While visiting Southeast Asia I had hoped to visit Cambodia and Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, that visit didn’t happen. I always enjoy researching destinations before I visit so I had already done so much research. Never like a good research effort to go to waste, so I’m sharing what I learned with you!
Much of what I learned focused on the fascinating Angkor Wat Temple complex dating back to the 8th century and the culture and history that produced Angkor Wat. I also learned about the development of Cambodia through its colonial reign and emergence into the modern world.
Where is Cambodia?
While we recognize the name of the country of Cambodia, you might not know its exact location. Many people think it’s part of Vietnam. Wrong!
Cambodia is located on the Indochinese mainland of Southeast Asia. It’s bordered by Thailand to the west and northwest, by Laos to the northwest, by Vietnam to the east and southeast, and the Gulf of Thailand is to the southwest.
By comparison, it’s a little bigger than Missouri, and a third the size of France.
As you might suppose when you consider its borders, Cambodia has been influenced by the nearby cultures of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. And it has also been affected by the colonial influence of China, India, France, and the United States.
Cambodia is a country of rivers (good for transportation as well as agriculture and fishing). It’s a country of plains, grasslands, mangrove swamps, low mountains, and forests.
Cambodia has always been comprised of rural villages of less than 10,000 people.
Even today only a small portion of people are considered urban dwellers. About 2 million people live in the capital of Phnom Penh—about 11% of the country’s total population of 17 million.
The climate of Cambodia influences how people live. Cambodia is hot year-round, and monsoon winds create two separate seasons.
From May to early October, southwest winds bring heavy rains and high humidity. From early November to mid-March, weather is much drier, with little rain and lower humidity.
Early inhabitants of the area raised pigs, water buffalo, and they fished. They cultivated rice as well. Today we still find miles of rice paddies in the central lowland region of the country.
At one time Cambodia was home to a wide range of wildlife including rhinoceros, elephants, oxen, and deer. But as the country evolved and forest area diminished, those animals disappeared. Many wild animals still live on the land (tigers, leopards, tigers, bear, and several dangerous species of cobras).
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The People of Cambodia
The vast majority (95%) of Cambodians belong to the Khmer ethnic group; they share a common national identity.
Most people in Cambodian speak the Khmer language (which is distinct from Vietnamese, by the way).
Learn more here about the Cambodian language!
The Khmer settled on the lowland regions of the Mekong River and the coastal plain known as Tonle Sap. Over the centuries the people moved south in the Mekong delta. Minority populations are Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham-Malay Muslim, and Laotians.
A notably influential minority group was the Chinese, as they controlled much of the country’s economic life.
Cambodian feelings towards the Vietnamese minority group represents centuries of tension, distrust, and dislike. There is little intermarriage between the groups.
Buddhism is the state religion of Cambodia (several varieties are practiced).
History of Cambodia
What we now know as Cambodia was inhabited by human beings at least 40,000 years ago. Cities developed along the coast in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ.
Indian and Chinese pilgrims and traders passed through these cities, and for the first centuries of the Christian era sources for Cambodian history that survive are almost entirely written in Chinese.
Elements of Indian culture, in the meantime, took root among Cambodia’s elite, and by the 5th and 6th centuries several Hindu kingdoms sprang up in southern Cambodia.
In the late 8th century, a Khmer prince later crowned as Jayavarman II returned to Cambodia from exile in Java, and began to consolidate the kingdom. In 802, in a ceremony near the site we now call Angkor, north of Cambodia’s Great Lake, he declared himself a universal monarch, and founded a dynasty that lasted until Angkor was abandoned in the 16th century.
What And Where Is Angkor Wat?
Angkor Wat is located roughly five miles north of the modern Cambodian city of Siem Reap, which has a population of more than 200,000 people.
However, when it was built, it served as the capital of the Khmer empire, which ruled the region at the time. The word “Angkor” means “capital city” in the Khmer language, while the word “Wat” means “temple.”
Initially, Angkor Wat was designed as a Hindu temple, as that was Jayavarman II’s religion. However, by the end of the 12th century, it was considered a Buddhist site.
