History

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.

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.

May Mayko Ebihara (1934–2005) was the first American anthropologist to conduct ethnographic research in Cambodia. Svay provides a remarkably detailed picture of individual villagers and of Khmer social structure and kinship, agriculture, politics, and religion. The world Ebihara described would soon be shattered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Empire, also known as the Angkor Empire, was a powerful empire of Southeast Asia that was established in 802 CE and ended in 1431 with the invasion of the Siamese and abandonment of Angkor. The Khmer Empire was responsible for many of the historic monuments and temples found throughout the jungles of modern-day Cambodia, and also in other countries of Southeast Asia, all made possible by the fact the Khmer Empire reached across modern-day Cambodia, parts of Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, making it a strategic trading partner with ships traveling from China and India.

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.

Beginning with a definition of who the Cambodians are, this fully illustrated history then tracks back to the earliest kingdoms before 800 AD, followed by an investigation of the creation of the magnificent city of Angkor and Cambodia’s centuries of greatness up to 1400 AD. The following chapter describes the times from 1400–1860, which were centuries of crisis, succeeded by the recovery during next 100 years when the country came under the influence of the French.

Cambodian is in many respects a typical Southeast Asian language, whose syntax at least on first acquaintance seems to approximate that of any SVO pidgin. On closer acquaintance, however, because of the richness of its idioms, the language seems to be a forbiddingly alien form of “Desesperanto” – a language of which one can read a page and understand every word individually, and have no inkling of what the page was all about.

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.

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

The history of Cambodia is essentially the history of the Khmer kings. Power can be very seductive and addictive; and for this reason, kings or people with power would not voluntarily relinquish what they had and they would use any means necessary to maintain their control for absolute power. Sometimes it was easier for the king to rule his country than his family. This was certainly true for Cambodia when the kings begat many children from their multiple wives and concubines, creating many possible successors in competition for his throne.