6
STATE, SOCIETY, AND FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1794–1848
In the half century or so before the arrival of the French, who established a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, Cambodian ideas about political geography did not include the notion that the country was defined primarily by the lines enclosing it on a map.1 Maps were rarely used, and no locally drawn map of Cambodia in the early nineteenth century appears to have survived.2 Instead, to the people who lived there, Cambodia probably meant the sruk where Cambodian was spoken and, more narrowly, those whose leaders (chaovay sruk) had received their official titles and seals of office from a Cambodian king.
Cambodians also thought of their country as a walled city with several imaginary gates. One chronicle places these at Sambor on the upper Mekong, Kompong Svay north of the Tonle Sap, Pursat in the northwest, Kampot on the coast, and Chaudoc, technically across the frontier in Vietnam on the Mekong Delta.3 Fittingly, these gates were the places where invading armies traditionally swept into Cambodia. The territory they enclosed, in the form of a gigantic letter C (there was no eastern gate, for armies did not cross the Annamite cordillera), covered roughly half the area of Cambodia today.
Inside this imaginary wall, sruk varied in size and importance. Although boundaries were generally vague, some, like Pursat and Kompong Svay, extended over several hundred square miles; others, like Koh Chan or Lovea Em, were islands in the Mekong or short stretches of cultivated land along the river.
SOCIETY AND ECONOMY
Little information about the size and composition of Cambodia’s population in this period has survived. Under Vietnamese suzerainty in the 1830s, a census was taken, but the Vietnamese dismissed its figures as deflated.4 French administrators in the 1860s, working from roughly compiled tax rolls, estimated Cambodia’s population at slightly less than a million.5 The area between Cambodia’s imaginary gates, therefore, may have supported about three-quarters of a million people in the 1840s, but probably fewer, for the records are filled with accounts of regions being depopulated by famine, flight, and invading armies.
This population was overwhelmingly rural. The largest town, Phnom Penh, probably never held more than twenty-five thousand people.6 The royal capital at Udong and the villages around it supported a population of ten thousand or so in the late 1850s; the Khmer-speaking city of Battambang, rebuilt by the Thai in the late 1830s, had three thousand inhabitants in 1839.7 The only parts of the kingdom that were relatively densely settled before the 1860s were those to the south and east of Phnom Penh, like Ba Phnom and Bati, and to the north along the Mekong River south of Chhlong. Significantly, these relatively wealthy sruk were often located outside the routes of invasion and retreat chosen by the Thai and the Vietnamese.
Nearly all the people in Cambodia were ethnic Khmer, who occupied themselves with rice farming and with monastic and official life. Commercial and industrial tasks were handled by minority groups. Marketing, garden farming, and foreign trade, for example, were handled by Chinese or by people of Chinese descent.8 Cattle trading, weaving, and commercial fisheries were controlled by a Muslim minority composed partly of immigrants from the Malay archipelago—known as chvea, or Javanese, in Khmer—but largely of immigrants from Champa known as Cham. The Kui people in the northern part of the country smelted Cambodia’s small deposits of iron ore (and had done so at least since Angkorean times). In the capital, a handful of descendants of Portuguese settlers who had arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served as translators for the king and were in charge of his artillery pieces.9 Before the 1830s there seem to have been few Vietnamese residents in the kingdom. Indeed, even without accurate statistics, it seems likely that there were proportionately fewer of these various groups in the kingdom until the arrival of the French. In the colonial era the numbers of Chinese and Vietnamese residents increased enormously.10
Near the imaginary gates, in thinly populated sruk like Kratie, Pursat, and Kompong Svay, tribal groups, such as the Porr, Stieng, and Samre lived in isolated villages and collected the forest products that formed a major source of a monarch’s income and the bulk of the goods that Cambodia sent abroad.
By the standards of other states in Southeast Asia at the time, Cambodia was poor. Unlike Burma and Laos, its soil contained few gems or precious metals. Unlike Siam, its manufacturing, trade, and commerce were underdeveloped, and finished goods, like brassware, porcelain, and firearms all came from abroad. Unlike Vietnam, Cambodia’s communications were poor and its internal markets undeveloped. Agricultural surpluses were rare, savings were low, and money was used only at the palace and by minority groups. Rural trade was in barter, as it had been in Angkorean times, and was handled to a large extent by women. Cambodia had a subsistence economy; most of its people spent most of their time growing rice, with men and women working side by side. Landholdings tended to be small (even high officials seldom had access to more than a few hectares), yields were low, and irrigation works, which might have increased production, were rare.
