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.
