Introduction
Those familiar with Cambodian history know of a commoner named Kan who, according to the current official history textbook,Footnote 1 became king and ruled between the years 1512–1516.Footnote 2 As the textbook recounts, Kan, who had been a close associate of the reigning monarch, rebelled against him after his loyalty had been questioned. A man of high merit and intelligence, Kan famously mobilised supporters, had the king killed, and took over the throne.Footnote 3 In more recent times, Kan's image as a ‘rival’ to the royal court has been promoted by the current Hun Sen administration (in power since 1985). At the initiative of the Prime Minister, a new history book (to be examined later) depicting Kan's heroic actions was published,Footnote 4 an ancient city believed to be Kan's sixteenth-century royal capital was re-built and promoted as a new national historical and tourist site, and statues of Kan, bearing Hun Sen's face, have been erected in many public places across the country. As Kan is believed to have been the ruler who introduced Cambodia's first monetary unit, known as slịṅ, the National Bank of Cambodia in 2006 commemorated Kan's legacy by producing and putting into circulation gold and silver slịṅ coins designed with a nāg (mythical snakelike reptile) with seven heads on its obverse. This nāg, which is also Hun Sen's animal zodiac birth-sign, is believed to have been Kan's zodiac animal sign.
In the wake of these efforts to align Kan's image with that of Hun Sen, Sebastian Strangio, in his book on Hun Sen's rule, saw the reconstruction of the Kan story as historical justification for Hun Sen's overthrow of Prince Norodom Ranariddh (president of the royalist FUNCINPEC Party), his eclipse of the monarchy, and its replacement with his own stable ‘reign’.Footnote 5 Likewise, in her recent study on ‘Second Kingdom’ Cambodia (1993–2013), Astrid Norén-Nilsson has linked the emergence of the Kan narrative to an attempt by Hun Sen to turn himself into a substitute Kan; as she has argued, “Hun Sen's reincarnation of Kan can be understood as fundamentally a bid to embody national leadership, rather than kingship as such”.Footnote 6
But while earlier studies have speculated on the use of the Kan narrative to the Hun Sen administration, much less attention has been given to how the palace, which has continued to talk about Kan for most of the twentieth century, has made use of it. Indeed, it could be argued that the Kan narrative is the palace's creation. Its origins can be traced back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when palace chronicles or baṅsāvtār texts presented Kan's uprising as an incident that interrupted the genealogy of the royal lineage. These royal texts (composed between 1810s-1920s) showed Kan as initially successful in overthrowing the king, but later defeated by Prince Ang Chan, whom they depicted as more capable than Kan. They also described the heroic actions of another commoner named Khlang Moeung, who assists Ang Chan in setting up his political faction, commands the Prince's army, and even sacrifices his own life to help the Prince defeat Kan's troops. Thus, according to this palace view, while Khlang Moeung is considered a key supporter, Kan is depicted as an enemy who betrays the king and threatens the well-being of members of the royal family. Furthermore, since that the Kan narrative was initially recounted as part of the palace's genealogy of Khmer rulers during the first decades of the nineteenth century, its historical value and political implication extend beyond the speculations of the current Hun Sen administration. Methodologically-speaking, it needs to be examined from a broader historiographical perspective, including discussions on its historical accuracy, the nature of the texts that have recounted it, and how the Kan narrative evolved before, during and after, the colonial years (1863–1953).
As this article will explore, the Kan narrative was profoundly re-constructed by two groups of chronicle writers during the 1900s in order to promote ideas regarding ‘treason’ and ‘loyalty’ to the palace. Accordingly, these accounts contain very little accurate ‘historical’ information regarding the competition for kingship taking place between a commoner and members of the royal family during the early sixteenth century. The way in which the narrative has been understood in Cambodia displays similarities to that of the ‘three Shan brothers’ in Burma that Michael Aung-Thwin has studied, and also to ‘the birth of national history’ in Thailand discussed by Thongchai Winichakul. As Aung-Thwin and Thongchai have both pointed out, though the work of key scholars—Sir Arthur Phayre (1812–85) for the Burmese case and King Vajiravudh (1880–1925) and Prince Damrong Rajanubhap (1862–1943) in the case of Thailand—may have misrepresented actual past events, it went on to profoundly shape Burmese and Thai collective historical imagination for many decades. Moreover, this scholarship was shaped by the social and political colonial circumstances that Phayre, Vajiravudh, and Damrong experienced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than actual past events per se.Footnote 7
In a similar fashion, the reworking of the Kan narrative at the turn of the twentieth century was deliberately carried out to fit the specific political and intellectual context of Cambodia in the colonial period. However, unlike Burma and Thailand, the Cambodian chronicle writers re-constructed the Kan narrative from ‘outside’ the Western colonial understandings of ‘history’ that Phayre, Vajiravudh, and Damrong had applied in their scholarship. Instead, the writers of these chronicles made use of a long-standing Cambodian literary tradition—that of baṅsāvtār texts—to re-shape its content and format. Hence, beside unravelling how this particular narrative was used to promote the palace's political standing and power, this article will also discuss the Khmer baṅsāvtār (chronicle scholarship), a literary body of knowledge no longer practised today but one that continues to have a substantial impact on collective memory and culture.
