Word: khmer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year 1297, a Chinese official named Chou Ta-kuan was sent by his emperor on a reporting mission to the kingdom of Khmer, in the land that is now Cambodia. The Cambodians, he quickly decided, "are not what we would call civilized people." The women were depraved and old before their time; the marketplaces were filled with homosexuals; and bathing in the nude was something of a national obsession-an obsession, Chou Ta-kuan was sure, that accounted for the high rate of dysentery and leprosy. Chou Ta-kuan could find almost nothing good to say about the Cambodians...
...years ago Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk himself opened the 132-mile Khmer-American Friendship Highway connecting the capital, Pnompenh, with the sea. Built by U.S. engineers and costing $34 million, it was billed as a yardstick of U.S. know-how, "the most conspicuous impact project" of U.S. aid to Cambodia, which has totaled almost $300 million since 1955. Last week the highway had impact aplenty-but the wrong kind...
...maple trees. They go as pilgrims to the Great Buddha of Nakamura or, if they get as far as Southeast Asia, stand in awed silence at Angkor, whose 40 square miles of ruins in the Cambodian jungle are about all that remain of the ancient 8th to 11th century Khmer civilization...
...this must have looked heaven-sent to Moscow. Outside the Cambodian capital of Pnompenh a team of Russian engineers, working with 1,500 coolies, two and a half years ago began to build a soo-bed "Soviet-Khmer Friendship Hospital." matching anything in Moscow itself. Staffed by 18 Russian doctors and medical technicians-Cambodia itself has only a handful of native M.D.s -the new hospital was equipped with ten air-conditioned operating rooms, a cobalt "bomb" for cancer treatment, a hairdressing salon, room telephones, and pale blue potties in the children's wards...
...brilliant rise from French army corporal-dap means corporal-to guerrilla leader, against first the French and then the Communist Viet Minh, Dap Chhuon had been named Royal Delegate and Governor of the Siemréap area, which includes the renowned ruins of the lost 12th century Khmer civilization of Angkor Wat. Slim, natty Dap Chhuon made Siemréap his personal fief with three battalions of Cambodia's 31,000-man army under his personal command...