Cambodia
 

Overview
Country, Southeast Asia.

 

Area: 69,898 sq mi (181,035 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 13,327,000. Capital: Phnom Penh. The vast majority of the population belongs to the Khmer ethnic group. Language: Khmer (official). Religions: Buddhism (official); also traditional beliefs. Currency: riel. The landscape is dominated by large central plains; the Dangrek Mountains rise along the northern border. Cambodia lies largely in the basin of the Mekong River; the large lake Tonle Sap is in its western part. Much of the country is tropical forest. It is one of the world’s poorest countries. Agriculture employs about three-fourths of the workforce. Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses; its chief of state is the king, and its head of government is the prime minister. In the early centuries ad the area was under Hindu and, to a lesser extent, Buddhist influence. The Khmer state gradually spread in the early 8th century and reached its height under Jayavarman II and his successors in the 9th–12th centuries, when it ruled the Mekong valley and neighbouring states and built Angkor. Buddhism was widely adopted in the 13th century. From the 13th century the state was attacked by Annam and Tai (Siamese) city-states and was subject largely to Tai and Vietnamese hegemony. It became a French protectorate in 1863. It was occupied by the Japanese in World War II and became independent in 1954. Its borders were the scene of fighting in the Vietnam War from 1961, and in 1970 its northeastern and eastern areas were occupied by the North Vietnamese and penetrated by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. A bombing campaign in Cambodia by U.S. warplanes alienated much of the population, enabling the communist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot to seize power in 1975. Their regime of terror resulted in the deaths of at least 1.5 million Cambodians. Vietnam invaded in 1978 and drove the Khmer Rouge into the western hinterlands, but Cambodian infighting continued. A peace accord was reached by most Cambodian factions under UN auspices in 1991. Elections were held in 1993, and Norodom Sihanouk was restored to the monarchy. A civilian government slowly emerged under UN tutelage until 1997, when a coup by Hun Sen consolidated his position as prime minister. Hun Sen’s party won legislative elections in 1998; also that year, Cambodia became part of ASEAN.

 

Profile
Official name Preahreacheanachakr Kampuchea (Kingdom of Cambodia)
Form of government constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [611]; National Assembly [123])
Chief of state King
Head of government Prime Minister
Capital Phnom Penh
Official language Khmer
Official religion Buddhism
Monetary unit riel (KHR)
Population estimate (2008) 14,242,000
Total area (sq mi) 69,898
Total area (sq km) 181,035
1Includes 59 indirectly elected seats and 2 nonelected seats.
 

Main

country on the Indochinese mainland of Southeast Asia. Largely a land of plains and great rivers, Cambodia lies amid important overland and river trade routes linking China to India and Southeast Asia. The influences of many Asian cultures, alongside those of France and the United States, can be seen in the capital, Phnom Penh, one of a handful of urban centres in the largely rural country.

 

For 2,000 years Cambodia’s civilization absorbed influences from India and China and, in turn, transferred them to other Southeast Asian civilizations. From the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Funan and Chenla (1st–8th century) through the classical age of the Angkor period (9th–15th century), it held sway over territories that are now part of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The Khmer (Cambodian) empire reached its apex in the 12th century, a time marked by the construction of the massive temple complexes known as Angkor Wat and Bayon and the imperial capital of Angkor Thom. Following 400 years of decline, Cambodia became a French colony and during the 20th century experienced the turmoil of war, occupation by the Japanese, postwar independence, and political instability. Between 1975 and 1979 the country was devastated by the reign of the Khmer Rouge, a rural communist guerrilla movement. During the Khmer Rouge’s period of power, at least 1.5 million Cambodians were killed or died, a monumental tragedy from which the country still suffers.

Cambodia began the process of recovery under the Vietnam-backed regime of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979–89), and in the 1990s it regained political autonomy, reestablished a constitutional government, and subsequently instituted free elections. The Cambodian economy has steadily improved, and the country seems to be living by the words of the Cambodian proverb, "Fear not the future, weep not for the past."

 

Land
Cambodia, about one-third the size of France and somewhat larger than the U.S. state of Missouri, is bordered to the west and northwest by Thailand, to the northeast by Laos, to the east and southeast by Vietnam, and to the southwest by the Gulf of Thailand. The country’s maximum extent is about 280 miles (450 km) from north to south and 360 miles (580 km) from east to west.

Relief
Cambodia’s landscape is characterized by a low-lying central alluvial plain that is surrounded by uplands and low mountains and includes the Tonle Sap (Great Lake) and the upper reaches of the Mekong River delta. Extending outward from this central region are transitional plains, thinly forested and rising to elevations of about 650 feet (200 metres) above sea level. To the north the Cambodian plain abuts a sandstone escarpment, which forms a southward-facing cliff stretching more than 200 miles (320 km) from west to east and rising abruptly above the plain to heights of 600 to 1,800 feet (180 to 550 metres). This escarpment marks the southern limit of the Dangrek (Khmer: Dângrêk) Mountains. Flowing south through the country’s eastern regions is the Mekong River. East of the Mekong the transitional plains gradually merge with the eastern highlands, a region of forested mountains and high plateaus that extend into Laos and Vietnam. In southwestern Cambodia two distinct upland blocks, the Krâvanh (Cardamom) Mountains and the Dâmrei (Elephant) Mountains, form another highland region that covers much of the land area between the Tonle Sap and the Gulf of Thailand. In this remote and largely uninhabited area, Mount Aôral, Cambodia’s highest peak, rises to an elevation of 5,949 feet (1,813 metres). The southern coastal region adjoining the Gulf of Thailand is a narrow lowland strip, heavily wooded and sparsely populated, which is isolated from the central plain by the southwestern highlands.

Drainage
The two dominant hydrological features of Cambodia are the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap. Rising in the Plateau of Tibet and emptying into the South China Sea, the Mekong enters Cambodia from Laos at the Khone Falls and flows generally southward to the border with Vietnam, a distance within Cambodia of approximately 315 miles (510 km). The Mekong is connected to the Tonle Sap by the Sab River. During the rainy season (mid-May to early October), the Mekong’s enormous volume of water backs up into the Sab and flows up into the Tonle Sap 65 miles (105 km) to the northwest, expanding the lake’s surface area from a dry-season minimum of 1,200 square miles (3,100 square km) to a rainy-season maximum of more than 3,000 square miles (7,800 square km). As the water level of the Mekong falls during the dry season, the process is reversed: water drains from the Tonle Sap back down into the Mekong, switching the direction of its flow. As a result of this annual phenomenon, the Tonle Sap is one of the world’s richest sources of freshwater fish.

Soils
Most of Cambodia’s soils are sandy and poor in nutrients. The so-called red-soil areas in the eastern part of the country, however, are suitable for commercial crops such as rubber and cotton. The annual flooding of the Mekong during the rainy season deposits a rich alluvial sediment that accounts for the fertility of the central plain and provides natural irrigation for rice cultivation.

Climate
Cambodia’s climate is governed by the monsoon winds, which define two major seasons. From mid-May to early October, the strong prevailing winds of the southwest monsoon bring heavy rains and high humidity. From early November to mid-March, the lighter and drier winds of the northeast monsoon bring variable cloudiness, infrequent precipitation, and lower humidity. The weather between these seasons is transitional. Maximum temperatures are high throughout the year, ranging from about 82 to 83 °F (28 °C) in January, the coolest month, to about 95 °F (35 °C) in April. Annual precipitation varies considerably throughout the country, from more than 200 inches (5,000 mm) on the seaward slopes of the southwestern highlands to about 50–55 inches (1,270–1,400 mm) in the central lowland region. Three-fourths of the annual rainfall occurs during the months of the southwest monsoon.

Plant and animal life
Although much of Cambodia is heavily forested, the central lowland region is covered with rice paddies, fields of dry crops such as corn (maize) and tobacco, tracts of tall grass and reeds, and thinly wooded areas. Savanna grassland predominates in the transitional plains, with the grasses reaching a height of 5 feet (1.5 metres). In the eastern highlands the high plateaus are covered with grasses and deciduous forests. Broad-leaved evergreen forests grow in the mountainous areas to the north, with trees 100 feet (30 metres) high emerging from thick undergrowths of vines, rattans, palms, bamboos, and assorted woody and herbaceous ground plants. In the southwestern highlands, open forests of pines are found at the higher elevations, while the rain-drenched seaward slopes are blanketed with virgin rainforests growing to heights of 150 feet (45 metres) or more. Vegetation along the coastal strip ranges from evergreen forests to nearly impenetrable mangroves.

The northeastern forests of Cambodia—like the neighbouring areas of Laos and Vietnam—once sheltered large populations of wild animals such as elephants, wild oxen, rhinoceroses, and several species of deer, but the loss of forest cover, combined with warfare and unregulated hunting in the region, sharply reduced those numbers. Small populations of most of these species may still be found, along with some tigers, leopards, bears, and many small mammals. Among the more common birds are herons, cranes, grouse, pheasant, peafowl, pelicans, cormorants, egrets, and wild ducks. Four varieties of snakes are especially dangerous: the Indian cobra, the king cobra, the banded krait, and Russell’s viper.

People
Ethnic groups
The Khmer (Cambodians) account for the vast majority of the population, producing a homogeneity unique in Southeast Asia that has encouraged a strong sense of national identity. Ethnic minorities include Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslim Cham-Malays, Laotians, and various indigenous peoples of the rural highlands.

The Khmer, who belong to the Mon-Khmer ethnolinguistic group, are concentrated in the lowland regions surrounding the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap, on the transitional plain, and along the coast. The product of centuries of intricate cultural and ethnic blending, the Khmer moved southward before 200 bc into the fertile Mekong delta from the Khorat Plateau of what is now Thailand. They were exposed to successive waves of Indian influence and, in the 8th century ad, to Indo-Malayan influence, perhaps including immigration from Java. Immigrations of Tai peoples occurred from the 10th to the 15th century, of Vietnamese beginning in the 17th century, and of Chinese in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Among the ethnic minorities in Cambodia before 1975, the Chinese were the most important, for they controlled the country’s economic life. They were shunted aside in the communist-led revolution of the 1970s and made to become ordinary peasants. Those who did not seek refuge abroad after 1975 and others who subsequently returned regained some of their former influence as urban centres were revived.

The Vietnamese minority occupied a somewhat lower status than the Chinese, and most of them fled or were repatriated to Vietnam after 1970. In the 1980s, however, a large number of Vietnamese migrants, many of them former residents of Cambodia, settled in the country. Centuries of mutual dislike and distrust have clouded Vietnamese-Khmer relations, and intermarriage has been infrequent.

The next most important minority after the Vietnamese is the Cham-Malay group. Known in Cambodia as Khmer Islam or Western Cham, the Cham-Malay group also maintained a high degree of ethnic homogeneity and was discriminated against under the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. Receiving only slightly better treatment than the Khmer Islam during that period were the smaller communities of indigenous peoples. These communities, known collectively as Khmer Loeu (“Upland Khmer”), include the Katu, Mnong, Stieng, Jarai, and Rhadé, among others, and inhabit the sparsely populated northeastern provinces bordering Vietnam and Laos.

