5
CAMBODIA AFTER ANGKOR

The least-recorded period of Cambodian history falls between Zhou Daguan’s visit to Angkor and the restoration of some of the temples there by a Cambodian king named Chan in the 1550s and 1560s. The intervening centuries witnessed major, permanent shifts in Cambodia’s economy, its foreign relations, its language, and probably, although this is harder to verify, in the structure, values, and performance of Cambodian society. Evidence about these shifts that can be traced to the period itself, however, is very thin. By the time the amount of evidence increases and becomes reliable around 1550 or so, many of the shifts have already taken place.

Evidence from the early decades of the period comes largely from Chinese sources, for almost no inscriptions appear to have been carved on stone inside the kingdom between the middle of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Indeed, whereas over a thousand inscriptions have been catalogued for the years prior to 1300, less than a hundred more were carved in later centuries. Other sources include a Cham inscription and some inscriptions from Thailand, while Thai chronicles written in the seventeenth century, one of them very fragmentary, contain some accurate information about political and social events. The Cambodian chronicles that purportedly deal with the period appear to have been drawn from folklore and from Thai chronicle traditions, and they are impossible to corroborate from other sources.¹

THE SHIFT FROM ANGKOR TO PHNOM PENH

The Chinese evidence is important, for as Michael Vickery and Oliver Wolters have convincingly argued, the southward shifts in Cambodia’s geographical and administrative center of gravity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were probably connected with the rapid expansion of Chinese maritime trade with Southeast Asia under the Mongols and the early Ming. Twenty-one tributary missions were sent from Cambodia to the Ming court in China between 1371 and 1432—more, it seems, than throughout the entire Angkorean period—and although some of these missions may have been purely ceremonial, they must have come primarily to trade, to arrange for trade, and perhaps also to request Chinese support against the depredations of the Thai. The number of missions and the respect accorded them by the Chinese indicate not only that Cambodia remained active and powerful during this period but also that the Cambodian elite, less rigidly tied to religious foundations and the ceremonial duties of brahmanical bureaucracy, were eager to exploit the possibility of commercial relations with China. How and why this shift in their thinking and behavior occurred is impossible to ascertain, but several scholars have held that the shift should not be connected with the notion of decline for, as Wolters has remarked, “perhaps we have become too ready to regard the decline of Angkor in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as being on a catastrophic scale.”² Indeed, throughout this period, rulers inside the present-day frontiers of Cambodia were able to compete for resources and trade with their new and prosperous neighbors in the recently established kingdom of Ayudhya to the west. The region of Angkor itself, as recent studies have revealed, was still quite heavily populated, and several buildings in the region were restored in these years. The Cambodians convinced the Chinese of their own continuing importance and were occasionally able, well into the seventeenth century, to attack Ayudhya and to defeat the Thai in war.

Because this shift of emphasis was accompanied by so few supposedly Angkorean activities (such as stone temple construction, grandiose inscriptions, and expanded irrigation works), authors have often spoken of decline or collapse where change or transformation would be more appropriate terms. Decline, for one thing, fails to explain Cambodia’s enduring strength; for another, the word suggests that Jayavarman VII, for example, was in some ways a more authentically Cambodian king than the Theravada monarch observed in 1296 by Zhou Daguan. Some authors have connected the royal abandonment of Angkor—a historical event that may not even have taken place before the 1560s with a national failure of nerve and with major losses of population. Such losses, the argument runs, would have made it impossible to maintain irrigation works at Angkor, and the water, becoming stagnant, could have become a breeding place for malarial mosquitoes, further depleting the population in a spiraling process. Still others have argued that Theravada Buddhism was in some ways subversive of Angkorean cohesion while it invigorated the politics of Ayudhya and Pagan in Burma; the peaceable nature of this variant of the religion has been used to explain the defeats but not the Cambodian victories nor those of the Thai who shared the same beliefs.

What emerges from the evidence is that Cambodia was entering what Ashley Thompson has called its middle period well before the wholesale abandonment of Angkor. Angkorean institutions—inscriptions, stone temples, a Hindu-oriented royal family, and extensive hydraulic works, to name four traditions—seem to have stopped, faded, or been redirected soon after the conversion of the Cambodian elite and the general population to Theravada Buddhism, an event that probably took place not long after Jayavarman VII’s death. It would be premature to see these social changes as springing uniquely or even primarily from the ideology or content of the new religion. It is more likely that they were related to the rise of the Theravada kingdom of Ayudhya to the west and to the entanglement, which was to last until the 1860s, between the Siamese and Cambodian courts. People, ideas, texts, and institutions migrated west from Angkor to Ayudhya, where they were modified and eventually reexported into Cambodia to survive as part of its genuine decline from the eighteenth century onward. The migration would have prisoners of war, including entire families, swept off to the west after successive Thai invasions of Angkor, the most important of these perhaps occurring in 1431. As this process was going on, other people and institutions were also migrating southward to the vicinity of Phnom Penh, where the capital of Cambodia was to remain for the next six hundred years.³

The suitability of Phnom Penh as a site for a Cambodian capital sprang in large part from its location at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap. A fortified city at this point, the “four faces,” could control the riverine trade coming down from Laos as well as trade in pottery, dried fish, and fish sauce from the Tonle Sap, to say nothing of incoming goods, primarily Chinese in origin, approaching Cambodia via the Mekong Delta, still largely inhabited by Khmer. Once the choice had been made to become a trading kingdom—and it is impossible to say when, how, or why this happened—locating the Cambodian capital at Phnom Penh made economic sense.

It is likely that the shift of the capital also represented a momentary triumph, later legitimized and prolonged, of regional interests and perhaps those of an individual overlord, at the expense of people lingering near Angkor or gathering strength in the Menam Basin to the west. These members of a southeastern Cambodian elite—for these interests were those of chiefs and their followings, rather than rice farmers singly or en masse—probably took advantage of their distance from Ayudhya to trade with China on their own account. It also seems likely that they could rely on support from overlords long entrenched in the region, which was the heartland of Funan, an area where Angkorean writ may often have been ignored.

