Word: khmer
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Last week Cambodia's lingering peace was being disturbed by the trailblazers of Communism, filtering across its eastern marchlands from Red-infested Viet Nam, raiding its villages, waylaying its merchants and preaching revolt in the Royal Khmer (i.e., Cambodian) army. The Reds posed as patriots, burning to liberate Cambodia from French imperialism; in fact they were the vanguard of an uglier imperialism: Communist China's. Waist-deep in swamp and jungle fighting in the Red River delta, the French could do little to defend their Cambodian proteges from Communist attack. Instead, the 3,000,000 Cambodians relied...
Three Months of Begging. Sixty-five thousand saffron-robed bonzes (Buddhist priests) and the 12,000-man Khmer army welcomed him home. Dutifully he shaved his head and begged for his living for three months as custom prescribed. But the King was determined to emancipate Cambodia from the semifeudal monarchy under which it had slumbered for centuries. He pushed through a program of constitutional reforms which transformed his kingdom from an absolute into a parliamentary monarchy under French protection. Cambodians freely elected their own 75-man National Assembly...
Bloodless Coup. Communist plots soon took away the King's fun. Pardoned by the French, Son Ngoc Thanh returned to Pnompenh. His Pnompenh newspaper, Khmer People Awake, sowed disaffection in the royal army. Viet Minh Communist battalions, 10,000 strong, skirmished along Cambodia's borders, and Son Ngoc Thanh cheered them on. Suddenly last month the King reacted. He closed down Khmer People Awake. Son Ngoc Thanh ducked off to join a band of Red guerrillas...
Among archeologists, Indo-China is famous for its immense, moldering, bat-infested ruins of Khmer civilization, of which Angkor Wat is the best known. Among economists, Indo-China is equally famous as one of the world's worst-run colonies. For a year young Malraux dug through ruins, crawled over fallen temples which reeked with the decayed jungle vegetation of eight centuries, collected Khmer statuary, then abruptly lost interest in Indo-China's past, became interested in Indo-China's present. Working with a group known as the Young Annam League, which fought for dominion status...
...Conquerors was an immediate critical success but sold badly. Living with his wife and two servants in a little apartment on the Rue du Bac - four rooms filled with Khmer statuary, Oriental books and hand-painted Persian linen panels on the walls - Malraux remained as secretive in Paris as he had been in Saïgon, met Indo-Chinese conspirators, Chinese revolutionists in his office, had so few contacts with the French literary world that even his closest friends did not know where he lived. The Conquerors was followed by a mediocre adventure story laid in Indo-China, The Royal...