Languages
The Khmer language is one of the major tongues of the Mon-Khmer subfamily of the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by nearly all people in Cambodia, including the Cham-Malay. Smaller numbers speak Vietnamese and dialects of Chinese. The Katu, Mnong, and Stieng speak Mon-Khmer languages, while the Jarai and Rhadé speak languages of the Austronesian language family.

Religion
Most ethnic Khmer are Theravada (Hinayana) Buddhists (i.e., belonging to the older and more traditional of the two great schools of Buddhism, the other school being Mahayana). Until 1975 Buddhism was officially recognized as the state religion of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, all religious practices were forbidden. The pro-Vietnamese communist regime that ruled Cambodia in the 1980s encouraged Buddhism in a limited way, and Theravada Buddhism was restored as Cambodia’s state religion in 1993. Almost 20 years of neglect have been difficult to reverse, however, and the religion has not regained the popularity and prestige that it had before 1975. Nonetheless, the social and psychological characteristics often ascribed to the Khmer—individualism, conservatism, patience, gentleness, and lack of concern for material wealth—represent Buddhist ideals toward which Cambodians, especially in rural areas, continue to aspire. Buddhist precepts, however, do not permeate Cambodian education and ideology as strongly as they did before 1975.

Minority populations are not Theravada Buddhists. Khmer Loeu groups generally follow local religions, while ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese are eclectic, following Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism. Many Vietnamese are members of the Roman Catholic Church or of such syncretic Vietnamese religious movements as Cao Dai. The Cham minority is Muslim, generally of the Sunni branch. More recently, thousands have converted to Evangelical Protestantism, particularly urban Khmer.

Settlement patterns
Cambodia has always been overwhelmingly a land of villages. Only a small fraction of the total population has ever lived in a town of more than 10,000 inhabitants. Since the 1920s most of these urban dwellers have been concentrated in Phnom Penh, which is situated at the confluence of the Mekong, Basăk (Bassac), and Sab rivers. Some four-fifths of the population still live in rural areas, the remainder being classified as urban.

Rural settlement
Until the mid-1970s, the vast majority of Cambodia’s people inhabited the central lowland region, where the rural village was second only to the family as the basic social unit. The typical Khmer family consisted of a married couple and their unmarried children. Both sons and daughters usually left the parental home after marriage to establish their own households. Most Cambodian villages in those days were made up of ethnically homogeneous people and had a population of fewer than 300 persons. The village (phum) was part of a commune or community (khum) with which it shared one or more Buddhist temples (wat), an elementary school, and several small shops. Cambodian villages usually developed in a linear pattern along waterways and roads, but houses were also often found on largely self-contained paddy farms. Houses in Cambodia were generally built on wooden pilings and had thatched roofs, walls of palm matting, and floors of woven bamboo strips resting on bamboo joists. Houses for the more-prosperous, while still on pilings, were built of wood and had tile or metal roofs.

There were a few large landowners in Cambodia until, under the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea, they were forced off their land and into collectives in 1975 and made to live as ordinary peasants; hardly any of these people reemerged after decollectivization in the 1980s. Before collectivization, villagers typically owned and worked enough land to provide for their families and generate small surpluses that could be converted into cash to buy additional goods or to pay taxes. Landholdings tended to be small in the crowded south-central regions of the country. During the 1960s the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk was successful in colonizing frontier regions, especially in the northwest, with army veterans or poor farmers from more-crowded parts of the country. These programs, however, did not significantly alter Cambodian settlement patterns.

Throughout rural Cambodia, lifestyle was attuned to the agricultural cycle, which was based in large part on family-oriented subsistence farming. Family members were awake before dawn, and most of the day’s work was accomplished before noon, although minor tasks were performed in the cool of the early evening. Electricity has always been rare in village areas, and country people were generally asleep soon after sunset. During the rice-growing season, all family members worked together in the fields, as the work of planting, transplanting, and harvesting had to be done quickly. Farmers had no access to agricultural machinery, and the work of several people was needed to grow enough rice to feed a family for a year. Because paddy farming required intensive labour, obligations would build up among families within a village during the agricultural season. Festivals and marriages, celebrated by a whole village, were usually held after the rice had been harvested and money had been obtained from selling the surplus grain.

Urban settlement
The urban areas of Cambodia emerged in their present form in the early 20th century, during the French colonial period, as commercial and administrative centres serving their surrounding rural regions. Most of them were located at the intersections of land or river routes and were relatively accessible to the areas they served. Phnom Penh (phnom means “hill”; Penh is a woman’s name) is Cambodia’s single metropolis, and its population fluctuations since the 1960s reflect the country’s recent history. Before the outbreak of war in 1970, it held about 500,000 people, but its population by 1975, then swollen with refugees, numbered some 2,000,000. Phnom Penh was virtually abandoned during the Democratic Kampuchea period, but people began returning to the city in 1979. Its population has grown rapidly since then, exceeding its 1970 level by the late 1980s and surpassing 1,000,000 by the start of the 21st century. Other cities, such as Bătdâmbâng and Kâmpóng Cham, are considerably smaller than Phnom Penh.

Demographic trends
Cambodia’s first national census as an independent country, taken in 1962, reported a population of about 5,700,000. Subsequent population figures are exceedingly difficult to determine because of the enormous number of people who died or were displaced in the years after 1970. After some stability returned in the 1990s, a second national census, conducted in 1998, indicated that the population was double its 1962 level. Since that time, the country’s population has continued to expand at a rate above the world average. In common with many developing countries, children under age 15 constitute the largest group, but the age distribution is becoming more balanced as the country continues to recover from its losses under the Khmer Rouge regime.

The war and social revolution of the 1970s, and the country’s subsequent political and economic disruption, also seriously affected the geographic distribution of Cambodia’s population. Between 1975 and 1978, hundreds of thousands of urban people were forcibly moved into rural areas to cultivate rice and to dig and maintain extensive irrigation works. Following the upheaval, towns and cities began again to grow, and most have regained or surpassed their pre-1970 population levels. However, the unrest of the 1970s led more than 300,000 Cambodians to emigrate. Of these, more than half (some 179,000) went to the United States, more than 50,000 to France, and 45,000 to Australia. Several thousand Cham were resettled in Malaysia in the 1980s. An additional 300,000 people who had sought shelter in refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s were repatriated to Cambodia in 1993–94 under the provisions of a 1991 peace agreement between the Cambodian government and what had been its political opponents.

Economy
Even before 1975, Cambodia’s economy was one of the least-developed in Southeast Asia. It depended heavily on two major products—rice and rubber—and consequently was vulnerable to annual fluctuations caused by vagaries in the weather and world market prices. Agriculture dominated the economy, with most rural families engaged in rice cultivation. Although the tradition of landownership was strong, family landholdings were relatively small, and the rural population was largely self-sufficient. Two and a half acres (one hectare) of rice paddy provided for the needs of a family of five people, and supplementary requirements were traditionally satisfied by fishing, cultivating fruit and vegetables, and raising livestock. Famine was rare in Cambodia, but the self-sufficiency of the rural family produced a conservatism that resisted government efforts before 1975 to modernize the country’s agricultural methods.

The pro-Vietnamese government that came to power in 1979 dismantled the collectivized agriculture that had been savagely imposed on a national scale by Democratic Kampuchea in 1975–79, but partial collectivization remained an ideal of the new regime, as it did in neighbouring Vietnam, in an attempt to improve efficiency. Voluntary cooperative groupings called krom samaki subsequently replaced collective farms in many areas, but the vast majority of Cambodian farming continued to be carried out by family units growing crops for subsistence and small surpluses for cash or barter. A law enacted in 1989 permitted Cambodians to buy and sell real estate for the first time. An immediate effect of the law was a speculative boom in urban areas and an increase in investment, particularly in Phnom Penh. In rural areas laws were also implemented that restored traditional rights of land tenure and inheritance.

In 1992–93, during a brief United Nations protectorate, the economies of Phnom Penh and Bătdâmbâng were fueled by foreign speculation in land and short-term, foreign-financed construction. Tourism became (and has remained) a major source of national revenue, but the rural economy has continued to be hampered by poor communications, bad weather, widespread poverty and disease, and often outdated and inefficient farming techniques. Although per capita income has been rising, it has remained among the world’s lowest.

The country’s external debt also increased sharply during the 1990s, and foreign aid continues to be a major source of revenue. Most of the international donors, the leader of which is Japan, have used aid to pressure the Cambodian government to carry out reforms aimed at promoting economic development and democratization. Donors have targeted funding at particular areas such as refugee repatriation and resettlement, education and training, health and sanitation, agriculture, and community development. Creditors have rescheduled and in some cases canceled repayment of loans, but they have also cut aid disbursements when they have disagreed with government policies or actions.

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Agriculture remains the most important sector of the Cambodian economy in terms of its share of the gross domestic product (GDP), and it employs the vast majority of the workforce. Rice is Cambodia’s major crop, its principal food, and, in times of peace, its most important export commodity. Rice is grown on most of the country’s total cultivated land area. The principal rice regions surround the Mekong and the Tonle Sap, with particularly intensive cultivation in Bătdâmbâng, Kâmpóng Cham, Takêv, and Prey Vêng provinces.

Cambodia traditionally has produced only one rice crop per year because it has lacked the extensive irrigation system needed for double-cropping. Under traditional patterns of agriculture, planting normally begins in July or August, and the harvest period extends from November to January. Where there is little irrigation, the amount of rainfall determines the size and quality of the crop.

The government of Democratic Kampuchea made great efforts to build irrigation systems throughout the country. The results occasionally were notable, and in a few parts of the country farmers were able to grow two or, more rarely, three crops of rice per year. In some cases the irrigation works were poorly conceived and hastily built, and they soon collapsed. Most of those that survived were abandoned after 1979. Another significant problem is that millions of land mines remain in Cambodian fields from the years of warfare; this has severely restricted the amount of land available for cultivation.

In addition to rice, other food products include cassava, corn (maize), sugarcane, soybeans, and coconuts. The principal fruit crops, all of which are consumed locally, include bananas, oranges, and mangoes, and are supplemented by a variety of other tropical fruits, including breadfruits, mangosteens, and papayas.

Cattle, particularly water buffalo, are used principally as draft animals in the rice paddies and fields. Hog production has also played a large role in agriculture. Efforts to replenish the number of livestock—depleted by years of war—have been hampered by uncertain social conditions and the prevalence of animal diseases.

About three-fourths of Cambodia was forested in 1970, but by the early 21st century that portion had decreased to roughly half, with Cambodia carrying one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. The provinces bordering Thailand and Vietnam continue to be logged by large companies to whom the government has granted concessions, as well as by smaller entrepreneurs, many of whom do not obtain official permits. Illegal logging is a persistent and serious problem despite efforts to curb it.