To the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang, writing in 1834, Cambodia was truly a “barbarian” country because “the people do not know the proper way to grow food. They use mattocks and hoes, but no oxen. They grow enough rice to have two meals a day, but they do not know how to store rice for an emergency.”11 Villagers often maintained a common pond, or trapeang, to water their rice, as they had done at least since the days of Chenla, but there were no longer any of the dams and canals that had characterized Angkorean civilization. This was partly because there were now so few mouths to feed and partly because the mechanisms of state control were so much weaker. There were no incentives and little technology for farmers to vary their crops, market their surpluses, or increase their holdings. Communications between the sruk were poor, there were no roads to speak of until the 1830s, and bandits, invading armies, and the followers of local officials carried off what surpluses they could find.
Foreign trade was restricted because the potentially important entrepôt of Phnom Penh was cut off from the outside world for most of this period by the authorities in southern Vietnam. After 1808, in fact, visitors to Phnom Penh needed Vietnamese permission to go there. Ports on the Gulf of Siam, like Kampot, engaged in some coastal and peninsular trade, but they were more closely integrated into the Vietnamese and Thai economies than into the Cambodian one.12
A few ships traded with central Cambodia every year. Cargo lists from two of these, bound for China and Japan respectively in about 1810, have survived.13 Their cargoes consisted of relatively small amounts of several different products. Three hundred pounds of ivory and two hundred pounds of pepper, for example, were among the goods exported to Japan while those going to China included small consignments of cardamom, hides, feathers, tortoise shells, and aromatic wood. Exports to Vietnam in the 1820s—trade with Vietnam was conducted partly in a tributary framework—included such goods as ivory, gutta percha, cardamom, dried fish, and elephant hides.
These were all traditional exports. The lists are like others that have come down from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, particularly concerning junk trade with Japan and, via Chinese sources, from the Angkorean period.14 External trade, including tribute, as we shall see, was an important source of the king’s revenues and probably was important to the Chinese community in Phnom Penh and to privileged members of the king’s entourage. But it was insignificant as far as the rest of the country was concerned.
Most Cambodians lived in villages. These can be divided, for the early nineteenth century at least, into three broad types. The first can be called kompong after the Malay word meaning “landing-place,” which often formed part of their names, as in Kompong Svay and Kompong Som.15 These were located along navigable bodies of water and could support populations of several hundred people. Often they would include a chaovay sruk and his assistants; the kompong was usually enclosed in a stockade. Some of the inhabitants were likely to be Chinese or Sino-Khmer, Malay, and Cham, although minorities tended to keep to themselves in separate hamlets that formed elements of the kompong. Kompong were in touch with others on the same body of water, with rice-growing villages around them, and indirectly with the capital and the court. Through trading, travel, hearsay, and invasions, people in the kompong had some awareness of events elsewhere.
Rice-growing villages, the second category, enclosed the kompong, ideally in a broken arc. Poorer and smaller than kompong, rice-growing villages were numerous and more likely to be populated entirely by ethnic Khmer. Houses were scattered around in no special order, often near a Buddhist monastery, or wat, and also near the pond or stream that provided water for the village. Rice-growing villages were linked to the kompong and the world beyond in irregular ways—through incursions of officials looking for recruits or rice; through the wat, whose monks were encouraged to travel about in the dry season; through festivals at the new year and at other points in the calendar; and through trade with the kompong, exchanging rice and forest products for metal, cloth, and salt.
Rice-growing villages were unstable because they lacked means of defense and because, unlike rice growing villages in Vietnam, no institutionalized ancestor cult anchored people to one place rather than another. The chronicles are filled with references to villagers running off into the forest in times of crisis. In times of peace, their lives were shaped by the contours of the agricultural year and the ceremonies—Buddhist, animist, and vestigially Hindu—that marked off one stage of the rice-growing cycle from another.16
The opposition between wild and civilized, noted in the discussion of the Reamker in Chapter 5, persisted in the literature of the nineteenth century. A verse chronicle from Wat Baray, in the north-central part of the kingdom, deals with this theme repeatedly while offering a chronological treatment of nineteenth-century events. The chronicle relates the fortunes of a bureaucratic family caught up in the turmoil of Vietnamese occupation and civil war. Driven into the forest, they lose their identity, regaining it only when new titles are bestowed on male members, first by a Thai monarch and later by a Cambodian one. The chronicle was composed to celebrate the restoration of Wat Baray in 1856, and the audience to whom it was recited would for the most part have recognized the events related in it as true. What gives the chronicle its literary resonance is the way in which the lives of the characters follow patterns laid down for them by the Reamker and Buddhist ideology. The restoration of their status accompanied the restoration of the king; demerit was seen, in some way, as associated with the forest, a lack of official titles, and misbehavior impossible to trace.17
Similarly, in a poignant Cambodian folktale probably well known in the 1800s, three girls who are abandoned by their mother become wild and turn into birds, happily crossing the border between forest and field where, as it turns out, the birds they have become are most frequently to be found.18 Because people’s grip on the things we take for granted was so precarious in nineteenth-century Cambodia—dependent on the goodwill of foreigners and overlords, on rainfall, and on health in a tropical climate—it is understandable that “civilization,” or the art of remaining outside the forest, was taken so seriously by poets and audience alike.19
The third type of village lay hidden in the prei, or wilderness, that made up most of Cambodia at this time. Here the people were illiterate and usually non-Buddhist; they spoke languages related to Khmer but owed no loyalties to the kompong or the capital unless these had been forced from them. The villages were frequently raided for slaves, and they were economically important because their populations were able to exploit forest resources that were valued in the capital and abroad. Their political loyalties, however, were to other villages in the prei, where people spoke the same dialect and performed similar religious rites.
