The Bardez incident also offers us a glimpse of Cambodian peasants entering the historical record, before 1927, in fact, there were no Khmer language newspapers or journals in the Kingdom, and Cambodian literature, when it was printed at all, consisted almost entirely of Buddhist texts and nineteenth century verse epics, the first novel in Khmer, Tonle-Sap, was published in 1938, two years after the appearance of the first Khmer newspaper, Nagara Vatta ( Angkor-Wat) although these facts are not especially surprising in view of French inactivity in Cambodian education, they contrast sharply with the quantity of printed material produced in the Vietnamese components of Indochina, literacy in Khmer was almost entirely in the hands og the Buddhist Monkshood, before 1936, in fact the only Khmer language periodical, Kabuja Surya { Cambodian Sun } had been published on a monthly basis under the auspices of the French-Funded institute Bouddhique, with rare exceptions, the journal limited itself to printing folklore, Buddhist texts, and material concerned with the royal family even Cambodian chronicle histories in Khmer were not yet available in print.
The Assassination Of French Resident Bardez
In late 1923, the acting French resident in Prey-Veng, a vigorous and ambitious official named Felix Louis Bardez, reported his belief that there were three reasons why tax receipts were so low: the complete inactivity of Cambodian officials, the lack of the supervision ( over the officers expected to collect the taxes),and shortcomings in collection procedures,in the course of 1924, Bardez improved the procedures for tax collection in the Srok to the all eighteen categories of tax yielded more revenues than in 1923, he showed that the system could be made more productive by working harder himself, indeed, the two categories of tax in which revenues rose the most-rice taxes and Chinese head taxes were precisely those that could be increased by a vigorous resident on the spot, eager to expose the compromises, Doctored books, and ex-aggregations of local officials.
Bardez's success in Prey-Veng attracted the attention of his superiors,and in late 1924 he was transferred ahead of many more senior officials to be resident in Kompong-chhnang, long bedeviled by banditry and low tax revenues, Bardez's arrival coincided roughly with the promulgation of a supplementary tax to pay for the mountain resort of Bakor, but money was hard to come by, as Bardez admitted to a friend, and receipts were slow in coming, one Cambodian official trying to collect them was severely beaten by villagers in early 1925.
On April 18, angered by resorts that another village,Krang Laav, was delinquent in its payment. Bardez visited the village himself, accompanied by an interpreter and a Cambodian militiaman, summoning delinquent taxpayers to the village hall, or Sala, he had several of them handcuffed and threatened to take them to prison.even though they would not be subject to fines for their delinquency for three months, his refusal to let the prisoners have lunch while he was eating himself destroyed the patience of the large crowd of people looking on, who lacked food or shelter, in a confused melee,
Bardez and his companions were set upon by twenty or thirty people, within half an hour, Bardez interpreter, and the militiaman had been beaten to death with the chairs, fence paling, ax handles, and the militiaman's rifle butt, the corpses were then mutilated, soon afterward, incited by local leaders who were never brought to trail, seven hundred Cambodians, the crowd that had gathered to listen to Bardez- began marching on Kompong-chhnang to demand re-mission of their taxes, after a few hours, however, their fervor died down, and the marchers broke up or were dispersed by armed militia before they reached their destination.
The news of Bardez's murder shocked the French community in Phnompenh, largely because it was the first case in which villagers been killed a high-ranking French official on duty, other officials had been killed by bandits or by their servants, but none while collecting taxes, the precedent obviously was dramatic one, moving swiftly through their puppets in the royal family, the French saw to it that Sisowath sent his eldest son, Prince Monivong, to the area with a French political counselor to communicate his discontent, this took the form of a Royal ordinance changing the name of the village from Krang laav to direchan( Bestiality) the ordinance force the villagers to conduct expiatory
services for Bardez on the anniversary of his murder for the next ten years, the most interesting feature of the ordinance was its insistence on collective guilt, this was the line pursued by the defense in the trail of the eighteen men arrested for Bardez's murder, but it was dismissed by the prosecution, which saw danger in linking the murder with any kind of political discontent, interestingly, one of the men arrested for the murder was still alive in 1980, when he told an interviewer that " everyone in the village" had beaten Bardez and his companions.
The trail of the men accused of the murders opened in Phnompenh in December 1925 and was widely reported in the press, in which it was fitted into pattern of increasing anti colonial feeling elsewhere in Indochina, at the trail. the prosecution tried to prove that the defendants were "pirates" from outside the village and that robbery had been their motive in fact, although the taxes collected by Bardez disappeared in the melee, his own billfold was untouched, more to the point, his diary was confiscated by the prosecution and classified as confidential because of the "political" material it contained, testimony by several of Bardez's friends suggested that the diary may have recorded his pessimism about collecting any extra taxes, to one of them, he had remarked shortly before his death that there was simply not enough money in the Srok to meet the newly imposed demands ,high-ranking French officials interfered with witnesses for the defense, at one point , the defense attorney's tea was apparently poisoned by unknown hands, and a stenographer hired by by the defense was forced by her former employers to return to her job in Saigon what the French wanted to kept quiet, it seems was the fact that emerged at the trial. namely, that on a per ca-pita basis the Cambodian peasants paid the highest taxes in Indochina as a price for their " docility"
The Bardez incident resembles in 1916 affair and the 1942 Monks demonstration, discussed below, in that nothing like it had happened previously in the colonial era,it that exposed the mechanics of colonial rule and the unreality of French mythology about the peaceable" Cambodian character" one aspect of the widening distance between the French and the Cambodians was the fact that Bardez, after fifteen years of conscientious service in Cambodia, was still incapable of speaking Khmer , without knowing the language, how accurate could his assessments be of what ordinary people were thinking? it is as if a great deal of Cambodian life in the colonial period was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French, another French resident, writing at about this time, made a perceptive comment in this regard, it's permissible to ask if the unvarying calm which the [Cambodia] people continue to exhibit is not merely an external appearance covering up vague, unexpressed feeling[ emphasis added whose extract nature we can not perceive.