Fisheries are important in the domestic economy. Fish in its various forms—fresh, dried, smoked, and salted—constitutes the most important source of protein in the Cambodian diet, and subsistence fishing is part of every farmer’s activity. The annual freshwater catch includes perch, carp, lungfish, and smelt. For larger-scale fishing, the government sells two-year leases to harvest segments of the Tonle Sap and inland rivers. Revenues from these sales have been significant at times, but the program has been fraught with corruption. Overfishing and environmental degradation around Tonle Sap have decreased the fish supply and driven up prices, and the sustainability of freshwater fisheries has become a matter of public concern.

Resources and power
Cambodia has few known mineral resources. Some limestone and phosphate deposits are found in Kâmpôt province, and precious stones are mined in Bătdâmbâng province. Cambodia’s small quantities of iron and coal have not justified commercial exploitation. Most electric power is generated at thermal plants fired by imported oil. Hydroelectric generation from facilities along the Mekong and its tributaries is being rapidly expanded and provides the remainder of the country’s electricity. Prospecting by foreign firms for petroleum and natural gas at offshore areas adjacent to sites being exploited by Vietnam has yielded sizeable deposits.

Manufacturing
Until the mid-1990s, industrial development in Cambodia remained at a low level, contributing a relatively small portion of the gross domestic product (GDP). Efforts had been made to build a modest industrial base suitable for domestic needs, and timber processing and rice milling, which were important before 1975, were revived in the 1980s. Toward the end of the 20th century, however, plants were established to produce soft drinks, paper, cigarettes, building materials, cement, and cotton textiles. Although Cambodia’s industrial sector initially found it difficult to compete with mass-produced goods from the more economically developed countries of the region, those countries have invested heavily in Cambodian garment factories, and manufacturing has contributed an increasingly significant proportion of annual GDP.

Finance
Cambodia’s commercial banking system was established in 1989–90. It is headed by the National Bank of Cambodia, which functions as the central bank and issues the national currency, the riel. The Foreign Trade Bank, originally established to manage commercial relations with other communist countries, facilitates the financing of the country’s commercial activities. Most other banks are either foreign-owned or joint ventures with a foreign partner; the first of these ventures was established in 1992 between the central bank and the Siam Commercial Bank. Foreign bank branches are concentrated in Phnom Penh. The remaining banks are small, private entities, many of which are suspected of engaging in money laundering in connection with regional drug trafficking.

The banking system actually plays only a minor role in public or private finance. Most of the population has little contact with banks, preferring instead to put their limited savings into gold or U.S. dollars. Rather than use the credit services offered by banks, small-scale business owners and farmers borrow from relatives, business associations, shopkeepers, or other nonfinancial entities and are often charged exorbitant interest rates.

The government has encouraged foreign investment, particularly through legislation providing tax incentives for foreigners, which has increased capital flow into the country. Hotel construction has intensified, as has foreign investment in the garment industry. Investor confidence, however, has continued to be restrained because of concerns about political instability.

Trade
Cambodia’s trading pattern has changed dramatically since the mid-1980s, when what was then the Soviet Union virtually dominated Cambodia’s trade. The country’s main import sources now are Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore; most exports go to the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Goods are freely smuggled between Cambodia and Thailand, and large volumes of Cambodian imports are undocumented and untaxed. Consequently, trade figures are difficult to interpret. This understood, major retained imports include investment-related products, petroleum products, and durable consumer goods. Until the late 1990s, re-export of imported goods such as cigarettes, motor vehicles, electronics, and gold accounted for the bulk of Cambodia’s external trade. Since then, garments have eclipsed all other commodities to constitute the bulk of Cambodia’s exports. Sawn timber, logs, and rubber, once central to Cambodia’s economy, continue to be exported—legitimately—in small quantities.

The success of free trading zones established at the ports of Kâmpôt and Krŏng Kaôh Kŏng in the late 1980s for trade with Thailand and Singapore led to the expansion and legalization of cross-border trade with Thailand. In 1999 Cambodia became a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and in 2004 the country joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). Both initiatives required implementing reciprocal tariff reductions and other trade legislation, some of which have posed a perennial challenge to the national budget. The country has long had chronic balance-of-trade deficits.

Services
The most important service activity in Cambodia is associated with tourism, which is one of the major sources of overseas investment and the fastest-growing segment of the economy. Tourism has become an important source of revenue and foreign exchange and has helped mitigate the effects of large trade deficits. Much of this investment goes into constructing hotels, developing resorts, and enhancing facilities serving tourists visiting Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh. The number of tourists has been increasing and diversifying. While the first visitors were primarily from socialist countries, Japan, and other parts of Asia, many tourists now arrive from France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other areas predominantly in Europe and North America.

Labour and taxation
Most Cambodians in the workforce are still engaged in agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Foreign investment is essential to job creation in Cambodia. Concerns among foreign investors about political instability and corruption have resulted in limited foreign capital inflows and only slow improvements in job opportunities. An additional obstacle to foreign investment and job creation has been the country’s lack of a trained and experienced labour force possessing the desired productive skills. Despite these problems, the new garment factories around Phnom Penh have become an important source of manufacturing employment, especially for women. The proportion of women in the labour force—more than half of the total—is one of the largest in the world, an imbalance created in part by the massive destruction of men during the period of Khmer Rouge rule. By law, women are guaranteed equal rights, but traditional views of the proper role of women have prevented women from entering senior management positions in business.

A 1992 law permitted the formation of labour unions. The three main labour federations are the Cambodian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, the Cambodian Union Federation, and the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia. The unions have been ineffective largely because the government has determined public-sector wages, and private-sector employers have set wages based on market conditions, unrestrained by union activities. Wages are usually so low that most workers hold more than one job.

The most-important sources of tax revenue in Cambodia have been consumption taxes and customs duties. In 1993 all tax collection and government spending was centralized and placed under the control of the Ministry of Finance, replacing the previous system that allowed individual ministries to assess taxes and spend the resulting revenues. Tax collection subsequently became more effective, and tax revenues increased. During that period new tax policies, instituted to encourage domestic and international investment, provided for lower corporate taxes, tax exemptions of up to eight years for companies in industrial sectors assigned priority status by the government, no taxes on reinvested profits, and tax exemptions on imported capital equipment intended for export-oriented production.

Transportation and telecommunications
Cambodia’s inland waterways and road systems constitute the main transportation routes, although they are invariably affected during the rainy season, when floods cause heavy accumulations of silt and washouts. Railroads rank third in significance. Domestic shipping and civil air facilities are limited, and maritime commerce is carried out almost exclusively by foreign vessels.

The road system eventually surpassed the country’s inland waterways as the principal means for moving cargo and passengers. The network was originally designed and constructed by the French during the protectorate period to link the agricultural hinterland with the port of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, Viet.). Consequently, the system did not serve Cambodia as a whole. Extensive land tracts in the northern, northeastern, and southwestern parts of the country were without roads. Of the total road network, only a small portion has been paved; other roads have been surfaced with crushed stone, gravel, or laterite or have been simply graded without being paved.

Roads and bridges deteriorated sharply during the Democratic Kampuchea period and the civil war that followed. Funds and equipment for repairs were not available, and after 1979 most roads were mined or cut by guerrillas hostile to the government in Phnom Penh. Especially in the 1990s, repairing Cambodia’s road network was a high priority for the United Nations and was a focus of foreign-aid efforts by other countries, especially Japan. The country’s longest bridge, traversing the Sab River at Phnom Penh, was destroyed in 1975, rebuilt with Japanese assistance, and reopened in 1997. Cambodia’s first bridge over the Mekong River was completed in 2001. Located about 45 miles (75 km) northeast of Phnom Penh, it has greatly facilitated travel between the eastern and western parts of the country.

Cambodia has some 1,200 miles (1,900 km) of inland waterways, of which the great bulk are part of the Mekong and Tonle Sap systems. Phnom Penh, located on the Mekong River about 200 miles (320 km) from its mouth, can be reached by vessels with drafts of less than 13 feet (4 metres). North of Phnom Penh, the Mekong is navigable to Krâchéh for rivercraft, but rapids and winding channels in the section between Krâchéh and the border with Laos generally preclude commercial navigation.

Kâmpóng Saôm (Sihanoukville), on the Gulf of Thailand, is Cambodia’s only maritime port. Completed in 1960, it can provide unrestricted anchorage for oceangoing ships. The port is of strategic importance to Cambodia, and the area has undergone considerable industrial development. A paved four-lane highway links Kâmpóng Saôm with Phnom Penh.

The railroad system is owned and operated by the Cambodian government. One line, completed prior to World War II, connects Phnom Penh with the Thai frontier and facilitates the movement of milled rice from the western provinces of Bătdâmbâng, Poŭthĭsăt, and Kâmpóng Chhnăng. Another line, completed in 1969, connects Phnom Penh with Kâmpóng Saôm.

Cambodia has two international airports, the newest of which opened in Siĕmréab (Siem Reap) in 2002. In 2003 a new terminal was added to the older airport in Pochentong (near Phnom Penh). These facilities constitute the hubs of domestic, regional, and international service.

Telecommunications have been developing slowly in Cambodia. In regional comparisons, the country lags far behind its neighbours in the number of telephone main lines as a proportion of population and is near the bottom in the proportion of cellular phone users per capita. There are telephone exchange centres in all major towns, and the number of telephone main lines is increasing (though cellular phones now vastly outnumber telephone main lines). Internet usage is also increasing, but the number of people with access is still small.

Government and society
Constitutional framework
In 1981 the Vietnam-backed communist government in Phnom Penh established a government based on a new constitution. This government was opposed by three factions that in 1982 formed a coalition government-in-exile. Though this coalition was unable to rule in Cambodia, it gained international recognition, held onto Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations (UN), and was able to negotiate with the Phnom Penh government.

In 1991 the government and opposition groups signed peace accords that provided for the creation of a new national government. The UN established a transitional authority to oversee the implementation of the accords, including elections in 1993 that formed a coalition government led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. A new constitution was adopted in September that restored the pre-1970 Kingdom of Cambodia, though now as a constitutional monarchy and a multiparty liberal democracy. Sihanouk immediately ascended the throne under the new constitution.

Under the constitution, the king, who is the head of state, is chosen from among royal descendants by the Throne Council. In 2004 King Sihanouk decided to abdicate, and Prince Norodom Sihamoni was selected to succeed him.

Cambodia’s legislature has been bicameral since 1999, with the directly elected National Assembly as its lower chamber and the indirectly elected (by commune councilors) Senate as its upper chamber. Members of parliament serve five-year terms. Executive power resides with the cabinet, headed by a prime minister—who is chosen by the king, based on the recommendation of the chairman of the National Assembly, from the representatives of the party with the largest number of seats in the assembly. The remaining government ministers are selected from all parties represented in the assembly.

