Cambodia, Kingdom of

Father-and-son architects Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, in designing the “Fontana Maggiore” completed in 1278 for the main square of Perugia, are the first to exploit the (now-familiar) decorative effect of water cascading from a central spout.

The fountain is part of program of civic improvements begun in 1278 to celebrate the autonomy of the free commune of Perugia.

On the twenty-five sides of the basin are sculptures representing prophets and saints, the labors of the months, the signs of the zodiac, scenes from Genesis, and events from Roman history.

The fountain’s relief figures reveal both classical and Gothic influences.

The Khmer, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, establish a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh.

This new center of power is located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sab rivers.

Thus, it controls the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms and has access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade routes that link the China coast, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean.

A new kind of state and society emerges, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor.

The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) provides lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who control royal trading monopolies.

The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulates commerce.

Angkor, after a long series of wars with neighboring kingdoms, had been sacked by the Ayutthaya Kingdom and abandoned in 1432 because of ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown.

This led to a period of economic, social, and cultural stagnation when the Khmner Empire’s internal affairs came increasingly under the control of its neighbors.

By this time, the Khmer penchant for monument building had ceased.

Older faiths such as Mahayana Buddhism and the Hindu cult of the god-king had been supplanted by Theravada Buddhism.

The Khmer court, leaving Angkor to the Thais and, ultimately, the jungle, had moved the capital to Longvek, where the kingdom seeks to regain its glory through maritime trade.

Thai invaders return in 1444 to Angkor and destroy it.

The Khmer officials who had aided the invading Thais secretly join the Ayutthayans at the death of Khmer king Dharmasoka in 1444.

King Photisarath, one of the great kings of Lan Xang, had taken Nang Yot Kham Tip from Lanna as his queen as well as lesser queens from Ayutthaya, and Longvek.

Photisarath is a devout Buddhist, and has declared it as the state religion of Lan Xang.

In 1523 he had requested a copy of the Tripiṭaka from King Kaeo in Lanna, and in 1527 he had abolished spirit worship throughout the kingdom.

In 1532 the period of peace ended for Lan Xang when Muang Phuan rebelled; it will take Photisarath two years to fully suppress the rebellion.

In 1533 he moves his court to Vientiane, the commercial capital of Lan Xang, which is located on the floodplains of the Mekong below the capital at Luang Prabang.

Vientiane is the principal city of Lan Xang, and lies at the confluence of trade routes, but this access also makes it the focal point for invasion from which it is difficult to defend.

However, the move does allow Photisarath to better administer the kingdom and to respond to the outlying provinces that border the Đại Việt, Ayutthaya and the increasingly powerful Burmese polity.

The Vietnamese—who, unlike other Southeast Asian peoples, have patterned their culture and their civilization on those of China—had by the late fifteenth century defeated the once-powerful kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam.

Thousands of Chams flee into Khmer territory.

By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese have reached the Mekong Delta, which is inhabited by Khmer people.

In 1620 the Khmer king Chey Chettha II (1618-28) marries a daughter of Sai Vuong, one of the Nguyen lords (1558-1778), who rules southern Vietnam for most of the period of the restored Le dynasty (1428-1788).

Three years later, Chey Chettha allows the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor, near what is today Ho Chi Minh City (until 1975, Saigon).

By the end of the seventeenth century, the region is under Vietnamese administrative control, and Cambodia is cut off from access to the sea

Trade with the outside world is possible only with Vietnamese permission.

King Ang Chan (1516-66), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moves the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek.

Portuguese and Spanish travelers who visit the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, describe it as a place of fabulous wealth.

The products traded here included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine).

By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contains flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese.

They are joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch.

Because the representatives of practically all these nationalities are pirates, adventurers, or traders, this is an era of stormy cosmopolitanism.

Hard-pressed by the Thai, King Chey Chettha (1576-94) surrounds himself with a personal guard of Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries, and in 1593 asks the Spanish governor of the Philippines for aid.

Attracted by the prospects of establishing a Spanish protectorate in Cambodia and of converting the monarch to Christianity, the governor sends a force of one hundred and twenty men, but Lovek has already fallen to the Thai when they arrive the following year.

The Spanish took advantage of the extremely confused situation to place one of Chey Chettha's sons on the throne in 1597.

Hopes of making the country a Spanish dependency are dashed, however, when
the Spaniards are massacred two years later by an equally belligerent contingent of Malay mercenaries.

The Thai, however, have dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing Lovek in 1594.

With the posting of a Thai military governor in the city, a degree of foreign political control is established over the kingdom for the first time.

Cambodian chronicles describe the fall of Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovers.

The Thai capture of Lovek, more than their conquest of Angkor a century and a half earlier, marks the beginning of a decline in Cambodia's fortunes.

One possible reason for the decline is the labor drain imposed by the Thai conquerors as they march thousands of Khmer peasants, skilled artisans, scholars, and members of the Buddhist clergy back to their capital of Ayutthaya.

This practice, common in the history of Southeast Asia, cripples Cambodia's ability to recover a semblance of its former greatness.

A new Khmer capital is established at Odongk (Udong), south of Lovek, but its monarchs can survive only by entering into what amounts to vassal relationships with the Thai and with the Vietnamese.

In common parlance, Thailand becomes Cambodia's "father" and Vietnam its "mother."

The preoccupation of Cambodia's neighbors with internal or external strife during periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries afford the beleaguered country a breathing spell.

The Vietnamese had been involved in a lengthy civil war until 1674, but upon its conclusion they had promptly annexed sizable areas of contiguous Cambodian territory in the region of the Mekong Delta.

For the next one hundred years they use  the alleged mistreatment of Vietnamese colonists in the delta as a pretext for their continued expansion.

By the end of the eighteenth century, they have extended their control to include the area encompassed today by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam).