Chapter IV: The Cambodians at Home

The efficient French manager of the _sala_ at Angkor, and those few of my fellow-guests who saw me set out on foot for Siem Réap that Sunday afternoon, gave me credit for being at least half mad. I have often suspected as much myself. The native town was nearly five miles away along that almost excellent French road by which we had come from the edge of the flooded forest on the evening of our arrival, and obviously it would be at least as great a distance back to the _sala_ again. But it was a delightful walk, even while the sun was pouring its rays like a molten flood of gold down into the roadway, and with every step forward its aim became less exact, so that the infinitesimal streak of shade along one dense forest wall gradually grew to be worth attention.

There were road-signs as in France, now and then an ox-cart with two wheels drawn by as many oxen. On the whole, though, the road was deserted, and for a long distance there was nothing but the Chinese wall of unbroken forest close on either side, with frequent visions of lianas in blossom, and in the streak of sky above, occasional flashes of strange tropical birds. Then there came scattered villages, water-buffaloes at pasture, more bourgeois birds sitting serenely on the spines of the beasts as on a telegraph-wire, naked children who live in the water, their gleaming skins mirroring the sun like the scales of a fish. At length, some little distance from the ruins of the ancient city, there began an almost endless succession of thatched huts back among the trees, stilted villages, so to speak, for every one of them was raised head-high above the ground on more or less haphazard posts that had once been the trunks of small trees. None of these simple homes had a clearing about it. The inhabitants had wisely cut away only enough of the underbrush to give themselves room to move and to plant a little, and they lived completely in the shade of the great forest about and high above them. Steps were cut in the earth bank of the little river that more or less followed the road, down to the water’s edge and what seemed to be fish-traps. There were also some simple but ingenious nets, and strangely shaped boats, the smaller ones paddled, the larger poled. A quiet Sunday-afternoon languor that was probably perpetual rather than only weekly hung over everything. The leisurely splashing of water called attention every little way to a large wheel, made of now age-blackened bamboo, that forced the river to lift itself by the scoopful into the little gardens beyond the houses. The slow regular thump of a wooden pestle worked by foot-power betrayed here and there woods-dwellers caught in the act of having to hull rice for their evening meal, in the hollowed upright section of log that serves them as mortar. Otherwise, there was only the forest and its natural noises.

Siem Réap, of which I had once before had a fleeting moonlight glimpse, was almost a city, in the Cambodian sense. For the Cambodians are not a townspeople, but prefer the woods, which, with a bit of tilled soil, gives them all they need. The place was entirely Siamese, its little houses all perched on piles and its temple decorated with golden horns; and even these were tucked back into the forest that crowded the wider place in the road closely on either side. Evidently the inhabitants sleep on the openwork bamboo-splint floor of their porches, as some of them were already, or still, doing now, with the sun barely touching the tree-tops. It was not always easy to tell the sexes apart at a glance, for girls and younger women cut their hair in the ugly Siamese pompadour fashion, slightly longer than that of the men. Grandmothers, old men, and priests dispensed with theirs entirely, having more or less recently shaven skulls. Both sexes wore like a short skirt a mere piece of cloth wrapped about the hips and thighs, a costume so simple that most Cambodian girls never learn to sew. Some of the younger women, especially if they were far from the family clearing, had a cloth thrown carelessly over their breasts; but about the house and in its immediate vicinity they had nothing above the waist to hamper them from working, or from suckling one of their interminable infants, carried on the hip, Hindu fashion. There seemed to be much bathing and washing of clothes, such as they were, reminding one of Ceylon. Bougainvillea hung in purple masses about the wooden house of the French _résident_ and some of the other better buildings. Police in half or full khaki uniforms, topped by a kind of tam-o’-shanter, seemed out of place in this languid Eden.