Local government
Local government, at the highest level, consists of provinces and municipalities. Each province (khet) is headed by a governor and is divided into districts (srok), communes (khum), and villages (phum). Each municipality (krong) is led by a mayor and is subdivided into sectors (khan) and wards (sangkat). At each level of local government, a People’s Assembly, composed of representatives elected by popular vote, chooses a People’s Committee that has formal responsibility within the locality for public administration and security. Within each province, effective control over the armed forces and security units, the civil bureaucracy, and tax collection is in the hands of the governor and provincial officials.

Justice
The country has a constitutionally independent judiciary composed of lower courts, an appeals court, and a Supreme Court. However, the judiciary has been closely allied with Cambodia’s ruling party and often has been suspected of corruption. A nine-member Constitutional Council determines the constitutionality of legislation. It also resolves electoral disputes. The Supreme Council of Magistrates appoints and disciplines judges. There is also a separate military justice system.

Political process
The three most important political parties in Cambodia are the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the FUNCINPEC Party, and the Sam Rainsy Party. The CPP is a noncommunist party descended from the pro-Vietnam and communist Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party. The FUNCINPEC Party is composed of the royalist supporters of the former king Norodom Sihanouk and his son Prince Ranariddh (although the latter was removed from the party in 2006). These two parties hold the largest number of seats in both legislative houses and form the governing coalition. The Sam Rainsy Party, founded in 1995 as the Khmer National Party and given its current name in 1998, is the third largest party and constitutes the official opposition.

The 1993 constitution provides for universal suffrage for citizens 18 years and older, and all citizens 25 years and older have the right to hold elective office. Few women hold governmental positions in either the National Assembly or the civil service.

Security
The king is the commander in chief of the armed forces, called the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), which include the army, navy, and air force. The RCAF was created in 1993 through the merger of the Cambodian government’s military forces and the two noncommunist resistance armies; the Khmer Rouge and royalist forces were absorbed into the RCAF in 1999. The army is much larger than the other two branches and is staffed mainly through conscription.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Cambodia was at peace, but its proportionally large armed forces imposed an enormous burden on national resources. The government has tried to reduce the size of its army by seeking funds from foreign countries to compensate demobilized soldiers, but donors have been reluctant to make such expenditures at the expense of the projects to rebuild Cambodia’s infrastructure that have been the main focus of foreign aid.

Health and welfare
Cambodia has long had an acute shortage of medical personnel, which has been a major obstacle to implementing an effective public health program. Phnom Penh has the country’s best health care facilities and trained medical personnel, whereas most rural areas are served only by local infirmaries. Even before the civil war of 1970–75, Cambodia had few doctors, hospitals, or medical facilities. The civil war strained and eroded this fragile structure. The rulers of Democratic Kampuchea moved medical personnel to collective farms and, as part of its policy of self-reliance, encouraged non-Western medical practices based on the use of local herbs.

Providing adequate health care has remained a serious problem since 1979. Scarce funds, unsettled conditions in the country, poor sanitation, and a shortage of medicine have contributed to high incidences of diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and pneumonia. Adding to this, tens of thousands of Cambodians have been maimed by land mines, but only a fraction of them have received proper medical attention. However, this issue has received widespread worldwide attention, and considerable international effort has been made to clear land mines and to provide prosthetic limbs for land-mine victims.

Another issue seriously affecting Cambodia is HIV/AIDS. By the late 1990s, HIV infection and AIDS cases had peaked at epidemic levels in urban areas. The government subsequently implemented programs among commercial sex workers to promote mandatory condom use and to treat sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, international organizations set up programs to treat those infected and to care for children orphaned by the epidemic. These initiatives had significantly reduced the proportion of the population infected with the virus by the early 21st century.

Housing
Prior to 1975, housing in Cambodia was comparable in quality to that of other Southeast Asian countries. The evacuation of Phnom Penh and other cities in 1975–76, however, left urban residential structures abandoned and produced tremendous housing pressures in the rural areas, where many people lived in temporary shelters. Overcrowding increased dramatically in Phnom Penh as people started returning to urban areas. Some people have lived in squatter huts built on the rooftops of buildings in the downtown area. The municipal government, with the cooperation of community groups and with the support of the national government and international agencies, has been trying to construct more residential units.

In rural areas more than half of residential structures are built using bamboo, thatch, grass, reeds, and similar materials. In urban areas the majority of residential buildings are constructed of wood, concrete, brick, stone, metal sheets, and tiles. About one-third of all urban residences have access to safe drinking water, electricity as their main source of lighting, and indoor toilet facilities; the proportion of houses with these facilities in the rural areas is far smaller.

Education
Cambodia’s educational system, as it had developed in the first 70 years of the 20th century, was another casualty of warfare and ideology. Only primary schools were open during the Democratic Kampuchea period; older students attended irregularly scheduled political and technical courses, often held in the communes. After 1979 the government in Phnom Penh gave high priority to primary education, and it reopened secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Although a large number of young Khmer attend some form of educational institution, schools and colleges are severely hampered by shortages of funds, books, equipment, and adequately trained and compensated staff. Less than half the students enrolled in primary school proceed beyond the fifth grade. The overwhelming majority of students at the country’s main institutions of higher education are male. Some four-fifths of males and three-fifths of females are literate, although some studies have indicated that functional illiteracy is increasing.

Cultural life
Before 1970, Cambodian culture and artistic expression were informed by the greatness of the past. The Khmer empire owed much to Indian influence, but its achievements also represented original contributions to Asian civilization. The magnificent architecture and sculpture of the Angkor period (802–1432), as seen in the temple complexes at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, marked a high point of Khmer creativity. Following the capture of Angkor by the Tai (15th century) and the crumbling of the empire, the region underwent four centuries of foreign invasions, civil war, and widespread depopulation. It was not until the establishment of the French protectorate in 1863 that internal security was restored, the country’s borders stabilized, and efforts undertaken to revive traditional Khmer art forms. After Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953, the government placed particular emphasis on accelerating that revival. This coincided with the rapid expansion of primary and secondary school facilities and the emergence of education as the most important factor of social mobility.

The leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, inspired in large part by the People’s Republic of China, subordinated culture to its own interpretations of Marxist-Leninist doctrines. The government in Phnom Penh after 1979, however, made serious efforts to restore such traditional forms of artistic expression as Cambodian classical music, ballet, and popular theatre. Foreign aid from India and Poland was used to clean and maintain some of the temples at Angkor, which had suffered from years of vandalism and neglect. Those aspects of high culture have had to compete for people’s attention with popular music and videotapes imported from Hong Kong, Thailand, and elsewhere.

Daily life and social customs
The sharp contrasts that have long existed between urban and rural Cambodians have broken down to some extent. This process began in the 1970s with the displacement of more than two million Cambodians from their urban homes, and it continued with the reoccupation of urban areas after 1979 by many who originally had lived in rural regions. After 1990 these changes were accelerated by the near ubiquity of television sets in rural areas—albeit in villages, rather than in individual homes—and by the penetration of globalization into the countryside. The pace of life, however, continues to be much faster in Cambodia’s larger cities than elsewhere in the country. Although Cambodia is impoverished, urban people tend to be better off than farmers. Salaried employment in government, industry, and Cambodia’s rapidly expanding service sector allows many city dwellers to own cars and motorcycles, eat fast food, and enjoy a vibrant nightlife. Outside of Phnom Penh, however, rural Cambodians largely rely on bicycles, oxcarts, and sporadic public transportation, and organized evening entertainment is infrequent.

Food shortages, a part of daily life in the past, have become less common with political stability and international aid. The Cambodian rural diet, however, tends to be rather monotonous, based almost solely on rice and fish. Variation comes with the garnishes used: hot peppers, mint, lemongrass, ginger, prahoc (a spiced fish paste), and red curry paste. A popular dish is ka tieu, a soup usually made with pork and rice noodles. Cambodian cuisine makes use of mangoes, papayas, bananas, durians, and other locally grown fruits.

Cambodians both rural and urban celebrate distinctive festivals and holidays such as January 7 (victory over Pol Pot), Bonn Chaul Chhnam (Khmer New Year; mid-April), Paris Peace Agreement Day (October 23), and Bonn Om Touk (Water and Moon Festival; early November), which marks the annual flow reversal of the Tonle Sap.

The arts
Music and dance forms
Music occupied a dominant place in traditional Cambodian culture. It was sung and played everywhere—by children at play, by adults at work, by young men and women while courting—and invariably was part of the many celebrations and festivals that took place throughout the year at Buddhist temples in the countryside. Traditional music ensembles, distinguished in part by their instrumentation, included various combinations of wooden flutes and reed instruments, bowed and plucked lutes, struck zithers, xylophones and metallophones, kong vong gong circles, and drums of different sizes. The players followed the lead of one instrument, often the xylophone, and improvised their own parts building from a pool of conventional melodic and rhythmic formulae.

Dancing and drama were also important forms of artistic expression. The Royal Ballet in Phnom Penh specialized in the classical, highly stylized apsara dances, as well as dance-dramas recounting the Reamker (Ramayana) epic and other tales. These forms were adapted over the centuries by both the Khmer and the Thai from the ancient dances of Angkor. In the countryside other dramatic genres and folk dances were performed at festivals and weddings by wandering troupes. The national classical ballet, reconstituted in the early 1980s by a handful of surviving dancers, has become highly professional and has toured successfully abroad. King Norodom Sihanouk’s daughter, Princess Bopha Devi, a former star performer in the royal troupe, vigorously supported the revival of classical dance during her tenure as minister of culture at the beginning of the 21st century. The Royal University of Fine Arts has been integral to the resurrection of Cambodian classical music and dance following their virtual extermination in the 1970s. Cambodian communities abroad have also established schools and cultural institutions to help perpetuate these traditions.

Although broadly valued as symbols of national and ethnic identity, Cambodian classical performing arts have little practical appeal for the younger population. Cambodian, Thai, and other Asian popular songs have a much wider audience, as do locally made video compact discs (VCDs)—the typical medium through which movies are now produced and distributed in Cambodia. Among urban Cambodian males, karaoke bars are a major source of entertainment.

Visual arts
In the past, the traditional visual arts of Cambodia revealed the conservatism of the Khmer. Ancient themes were preferred, and rarely was there an effort to improve or adapt. The principal crafts were weaving, silver- and goldsmithing, jewelry making, and wood and stone sculpture. In the 1970s and ’80s, visual arts were often made to serve the purposes of government propaganda, and little original art has developed in Cambodia since then.

While most artists paint traditional scenes and sculpt in repetitive, classical forms, largely for tourists and Cambodia’s emerging middle class, others are more progressive, projecting Cambodia’s heritage and tumultuous past in both abstract and soberingly realistic styles. The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has striven to employ senior artists, train new ones, and promote Cambodian art through sponsorship of domestic and international exhibitions. International aid organizations such as UNESCO and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations have also worked to revitalize traditional and contemporary arts programs, both in Cambodia and abroad.