PATRONAGE AND GOVERNMENT
How were Cambodian villages governed in the early nineteenth century? Some French writers have asserted that at this time they had no government at all,20 and in most of them relations with outsiders and with the state were indeed sporadic and unfriendly. Quarrels within a village or between neighboring villages were settled by conciliation rather than by law, and often smoldered on for years. Villages were usually ruled, for ceremonial purposes and for the purposes of relations with higher authorities, by elderly men chosen by the villagers for their agricultural skill, literacy, good conduct, and fair-mindedness. Taxes in rice and labor seem to have been paid, irregularly, on demand. Village government was perhaps more noticeable in the kompong, where there were more officials and hangers-on, but there is no evidence that any villages in Cambodia were governed by formally constituted councils of elders, as was the case in nineteenth-century Vietnam.21
Rice-growing villages and those in the prei could be days apart from each other and from the nearest representative of authority. In their isolation the villagers faced inward, toward the lives and traditions they shared with one another. They identified themselves and saw their history in terms of localized religious traditions passed on from one generation to the next. Outside the villages, just past the fields in most cases, lay the prei, crowded with wild animals, malarial mosquitoes, and the spirits of the dead. Beyond the prei, where villagers seldom ventured, lay the world of the kompong, the capital, and the court.
French writers in the nineteenth century often denigrated Cambodian society (one of them referred to its institutions as “worm-eaten débris”)22 and compared it unfavorably with their own “rational,” centralized one or with that of the Vietnamese. The trend has continued among some anthropologists concerned with Thailand, who have referred to Thai peasant society as “loosely structured.”23 The phrase is helpful, whether or not one attaches values to tight structure, in the sense that in Thai and Cambodian villages, in the nineteenth century at least, there were no “durable, functionally important groups” or voluntary associations aside from the family and the Buddhist monastic order, or sangha. When a village organized itself for defense, for instance, or for a Buddhist festival, it did so for a short time in response to a specific need.
Despite the apparent informality of these arrangements, there was considerable structural consistency in each Cambodian village and family. This arose from the fact that Cambodians always identified themselves in terms of their status relative to the person being addressed. This identification located them for the moment at a particular, but by no means fixed point in a flexible set of dyadic relationships extending downward from the king and the sangha through the graded bureaucracy of the capital and kompong to the villages and past them to the landless debt-slaves and minority peoples living literally at the edges of the state. As with most systematic social arrangements, what mattered to the people who used the system was the place they occupied inside it. If a person’s place was relatively secure, people in weaker positions sought him out and offered homage in exchange for protection. The society, in a sense, was fueled by the exchange of protection and service implied in these “lopsided friendships,” as they have been called.24 In a village context these links might be with older or more fortunate members of one’s family, monks in the local wat, bandit leaders, government officials, or holy men (nak sell) who appeared from time to time, promising their followers invulnerability and riches.
In the kompong and the capital, where people no longer grew their own food, patronage and clientship became more important and more complex. Having a patron and having clients were connected with one’s chances to survive. People with access to power accepted as many followers or slaves as they could. In many cases, these men and women had contracted debts to their patrons, which they then spent their lifetimes working off. The widespread presence of slavery in nineteenth-century Cambodia should cloud over, to an extent, the sunny notion that clients entered their “lopsided friendships” as volunteers with a variety of choices. But it is also true that many people enslaved themselves to a patron, or me (the word can also mean “mother”), to protect themselves against the rapacity of others.