The Cambodians are a slow and quiet race compared with the Chinese, even with the Annamese, so gentle that even the shoulder-poles of their oxen are seldom weighted down with heavy loads. The Tai, as the race to which they belong is better known, are about equal in civilization, under equal circumstances, to the Chinese, according to those who know them well, except that the Tai are superior in personal cleanliness and the lack of monkey-like curiosity, and the Chinese in foresight and industry. Here there was none of the crowding of staring or chattering throngs about the foreigner, so common an experience in China. The Cambodians seemed to have a greater sense of personal dignity. As a people they appeared a little surly toward the French, therefore toward white men in general, though this may only have been bashfulness. Physically the individual type is more sturdy, and observers agree that they are much more reserved in their personal habits, than the surrounding peoples. In situations where the Annamese squirms and howls the Cambodian shows neither fear nor excitement. Simple timid souls, however, manly and infantile at the same time, they are too naïve to be any match for the world of to-day. Though they are physically stronger, laborious in their leisurely way, intelligent, and not easily swayed from their purposes or beliefs, they will let a puny Annamese chastise them without any attempt at retaliation, because they are afraid of the tricks this more sophisticated fellow might play upon them if they dared to resist. For though the Annamese really look down upon, even hate, the French, they are regarded by the other races comprising Indo-China as the special pets of the foreign rulers. Being nearer in their own sophistication to the modern wisdom, or trickery, of the Westerner, they know much better how to turn the presence of the French to their own good than do these isolated woodsmen of Cambodia, a prey to all sorts of rascalities. The spirit of tolerance, renunciation, non-resistance, of this timid forest-dweller who ornaments his body with symbolic tattooings is so great as to make what in the Chinese seems to be that quality appear none at all.

So while Cambodia is rich, the Cambodian is poor. “Wealthy as Cambodia” was for centuries a byword among the Chinese. The yearly flooding of the Mekong, the Nile of Indo-China, annually brings down a new covering of rich soil for all the delta. Yet even the hasty traveler notes the far greater prosperity of less fertile Cochinchina. There is only thatch in Cambodia; in Cochinchina, inhabited by all the races of Indo-China, including the Cambodians, there are tiled wooden houses, always a sign of prosperity, for the fear of fires causes any race to get beyond the thatch stage as soon as possible. Not merely the Chinese, with their special privileges, but the Annamese, so easily outdone by the Celestials in commerce, become in their turn the harsh commercial exploiters of their simpler neighbors, not only the Cambodians but the Moï, the Muong, and the Laosians. Even the recently arranged export of Cambodian cattle to Manila has proved of no real help to the people themselves, for they are often cheated out of their working cattle by the tricky Chinese or Annamese traders.

The Cambodian is exclusively an agriculturist. Even though he makes his own tools, carts, and houses, that is merely an adaptation to his isolated life. In whatever he does he works with the spirit of the genuine artist, which means that he gives too little attention to getting all possible material benefit from his labor. Thus during the past several centuries this little people—they are barely a million and a half—has been terrorized, vanquished, despoiled, forced to fly, in the dry season, before the Siamese, at the mercy, in the wet, of the Annamese flotillas. The first were looking for slaves, and deported people en masse to cultivate their lands of the Menam; the second came killing the people off and driving them out in order to take their lands for themselves.

To come through the forests and see so low a type of humanity, at least in so far as ambition and the ability to build lasting things go, and then suddenly see the towers of Angkor-Vat, through the half-cleared vista of the old cart road, is to refuse to believe that the ancestors of these built that. It shakes one’s belief in the equality of man; for surely without masters of higher type than these hut-dwellers of to-day this people could never have produced such things. But no, one reflects, peoples, like individuals, have their day, their prime, their productive years. They develop for centuries, then at a certain level accomplish rapidly for a time, then sink into old age. All our own real progress has been during the past few hundred years; we may soon cease to be productive, perhaps not even remain static, like the Chinese, but drift back down-stream, like these simple gentle Cambodians. Possibly some of their once great creative ability might be revived; more likely not. Besides, it is better to let others have the next chance, just as we each give way in turn to the rising generation, than to try to resuscitate what is past, as we sometimes try with the individual. For it is impossible to backwater in life.