Residents would reply by saying that they were paid to administer the population, not to understand it, every month, they were required to complete mountains of paperwork, to sit for days as referees in often inconclusive legal case, and to supervise the extensive programs of public works, primarily roads, which the French used to perpetuate corvee' and to justify their presence in the Kingdom.
The end of The Assassination Of French Resident Bardez.
Bardez's success in Prey-Veng attracted the attention of his superiors,and in late 1924 he was transferred ahead of many more senior officials to be resident in Kompong-chhnang, long bedeviled by banditry and low tax revenues, Bardez's arrival coincided roughly with the promulgation of a supplementary tax to pay for the mountain resort of Bakor, but money was hard to come by, as Bardez admitted to a friend, and receipts were slow in coming, one Cambodian official trying to collect them was severely beaten by villagers in early 1925.
On April 18, angered by resorts that another village,Krang Laav, was delinquent in its payment. Bardez visited the village himself, accompanied by an interpreter and a Cambodian militiaman, summoning delinquent taxpayers to the village hall, or Sala, he had several of them handcuffed and threatened to take them to prison.even though they would not be subject to fines for their delinquency for three months, his refusal to let the prisoners have lunch while he was eating himself destroyed the patience of the large crowd of people looking on, who lacked food or shelter, in a confused melee,
Bardez and his companions were set upon by twenty or thirty people, within half an hour, Bardez interpreter, and the militiaman had been beaten to death with the chairs, fence paling, ax handles, and the militiaman's rifle butt, the corpses were then mutilated, soon afterward, incited by local leaders who were never brought to trail, seven hundred Cambodians, the crowd that had gathered to listen to Bardez- began marching on Kompong-chhnang to demand re-mission of their taxes, after a few hours, however, their fervor died down, and the marchers broke up or were dispersed by armed militia before they reached their destination.
The news of Bardez's murder shocked the French community in Phnompenh, largely because it was the first case in which villagers been killed a high-ranking French official on duty, other officials had been killed by bandits or by their servants, but none while collecting taxes, the precedent obviously was dramatic one, moving swiftly through their puppets in the royal family, the French saw to it that Sisowath sent his eldest son, Prince Monivong, to the area with a French political counselor to communicate his discontent, this took the form of a Royal ordinance changing the name of the village from Krang laav to direchan( Bestiality) the ordinance force the villagers to conduct expiatory
services for Bardez on the anniversary of his murder for the next ten years, the most interesting feature of the ordinance was its insistence on collective guilt, this was the line pursued by the defense in the trail of the eighteen men arrested for Bardez's murder, but it was dismissed by the prosecution, which saw danger in linking the murder with any kind of political discontent, interestingly, one of the men arrested for the murder was still alive in 1980, when he told an interviewer that " everyone in the village" had beaten Bardez and his companions.
The trail of the men accused of the murders opened in Phnompenh in December 1925 and was widely reported in the press, in which it was fitted into pattern of increasing anti colonial feeling elsewhere in Indochina, at the trail. the prosecution tried to prove that the defendants were "pirates" from outside the village and that robbery had been their motive in fact, although the taxes collected by Bardez disappeared in the melee, his own billfold was untouched, more to the point, his diary was confiscated by the prosecution and classified as confidential because of the "political" material it contained, testimony by several of Bardez's friends suggested that the diary may have recorded his pessimism about collecting any extra taxes, to one of them, he had remarked shortly before his death that there was simply not enough money in the Srok to meet the newly imposed demands ,high-ranking French officials interfered with witnesses for the defense, at one point , the defense attorney's tea was apparently poisoned by unknown hands, and a stenographer hired by by the defense was forced by her former employers to return to her job in Saigon what the French wanted to kept quiet, it seems was the fact that emerged at the trial. namely, that on a per ca-pita basis the Cambodian peasants paid the highest taxes in Indochina as a price for their " docility"
The Bardez incident resembles in 1916 affair and the 1942 Monks demonstration, discussed below, in that nothing like it had happened previously in the colonial era,it that exposed the mechanics of colonial rule and the unreality of French mythology about the peaceable" Cambodian character" one aspect of the widening distance between the French and the Cambodians was the fact that Bardez, after fifteen years of conscientious service in Cambodia, was still incapable of speaking Khmer , without knowing the language, how accurate could his assessments be of what ordinary people were thinking? it is as if a great deal of Cambodian life in the colonial period was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French, another French resident, writing at about this time, made a perceptive comment in this regard, it's permissible to ask if the unvarying calm which the [Cambodia] people continue to exhibit is not merely an external appearance covering up vague, unexpressed feeling[ emphasis added whose extract nature we can not perceive.