Kan Prior to the Twentieth Century
Little historical information has been uncovered about the Khmer royal court during the first decades of the sixteenth century. Sources such as inscriptions and Western missionary records do not provide detail about the Kan uprising, nor even mention the names of Kan or Ang Chan. Epigraphical sources only recount information about a Khmer ruler commonly believed by scholars to be King Ang Chan, who ruled over the royal capital of Longvek during the 1540s and 1560s. Two short inscriptions, dated 1546 and 1564, on the northeastern bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat depict the reigning king, presumably Ang Chan, ordering his artisans to continue the work of King Mahāvisnulok, the posthumous name of King Suryavarman II (r. 1113–45), on the incomplete panels of the temple.Footnote 8 The Portuguese Dominican Gaspar da Cruz, who appears to have been the first European missionary to come to Cambodia in 1556, mentioned that “The king [seemingly Ang Chan] acquired his rights over the country because the people revolted against one of his brothers who was then king, and he conquered them, in consequence of which his brother handed over the kingdom”.Footnote 9 Gaspar da Cruz thus hints at a revolt that took place during the early sixteenth century, which nineteenth-century Khmer palace chronicles later portrayed as an incident involving Ang Chan, Ang Chan's brother Srī Sugandhapad, and a revolt leader named Kān’/Kan. While, to a lesser extent, the Cruz account corresponds to these later chronicles’ depiction of a revolt during the reign of a Khmer ruler whose throne was taken over by his brother after successfully cracking down the revolt, it does not mention any specific names.
Besides the two inscriptions and Gaspar da Cruz's account, two other inscriptions, one in Khmer and one in Pali, dated 15 July 1566, at the Vat Nokor temple in Kampong Cham provide information about a ranking royal member named Srī Sugandhapad,Footnote 10 whose name matches the one given as Ang Chan's brother in the chronicles. These epigraphic texts contain a long passage concerning Srī Sugandhapad's desire to follow the teachings of the Buddha and to retain the state of arahant (Enlightened Being) in his future life and his construction of the sīmā (the sacred border stones) of the main monastery.Footnote 11 Jean Filliozat suggested that Sugandhapad is a posthumous name for a man called Sugandha, who, according to Buddhist legend, lived in the Tusita heaven.Footnote 12 This possibility is supported by Ashley Thompson, who has gone further by proposing that a person whose name emerges in a later part of the Pali text as Mahābrahmā appears to be Srī Sugandhapad's son and the author of the inscriptions.Footnote 13 This post-Angkor posthumous name also appears at least one more time in nineteenth-century palace chronicles, which depict a royal member named Srī Sugandhapad as a leading figure said to have been involved in internal conflict within the Khmer court during the eighteenth century.Footnote 14 Michael Vickery, in his analysis of Khmer and Siamese chronicles as the evidence for Cambodian society during the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, proposed that sugandhapad was Ang Chan's title on the grounds that “the chronicles may be confused about the title sugandhapad, which, rather than belonging to Ang Chan's brother, would have been another title of Ang Chan himself”.Footnote 15 Vickery's suggestion is plausible but not conclusive simply because there is no contemporary evidence to prove that Ang Chan and Srī Sugandhapad—who were mentioned in the nineteenth-century chronicles—actually existed during the first half of the sixteenth century. Given the existence of the royal title ‘Srī Sugandhapad’, which was also used to designate another eighteenth-century figure, and Vickery's suggestion, this would suggest errors in the way in which the chronicles recount these royal titles and figures rather than evidence to complement the narrative that they provide.
Moreover, while Siamese texts, including all known versions of the Ayutthaya chronicles that Richard Cushman collected and translated into English,Footnote 16 only provide brief information on Ayutthaya's warfare with Longvek from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, Vickery's discussion of different aspects of the Kan narrative based on nineteenth-century Khmer chronicles draws very little further understanding about the Khmer court during those years. His discussion of Kan's appointed royal title ‘hluoṅ braḥ stec’, which shows Siamese influence,Footnote 17 Srī Sugandhapad's death in 1512,Footnote 18 Kan's 1508 rebellion,Footnote 19 and Ang Chan's death in 1576Footnote 20, are among the aspects that he believed to be trustworthy information. But given Vickery's suggestion regarding a possibility that Srī Sugandhapad is Ang Chan's royal title mentioned earlier, his commentary on the years of Srī Sugandhapad and Ang Chan's death does not allow us to draw a connection between the two statements or to advance our knowledge about what really happened during those years. Moreover, Vickery's comparative analysis of different versions of the nineteenth-century chronicles that he collected might be viewed as problematic in the sense that he missed out the most important palace chronicle composed by the Norodom court in 1869, classified in the EFEO catalogue as P.Camb. 88. Indeed, P.Camb. 88 is the manuscript that shaped the production of other chronicle texts that appeared between the 1870s and 1890s including the Kok Kāk, the Nupprata(ṇ), and Moura's text that he used in the comparison.Footnote 21
Bearing in mind the limitations present the sources derived from epigraphic texts, Western and Siamese accounts, and Vickery's studies on early sixteenth-century Cambodia and the Kan story, this article argues that there are problems with accepting the account of the sixteenth-century Khmer court that appears in present-day Cambodian history textbooks. The uncertainty surrounding the royal title Srī Sugandhapad—which was a posthumous name used in the chronicles to designate more than one person—combined with the absence of contemporary sources to corroborate the existence of key figures such as Ang Chan and Kan, these narratives can only be viewed as a long-held belief passed on through the chronicle literary tradition without adequate supporting evidence. This belief is historically significant regarding the existence of important post-Angkor royal cities—such as Chaktomuk (Phnom Penh), Pasan, Longvek, and Oudong—rather than as an early sixteenth-century incident concerning two royal brothers and a commoner who was labelled a rebel.Footnote 22
Unsupported by historical sources dating from the sixteenth century, the Kan narrative is only briefly mentioned in one of the earliest Khmer palace chronicle texts of the nineteenth century, known as the Nong chronicle.Footnote 23 This depicts King Srī Sugandhapad's decision to move the royal court from Chaktomuk to the area of Pasan, as well as his arrangement for his younger brother Prince Ang Chan to be in charge of the Chaktomuk palace. Then it depicts Kan's revolt against Srī Sugandhapad, his killing of the king, and his declaration as ruler at Pasan during the 1500s.Footnote 24 Prince Ang Chan, according to the Nong chronicle, first flees to Siam, from whence he later leaves for the Cambodian province of Pursat to raise an army against Kan, who he successfully has killed in the 1520s.Footnote 25 Following Ang Chan's successes in defeating Kan and claiming the Cambodian throne, it then portrays Ang Chang's Buddhist religious activities in his new royal city of Longvek and a nearby place called Oudong, which became the royal capital between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 26 Several other chronicles,Footnote 27 including the P. Camb. 88 of 1869,Footnote 28 the Nupprata(ṇ) of 1878,Footnote 29 and the 1883 chronicle used by Jean Moura,Footnote 30 depict the Kan narrative in a comparable format and length. But although these nineteenth-century royal texts all portray Kan as an ‘enemy’ (satrūv) of the palace, their depiction is far less elaborate than his depiction in texts composed in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Kan in Twentieth-Century Chronicles
During the 1900s, the Kan narrative was further embellished, and this became the ‘template’ for how Cambodia's collective history of the first half of the sixteenth century has been understood to the present day. One way of appreciating how much was added to the narrative by twentieth-century chronicle writers is to compare the length of their texts with those of the nineteenth century. Producers of the Nong chronicle, together with those who produced the three nineteenth-century chronicle texts mentioned above, never used more than four pages to describe the incident involving Kan. However, twentieth-century chronicle scholars, particularly those linked with the 1904 and the 1906 texts (to be discussed in detail below), took more than twenty pages when detailing the information surrounding Kan alone. This greater length highlights the special treatment given to the Kan episode by the producers of these elite texts. But in order to understand more specifically the parts that they added to the narrative, it is necessary to look at the contents of two important chronicle texts more closely.
