Cambodia's Curse (5 page)

Angkor’s lifeblood was rice. The kings of Angkor built large reservoirs and complex irrigation canals for the farmers. After all, rice was
the source of the kings’ wealth, and, as Zhou reported, the irrigation allowed the farmers to grow three or four crops a year. Farmers hauled their rice to market on crude wooden oxcarts with hand-hewn wheels. These carts can still be seen on friezes at Angkor. They are identical to the oxcarts Cambodians use today. Then, as now, the nation’s economy was structured around an expansive patronage network.

Zhou saw hints of it, remarking, “There’s a market every day, from around six in the morning until midday. There are no stalls, only a kind of tumbleweed mat laid on the ground, each mat in its usual place. I gather there is a small fee paid to officials.”

Historians of Cambodia, drawing on texts like Zhou’s and the friezes at Angkor, conclude that the king sold positions in his government. Once his mandarins paid their fee, they had the right to gather up each rice harvest, take some for themselves, and pass the rest up to the next most senior official, until finally the bulk of it was delivered to the royal palace.

No one ever questioned this practice. It was part of Angkor’s natural order. Hierarchy was everything. And each of Angkor’s people belonged to one of only three classes: peasantry, officialdom, or royalty. Each family’s place in that hierarchy was unchangeable, from one generation to the next—from one millennium to the next. Through the centuries, Angkor’s kings never acquired the view that they were accountable to their people. Still, the people clamored for favors; they begged the king for financial assistance or to weigh in on land disputes—an endemic problem.

The king also stepped in if someone committed a crime or failed to play his proper role in the hierarchy exactly as required. “If there is a dispute among the peasants,” Zhou observed, “it must be referred to the king, even if it is a small matter.” Penalties were brutal, even savage. For the guilty, “they just dig a ditch in the ground outside the west gate of the city, put the criminal inside it, fill it up solid with earth and stones, then leave it at that. Otherwise, people have their fingers or toes amputated, or their nose cut off.”

The kings of Angkor appeared to view their citizens as little more than pawns in service of their own agendas. They conscripted thousands as slaves. Others faced even worse fates, giving their lives in service of the kings’ foreign policy.

Kings of that time paid homage to one another. Indravarman knew just what it took to please the king of Champa (now central Vietnam). “At night men were sent out in many directions, to well-frequented places in towns and villages,” Zhou wrote. “When they met people out at night, they snared their head with a rope and took out their gall bladder by sticking a small knife into their right-hand side. When there were enough of these, they were given to the Champa king,” who most likely cooked and ate them.

Cambodians believed independent spirits lived within their bodies. Therefore, when you ate another person’s internal organs, you absorbed his power. It would seem that the kings of Champa held the same view. That superstition persists today.

Following a coup in 1970, a mob killed Lon Nil, brother of Prime Minister Lon Nol, along with another member of parliament. They cut out both men’s livers, took them to a Chinese restaurant, and ordered the owner to cook and slice them, then serve the attendant crowd.

For all of the vast wealth and slaves’ lives Cambodian kings expended to build their temples and palaces, for their subjects they built only what was necessary to sustain the commerce that provided their wealth. Historian David Chandler wrote that, beginning with the earliest kings, the principal public works were roads, bridges, and reservoirs—all vital to growing and transporting rice.

The same remains true today. In Bon Skol, that village about a hundred miles east of Phnom Penh, the village chief, Mou Neam, does not hesitate when asked what the government does for him now. “The roads, the bridges, the wells,” he said.

About 680 people live in Bon Skol. Their homes are small abodes perched on poles a few feet above the ground, with thatched roofs and walls of bamboo matting. They cook their meals over open fires
and set their earthen pots atop three rocks. Bathrooms are open pits back behind the homes. These latrines sit atop the water table. Dysentery is as commonplace in the 2000s as it was in the 1200s.

 

Historians believe the Angkor empire began to decline in the fifteenth century. It had reigned longer than the Roman Empire. Though no one knows exactly why Angkor lost its way, theories abound. Most likely, the city outgrew its ability to sustain itself. Cambodians have always had large families; even today it’s not unusual for the most desperately poor couples to have as many as eight or ten children. It seems probable that Angkor’s population swelled beyond the natural environment’s ability to sustain it. Add to that periods of drought and the evolution of the Asian economy into the era of trade and international commerce during the 1600s.

Responding to mounting threats to the Angkorian way of life, over time the people began to leave. That was easy. They could dismantle their simple homes, load them onto oxcarts, and move someplace else in the Khmer kingdom where they could grow rice, pick fruit, and catch fish.

Yet as the Angkor empire died, Cambodia lost its soul. Until just five hundred years ago, it had been a great nation-state—strong, confident, powerful, respected, and feared. But as the state declined, its kings became helpless, even pathetic, vassals of their neighbors.

Cambodia’s neighbors were quick to seize upon this weakness. The Siamese to the west and Vietnamese to the east began taking bites out of the state, beginning in the 1500s and 1600s. Meantime, the Vietnamese migrated southward until they outnumbered Cambodians in the southern delta region. Over time, they became the de facto rulers. Siamese military forays made inroads from the west.

Over the years a series of kings and their family members allied themselves with either Thai or Vietnamese rulers, whichever they thought could serve as protectors against the other neighbor’s aggression. Hoping to outmaneuver the king, dissident members of the
royal family would sometimes make secret alliances with different neighboring states. Through all of this intrigue, Cambodia continuously suffered invasions and civil wars.