The rectitude and permanence of these relationships had been drummed into everyone from birth. Cambodian proverbs and didactic literature are filled with references to the helplessness of the individual and to the importance that everyone accept power relationships as they are. Both sides of the patron-client equation, in theory at least, saw their relationships as natural, even obligatory. “The rich must protect the poor,” a Cambodian proverb runs, “just as clothing protects the body.”25
The relationships in fact were seldom that genteel. Throughout Southeast Asia, patrons, like kings, spoke of “consuming” the territory and people they controlled, and there are few just officials in Cambodian folklore, in which officials are compared to tigers, crocodiles, and venomous snakes. Rural government was seen as an adversary proceeding. In one sruk at least, when a new chaovay sruk took office, a cockfight was held. One bird represented the newly arrived official; the other, the people of the sruk. The outcome of the fight supposedly gave both sponsors a hint about the balance of power that was expected to ensue.26
Why did the people accept these demeaning arrangements? Partly it was a case of force majeure. The alternatives of individual flight or organized resistance were usually impossible. Moreover, a man without a patron was fair game, and an unknown patron, like a foreigner, was more of a threat than one who lived nearby. Although the chaovay sruk often “ate” what little material wealth he could get his hands on, the social distance between him and the rest of the kompong was not especially great. His wives, for example, were local women. He lived in a simple house, chewed betel, and sponsored festivals at the wat and ceremonies to propitiate the nak ta. These officials shared their clients’ food, their belief in magic, their vigorous sense of the absurd, and their distrust of other officials and outsiders. Probably because they lived among the people they supposedly controlled, chaovay sruk were more responsive to local issues than were authorities in the capital. The fact that all these “lopsided friendships” could be renegotiated in times of stress added to the instability of the system and perhaps to its attractiveness in the eyes of villagers and slaves.
For most Cambodians, these shifting networks of subordination and control, chosen or imposed, benevolent or otherwise, marked the limits of their experience and of their social expectations. Their ideas about the king, on the other hand, and about the Buddhist sangha took a different form and were expressed in a different language. Although it is useful to place the king and the sangha at the end of imaginary chains of local and spiritual authority extending down through the officials to the people, the people saw them as operating on a different plane and on a different set of assumptions. Little is known about the sangha in mid-nineteenth-century Cambodia, and it could be misleading to assert that conditions were the same as those in Siam or Burma. There is no evidence, for example, that the sangha played a political role vis-à-vis the royal family, although monks and ex-monks were active in the anti-Vietnamese rebellion of 1821.27 By and large, monks were widely respected as repositories of merit, as sources of spiritual patronage, and as curators of Cambodia’s literary culture. They occupied a unique, mysterious place in Cambodian life because they had abandoned—temporarily at least—agriculture, politics, and marriage.
People’s ideas about the king tended to be grounded in mythology rather than their own experience. The relationship of the king to most of his subjects was not negotiated, rarely enforced, and was seldom face to face. For most of the early nineteenth century, by choice or by circumstance, the monarch was confined to his palace or lived in exile in Siam or Vietnam. Given the weight of traditional and popular literature about him and because they never saw him, views of the king held by villagers tended to be vaguer and more approving than their views of each other, their patrons, or even the nak ta. The king was at once as real and as unreal as the Lord Buddha. People would have accepted the Ramayana’s description of royal duties; they were “to be consecrated, to sacrifice, and to protect the people.”28 Many of them believed that the king could influence the weather. Unlike the sauphea, or judges, he could dispense true justice, and he was often the only political source of hope among peasants. This cluster of ideas persisted into the colonial era and beyond.
The king, of course, was not always or even often in the villagers’ thoughts, but when he appeared in his capital after years of exile, as Eng did in 1794, Duang nearly half a century later, or Norodom Sihanouk 1991, the event ignited widespread rejoicing.
Several other segments of Cambodian society affected people’s lives in the villages and the outcome of Cambodian politics. These included minor sruk officials and hangers-on, who were appointed in some cases from the capital and in others by the chaovay sruk; ex-monks, or achar, who acted as religious spokesmen and millenarian leaders, often in opposition to the chaovay sruk; itinerant traders, actors, and musicians; and poor relations of the rich, who were able to act as go-betweens. Unfortunately, the elite-centered chronicles usually devote little space to these categories of people so it is difficult to assess their power, except indirectly. A rice-growing village going into revolt against the Vietnamese, as many did in 1820 and 1841, for example, was unlikely to have done so merely through the exhortations of a high official.
THE OKYA
Historical records, on the other hand, have left a good picture of Cambodia’s high-ranking officials, or okya.29 Included in their number were the chaovay sruk and the officials surrounding the king. It is impossible to say how many okya there were at any given time. Lists of officials assembled in the 1860s and 1870s for the French are full of gaps and contradictions. Many of the titles in these lists do not appear to have been used, and titles occur in other sources that do not appear in the lists. Roughly, however, there seem to have been about two hundred okya in the capital and the countryside throughout most of the nineteenth century. The number was probably smaller after defections to the Thai in the 1830s and larger after Duang’s accession in 1848. For these two hundred men, about seven hundred titles were available for use. Some of these, like those carried by the king’s highest advisers and by most of the chaovay sruk, were always used. Others seem to have lapsed, for a while at least, after having been used by one or several incumbents.