Though they have lived more or less intermingled for centuries, there has been little racial intermixture of the Cambodians and the Annamese. They are too nearly like oil and water, the real dividing-line between the Chinese and the Hindu world which makes the name “Indo-China” so fitting. It is only recently that Cambodian girls have not been forbidden to marry foreigners, and there are far fewer _mariages à terme_ with the French, and the resultant half-castes, than in Annam. Yet it is said that the Cambodian, interbred with some other race having more aggression in its fiber, makes an excellent human specimen. There is little repulsion between the Tonkinese and the Cambodians, for those two groups are historically little acquainted. But the two discordant races are so different that to train a French official in Annam, or even in Cochinchina, and then send him to Cambodia, is almost as bad as to send one from Algeria to Madagascar.

Whereas the Annamese language is a singsong of many tones, like the Chinese, and they use, or did at least until the French came, Chinese characters for their writing—so that Japanese and Annamese, Korean and Chinese, could all read, though not speak, together—the Cambodian tongue is in one tone, like our own, and their writing is similar to that of Siam and India. Cambodian music seems such to Western ears. Their freedom from the cacophonic hullabaloo of the rest of the Far East gives the traveler ground for hoping that here at last he is running into our own Aryan influences again. The Cambodians accompany themselves on a kind of guitar, and are the only people in Indo-China who have so far been taught to play band music well.

The favorite game of Cambodian boys is to keep a ball made of bamboo splints in the air as long as possible, kicking, striking, butting it with any part of the body except the hands—real football, which of course ours is not. Their dances, of immemorial tradition, are a kind of drama of pantomine ballet, perpetuating the old Hindu epics, given only by troupes of imperial dancers from the royal harem. The people themselves do no dancing.

Once from the north, influenced by the more mystic Buddhism of Tibet, with Sanskrit as the language, the Cambodians are now of the Ceylon or southern Buddhist school, the language of which is Pali. The Annamese, on the other hand, inherited the harsher northern Buddhism by way of Mongolia and China. Thus the clergy, as disdained in Annam as in China, has great prestige in Cambodia. The monks are very simple, and in their piety at least are worthy the profound respect with which they are surrounded. Though they live only on what they can beg, they are not hermits and anchorets, as in the Chinese atmosphere of Annam, but live the monkish life in common in the numerous temples of the country, quite independent of one another. Priests become laymen, and vice versa, very easily; all Cambodians are in fact expected to don the yellow robe at least once in their lives. Most of them being country people, the monks do not find it repugnant to engage in manual labor. There are many woodsmen, brick-makers, even clock-menders and other industrious “artists” among them. Personally I saw none of this, but only meditation and begging; and I am quite ready to admit that I am hopelessly prejudiced toward those who withdraw from their share of the world’s work and troubles the world over. During the three months of the rainy season the monks of Cambodia practise “the retreat” and refrain from all pilgrimages; the rest of the year they go and come almost at will. Their five commandments are: thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, drink intoxicating beverages, or take the woman of another—which is not, be it noted, celibacy in the Christian sense. It is said that at least they never drink strong liquor, and so careful are they to avoid killing that they have a special word (“Bahboh!”) and gesture to drive off the militant mosquito without injuring it.

There have long been _salas_, or public houses maintained by the government for travelers, along the principal roads of Cambodia, for the same reason that there are _dak-bungalows_ in India. They do not want strangers in their houses, which are semi-sacred; and from that to the Hindu belief in caste pollution by so much as an alien shadow is no great step. Suicide, as common among the Annamese as with the Chinese, is rare among the Cambodians, not because they are greater cowards or more generally happy, but because of their fear of vile reincarnations. They burn their dead, like the Hindus and the real Buddhists farther west; the Annamese practise the loathsome Chinese and Western custom of burying their corpses and keeping them as long as possible.