Kan in the 1904 Baṅsāvtār
Divided into three parts, this manuscript was produced under King Sisowath's (r. 1904–27) appointment of a baṅsāvtār commission in 1904, directed by Palace Minister Thiounn (1864–1946),Footnote 31 just a few months after the death of his elder brother King Norodom (r. 1864–1904) that same year. As part of a long-standing palace literary tradition, the 1904 baṅsāvtār was useful for demonstrating the continuity of the royal lineage, and so marked Sisowath's new reign as an auspicious, harmonious, and glorious one. Considered ‘Buddhist’ to varying degrees, it also helped to strengthen Buddhist kingship under the reigning monarch by recounting the activities of members of the royal family who sponsored religious projects and ceremonies. With a few exceptions,Footnote 32 a typical baṅsāvtār—including this 1904 text—includes information on kings and the activities of the royal family from the time when the kingdom in question was supposed to have come into being through to the reign in which the text was produced. The past, in this regard, was viewed as a series of events that developed in linear fashion from a distant time through to the near present. Hence, such texts can be read as a ‘long genealogy’ of Khmer rulers.
Like the chronicles of the previous century, the Kan narrative contained in the 1904 chronicle was presented as part of a long genealogy, and information regarding Kan's uprising was reported as an ‘interruption’ in the royal lineage. While it depicted Srī Sugandhapad's kingship and his death, Kan's uprising, Ang Chan's escape to Siam and his defeat of Kan, and Ang Chan's kingship and his religious activities, it incorporated many other details that were not found in nineteenth-century baṅsāvtār. These included depictions of Srī Sugandhapad's love for Kan’ sister Bau, Kan's family members, a healing monastery called Vat Brai Pāṃṅ, Kan's conflict with palace officials, Kan's escape to mobilise troops in order to take the throne, Kan's kingship and his construction of a new royal city called Sraḷap’ Brai Nokor, and Kan's losses to Ang Chan in a lengthy war. Regarding the description of Ang Chan, several new features were also added, such as the descriptions of his loyal assistant Khlang Moeung, Ang Chan's escape from Siam to Pursat, Ang Chan's killing of Kan by cutting off his head and hanging it on the palace wall, and Ang Chan's search for the Preah Khan (regalian sword) prior to his coronation.Footnote 33
Kan in the 1906 Baṅsāvtār
The 1906 baṅsāvtār was composed at the initiative of Adhémar Leclère (1853–1917),Footnote 34 who between 1880s-1900s served as Résident (governor) of several provinces during the period of French colonial rule. The original Khmer text can be found online in the Fonds Adhémar Leclère of the Communauté Urbaine d'Alençon.Footnote 35 It was later published in book format by the Japan Sotoshu Relief Committee (JSRC, a Japanese organisation that specialised in producing a wide range of publications of Khmer language materials in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp along the Thai-Cambodian border from the 1980s),Footnote 36 and then by Michel Tranet in 1987 and 2002.Footnote 37 Based on its contents, the text represents a typical Khmer chronicle—it covers the period from when the Khmer kingdom is said to have come into existence through to Ang Duong's coronation in 1848. Leclère seems to have initiated the composition of the text as part of his own book project on the historical formation and development of the Khmer state since its beginning until the time of his writing. He started the project in 1907, eventually publishing it in 1914 under the title of Histoire du Cambodge.Footnote 38 It appears that the 1906 chronicle combined most of the contents of the 1904 palace text together with several short stories that Leclère may have collected from various Buddhist monasteries across Cambodia: indeed, Leclère himself stated in the Preface of his Histoire du Cambodge that some of the texts that he had collected during those years (1890s and 1900s) were related to Kan.Footnote 39 Following the completion of the manuscript, this French scholar-official ‘extracted’ the Kan narrative from the Khmer text, translated it into French, published it twice—in 1910Footnote 40 and 1911Footnote 41—and incorporated it into his 1914 book in order to be able to give an account of Cambodian history during the first half of the sixteenth century.Footnote 42
The 1906 baṅsāvtār clearly pays special attention the Kan narrative. It devotes more than forty pages, almost one third of the entire text, to the narration of events related to this controversial figure. But though it was an elaboration of the 1904 chronicle, largely encompassing all the aspects recounted in that earlier palace text, it did include some new features, such as stories about Kan being swallowed by a fish when he was a baby, Srī Sugandhapad's bad dream and his intention to kill Kan, Kan's escape with the help of his sister, a nāg, and a monk, and names of places such as a village, a pond, a boat, a fortress, a secret site and a monastery.
