When the War Was Over (8 page)

India made the greatest contribution to the Angkor society. The Indian culture—its religion, philosophy, political beliefs, and language—gave the Khmers the larger framework they needed to build a true empire. Indian Brahmans traveled to the region as early as the second century A.D., from Burma to Cambodia and Champa. These Indians, whether priests or merchants, brought the new culture as commercial and religious emissaries from India, not as a vanguard for a military conquest. India never ruled over the region. India's culture was impressed onto these Southeast Asian societies through this peaceful exchange. And much of the region was marked permanently as “Indianized” or “Sanskritized” states.

The Khmers were among the most brilliant adapters of the new Indian culture. The Hindu cosmology and outlook appeared to them to be an expansion of their own vision, not at odds with it. The mingling of the two societies proved electric. The Angkor era, which lasted 600 years, proved so powerful that its basic institutions survived, however transformed or tattered, until the revolution of the Khmer Rouge.

When the Indian Brahmans arrived, Cambodia was ruled by tribal chiefs already perceived as godlike. The faith of the Khmers was animistic. The Cambodians accepted the Hindu religion of the Brahmans, including the concept of a
deva-raj
or god-king, without abandoning their animism, which survived into modern times. The god-king became the one all-powerful ruler of the tribal lords. Eventually, the Angkor kings came to be revered as the rulers of the gods, as well. They became among the most absolute rulers of the era, the supreme political, moral, and religious leaders of their empire. “It is safe to say that it was the king who was the great god of ancient Cambodia,” wrote an eminent historian.

This absolute god-king was able to build a strong central state system that became the basis for the kingdom's expansion and its wealth. At its peak in the fourteenth century, the Angkor Empire was the most powerful in peninsular Southeast Asia. Its borders stretched eastward to the South China Sea, encompassing southern Vietnam and the Mekong Delta; to the north over southern Laos as far as the royal city of Luang Prabang and touching China; to the west encompassing Thailand and parts of Burma; and to the southeast down to the isthmus of Kra, which connects Thailand to Malaysia.

The king saw little separation in his duties as conqueror, religious
deva-raj,
and public works administrator. The wealth of the kingdom depended on the king's public works, specifically the irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes which were revolutionary in their time. The kingdom had to master water. The extreme monsoon climate that produced alternating seasons of floods and drought had to be tamed through these irrigation projects in order for Angkor to flourish. The kings began the national waterworks system in the late ninth century, and by the fourteenth century they irrigated nearly 13 million acres of rice fields. They reclaimed and cultivated plains that had been sunk in swamps or covered by jungle scrub bush.

Irrigation not only multiplied the amount of land under cultivation but increased the number of crops planted each year—from one to two and even three crops of rice. That abundant surplus of rice was the chief source of wealth for Angkor.

The irrigation system also supplemented the national highways. Canals tied the kingdom together and carried the traffic of society: boats laden with the rice harvest or with stones for monuments, boats with soldiers off to fight the empire's battles, boats with merchants and their wares destined for trade in the wealthy capital. Above all, Angkor was a water kingdom.

It was also a society permeated by the religion of the
deva-raj,
a religion the kings interpreted as requiring the construction of those massive funerary temples. In the religious cosmology the Cambodians inherited from India, the center of the universe is Mount Meru, the mountain home of the gods. Angkor, the capital of the kingdom, was built as a microcosm of the universe. The temple of Angkor represented the mythical Mount Meru, the center of the universe and home of the gods. According to a Sanskrit poem it was “a city enclosed in immense walls like the mountains that girdle the great world. There, contemplating gold and silver terraces, the inhabitants have no need to wish they could see the peaks of Meru.”

Cambodian temples were built to vast specifications to render faithfully the sense of majesty while remaining within human dimensions. The result was monuments “incomparable for number, size and perfection.” Angkor Wat itself is the largest religious building in the world. While the irrigation network proved the practical innovations of the Khmers, the temples displayed their aesthetic genius. The buildings are architectural masterpieces and the statuary extraordinary—long rows of gods and giants, carvings of entwined dragons, details of three-headed elephants, and the superb
apsara
angels.

But the source of wealth—the irrigation system—and the source of inspiration—the all-powerful god-king—proved to be the sources of the kingdom's
downfall. Successive kings required greater and more numerous buildings to honor their divinity, draining the energy and wealth of the country. The irrigation system that seemed so beneficial was based at the upstream limit of the flooding and began to wear out the soil. More important, the canals were vulnerable to attack.

Angkor's decline was hastened by geography. Since the empire was centered on the country's northwest plains, Angkor was largely cut off from the new, thriving trade with China. And to the west and east new states were coming of age, states that would eventually compete over the right to annex the entire Khmer kingdom. During the next 600 years Siam (Thailand) and later Vietnam (with its court at Hue) regularly defeated Khmer armies and annexed Khmer territory.

The country was a victim of the royal family as well as geopolitics. Feuds over the throne grew in direct proportion to the diminishing size of the empire. Princes (and an occasional princess) would plead for military aid from Siam or Vietnam to oust a rival claimant. In return, the petitioning prince or princess routinely gave up rights over Cambodian territory.

The capital was moved from Angkor to Oudong in central Cambodia and finally, in the nineteenth century, to Phnom Penh. By then Angkor was a distant memory, the buildings largely deserted to the jungle. Cambodians preferred to avoid the temple ruins in fear of the demonic spirits they housed. By then Cambodia had become a Buddhist nation, its monks disdainful of the old Hindu gods of Angkor. Some of the old Angkor temples were used as Buddhist pagodas. But the actual history was lost. What survived was the possibility to reinvent Angkor's traditions, however distorted, the traditions that could be used to legitimize twentieth-century versions of the
deva-raj,
the water kingdom, and the strong belief in Cambodia's cultural superiority.