But these are suppositions. It seems more certain that the myth connected with the founding of Phnom Penh, which tells of an old woman’s discovery of a Buddha image floating miraculously downstream, was concocted after the city had come to life, under a name suggestive of its location at the crossroad of two rivers, a name that has survived into modern Khmer as Chatomuk, or “four faces,” an interesting echo of the iconography of the Bayon.⁴

The role played by foreigners adept at trade in this new city is difficult to assess, but influential figures probably included speakers of Malay, from Champa or the Indonesian islands who may have left behind in the Cambodian language words such as kompong, or “landing place,” and psar, or “market,” as well as several bureaucratic titles and administrative terms. The Malay legacy may have been deeper than this and needs to be explored, for seventeenth-century European descriptions of riverine Cambodia, and the way its politics were organized, strongly resemble descriptions from this era and later of riverine Malaya.⁵ Other foreigners active in Phnom Penh at this time were the Chinese, already busily trading at Angkor in the thirteenth century; there were three thousand of them in Phnom Penh in the 1540s. It seems likely that Chinese and Malay traders and their descendants married into the Cambodian elite, just as the Chinese continued to do later on, tightening the relationships between the king, his entourage, and commercial profits.

By the late fifteenth century, it seems, the social organization, bureaucracy, and economic priorities of Angkor, based on heavy taxation, forced labor, and the primacy of a priestly caste, were no longer strong or relevant. New forms of organization, new settlement patterns, and new priorities based in part on foreign trade became feasible and attractive.

Some of the reasons for the changes that Cambodia underwent in this period have already been suggested. Another element conducive to change might be called the emulation factor, affecting both Phnom Penh (and other capitals nearby) and Ayudhya. These were newly established trading kingdoms, respectful but perhaps a little wary of the idea of Angkor. By the 1400s, Ayudhya and these Cambodian cities looked to each other rather than to a brahmanical past for exemplary behavior. Until the end of the sixteenth century, moreover, Phnom Penh (or Lovek or Udong) and Ayudhya considered themselves not separate polities but participants in a hybrid culture. The mixture contained elements of Hinduized kingship, traceable to Angkor, and Theravada monarchic accessibility, traceable to the Mon kingdom of Dvaravati perhaps, which had practiced Theravada Buddhism for almost a thousand years, as well as remnants of paternalistic, village-oriented leadership traceable to the ethnic forerunners of the Thai, the tribal peoples hailing originally from the mountains of southern China. Throughout the fourteenth century and much of the fifteenth, the official language common to both kingdoms was probably Khmer. In both societies the Buddhist sangha, or monastic order, was accessible, in its lower reaches at least, to ordinary people. Brought into contact with each other through wars, immigration, and a shared religion, the newly established Thai and Khmer kingdoms blended with each other and developed differently from their separate forebears.

This hybrid blending was rarely peaceful. Both kingdoms estimated political strength in terms of controlling manpower rather than territory or resources and interpreted such strength (and tributary payments) as evidence of royal merit and prestige. The Thai would have learned from the Khmer, and vice versa, to a large extent via defectors and prisoners of war. Between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century there were frequent wars, generally west of the Mekong, between the Cambodians and the Thai. These laid waste the regions through which invading and retreating armies marched. The invasions usually coincided with periods of weakness in the areas that were invaded. In the 1570s, for example, after a Burmese army had sacked Ayudhya, several Cambodian expeditions were mounted against Siam. Invasion routes ran along the edges of the Tonle Sap, and this fact probably made the site of Yasodharapura unsuitable as a residential area for large numbers of unprotected people.

CAMBODIA IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

The narrative history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, about which we know so little, can be disposed of fairly quickly. The Thai-oriented administration of the Angkor region, it seems, was overthrown by forces loyal to Phnom Penh toward the middle of the fifteenth century; that is, perhaps about twenty years after the last Thai attack on the old capital. During this period, a succession of kings, whose names and dates as reported in the chronicles are probably fictional, held power in Phnom Penh.

Chronicles suggest that by the end of the fifteenth century, conflict had developed between these new rulers as they renewed and formalized their relations with Ayudhya and with officials or chieftains with followings rooted in the southeastern sruk, or districts. A former slave, the chronicles state, led some of these forces, and Europeans writing somewhat later stated that this new king was in fact a relative of the monarch whom he had deposed.⁶ What is important for later events is that the deposed king, Chan, took temporary refuge in Ayudhya before returning with an army to depose the usurper. His restoration under Thai patronage set a precedent that many Cambodian kings were to follow.

So did the fact that he was deposed by forces coming from the eastern portions of the kingdom. From the 1620s onward, these regions of dissidence could often rely on Vietnamese support. According to the Khmer chronicles, a Cambodian king married a Vietnamese princess in the 1630s and allowed Vietnamese authorities to set up customs posts in the Mekong Delta, then inhabited largely by Khmer but beyond the reach of Cambodian administrative control.⁷ Over the next two hundred years, Vietnamese immigrants poured into the region, still known to many Khmer today as Lower Cambodia or Kampuchea Krom. When Cambodia gained its independence in 1953, some four hundred thousand Cambodians still lived in southern Vietnam, surrounded by more than ten times as many Vietnamese. The Khmer residents developed a distinctive culture, and many twentieth-century Cambodian political leaders, including Son Sen, Son Sann, Ieng Sary, and Son Ngoc Thanh, were born and raised as members of this minority. The presence of rival patrons to the west and east set in motion a whipsaw between Thai and Vietnamese influence over the Cambodian court, and between pro-Thai and pro-Vietnamese Cambodian factions in the provinces as well. Already severe in the 1680s,⁸ this factionalism lasted until the 1860s, and arguably was revived under Democratic Kampuchea, where eastern-zone cadres were accused by Pol Pot and his colleagues of having “Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds.”⁹