The Cambodians have a feudal Hindu civilization, entirely distinct from the mandarinic, communal, oligarchical civilization of the Annamese and Chinese. In theory all land belongs to the king, and any that lies uncultivated for three years may be demanded by some one else as a concession. Only the produce is taxed, the assessments being gathered by royal delegates quite independent of the provincial authorities. In reality the French have not greatly changed the ancient order of things during their sixty years as the “protectors” of Cambodia. They have improved the ways of communication, beautified the old royal city of Pnom Penh. They have done much against smallpox: formerly those who had never had this disease were considered “not yet born to existence.” They were exempt from taxes; a girl could not marry, a boy could not claim the rights and duties of an adult, until a pock-marked face could be presented as a certificate of maturity. The French have given the country peace, external peace, that is; old residents say there is piracy in the provinces as usual, even more of it the past twenty years than a century ago. The French are impotent to stop criminal violence against the natives, and the local authorities have every interest in coming to an understanding with the robbers instead of fighting them. The Chinese merchants of Cambodia pay pirate insurance.

The French have kept the old forms of kingly rule; and “beneath an appearance of order there still reigns the old anarchy,” said a French doctor long resident there. Under cover of the French the ancient injustices of despotic Oriental rule have been perpetuated and modernized. It is next to impossible for an ordinary Cambodian with just cause for complaint to get satisfaction. The mass of the people dare not tell the wrongs done them, even were there some one both willing and able to listen to them, because of the fear of reprisals. In a forested Oriental country very few would risk giving testimony, even if it were not the Hindu-Buddhist temperament not to complain; for vengeance is easy. Native functionaries stick together; they are closely related to the ministers of Pnom Penh. Even if a case is taken directly to the French _résident_, about all he can do is refer the matter to the governor of the province involved, “for information.” There are many clandestine tariffs for legally gratuitous formalities. By law registry of birth is free; in practice it costs all that those concerned can be made to pay. There is a tax on furnaces used in the production of fish-oil; but because the same Cambodian word also means a little portable stove made of glazed earth, on which all Cambodia once did its cooking, tax-gatherers have laid by great personal fortunes, and most of the people have gone back to the three sticks stuck in the earth used by their ancestors to hold their rice-pots over a fagot fire.

It is the old story of a very alien race unable to help, whatever its good will, except in superficial things that are easily understood, because it cannot get down into the deeper facts. In the French courts the interpreter reigns as absolute master, and erects a stone wall between the best judge and the parties before him. Even the making of good roads has augmented rather than decreased the helplessness of the people, for now French officials, often changed, dash to and fro between their posts, whereas in the days of slow native travel they got perforce some clear idea of the needs of the people. The French of course see to it that their rule is treated with full honors, whatever the results of it. There is a costly series of splendid fêtes at Pnom Penh in honor of each new _résident supérieur_, which contrasts sadly with the poverty-stricken people whom he comes in theory to help, and who must pay for all such festivities. The fact is that he rarely comes for any such purpose, but to follow his career with the least possible trouble and the greatest possible advancement. But in the eyes of the Cambodians the French are merely a passing phase, as the Siamese and their other conquerors were before them, and they endure this brief affliction as true fatalists do any other misfortune.

The minister of the palace is the real power in Cambodia. A former interpreter—all who knew a little French when the French took upon themselves the “protection” of Cambodia naturally got in on the ground floor—imposed first upon Norodom as secretary-general of the Council of Ministers, is now a kind of political comprador. An intelligent hard worker, supple, well informed, speaking French fluently now, he has made himself indispensable to the superficial and unstable French administrators and is richer than old King Sisowath himself. Naturally he drew a marvelous personal advantage out of a situation that he was no doubt stupefied to find falling into his hands, and with an almost Chinese point of view toward political matters he tends to perpetuate himself, every day perfecting his double game between the king and the French _résident_, peopling posts with his relatives and retainers, keeping his political fences in order. It is the story of the rise of Charlemagne’s forebears all over again, in an Oriental setting. Some _résidents_ have tried to outwit this now richest and most powerful man in the kingdom, but he always comes out best. He is the real master; the other ministers, the crown prince, even the octogenarian king himself tremble before him, mute and resigned.

To this have the descendants of the mighty Khmer sunk in the millennium since they were forced to abandon Angkor-Thom. Yet after all the Cambodians are the only people in the peninsula who have left enduring works of their intellectual past. Their great art, in which the grandiose perfection of the ensemble is combined with the most delicate finesse of detail, is their certificate as one of the great races of mankind.