Residents would reply by saying that they were paid to administer the population, not to understand it, every month, they were required to complete mountains of paperwork, to sit for days as referees in often inconclusive legal case, and to supervise the extensive programs of public works, primarily roads, which the French used to perpetuate corvee' and to justify their presence in the Kingdom.
The end of The Assassination Of French Resident Bardez.
Cambodia's Response to France, 1916-1945
Two events of major political importance stand out from the last ten years or so of Sisowath's Reign there are the so called 1916 affair and the murder of French resident,Felix Louis Bardez in rural Kompongchhnang in 1925, the first of these revealed how little the French knew about communications and social organization in Cambodia after more than fifty years of control, the second, perhaps because it was the only incident of its kind in the colonial era, shocked the regime and was blown out of proportion in post-colonial times by Cambodian nationalist writers.
The 1916 Affair: រឿងរ៉ាវក្នុងឆ្នាំ១៩១៦
To understand the 1916 affair, we must remember that the French financed almost all their activities in Cambodia, including public works and the salaries of french officials, by a complex and onerous network of taxes on Salt, Alcohol, Opium, Rice and others Crops, and exported and imported goods and by levying extensive fees and all government services, of those too poor to pay their way out, the French could require ninety days per year of corvee', but people who paid their way out were still liable in many cases to other labor requirements, the cash to pay rice taxes came only when peasant householders had sold their harvests for cash or had been able to earn enough cash to pat the taxes by hiring themselves out in the off season, there was a certain amount of flexibility in the system, because tax records were poorly kept and local leaders tended to spread the tax burden more evenly through the population and incidentally, to increase their opportunities for profit.
During world war I, the French increased this burden throughout Indochina by floating war loans to which local people, especially " the leisure classes"( presumably Chinese merchants) were rather forcefully urged to subscribe, by levying additional tax', and by recruiting volunteers for military service abroad, in late November 1915, some three hundred peasants from the area Northeast of Phnompenh arrived in the capital with a petition to Sisowath asking him to reduce taxes, which although levied by the French, were collected by Cambodian officials, the King met the delegation and ordered its members to go home, promising vaguely that some adjustments would be made.
News of the confrontation apparently spread in the Srok to the East of Phnompenh- long a hotbed of anti-dynastic sentiment in any case and larger and larger delegations , some times numbering as many as three thousand peasants, began walking into capital and assembling outside the Palace to place their grievances before the King French residents reporting on these movements, registered their surprise not only at the magnitude of the delegations but also, as one wrote, that they had "been set in motion with such disconcerting speed." another mentioned that no one had predicted the affair. although, the entire population was involved, French people police estimated that some forty thousand peasants passed through Phnompenh in the early months of 1916 before being ordered back to their villages by the King, other estimates run as high as hundred thousand, scattered incidents in the Srok later in the year claimed half a dozen Cambodian lives, and at the same time, Sisowath toured the Eastern Srok by automobile. exhorting peasants to remain peacefully in their home and canceling any further corvee' for 1916.
In the long run, the 1916 affair had little effect on the way the French ran Cambodia or on Cambodian responses to the French, in fact, it is unclear that the demonstrations were against the French at all, French administrators were sidestepped by the petitioners, who sought justice directly from the King,. what is extraordinary about the demonstrations is the speed and efficiency with which they were organized by leaders whose identity and motives rema8in obscure the incident undermined French mythology about "Lazy" and individualistic" Cambodians supposedly impervious to leadership or Ideology,some french officials ,panicked by the size of the delegations, blamed the affair on German Agents" still others saw evidence of deep seated anti monarchic feeling, citing in evidence a manifesto that had circulated earlier in 1915, which stated, the French have made us very unhappy for many years by keeping bad people as the King and as officials while treating good people as bad.
Interestingly,in the 1916 affair coincided with serious anti-French demonstrations in Cochin-China, the possibility of links between the two was noted by some French officials, but the speed with which Cambodian disaffection died down suggest that people there had been demonstrating to relieve local wrongs.
In the nine years that passed before the assassination of Resident Bardez, the French so tightened and rationalized their control over Cambodia- and especially over the organization of revenue collection and day-to-day administration- that some"aged" Cambodian officials complained to them that " to many changes " were taking place, in 1920,for example, the French arranged for the rice taxes to be collected by local officials rather than officials sent to the Srok from Phnompenh, a year later, the French experimented with a " communal" reorganization of Cambodia along Vietnamese lines, only to drop the idea after a year or so, the French extended their supervisory role to cover local justice in 1923, expanded Wat education from 1924 onward, and used Corvee' to build an impressive array of public works, particularly roads and a mountain resort at Bokor, favored by the King, which was built by prisoners ( with a tremendous loss of life) and opened in 1925, the first rice mills had opened in Cambodia in 1917- previously, un-milled rice had been shipped to saigon- and the period 1916-1925, (first the noticeable exception of 1918-1919, a year of very poor harvests and, in some Srok, famine conditions) was one of increasing prosperity in Cambodia,especially for local Chinese merchants and the french.