Literature
Cambodia has a long literary tradition, based largely on Indian and Thai literary forms. Few people could read the indigenous literature, however, because historically only a small portion of the population was literate. Even so, most Khmer are familiar with the stories of such traditional epic figures as Neang Kakey and Dum Deav, as well as the Jataka tales relating episodes in the life of the Buddha, all of which are widely broadcast on radio and distributed in comic-book form. Folktales called reuang preng are also widely known.

During the 1960s and early ’70s, Cambodia’s traditionally conservative literature came under Western influence, as did its audience of young, urbanized Cambodian elite. Novels, poetry, visual arts, and films came to reflect international taste and enjoyed a flowering; in the early 1970s, for example, some 50 new novels appeared each year, and new films were frequently released. All such forms of expression, however, were banned by the officials of Democratic Kampuchea. Writers and artists were murdered or driven into exile, and the communist regime systematically destroyed existing works of art and literature, resulting in the loss of most of the country’s books, manuscripts, and paintings. After 1979 the Vietnam-backed government continued to limit freedom of expression by controlling the distribution of paper and by using literature for propaganda. Few books are published in Cambodia today, aside from Khmer-English dictionaries, textbooks for schools, horoscopes, and how-to books. There is no market for novels or serious nonfiction; in addition, government patronage of writers, which flourished in the 1980s, has ceased. As a result, most Cambodian writers now live and publish in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Cultural institutions
With national independence in 1953, the Cambodian government sought to revive the nation’s rich artistic traditions. The Royal University of Fine Arts, located in Phnom Penh, was founded by King Sihanouk in 1965 to preserve and nurture traditional arts. With the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the school, along with all other educational institutions, was closed. Although most artists were killed during the period of Khmer Rouge rule, a small number survived by hiding their identities. When the school was reopened in 1980, it became a magnet for those surviving artists and has continued to be an epicentre of Cambodian creative activity. With two primary units—one embracing archaeology, architecture and urbanism, and plastic arts, the other encompassing choreographic arts and music—it is energetically training new artists in traditional art forms and sponsoring performances in Cambodia and throughout the world.

Cambodia has two major museums. The National Museum of Arts is devoted to Cambodian ethnography, bronze ware, sculpture, and ceramics. The Museum of Genocide, housed in a former school that became a prison and execution centre in 1976, memorializes the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime. The Hindu-Buddhist ruins of the Khmer state of Angkor (9th–15th century) were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992. The Temple of Preah Vihear, dedicated to the worship of Shiva, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008.

Sports and recreation
Football (soccer) has long been popular in Cambodia, but during the Khmer Rouge years the finest players died or left the country. The national team was subsequently rebuilt and has trained under German supervision. Similarly, Khmer kickboxing, a martial art performed to the accompaniment of a unique genre of traditional music, reemerged after the 1970s and has attracted a large and devoted following. Also widely played are badminton and tennis, and cycling is popular. More recently, golf has been catching on among the elite, and motocross has gained a following, with regular competitions in Phnom Penh and in the provinces. There are few sports facilities outside of Phnom Penh, which has two major venues: Olympic Stadium and the National Sports Centre. Cambodia attended its first Olympic Games in 1956 and participated in two more before warfare and civil strife interrupted its attendance. The country returned to regular participation with the 1996 Summer Games.

Media and broadcasting
Several daily newspapers (in print or online) in Phnom Penh, including one in English, reflect a range of political views. Television and radio, however, are generally controlled by the dominant Cambodian People’s Party; a number of Cambodian journalists hostile to the regime were killed in the 1990s, and others have been imprisoned. More than a dozen major radio stations cater to an array of audiences with different religious, linguistic, and, to some degree, political orientations. Many of these broadcast internationally through the Internet. There are also many small, private stations serving local communities. Several television stations offer a range of programming in Khmer and other languages.

Leonard C. Overton
David P. Chandler

 

History
The historical importance of Cambodia in mainland Southeast Asia is out of proportion to its present reduced territory and limited political power. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the Khmer (Cambodian) state included much of the Indochinese mainland, incorporating large parts of present-day southern Vietnam, Laos, and eastern Thailand. The cultural influence of Cambodia on other countries, particularly Laos and Thailand, has been enormous. For a discussion of Cambodian history in its regional context, see Southeast Asia, history of.

Early history
It is not known for certain how long people have lived in what is now Cambodia, where they came from, or what languages they spoke before writing was introduced (based on a Sanskrit-style alphabet) about the 3rd century ad. Carbon-14 dating indicates that people who made and used pottery inhabited Cambodia as early as 4000 bc. These and subsequent findings suggest that these early people, like Cambodians today, were of slight to medium build, constructed their houses on wooden piles, consumed a considerable quantity of fish, and raised pigs and water buffalo.

Whether the early inhabitants of Cambodia came originally or primarily from the north, west, or south is still debated, as are theories about waves of different peoples moving through the region in prehistoric times. Archaeological finds since 1950 suggest that prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, had a comparatively sophisticated culture. These finds include artificial circular earthworks thought to be from the 1st millennium bc. Some scholars have even traced the first cultivation of rice and the first casting of bronze to the region.

Funan and Chenla
Indian influences were the most important in Cambodia’s early history during the first centuries ad, when Chinese and Indian pilgrims and traders stopped along the coasts of present-day Cambodia and Vietnam and exchanged silks and metals for spices, aromatic wood, ivory, and gold. Written sources dating from that period are almost entirely in Chinese and describe a kingdom or group of kingdoms flourishing in southern Cambodia, known to Chinese writers as “Funan.” Over a period of 300 years, between the 3rd and 6th centuries ad, its rulers offered gifts from time to time to Chinese emperors. Chinese writers testified to the extent of Indian influence in the kingdom and accounted for it by citing a local story, dating from the 6th century, of an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya who came to the area and “changed its institutions to follow Indian models.” One consequence of this early contact with Indian civilization was the introduction of large-scale irrigation, which allowed people to produce three or more crops of rice per year in some districts and brought previously unproductive areas under cultivation. Another was the worship of the Hindu god Shiva, who was conceptualized as a tutelary ancestor or spirit of the soil and was often represented by a stone lingam, or phallus. A third was the relatively peaceful coexistence in Cambodia of Hinduism and Buddhism, which endured for more than a thousand years.

The capital city of Funan was probably located at the site of the village of Angkor Borei in Takêv province, where systematic archaeological digs have been conducted since the mid-1990s. The most important legacy of Funan, though it may have been exaggerated by Chinese writers, was a centralized state apparatus. At the pinnacle of this structure was a theoretically absolute ruler who relied on an agricultural workforce and off-season labour to generate agricultural surpluses to sustain his lifestyle, support a priestly caste, and build fortresses, palaces, and temples. In a general way, these social arrangements resemble those found in medieval Europe, but it would be imprecise to use a term like “feudalism” to characterize Funan and its successor states. Instead, it is probably more fruitful to seek links between ancient and present-day Cambodia than between ancient Cambodia and countries far to the west about which the Khmer would have known nothing.

The appearance of Sanskrit inscriptions in the 6th century—the earliest known Khmer inscription dates from the early 7th century—has made it possible to use indigenous sources to supplement Chinese ones, but they all fail to clarify the confusing political developments that occurred in the Cambodian region between the decline of Funan in the 6th century and the founding of a centralized state in northwestern Cambodia about three centuries later. It has been common practice for modern writers to use “Chenla,” the contemporary Chinese term for the region, when referring to Cambodia during that time. Chinese sources suggest that there were at least two kingdoms in Cambodia, known as “Water Chenla” and “Land Chenla,” that vied for recognition from China in that period. Whereas the geographic centre for both Funan and Water Chenla lay in the Mekong delta south and east of Phnom Penh and extended into present-day Vietnam, the heartland of Land Chenla appears to have been farther north along the Mekong, with an important cult site called Wat Phu located in present-day southern Laos. It seems likely that Water Chenla looked outward and welcomed foreign trade, while Land Chenla was more inward-looking and based its economy on intensive agriculture. Surviving inscriptions in Sanskrit and Khmer testify to a multitude of small kingdoms on Cambodian soil between the 7th and 9th centuries. Remarkable sculptures and architectural remains also have survived from that period, displaying a mixture of Indian influence and local inspiration. The appearance of local styles reflected, in part, declining Indian commercial interest in the region beginning in the 7th century.

The Khmer state (Angkor)
Foundation of the kingdom
In 790 a young Cambodian prince, claiming to be descended from the rulers of Funan, was consecrated in eastern Cambodia under the title Jayavarman II. Part of the ceremony involved breaking ties with “Java,” which probably was a reference not to the island of Java but to the kingdom of Śrīvijaya on the island of Sumatra. Over the next 10 years, Jayavarman extended his power northward into the Mekong River valley until, in 802, he was reconsecrated as a chakravartin (the ancient Indian conception of world ruler) in northwestern Cambodia. The capital seems to have been located in the Kulén Hills, north of the present-day provincial capital of Siĕmréab, where he died in 835. Despite the high status accorded him by subsequent Angkorean kings, Jayavarman II seems to have left no inscriptions of his own, and the monuments that can be dated to his reign were small and hastily built.

Jayavarman’s real accomplishment was less tangible and lasted longer, for he appears to have established what came to be called Kambuja-desa, a confident, self-aware kingdom that superseded and came to control a range of smaller states. He was Cambodia’s first nationally oriented king. It is not known whether smaller states were forced into submission or joined of their own volition. Despite the grandeur of the Angkorean temples that were built over the next four centuries, Jayavarman II’s successors were often powerless or constrained by opposing forces. Revolts and usurpations were frequent, as were foreign invasions. Rulers were the object of rival claims by family members, priests, generals, and bureaucrats. Some kings, especially usurpers, had more freedom of action than others. Those who ruled in periods of peace were also in a better position to undertake building programs and public works. Like their counterparts in medieval Europe, Cambodian kings were far removed from ordinary people. The king was perceived primarily in religious terms, and he assured the fertility of the soil and the well-being of the kingdom through the rituals he performed. In exchange for his protection, the people were subject to intermittent military service and corvée duty and were also called on to provide labour without payment for Buddhist and Hindu religious foundations and for local elites.

Toward the end of the 9th century, soon after Jayavarman II’s death, the Cambodian capital shifted to the northern shores of the Tonle Sap, near present-day Phumĭ Rôluŏs. A king named Indravarman I (ruled 877–c. 890) constructed a large reservoir and several temples there, including a pyramidical structure called the Bakong—the first Cambodian temple to be built primarily of stone rather than brick. This so-called “temple mountain” became the model for the many larger royal temples at Angkor that served as monuments to the greatness of their patrons and, subsequently, as their tombs.

