South East Asia

Modern Cambodia / Kampuchea (Second Kingdom)
AD 1993 - Present Day
Incorporating Heads of State (1993-2025)

The region of Asia which is usually known as South-East Asia has a long history of its own kingdoms and empires, as well as incursions by outside forces. Today's kingdom of Cambodia is a small country which has produced some of the earliest of those kingdoms. To its west and along the western half of its northern border lies Thailand, on the eastern half of that border lies Laos, to the east is Vietnam, and to the south-west lies the Gulf of Thailand.

Early Chinese rice and millet farmers spread southwards around 2000 BC to enter a region which stretched between what are now Vietnam and Burma. There they interbred with local hunter-gatherers in two main pulses, this being the first, with the second taking place around the end of the first century BC.

A team led in 2017 by Harvard Medical School geneticist, Mark Lipson, concluded that these population movements brought agriculture into the region and triggered the spread of Austroasiatic languages which are still spoken in parts of South Asia and South-East Asia.

Over the preceding twenty years, archaeology had already accumulated increasing amounts of evidence to support the emergence of rice farming in South-East Asia between about 2500-2000 BC, accompanied by tools and pottery which revealed links to what is now southern China.

Cambodia witnessed one of the earliest of the region's historical kingdoms to be formed. Despite the Chinese admixture into the ancestry of its people, culturally it was heavily influenced by what is now India, and was essentially an indigenous culture which predated most of the later Chinese influences on the region. The first kingdom, Funan, dominated an area from the first century AD which covered modern Cambodia, southern Thailand, and southern Vietnam.

Modern Cambodia itself is the heir to the ancient Khmer empire, which was founded at the start of the ninth century AD as a continuation of the older kingdom of Chen-La, itself a continuation of Funan. The empire declined from the fourteenth century as a result of dramatic climate change in the region. A new capital had to be created at Phnom Penh for the 'Middle Kingdom' in order to avoid the now-flooded Angkor Wat, and successive domination followed by several neighbouring kingdoms.

The nineteenth century French rule of a 'Colonial Cambodia' largely displaced the ruling kings under the umbrella colonial administration of French Indochina and the 'Cambodian Protectorate' This largely ended when France was also displaced during its eclipse within the Second World War. Cambodia's 'First Kingdom' became independent in 1953 but intense turmoil, including the Vietnam War which raged next door brought down the kingdom in 1970, to be replaced by a series of unstable 'Cambodian Republics'.

The second of these, Pol Pot's communist dictatorship, returned the clock to 'Year Zero'. Vietnamese occupation in 1979 introduced another, but far milder, communist puppet republic. International pressure led to the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces in 1989, so that the short-lived fourth republic, the 'State of Cambodia', with UN intervention was finally ended and the monarchy could be restored under the 'Second Kingdom'.

Cambodia re-emerged into the modern world and benefited from two decades of relative stability between 1993-2015. Painful memories still endure of the radical Khmer Rouge dictatorship (whose leadership is shown here with a blue shaded background), and Cambodia remains a desperately poor country, one of the poorest in the world. The country seems finally to be on the road to recovery though, with a new generation emerging which is making the most of its freedoms.

Frequent food shortages which prevailed in the past have largely been eliminated. The economy is dominated by garment-making, but tourism is expanding and Cambodia hopes to tap into offshore oil and gas reserves and draw in overseas investment to replace aid. Corruption is still deep-rooted and the rural society, which contains the bulk of the country's workforce, is plagued by poverty and disease, poor communications and transportation, and outdated farming techniques.

In terms of governance, Cambodia is a liberal democracy with a constitutional monarchy. A royal throne council selects the king as head of state from amongst royal descendants. The bicameral legislative body consists of a lower chamber, a directly elected national assembly, and an upper chamber which is known as the senate, which is indirectly elected and is mainly advisory. A prime minister is selected by the king on the recommendation of the chairman of the national assembly.

Far East Kingdoms

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