The first European to mention Cambodia was probably Tome Pires, whose Suma Oriental was written between 1512 and 1515. The kingdom he described was a warlike one, whose ruler “obeys no one,” and Pires hinted at the richness of the products that could be obtained from it.¹⁰ He was relying, however, on hearsay. The first eyewitness account comes from the Portuguese missionary Gaspar da Cruz, who visited Lovek toward the end of King Chan’s reign in 1556. He left after about a year, disappointed by his inability to make converts, and chose to blame his failure on the superstitions of the people and their loyalty to Buddhist monks. Cruz was impressed, indeed, by the solidarity of the Cambodians, and in an interesting passage he remarked that they

dare do nothing of themselves, nor accept anything new without leave of the king, which is why Christians cannot be made without the king’s approval. And if some of my readers should say that they could be converted without the king knowing it, to this I answer that the people of the country is of such a nature, that nothing is done that the king knoweth not; and anybody, be he never so simple may speak with the King, wherefore everyone seeketh news to carry unto him, to have an occasion for to speak with him; whereby without the king’s good will nothing can be done.

He suggested that the sangha contained more than a third of the able-bodied men in Cambodia or, by his estimate, some hundred thousand, a fact with clear implications for politics and the economy. These monks commanded great loyalty from the population, and Cruz found them to be

exceedingly proud and vain . . . alive they are worshipped for gods, in sort that the inferior among them do worship the superior like gods, praying unto them and prostrating themselves before them: and so the common people have great confidence in them, with a great reverence and worship: so that there is no person that dare contradict them in anything. . . . It happened sometimes that while I was preaching, many round me hearing me very well, and being very satisfied with what I told them, that if there come along any of these priests and said, “This is good, but ours is better,” they would all depart and leave me alone.¹¹

The absence of inherited riches cited by Cruz is a vivid example of royal interference in everyday life. When the owner of a house died, Cruz remarked, “All that is in it returneth to the king, and the wife and children hide what they can, and begin to seek a new life.” Possessions, in other words, were held by people at the king’s pleasure, as were ranks, land, and positions in society. This residual absolute power, it seems, gave the otherwise rickety institution of the monarchy great strength vis-à-vis the elite. One consequence of the arrangements cited by Cruz was that rich families could not, in theory at least, consolidate themselves into lasting antimonarchical alliances; the king’s response to them (dispossessing a generation at a time) suggests that kings distrusted the elite.

Cruz said nothing about Angkor, although a later Portuguese writer, Diego do Couto, reported in 1599 that some forty years beforehand (in 1550 or 1551), a king of Cambodia had stumbled across the ruins while on an elephant hunt. The story is not confirmed by other sources, but several dated inscriptions at Angkor reappear in the 1560s, suggesting that the date of the rediscovery may be accurate, although it may have taken place during a military campaign instead of during a hunt, for the Angkor region was a logical staging area for Cambodian armies poised to invade Siam.

Couto wrote that when the king had been informed of the existence of ruins,

he went to the place, and seeing the extent and the height of the exterior walls, and wanting to examine the interior as well, he ordered people then and there to cut and burn the undergrowth. And he remained there, beside a pretty river while this work was accomplished, by five or six thousand men, working for a few days. . . . And when everything had been carefully cleaned up, the king went inside, and . . . was filled with admiration for the extent of these constructions.¹²

He added that the king then decided to transfer his court to Angkor. Two inscriptions from Angkor Wat indicate that the temple was partially restored under royal patronage in 1577–78. Both of the inscriptions, and two more incised at Phnom Bakheng in 1583, honored the king’s young son in whose favor he was to abdicate in 1584, possibly to delay a coup by his own ambitious and more popular brother.¹³ The identically worded Phnom Bakheng inscriptions, in fact, may refer to this infighting by expressing the hope that the king would no longer be tormented by “royal enemies.” It is equally possible, however, that the phrase refers to the Thai royal family, with whom the Cambodian elite had been quarreling throughout the 1570s.

Indeed, in spite of the apparent ideological solidarity noted by Cruz, and the florescence of Buddhism reflected in several inscriptions, the 1560–90 period was a turbulent one in which Cambodian troops took advantage of Thai weakness (brought on in part by the Burmese sacking of Ayudhya in 1569) to attack Thai territory several times. According to Europeans, the Cambodian king, worried by internal and external threats, changed his attitude toward Catholic missionaries, allowing them to preach and sending gifts of rice to the recently colonized centers of Malacca and Manila in exchange for promises of military help (which never arrived). Earlier, the king had apparently attempted to seek an alliance, or at least a nonaggression pact, with the Thai.

The flurry of contradictory activities in the field of foreign relations suggests instability at the court that is reflected in the frequent moves the king made, his premature abdication, and his unwillingness or inability to remain at peace with the Thai, who unsuccessfully laid siege to Lovek in 1587, a date confirmed by an inscription from southeastern Cambodia.¹⁴ If subsequent Cambodian diplomatic maneuvering is a guide, it seems likely that these sixteenth-century moves were attempts by the king to remain in power despite the existence of heavily armed, more popular relatives and in the face of threats from Ayudhya and the surprisingly powerful Lao states to the north.

By 1593 Thai preparations for a new campaign against Lovek forced the Cambodian king to look overseas for help. He appealed to the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines, even promising to convert to Christianity if sufficient aid were forthcoming. Before his letter had been acted on, however, the king and his young son fled north to southern Laos, and another son was placed in charge of the defense of Lovek. The city fell in 1594.