Angkorean civilization
Indravarman’s son and successor, Yaśovarman I (ruled c. 890–c. 910), moved the capital again, this time closer to Siĕmréab, to a location that subsequently became Angkor—a name derived from the Sanskrit word nagara, meaning “city”—which has become one of the world’s most-celebrated archaeological sites, as well as the popular name for Cambodia’s medieval civilization. The city that Yaśovarman founded, Yaśodharapura, retained that name and remained Cambodia’s capital until it was abandoned in the 16th century. His temple mountain, now called Bakheng (literally “Mighty Ancestor”), was built on a natural hill that overlooked a teeming city, the more distant rice-growing plain, and the Tonle Sap. The mountain occupied the centre of the city, just as Mount Meru, the mythical home in India of the Hindu gods, was said to stand at the centre of the universe. Yaśovarman built a large reservoir nearby. The city wall of Yaśodharapura measured 2.5 miles (4 km) on each side. For such an ambitious building program, the king needed to command a large labour pool. Other evidence suggests that his reign was characterized by tolerance toward a variety of Buddhist and Hindu sects that occasionally blended into local cults honouring ancestral spirits and spirits of the soil. Indeed, for all the apparent absolutism of its kings, a consistent feature of Angkorean civilization unmatched in medieval Europe was religious toleration.

After several decades of warfare, dislocations, and disorder—Yaśodharapura itself was abandoned for nearly 30 years—Rajendravarman II (ruled 944–968) restored the capital and set in motion a period of peace and prosperity that lasted nearly a century. During the reign of his successor, Jayavarman V (968–c. 1000), the rose-coloured sandstone shrine of Banteai Srei—arguably the loveliest temple at Angkor—was built on the outskirts of the capital under the patronage of a wealthy priestly family, one of whose members had been Jayavarman’s teacher. In Yaśodharapura itself, Jayavarman V began work on the imposing temple mountain now called Ta Keo, which was completed under his successor, Suryavarman I (ruled c. 1004–c. 1050). Suryavarman I, an innovative and demanding monarch, was a usurper with links to princely families in what is now northeastern Thailand. His rise to power involved the subjugation of many areas that had become semi-independent under his predecessors, and his reign resembled that of Jayavarman II two centuries earlier. Suryavarman extended the Khmer empire westward into present-day Thailand, where he constructed the large mountaintop temple known as Preah Vihear. During his reign the number of cities ruled from Yaśodharapura grew from roughly 20 to nearly 50, and foreign trade increased, along with tighter central bureaucratic control. His successor consolidated these gains, put down a dangerous rebellion, and was responsible for the temple mountain known today as the Baphuon.

The closing years of the 11th century were ones of turmoil and fragmentation. At different times, two and even three “absolute monarchs” contended simultaneously for the title of chakravartin. At the end of the century, however, a new dynasty—which was to last for more than a century—began to rule at Angkor. Its most powerful monarch took the name of Suryavarman II (ruled 1113–c. 1150), although he probably was not descended from the earlier king of that name. Like his namesake predecessor, Suryavarman II was a formidable military campaigner. He avenged earlier attacks on Angkor by armies launched from the kingdom of Champa, in what is now south-central Vietnam, and led expeditions into northern and southern Thailand. A campaign against Vietnam, which had recently declared its independence from China, was less successful.

Suryavarman’s major accomplishment, from a modern perspective, was the Angkor Wat temple complex, still the largest religious structure in the world and one of the most beautiful. The temple, which eventually became his tomb and probably was an astronomical observatory as well, was dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. Its bas-reliefs, running for nearly a half mile inside its third enclosure, depict events in the well-known Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana—confirming that these texts were widely known at Angkor—as well as Suryavarman himself holding court. The elegance of these carvings, the hundreds of graceful statues of angelic dancers (apsaras) that adorn the temple, and its reflection in the moats that surround it continue to give Angkor Wat an awe-inspiring air; in the 12th century, when its towers were gilded and its moats properly maintained, it must have been even more breathtaking.

Jayavarman VII
Suryavarman II’s successor, Yaśovarman II (ruled 1160–66), also reached into earlier history for his royal name, tracing his lineage to the Rôluŏs period of the late 9th century. During his reign, several temples begun under Suryavarman were completed. Yaśovarman was overthrown by one of his officials after returning from a military campaign in Thailand. In the aftermath of the coup, a Cambodian prince, later to rule under the name of Jayavarman VII (1181–c. 1220), hurried home from Champa—it is uncertain from his inscriptions why he was there—to vie for the Cambodian throne. He arrived too late, and for the next 10 years he bided his time as the usurper lost control and Angkor was invaded and occupied by the Chams. In 1177, heading an army of his own, the prince attacked Angkor and defeated the Cham forces. The battles are vividly depicted in the bas-reliefs of his temple mountain, the Bayon. To forestall further Cham attacks, Jayavarman annexed the Cham capital, and Angkor controlled Champa until Jayavarman’s death.

When his campaign against the Chams was over, the future monarch worked to bring Cambodia under his control. An inscription referred to the kingdom he encountered as being “shaded by many parasols,” a metaphor for a multiplicity of rulers. In 1191, presumably when the process was complete, Jayavarman finally settled in Angkor. He soon embarked on a program of building and public works that was more extensive and grandiose than any in Angkorean history. According to his inscriptions, hundreds of thousands of people were involved in these projects.

Numerous temples, statues, stone bridges, and inscriptions in the Angkor region and elsewhere in Cambodia testify to the vigour of Jayavarman VII’s long reign. He rebuilt and refortified the city. He was a fervent Buddhist of the Mahayana school; several larger-than-life-size statues of the monarch depict him in meditation. Like most other Cambodian kings, however, he also tolerated and patronized Hinduism and local ancestor cults. His extraordinary temple, the Bayon, with its multiple towers, each bearing faces of divinities turned in the cardinal directions, is perhaps the most intriguing of the monuments at Angkor. Like Yaśovarman I’s Bakheng, the Bayon stood at the centre of the royal city—which had shifted since Yaśovarman’s time—and symbolized Mount Meru. Many Hindu gods and the Buddha are depicted in the statuary of the temple, while the bas-reliefs depict scenes of ordinary life, providing a picture of 12th-century Cambodians at work, rest, and play that fails to emerge from the religiously oriented inscriptions or from carvings at other temples. The clothing, tools, houses, and oxcarts in the bas-reliefs closely resemble those found in the Cambodian countryside today.

The decline of Angkor
After Jayavarman’s death (about 1220), few stone monuments were erected at Angkor, and very few inscriptions were incised. Little by little, the Khmer empire began to contract. Jayavarman’s campaigns neutralized Champa as a threat to Angkor, but, by the early 13th century, vigorous new kingdoms in what is now northern Thailand—centring on the city of Sukhothai—became powerful enough to throw off Angkorean domination, as did some Tai principalities in the south. In the mid-13th century, Tai armies even raided Angkor. For the next 200 years, however, Angkor remained a glittering, crowded, and wealthy city. It impressed a Chinese visitor, Zhou Daguan, who arrived there with a diplomatic mission in 1296. Zhou’s account is the longest and most-detailed extant description of the Khmer capital, supplementing the bas-reliefs of the Bayon. He left a picture of a bustling city in which the king still went forth in great pomp and ceremony.

Zhou also saw monks of the Theravada school of Buddhism at Angkor. This more orthodox and austere school flourished in kingdoms to the west of Cambodia and contrasted sharply with the lavish and elitist rituals associated with Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism. When Zhou visited Angkor, Theravada Buddhism was still one religion among many. Soon afterward, however, it began to benefit from royal patronage, and the conversion of the majority of the population probably followed the conversion of members of the elite. Those disadvantaged by the change included the high-ranking Hindu and Mahayana priestly families who had built and maintained the temples at Angkor.

Some historians believe that the mass conversion to Theravada Buddhism—by undermining the Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist institutions underpinning the state and by encouraging through its doctrines a more individualistic attitude among believers—contributed to the decline and gradual abandonment of Angkor, which certainly accompanied the conversion in the 14th and 15th centuries. This view, however, has been challenged by those who, doubting that Theravada Buddhism by itself could have had such a disintegrating influence, note that Thailand, even though it followed Theravada Buddhism, remained united and vigorous enough to conduct repeated military attacks on Angkor and carry away hundreds and perhaps thousands of Cambodians into captivity in Thailand. According to this opposing view, these Tai military campaigns offer a more credible explanation for the collapse of Angkor than does an interpretation identifying Theravada Buddhism as the primary cause. Yet a third explanation that has been proposed as for why Angkor declined is based on archaeological work on the site done in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that found evidence that serious environmental degradation may have undermined the region’s vital irrigation system.

Recorded Tai attacks on Angkor occurred in 1369, 1389, and 1431, and there undoubtedly were other attacks as well. In 1351 a Tai kingdom whose court modeled itself culturally on Angkor was founded at Ayutthaya (Ayudhya, or Siam), not far from present-day Bangkok. The Tai capital remained at Ayutthaya for the next 400 years. It is likely that a transfusion of elite culture from Angkor to the more prosperous, more secure Tai court began sometime in the mid-14th century. Many of the Khmer who remained at Angkor were probably drawn southward to the vicinity of Phnom Penh (which is thought to have been founded in the mid-15th century) by the region’s commercial possibilities. In any case, the smaller, outward-looking Khmer kingdom that had replaced Angkor in the south by the 16th century earned its wealth primarily from trade rather than from intensive rice cultivation and the mobilization of labour for public works.

Tai and Vietnamese hegemony
The little that is known of Khmer history in the years following the abandonment of Angkor is a confusing mixture of uncertain dates, mythical figures, and complex dynastic rivalries. Cambodian chronicles for this period, composed several centuries afterward, are impossible to verify against inscriptions or other primary sources. Between the mid-14th century and the end of the 16th, while Angkor was still inhabited, the Tai court of Ayutthaya was most likely absorbing some of its culture and prestige, and the political centre of Cambodia was shifting to the south. Relations between the Tai and the Khmer remained uneasy.

In the late 16th century a period of Tai weakness following wars with Myanmar (Burma) coincided with a time of Cambodian prosperity, and a Khmer monarch, Chan I (ruled 1516–66), reoccupied the Angkor area briefly, restoring some of the temples, adding some bas-reliefs to those at Angkor Wat, and leaving several new inscriptions. When the Tai recovered their strength in the 1590s, however, they invaded Cambodia in force and sacked the Khmer capital at Lovek, north of Phnom Penh, ushering in a period of Cambodian weakness vis-à-vis its neighbours that has endured to the present day.

Cambodian political history from the beginning of the 17th century until the establishment of the French protectorate in 1863 is indeed a sorry record of weak kings being undermined by members of their families and forced to seek the protection of their stronger neighbours, Siam (Thailand) and Vietnam. Between 1603 and 1848, 22 monarchs occupied the Cambodian throne. By seeking Tai or Vietnamese protection against their rivals in the royal family and against the foreign power temporarily out of favour, they lost territory and sovereignty.