Everything about the titles and the work associated with them, except the fact that they were conferred on the incumbent by the king, was subject to adjustment. Sometimes a title carried a rank. Sometimes it was associated with a job, such as maintaining the king’s elephants, guarding his regalia, or collecting taxes. Certain titles were reserved for certain sruk, and the word sauphea when it occurred in a title often implied judicial functions. But none of these rules was rigorously applied. Favorites or people out of favor were given jobs to do or removed from them on an ad hoc basis. People went up the ladder (or fell off) quickly. For example, one official whose function was to be in charge of the throne room of the second king (hardly an arduous calling) was named to head a diplomatic mission to Bangkok in 1819. Another, whose duties were to survey the levels of rice in the royal storehouses, led an army against the Thai in Battambang in 1818.
The titles that okya carried usually consisted of two or three honorific words, like ratna (“jewel”) or verocana (“splendor”), drawn from Pali or Sanskrit. The okya received their titles along with the seals of office and insignia of rank (which included tiered umbrellas, betel containers, court costumes, and the like) from the king’s hands in an intentionally awesome ceremony built around an oath of allegiance that had been in effect in more or less the same form for at least eight hundred years. At that time, and at regular intervals, the okya were expected to give presents to the king. French writers equated this exchange of titles and gifts with the notion that the Cambodian government was corrupt because jobs were available only to the highest bidder. At one level of thinking this was true, but little ethical weight was given to the transaction. High bidders, after all, were people whose power had to be reckoned with. Twice a year the okya assembled at the royal wat near the palace where they drank the “water of allegiance”—water brought to the capital, in theory, from streams throughout the kingdom—and renewed their oaths of allegiance to the king. Failure to attend this ceremony was tantamount to treason.
Once in office, an okya became part of the komlang, or strength (i.e., entourage) of some higher-ranking person. This might be one of the king’s advisers, a member of the royal family, or the king himself. A similar system was in effect in Siam. It is not clear whether these alliances were meant to check or to enhance the power of the okya in question. Probably they served both purposes at once. The interconnections between certain regions, official posts, family ties, and particular jobs in this period remain obscure. One manuscript chronicle, dating from the early nineteenth century, suggests that the landholdings of okya in certain regions persisted from one generation to the next, even when the titles of one okya were not passed along to his son.30 Titles in Cambodia, in any case, were not hereditary. Even the successor to the throne was chosen after a monarch’s death from among several eligible candidates. A similar fluidity affected okya families, although high status seems to have run in particular families whose members enjoyed access to the king.
Despite these continuities, there were few certainties in Cambodian political life. Theoretically, the survival of an okya depended on the king. Akin Rabibhadana has cited a 1740 Thai decree that “a king can turn a superior person into a subordinate person, and vice-versa. When he gives an order, it is like an axe from heaven.”31 In reality, however, a king’s power depended on how recently he had attained it and how many outstanding debts he had. It was hampered in any case by poor communications between the capital and the sruk.
A new king at the start of a dynasty, or after a period of exile, could often act like an “axe from heaven” and fill okya positions with men who had been loyal to him in his climb to power. King Duang rewarded his followers in this way in the 1840s, as we shall see, just as the first kings of the Chakri dynasty in Thailand (1782–) and Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam (1802–1945) rewarded theirs. Under a weak king, on the other hand, or one entangled in long-standing obligations, perhaps to older people, okya tended to root themselves in the sruk. In the process they became become more or less independent.
Uncertainty was an occupational hazard of Cambodian life. Everyone was on the lookout against everyone else. An okya’s obligations toward his king, his family, and his patrons sometimes overlapped and sometimes were in conflict. The other okya were potential allies and potential enemies; alliances and betrayals that took advantage of existing power balances occupied a good deal of an okya’s time.
Cambodia in the 1800s was not a bureaucratic society like China or Vietnam, and in times of peace an okya’s official duties were light. He had to wait upon his patron, there was little paperwork to do, and many tasks, like requisitioning supplies for the palace or raising armies for defense (Cambodia had no standing army), were farmed out among several okya. This was done perhaps to keep a single official from becoming too powerful and perhaps because there were no institutional mechanisms to prevent ambitious okya from shouldering each other aside in search of profit.
The judgment implied in these remarks may be too strong. Some okya were accomplished poets and musicians, and others were generous patrons of Buddhism and the arts. A few emerge from the chronicles as competent, innovative, or brave, but the uncertainty of favor, the ubiquity of rivals, and the unreliability of followers militated against an okya’s being active or even attracting official notice. The okya and the people, then, were tied to each other with bonds of terror, affection, duty, and contempt within the framework of a shared culture. In Cambodian terms the system worked, but when the Vietnamese tried to use the okya as their spokesmen in Cambodia in the 1830s and 1840s, they found them incapable of governing the country in a Vietnamese way—which is to say, of administering regions, conducting cadastral surveys, collecting taxes, and making detailed reports.