The Leclère version of the Kan narrative has become the main template for understanding the incidents related to Kan as well as Cambodia during the first half of the sixteenth century. Either wholly or in part, its contents have been widely accepted, and turned into various forms of knowledge production in the century or so since then. We find it emerging in the contents of later palace chronicles,Footnote 43 textbooks, history texts, novels, films, songs, stage performances, rituals, military propaganda, memoirs, currency, tourist and pilgrimage sites, statues and political speeches. In other words, the 1906 narrative became relevant to all subsequent political regimes in Cambodia, together with numerous cultural events and rituals, from the early twentieth century right through to the present day.
A Collection of Local Fables
Epistemologically speaking, baṅsāvtār or chronicle texts are widely recognised by scholars to be unreliable sources, particularly in how they depict long-distant historical events surrounding the Khmer court. Vickery, for instance, has claimed that until the mid-sixteenth century, extant local historical sources such as the Khmer baṅsāvtār were all fictitious.Footnote 44 Similarly, George Cœdès, in 1962, downplayed the value of various versions of the Khmer palace baṅsāvtār, asserting that these royal texts were not very useful when it came to studying the historical chronology of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cambodia.Footnote 45 Even when it comes to their depiction of events of Cambodia during the nineteenth century—the period when many versions of the baṅsāvtār were actually produced—these local accounts in many respects are less reliable than those found in Thai palace chronicles and Thai official correspondence (chotmaihet).Footnote 46
This lack of historical accuracy occurs because the approach to past events in nineteenth-century Khmer baṅsāvtār texts is very different from that of Western historical writing. While the latter tends to view the past as a ‘field of study’ requiring the critical examination of sources and fragmented events, the former looks regards the past as ‘unchangeable’ in its core but ‘extendable’ in terms of how it covers certain events and chronological timeframes. Hence, when a new baṅsāvtār was composed, the primary concern of its producers was not to change the main structure and contents of earlier texts.Footnote 47 Their writers did not believe it necessary to revise significantly the information or viewpoints conveyed by previous texts. Instead, though they may have corrected spellings, changed some dates and added more information about events that appeared in earlier texts, they adhered strictly to the conventional structure and contents of existing baṅsāvtār texts. Unlike ways of writing history that are concerned first and foremost with ‘fact’, the baṅsāvtār tradition does not make a distinction between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ events, and usually refers to external supernatural forces as the main drivers involved. The content of baṅsāvtār was thus largely constructed by incorporating material contained within extant baṅsāvtār texts, while adding new information relevant to the reign of the existing monarch. This textual practice then continued to a large extent in the production of twentieth-century texts, which included a new practice of adding long royal titles and reigns to many monarchs as well as adding in elaborate descriptions of specific events often derived from local oral fables.
Indeed, the lengthy description of the Kan narrative in the 1904 and 1906 texts was pieced together from various pre-existing stories that featured elements of myth and legend in their content. In many ways, these earlier stories demonstrated indigenous understanding about what were perceived as important historical ‘landmarks’, such as ancient temples and stupa, pilgrimage sites, mountains, and Buddhist monasteries. They often existed in different versions, and their key function was associated with rituals; they also played a role in making sense of existing norms and behaviours, as well as key figures whose activities were believed still to be shaping the social and political hierarchy of communities.
Among many stories contained within the Kan narrative, two appear to be the dominant ones, especially in the 1906 baṅsāvtār. The first of these relates to the description of Kan's family background, which belonged to the temple-servant class. Interestingly, the writers of this Khmer text admitted that this fact had never been recorded in any extant baṅsāvtār texts. Instead, they had adopted it from a daṃnāy (prophecy or portrayal) of the Preah Khan.Footnote 48 The story depicted Kan's mother, who was pregnant with her second child Kan, giving birth to him beside a river and accidentally dropping him into the water. The baby was then swallowed by a big fish, which was later caught by a fisherman. An abbot of a monastery saw the fish and asked the fisherman to donate it to him. When the monk, to satisfy his curiosity about its unusual size, ordered his servants to open up the fish's stomach, the baby Kan was discovered. Kan was then sent by his parents to the monastery to be blessed by the abbot and to study with him. Once Kan had grown up, he possessed charm, great intelligence, and strong learning skills.
At least two other versions of this fish-related story have been uncovered in Cambodia. One is depicted on the southern bas-relief of the inner gallery of the Bayon temple (built by King Jayavarnman VII [r. 1181–1218?] between the 1190s and the 1200s), which displays a fish swallowing a baby. While several aspects of the sculpture relief have been broken due to natural causes, this scene clearly shows the story of a newborn child being swallowed by a fish. The fish is caught and brought to a high-ranking person who holds a knife pointing to the fish, and the baby is found alive after being removed from the fish's stomach.Footnote 49 Nhim Sotheavin's studies of post-Angkor royal cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries have pointed out that at least two other similar stories depicting a baby being swallowed by a fish appear in the Mahābhārata and the Vishu Purana of ancient Hindu mythology.Footnote 50 Nhim does not make his point explicit with regard to the connection between the bas-relief and these two Hindu mythologies, but it is quite clear—based on the way the temple's inner gallery is structured—that the scene was carved following one or other of these texts. It is worth mentioning here that the Bayon has two sets of bas-reliefs. While its outer gallery illustrates scenes such as historical events, the daily activities of people and a marching army, the inner one displays Hindu mythological scenes that include the depiction of the three members of the trimurti (or triple deity), namely Siha, Vishnu and Brahma.
