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More than 400 years passed between the departure from of Angkor to the
establishment of a protectorate under the French in 1863. Cambodia's
internal affairs came increasingly under the control of its aggressive
neighbours, the Thai and the Vietnamese. Only by balancing their
respective influences could the Khmer monarchy survive.
King Ponhea Yat moved his capital to Phnom Penh. This new centre of power was located at the confluence of the
Mekong and the Tonle Sab rivers. Moving to the Chaktomuk conjunction
indicates an increased interest for trade along the international trade routes between the
Chinese coast, the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
After one reign in Phnom Penh, the Khmer
kings settled several hundred kilometres to the southeast on the site of
Phnom Penh. By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese--who, unlike other
Southeast Asian peoples, had patterned their culture and their
civilization on those of China--had defeated the once powerful kingdom of
Champa in central Vietnam. Thousands of Chams fled into Khmer territory.
The Siamese dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing
Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Siamese military governor in the
city, a degree of foreign political control was established over the
kingdom for the first time. Cambodian chronicles describe the fall of
Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovered. King Ang Chan (1516-66) was one of the few great Khmer kings of
the period. He moved his capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek. Travelers who visited the capital Lovek, located on the banks
of the Tonle Sab described it as a prosperous city.
Around the end of the 16th century, a most
tragic series of events occurred. After he heard reports about strange
white men who travelled in ships along the coast of Southeast Asia, King
Satha decided to see if they could help him save his shaky throne. The
white men were Spanish and Portuguese navigators and merchants who opened
up the Far East to European exploration and commerce in the 16th
century. King Satha sent them a message, asking for the support of their
powerful and mysterious weapons against the Siamese. In response, a small
Spanish expedition, greedy for loot and adventure, sailed from a base in
1596. By the time the Spanish reached Cambodia,
Satha had already been disposed. The Spanish killed the new king and
his son and took control of the capital. They looted Phnom Penh and
put one of Sitha's sons on the throne. |
The Cambodians however hated and resented the
swaggering foreigners. After a period of complicated plotting and
counter-plotting, a conspiracy of high-ranking Cambodian massacred the
Spanish in their garrison in 1599.
By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained
flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians, Malays,
Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. Later in the century the English
and the Dutch joined in.
By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese had reached the Mekong
Delta, which was inhabited by Khmer people. In 1620 the Khmer king Chey
Chettha II (1618-28) married a daughter of Sai Vuong, one of the
Nguyen lords (1558- 1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the
period of the restored Le dynasty (1428-1788). Three years later, Chey
Chettha allowed the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor,
near what is now Ho Chi Minh City (until 1975, Saigon).
By the end of the seventeenth century, the region was under Vietnamese
administrative control, and Cambodia was cut off from access to the sea.
Trade with the outside world was possible only with Vietnamese permission.
A renewed struggle between Siam and Vietnam for control of Cambodia in
the nineteenth century resulted in a period when Vietnamese officials,
working through a puppet Cambodian king, ruled the central part of the
country and attempted to force Cambodians to adopt Vietnamese customs.
Several rebellions against Vietnamese rule ensued. The most important of
these took place in 1840 to 1841 and spread through most of the country.
After two years of fighting, Cambodia and its two neighbours reached an
accord that placed the country under the joint suzerainty of Siam and
Vietnam.
At the behest of both countries, a new monarch, Ang Duong
(1848-59), ascended the throne and brought a decade of peace and relative
independence to Cambodia.
But the Siamese and the Vietnamese had fundamentally different
attitudes concerning their relationships with Cambodia. The Siamese shared
with the Khmer a common religion, mythology, literature, and culture. The
Chakri kings at Bangkok wanted Cambodia's loyalty and tribute, but they
had no intention of challenging or changing its people's values or way of
life. The Vietnamese viewed the Khmer people as barbarians to be civilized
through exposure to Vietnamese culture, and they regarded the fertile
Khmer lands as legitimate sites for colonization by settlers from Vietnam.
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