Unfortunately, by then Angkor Wat had been sacked by a rival tribe to the Khmer, who in turn, at the direction of the new emperor, Jayavarman VII, moved their capital to Angkor Thom and their state temple to Bayon, both of which are a few miles to the north of the historic site.
As Angkor Wat’s significance within the Buddhist religion of the region increased, so too did the legend surrounding the site. Many Buddhists believe the temple’s construction was ordered by the god Indra, and that the work was accomplished in one night.
However, scholars now know it took several decades to build Angkor Wat, from the design phase to completion.
Angkor Wat’s Design
Although Angkor Wat was no longer a site of political, cultural or commercial significance by the 13th century, it remained an important monument for the Buddhist religion into the 1800s. But unlike many historical sites, Angkor Wat was never truly abandoned. Rather, it fell gradually into disuse and disrepair.
It was rediscovered in 1840s by the French explorer Henri Mouhot, who wrote that the site was “grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.”
The compliment can likely be attributed to the temple’s design, which is supposed to represent Mount Meru, the home of the gods, according to tenets of both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Its five towers are intended to recreate the five peaks of Mount Meru, while the walls and moat below honor the surrounding mountain ranges and the sea.
By the time of the site’s construction, the Khmer had developed and refined their own architectural style, which relied on sandstone. As a result, Angkor Wat was constructed with blocks of sandstone.
A 15-foot high wall, surrounded by a wide moat, protected the city, the temple and residents from invasion, and much of that fortification is still standing. A sandstone causeway served as the main access point for the temple.
Inside these walls, Angkor Wat stretches across more than 200 acres. It’s believed that this area included the city, the temple structure and the emperor’s palace, which was just north of the temple.
The temple is a majestic structure: At its highest point—the tower above the main shrine—it reaches nearly 70 feet into the air.
The temple walls are decorated with thousands of bas-reliefs representing important deities and figures in the Hindu and Buddhist religions as well as key events in its narrative tradition.
Angkor Wat Today
Unfortunately, although Angkor Wat remained in use until fairly recently—into the 1800s—the site has sustained significant damage, from forest overgrowth to earthquakes to war.
The French established a commission to restore the site for tourism purposes in the early 1900s. This group also oversaw ongoing archeological projects there.
While restoration work was accomplished in bits and pieces under French rule, major efforts didn’t begin in earnest until the 1960s. By then, Cambodia was a country transitioning from colonial rule to a limited form of constitutional monarchy.
When Cambodia fell into a brutal civil war in the 1970s, Angkor Wat, somewhat miraculously, sustained relatively minimal damage. The Khmer Rouge regime did battle troops from neighboring Vietnam in the area near the ancient city, and there are bullet holes marking its outer walls as a result.
Since then, with the Cambodian government undergoing numerous changes, the international community, including representatives of India, Germany and France, among others, have contributed to the ongoing restoration efforts.
The site remains an important source of national pride for Cambodians.
In 1992 it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Although visitors to Angkor Wat numbered in just the few thousands at the time, the landmark now welcomes some 500,000 visitors each year—many of whom arrive early in the morning to capture images of the sunrise over what still is a very magical, spiritual place.
From Kingdom to Country
In the 13th century, Cambodians converted en masse to Theravada Buddhism, the style practiced by the Khmer today. State-sponsored Hinduism and the temples inspired by that religion lost their importance, but for many years the kingdom remained strong and prosperous.
Over the next 200 years, the empire shrank, as tributary states in what is now Thailand declared their independence and invaded Cambodian territory. By 1450 or so, the capital had shifted southward to the region of present-day Phnom Penh, where it has remained ever since.
Over the next four centuries, Cambodia became a small Buddhist kingdom dependent on the goodwill of its neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. In the mid-19th century, conflict between these kingdoms spilled onto Cambodian soil, and Cambodia almost disappeared.
In 1863 the Cambodian king, fearful of Thai intentions, asked France to provide protection for his kingdom. France kept Cambodia from being swallowed up, but the protectorate developed into a full-scale colonial relationship that the king had not foreseen.
French rule lasted until the 1950s, and was less harsh than in neighboring Vietnam. The Khmer elite was treated well and French policies had a relatively light impact on the population, while improvements in infrastructure strengthened the economy and brought Cambodia to the edges of the developed world.