Although Cambodian military forces were often as strong as those of the Thai throughout most of the seventeenth century, and although European traders were often attracted to Cambodia almost as strongly as they were to Ayudhya at this time, Thai and Cambodian historiography and Cambodian legend interpret the capture of Lovek as a turning point in Cambodian history, ushering in centuries of Cambodian weakness and intermittent Thai hegemony. The facts of the case as they appear in European sources are more nuanced than this, but the belief is still strong on both sides of the poorly demarcated border that a traumatic event (for the Cambodians) had taken place.

The popular legend of preah ko preah kaev, first published in fragmentary form by a French scholar in the 1860s, is helpful on this point and is worth examining in detail.¹⁵ According to the legend, the citadel of Lovek was so large that no horse could gallop around it. Inside were two statues, preah ko (“sacred cow”) and preah kaev (“sacred precious stone”). Inside the bellies of these statues, “there were sacred books, in gold, where one could learn formulae, and books where one could learn about anything in the world. . . . Now the king of Siam wanted to have the statues, so he raised an army and came to fight the Cambodian king.”

The legend then relates an incident contained in the chronicles as well. Thai cannon fired silver coins, rather than shells, into the bamboo hedges that served as Lovek’s fortifications. When the Thai retreated, the Cambodians cut down the hedges to get at the coins and thus had no defenses when the Thai returned in the following year to assault the city. When they had won, the Thai carried off the two statues to Siam. After opening up their bellies, the legend tells us,

they were able to take the books which were hidden there and study their contents. For this reason [emphasis added] they have become superior in knowledge to the Cambodians, and for this reason the Cambodians are ignorant, and lack people to do what is necessary, unlike other countries.

Although keyed to the capture of Lovek, the legend may in fact be related to the long-term collapse of Angkor and perhaps to the relationships that had developed between Siam and Cambodia by the nineteenth century, when the legend emerged in the historical record. The temptation to prefer the earlier collapse as the source for the legend may spring from the fit between the legend’s metaphors and what we know to have happened, i.e., the slow transfer of Cambodia’s regalia, documents, customs, and learned men from Angkor to Ayudhya in the period between Jayavarman VII’s death and the Thai invasions of the fifteenth century. The statue of preah ko is a metaphor for Cambodia’s Indian heritage and clearly represents Nandin, the mount of Siva. The less precisely described preah kaev is a metaphor for Buddhist legitimacy, embodied by a Buddha image like the one taken from Vientiane by the Thai in the 1820s (and known as a preah kaev) to be enshrined in the temple of that name in Bangkok; a replica is housed in the so-called Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh. The seepage of literary skills from Cambodia to Siam and the increasing power of the Thai from the seventeenth century onward are ingredients in the legend which, like that of the leper king discussed in Chapter 4, may contain a collective memory of real occurrences half-hidden by a metaphorical frame of reference. The Cambodian scholar Ang Choulean, in his discussion of this legend, has called it “partially historic, mostly legend, but above all totally coherent.”¹⁶

The myth, in other words, may have been used by many Cambodians to explain Cambodia’s weakness vis-à-vis the Thai in terms of its unmeritorious behavior (chasing after the coins) and its former strength in terms of palladia that could be taken away.

The closing years of the sixteenth century, when the capture of Lovek took place, are well documented in European sources. These years were marked by Spanish imperialism in Cambodia, directed from the Philippines and orchestrated largely by two adventurers named Blas Ruiz and Diego de Veloso.¹⁷ Their exploits illuminate three themes that were to remain important in Cambodian history. The first was the king’s susceptibility to blandishments and promises on the part of visitors who came, as it were, from outer space. Both Spaniards were honored with bureaucratic titles and given sruk to govern and princesses for wives. The second theme was the revolution in warfare brought on by the introduction of firearms, particularly naval cannon, which played a major part in all subsequent Cambodian wars. Because they were masters of a new technology, Ruiz and Veloso were able to terrorize local people just as their contemporaries could in Spanish America, while accompanied by fewer than a hundred men.

The third theme was that by the end of the sixteenth century the Cambodian king and his courtiers had become entangled in the outside world, symbolized at the time by the multitude of foreign traders resident in Lovek and Phnom Penh. European writers emphasized the importance of these people and the foreign residential quarters at Lovek. These included separate quarters for Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as traders from the Indonesian archipelago; they were joined briefly in the seventeenth century by traders from Holland and Great Britain.¹⁸ The traders worked through officials close to the king and members of the royal family, as well as through their compatriots. In the seventeenth century, according to Dutch sources, foreign traders were required to live in specific areas of the new capital, Udong, reserved for them and to deal with the Cambodian government only through appointed representatives, or shabandar. This pattern may have originated in China and also applied in Siam; its presence at Lovek in the depths of Cambodia’s so-called decline, like other bits of data, suggests that the kingdom was by no means dead.

The Spanish missionary San Antonio also left an account of the closing years of the sixteenth century, which includes the adventures of Ruiz and Veloso. His account is often illuminating and occasionally comic, as when he attributes the construction of the temples at Angkor to the Jews, echoing local disbelief in Cambodian technology.¹⁹ He was also convinced that Spain should colonize the kingdom for religious and commercial reasons, and this may have led him to exaggerate the value of its resources, as French visitors were to do in the 1860s. His impressions of prosperity may have sprung from the fact that visitors were forced by the absence of overland communication to limit their observations of Cambodia to the relatively rich and populated areas along the Mekong north of Phnom Penh, an area that was still one of the most prosperous in Cambodia when it was studied four hundred years later by Jean Delvert.²⁰ The goods that San Antonio saw included gold, silver, precious stones, silk and cotton cloth, incense, lacquer, ivory, rice, fruit, elephants, buffalo, and rhinoceros. The last was valued for its horns, skin, blood, and teeth as a “subtle antidote for a number of illnesses, particularly those of the heart,” a reference to the Chinese belief that rhinoceros by-products were effective as aphrodisiacs. San Antonio stressed that Cambodia was prosperous because it was a gateway to Laos which, almost unknown to Europeans, was assumed to be some sort of El Dorado. He closed his discussion of Cambodia’s prosperity with a passage that might seem to have been lifted from Hansel and Gretel, echoing the preah ko preah keo myth while altering the villains: “There are so many precious things in Cambodia that when the king [recently] fled to Laos, he scattered gold and silver coins, for a number of days, along the road so that the Siamese would be too busy gathering them up to capture him.”²¹

