cambodia up to Angkorean times—was not obeyed and Duang’s body was cremated.) Perhaps the old king despaired that he had been able to do no more for his kingdom, but if so he underestimated himself, for he had brought some stability and warded off chaos and disintegration. His death was followed by another depressing interregnum of court intrigues, dynastic squabbling, revolts and foreign meddling. Duang’s oldest son, Prince Norodom, turned to the French for support, and this time the French were quick to accept. During the monsoon of 1863, a bluff middle-aged French admiral sailed up the Mekong to Udong by gunboat to sign a treaty with this prince. A new era in Cambodian history was about to begin.