After Cambodia gained its independence from France, it entered a short period of peace and prosperity which many older Khmer now look back on as a golden age.
Recent Cambodian history is not a happy story. You might have seen the movie “The Killing Fields” or read about what happened in the country beginning in the 1970s.
Cambodian Conflict: The Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that ruled Cambodia, under the leadership of Marxist dictator Pol Pot, from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot’s attempts to create a Cambodian “master race” through social engineering ultimately led to the deaths of more than 2 million people in the Southeast Asian country. Those killed were either executed as enemies of the regime, or died from starvation, disease or overwork. Historically, this period—as shown in the film The Killing Fields—has come to be known as the Cambodian Genocide.
How it Began
Although Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge didn’t come to power until the mid-1970s, the roots of their takeover can be traced to the 1960s, when a communist insurgency first became active in Cambodia, which was then ruled by a monarch.
Throughout the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge operated as the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the name the party used for Cambodia.
Operating primarily in remote jungle and mountain areas in the northeast of the country, near its border with Vietnam, which at the time was embroiled in its own civil war, the Khmer Rouge did not have popular support across Cambodia, particularly in the cities, including the capital Phnom Penh.
However, after a 1970 military coup led to the ouster of Cambodia’s ruling monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge decided to join forces with the deposed leader and form a political coalition. As the monarch had been popular among city-dwelling Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge began to glean more and more support.
For the next five years, a civil war between the right-leaning military, which had led the coup, and those supporting the alliance of Prince Norodom and the Khmer Rouge raged in Cambodia. Eventually, the Khmer Rouge side seized the advantage in the conflict, after gaining control of increasing amounts of territory in the Cambodian countryside.
In 1975, Khmer Rouge fighters invaded Phnom Phen and took over the city. With the capital in its grasp, the Khmer Rouge had won the civil war and, thus, ruled the country.
Notably, the Khmer Rouge opted not to restore power to Prince Norodom, but instead handed power to the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot. Prince Norodom was forced to live in exile.
Cambodia’s Angkor temples attract thousands of visitors per year, but there’s more to Cambodia than just Angkor Wat.
Kampuchea
As a leader of the Khmer Rouge during its days as an insurgent movement, Pol Pot came to admire the tribes in Cambodia’s rural northeast. These tribes were self-sufficient and lived on the goods they produced through subsistence farming.
The tribes, he felt, were like communes in that they worked together, shared in the spoils of their labor and were untainted by the evils of money, wealth and religion, the latter being the Buddhism common in Cambodia’s cities.
Once installed as the country’s leader by the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and the forces loyal to him quickly set about remaking Cambodia, which they had renamed Kampuchea, in the model of these rural tribes, with the hopes of creating a communist-style, agricultural utopia.
Declaring 1975 “Year Zero” in the country, Pol Pot isolated Kampuchea from the global community. He resettled hundreds of thousands of the country’s city-dwellers in rural farming communes and abolished the country’s currency. He also outlawed the ownership of private property and the practice of religion in the new nation.
Cambodian Genocide
Workers on the farm collectives established by Pol Pot soon began suffering from the effects of overwork and lack of food. Hundreds of thousands died from disease, starvation or damage to their bodies sustained during back-breaking work or abuse from the ruthless Khmer Rouge guards overseeing the camps.
Pol Pot’s regime also executed thousands of people it had deemed as enemies of the state. Those seen as intellectuals, or potential leaders of a revolutionary movement, were also executed. Legend has it, some were executed for merely appearing to be intellectuals, by wearing glasses or being able to speak a foreign language.
As part of this effort, hundreds of thousands of the educated, middle-class Cambodians were tortured and executed in special centers established in the cities, the most infamous of which was Tuol Sleng jail in Phnom Penh, where nearly 17,000 men, women and children were imprisoned during the regime’s four years in power.
During what became known as the Cambodian Genocide, an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million Cambodians died during Pol Pot’s time in charge of the country.
The End of Pol Pot
The Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia in 1979 and removed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from power, after a series of violent battles on the border between the two countries. Pol Pot had sought to extend his influence into the newly unified Vietnam, but his forces were quickly rebuffed.