A second version of the fish-related story was included in the nine-volume collection of oral legends published in Khmer between the 1950s and 1970s by Commission des moeurs et coutumes du Cambodge [Commission of Mores and Customs of Cambodia, hereafter CMCC], a division of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. This story was found in the vicinity of another Jayavarman VII twelfth-century temple of Vat Nokor. It similarly depicts a three-month old baby who is swallowed by a fish when his parents bring him to bathe in a river. The fish is caught by a fisherman who having discovered the baby alive in the fish's stomach, offers him to a Chinese emperor. As the emperor's adopted son, once the baby grows up, he possesses great knowledge and returns to Kampong Cham searching for his parents. Calling himself Tā Brahm, he falls in love with a widow who happens to be his mother. Recognising this to be a serious mistake, the mother requests Tā Brahm to build a statue of himself sitting with his hands raised in respectful devotion toward her stupa after she has died.Footnote 51 The name ‘Tā Brahm’ in this story, as Thompson observes, appears to have a close relationship with the person named Mahābrahmā mentioned in the 1566 Pali inscription. In this respect, Thompson suggests that the story of Tā Brahm in the area may have developed out of fanciful readings of epigraphy in order to counterbalance father-son inscriptions with a mother-son story.Footnote 52 Another interesting comment regarding the stories in Kampong Cham and in Angkor is that they may have originated at two important religious sites connected with Jayavarman VII, something that may explain the connection between the Tā Brahm story at Vat Nokor and the Bayon's bas-reliefs. The depiction of Kan being swallowed by a fish in the baṅsāvtār shares the same storyline, and so would seem to have a much stronger connection with them rather than with any historical event belonging to sixteenth-century Cambodia.
Another important aspect of the Kan narrative concerns how it depicts Ang Chan's close associate Khlang Moeung. According to both the 1904 and the 1906 texts, Khlang Moeung is the governor of Pursat who offers his assistance to Ang Chan from the moment that the Prince is forced to leave his Chaktomuk palace by Kan. As Ang Chan intends to seek protection from the Siamese court, he asks Khlang Moeung to keep a close eye on Kan while he is away. After staying in Siam for some time, Ang Chan makes plans to return to Cambodia to battle against Kan. Accordingly, he concocts false reports about a huge wild elephant in a province near to the Cambodian border, and requests the Siamese ruler for permission to hunt down the creature for the Siamese court. Using this trick, Ang Chan successfully comes back and sets up his military base in Pursat with Khlang Moeung as the commander. Following several battles against Kan's troops, Ang Chan's forces prove incapable of defeating them. It is then that Khlang Moeung, together with two of his four sons and his wife, decides to take his own life in order to gather ghost troops (bal khmoc or dăp pisāc) to fight Kan's troops.Footnote 53 Following Khlang Moeung's effort, Ang Chan's troops prove victorious. To commemorate Khlang Moeung's service, Ang Chan orders the construction of a ritual site in Pursat, and names it Anak TāFootnote 54 Khlang MoeungFootnote 55 (spiritual grandfather Khlang Moeung).Footnote 56
This narrative shares a similar storyline with another local story in Pursat collected by the CMCC. Instead of depicting Ang Chan's escape to Siam, this story portrays the Ang Chan court as destroyed by Siamese troops, who kill Ang Chan and abduct his royal relations, together with many Khmer families. After living in Siam for a while, Ang Chan's wife gives birth to a baby son named Uden. When he reaches sixteen, Uden attempts to return with the Khmer families to Cambodia and take over its throne. Then he too spreads false rumours about a wild elephant and requests the Siamese king for permission to hunt it down for him. The Siamese ruler agrees and provides all the support required. After that, Uden escapes to the Cambodian province of Pursat, and former Ang Chan's associate Khlang Moeung, together with his four sons and many other Khmer families, join the young Prince to prepare for war with Siam. After learning of Uden's escape, the Siamese king sends his troops to Cambodia to kill Uden and his collaborators. Aware of the advancing Siamese troops and recognising that Uden does not have sufficient military forces and equipment, Khlang Moeung decides to kill himself in order to mobilise ghost troops to defeat the Siamese army. After the Siamese troops are defeated by Khlang Moeung's ghost troops and withdraw from Cambodia, Uden is crowned as king. He organises a ceremony to commemorate Khlang Moeung's sacrifice: called Puṇy Ḷoeṅ Anak Tā Khlang Moeung (the ritual for spiritual grandfather Kleang Moeung), it has been held annually ever since.Footnote 57
The descriptions of Khlang Moeung in the 1904 and the 1906 chronicle texts share many features with the story taking place in Pursat. Whether it is Ang Chan or his son Uden who escapes to Siam and circulates false news about the elephant, the bottom-line of the two narratives is the sacrifice of Khlang Moeung, who in mythical style is depicted as the main actor responsible for defeating the enemy of the Khmer court as well as helping restore the royal lineage through the use of a ghost army. But what is particularly interesting is that, while the baṅsāvtār texts closely associates the ritual to commemorate Khlang Moeung's death with Kan, the story in Pursat links it with the Siamese troops’ attack without showing any connection to Kan's anti-monarchy figure. This key distinction illustrates the different interpretations of this popular royal ritual while, at the same time, highlighting one of the primary purposes of recounting this story, namely to justify the ritual itself. Indeed, the depiction of Khlang Moeung's role in both texts appears to be a modification of the local oral story, for it is not recorded in any earlier baṅsāvtār texts, nor in any other known written documents. While it is adapted and incorporated into the Kan narrative by the 1904 and 1906 chronicle producers to signify Ang Chan's greatness in contrast to Kan, the key point within both texts remains the ritual for Khlang Moeung's spirit in Pursat.Footnote 58