San Antonio also remarked that the country contained only two classes of people, the rich and the poor:

The Cambodians recognize only one king. Among them there are nobles and commoners. . . . All the nobles have several wives, the number depending on how rich they are. High ranking women are white and beautiful; those of the common people are brown. These women work the soil while their husbands make war. . . . The nobles dress in silk and fine cotton and gauze. Nobles travel in litters, which people carry on their shoulders, while the people travel by cart, on buffalo, and on horseback. They pay to the principal officials, and to the king, one-tenth of the value of all goods taken from the sea and land.

The slave-owning, nonmercantile middle class noted by Zhou Daguan seems to have diminished in importance, although there is evidence from legal codes and at least one chronicle that it continued to exist.²² It is possible that its place was taken in Cambodian society to a large extent by foreign traders and semiurban hangers-on, while ethnic Khmer remained primarily rice farmers, officials, members of the sangha, and gatherers of primary produce. San Antonio’s contempt for the sangha seems to have exceeded his curiosity.

As so often happens in Cambodian history, the rice farmers are omitted from the record. We see the people the visitors saw, the king, the elite, the foreign traders, and their slaves. Inland from the kompong, villages were linked to the trading capitals by economic relationships, by taxation, and by the social mobility provided by the sangha; the villagers were leading their lives. At least this is what we must suppose for without these people, kingship and other institutions in Cambodia would have withered on the vine. But like the particles of subatomic physics, in terms of which atomic behavior makes sense, these major actors are invisible and their voices are unheard.

In the early seventeenth century, Cambodia became a maritime kingdom, with the prosperity of its elite dependent on seaborne overseas trade conducted in large part by the European traders, Chinese, and ethnic Malays operating out of Sumatra and Sulawesi. Japanese and European visitors—Dutch, English, and Portuguese—left records of this period that are useful as they corroborate and supplement the Cambodian chronicles. These people were also involved in factionalism at the court and in plotting among themselves.

The period came to a climax of sorts in the 1640s when a Cambodian king married a Malay and converted to Islam.²³ He is known in chronicles as the “king who chose [a different] religion.” In 1642 a Dutch naval force attacked Phnom Penh to avenge the murder of Dutch residents of the capital, but it was driven off. In the 1650s rival princes sought military help from Vietnam to overthrow the Muslim monarch, and when the troops came they were reinforced by local ones recruited in eastern Cambodia, a pattern followed in Vietnamese incursions in the nineteenth century and the 1970s. After a long campaign the Cambodian king was captured and taken off in a cage to Vietnam, where some sources assert he was killed and others that he died soon afterward of disease.

The remainder of the seventeenth century saw a decline in international trade as Cambodia’s access to the sea was choked off by the Vietnamese and by coastal settlements controlled by Chinese merchants who had fled southern China with the advent of the Qing dynasty. The newcomers turned Saigon into an important, accessible trading center. Phnom Penh became a backwater, and by the eighteenth century Cambodia was a largely blank area on European maps. In the 1690s Chinese traders with Japan reported that Cambodia had suffered a sharp decline. One such trader wrote:

Cambodia is a poor country with a poorly organized government and armed forces. There are virtually no rich people. They do not produce raw silk. Their main products are deer hides, low quality brown sugar, lacquer . . . in small quantities.²⁴

VALUES IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CAMBODIA

It would be wrong to suggest that seventeenth-century Cambodian society can be best understood in terms of timelessness. In many ways it differed from its nineteenth-century counterpart. For example, nineteenth-century Cambodia had been brought to its knees by foreign powers; for most of the seventeenth century, Cambodia was still reasonably independent. Nineteenth-century Cambodia was isolated from the outside world by the same two powers, Siam and Vietnam, that dominated its internal politics; seventeenth-century Cambodia, on the other hand, traded freely with many countries until the 1680s. Also, the elite Cambodian literary tradition, enshrined in the local version of the Ramayana, the Reamker, as well as in the inscriptions at Angkor Wat and other works, was far more vigorous in the seventeenth century than in the nineteenth, as we shall see.

Saveros Pou has attributed these changes in part to Thai influence but more profoundly to what she referred to as a “slow degradation of values from the seventeenth century on.”²⁵ It is easy to share her impression after reading the Reamker alongside some of the fatuous verse-novels composed in the 1880s or after comparing the seventeenth-century legal codes, translated by Adhémard Leclère and Gregory Mikaelian, with the scattered and often timorous documents left behind by nineteenth-century kings. Although the values she referred to emanated from the elite, Pou saw the decline as one that altered the collective acceptance of traditional values. She saw these values, in turn, as linked with Buddhist notions of the cosmos (enshrined in the long didactic poem known as the Trai Phum, “Three Worlds”), especially as these filtered into Buddhist teaching in oral form enshrined in the aphoristic collection of laws, or chbab, until very recently memorized by Cambodian schoolchildren. In other words she viewed seventeenth-century Cambodia as a nation abiding by rules that were later watered down, abused, or forgotten.

These values delineate proper conduct for the people. This conduct has to do in large part with one’s position in society and governs the way that one relates to others. Everyone, of course, comes equipped with several positions, being at the same time older than some and younger than others, richer and poorer, wiser and more foolish, and so on. An elderly “inferior” is to be addressed with respect, for example; so is a younger monk, and a monk of peasant origin, in theory at least, is to be paid homage by a king. In many cases, moreover, one person’s patron is someone else’s client.