The gap in income between the French and the Cambodians- with the rare exception of a few favored officials and the royal family was very wide, a French official could earn as much as 12.000 piastres a year, with exemptions for his wife and two children,such as official would pay only 30 piastres in tax,Cambodian officials were pay less for similar jobs and were the first to have their wages cut
during the depression of the 1930s, a Cambodian farmer, on the other hand, with no salary other than what he could sell his crops for ( seldom more than 40 piastres a year) was saddled with a range of taxes that totaled in the 1920s as much as 12 piastres per year, he was taxed individually and in cash payment in lieu of Corvee', his rice was taxed at fixed percentage, he paid high prices for salt, opium and alcohol and paid abattoir ទីសត្តឃាត taxes when his livestock went to slaughter.
What did the the peasant receive in exchange ? very little, despite French rhetoric វោហាសាស្រ្ត to the contrary, monthly reports from French residents show widespread rural violence and disorder, which, because it made no direct challenge to french control, seldom rose into the "political" portions of the reports, it is clear, however, that to most villagers the perpetual harassment of bandit gangs,
especially in the dry season, was far more real than any benefits brought to them by the French.
Before the 1930s. moreover, the French spent almost nothing on education, a French official in 1922 accurately characterized efforts in this field as a mere facade, medical services were also derisory, and electricity and running water were also almost unknown outside Phnompenh, Cambodia's money, in other words , went to finance French officials and the things they wanted to build , in exchange , Cambodia was protected from control by anyone else, as well as from the perils of independence, the French succeeded in keeping the nineteenth century from repeating itself while keeping the twentieth century at bay, the fear of, modernity runs through a good deal of French writing about colonial Cambodia, even though the French in another context perceived their role as one of transmitting modernity to the Khmer, because what they were supposed to be doing was not allowed to take place, the French took refuge in beliefs about the "innate " characteristics of the Cambodians, which kept them immune from modern ideas or inherently hostile to them.
These beliefs were based on less and less direct experience with the Cambodians themselves, the most articulates critic of French colonialism at this time , Andre' Pannetier, remarked that competence among French men in Khmer-language declined steadily as the twentieth century wore on, ironically as the adventure and romance of serving in Cambodia wore thin,the clinches' with
which French bureaucrats describe the Cambodian people became increasingly fuzzy and romantic,
the process came to a climax of sort in 1927, when former Governor- General Paul Doumer, by then president of French,unveiled a group of statues on the staircase that links the railroad station in Marseilles with the City below, one of these, entiled" our possessions in Asia, depicts a half naked teenage girl, decked out in approximately Angkorean garb, lying on a divan being waited on by smaller, half-clad girls representing Laos and Vietnam, as the Easiest" and oldest of French protectorates in Indochina, Cambodia was rewarded by being portrayed as the notion that Cambodians lay around receiving tribute of kind from the other two the notion that Cambodians lay around receiving tidbits, of course may also have been at the back of the sculptor's mind.
The end of Cambodia's Response to France, 1916-1945
The 1916 Affair: រឿងរ៉ាវក្នុងឆ្នាំ១៩១៦
To understand the 1916 affair, we must remember that the French financed almost all their activities in Cambodia, including public works and the salaries of french officials, by a complex and onerous network of taxes on Salt, Alcohol, Opium, Rice and others Crops, and exported and imported goods and by levying extensive fees and all government services, of those too poor to pay their way out, the French could require ninety days per year of corvee', but people who paid their way out were still liable in many cases to other labor requirements, the cash to pay rice taxes came only when peasant householders had sold their harvests for cash or had been able to earn enough cash to pat the taxes by hiring themselves out in the off season, there was a certain amount of flexibility in the system, because tax records were poorly kept and local leaders tended to spread the tax burden more evenly through the population and incidentally, to increase their opportunities for profit.
During world war I, the French increased this burden throughout Indochina by floating war loans to which local people, especially " the leisure classes"( presumably Chinese merchants) were rather forcefully urged to subscribe, by levying additional tax', and by recruiting volunteers for military service abroad, in late November 1915, some three hundred peasants from the area Northeast of Phnompenh arrived in the capital with a petition to Sisowath asking him to reduce taxes, which although levied by the French, were collected by Cambodian officials, the King met the delegation and ordered its members to go home, promising vaguely that some adjustments would be made.
News of the confrontation apparently spread in the Srok to the East of Phnompenh- long a hotbed of anti-dynastic sentiment in any case and larger and larger delegations , some times numbering as many as three thousand peasants, began walking into capital and assembling outside the Palace to place their grievances before the King French residents reporting on these movements, registered their surprise not only at the magnitude of the delegations but also, as one wrote, that they had "been set in motion with such disconcerting speed." another mentioned that no one had predicted the affair. although, the entire population was involved, French people police estimated that some forty thousand peasants passed through Phnompenh in the early months of 1916 before being ordered back to their villages by the King, other estimates run as high as hundred thousand, scattered incidents in the Srok later in the year claimed half a dozen Cambodian lives, and at the same time, Sisowath toured the Eastern Srok by automobile. exhorting peasants to remain peacefully in their home and canceling any further corvee' for 1916.