Discussion on the origins of the stories contained in the 1904 and the 1906 chronicles, thus, reveals that they existed in oral form before being incorporated into the texts under consideration. But this finding does not necessarily suggest that these oral stories were ‘replaced’ by the written texts. As will be discussed below, the two stories, especially that of Khlang Moeung, have continued to circulate orally at local, national and even international levels, and they have played a key role in shaping politics and collective memory in modern Cambodia as well as among Cambodian communities overseas. However, while I would agree with Eveline Porée-Maspero's suggestion of a blurred boundary between the Khmer baṅsāvtār and oral traditions,Footnote 59 a deeper discussion of the relationship between them lies beyond the scope of the article and deserves further separate study.Footnote 60
Kingship and Meritorious Men
As the Kan narrative was extensively re-constructed in different historical contexts, it is necessary to understand the core ideas behind its construction above and beyond the accuracy of these early twentieth-century baṅsāvtār texts. The way in which the narrative was put together and recounted as part of the genealogy of the royal lineage directly reflected concepts of Khmer kingship that existed during those years. The contents of the Kan narrative emphasised ‘puṇy’ or ‘merit’ as a core component involved in kingship. Kings were credited with possessing the highest merit in their realm. When a reigning king, such as Srī Sugandhapad, was killed or died due to illness, this signified the decline of his merit. New kings, such as Kan or Ang Chan, who captured the throne through force were portrayed as possessing greater merit than the king who had died. In other words, merit endowed new monarchs, including those who were not members of royal families, with the legitimacy to defeat a reigning king. In this respect, merit was the most important driving force for both capturing and legitimising the throne. It is worth emphasising, moreover, that, as one of the most significant elements in Theravada ideological doctrine, merit can be defined as an individual's virtue usually involving supernatural elements. Although it could also be gained through religious activities and from success in struggles, merit was believed to be accumulated by the individual during their previous existences. It was also believed to be given to the person through birth. In some circumstances, tangible objects like a weapon were also thought to confer merit on the individual.
While the 1904 text is less explicit regarding this point, both Kan and Ang Chan are depicted by the two baṅsāvtār texts as ‘meritorious men’ or ‘anak mān puṇy’.Footnote 61 Particularly in the 1906 text, Kan's merit is clearly shown through his survival in difficult circumstances, such as when he is swallowed by a fish or when he escapes Srī Sugandhapad's plan to take his life with the help of a nāg.Footnote 62 Other elements, such as his association with people working in the monasteries and with a highly respected abbot who becomes his teacher, also serve as indications of Kan's high merit, which in turn plays a key role in enabling him to defeat the reigning king, to make Ang Chan run away, and to take over the throne. After Kan is defeated in a series of battles against Ang Chan, the baṅsāvtār texts portray him as addicted to women and other forms of entertainment, and his losing interest in pursuing the battle.Footnote 63 This portrayal points to a decline in Kan's merit, which in turn leads to his arrest and death. For Ang Chan, his quality as a meritorious man can be understood through his outstanding ability to mobilise loyal associates such as Khlang Moeung, his tricking of the Siamese ruler, his ability to lead the army, his defeat of Kan, and his virtue in performing many Buddhist religious activities.Footnote 64 Indeed, the characteristics that Ang Chan possesses typified the notion of ‘great king’ that twentieth-century baṅsāvtār producers attempted to construct. An idea largely inherited from the nineteenth-century baṅsāvtār tradition, their notion of the meritorious man is defined through a Theravada Buddhist lens; and this differs from the way in which colonial-era historiography portrayed most of the great Angkor kings as Hindu rulers (with the exception of King Jayavarman VII whom they identified as a Mahayana Buddhist ruler).Footnote 65
Traitor and Loyalist to the Royal Court
The two early 1900s’ chronicles under discussion in this article were constructed at different times and by different sponsors—the 1904 version was produced under order from Sisowath whereas the 1906 version was initiated and sponsored by Leclère—but as far as the Kan narrative is concerned, they largely share the same storyline as well as underlying motivation. In both, the Kan narrative was elaborated by incorporating different local fables, partly because of the establishment of colonial rule and colonial scholarship in the kingdom. The reinforcement of French rule during the period from 1890s-1900s brought the arrival of several key colonial scholar-officials including Auguste Pavie (1847–1925), Étienne Aymonier (1844–1929), and Leclère himself, whose combined interests lay in collecting local texts and fables from across French Indochina. As the person in charge of the production of the 1904 baṅsāvtār, scholar-official Thiounn had developed a close association with these French scholars, especially Pavie and Aymonier, who encouraged his scholarly interest in incorporating more sources into the royal text. The baṅsāvtār composed under Thiounn's direction is thus more elaborate when compared to those produced earlier, and many parts of it are derived from fables that were used locally to make sense of historical and religious landmarks. This was also the case for the 1906 version, which was more elaborate than its predecessors mainly because its writers incorporated additional sources provided by Leclère, who, by this time, probably owned the largest collection of sources related to local fables, folk culture, laws, religions, history and arts.Footnote 66
Furthermore, these extended versions of the Kan narrative must have been linked to their producers’ motivation to ‘redefine’ the genealogy of Khmer rulers. As already explained, nineteenth-century baṅsāvtār texts laid stress on Kan's characteristic as an enemy of the royal court. When twentieth-century baṅsāvtār writers, particularly those who produced the 1904 and the 1906 texts, added extra information on Kan as well as on many other figures and events, they added new dimensions to the existing narrative. In their versions, they not only depicted Kan as the court's enemy but also provided long descriptions concerning his rise to power, his kingship, and his eventual defeat both in warfare and in virtue. With regard to other key figures such as Srī Sugandhapad, Ang Chan and Khlang Moeung, though the writers turned Srī Sugandhapad into a symbol of the Khmer court's downfall, they invested Ang Chan and Khlang Moeung with the necessary heroic characteristics to defeat the court's enemy and also to reinstate and bring glory to the throne.