Cambodia's modern history begins during the reign of King Norodom, grandfather of Norodom Sihanouk. When Norodom was chosen king in 1860, Cambodia was a thin shadow of the empire it had been under the Angkor kings. Neighboring Vietnam had won control over the lower Mekong Delta area of Cambodia (present-day southern Vietnam) and had recently attempted to colonize Cambodia itself. A popular revolt by the Cambodians and maneuvers by Siam forced the Vietnamese out. Siam and Vietnam claimed suzerainty over Cambodia, and King Norodom was hard-pressed to satisfy both of his neighbors without losing his country.

Into this breach stepped the French, trying to win the race among the European nations to lay claim to the riches of the Orient. The French believed the Mekong River would be the southern road to China and its wealth. By colonizing the countries of the Mekong they could push on to China and offset the British foothold there. But the Siamese court resisted the French through skillful maneuvers using the British against France and strong control over its people. The Siamese retained their independence in exchange for abandoning their claim on the Cambodian court but winning, in the process, Lao and Cambodian territory from the new French colonizers.

The French had convinced King Norodom that they wanted his vulnerable country solely as a protectorate, to act as a buffer between the more highly prized Vietnamese colonies and Siam, by then considered part of the British sphere of influence. King Norodom signed the 1863 and 1864 treaties with France to protect his throne from a series of claims by pretenders and from control by the Vietnamese or the court of Siam. As a last gamble, he immediately moved to try to outmaneuver the French by negotiating a secret treaty with the Siamese. He failed.

The French told Norodom he would control his country; France would only dictate Cambodia's foreign policy. As long as the French believed they had a chance to reach China via the Mekong River, Cambodia itself did not seem to matter to them. Norodom could reign as a semidivine autocrat, the bearer of a reinvented Cambodian tradition.

And Norodom could be made to fit the part well. A contemporary French chronicler in 1888 imputed to him the stereotypical characteristics such as having “a great sense of Asian politics and a very high appreciation of the nobility of his race. One may say, without deceiving oneself, that he is the first Cambodian of his kingdom, if he is not the only one.” Norodom indulged his passions and whims without restraint. He beat unruly ministers of the court, he executed unfaithful women of his harem. But, the story went, regardless of his behavior he had the undying devotion of his subjects. The king was the country, or so it seemed. “The attachment of the Cambodians to their hereditary chiefs is as profound as it is sincere,” a French official asserted. “The nation has long been accustomed to the idea of not separating its own existence from that of the royal house. The monarch is the living incarnation, the august and supreme personification of nationality.”

In reality, Norodom had had to earn the support of the nobility and popular legitimacy to be considered the king. His two half-brothers—Prince Sisowath and Prince Si Votha—made claims to the throne and there were hereditary chiefs who had to accept him as the personification of kingship.
The royal family feuds were constant. Sisowath tried to dethrone Norodom by currying favor with the French; Si Votha by arming hill tribesmen and inciting them to revolt.

By then the French realized the Mekong would not provide an entree into China and that Cambodia's usefulness had to be realized in another fashion. The logic of colonization eroded the short-lived pragmatic relationship that had kept Norodom his country's ruler. First the French assumed responsibility for collecting taxes on opium and alcohol; Norodom agreed even though the French claimed the money was payment to cover French costs for protecting Cambodia. The people abhorred the taxes. Then, in 1884, the French demanded control over the country's lucrative customs service. This time Norodom refused. “It will be thought that the king has lost all authority over his subjects,” he wrote.

Angered, the French decided to end this game with what they denigrated as an Oriental despot, and they wrote a new treaty granting themselves authority over all of Cambodia's administrative, judicial, financial, and commercial affairs—reducing Cambodia to a near colony. To add greater insult, the French governor-general got King Norodom to sign the new treaty by storming into Norodom's sacrosanct private chambers and ordering the king to sign at gunpoint.
¹

This affront wounded what the French and their subjects would declare was national pride. Led by the royal family, the country revolted. The rebellion became known as the Uprising of 1885 and spread throughout the country, lasting two years. Peasants took up arms against the French in the name of the monarchy, if not Norodom. They were often led in battle by a member of the royal family or of one of the elite families of Phnom Penh. Prince Si Votha, a half-brother and rival of Norodom, was the chief sponsor, and he was at once a help to Norodom in frightening the French and a threat in acting as if he might be the more legitimate candidate for the throne.

The leaders of the revolt were fighting to prevent French control of their court. But the peasants following them had more at stake. If the French gained more control it would mean higher taxes and the introduction of private property to Cambodia, thus ending the feudal but beneficent royal dispensing of land. The French wanted to impose a “rational” system whereby land would be held privately for the first time, by the French, the Vietnamese
immigrating from Cochin China, and the ambitious Sino-Khmers and aristocratic Khmers who would turn the peasants into indentured laborers. Under the royal system, they controlled the land they tilled as long as they kept it in agricultural use.

Norodom stayed out of the fray, watching and hoping for a quick French surrender that did not come. Finally in August of 1886 he concluded he had to act, to outflank the increasingly popular Si Votha, who might claim the throne. However, Norodom appeared to harbor a naive belief that the French would be grateful for his action and rescind their intolerable demands.