In the long run, the 1916 affair had little effect on the way the French ran Cambodia or on Cambodian responses to the French, in fact, it is unclear that the demonstrations were against the French at all, French administrators were sidestepped by the petitioners, who sought justice directly from the King,. what is extraordinary about the demonstrations is the speed and efficiency with which they were organized by leaders whose identity and motives rema8in obscure the incident undermined French mythology about "Lazy" and individualistic" Cambodians supposedly impervious to leadership or Ideology,some french officials ,panicked by the size of the delegations, blamed the affair on German Agents" still others saw evidence of deep seated anti monarchic feeling, citing in evidence a manifesto that had circulated earlier in 1915, which stated, the French have made us very unhappy for many years by keeping bad people as the King and as officials while treating good people as bad.
Interestingly,in the 1916 affair coincided with serious anti-French demonstrations in Cochin-China, the possibility of links between the two was noted by some French officials, but the speed with which Cambodian disaffection died down suggest that people there had been demonstrating to relieve local wrongs.
In the nine years that passed before the assassination of Resident Bardez, the French so tightened and rationalized their control over Cambodia- and especially over the organization of revenue collection and day-to-day administration- that some"aged" Cambodian officials complained to them that " to many changes " were taking place, in 1920,for example, the French arranged for the rice taxes to be collected by local officials rather than officials sent to the Srok from Phnompenh, a year later, the French experimented with a " communal" reorganization of Cambodia along Vietnamese lines, only to drop the idea after a year or so, the French extended their supervisory role to cover local justice in 1923, expanded Wat education from 1924 onward, and used Corvee' to build an impressive array of public works, particularly roads and a mountain resort at Bokor, favored by the King, which was built by prisoners ( with a tremendous loss of life) and opened in 1925, the first rice mills had opened in Cambodia in 1917- previously, un-milled rice had been shipped to saigon- and the period 1916-1925, (first the noticeable exception of 1918-1919, a year of very poor harvests and, in some Srok, famine conditions) was one of increasing prosperity in Cambodia,especially for local Chinese merchants and the french.
The gap in income between the French and the Cambodians- with the rare exception of a few favored officials and the royal family was very wide, a French official could earn as much as 12.000 piastres a year, with exemptions for his wife and two children,such as official would pay only 30 piastres in tax,Cambodian officials were pay less for similar jobs and were the first to have their wages cut
during the depression of the 1930s, a Cambodian farmer, on the other hand, with no salary other than what he could sell his crops for ( seldom more than 40 piastres a year) was saddled with a range of taxes that totaled in the 1920s as much as 12 piastres per year, he was taxed individually and in cash payment in lieu of Corvee', his rice was taxed at fixed percentage, he paid high prices for salt, opium and alcohol and paid abattoir ទីសត្តឃាត taxes when his livestock went to slaughter.
What did the the peasant receive in exchange ? very little, despite French rhetoric វោហាសាស្រ្ត to the contrary, monthly reports from French residents show widespread rural violence and disorder, which, because it made no direct challenge to french control, seldom rose into the "political" portions of the reports, it is clear, however, that to most villagers the perpetual harassment of bandit gangs,
especially in the dry season, was far more real than any benefits brought to them by the French.
Before the 1930s. moreover, the French spent almost nothing on education, a French official in 1922 accurately characterized efforts in this field as a mere facade, medical services were also derisory, and electricity and running water were also almost unknown outside Phnompenh, Cambodia's money, in other words , went to finance French officials and the things they wanted to build , in exchange , Cambodia was protected from control by anyone else, as well as from the perils of independence, the French succeeded in keeping the nineteenth century from repeating itself while keeping the twentieth century at bay, the fear of, modernity runs through a good deal of French writing about colonial Cambodia, even though the French in another context perceived their role as one of transmitting modernity to the Khmer, because what they were supposed to be doing was not allowed to take place, the French took refuge in beliefs about the "innate " characteristics of the Cambodians, which kept them immune from modern ideas or inherently hostile to them.
These beliefs were based on less and less direct experience with the Cambodians themselves, the most articulates critic of French colonialism at this time , Andre' Pannetier, remarked that competence among French men in Khmer-language declined steadily as the twentieth century wore on, ironically as the adventure and romance of serving in Cambodia wore thin,the clinches' with
which French bureaucrats describe the Cambodian people became increasingly fuzzy and romantic,
the process came to a climax of sort in 1927, when former Governor- General Paul Doumer, by then president of French,unveiled a group of statues on the staircase that links the railroad station in Marseilles with the City below, one of these, entiled" our possessions in Asia, depicts a half naked teenage girl, decked out in approximately Angkorean garb, lying on a divan being waited on by smaller, half-clad girls representing Laos and Vietnam, as the Easiest" and oldest of French protectorates in Indochina, Cambodia was rewarded by being portrayed as the notion that Cambodians lay around receiving tribute of kind from the other two the notion that Cambodians lay around receiving tidbits, of course may also have been at the back of the sculptor's mind.