In this sense, besides demonstrating the restitution of the royal lineage, these early twentieth-century depictions were significant with respect to how the palace defined who could be considered a ‘traitor’ and a ‘loyalist’ to the throne.Footnote 67 Although the 1904 text provides a much more negative portrayal of Kan, both the 1904 and the 1906 baṅsāvtār depict him as a traitor. As king, Srī Sugandhapad marries Kan's sister and promotes his family to a high-ranked position at court. Kan himself is appointed as Stec (lord) in charge of people working for Buddhist monasteries across the kingdom. Despite these privileges, however, Kan turns against the throne by causing the death of the king, threatening other members of the royal family, and abolishing the royal lineage itself when he declares himself king. In stark contrast, the two texts portray Khlang Moeung as the loyalist to the throne. Together with his four sons and his wife, Khlang Moeung never loses hope in the Khmer royal family. He offers his services to Ang Chan at precisely the moment when Ang Chan runs away from his Chaktomuk palace to Siam, and he remains loyal to the Prince even after he dies. Once Ang Chan returns to Pursat, Khlang Moeung helps set up a military base, mobilises and commands troops, and eventually sacrifices his own life in order to help him defeat the court's enemy and restore the Khmer throne.
Placing the royal court at the centre of their portrayal, writers of these early twentieth-century baṅsāvtār constructed two major competing notions—‘traitor’ versus ‘loyalist’—out of the Kan narrative. Most likely, these notions were needed at the time to reinforce the moral and political power of the palace, which had been shaken by revolts and protests in the 1880s and 1890s, as well as by the tightening of French colonial rule over the kingdom. More specifically, the reworked narrative contained within the 1904 text reflects Sisowath's thinking: his own succession to the throne following his elder brother King Norodom had only come about because the French put him there when Norodom's eldest son Prince Norodom Yukanthor (1860–1934) had fallen into disfavour.Footnote 68 Sisowath thus instructed the narrative to be rewritten to make Kan into an unmistakable usurper in order to underline that Srī Sugandhapad's younger brother Ang Chan (like himself) was the legitimate ruler. This formulation helped to justify the legitimacy of Sisowath succeeding his brother in 1904.Footnote 69 By inserting present-day political meanings as well as collective cultural values into distant past events, such moves pointed to a major change taking place in the baṅsāvtār tradition during the early decades of the twentieth century. After all, nineteenth-century baṅsāvtār producers (though to a certain extent, also driven by a desire to shape the past for use in the present)Footnote 70 do not appear to have reconstructed the royal texts beyond seeking to convey information or viewpoints present in earlier texts.
Kan and Khlang Moeung in Modern Collective Memory
The image of Kan and Khlang Moeung constructed by the baṅsāvtār producers in the early 1900s has subsequently continued to evolve via the re-creation of baṅsāvtār texts during the remaining years of the colonial period and thereafter. As non-royals, these two figures not only became part of the genealogy of Khmer rulers but have come to be embedded in Cambodia's collective memory right through to the present day. Both Kan and Khlang Moeung represent national figures whose images have been adopted and turned into various forms of political ideology.
As well as the characteristics possessed by Khlang Moeung in the chronicles, he was popularly well known thanks to the annual ritual held in Pursat to commemorate his spirit as the protector of Cambodia from the invading Siamese/Thai army. As Porée-Maspero has shown, together with his image in Pursat, Khlang Moeung was widely regarded as a spiritual protector in the area of Phnom Dvear, Kampot province (some 150 kilometres to the south of Phnom Penh), who helped Khmer royal armies defeat both rebellions and the Vietnamese.Footnote 71 Khlang Moeung's image in this regard was understood separately from Kan's, and he has been promoted as both a national hero and Cambodia's spiritual protector since at least the early 1940s.Footnote 72 A 1969 film, for instance, depicted Khlang Moeung's heroic actions in protecting the kingdom from invasion during the sixteenth century.Footnote 73 Famous for his bravery and loyalty to the country, his image was promoted by the Lon Nol regime as a symbol of patriotism and victory over enemies. Patriotic songs adopted his name as did a resistance movement against the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s, a monastery, and even a boxing club. The site where Khlang Moeung was believed to have killed himself became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites attracting visitors from all over the country. Following a ceremony sponsored by a Khmer-American family to summons his spirit at Oudong (and witnessed by Thompson) in 1994,Footnote 74 a similar ritual has been more recently adopted by a Khmer refugee community in Long Beach, California, which involves them honouring Khlang Moeung's spirit as well as seeking to connect its members with their motherland.Footnote 75
As far as later baṅsāvtār texts were concerned, between 1920s and 1960s the palace institution continued its dominant role in producing Khmer narratives about Cambodia's collective past, and knowledge about Kan and Khlang Moeung did not undergo any significant change.Footnote 76 Following the abolition of the Khmer monarchy in 1970, when Khlang Moeung's image as a loyalist to the throne was usually not mentioned, intellectuals of the Khmer Republic (1970–5), led by Lon Nol (1913–85), made several efforts to turn Kan into a popular anti-monarchy figure credited with successfully removing a ‘bad king’ from power. In a historical novel by Saing Hel published in 1972, for example, the author depicted Kan's outstanding ability as well as his heroic actions in overthrowing Srī Sugandhapad, who is portrayed as an unjust king.Footnote 77 However, after successfully declaring himself King, the novel shows Kan as a bad leader who appoints corrupt officials in his court.Footnote 78 Hel's depiction of Kan's image in this regard was clearly aimed at legitimising the Khmer Republic's removal of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) from power as well as their abolition of the monarchy. At the same time, it also implied criticism of the Lon Nol regime for being incapable of removing corrupt government officials.
