Dark ages of Cambodia
Encyclopedia
The Dark Ages of Cambodia, covers the history of Cambodia
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, a period of continued decline and territorial loss. Cambodia
enjoyed a brief period of prosperity during the sixteenth century because its kings, who built their capitals in the region southeast of the Tonlé Sap
along the Mekong River, promoted trade with other parts of Asia. This was the period when Spanish and Portuguese adventurers and missionaries first visited the country. But the Siamese conquest of the new capital at Longvek in 1594 marked a downturn in the country's fortunes and Cambodia became a pawn in power struggles between its two increasingly powerful neighbors, Siam and Vietnam. Vietnam's settlement of the Mekong Delta
led to its annexation of that area at the end of the seventeenth century. Cambodia thereby lost some of its richest territory and was cut off from the sea. Such foreign encroachments continued through the first half of the nineteenth century because Vietnam was determined to absorb Khmer land and to force the inhabitants to accept Vietnamese culture.
around the mid-15th century to the establishment of a protectorate under the French in 1863 are considered by historians to be Cambodia's "Dark Ages", a period of economic, social, and cultural stagnation when the kingdom's internal affairs came increasingly under the control of its neighbors, the Thai (Siam) and the Vietnamese. By the mid-19th century, Cambodia had become an almost helpless pawn in the power struggles between Siam and Vietnam
and probably would have been completely absorbed by one or the other if France had not intervened, giving Cambodia a colonially dominated "lease on life." Fear of racial and cultural extinction has persisted as a major theme in modern Cambodian thought and helps to explain Cambodian intense nationalism
and xenophobia
and its original support to the Khmer Rouge
during the 1970s. Establishment in 1979 of the People's Republic of Kampuchea
, a Vietnamese-dominated satellite state
, can be seen as the culmination of a process of Vietnamese encroachment that was already well under way by the seventeenth century.
The process of internal decay and foreign encroachment was gradual rather than precipitous and was hardly evident in the fifteenth century when the Khmer were still powerful. Following the fall of Angkor Thom
, the Cambodian court abandoned the region north of the Tonlé Sap
, to Siam, never to return except for a brief interlude in the late sixteenth century. By this time however, the Khmer penchant for monument building had ceased. Older faiths such as Mahayana Buddhism and the Hindu
cult of the god-king had been supplanted by Theravada Buddhism, and the Cambodians had become part of the same religious and cultural cosmos as the Siamese. This similarity did not prevent intermittent warfare between the two kingdoms, however. During the sixteenth century Cambodian armies, taking advantage of Siamese troubles with the Burmese, unsuccessfully invaded the Siamese kingdom several times.
In the meantime, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, the few remaining Khmer survivors, with Siamese help, established a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh
. This new center of power was located at the confluence of the Mekong
and the Tonle Sab rivers. Thus, it controlled the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms
and had access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade route
s that linked the China coast, the South China Sea
, and the Indian Ocean
. A new kind of state and society emerged, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor. The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty
(1368–1644) provided lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who controlled royal trading monopolies. The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulated commerce.
King Ang Chan (1516–1566), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek
. Portuguese
and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians
, Malays, Japanese
, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch
.
It was during this period (in 1555-1556) that the Portuguese friar
Gaspar da Cruz
made the first attempt to introduce Christianity into the country. According to his own account, his attempt was a complete failure due to the strong "Bramene
" conviction of the king and the ruling classes; however, the brief report he made of his mission offers an interesting insight into the nations' religious practices
of the time.
Because the representatives of practically all these nationalities were pirates, adventurers, or traders, this was an era of stormy cosmopolitanism. Hard-pressed by the Siamese, to repay his debts, King Sattha (1576–94) surrounded himself with a personal guard of Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries, and in 1593 asked the Spanish governor of the Philippines
for aid. Attracted by the prospects of establishing a Spanish protectorate in Cambodia and of converting the monarch to Christianity
, the governor sent a force of 120 men, but Lovek had already fallen to the Siamese when they arrived the following year. The Spanish took advantage of the extremely confused situation to place one of Sattha's sons on the throne in 1597. Hopes of making the country a Spanish dependency were dashed, however, when the Spaniards were massacred two years later by an equally belligerent contingent of Malay mercenaries.
The Siamese, however, had dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Siamese military governor in the city, a degree of foreign political control was established over the kingdom for the first time. Cambodian chronicles describe the fall of Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovered. Siam ruled Cambodia for most of the next 300 years, finally losing Angkor Wat to the French in 1907 after holding it for over 450 years.