After the invasion, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge fighters quickly retreated to remote areas of the country. However, they remained active as an insurgency, albeit with declining influence. Vietnam retained control in the country, with a military presence, for much of the 1980s.
Over the decades since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia has gradually reestablished ties with the world community, although the country still faces problems, including widespread poverty and illiteracy. Prince Norodom returned to govern Cambodia in 1993, although he now rules under a constitutional monarchy.
Pol Pot himself lived in the rural northeast of the country until 1997, when he was tried by the Khmer Rouge for his crimes against the state. The trial was seen as being mostly for show, however, and the former dictator died while under house arrest in jungle home.
Under peace agreements signed in Paris in 1991, Cambodia came under United Nations protection for a time in preparation for general elections that were held in 1993. Since then, Cambodia has been a constitutional monarchy ruled by a coalition government that has accepted large infusions of foreign aid. In 1999 Cambodia, after centuries of isolation, became a full-fledged member of the Southeast Asian community.
Cambodia Today: Economy and Government
Cambodia is still one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, with a low per capita income, but it is trying to bolster its economy.
Before 1975, the economy depended on rice and rubber. Rural families were allowed about 2.5 acres of rice paddy to provide for their families. They supplemented by growing gardens, raising livestock, and fishing.
During the Kampuchea regime, the communist government banned private land ownership but created collective farms. With fall of the regime, rural laws were instated to restore traditional land rights to the people.
In the past 30 years the country’s economy got a boost by foreign investment, especially in Phnom Penh. Japan is one of the largest international donors to aid Cambodia. Cambodia also has strong economic and political ties with its large neighbor to the north, China.
Cambodia still relies on its agricultural resources (rice is the major crop). The farmers also raise coconuts, sugarcane, cassava, and corn. Fisheries are also an important resource to the agricultural economy.
Cambodia has a small industrial sector, with manufacturing plants that produce textile products, building materials, paper, soft drinks, and cigarettes.
And tourism is a major source of income for Cambodia, the fastest growing segment of the economy. It has led to construction of hotels and resorts, improved infrastructure in towns, and employment.
Cambodia is considered a constitutional monarchy. The king rules according to a written constitution. The Prime Minister is the acting head of government (the king is considered head of state—a symbol of national unity). A Parliament system oversees creating the creation of laws and other issues.
Other Sites to See In Cambodia
As mentioned, Cambodia’s tourism industry has grown over the decades. So let’s take a look at several of the unique places to visit.
Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. More than 2 million people live in the city (about 14% of the population).
Phnom Penh was settled back in the 5th century, and has grown over the ages. It has been the royal capital, home to the Khmer Empire. It was also the center during French colonial rule.
The city bears traces of ancient Buddhist and Hindu culture, as well as French architecture and European influence.
During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong used Phenom Penh as one of its bases. The Khmer Rouge shelled the city during the 1970s, causing massive damage.
But today Phnom Penh is the country’s economy center. Tourists enjoy visiting the shopping markets and malls, as well as the museums and centers of art.
Siem Reap is the second largest city in Cambodia. Because of its proximity to Angkor Wat, visitors often start their Cambodian voyage in Siem Reap. One can appreciate both traditional culture of Cambodia, as well as the influence of colonial France.
The city is also known for its natural beauty, temples, and museums.
Other places on the tourist map include two southern provinces of Kampot and Kep, which are popular for beach life, exploring cave pagodas, and kayaking.
As for enjoying the wildlife of Cambodia, Mondulkiri is home to the Elephant Valley Project, and has several wildlife sanctuaries tourists can visit.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s Royal Palace showcases the history of the Southeast Asian nation.
Final Thoughts On Visiting Cambodia and Angkor Wat
Southeast Asia is a fascinating place of contrasts, conflict, and culture in transition. From the splendors of Angkor Wat to the ravages of war in modern times, we can appreciate Cambodia’s challenges through the ages. Visiting Cambodia is both a step back in time and glimpse into the country’s future.
Have you been to Cambodia? Please share your impressions in the comments below!
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2 comments
Nice overview of the country.
Thank you Aleks for reading and taking the time to comment! Appreciate it.