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In-Depth Information
the Cambodians struggled and flinched in pain from the flames, the Vietnamese laughed
and warned them: “don't spill the master's tea.” 3
Eventually this mini-Confucian “civilizing mission” prompted bloody revolts. By the
early 1840s, imperial officials had decided that the cultural world of the “barbarian” Kh-
mers was impervious to change. “The people do not know the proper way to grow food,”
Minh Mang complained. “They use mattocks and hoes, but no oxen. They grow enough
rice to have two meals a day, but they do not know how to store rice for an emergency.” 4
For Cambodians the period of Vietnamese domination was formative. The “ yuon ,” as the
Vietnamese are often pejoratively termed, became the bogeymen of the Cambodian polit-
ical imagination. Again and again they would resurface as a cruel and rapacious enemy,
inexorably bent on “swallowing” the rest of Cambodia's land, just as they did Kampuchea
Krom (“lower Cambodia”), the former Khmer territory in the Mekong Delta. The yuon
became synonymous with death and disunity, a force that threatened the country's very
existence.
If it wasn't for the French empire, Cambodia might well have ceased to exist in the mid-
nineteenth century. The first French explorers had arrived in Cambodia in the early 1860s,
seeking to expand French commercial interests in Southeast Asia, and believing that the
Mekong might provide a backdoor to China and its riches. By the time the French es-
tablished a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, the kingdom had endured a half-century
of civil wars, rebellions, and Siamese invasions, as well as the depredations of the Viet-
namese protectorate.
The Cambodian kingdom became a part of French Indochina. King Norodom wel-
comed the French offer of protection, which kept him in nominal power and prevented
the loss of further territory to the Thais and Vietnamese. In 1907 the French negotiated
the return of the Angkor region and the western provinces from Thailand, and fixed Cam-
bodia's national borders in roughly the place they remain today. But French protection
soon evolved into a firmer form of control. The Cambodian monarchy became a ward of
the colonial authorities, which kept it from performing any significant political activities
and placed the next three Cambodian kings on the throne.
Many French officials saw their new colonial possession in romantic terms, viewing
the Khmers as innocent savages—a pale vestige of the people who had produced the glor-
ies of Angkor. The French scholar George Groslier wrote, “the gods have disappeared,
and ironic Death has left only slaves.” 5 But French scholars did much to reconstruct the
country's early past. Proclaiming the greatness of Angkor, they set about translating in-
scriptions and restoring monuments, including Angkor Wat. At the same time the French
shielded Cambodians from the perils of freedom, judging them unready for the challenges
of the modern world. It was the Vietnamese, rather, who were the true dynamo of Indoch-
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