More than their conquest of Angkor a century and a half earlier, the Siamese capture of Lovek marked the beginning of a decline in Cambodia's fortunes. One possible reason for the decline was the labor drain imposed by the Siamese conquerors as they marched thousands of Khmer peasants, skilled artisans, scholars, and members of the Buddhist clergy back to their capital of Ayutthaya. This practice, common in the history of Southeast Asia, crippled Cambodia's ability to recover a semblance of its former greatness. A new Khmer capital was established at Odongk (Udong), south of Lovek, but its monarchs could survive only by entering into what amounted to vassal relationships with the Siamese and with the Vietnamese. In common parlance, Siam became Cambodia's "father" and Vietnam its "mother."
By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese - who, unlike other Southeast Asian peoples, had emerged from the Sinic civilization sphere- had completely absorbed the once most powerful maritime kingdom of Champa
in central Vietnam. Thousands of Chams fled into Khmer
territory. By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese had reached the Mekong Delta, which was inhabited by Khmer people. In 1620 the Khmer king Chey Chettha II
(1618–28) married a daughter of Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên, one of the Nguyễn lords (1558–1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the period of the Lê Dynasty
(1428-1788). Three years later, Chey Chettha allowed the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor, near what is now Ho Chi Minh City
(until 1975, Saigon). By the end of the seventeenth century, the region was under Vietnamese administrative control, and Cambodia was cut off from access to the sea. Trade with the outside world was possible only with Vietnamese permission.
There were periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, when Cambodia's neighbors were preoccupied with internal or external strife, that afforded the beleaguered country a breathing spell. The Vietnamese were involved in a lengthy civil war until 1672 (see the Trịnh–Nguyễn War for details), but upon its conclusion the Nguyễn Lords, who ruled in the south, promptly annexed sizable areas of Cambodian territory in the region of the Mekong Delta. For the next one hundred years they used the alleged mistreatment of Vietnamese colonists in the delta as a pretext for their continued expansion, as well as territorial concessions from inter-royalty marriage. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had extended their control to include the area encompassed in the late 1980s by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam).
Siam, which might otherwise have been courted as an ally against Vietnamese incursions in the eighteenth century, was itself involved in a new conflict with Burma. In 1767 the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya was besieged and destroyed. The Siamese quickly recovered, however, and soon reasserted their dominion over Cambodia. The youthful Khmer king, Ang Eng (1779–96), a refugee at the Siamese court, was installed as monarch at Odongk by Siamese troops. At the same time, Siam quietly annexed Cambodia's three northernmost provinces. In addition, the local rulers of the northwestern provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab (Siemreap) became vassals of the Siamese king, and these areas came under the Siamese sphere of influence.
A renewed struggle between Siam and Vietnam for control of Cambodia in the nineteenth century resulted in a period when Vietnamese officials, working through a puppet Cambodian king, ruled the central part of the country and attempted to force Cambodians to adopt Vietnamese customs. Several rebellions against Vietnamese rule ensued. The most important of these occurred in 1840 to 1841 and spread through much of the country. After two years of fighting
, Cambodia and its two neighbors reached an accord that placed the country under the joint suzerainty of Siam and Vietnam. However, fearful of a longer past dominated by Thai incursions, under a separate attempt, Cambodia offered to reside under Vietnamese protectorship. At the behest of both countries, a new monarch, Ang Duong
(1848–59), ascended the throne and brought a decade of peace and relative independence to Cambodia.
In their arbitrary treatment of the Khmer population, the Siamese and the Vietnamese were virtually indistinguishable. The suffering and the dislocation caused by war were comparable in many ways to similar Cambodian experiences in the 1970s. But the Siamese and the Vietnamese had fundamentally different attitudes concerning their relationships with Cambodia. The Siamese shared with the Khmer a common religion, mythology, literature, and culture. The Chakri kings at Bangkok wanted Cambodia's loyalty, tribute and land, but they had no intention of challenging or changing its people's values or way of life. The Vietnamese viewed the Khmer people as barbarians to be civilized through exposure to Vietnamese culture, and they regarded the fertile Khmer lands as legitimate sites for colonization by settlers from Vietnam.
(Mekong Delta) region.