Aside from the king’s five closest advisers, who formed a kind of cabinet, the most active and visible okya were the chaovay sruk. These men enjoyed considerable freedom and considerable power. They were authorized to collect taxes from their sruk, which meant that they had access to any surplus crops they could lay their hands on, and they were authorized to mobilize manpower for warfare or public works. In practice they maintained small private armies, as did their counterparts, the riverine chieftains of nineteenth-century Malaya. In populous sruk, these armies sometimes contained several thousand men; in others, they seem to have acted as bodyguards for the chaovay sruk. Access to manpower and rice meant that, in effect, the chaovay sruk controlled the balance of power in the kingdom. In fact, they more often acted individually than collectively, responding to local interests and dyadic arrangements. This meant that a king could count on some chaovay sruk but not on others and that invading armies might find some chaovay friendly and others opposed to them.
Some chaovay sruk were more important than others. Five of them, called sdac tran, or kings of the field, were the highest-ranking okya and were responsible, in an unspecified way, for the governance of several sruk at once.32 Each of these groupings was known as a dei, or “earth.” Unfortunately, nineteenth-century references to the phrase sdac tran occur only in French texts, and the meaning of tran itself is not clear. The officials seem to have acted as viceroys, or stand-ins for the king, in the performance of annual ceremonies in the five dei honoring the nak ta. They had the power to order executions, which the other chaovay sruk did not. In a functional sense they echoed the five high ministers around the king.
These five ministers in the capital were led by a first minister, sometimes referred to as the ta-la-ha, and included ministers of justice (yomraj), of the army (chakrei), of the navy and foreign trade (kralahom), and of the palace (veang). Each of these officials maintained his own komlang and probably had economic and patrimonial links with certain sruk. Loosely defined territorial responsibilities of these men overlapped or extended to those of the sdac tran and the chaovay sruk, as well as those of certain members of the royal family who were also entitled to “consume” particular regions. In times of stress, as several chronicles reveal, okya retreated to their villages, where they had relatives and land. Despite these regional links, however, the high-ranking okya spent their time close to the king, except in war, when some of them were called on to recruit troops and act as generals in the field. Their careers were tied to the fortunes of the king. Their effect on life in the countryside is not so clear. The palace-oriented chronicles probably exaggerate the importance of these men, and so did the Vietnamese when they looked for people to help them centralize and tidy up Cambodian government in the 1830s.
The last segment of Cambodian society that came between the villagers and their king consisted of other members of the royal family. In theory there could be hundreds of these, for kings were traditionally polygamous, but in the nineteenth century a series of deaths and coincidences sharply reduced their number. King Eng, who died in his twenties, had no surviving brothers and only five children. The oldest of these, Prince Chan, came to the throne when he was only six. When he died more than thirty years later, he left four daughters but no sons. His three brothers (the fourth had died as a child) went to Bangkok in 1812 and stayed there, with brief exceptions, until Chan’s death in 1835. This meant that for most of his reign Chan was the only male member of the royal family living in Cambodia. The factionalism and jockeying for position, a conventional feature of Cambodian court life before and since, took place offstage, in Siam, and in the late 1830s in the Cambodian sruk under Thai control.
The Cambodian king, at the pinnacle of society, was remote from his subjects. Scholars have argued that this remoteness was expected of any Asian king. He was to rule by his largely invisible example, just as the sun shone, and he was to act as the custodian of a fund of merit and power—viewed perhaps as an interlocking, expendable commodity—that he had accumulated in previous existences en route to the throne. What has sometimes been called the purely religious or symbolic importance of kingship in Southeast Asia, as transmitted in Indianized texts, has been overstressed. The frontiers between political and religious actions and institutions were neither sharply delimited nor especially important. In their daily lives, Cambodian kings were as concerned with mere survival as they were with their religious and ceremonial roles. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to blot out the religious importance of kingship with evidence—however easy to assemble—of a given king’s weakness or fallibility. Having a king was indispensable. According to the Ramayana, a country without a king enjoys “neither rain nor seed, neither wealth nor wife, neither sacrifices nor festivals,”33 and the alarm of the okya in 1840–41 when Cambodia was briefly without a monarch shows how deeply ingrained these notions were. Only a king was empowered to hand out the official titles, seals of office, and insignia of rank that held the Cambodian official class together. One Cambodian law even stated that an official without a seal did not need to be obeyed.34
In addition to setting Cambodia’s official class in motion—an action that had no consistent effect on village life—the Cambodian monarch, like his counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia, presided over a series of partly brahmanical, partly Buddhist, and partly animistic ceremonies that, from the villagers’ point of view, defined the boundaries of his merit and the limits of the agricultural year and were closely related to the success or failures of their harvests. The ceremonies included ones that honored the king’s ancestors and the nak ta, ones that inaugurated and closed the rice-growing cycle, and ones that marked off stages of the Buddhist and solar calendars. In many of them the king was assisted by so-called court brahmans called Baku who also acted as guardians of his regalia—the sacred sword, arrows, and other objects that he handled only once in his lifetime, at his coronation. It is impossible to decide if the regalia were political or religious. Without them, a monarch could rule—handing out titles, raising armies, and so forth—but he could not reign. He had not been consecrated, as Prince Duang discovered in the 1840s when the Vietnamese withheld the regalia from him until they could extract favorable peace terms from the Thai.