For the first time Cambodian leaders acquired a new character trait: an overwhelming sense of dependency. For solutions to their problems, they had to look beyond themselves. They searched for saviors outside their borders—a far cry from the great medieval kings who held a vast, glittering empire together with cunning and military might.

The Thai and Vietnamese had little respect for the Cambodian people after the fall of Angkor. Their views were scathing. Writing in 1834 Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang called Cambodia a barbarian state because “the people do not know how to grow food.” They used picks and hoes in the rice paddies, wielding them by hand; they didn’t know even how to use oxen, the emperor complained. The sophisticated irrigation schemes the Angkorian kings devised had long since fallen into decay, and in other parts of the country no one even thought to irrigate their fields. “They grow enough rice to eat two meals a day” and saw no value in growing anything more, Emperor Minh Mang wrote. Without irrigation, Cambodians were wholly dependent on the rains to water their crops. At best they could grow one rice crop a year, and then only when the rains fell as expected—a pitiable state compared to the farmers who lived when the kings of Angkor ruled.

A few years later the Vietnamese emperor assigned his best general, Troung Minh Giang, to civilize the Cambodians. But in short order, the general gave up. “After studying the situation,” he reported, “we have decided that Cambodian officials only know how to bribe and be bribed. Offices are sold. Nobody carries out orders; everyone works for his own account.”

Centuries before, the kings of Angkor had set up an economic model that relied on patronage. The king sold government positions to his mandarins. Once ensconced, these aides would be awarded the right to collect rice from the farmers who lived in their respective
territories and keep part of it—generally one-tenth of the crop. Over time, this model naturally evolved into full-throated corruption.

T
hrough the Angkor empire and into the twentieth century, Cambodia had not a single school. Only monks in village pagodas who taught young boys scripture and perhaps how to read. Girls received no education whatsoever. As a result, the men who bought their positions in the royal court had no training or knowledge in government administration. Most were illiterate. The very idea of working on behalf of the people to improve their lot was a foreign concept. These officers looked out only for themselves; their sole occupation was accruing personal wealth. This state of affairs had continued uninterrupted for centuries, and there was no reason to question it.

Cambodia’s peasantry viewed the government with suspicion, even fear. Men were liable for military conscription at any time. The only other interaction families had with the government came when an official showed up to collect “taxes”—10 percent of each harvest. It’s no wonder that the Khmer verb
to govern
literally means “to eat the kingdom.”

It’s also not surprising that most Cambodians lack ambition or any hope for a better life. Their religion, Theravadist Buddhism, taught them to shun status and eschew material possessions because “contentment is wealth,” as the monks still say. In the pagoda schools, monks preached that children should be pleased with the lives they had and not aspire for more.

Theravadist Buddhism swept the country and much of the region in the fourteenth century, possibly because its credo fit so neatly with the Cambodian reality. As nearly every Cambodian recognized, social advancement of any kind was impossible. Material wealth was unattainable. Theravadist monks advised the people to be content with the status quo, and having no other option, they complied.

Centuries later the Vietnamese viewed this Cambodian personality trait with contempt. Emperor Minh Mang complained that the people’s shortcomings, as he saw them, “stem from the laziness of the Cambodian people”—an unfortunate epithet that grew to be commonplace among foreigners.

The Thai practiced Theravadist Buddhism as well, but they also characterized the Cambodians as indolent and dumb. Chaophyraya Bodin, a Thai military commander, complained in the nineteenth century that “all the Khmer leaders and nobles, all the district chiefs and all the common people are ignorant, stupid, foolish and gullible. They have no idea what is true and what is false.”

 

Into the mid-nineteenth century the Thai and the Vietnamese battled each other for dominance over Cambodia, and had events played out without interference, in time the two states would have divided up the whole of Cambodia and annexed their shares. That is how weak and hapless the Cambodian state had become. But in the mid-1800s King Norodom, who had spent his youth as a hostage in the Thai royal court, changed the course of Cambodian history.

The king signed a treaty with France in 1863, offering timber and mining rights in exchange for protection from Cambodia’s neighbors. The French could easily deal with the Vietnamese threat, as they had recently occupied Vietnam, too. The Thai were a more difficult problem.

For the first few years the French were benign guardians, asking only for taxes and fees in return for their protection. But by the mid-1870s they began demanding change in Cambodia’s ossified government. At their urging King Norodom promised to abolish slavery and end the monarchy’s insistence that all land belonged to the crown. He also pledged to reform “tax collection,” which had grown into a system of runaway thievery. But then Norodom employed a passive-aggressive tactic that would remain commonplace, even into the modern era. He signed orders for all of these reforms—but then declined to enforce them.

This didn’t escape French notice. Over the following decades the French grew ever more frustrated with the Cambodian people. Just as the Thai and Vietnamese before them, the French viewed the populace as ignorant and torpid. As for the government bureaucracy, one French administrator described it as “worm-eaten debris,” historian John Tully wrote. As ever, the government’s legal and administrative officials were dedicated only to enriching themselves. The French calculated that they pocketed about 40 percent of the nation’s revenue.

King Norodom was another problem altogether. The French complained frequently about his vast harem, which included four to five hundred women plus another thousand relatives and children. Tully wrote that a French report in 1894 caustically noted that the king’s concubine city cost the government 160,000 francs a year—a very considerable sum one hundred years ago. The French also chafed at his addiction to opium and deep affection for alcohol.