In the view of the government in Paris, Cambodia was a promising backwater. Persuaded by a missionary envoy to seek French protection against both the Thai and the Vietnamese, King Ang Duong invited a French diplomatic mission to visit his court. The Thai, however, pressured him to refuse to meet with the French when they finally arrived at Odongk in 1856. The much-publicized travels of the naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited the Cambodian court, rediscovered the ruins at Angkor, and journeyed up the Mekong River to the Laotian kingdom of Luang Prabang from 1859 to 1861, piqued French interest in the kingdom's alleged vast riches and in the value of the Mekong as a gateway to China's southwestern provinces. In August 1863, the French concluded a treaty with Ang Duong's successor, Norodom (1859–1904). This agreement afforded the Cambodian monarch French protection (in the form of a French official called a résident—in French resident) in exchange for giving the French rights to explore and to exploit the kingdom's mineral and forest resources. Norodom's coronation, in 1864, was an awkward affair at which both French and Thai representatives officiated. Although the Thai attempted to thwart the expansion of French influence, their own influence over the monarch steadily dwindled. In 1867 the French concluded a treaty with the Thai that gave the latter control of Batdambang Province and of Siemreab Province in exchange for their renunciation of all claims of suzerainty over other parts of Cambodia. Loss of the northwestern provinces deeply upset Norodom, but he was beholden to the French for sending military aid to suppress a rebellion by a royal pretender.
In June 1884, the French governor of Cochinchina went to Phnom Penh, Norodom's capital, and demanded approval of a treaty with Paris that promised far-reaching changes such as the abolition of slavery, the institution of private land ownership, and the establishment of French résidents in provincial cities. Mindful of a French gunboat anchored in the river, the king reluctantly signed the agreement. Local elites opposed its provisions, however, especially the one dealing with slavery, and they fomented rebellions throughout the country during the following year. Though the rebellions were suppressed, and the treaty was ratified, passive resistance on the part of the Cambodians postponed implementation of the reforms it embodied until after Norodom's death.
History of Cambodia
- Prehistory and early history :Carbon 14 dating of a cave at Laang Spean in northwest Cambodia reveals people who made pots were living in Cambodia as early as 4200 BCE . Further archaeological evidence indicates that other parts of the region now called Cambodia were inhabited from around...
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, a period of continued decline and territorial loss. Cambodia
Cambodia
Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...
enjoyed a brief period of prosperity during the sixteenth century because its kings, who built their capitals in the region southeast of the Tonlé Sap
Tonlé Sap
The Tonlé Sap is a combined lake and river system of major importance to Cambodia.The Tonlé Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and is an ecological hot spot that was designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1997....
along the Mekong River, promoted trade with other parts of Asia. This was the period when Spanish and Portuguese adventurers and missionaries first visited the country. But the Siamese conquest of the new capital at Longvek in 1594 marked a downturn in the country's fortunes and Cambodia became a pawn in power struggles between its two increasingly powerful neighbors, Siam and Vietnam. Vietnam's settlement of the Mekong Delta
Mekong Delta
The Mekong Delta is the region in southwestern Vietnam where the Mekong River approaches and empties into the sea through a network of distributaries. The Mekong delta region encompasses a large portion of southwestern Vietnam of . The size of the area covered by water depends on the season.The...
led to its annexation of that area at the end of the seventeenth century. Cambodia thereby lost some of its richest territory and was cut off from the sea. Such foreign encroachments continued through the first half of the nineteenth century because Vietnam was determined to absorb Khmer land and to force the inhabitants to accept Vietnamese culture.
Cambodia's struggle for survival, 1432-1863
The more than four centuries that passed from the abandonment of AngkorAngkor
Angkor is a region of Cambodia that served as the seat of the Khmer Empire, which flourished from approximately the 9th to 15th centuries. The word Angkor is derived from the Sanskrit nagara , meaning "city"...
around the mid-15th century to the establishment of a protectorate under the French in 1863 are considered by historians to be Cambodia's "Dark Ages", a period of economic, social, and cultural stagnation when the kingdom's internal affairs came increasingly under the control of its neighbors, the Thai (Siam) and the Vietnamese. By the mid-19th century, Cambodia had become an almost helpless pawn in the power struggles between Siam and Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
and probably would have been completely absorbed by one or the other if France had not intervened, giving Cambodia a colonially dominated "lease on life." Fear of racial and cultural extinction has persisted as a major theme in modern Cambodian thought and helps to explain Cambodian intense nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and xenophobia
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...
and its original support to the Khmer Rouge
Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge literally translated as Red Cambodians was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan...
during the 1970s. Establishment in 1979 of the People's Republic of Kampuchea
People's Republic of Kampuchea
The People's Republic of Kampuchea , , was founded in Cambodia by the Salvation Front, a group of Cambodian leftists dissatisfied with the Khmer Rouge, after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's government...
