A History of Cambodia

Professor Chandler is well-qualified to write a two-thousand-year Khmer history. I am amazed of what he knows about the details of the incidents throughout our history. The malevolence of the Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang toward the Khmer race, the conquest of the Thai's kings (Rama I, II, III) to rule over the Khmer's territory and the struggle of the Khmer's kings to defend their shrinking empire from the two powerful neighboring countries are very well written in an utmost account of the Indochina's history, without bias or influence from anyone of the nations involved. The French Emperor Napoleon III's intervention that was requested by the Khmer king, Duang in 1853, saved Cambodia to this present day. But there were other serious disadvantages for the Khmer people from the French's colonization of Cambodia (1863-1954) that lost almost one half of the Cambodian territory to Vietnam in June 4, 1949 and France completely gave up Indochina in just five years later and the mistreatment to the Khmer people under their colonial rules. The selection of King Norodom Sihanouk by the Supreme Commander of Armed Forces of the Vichy government, Henri-Phillippe Patain, in April 1941 had great consequences and impacted the Khmer people in every walk of life in and outside Cambodia to this present day. It is fascinating to read A History of Cambodia with its grandeur whose people built the greatest and most beautiful religious monument of Angkor Wat in the world in the 1100s. Almost nine hundred years later Cambodia lost more than half of its territory to Vietnam and Thailand. In addition, the Khmer Rouge leaders became oblivious of the malicious plan by the North Vietnamese communists who have been carrying out the emperor's ridiculous plot, and they blindly slaughtered approximately two millions of its own people between 1975 and 1979. Ironically, the emperor's name means "retarded" in the Khmer language which is contradictory to his opinion of whatever his subjects told him about the nature of the Khmer people. I am very grateful to be alive to have gone through the most horrific regime of the Pol Pot's clique who was trained by the North Vietnamese communists as their puppets to further the Vietnam's conquest. Look at what they had done to Cambodia in the 1970s and their post-revolutionary era! The majority of the Khmer people continue to suffer a great deal as a result of their actions, greed and the Vietnamese's continuous intervention and influence over the Khmer's internal affairs. To learn more of what I experienced in the Khmer Rouge's regime as a young child and barely survived, read "When Slaves Became Masters" and you will fully understand of what went on inside the close-bordered Cambodia in the mid 1970s. Then you will know the root cause of the catastrophe during the Khmer Rouge regime that became so violent and cruel to the Khmer people who are often thought to be peaceful and compassionate as the Theravada Buddhists. I am very grateful to P

This is the only book that I know of that tries to cover Cambodia history from pre Angkorean times until now in a comprehensive fashion. It does not give short shrift to the times before Europeans arrived, like most books on Asian history. The book is short, concise, to the point and a joy to read. It does not only focus on political structure, and dynastic successions, but give a very good effort to describe the development of religion, the identity, social norms, the relationship between the Monarch and sruks and the people. There are certain places where the Author's personal views are revealed however objective the book tries to be throughout. Nevertheless, the book gives a very good "feel" of the Cambodian nation as a people. Highly recommended.

Chandler presents a rather complete picture of the long history of Cambodia in about 250 pages. He's concise--what a blessing from a historian. He highlights the most important AND the most interesting details about each period in Cambodian history, and avoids the common problem of banality that many history books have. It's truly a good read, and an easy one, too. It's written in a very clear style--another of its strong points. In sum, I am supplementing this book with one that deals exclusively with Cambodian history in the last 30 years, but for the "big picture," "A History of Cambodia" is The One. I couldn't be more impressed.

Those who are fascinated with Cambodia, the Khmer language and the Cambodian people treasure the work of David Chandler. Clear and logical presentation are to be taken for granted. The author has for years set the standard toward which the next generation of Asia scholars strive. Even more rare than his impressive intellect is David Chandler's collegial approach to his subjects and his fellow researchers. The 2005 publication in the Khmer language is a beautiful piece of work done in a very crisp and legible Khmer font. The set in both English and Khmer will make the best study aid ever available for students of Khmer and for native speakers studying English. Very encouraging to see the American Embassy in Phnom Penh and the Van Waveren Foundation assist with funding this project. [[email protected] & www.khmerstudies.org]

The coverage in this book is genuinely refreshing: from dim origins of the various ethnic and linguistic groups of Indochina; through the fascinating but frustratingly scant data on pre-Angkorean times; to the glory of Angkor itself; and then into the welcome light of more ample documentation, be it Chinese, European, Siamese or Vietnamese; and finally, of course, colonization, modern war, and the staggering horror of the Khmer Rouge. I believe that history--all history--is the mother of insight, and Chandler's work serves to bolster this opinion. Even the pre-Angkorean chapters--which, as I noted, are cursed by a paucity of evidence--fired my mind: I am now fascinated by the "indianization" of Southeast Asia that occurred in the first millenium AD. It struck me that it was one of the few times where a civilization spread its culture in a big way without either much violence or emigration. [Are there parallels with the contemporary global spread of American culture? True, American ascendance has not been without a torrent of violence--as amply recounted in this book--but I would submit that force has, if anything, hindered rather than advanced the adoption of American cultural norms.] This book is also a welcome antidote to the myriad histories of Southeast Asia that treat all the events before European colonization as the merest of preambles. We learn, for instance, that well before Cambodia became a disposable pawn in bloody post-war neo-imperialist games, it was long an important prize in a previous bipolar arena of gruesome geopolitical struggle--that between Vietnam and Siam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus the tragedy of modern Cambodia does not lie in Western, patronizing visions of the Cambodians as innocent children, but rather in the story of a wordly civilization that had endured and survived so many depradations from outsiders, only to all but self-destruct in our own time.