The end of Cambodia's Response to France, 1916-1945
Sisowath's Early years
Norodom, like millions of people of his generation, was born in a village and died in a semi-modern city,graced at the time of his death with electricity and running water, the modernization of the edges and surfaces of his kingdom, however, spread very slowly, partly because communications inside Cambodia remained so poor, partly became monks, royalty, and officials- ie, the people held in most respect resisted institutional change, and partly because the " modernizing" segment of the Society was dominated by the French, aided by immigrants from China and Vietnam.the modernizers, interestingly, thought in Indochinese terms, or perhaps in capitalist ones, while members of the traditional elite saw no reason to widen their intellectual horizons or to tinker with their belief.
Norodom's death , nonetheless, was watershed in French involvement and in Cambodian Kingship as an institution, as the next three Kings of the country were handpicked by the French, until 1953, except for a few months in summer of 1945, Cambodian officials of high rank played a subordinate, ceremonial role, and those at lower levels of the administration were underpaid servants of colonial power, at no point in the chain of command was initiative rewarded while Norodom lived, the French encountered obstacles to their plans, efficient revenue - producing machine.
The change over the long term, easy to see from our perspective, was not immediately perceptible in the Srok, where French officials found old habits of patronage, dependence, violence, fatalism, and corruption largely unchanged from year to year, offices were still for sale, tax rolls were falsified, rice harvest were underestimated, credulous people were still ready to fellow sorcerers and mountebanks, as late as 1925, in Stung-Treng , an ex monk gathered a following by claiming to possess a golden frog with a human voice" and epidemics of malaria and cholera, the contrast between the capital and the Srok, therefore, sharpened in the early twentieth century, without apparently producing audible resentment in the Srok, even though peasants in the long run paid with their labor and their rice for all the improvements in Phnompenh and for the high salaries enjoyed by French officials , fueling the resentment of anti-French guerrillas in the early 1950s and communist cadres later on.
When Sisowath succeeded his brother in 1904, he was sixty-four years old, and ever since in the 1870s he had been an almost fawning collaborator with the French, he seems to have been a somewhat more fervent Buddhist than Norodom and more popular among ordinary people, some of whom associated him with the ceremonies that he had sponsored( and that they had paid for) rather than the taxes charged by his brother or by the French, according to one French writer, he was so frightened of his brother, even in death, that he refused to attend his cremation. the first two years of his Reign,according to the chronicle, were devoted largely to ceremonial observances and to bureaucratic innovation ( such as appointing an electrician for the Palace and enjoining officials to wear stocking and shoes in Western-style) on another occasion, Sisowath harangued visiting officials- probably at French insistence- about the persistence of slavery in the Srok, throughout the year, like all Cambodian King, he sponsored ceremonies meant to assure good harvests and rainfall , each year for the rest of his Reign, the French provided Sisowath( as they had Norodom) with an allowance of high grade opium, totaling 113kg(249 pound) per year.
This early stage of his Reign culminated in Norodom's cremation in 1906. which was followed almost immediately by Sisowath's coronation, for the first time in Cambodian history, the ceremony is described in detail in the chronicle( as well as by French sources) it lasted for several days , one of its interesting features was that the French governor-general of Indochina was entrusted with giving Sisowath his tiles and handing him his regalia, another was that Chaovay-Srok, summoned to the Palace for the occasion, solemnly pledged to the King" all rice land, vegetable fields, water, earth, forest and mountains, and the sacred boundaries of the great city, the Kingdom of Kampuchea.
Almost immediately after being crowned, Sisowath left Cambodia to visit the colonial Exhibition at Marseilles,in the company of Royal ballet troupe,his voyage is scrupulously recorded in the chronicle
which makes it sound like an episode in a Cambodian poem, the King's progress through Singapore, Ceylon, and Indian Ocean is recently set down, and so are gnomic comments about the sights farther on ( three-story building in Italy; the coastline of the red sea consisting of Nothing but sand and rock) at port said, people eagerly came" in Marseilles, when the King made a speech, all the French people who were present clapped their hands- men and women alike' the chronicle gives the impression that King decided to visit France , in fact, his visit was force on him by the requirement of the exposition officials that the Royal ballet perform from the French point of view , unofficially at least, this visit by an aged potentate and his harem told them what they already, knew" about his exotic, faintly comic little country.
After exchanging visits and dinners with the President of the republic and a trip to Nancy to observe" the 14th of July in a European way, the King returned to Cambodia, although the chronicle makes no mention of discussion of substantive matters, Sisowath's visit to Paris coincided with Franco Thai negotiation there that culminated, a few months later, in Siam's retro-cession to Cambodia of the Srok of Battambong and Siam-Reap, the trip received little publicity at home and is mentioned in French records from the Srok only in connection with a rumor that Sisowath had gone to France to plead with the French to legalize gambling in Cambodia.
The number of pages in Sisowath's chronicle devoted to the return of Battambong and Seam-reap suggests that the compilers, like the French, considered this to be most important event of the Reign,
even though the King had little to do with it beyond providing the resident Superior, in 1906, with a"History" of Thai occupation, the importance of the retro-cession was probably connected with the importance of that Angkor , and especially Angkorwat, retained for the Cambodian monarchy throughout Cambodia's dark ages in 1906, a copy of the Cambodian translation of sacred Buddhist writing, the Tripitaka, was deposited in a monastery on the grounds of Angkor-Wat, and for another sixty years Cambodian monarchs frequently visited the site and sponsored religious ceremonies there.