, a Vietnamese-dominated satellite state
Satellite state
A satellite state is a political term that refers to a country that is formally independent, but under heavy political and economic influence or control by another country...
, can be seen as the culmination of a process of Vietnamese encroachment that was already well under way by the seventeenth century.
The process of internal decay and foreign encroachment was gradual rather than precipitous and was hardly evident in the fifteenth century when the Khmer were still powerful. Following the fall of Angkor Thom
Angkor Thom
Angkor Thom , located in present day Cambodia, was the last and most enduring capital city of the Khmer empire. It was established in the late twelfth century by king Jayavarman VII. It covers an area of 9 km², within which are located several monuments from earlier eras as well as those...
, the Cambodian court abandoned the region north of the Tonlé Sap
Tonlé Sap
The Tonlé Sap is a combined lake and river system of major importance to Cambodia.The Tonlé Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and is an ecological hot spot that was designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1997....
, to Siam, never to return except for a brief interlude in the late sixteenth century. By this time however, the Khmer penchant for monument building had ceased. Older faiths such as Mahayana Buddhism and the Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
cult of the god-king had been supplanted by Theravada Buddhism, and the Cambodians had become part of the same religious and cultural cosmos as the Siamese. This similarity did not prevent intermittent warfare between the two kingdoms, however. During the sixteenth century Cambodian armies, taking advantage of Siamese troubles with the Burmese, unsuccessfully invaded the Siamese kingdom several times.
In the meantime, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, the few remaining Khmer survivors, with Siamese help, established a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh is the capital and largest city of Cambodia. Located on the banks of the Mekong River, Phnom Penh has been the national capital since the French colonized Cambodia, and has grown to become the nation's center of economic and industrial activities, as well as the center of security,...
. This new center of power was located at the confluence of the Mekong
Mekong
The Mekong is a river that runs through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is the world's 10th-longest river and the 7th-longest in Asia. Its estimated length is , and it drains an area of , discharging of water annually....
and the Tonle Sab rivers. Thus, it controlled the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms
Laos
Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...
and had access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade route
Trade route
A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long distance arteries which may further be connected to several smaller networks of commercial...
s that linked the China coast, the South China Sea
South China Sea
The South China Sea is a marginal sea that is part of the Pacific Ocean, encompassing an area from the Singapore and Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan of around...
, and the Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
. A new kind of state and society emerged, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor. The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
(1368–1644) provided lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who controlled royal trading monopolies. The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulated commerce.
King Ang Chan (1516–1566), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek
Lovek
Longvek was a city in ancient Cambodia, the capital city of the country after the sacking of Angkor by the Siamese in 1431. Little more than a village today in Kampong Chhnang Province, it lies just north of Oudong....
. Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians
Indonesians
Indonesians may be:*any nation or ethnic group of Indonesia**see Demographics of Indonesia**see Overseas Indonesians**see Ethnic groups in Indonesia**see Native Indonesians...
, Malays, Japanese
Japanese people
The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...
, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch
Dutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...
.
It was during this period (in 1555-1556) that the Portuguese friar
Friar
A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders.-Friars and monks:...
Gaspar da Cruz
Gaspar da Cruz
Gaspar da Cruz was a Portuguese Dominican friar born in Évora, who traveled to Asia and wrote one of the first detailed European accounts about China.-Biography:Gaspar da Cruz was admitted to the Order of Preachers convent of Azeitão...
made the first attempt to introduce Christianity into the country. According to his own account, his attempt was a complete failure due to the strong "Bramene
Hinduism
Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...
" conviction of the king and the ruling classes; however, the brief report he made of his mission offers an interesting insight into the nations' religious practices
Religion in Cambodia
Historically, Buddhism has been the dominant Religion in Cambodia, however before its introduction Hinduism also flourished. Roman Catholicism was introduced by French missionaries beginning in the eighteenth century...
of the time.