That Cambodia survived at all can be attributed to the fact that in the 18th century the Tai and the Vietnamese had other preoccupations. In the 1750s and ’60s, Tai energies were taken up by wars with Myanmar, whose armies sacked and destroyed Ayutthaya in 1767. Soon afterward the Nguyen rulers of southern Vietnam were engaged in a prolonged campaign to regain power from the usurping Tay Son rebels. Fighting spilled over from Vietnam into Cambodia, and the Cambodian royal family fled to Thailand. By the end of the century a powerful Tai dynasty had established the kingdom of Siam and had installed itself in its new capital in Bangkok, and at the beginning of the 19th century the Nguyen founded a dynasty that governed all of Vietnam.

A confrontation between the two powers in Cambodia was inevitable. In 1794, in exchange for placing a refugee Cambodian prince, Eng, on the Cambodian throne, the Siamese appropriated two Cambodian provinces, Bătdâmbâng (Battambang) and Siĕmréab (Siem Reap)—the latter including the ruins of Angkor. These provinces remained in Siamese hands until 1907. When Eng died after a short reign, he was replaced by his young son, who ruled as Chan II under the protection of Thailand.

Chan II’s reign confirmed Cambodia’s dual vassalage to Thailand and Vietnam. With three rebellious younger brothers and demanding patrons at the Siamese court, he sought assistance from Vietnam; the Siamese supported his brothers, who took refuge in Bangkok. The uneasy calm that ensued, with Chan acknowledging Siamese and Vietnamese suzerainty, ended with Chan’s death in 1835. Vietnamese pressure was strong enough to ensure that a powerless princess named Mei was then enthroned, permitting the Vietnamese to control most of the country. Not until 1841, when Chan’s brother Duong (Duang; ruled 1848–60) returned from exile in Bangkok supported by Siamese troops, were the Cambodians able to exercise a small degree of independence. Fighting between the Siamese and Vietnamese continued in Cambodia for several years. Duong was crowned only after Vietnamese troops agreed to leave the country. Cambodia again became a Siamese protectorate. Duong tried hard to revitalize the kingdom’s institutions, but his resources were desperately limited, and his reign was marred by several rebellions. When he died, he was succeeded by his son, Norodom, but conditions were too unstable in the kingdom for Norodom to be crowned.

French rule
The protectorate
French control over Cambodia was an offshoot of French involvement in the neighbouring provinces of Vietnam. France’s decision to advance into Cambodia came only when it feared that British and Siamese expansion might threaten its access to the largely unmapped Mekong River, which, it assumed (incorrectly), would provide access to central China. In 1863 French naval officers from Vietnam persuaded Norodom to sign a treaty that gave France control of Cambodia’s foreign affairs. The effect of the treaty was to weaken Siamese protection. A French admiral participated in Norodom’s coronation, with Siamese acquiescence, in 1864.

For the next 15 years or so, the French were not especially demanding, and Norodom benefited from French military help in putting down a series of rebellions. By the late 1870s, however, French officials in Cambodia were pressing for greater control over internal affairs. Shocked by what they regarded as the ineptitude and barbarity of Norodom’s court and anxious to turn a profit in Cambodia, they sought to introduce fiscal and judicial reforms. In doing this, the French knew that Norodom’s half brother, Sisowath, who had ambitions for the throne, would cooperate with them. Norodom, however, resisted the reforms, which he correctly perceived as infringements on his power. Exasperated by his intransigence, the French in 1884 forced him at gunpoint to sign a document that virtually transformed Cambodia into a colony. Soon thereafter, provincial officials, feeling threatened, raised guerrilla armies to confront the French.

The rebellion, which lasted until mid-1886, was the only anti-French movement in the kingdom until after World War II. The French succeeded in suppressing it after agreeing to some concessions to the king, but Norodom’s apparent victory was hollow. What the French had been unable to achieve by the convention of 1884, they proceeded to gain through piecemeal action. As Norodom’s health declined and as senior Cambodian officials came to see their interests increasingly linked with French power, the way was opened for greater French control. In 1897 the French representative in Phnom Penh assumed executive authority, reducing the king’s power to a minimum. Norodom died, embittered and overtaken by events, in 1904.

The first 40 years of the French protectorate—whatever French motives may have been—had guaranteed the survival of the Cambodian state and had saved the kingdom from being divided between its two powerful neighbours. Norodom’s successor, Sisowath (ruled 1904–27), was more cooperative with the French and presided benignly over the partial modernization of the kingdom. The northwestern provinces of Bătdâmbâng and Siĕmréab were returned to Cambodia by the Siamese in 1907. By the time Sisowath died, 20 years later, hundreds of miles of paved roads had been built, and thousands of acres of rubber plantations had been established by the French. Resistance to French rule, in sharp contrast to what was happening in neighbouring Vietnam, was almost nonexistent.

Sisowath’s eldest son, Monivong, who reigned until 1941, was even more of a figurehead than his father had been. During the 1930s a railway opened between Phnom Penh and the Siamese (Thai) border, while the first Cambodian-language newspaper, Nagara Vatta (“Angkor Wat”), affiliated with the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, conveyed a mildly nationalistic message to its readers.

World War II and its aftermath
When Monivong died in 1941, Japanese forces had already occupied the component states of French Indochina, while leaving the French in administrative control. In these difficult circumstances, the French governor-general, Jean Decoux, placed Monivong’s grandson, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, on the Cambodian throne. Decoux was guided by the expectation that Sihanouk, then only 18 years old, could be easily controlled. In the long run, the French underestimated Sihanouk’s political skills, but for the remainder of World War II he was a pliable instrument in their hands.

The effect of the Japanese occupation was less profound in Cambodia than it was elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but the overthrow of the French administration by the Japanese in March 1945, when the war was nearing its end, provided Cambodians with some opportunities for greater political autonomy. Pressed by the Japanese to do so, Sihanouk declared his country’s independence, and for several months the government was led by Son Ngoc Thanh, a former editor of Nagara Vatta, who had been forced into exile in Japan in 1942.

In October 1945, after the war was over, the French returned to Indochina, arrested Son Ngoc Thanh, and reestablished their control. Cambodia soon became an “autonomous state within the French Union,” with its own constitution and a handful of political parties, but real power remained in French hands. There were, however, several significant political developments between 1945 and the achievement of complete independence in 1953, the most important of which was the confrontation between Sihanouk and his advisers on the one hand and the leaders of the pro-independence Democratic Party, which dominated the National Assembly, on the other. Cambodia was poorly prepared for parliamentary democracy, and the French were unwilling to give the National Assembly genuine power. The Democrats, for their part, suffered from internal dissension. The death in 1947 of their leader, Prince Yuthevong, was a severe blow, exacerbated by the assassination of Yuthevong’s heir apparent, Ieu Koeuss, in early 1950. Outside Parliament, Son Ngoc Thanh, released from exile in France in 1951, formed a dissident movement, the Khmer Serei (“Free Khmer”), that opposed both Sihanouk and the French.

In June 1952 Sihanouk assumed control of the government. Many Cambodian students in France, among them Saloth Sar (who would become the future communist dictator Pol Pot), objected to Sihanouk’s move, but inside Cambodia the king remained extremely popular. His self-styled “Royal Crusade,” consisting of a tour of several countries to elicit their support, wrested political independence from the French, who by the end of 1953 were anxious to compromise. Sihanouk’s success discredited the communist-dominated guerrilla movement in Cambodia—associated with the Viet Minh of Vietnam—and Son Ngoc Thanh’s anticommunist Khmer Serei.

Independence
Sihanouk’s government was recognized as the sole legitimate authority within Cambodia at the Geneva Conference convened in 1954 to reach a political settlement to the First Indochina War. This decision prevented the Viet Minh from gaining any regional power in Cambodia, as they did in Laos.

While Democrats and communists alike recognized Sihanouk’s role in gaining Cambodia’s independence, they opposed his increasing authoritarianism. Sihanouk abdicated the throne in March 1955 in favour of his father, Norodom Suramarit, and formed a mass political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (“People’s Socialist Community”), whose members were forbidden to belong to other political parties. The effect of the move was to draw thousands of people away from the Democrats, who had expected to win the national elections scheduled for later in the year. When the elections took place, amid widely reported abuses by Sihanouk’s police, the Sangkum won every seat in the National Assembly. Sihanouk became the central figure in Cambodian politics from then until his overthrow in 1970, as prime minister and—after his father’s death in 1960, when no new monarch was named—as head of state. Overt political life was strictly controlled by the prince, his colleagues, and the police; Cambodian communists, a marginal group of fewer than a thousand members, operated clandestinely and enjoyed little success. In 1963 Saloth Sar, a schoolteacher who was also secretary of the communist party, fled Phnom Penh and took refuge in the forests along the Vietnamese border; from there he built the organization that later would be known as the Khmer Rouge.

Sihanouk was widely revered in Cambodia until the late 1960s, when opposition to his rule intensified. He saw Thailand and what was then South Vietnam as the greatest threats to Cambodia’s survival. Those two countries were allied with the United States, which the prince disliked. At the same time, Sihanouk feared the eventual success of the Vietnamese communists in their war against South Vietnam and the United States, and he dreaded the prospect of a unified Vietnam under communist control. To gain some freedom to maneuver, he proclaimed a policy of neutrality in international affairs. Sihanouk broke off relations with the United States in 1965, convinced of American involvement in two South Vietnamese-backed plots against the Cambodian state in 1959 and encouraged in his anti-Americanism by the French president, Charles de Gaulle, whom he idolized. Soon afterward he concluded secret agreements with the Vietnamese communists, who were allowed to station troops on Cambodian territory in outlying districts as long as they did not interfere with Cambodian civilians. The secret agreement protected Sihanouk’s army from attacks by the Vietnamese but compromised his neutralist policies. After 1965, when the war in Vietnam intensified, he also edged toward an alliance with China.

Cambodia’s internal politics after 1965 developed in a complex fashion. Elections in 1966, the first since 1951 not to be stage-managed by the prince, brought in a majority of National Assembly members who owed little or nothing to Sihanouk himself. Although the prince was still a revered figure among the rural populace, he became increasingly unpopular with the educated elite. Conservatives resented his break with the United States and his seemingly procommunist foreign policy, while Cambodian radicals opposed his internal policies, which were economically conservative and intolerant of dissent. A rebellion in Bătdâmbâng province in 1967, manipulated by local communists, convinced the prince that the greatest threat to his regime came from the radical sector, and without hesitation he began using severe measures—including imprisonment without trial, assassinations, and the burning of villages—to impose his will.

By 1969 Sihanouk’s grip on Cambodian politics had loosened, and conflict between his army and communist guerrillas, especially in the northeast, had increased. Some anticommunist ministers led by Prince Sirik Matak and Gen. Lon Nol plotted to depose Sihanouk, whose credibility with radicals had evaporated following his renewal of diplomatic relations with the United States. Sihanouk’s elaborate policy of juggling major powers against each other had failed. Matak and Lon Nol worked closely with anticommunists in South Vietnam, including Son Ngoc Thanh, whose Khmer Serei movement had gained recruits among the Khmer-speaking minority in Vietnam.

