The Land

CHAPTER 2  

The Land 

Cambodia has held a special appeal for foreigners. Many of the journalists, tourists and diplomats who visited it in the 1950s and ’60s wrote of an idyllic, antique land unsullied by the brutalities of the modern world. Phnom Penh was, it is true, an exquisite riverine city, and its fine white and yellow-ochre buildings, charming squares and cafés lent it a French provincial charm that gave it a considerable edge over its tawdry neighbors Bangkok and Saigon. It had not been overwhelmed by the pressures of trade and war; its population was only about 600,000, and there was little sign of the shanty towns of Coca-Cola-can slums in which Thai and Vietnamese peasants eked out a miserable existence. The huge covered market was stacked high with local produce—vegetables, rice and dozens of kinds of fish caught in the many waters of the land. And the countryside, where 90 percent of the people lived in villages built around their Buddhist temples seemed, if anything, even more attractive than the capital.

The Cambodian people were taller, darker, more sensuous and apparently more friendly than the Thais or the Vietnamese; visitors took to them immediately. There were no strategic hamlets, no refugee camps, no State Department men with M-16 rifles and earnest smiles explaining the logic of rural development, and neither were there any Soviet or Chinese B-40 rockets firing indiscriminately from the tree line into the villages.

The country is about the same size as Missouri, or of England and Wales. Thick tropical forests cover much of the land, and two great rivers flow across and fertilize the central plains, where most of the people have always lived. The overriding impression was of fecundity and greenness, and of chocolate-brown waterways where buffalo and sometimes elephants steamed gently in the heat, with small brown boys or large white birds perched on their backs.

Not all of the country was easily accessible. Bandits operated out of the Cardamom mountains in the southwest, and troupes of pirates sped along many of the waterways. In the mountains of the northeast, the hill tribes people, the Khmer Loeu, lived outside government control, and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese moved among them. A few groups of indigenous Communist guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge, operated deep in the forests, but their influence was small in a conservative, religious country where most land was owned by the tiller, where even the most relaxed could usually be assured enough rice, and where fish were to be had for the drop of a net. Such was the illusion—bucolic plenty, Buddhist serenity, neutralist peace. It was, however, an oversimplification. Like any other country, Cambodia was the complex product of geographical, social and political experience that provides precedent and warning for future history. It was never quite the smiling, gentle land that foreigners liked to see.

Water has fashioned Cambodia. In prehistory the central plain of the country was under the sea, and waves broke against the Dangrek moun- tains of Southern Laos. The Mekong river fell through the narrow Laotian ranges and over the Khong Falls into the sea. Gradually the river built up the soil and filled the gulf to form present-day Cambodia and southern Vietnam. Today only the Great Lake (Tonle Sap) in the center of Cam- bodia marks the original line of the seacoast. The lake is shaped like an upside-down violin from northwest to southeast across the country, its stem leading into the Tonle Sap river to join the Mekong at the watershed on which the city of Phnom Penh was eventually built. The rivers meet briefly and divide again, as the Mekong and the Bassac, and flow on in two streams through fertile, red, muddy fields into the great fanlike Delta of the Mekong, and so to the South China Sea.

In late spring the rivers begin to swell as torrents flow from the Hima- layas over the Khong Falls and into the central plains. The great clouds that have been lowering over the Indian Ocean are driven toward the Asian land mass by the southwest trades. They break over the cracked plains and for four months Cambodia is inundated. The Mekong and the Bassac cannot contain the mass of silt-laden water that pours down toward the sea, and it backs up in the Tonle Sap. In what should constitute a wonder of the world, the waters are actually reversed; they rush swiftly back up the Tonle Sap river and burst into the Great Lake, which instantly spills over its shores and drowns thousands of acres of trees and fields. For most of the summer months the land remains under water, to be refertilized and reinvigorated, and all of Cambodia is, in Rimbaud's words, "filled with ochrous skies and drowned forests." By November, when the Himalayan snows have melted, prevailing winds are reversed, the clouds are driven away, the torrents of the monsoon cease, and the pressure on the Tonle Sap eases. The waters slip off the land and, filled with millions of fish, sweep down the rivers and into the sea.

As a result, parts of Cambodia are potentially among the most fertile of the tropical zones. But in its raw state the area is hostile; the climate is draining and oppressive, the animal life is unfriendly, and the receding waters leave stagnant swamps as well as fertilized soil. Only extensive irrigation ensures a crop necessary for an expanding population. Civilizations have flourished in the plains when the water has been brought under control, but—as elsewhere in Southeast Asia—there has always been tension between the people in the plains and the groups who have lived in the forests or the mountains.