Because the representatives of practically all these nationalities were pirates, adventurers, or traders, this was an era of stormy cosmopolitanism. Hard-pressed by the Siamese, to repay his debts, King Sattha (1576–94) surrounded himself with a personal guard of Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries, and in 1593 asked the Spanish governor of the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
for aid. Attracted by the prospects of establishing a Spanish protectorate in Cambodia and of converting the monarch to Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, the governor sent a force of 120 men, but Lovek had already fallen to the Siamese when they arrived the following year. The Spanish took advantage of the extremely confused situation to place one of Sattha's sons on the throne in 1597. Hopes of making the country a Spanish dependency were dashed, however, when the Spaniards were massacred two years later by an equally belligerent contingent of Malay mercenaries.
The Siamese, however, had dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Siamese military governor in the city, a degree of foreign political control was established over the kingdom for the first time. Cambodian chronicles describe the fall of Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovered. Siam ruled Cambodia for most of the next 300 years, finally losing Angkor Wat to the French in 1907 after holding it for over 450 years.
Domination by Siam and by Vietnam
By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese - who, unlike other Southeast Asian peoples, had emerged from the Sinic civilization sphere- had completely absorbed the once most powerful maritime kingdom of Champa
Champa
The kingdom of Champa was an Indianized kingdom that controlled what is now southern and central Vietnam from approximately the 7th century through to 1832.The Cham people are remnants...
in central Vietnam. Thousands of Chams fled into Khmer
Khmer people
Khmer people are the predominant ethnic group in Cambodia, accounting for approximately 90% of the 14.8 million people in the country. They speak the Khmer language, which is part of the larger Mon–Khmer language family found throughout Southeast Asia...
territory. By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese had reached the Mekong Delta, which was inhabited by Khmer people. In 1620 the Khmer king Chey Chettha II
Chey Chettha II
Chey Chettha II was a king of Cambodia who reigned from Oudong, about 40 km northwest of modern-day Phnom Penh, from 1618 to 1628. He was the son of King Borommaracha VIII...
(1618–28) married a daughter of Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên, one of the Nguyễn lords (1558–1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the period of the Lê Dynasty
Lê Dynasty
The Later Lê Dynasty , sometimes referred to as the Lê Dynasty was the longest-ruling dynasty of Vietnam, ruling the country from 1428 to 1788, with a brief interruption....
(1428-1788). Three years later, Chey Chettha allowed the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor, near what is now Ho Chi Minh City
Ho Chi Minh City
Ho Chi Minh City , formerly named Saigon is the largest city in Vietnam...
(until 1975, Saigon). By the end of the seventeenth century, the region was under Vietnamese administrative control, and Cambodia was cut off from access to the sea. Trade with the outside world was possible only with Vietnamese permission.
There were periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, when Cambodia's neighbors were preoccupied with internal or external strife, that afforded the beleaguered country a breathing spell. The Vietnamese were involved in a lengthy civil war until 1672 (see the Trịnh–Nguyễn War for details), but upon its conclusion the Nguyễn Lords, who ruled in the south, promptly annexed sizable areas of Cambodian territory in the region of the Mekong Delta. For the next one hundred years they used the alleged mistreatment of Vietnamese colonists in the delta as a pretext for their continued expansion, as well as territorial concessions from inter-royalty marriage. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had extended their control to include the area encompassed in the late 1980s by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam).
Siam, which might otherwise have been courted as an ally against Vietnamese incursions in the eighteenth century, was itself involved in a new conflict with Burma. In 1767 the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya was besieged and destroyed. The Siamese quickly recovered, however, and soon reasserted their dominion over Cambodia. The youthful Khmer king, Ang Eng (1779–96), a refugee at the Siamese court, was installed as monarch at Odongk by Siamese troops. At the same time, Siam quietly annexed Cambodia's three northernmost provinces. In addition, the local rulers of the northwestern provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab (Siemreap) became vassals of the Siamese king, and these areas came under the Siamese sphere of influence.
A renewed struggle between Siam and Vietnam for control of Cambodia in the nineteenth century resulted in a period when Vietnamese officials, working through a puppet Cambodian king, ruled the central part of the country and attempted to force Cambodians to adopt Vietnamese customs. Several rebellions against Vietnamese rule ensued. The most important of these occurred in 1840 to 1841 and spread through much of the country. After two years of fighting
Siamese-Vietnamese War (1841-1845)
The 1841-1845 Siamese-Vietnamese War in Cambodia was a war between Viet Nam and Siam , triggered by Siam's attempt to expand its influence in Cambodia and to prevent its rival, Viet Nam, from territorial gains in the region at the expense of the declining Khmer Empire.After the unsuccessful attempt...