Moreover, in Tren Ngea's two-volume history book on Cambodia's national past, published between 1973–4, when telling the story of Kan's success in claiming the throne as well as his defeat of Ang Chan,Footnote 79 the author did not refer explicitly to Khlang Moeung. Instead Tren used the figure ‘Pich’ whom he selectively invested with the various characteristics associated with Khlang Moeung in the 1904 and 1906 chronicles, including his mobilisation of a ghost army to defeat Kan's troops. Tren's widely circulated narrative does not include information concerning the ritual for Khlang Moeung's soul that the chronicle writers had portrayed as a royal commemoration of Khlang Moeung's loyalty to the throne.Footnote 80 This, together with his choice of name, may have been linked with the author's understanding that Khlang Moeung, who was associated with the ritual in Pursat, was a different figure to the one recorded in the baṅsāvtār. It may also have been because the Lon Nol government had adopted the image of Khlang Moeung in Pursat as a symbol of its own military campaigns against Prince Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, as well as North Vietnamese troops during the early 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, following various efforts to reconstruct knowledge of Cambodia's collective past after the Khmer Rouge era (1975–79), Kan and Khlang Moeung both became an integral part of this historical reconstruction. At least four major Khmer texts were produced based on knowledge contained within the chronicle texts of the 1900s. These included the reproduction of the baṅsāvtār text compiled and published by Eng Sut in 1969 and republished by Association Culturelle des Pierres d'Angkor in France in 1985, the publication of the 1906 baṅsāvtār text by the JSRC in the 1980s, Sor Ioe's re-creation of the Kan narrative in 1989 based on the 1906 version,Footnote 81 and Touch Chhoung's 1995 poetic retelling of Kan's uprising against the throne.Footnote 82 The appearance of these texts in the late twentieth century not only highlights the influence of the 1904 and 1906 chronicle texts on post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia's collective memory. It also suggests a collective effort on the part of these different groups of scholars, who tended to construct knowledge regarding the nation's past by ‘adopting’ colonial scholarship, rather than by producing new knowledge that went beyond the colonial-era historiography. Moreover, as they did not make any major changes to the original texts besides fixing some spellings and dates, their work reinforced the notions of treason and loyalty to the throne that had been embodied in the images of Kan and Khlang Moeung in the early 1900s.Footnote 83
These ideas were stimulated once again by the publication of Tranet's text in 2002 and the Khmer version of Leclère's Histoire du Cambodge in 2004.Footnote 84 A few years later, French-educated Ros Chantrabot, as senior advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen, released his revised version of the Kan narrative, which specifically aimed at turning Kan into a national hero.Footnote 85 Since Ros's reconstruction was part of a broader effort to promote Kan's legacy and align it with Hun Sen's accomplishments, including victory over his own royal political rival Prince Norodom Ranariddh, this book was largely in line with Saing's early 1970s novel. Both, it could be argued, were produced to fit in with a specific political agenda rather than to provide accurate historical knowledge concerning sixteenth-century events that involved the Khmer court. What is interesting about Ros's book is that, since its publication, it has been adopted by the country's administration as a new template for promoting present-day historical understanding of early sixteenth-century Cambodia. Besides being quoted by the Prime Minister in his public speeches, its contents were used to support the development of what Ros believes had been Kan's sixteenth-century royal capital into a national tourist and cultural site.Footnote 86 This in turn led to the erection across the country of statues of Kan bearing Hun Sen's face, the production of a film depicting Kan's heroic actions and legacy,Footnote 87 and even the naming of a boat after Kan.Footnote 88 While these activities have been criticised by local Cambodians and others living overseas,Footnote 89 Ros's projects centred on Kan point to how far the Kan narrative has evolved since the 1900s. At the same time, it underscores the lingering impact of the pre-colonial and colonial formats of the baṅsāvtār tradition, and not just French colonial-era historiography, on post-independence Cambodian collective memory and culture.
Conclusion
This article has offered a critical reading of the popular Kan narrative, a story that has been accepted in post-colonial Cambodia (1953 onwards) as national ‘historical knowledge’ concerning the early decades of the sixteenth century. While demonstrating the lack of reliable sources to support the accuracy of this narrative, the foregoing discussion has highlighted that the narrative originated in chronicle texts written during the nineteenth century, and its subsequent evolution over the course of the twentieth century. Not only did the narrative's format and contents evolve, but changes took place in the approach and motivation of chronicle writers toward Cambodia's collective past. Moreover, core concepts of kingship as well as the great king and the characteristics of non-royal figures were incorporated into chronicle manuscripts in order to draw attention to the continuing significance of the notions of treason and loyalty to the royal court during the 1900s.
In addition, this article has also sought to highlight how far pre-colonial and colonial formats of the chronicles have been included in the collective memory and culture of post-independence Cambodia, especially under Hun Sen. Drawing on reproductions of the Kan narrative and the government's focus on revising it in order to fit in with Hun Sen's political priorities, more recent publications have displayed a collective effort to re-interpret the narrative rather than to generate any new historical understanding that goes beyond existing conventional knowledge bound up in the chronicles. At the same time, it points to a lack of awareness among contemporary Cambodian scholars of the process whereby the Kan narrative has been re-constructed and the motivation behind its reformulations. Since the Kan narrative operates like a ‘chronicle-created myth’ with little historical validity in terms of how it represents actual past events, the decision of the present Cambodian authorities to adopt it for a national narrative not only suggests that modern Cambodian historiography has incorporated a false understanding of a sixteenth-century event, but also how far this misrepresentation has been used in an attempt to control the present and possibly the future.