The precise origins of the plains people are not known, but the shores of the South China Sea were originally populated by people very closely resembling those found in the islands of the Pacific. Soon after the birth of Christ, the culture of India began to influence the area that is now Cambodia, and contact with China then followed. Most of what we know of those times comes from Chinese dynastic annals. The Chinese name for the state that occupied the Mekong Delta from the second to sixth century A.D. was "Funan." Funan was the crucible in which Indian culture and the local people fused to produce a new civilization, the Khmers.

It was a major stop on the sea trade routes to China; excavations have uncovered Indian-influenced art and trade goods from China, India, and the Roman Empire.

Funan was expansionist, and according to Chinese texts, one of its first leaders, Fan Man, "attacked and conquered the neighboring kingdoms that gave allegiance to him." But just to the north, a more clearly Khmer state appears in Chinese texts as "Chenla." It too was heavily under the influence of Indian cultures.

By the middle of the sixth century, Funan fell into decline, and the state.

was unable to repair the ravages of catastrophic floods that swept away the canals and the dikes, and forced the inhabitants to withdraw northward, abandoning the Mekong Delta once more to the mud. Then, it seems, Funan was annexed by Chenla, and from the combination of these two states Cambodia evolved.

It was not an easy association, and Chinese texts of the next two centuries refer to endless disputes and civil wars. Capital cities were evacuated and abandoned as kingdoms crumbled; it was not until the end of the eighth century that any kind of unity was achieved. Then the extraordinary civilization of Angkor, based on slavery, on worship of the God-King and on control of the waters, began.

King Yasovarman I, who reigned from 889 to 900 A.D., built the first city of Angkor northwest of the Great Lake and harnessed the Siem Reap river. Using slave labor, subsequent kings went on to build enormous reservoirs, or “barays,” intricate canals and careful dams. Year by year the canals stretched farther and farther out into the country, linking every town in the land. The big ships sailed up the Mekong into the Great Lake and transferred their cargoes to smaller barques, which could reach even the least accessible areas. The waterworks provided an everlasting and totally controlled source of irrigation, and the Khmers managed to produce three or four harvests a year.

This strong economic base enabled the kings of Angkor to pursue an expansionist foreign policy and to extend their suzerainty over vast areas of Southeast Asia, from the Mekong Delta across what is now Laos and Thailand, west into Burma, and down the isthmus toward Malaya. Water also provided the hydraulic power and the transport for the construction of huge "temple-mountains," which each king erected to his own glory. The most famous of them, Angkor Wat, was built in the twelfth century by Suryavarman II, a militant ruler (contemporary of Frederick Barbarossa) who waged war on all his neighbors. It was a stupendous creation; the main structure stood 130 feet high within square walls inside a moat that encompassed an area of almost one square mile. The temple rose in three successive tiers, and each terrace was surrounded by a carved gallery interrupted by pavilions, corner towers, stairways.

Suryavarman II's creation was not unassailed for long. The Chams invaded Angkor crossing the Great Lake from the south, sacking it and driving out the people. The empire never really regained its strength, but its decline was arrested for a time at the end of the twelfth century by King Jayavarman VII, who routed the Chams in a great naval battle and extended the country's frontiers southward.

Jayavarman was a Buddhist, a follower of Mahayana, the Greater Vehicle But during his reign the influence of Theravada Buddhism, the Hinayana or Lesser Vehicle, began to spread from Siam. Unlike almost all the previous religions of the country, its doctrines were not imposed from above but were preached to the people. It was simple, required no expensive priesthood or temples and little ceremonial. Its missionaries practiced austerity, solitude, humility and poverty. Their example and their direct contact with the people started to undermine the old state religion and the monarchy which rested upon it. Theravada Buddhism remained the great belief and comfort of the Khmer people until 1975.

Only one eyewitness account of life in Angkor remains. It comes from Kubla Khan's envoy, Chou Ta-kuan, who spent a year there at the end of the thirteenth century. He reported that for the mass of the people life still revolved around the palace and the temples. Thousands were conscripted into the armies of laborers, masons, sculptors and decorators who built the temples. Thousands more served these shrines once they had been constructed; one such sanctuary contained 18 high priests, 2,740 officiants, 2,202 servers and 615 dancing girls.

The little houses along the canals of the city were dominated by the pagodas and by the green and gold tiles of the palace roof. The king's family held almost all the important posts of state, and if any commoner were chosen for office he offered his daughter as a royal concubine. The people could, however, approach the king; he frequently held audiences in a marvelous pillared hall hung with mirrors.

Chou Ta-kuan was not uncritical of life in Angkor. Slaves were treated badly and chained by the neck. Capital offenses were invariably punished by burial alive; lesser offenses by the removal of fingers, hands, feet, or nose. If a dead man was found lying in the street, he would simply be dragged into the fields to be eaten by wild animals.