, Cambodia and its two neighbors reached an accord that placed the country under the joint suzerainty of Siam and Vietnam. However, fearful of a longer past dominated by Thai incursions, under a separate attempt, Cambodia offered to reside under Vietnamese protectorship. At the behest of both countries, a new monarch, Ang Duong
Ang Duong
Ang Duong was king of Cambodia.Ang Duong was younger son of king Ang Eng, who 1779-1797 was ruler of Cambodia at the then capital Oudong, by one of his Thai consorts, Ros, 'queen Vara' , whom he had taken as concubine in 1793 from Bangkok.He is regarded as the Great-King of Cambodia who...
(1848–59), ascended the throne and brought a decade of peace and relative independence to Cambodia.
In their arbitrary treatment of the Khmer population, the Siamese and the Vietnamese were virtually indistinguishable. The suffering and the dislocation caused by war were comparable in many ways to similar Cambodian experiences in the 1970s. But the Siamese and the Vietnamese had fundamentally different attitudes concerning their relationships with Cambodia. The Siamese shared with the Khmer a common religion, mythology, literature, and culture. The Chakri kings at Bangkok wanted Cambodia's loyalty, tribute and land, but they had no intention of challenging or changing its people's values or way of life. The Vietnamese viewed the Khmer people as barbarians to be civilized through exposure to Vietnamese culture, and they regarded the fertile Khmer lands as legitimate sites for colonization by settlers from Vietnam.
French Protectorate 1863-1953
France's interest in Indochina in the nineteenth century grew out of its rivalry with Britain, which had excluded it from India and had effectively shut it out of other parts of mainland Southeast Asia. The French also desired to establish commerce in a region that promised so much untapped wealth and to redress the Vietnamese state's persecution of Catholic converts, whose welfare was a stated aim of French overseas policy. The Nguyễn Dynasty's repeated refusal to establish diplomatic relations and the violently anti-Christian policies of the emperors Minh Mạng (1820–41), Thiệu Trị (1841–47), and Tự Đức (1848–83) impelled the French to engage in gunboat diplomacy that resulted, in 1862, in the establishment of French dominion over Saigon and over the three eastern provinces of the CochinchinaCochinchina
Cochinchina is a region encompassing the southern third of Vietnam whose principal city is Saigon. It was a French colony from 1862 to 1954. The later state of South Vietnam was created in 1954 by combining Cochinchina with southern Annam. In Vietnamese, the region is called Nam Bộ...
(Mekong Delta) region.
In the view of the government in Paris, Cambodia was a promising backwater. Persuaded by a missionary envoy to seek French protection against both the Thai and the Vietnamese, King Ang Duong invited a French diplomatic mission to visit his court. The Thai, however, pressured him to refuse to meet with the French when they finally arrived at Odongk in 1856. The much-publicized travels of the naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited the Cambodian court, rediscovered the ruins at Angkor, and journeyed up the Mekong River to the Laotian kingdom of Luang Prabang from 1859 to 1861, piqued French interest in the kingdom's alleged vast riches and in the value of the Mekong as a gateway to China's southwestern provinces. In August 1863, the French concluded a treaty with Ang Duong's successor, Norodom (1859–1904). This agreement afforded the Cambodian monarch French protection (in the form of a French official called a résident—in French resident) in exchange for giving the French rights to explore and to exploit the kingdom's mineral and forest resources. Norodom's coronation, in 1864, was an awkward affair at which both French and Thai representatives officiated. Although the Thai attempted to thwart the expansion of French influence, their own influence over the monarch steadily dwindled. In 1867 the French concluded a treaty with the Thai that gave the latter control of Batdambang Province and of Siemreab Province in exchange for their renunciation of all claims of suzerainty over other parts of Cambodia. Loss of the northwestern provinces deeply upset Norodom, but he was beholden to the French for sending military aid to suppress a rebellion by a royal pretender.
In June 1884, the French governor of Cochinchina went to Phnom Penh, Norodom's capital, and demanded approval of a treaty with Paris that promised far-reaching changes such as the abolition of slavery, the institution of private land ownership, and the establishment of French résidents in provincial cities. Mindful of a French gunboat anchored in the river, the king reluctantly signed the agreement. Local elites opposed its provisions, however, especially the one dealing with slavery, and they fomented rebellions throughout the country during the following year. Though the rebellions were suppressed, and the treaty was ratified, passive resistance on the part of the Cambodians postponed implementation of the reforms it embodied until after Norodom's death.