History

In this clear and concise volume, author David Chandler provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation.

This volume showcases some of the most current and exciting research being done on Cambodian religious ideas and practices by a new generation of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The different contributors examine in some manner the relationship between religion and the ideas and institutions that have given shape to Cambodia as a social and political body, or nation.

384 pages packed with (updated) information, illustrations and detailed maps, yet delivered in a portable, easy-to-use format. Focusing on the Angkor temples is the lightest, and the smallest in size, of the Angkor guide books offering more than a brief introduction to the site.

By the end of 1971, the hastily raised, poorly trained, and woefully led Cambodian army had suffered a string of defeats and heavy casualties inflicted by North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong units. With many of its best infantry battalions and much of its armor, transport and equipment destroyed, only three of its 15 brigade groups were militarily effective. In South Vietnam, America and its allies were in the process of withdrawing and handing back to the Vietnamese full responsibility for the conduct of the war.

The Cambodian Church was first planted among the rice farmers of North-West Cambodia in the mid-1920s. Growth was slow and painful. Then fifty years of nearly fruitless toil culminated in the incredible decade of the 1970s, when joyous spiritual awakening was juxtaposed with indescribable devastation.

Temples and killing fields, mighty rivers and impenetrable forests, a past filled with glory and decline Cambodia is a land of contrasts. A millennia ago it was an empire at the height of its power, building the vast temple complexes of Angkor. Now, a thousand years later, ravaged by conflict and a genocidal civil war, Cambodia finds itself struggling with democracy, beset by corruption and on the lowest end of the global spectrum of economic wealth.

The fall of Angkor did not provide the coup de grâce to Cambodia. The kingdom was still relatively strong after the Angkor period up until the fall of Longvek in 1594. After Naresuan had conquered Cambodia, he took back to Ayutthaya all the Khmer treasures such as sacred manuscripts, chronicles, books of code of laws, custom and tradition, skilled people, and a great number of Khmer families.

Early Indianized Kingdom of Funan, Government, Politics, Economy, People of Cambodia.

Archaeological evidence indicates that parts of the region now called Cambodia were inhabited during the first and second millennia B.C. by peoples having a Neolithic culture. By the first century A.D., the inhabitants had developed relatively stable, organized societies, which had far surpassed the primitive stage in culture and technical skills.

One figure strides across modern Cambodian history―Norodom Sihanouk. From his accession to the throne of Cambodia in 1941 until his extravagant funeral ceremony in 2013, the prince turned ‘king father’ in later life never dodged controversy. But this is not a biography of Sihanouk; the focus is upon the final decades of the French protectorate, the rise of a counter-elite and winning of Cambodia’s independence.

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s.