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, the extravagant building program and foreign policy of the God-Kings led to the destruction of Angkor. No society could sustain such enormous undertakings indefinitely; it is a tribute to the power of the irrigation system that it lasted as long and created as much as it did. No one knows exactly what happened, but it appears that through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the spirit of the empire dissipated. The waterways were no longer properly tended, the barays began to leak, and the canals became clogged. Rice fields reverted to swamp or savanna; food production fell and so did the population. As the Siamese (Thais) expanded their kingdom to the west, they began, with the encouragement of Kubla Khan to the north, to lay waste to Angkor. They annexed province after province and finally seized and sacked the capital itself. In 1431 the Khmers were driven out; thousands were carried off to Siam as slaves. Conscious of the power of the waterworks, the Siamese destroyed them. They stripped the temples and palaces of their rich adornments; the gray stones were left naked to face an encroaching jungle.

Cambodia became a vassal of Siam, unnoticed and almost unmentioned. Occasional attempts were made by her kings to reassert themselves, and Angkor was briefly reoccupied, but the efforts never lasted long. For the next several centuries the Siamese and Vietnamese kingdoms grew and Cambodia waned. Siamese armies moved back and forth across the western part of the unproductive land, and to the east the Vietnamese moved southward into the Mekong Delta. The capital shifted from site to site, including Phnom Penh, as different dynasties occupied the throne. Successive princes sought support from either the Vietnamese or the Siamese and became beholden to either one or the other.

The Khmers' fear of their more populous neighbors increased as more and more of the old empire was annexed. But there was a vital difference in the relationships. The Siamese and the Khmers shared the same religion and similar cultural patterns; this mitigated the effects of occupation by Siam. Relations with Vietnam by contrast involved a sharp cultural clash between Indian-influenced and Chinese-dominated views of society; they were much more brutal and bitter. Unlike the Siamese, the Vietnamese regarded the Cambodians as "barbarians" and attempted to eradicate Cambodian customs in the areas they seized.

By the early nineteenth century, the king received his crown from the Siamese and paid tribute to the Vietnamese. Cambodia was reduced to a sliver between the two countries; Angkor, largely lost from view, was well inside Siam. As one scholar has noted, thousands of Khmers were being "killed and uprooted in a series of ruinous wars, carried on inside [their] territory by the Thai, the Vietnamese and local factions." The Thais burned down the Khmer capital three times in the first half of the century; Vietnamese advisers kept the Cambodian monarch a prisoner for fifteen years; the chronicles are filled with references to plagues, famines and floods. It was a dark period.

In 1840 the Cambodians mounted a rebellion against the increasing Vietnamese domination of Khmer life. The Vietnamese emperor, Minh Mang, characterized Vietnam's attitude to the Khmers in a letter to his general, Truong Minh Giang: "Sometimes the Cambodians are loyal; at  other times they betray us. We helped them when they were suffering and lifted them out of the mud... Now they are rebellious! I am so angry that my hair stands upright... Hundreds of knives should be used against them, to chop them up, to dismember them... Elsewhere he ordered that they be "crushed to powder." The Cambodian view was expressed by an official who said simply, "We are happy killing Vietnamese. We no longer fear them." On this occasion the Khmer rebels used hit-and-run tactics against the better-armed Vietnamese, who were forced to withdraw from around Phnom Penh to the Delta. Even so, by the middle of the century the country was on the verge of disappearing altogether into the grasp of its neighbors; it would have happened had the French not intervened and imposed a protectorate.

At the end of the 1850s Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, made a long tour of Siam, Cambodia, and Laos. Cambodia he found rather pitiful, the people conceited, poor, and terrified of the king. Mouhot traveled widely through the country, spending time with the “savages” in the hills and then journeying by boat up the Great Lake. The fish were so incredibly abundant that even when the water was high “they are actually crushed under the boats and the ply of the oars is frequently impeded by them.” He passed the pole in the middle of the Lake which marked the Siamese-Khmer boundary, and which the Siamese had constantly pushed further into Cambodia, and landed on the northern shore. His destination was the ruined city of “Ongcor,” of which almost nothing was then known.

It had vanished so completely that earlier in the nineteenth century, when Chinese texts mentioning Angkor were translated, no one believed it still existed at all. With his servants and his bearers, Mouhot cut his way through the woods, and all of a sudden, he came upon Angkor Wat stretching up and out before him. He was overcome, and he wrote in his diary that the sight made the traveler “forget all the fatigues of the journey, filling him with admiration and delight, such as would be experienced in finding a verdant oasis in the sandy desert. Suddenly, and as if by enchantment, he seems to be transported from barbarism to civilization, from profound darkness to light.” He could not understand how the temples could possibly have been built, and no one in Cambodia was able to explain. He heard, “It is the work of giants”; “It was built by the leprous king”; “It made itself”; “It is the work of Pra-Wun, the king of angels.”