The monarch’s powers, then, although perhaps overstressed in the written record, remained considerable in the eyes of the okya and among the common people. The absence of a monarch was felt, at many points in the society, perhaps more acutely than his presence on the throne.
CAMBODIA’S RELATIONS WITH VIETNAM AND SIAM
As we have seen, the two most important characteristics of post-Angkorean Cambodia were the shift in the country’s center of gravity from Angkor to Phnom Penh, with the commercial and demographic ramifications that the move implied and the roles played by the Thai and Vietnamese. Nineteenth-century Cambodia, therefore, must be seen in part against the background of its foreign relations.
These relations were carried out with two countries, Vietnam and Siam, and occurred within a framework of rivalry between the two larger kingdoms. Rivalry sprang from the unwillingness of either court to accept the other as its equal or its superior. This unwillingness, in turn, can be traced in part to the traditional language of tributary diplomacy, which stressed the inequality between the sender and the recipient of tribute.
A major objective of Southeast Asian diplomacy in the nineteenth century, indeed, was the ritualized expression of differential status through the ceremonial exchange of gifts. The rules for these tributary exchanges grew out of the particular system in which they occurred. The Thai and the Vietnamese, for example, had separate ones, which overlapped inside Cambodia.
Both systems owed a good deal to their counterpart in China,35 which had been in effect since the third century BCE and was still in operation in the 1800s. From a Cambodian point of view, the Thai variant was looser and more idiosyncratic, for the Thai made allowances for local customs and local products while the Vietnamese did not. The latter were rigid in copying the Chinese model. In 1806, for example, Vietnamese Emperor Gia Long, in choosing gifts to send to the Cambodian king, transmitted facsimiles of the ones he had received, at the beginning of his own reign, from the Chinese emperor. Some of these, such as “golden dragon paper for imperial decrees” and Chinese bureaucratic costumes, were meaningless to the Khmer. The seals of investiture sent from Hué to Udong were irrelevant to Cambodians because they had camels carved on them, like the seals that the Chinese court sent to tributary states in central Asia and, incidentally, to Vietnam. One puzzled Cambodian chronicler referred to the animal as a “Chinese lion.”36
From Vietnam’s point of view, Vietnam was above Cambodia, just as China was above Vietnam. At the same time, of course, Cambodia was below Vietnam and Vietnam was below China. In other words, Vietnam was the master in one relationship and the servant in the other. As a byproduct of this duality, the civilized goods sent from Hué to Udong were facsimiles of those sent from Beijing to Hué, while the so-called barbarian goods transmitted from Udong were the same sorts of products that Vietnam transmitted to China.37
In the matter of tributary gifts, the Thai were more flexible than the Vietnamese. The Chakri kings sent gifts to nineteenth-century Cambodian kings that the recipients could recognize and use. In exchange the Thai seem to have settled for whatever products they could get. Sometimes Cambodia sent pepper, at other times lacquer and cardamom. There is no evidence, however, that the Cambodians ever transmitted the gold and silver ornamental trees (banga mas) that were a feature of tribute to Bangkok from other dependent states.38
Similarly, the embassies that King Chan (r. 1797–1835) sent to Bangkok and Hué obeyed different sets of rules, as embassies to Bangkok were larger, more frequent, and more informal. The differences between the two diplomatic systems paralleled differences in Thai and Vietnamese official attitudes toward themselves, each other, and the Khmer. These differences became crucial and painful for the Khmer in the 1830s, when the Vietnamese emperor sought to administer Cambodia directly in a Vietnamese way. From a Cambodian point of view, however, what mattered about the Thai and Vietnamese tributary systems and attitudes toward Cambodia was not that they were different and made different sorts of demands but, rather, that they were condescending, overlapping, and expensive.
Thai and Vietnamese official relations with each other, until they soured in the 1820s, were marked by considerable informality.39 This arose in part from a mutual unwillingness on the part of the Thai and the Vietnamese to accept or impose authority on each other because they enjoyed roughly similar power and prestige. The problem of hegemony did not yet arise in their relations with the Khmer, and notions about the roles both states should play in Cambodia were quite consistent. The barbarity of the Cambodian people and the subservience of their king, for example, were taken for granted, and so was the corollary that each superior state had a sort of civilizing mission to carry out inside Cambodia. The rulers saw themselves, in their official correspondence, as destined to supervise the Khmer. As one Thai diplomatic letter put it, “It is fitting for large countries to take care of smaller ones.” Others referred to Chan as an “unruly child” and to the confluence of Thai and Vietnamese policies in Cambodia as “fruit and seeds forming a single unit.”