The chbab stress several normative relationships of this kind, the most important of which are probably those with parents and teachers. According to the chbab, these authority figures convey material to be memorized. There is nothing to discuss. The teacher’s relation to his student, like so many relationships in traditional Cambodian society, was lopsided.²⁶

The teacher, like a parent, bestows, transmits, and commands. The student, like the child, receives, accepts, and obeys. Nothing changes in the transmission process, except perhaps the diminishing ignorance of the student; knowledge is passed on by teachers who are former students over generations. If this involves little or no progress, we should recall that the idea of progress is not widespread and was not well known in precolonial Southeast Asia. What kept society coherent, Cambodians believed, was the proper observance of relationships among people as well as the shared acceptance of Buddhist ideology. The first of these involved proper language and appropriate behavior. The Khmer language, like many others in Southeast Asia (Javanese is perhaps the best example), displays differences between people in the pronouns they use in speaking to each other and, in exalted speech (used to describe royalty or monks, for example), in many verbs and nouns as well. Except among close friends not otherwise related (for relatives, family-oriented pronouns would normally be used), no word in traditional Khmer translated readily as you or I. Instead, words emphasized the status of the speaker in relation to the person addressed. Thus, you could be directed up, or down, as could I and the other personal pronouns.²⁷

Cambodian thinkers also saw the universe in graded terms, with people inhabiting “middle earth.” This is a familiar concept in many cultures, and so is its corollary, that behavior on Earth has been prescribed to an extent by heroes who have passed above or below us. To those of us accustomed to expanded (or fragmented) frames of reference, this picture of the world entails enslavement or mystification. To scholars like Saveros Pou, however, and, it would seem, to the poets who composed the Reamker (“the Glory of Rama”), the picture offered little to complain about in moral or aesthetic terms.²⁸ Perhaps there is a relationship between the day-to-day dangers of a society and the energy of belief that its thinkers invest in otherworldly or exceptionally beautiful alternatives. But to say this is to suggest that the Reamker is essentially a vehicle by which to escape society; its authors and many of its listeners, on the other hand, might say that the poem was an excellent vehicle for understanding it.

Egalitarian ideals and the related notion of class warfare have perhaps eroded our sympathies for hierarchical societies, which in twenty-first-century terms—themselves ephemeral, of course—appear to make no sense. We think of society as being at war with itself or at peace, brushing up against other societies with different interests, and so on. Seventeenth-century Cambodians had no word for society at all; the word sangkum appears to have entered the language via Pali, and Thailand, in the 1930s. They preferred to think of themselves in terms of a king and his subjects; in terms of a spectrum of relative merit; or as people, scattered over time and space, sharing recognizable ideals that sprang in turn from being farmers, being lowly, being Buddhists, and speaking Khmer.

An excellent way to enter the thought-world of seventeenth-century Cambodia is to look at the Reamker itself. The version that has survived contains only some of the events related in the Indian original, and many of these have been altered to fit into a Theravada Buddhist frame of reference and into Khmer. Although its characters inhabit a recognizably Indian, brahmanical world (as well as half-mythical kingdoms far away, it seems, from Southeast Asia), their behavior, language, and ideals are very much those of the Cambodian people who assembled to listen to the poem or to watch it enacted by dancers, poets, and musicians. These additional dimensions resemble the way in which medieval and Renaissance painters in Europe depicted Greek and Biblical figures wearing European clothes.

The plot of the Reamker can be easily summarized. Sent out in disgrace from the kingdom he was about to inherit, Prince Ream (Rama), accompanied by his wife, Sita, and his younger brother, Leak (Laksmana), travels in the forest and has many adventures until Sita is taken away by the wicked Prince Reab (Ravana) who rules the city of Langka. Aided by Hanuman, the prince of the monkeys, Ream attacks Langka, hoping to regain his wife, and wins a series of battles. Here the Khmer version of the narrative breaks off. In terms of plot alone it is difficult to understand the hold the Reamker has had for so long on the Cambodian imagination. Its language is often terse, and the development of the action is occasionally obscure. This is partly because the poem has come down to us as a series of fairly brief episodes, each suitable for mime (with the verse to be recited) and geared to a performance by dancers or leather shadow puppets.

Reenactment of the Ramayana, Battambang, 1966. Photo by Jacques Nepote.

In modern times, episodes from the poem were often enacted by the palace dancers; in the countryside, they were acted out until recently as part of village festivals.²⁹ A complete oral version, somewhat different from the printed text, was recorded in Siem Reap in 1969.³⁰

What probably captivated so many Cambodians about the Reamker was its combination of elegance and familiarity. Its subject, the conflict of good and evil, is the theme of much epic literature. On one level the poem is a statement of Theravada Buddhist values; on another, a defense of hierarchy and the status quo; and on a third, it is about the contrast between what is wild (prei) and what is civilized. The poem, in a sense, is itself a civilizing act, just as the Javanese word for “chronicle” (babad) is derived from one that means to “clear the forest.”³¹ Goodness in the poem and its three heroes are linked to meritorious action and elegance. Evil characters are unpredictable, passionate, in disarray.³² The contrast is by no means mechanical, however, and is worked out in the course of the poem with considerable subtlety. The savage ruler of the forest, Kukham, for example, is filthy and spontaneous but is redeemed by his meritorious deference to Ream. On the other hand, Reab, the prince of Langka, consumed with passion and a slave to it, is almost as royal and at times nearly as elegant as Ream and Sita.