Civil war
In March 1970, while Prince Sihanouk was visiting the Soviet Union, the National Assembly voted to remove him from office as head of state. Lon Nol subsequently took control of the government. Confused and hurt, Sihanouk traveled to Beijing and accepted Chinese advice to resist the coup by taking charge of a united front government-in-exile. This government was to be allied with China and North Vietnam and was to use the Cambodian communist forces led by Saloth Sar, which only a few days before had been fighting against Sihanouk’s army.

In Phnom Penh, Lon Nol’s new government was initially popular, particularly for his quixotic pledge to rid Cambodia of Vietnamese communist troops. In fact, the resulting confrontation dragged Cambodia fully into the Vietnam conflict. In May 1970 an American and South Vietnamese task force invaded eastern Cambodia, but communist forces had already retreated to the west. Two offensives launched by Lon Nol—named for the semimythical Cambodian kingdom of Chenla—were smashed by the Vietnamese, and thereafter his troops assumed a defensive stance. North Vietnamese support for the Cambodian communists diminished in 1973, following a cease-fire agreement reached in Paris with the Americans. The Cambodian communists, however, refused to adhere to the agreements, and in 1973 they were subjected to a massive American aerial bombardment, although the United States and Cambodia were not at war and no American troops were endangered by Cambodia. The bombing slowed communist attacks on Phnom Penh and wreaked havoc in the heavily populated countryside around the capital. The civil war lasted two more years, but already by the end of 1973 the Lon Nol government controlled only Phnom Penh, the northwest, and a handful of provincial towns.

In the meantime, Sihanouk declined in importance. By the end of 1973 the Cambodian communists dominated every element of the resistance, although they still claimed Sihanouk as a figurehead. Lon Nol’s isolated regime in Phnom Penh continued to receive large infusions of American aid, increasing opportunities for corruption.

In April 1975 the Lon Nol government collapsed. Communist forces quickly entered Phnom Penh and immediately ordered its inhabitants to abandon the city and take up life in rural areas. Phnom Penh and other cities and towns throughout the country were emptied in less than a week. Thousands of city dwellers died on the forced marches, and in subsequent years conditions worsened.

Democratic Kampuchea
Over the next six months, following the directives of a still-concealed Communist Party of Kampuchea, Cambodia experienced the most rapid and radical social transformation in its history. Money, markets, and private property were abolished. Schools, hospitals, shops, offices, and monasteries were closed. Nothing was published, no one could travel without permission, and everyone was ordered to wear peasant work clothes. As in Mao Zedong’s China, the poorest peasants were favoured at everyone else’s expense. A handful of party leaders controlled everything in the country, but they remained in hiding and explained few of their decisions. Instead, they urged everyone to “build and defend” the country. In April 1976 Sihanouk resigned as head of state, soon after a new constitution had renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. A soft-spoken and unknown figure named Pol Pot became prime minister, and more than a year passed before observers outside the country were able to identify him as Saloth Sar.

In 1976–77 the new regime, following the lead of Maoist China, sought to collectivize Cambodia totally, mobilizing its population into an unpaid labour force and seeking to double the average prerevolutionary yields of rice immediately and on a national scale. The human costs of this ill-conceived experiment were enormous, and the Khmer Rouge were widely condemned by the international community once the magnitude of their crimes became known, most notably through the release in 1984 of The Killing Fields, a film adaptation of the Khmer Rouge story. Conservative estimates are that between April 1975 and early 1979, when the regime was overthrown, at least 1.5 million Cambodians—about 20 percent of the total population—died from overwork, starvation, disease, or execution. Parallels have been drawn between these events and Josef Stalin’s collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China in the late 1950s, and the massacres in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. The Soviet and Chinese experiments appear to have been models for the Khmer Rouge, although the proportion of the population killed in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was greater than it had been in China or the Soviet Union. The number of deaths stemmed from the literalism with which plans were carried out (Pol Pot’s supporters were told to “smash” the enemy), the cruelty of the inexperienced communist cadres, and—as far as executions were concerned—the suspicions of the leadership that the failure of their experiment could be traced to “traitors” in the pay of foreign powers. The Communist Party’s interrogation centre in Phnom Penh, a prison code-named “S-21,” was the site of more than 15,000 such executions. Those tortured and put to death included men and women who had served the party faithfully for years—victims of the extreme paranoia of Pol Pot and his colleagues.

Vietnamese intervention
The Khmer Rouge initially had been trained by the Vietnamese, but from the early 1970s they had been resentful and suspicious of Vietnam and Vietnamese intentions. Scattered skirmishes between the two sides in 1975 had escalated into open warfare by the end of 1977. The Cambodians were no match for the Vietnamese forces, despite continuing infusions of Chinese aid. In December 1978 a large Vietnamese army moved into Cambodia, brushing aside the Democratic Kampuchean forces. Within two weeks the government had fled Phnom Penh for Thailand, and the Vietnamese had installed a puppet regime—called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea—consisting largely of Cambodian communists who had deserted Pol Pot in 1977–78.

Over the next decade, under the relatively benign tutelage of the Vietnamese, Cambodia struggled back to its feet. Private property was restored, schools reopened and some Buddhist practices were reintroduced, cities were repopulated, and, with freedom of movement, internal trade flourished. At the same time, at least 500,000 Cambodians, including some 100,000 associated with the communists, fled to Thailand in the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea’s fall and because of the hardship, uncertainty, and disorder that accompanied the installation of the new regime. Of these, perhaps 200,000 people, including most of the surviving members of Cambodia’s educated elite, sought refuge in other countries, while the rest came under the control of three resistance groups camped along the Thai-Cambodian border: Norodom Sihanouk and his followers, the Khmer Rouge, and the noncommunist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (renamed the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party in 1992) under the leadership of Son Sann (a former prime minister). These groups were supported financially by foreign powers, including the United States, who were anxious to oppose Vietnam. Thousands of Cambodians continued to enter Thailand in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade those in refugee camps were thought to exceed 300,000.

In 1982 an uneasy alliance was reached among the three groups opposing the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh, and a government-in-exile was established with Sihanouk as president and Son Sann as prime minister. This government, despite UN recognition, received little support from Cambodians inside the country and was largely ineffectual. The member groups of the coalition continued independently to resist the Phnom Penh regime, the larger and better-equipped forces of the Khmer Rouge being the most effective.

Cambodia since 1990
The political stalemate that developed among the four groups vying for power was broken in the late 1980s, when international political pressure, an economic boycott of Cambodia led by the United States, and a reduction in aid from the Soviet Union contributed to Vietnam’s decision to withdraw its forces from Cambodia, which was completed in 1989. Freed from Vietnamese tutelage, the Phnom Penh government took two initiatives that sharply increased its popularity. It legalized property ownership, which created a real estate boom in Phnom Penh. More significantly, it openly encouraged the practice of Buddhism, and hundreds of Buddhist monasteries were restored, often with funds provided by Cambodians living overseas. One result of the resurgence of Buddhism was that thousands of young Cambodian males became Buddhist monks, even if only for a brief time, as in most cases. The withdrawal of the Vietnamese also allowed the resistance factions to seek through negotiation the political objectives that they had been unable to obtain by military action against the Phnom Penh government; they were encouraged in this endeavour by their foreign patrons.

These negotiations, which had been conducted for some time and which had intensified after 1989, led in 1991 to two significant results. The first was the creation of a largely ceremonial coalition government under a Supreme National Council (SNC) chaired by Sihanouk and composed of representatives of the government and the three factions. Although the SNC was recognized by the United Nations, effective control in most of Cambodia remained in the hands of the Phnom Penh regime. The second and more important result was the conclusion of a peace agreement among the factions that also provided for a popularly elected government. The UN Security Council, with the backing of the factions, endorsed this treaty and agreed to establish in the country a peacekeeping operation consisting of both soldiers and civil servants under the control of a United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia which would monitor progress toward conducting elections, temporarily run several government ministries, and safeguard human rights.

The operation, inaugurated in January 1992, was difficult to implement, notably because the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm and cooperate, the UN machinery for such an innovative mission was cumbersome, and the ruling party in Phnom Penh was unwilling to cede day-to-day political power to the UN. Nonetheless, more than 300,000 refugees were repatriated from Thailand under UN auspices in 1992–93, and in July 1993 national elections were held under UN supervision. These were arguably the first free and fair elections in Cambodian history. More than 90 percent of the registered voters went to the polls, and by a clear majority they chose candidates from a royalist political faction sponsored by Prince Sihanouk, who had returned home in 1992 after 12 years of residence in China and North Korea. The incumbent Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the former prime minister, Hun Sen, refused to accept the results of the election. In a deal brokered by Prince Sihanouk and approved by the UN, the victorious royalists, led by Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, agreed to form a coalition with the CPP, with Ranariddh as first prime minister and Hun Sen as second prime minister. Under the new constitution, Cambodia became a kingdom again, and Sihanouk became its monarch for the second time.

Because the CPP controlled the army, judiciary, and police, it soon dominated the coalition, and Prince Ranariddh, despite his position, was unable to influence events. The Khmer Rouge movement collapsed in the mid-1990s, as it lost foreign backing, its leaders quarreled among themselves, and thousands of supporters defected to the government and were offered positions in the Cambodian army. In 1997 Hun Sen staged a coup against his coalition partners and tightened his control over the country. The brutality of the coup alarmed foreign donors and delayed Cambodia’s entry into ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).

By 1998 Pol Pot was dead, the Khmer Rouge movement had fallen apart, and for the first time in 30 years Cambodia was at peace. In July, after internationally monitored elections that were relatively free and fair, Hun Sen returned as prime minister to form a second coalition government; Ranariddh became chairman of the National Assembly. Cambodia continued to face enormous problems: a runaway birth rate, an AIDS epidemic, a stagnant economy, widespread deforestation, a climate of violence exacerbated by the ruling party’s unwillingness to abide by the rule of law, impatience among donors at the government’s slowness in introducing reforms, and human rights abuses often traceable to members of the ruling party.

Over the next few years, the country began to stabilize. Cambodia was officially admitted to ASEAN in 1999, which meant that it was constructively linked, perhaps for the first time in its history, to the rest of Southeast Asia. By the early 21st century, Cambodia had joined the WTO (2004), begun to bring a serious AIDS epidemic under control, reined in the country’s birth rate to approach the world average, reduced its dependence on logging, begun to realize the economic benefits of strong garment-manufacturing and tourist sectors, and regained the confidence of foreign investors and aid organizations. Sihanouk resigned as king in 2004, and his youngest son, Norodom Sihamoni, became king in his place.

David P. Chandler