The retro-cession apparently was less painful to the Thai than the loss of the Lao states, which occurred at roughly the same time as we have seen, the Northwestern Srok had come under Thai control in 1794 in exchange for Thai permission for Eng to rule at Udong, over the next hundred years, except for a brief period in 1830s, the Thai had made little effort to colonize( or depopulate) the region, choosing to the govern it at most levels with ethnic Khmer, although they did nothing to restore the temples at Angkor, they left them intact, revenue from the two Srok- in stipulate amounts of cardamom and other forest products- was not especially high and the region was more defensible by water from Phnompenh than overland from Bangkok.
For these reasons, but primarily to avoid further friction along its border, the Thai decided in 1906 to cede the Srok to France, the final agreement was signed by the French and the Thai in April 1907, and the Srok came under French control toward the end of the year, Sisowath was not encouraged to visit the area, however, until 1909, for reasons that the chronicle fails to make clear.
And yet the King and his subjects were overjoyed at the restoration of Angkor, in the Tang-Kok ceremonies of Oct-1907, when officials traditionally offered gifts to monarch widely attended celebrations occurred throughout the Kingdom to "Thank the Angles"( Thevada) for the return of the Srok, and local officials assigned to region came to Phnompenh to pay homage to the King.
Over the next haft century, French scholars and Cambodian workers restored the temples at Angkor, in the long run, probably France's most valuable legacy to Cambodia, Battambang, especially in the 1920s. developed into the country's most prosperous Srok, providing the bulk of Cambodia's rice exports and sheltering, idiosyncratically, by far the greatest number of landlords in the country as well as the highest number of immigrants from elsewhere in Cambodia and from the Cambodian-speaking portions of Cochin-China.
By 1909, typewriters had been installed in all the residences, automobiles came into use on a national scale at about the same time, these two; Improvements" in French administration had several un-intentional effects, for one thing, the volume of reports required by residents, and consumed by their superiors in Phnompenh, Saigon, Hanoi, and Paris,increased dramatically,Residents, more than ever,were tied down to their offices,presiding over a two-way flow of paper, they were seldom in contact, socially or professionally, with the people they were intended to protect, in automobiles, tours of inspection became speedier and more superficial, for residents and their aides were confined to passable roads in fact, the intensification of French economic and political controls over Cambodia, noticeable throughout the 1920s and after, was accompanied, ironically, by the withdrawal of French officials from many levels of Cambodia life, the' Government" that a Cambodian peasant might encounter in these years was composed of minority of Cambodians they could prepare reports in French, and this interplay between Cambodian
and Vietnamese had important effects on the development of Cambodian nationalism.especially after World-War II.
The End of Sisowath's Early years
Norodom's death , nonetheless, was watershed in French involvement and in Cambodian Kingship as an institution, as the next three Kings of the country were handpicked by the French, until 1953, except for a few months in summer of 1945, Cambodian officials of high rank played a subordinate, ceremonial role, and those at lower levels of the administration were underpaid servants of colonial power, at no point in the chain of command was initiative rewarded while Norodom lived, the French encountered obstacles to their plans, efficient revenue - producing machine.
The change over the long term, easy to see from our perspective, was not immediately perceptible in the Srok, where French officials found old habits of patronage, dependence, violence, fatalism, and corruption largely unchanged from year to year, offices were still for sale, tax rolls were falsified, rice harvest were underestimated, credulous people were still ready to fellow sorcerers and mountebanks, as late as 1925, in Stung-Treng , an ex monk gathered a following by claiming to possess a golden frog with a human voice" and epidemics of malaria and cholera, the contrast between the capital and the Srok, therefore, sharpened in the early twentieth century, without apparently producing audible resentment in the Srok, even though peasants in the long run paid with their labor and their rice for all the improvements in Phnompenh and for the high salaries enjoyed by French officials , fueling the resentment of anti-French guerrillas in the early 1950s and communist cadres later on.
When Sisowath succeeded his brother in 1904, he was sixty-four years old, and ever since in the 1870s he had been an almost fawning collaborator with the French, he seems to have been a somewhat more fervent Buddhist than Norodom and more popular among ordinary people, some of whom associated him with the ceremonies that he had sponsored( and that they had paid for) rather than the taxes charged by his brother or by the French, according to one French writer, he was so frightened of his brother, even in death, that he refused to attend his cremation. the first two years of his Reign,according to the chronicle, were devoted largely to ceremonial observances and to bureaucratic innovation ( such as appointing an electrician for the Palace and enjoining officials to wear stocking and shoes in Western-style) on another occasion, Sisowath harangued visiting officials- probably at French insistence- about the persistence of slavery in the Srok, throughout the year, like all Cambodian King, he sponsored ceremonies meant to assure good harvests and rainfall , each year for the rest of his Reign, the French provided Sisowath( as they had Norodom) with an allowance of high grade opium, totaling 113kg(249 pound) per year.