The role played by the Reamker in prerevolutionary Cambodia resembles the one enjoyed by the wayang, or shadow-puppet theater, in Java and Bali. Many Cambodians, in their encounters with the poem, found in it a completeness and balance that was probably missing from their everyday lives. Good and evil, as we all can see, are at war, and evil is often victorious. In the poem, however, the two are perpetually in balance, held in place as it were by almost equal quantities of ornamental verse. In the strophes that have survived, the major actors are never destroyed, perhaps because evil and good must survive in order to define each other. In the Reamker, as in many of the poems enacted in wayang, “nothing happens” in the sense that nothing changes or turns around.³³ The poem is useless as a revolutionary text, and it is also useless in a narrow sense as a historical document because we cannot locate it in a particular time and place. Its verbal elegance and its austerity, however, allow us a glimpse of the seventeenth-century Cambodian elite’s range of values and of a high artistic polish that would be difficult to associate with a period of intellectual decline.

Placed against what we know of events in the seventeenth century, the gap between ideals and reality, as expressed in the poem, is wide and deep. Chronicles and European sources reveal a country whose capital was isolated from its hinterland, whose royal family was murderous, intriguing, and unstable, and which was at the mercy, much of the time, of elite factions, national catastrophes, and invaders. The persistence of Cambodian elites, however, and the continuity of overseas trade suggest that these crises, real enough at the time, were periodic rather than perpetual and affected the parts of the country that armies moved across rather than those outside their paths.

A revealing document from this period is a collection of fifty anecdotes, allegedly provided by an elderly female member of the royal family when a new set of Cambodian law codes was promulgated in the 1690s.³⁴ These deal with the notion of lèse majesté and thus concern the position of royalty in Cambodian society; they also reveal the strengths and weaknesses of Cambodian kingship at this time. The king’s greatest strength, it seems, sprang from his capacity to assign and revoke titles, which were permissions to exploit people less fortunately endowed. Offenders against the king could be stripped of their possessions, and crimes of lèse majesté, even at several removes, were severely dealt with. One anecdote, for example, relates how a princess ordered her advisers to find her some fish. The officials encountered a fisherman, who muttered that they had no right to take his fish without paying for them. The officials took the fish and informed the princess about him, and he was fined for disrespect. Another anecdote relates that a king, out hunting, wandered from his entourage and encountered a buffalo tender who addressed him in ordinary language. Instead of punishing the man, the king returned to his followers to declare that he had increased his fund of merit, as he had obeyed the law that did not allow a king to punish subjects for disrespect outside the palace. “If I had shot the man when I was alone,” he said, “I would have done a prohibited thing, and after my death I would have fallen into hell, because, after all, the man didn’t know that I was the king.” Other anecdotes reveal that the monarch was often used by ordinary citizens as the court of last resort, as Zhou Daguan had suggested in the thirteenth century.

These anecdotes differ from the chronicles and from the Reamker by providing day-to-day information about the king. They provide a picture of a variegated, conservative, and hierarchically organized society, consisting of a few thousand privileged men and women propped up by an almost invisible wall of rice farmers, in which great emphasis was placed on rank and privilege and on behavior thought to be appropriate to one’s status. The texts also reveal how perilous it was to enjoy power in seventeenth-century Cambodia. The king, always fearful of being overthrown, ruled through changeable networks of favorites and relations, and he governed in many cases, it would seem, by pique. Officials rose into favor and fell from one day to the next. A chronicle from this period, for example, relates that a royal elephant trainer was named minister of war (chakri) after saving the king’s life while he was hunting. Although the society was permanently ranked, change was possible and could rarely be predicted.

VIETNAMESE AND THAI ACTIVITIES IN CAMBODIA

The impression of instability was exacerbated by increasing foreign interference, particularly from the Vietnamese, whose “march to the south” (nam tien) once the Cham kingdoms had been subdued had carried colonists into the Mekong Delta by the 1620s. In 1626 the Nguyen overlords of the south broke off their ties with the northern Le dynasty and began governing the southern region on their own.³⁵ Although the area was lightly populated, Nguyen control eventually had the effect of sealing off Cambodia’s southeastern frontier. The Vietnamese intrusion also had three long-term effects. First, the takeover of Saigon (known to Cambodians even today as Prey Nokor), meant that Cambodia was now cut off to a large extent from maritime access to the outside world, especially after other, smaller ports along the Gulf of Siam were occupied in the early eighteenth century by Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese entrepreneurs and Vietnamese troops.³⁶ Cambodian isolation, which lasted nearly two hundred years, was unique in precolonial Southeast Asia, with the exception of Laos. Second, the Nguyen institutionalization of control, a process that took more than two hundred years, eventually removed large portions of territory and tens of thousands of ethnic Khmer from Cambodian jurisdiction. This process produced a legacy of resentment and anti-Vietnamese feeling among Cambodians inside Cambodia. It fueled the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea and persists among many elite and émigré Cambodians today. Finally, by taking over the delta and extending de facto control over the Gulf of Siam (a state of affairs that lasted through the eighteenth century), the Nguyen placed Cambodia in a vise between two powerful neighbors; its capital region, moreover, was more accessible to Saigon than to Ayudhya or Bangkok.

A side effect of the advent of Vietnamese power was that the Cambodian royal family and its elite supporters were now liable to split along pro-Thai and pro-Vietnamese lines. Depending on which power supported an incumbent, his rivals would seek support from the other to overthrow him. The history of Cambodia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of repeated invasions from Vietnam and Siam, usually preceded and followed by ruinous civil wars. Instability at the center extended into the sruk. Because loyalty to the throne was costly, perilous, and easy to avoid, by the end of the eighteenth century large areas of the kingdom were under only nominal control from Udong, and this state of affairs, in turn, decreased the king’s ability to respond to foreign invasions. The king’s power to reward his friends and punish dissidents had also been weakened by the rapid succession of monarchs, communication difficulties, and the need to withstand foreign attacks.

