Against the Ages - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 13

mer of future greatness. “If our people can build Angkor,” he said in 1977, “we can do
anything.” 1 But while Angkor was a source of great pride for Cambodians, it would also
become a crushing burden—a symbol of the country's past achievements, and a reminder
of its subsequent decline.
By the fifteenth century, Khmer power was on the wane. The Siamese (Thai) kingdom
of Ayutthaya had arisen to the west, and sometime during the 1400s the royal court aban-
doned Angkor Wat and relocated its capital southward to Oudong, and then to Phnom
Penh, both of which commanded better access to the Mekong and maritime trade routes.
Post-Angkorian Cambodia appeared as a void on many early European maps—a fea-
tureless expanse hemmed in by the Vietnamese and Thai kingdoms rising to its east and
west. 2 Its diminished territory provided few natural barriers to invasion. During these
dark years, the foundering Cambodian kingdom became a buffer state and object of
rivalry between Thailand and Vietnam, serving at various points as a vassal state to one
or both.
In the 1790s Thailand moved in from the west, annexing Cambodia's western
provinces (including Angkor Wat) and installing a Thai governor to oversee them. From
the east, Vietnam's nam tien —its “southward march” from the heavily populated Red
River Delta—brought it into contact with the diminished Cambodian kingdom. Before
long, Vietnamese settlers had occupied large parts of the Mekong Delta.
Cambodia's border with Vietnam, unlike its western frontier, lies along a deep cultural
fault-line—the hyphen separating the two halves of what the French called “Indo-China.”
This gulf was geographical, political, religious, and linguistic. Vietnam's Confucian so-
cial and political system, inherited from China, contrasted sharply with the informal
nature of Cambodia's political arrangements. On the Vietnamese side of the border,
people aggressively shaped nature to serve their needs, clearing jungle and threading the
landscape with a network of dikes and canals, while Khmer peasants adapted themselves
to the natural rhythms of the land, living off the rice, fish, and fruit that they found every-
where around them. The situation along the two countries' border remains similar today.
In the dry months the Vietnamese fields glow a deep green, while on the other side of the
border much of the land remains parched and brown.
It wasn't long before Vietnam tried to extend more direct control. In the early 1800s
the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang started building fortresses and forced Cambodian
officials to adopt Vietnamese clothes and hairstyles. Confucian forms of administration
were imposed and more Vietnamese migrants settled in the Khmer territories. In 1817,
Vietnam began conscripting Cambodian laborers to build a canal linking the river town of
Chau Doc to the Gulf of Thailand. The Vietnamese overseers treated their Khmer work-
ers cruelly. According to legend, one punishment consisted of burying Khmer workers up
to their necks in groups of three and using their heads to support their boiling teapots. As