This early stage of his Reign culminated in Norodom's cremation in 1906. which was followed almost immediately by Sisowath's coronation, for the first time in Cambodian history, the ceremony is described in detail in the chronicle( as well as by French sources) it lasted for several days , one of its interesting features was that the French governor-general of Indochina was entrusted with giving Sisowath his tiles and handing him his regalia, another was that Chaovay-Srok, summoned to the Palace for the occasion, solemnly pledged to the King" all rice land, vegetable fields, water, earth, forest and mountains, and the sacred boundaries of the great city, the Kingdom of Kampuchea.
Almost immediately after being crowned, Sisowath left Cambodia to visit the colonial Exhibition at Marseilles,in the company of Royal ballet troupe,his voyage is scrupulously recorded in the chronicle
which makes it sound like an episode in a Cambodian poem, the King's progress through Singapore, Ceylon, and Indian Ocean is recently set down, and so are gnomic comments about the sights farther on ( three-story building in Italy; the coastline of the red sea consisting of Nothing but sand and rock) at port said, people eagerly came" in Marseilles, when the King made a speech, all the French people who were present clapped their hands- men and women alike' the chronicle gives the impression that King decided to visit France , in fact, his visit was force on him by the requirement of the exposition officials that the Royal ballet perform from the French point of view , unofficially at least, this visit by an aged potentate and his harem told them what they already, knew" about his exotic, faintly comic little country.
After exchanging visits and dinners with the President of the republic and a trip to Nancy to observe" the 14th of July in a European way, the King returned to Cambodia, although the chronicle makes no mention of discussion of substantive matters, Sisowath's visit to Paris coincided with Franco Thai negotiation there that culminated, a few months later, in Siam's retro-cession to Cambodia of the Srok of Battambong and Siam-Reap, the trip received little publicity at home and is mentioned in French records from the Srok only in connection with a rumor that Sisowath had gone to France to plead with the French to legalize gambling in Cambodia.
The number of pages in Sisowath's chronicle devoted to the return of Battambong and Seam-reap suggests that the compilers, like the French, considered this to be most important event of the Reign,
even though the King had little to do with it beyond providing the resident Superior, in 1906, with a"History" of Thai occupation, the importance of the retro-cession was probably connected with the importance of that Angkor , and especially Angkorwat, retained for the Cambodian monarchy throughout Cambodia's dark ages in 1906, a copy of the Cambodian translation of sacred Buddhist writing, the Tripitaka, was deposited in a monastery on the grounds of Angkor-Wat, and for another sixty years Cambodian monarchs frequently visited the site and sponsored religious ceremonies there.
The retro-cession apparently was less painful to the Thai than the loss of the Lao states, which occurred at roughly the same time as we have seen, the Northwestern Srok had come under Thai control in 1794 in exchange for Thai permission for Eng to rule at Udong, over the next hundred years, except for a brief period in 1830s, the Thai had made little effort to colonize( or depopulate) the region, choosing to the govern it at most levels with ethnic Khmer, although they did nothing to restore the temples at Angkor, they left them intact, revenue from the two Srok- in stipulate amounts of cardamom and other forest products- was not especially high and the region was more defensible by water from Phnompenh than overland from Bangkok.
For these reasons, but primarily to avoid further friction along its border, the Thai decided in 1906 to cede the Srok to France, the final agreement was signed by the French and the Thai in April 1907, and the Srok came under French control toward the end of the year, Sisowath was not encouraged to visit the area, however, until 1909, for reasons that the chronicle fails to make clear.
And yet the King and his subjects were overjoyed at the restoration of Angkor, in the Tang-Kok ceremonies of Oct-1907, when officials traditionally offered gifts to monarch widely attended celebrations occurred throughout the Kingdom to "Thank the Angles"( Thevada) for the return of the Srok, and local officials assigned to region came to Phnompenh to pay homage to the King.
Over the next haft century, French scholars and Cambodian workers restored the temples at Angkor, in the long run, probably France's most valuable legacy to Cambodia, Battambang, especially in the 1920s. developed into the country's most prosperous Srok, providing the bulk of Cambodia's rice exports and sheltering, idiosyncratically, by far the greatest number of landlords in the country as well as the highest number of immigrants from elsewhere in Cambodia and from the Cambodian-speaking portions of Cochin-China.
By 1909, typewriters had been installed in all the residences, automobiles came into use on a national scale at about the same time, these two; Improvements" in French administration had several un-intentional effects, for one thing, the volume of reports required by residents, and consumed by their superiors in Phnompenh, Saigon, Hanoi, and Paris,increased dramatically,Residents, more than ever,were tied down to their offices,presiding over a two-way flow of paper, they were seldom in contact, socially or professionally, with the people they were intended to protect, in automobiles, tours of inspection became speedier and more superficial, for residents and their aides were confined to passable roads in fact, the intensification of French economic and political controls over Cambodia, noticeable throughout the 1920s and after, was accompanied, ironically, by the withdrawal of French officials from many levels of Cambodia life, the' Government" that a Cambodian peasant might encounter in these years was composed of minority of Cambodians they could prepare reports in French, and this interplay between Cambodian
and Vietnamese had important effects on the development of Cambodian nationalism.especially after World-War II.
The End of Sisowath's Early years
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)