He was startled by the contrast between the traces of splendid civilization and the deplorable state of the country he was visiting. He saw only one hope for the future: "European conquest, abolition of slavery, wise and protecting laws, and experience, fidelity and scrupulous rectitude in those who administer them." "Since France was about to subject Cochin China to her sway she should take Cambodia as well; the country would be "a magnificent jewel in her crown."

French officials shared his views. Through the 1850s they had become increasingly alarmed by the difficulty of maintaining security in Saigon when Vietnamese rebels and bandits could swoop on the city and then rush back into sanctuaries in Cambodia only forty miles away across flat woodlands. Furthermore, they saw the Mekong as a road to China. In 1861 Admiral Charner, the French commander in Saigon, traveled to the Cambodian capital, Oudong, to tell King Norodom that the French were determined to occupy Indochina permanently and would like to help Cambodia maintain its freedom. The king, who was now under the control of the Siamese resident in the capital, replied that his country owed its existence to the Siamese, who had saved it from Vietnamese dominance. He welcomed the French offer of help but was concerned lest, after he had defied his neighbors, the French would withdraw from the area leaving him at their mercy. Eventually, however, French pressure overcame his doubts. Despite the anger of the Siamese, a protectorate was established over Cambodia in 1864.

It was not long before the king realized that the interests of the French resident differed little from those of his Siamese predecessor. In 1867 the French ceded to the Siamese the provinces of Battambang and Angkor, which were already in their hands, in return for their renunciation of sovereignty over Cambodia as a whole. The king protested in vain. The French did manage to preserve the country from the worst encroachments of its old enemies—in 1907 the two provinces were returned, thanks in part to the wisdom of an American adviser to the Thai monarchy, Edward H. Strobel. But, because Cochin China was a full colony and Cambodia merely a protectorate, the French tended to push the Vietnamese borders northward and westward at the expense of Cambodia. Constant minor changes in the frontier took place; maps were always out of date, or ambiguously drawn, or both. Such alterations remain a source of bitterness and warfare.

French concern lay much more in erecting a buffer between Vietnam and Siam, where the British had established strong trading interests, and in securing the upper reaches of the Mekong, than in developing Cambodia. The country was treated, in some ways, as a granary for Cochin China.

The French found, however, that it was not the placid indolent place that some of them had anticipated, and a series of revolts broke out in the provinces. The king’s servility helped the French, but his own feelings about the protectorate became more and more hostile. In 1884 the French tried to take full control, forcing Norodom to sign a convention relinquishing all power to the French resident and making Cambodia, in effect, a colony. The king was furious, and with at least his tacit support, an insurrection spread.

As ninety years later, the rebels were based principally in the mountains and forests in the east of the country, they had the support of local officials and feudal chiefs, and they acted in the name of their king. The French failed to subdue them. In January 1886, the French resident in Kompong Cham reported that with few exceptions “the uprising is master of the whole region. Everywhere, bands of insurgents circulate in the countryside... the people... all foresee the possibility of our evacuation of the country. The entire Cambodian population acquiesces in the revolt.” Eventually, the French had to concede. They withdrew their more humiliating demands, and the king called for an end to the revolt. Afterward, they applied their control more carefully. In order to diminish the power of the king, they denigrated Norodom as a bumbling, clownish figure of fun and paid court to the rival branch of the royal family, the Sisowaths, who were more amenable to their control. When Norodom died in 1904 the French discounted his heir and forced the Crown Council to choose his half brother, Prince Sisowath, to succeed him.

Throughout the early part of this century the country remained undeveloped and heavily taxed. There was sporadic violence, but little political activity. The Indochinese Communist Party, formed in 1930, was almost wholly Vietnamese, and it was not until the end of the 1930s that nationalism really began to stir in Cambodia. It was led by Son Ngoc Thanh, a man who was to exercise a vital, if mainly symbolic influence over Cambodian politics during the next forty years. He was a Khmer Krom, an ethnic Khmer from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta area. In 1937, he founded the first Cambodian-language newspaper, Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat), and he soon gathered around him groups of Buddhist monks, sons of rich families who resented the way in which the French gave preferment to Vietnamese in the civil service, and some of those few young Cambodians whose intellectual and political aspirations had been sharpened in France. As Secretary of the Buddhist Institute, he disseminated anti-French, anticolonialist and republican ideas.

The French, meanwhile , decided that thir best protection against nationalism was to switch royal families once again. When Sisowath's son Monivong died in 1941, they dropped the Sisowaths and reverted to the Norodoms. The Sisowaths were as dismayed in 1904 and few more so than Prince Sisowath Sirk Matak , Who had expected his family to retain power all his life. He was now forced to watch as his nineteen-year-old cousin,Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whom the French had selected because of his pliable youthfulness, was crowned king.