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