At the same time, it seems likely that certain continuity persisted at the capital among the bureaucratic elite who, along with the Buddhist sangha, were the curators of Cambodia’s literate traditions. Several inscriptions at Angkor from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries record the careers of important officials whose graceful rise to increasing responsibility contrasts sharply with the jagged sequence of events related by the chronicles.³⁷ Moreover, Vietnamese and Thai accounts agree that at several points in the eighteenth century (when it would be tempting to assert that Cambodia had already been bled white), Cambodian forces managed to repel their invading armies. This suggests, at the very least, that some regional leaders, nominally officials of the crown, were able in a crisis to mobilize enough supporters to harass and defeat a foreign expeditionary force, especially when the defenders were skilled in guerrilla warfare.

Evidence from the chronicles suggests, nonetheless, that one of the darkest periods of Cambodian history came in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. The ingredients, dynastic instability, foreign invasions, and civil wars, were familiar ones, but this time they were on a large scale.

The 1750s and 1760s were relatively calm as far as invasions from Siam and Vietnam were concerned, but they also saw a series of coups and countercoups by rivals in the royal family that involved assassinations and reprisals. In 1767 Ayudhya fell to a Burmese army. When a Thai prince and his entourage sought asylum in Cambodia and threatened to set up a legitimate kingdom there, a Thai regional overlord, Taksin, who had assumed royal power in Siam, launched a series of expeditions against Cambodia.³⁸ His aims were to reestablish Thai hegemony over the region and thus to backdate what he interpreted as his own enormous fund of merit. He also sought to avenge himself against the Cambodian king who, according to the chronicles, refused to send gifts to him because he was the “son of a Chinese merchant and a commoner,” charges that appear to have been true. There is some evidence also that he wanted to put his own son on the Cambodian throne.

Thai pressure on the kingdom persisted into the 1770s, when the Nguyen were distracted by a populist rebellion led by the so-called Tay Son brothers, which threatened to overturn institutions throughout Vietnam. Sensing weaknesses in northern Vietnam, Thai armies attacked overland via Angkor, and their naval expeditions laid waste several small ports along the Gulf of Siam, partly in order to divert Chinese traders from this region to the vicinity of Bangkok and partly to avenge an earlier expedition financed by Chinese merchants from these coastal enclaves that had almost succeeded in capturing the new Thai capital, Thonburi. In 1772 the Thai burned down Phnom Penh. Seven years later a Thai protégé, Prince Eng, then only seven years old, was placed on the Cambodian throne at Udong under the regency of a pro-Thai official. In 1782 Taksin himself was deposed and was replaced by his minister of war (chakri), then campaigning in Cambodia. Later known in the West as Rama I, this man founded the dynasty that holds constitutional power in Thailand today.

By the 1780s the heir to the Nguyen throne, fleeing the Tay Son, had taken refuge in Bangkok, providing the basis for a rapprochement between the two nations when and if the prince assumed control of all Vietnam, as he did in 1802.

Prince Eng was taken off to Bangkok in 1790 and was anointed there by the Thai before being sent back to Cambodia four years later. His reign, which opened up a cycle of nineteenth-century history, is discussed in Chapter 6; the fact that he was crowned in Bangkok is symbolic of his dependence on the Thai.

CONCLUSIONS

The two main features of the post-Angkorean era were the shift of the capital from the rice-growing hinterlands of northwestern Cambodia to the trade-oriented riverbanks in the vicinity of Phnom Penh on the one hand and the increasing importance of foreign powers in Cambodian internal affairs on the other. It seems clear that the apparent self-sufficiency of Angkor was as much related to the absence of military rivals as to inherent strength or flexibility in Angkorean institutions. Many of these institutions, in fact, persisted into the middle period, both in Cambodia and in Thailand and got in the way of rapid bureaucratic responses (supposing that this was psychologically possible or culturally rewarding) in the face of foreign and domestic pressure.

Because of a shortage of data, it is impossible to enter the thought world of Cambodian villagers or to compare their responses to experiences at different stages of Cambodian history. How much difference did it make for them to become Theravada Buddhists, for example? What were the effects on daily life of the commercialization of the elite and the economy after 1500—to say nothing of the other changes noted in this chapter? Did the Europeans they saw have any effect on them? And what differences did they perceive, aside from linguistic ones, in being Cambodian instead of Thai?

There were several important changes between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and the most important of these, perhaps, was the decline in the importance of a priestly class that for several hundred years had effectively linked landholdings, control of slaves, religious practices, education, and the throne. Another change was in the declining power of the royal family to influence events, although periods of relative weakness in the Angkor era, which must have occurred, are difficult to pin down. Perhaps equally important, but even harder to confirm, was the widespread and apparently increasing influence of the Thai on Cambodian life. Saveros Pou regarded this process as inimical to Cambodian identity, especially in terms of its effects on literary style, but recognized its importance in the history of the period.

Another important change—the intrusion of the Vietnamese into the official levels of Cambodian life—came later on, reaching peaks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even in the eighteenth century, however, Vietnamese activities had the effect of sealing off Cambodia from the outside world at exactly the point when other Southeast Asian countries, especially Siam, were opening up.

A final change was the decline in the popularity of kingship. Of all the post-Angkorean kings of Cambodia, only Duang (r. 1848–60) and Norodom Sihanouk seem to have struck a sustained chord of popular approval. The disjuncture between the palace and the people that is noticeable in the legal anecdotes of the 1690s probably widened in the following century. But this so-called decline, like many notions put forward about Cambodian history, is impossible to verify. After all, during the heyday of Angkor, we have only the kings’ own words to support the notion that they were popular. Like the Ramayana, the king and his entourage had roles to play in people’s thinking, but they played central roles only in their own. Although Clifford Geertz’s phrase “theater state,” originally applied to pre-colonial Java and more recently to nineteenth-century Bali, can be used with caution to describe Cambodian court life in this period, most Cambodian people probably knew and cared less about it than some scholars, entranced perhaps by the exoticism of the “theatrical” arrangements, might prefer. In periods of stability, of course, Cambodians probably had more time for ceremony and more surpluses to pay for ceremonies than in periods of warfare, famine, or distress.³⁹