Some of this language was a mask for realpolitik, but the images are nonetheless suggestive. The language of diplomatic correspondence, like the languages in everyday use in Southeast Asia, used pronouns that were hierarchical and family-oriented, and relationships between states were often described by using images of child rearing. In these the Thai and the Vietnamese became the “father” and the “mother” of the Khmer, whose king was referred to as their “child” or their “servant.” In the 1860s a French official mused perceptively that Siam was Cambodia’s father because its king gave names to the monarch, whereas Vietnam was seen to be the mother because its rulers provided the Khmer with seals of office.40 Whatever the reasons, Thai and Vietnamese statements, like those made later by the French, amounted to unilateral declarations of Cambodian dependence. The family-oriented images were unjustified and far-fetched, but they are a useful way of looking at the period—that is, as the continuing struggle between increasingly incompatible parents for the custody of a weak and often disobedient child.
Although Thai political ideas were often couched in Buddhist terminology and Vietnamese ones in terms of a Sino-Vietnamese Confucian tradition, Thai and Vietnamese objectives in Cambodia, seldom voiced explicitly, were similar. Like the Nguyen, the Thai were eager to extend their prestige along their frontiers and to amplify their self-images as universally accepted kings. The Thai rulers also wanted to link themselves as patrons of Buddhism to the chakravartin, or wheel-turning monarchs, who had reigned for so many centuries at Ayudhya. These ambitions led the rulers of both states to expand the land and people under their control.
After 1810 King Chan and his advisers were swept up into a game of power politics that they had little chance to change and no opportunity to win. They had no choice. In Vietnamese terms, Cambodia was a fence, a buffer state, and a dumping ground for colonists. To the Thai, the Cambodians were fellow Buddhist children basking in a fund of Chakri merit who could provide cardamom for the court and manpower for Chakri wars. The Thai wanted the Cambodians to be loyal while the Vietnamese wanted access to Cambodia’s land and, incidentally, the king’s recognition of their superiority. The Thai demanded service and friendship, but they were usually unable, given the way they organized their armies and the distance between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, to provide protection. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, provided protection of a sort, but their actions led for a time to the disappearance of Cambodia as an independent state. By different routes, then, the Thai and the Vietnamese often accomplished the same things: they took over certain sruk, they made hostages of the Cambodian ruler and his relations, and they reduced the independence of the okya.
The outcome of this game was not obvious at first to Chan and his advisers. In the early part of his reign, his alliance with Vietnam was probably meant only to deflect some of the pressures on him from the Thai. Letters between Bangkok, Udong, and Hué took so long that Chan was able to buy time on several occasions by saying one thing to the Thai and another to the Vietnamese. Moreover, for most of his reign he kept his communications open with both capitals by means of the embassies he sent them. In fact, Chan may well have been under the impression that the equilibrium that prevailed in the early years of his reign was his own creation and that he had more bargaining power with his patrons than he really did. In this way, he resembled his younger brother’s great grandson, Norodom Sihanouk, who ruled Cambodia in the 1950s and 1960s.
Even if the balance of forces and the inactivity of the Thai and the Vietnamese reflected Thai and Vietnamese choices dictated by their own perceptions of national interest, and even if Cambodia’s independence reflected what were for the moment limited Thai and Vietnamese ambitions rather than Cambodian skill, there were still advantages to Chan in blurring the lines of his allegiance. One of the chronicles, allegedly quoting Emperor Gia Long, makes this point quite clearly:
“Cambodia is a small country,” the Emperor said. “And we should maintain it as a child. We will be its mother; its father will be Siam. When a child has trouble with its father, it can get rid of suffering by embracing its mother. When the child is unhappy with its mother, it can run to its father for support.”41
Chan was not alone in playing this game. He was joined by his rivals in the Cambodian royal family whose alternating loyalties led King Rama III of Siam to write in the early 1840s, “The Cambodians always fight among themselves in the matter of succession. The losers in these fights go off to ask for help from a neighboring state; the winner must then ask for forces from the other.”42
Chan’s freedom of action was illusory. He survived as king only so long as one of his patrons and all of his rivals were inactive and so long as the relatively active patron provided him with military help. When either patron turned his attention fully to Cambodia, there was nothing Chan could do to deflect the destruction that ensued. Like Prince Sihanouk in the 1960s, or Pol Pot a decade later, Chan remained neutral as long as stronger powers allowed him to be so. Chan suffered an additional disadvantage in having no world leaders or world forums to turn to—no Mao Zedong, no Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and no United Nations.