In 1864, the French government established a Protectorate over the small and politically weak country of Cambodia, and by this act consolidated their indirect rule over this part of what was then known as Indochina.
Even before that date, French explorers and military men had found impressive vestiges of a great civilization at the ancient city of Angkor, then largely in ruins, and elsewhere in the country.
Some of Frances colonial officials in the Southeast Asia of those days became adept readers of the Sanskrit and Khmer texts inscribed on Angkor's monuments, and eventually they were able to put together a forgotten history for the Cambodian people, a history that had long ceased to exist in the Khmer collective consciousness. The subsequent founding of the Ecole Frangaise d’Extreme-Orient in 1900 carried this scholarly tradition into the twentieth century and beyond. It soon became clear not only that there had once existed a powerful Khmer kingdom in Cambodia, but that for a span of six centuries Angkor had been the capital ofwhat was to become the largest empire ever known in mainland Southeast Asia.And empire it was, in the minimum definition of the word as employed by Carla Sinopoli:1
a territorially expansive and incorporative kind of state, involving relationships in which one state exercises control over other sociopolitical entities (e.g. states, chiefdoms, non-stratified societies), and of imperialism as the process of creating and maintaining empires.
Founded at the beginning of the ninth century ce, the Khmer Empire gradually expanded to include all of modern Cambodia and Thailand, part of Laos, all of the south coast and Delta region of Vietnam, and some of Burma (Myanmar). Like every empire that the world has known, it suffered its own decline and collapse. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Kambujadesa (the Khmer state) had been seriously reduced in size, and its once-glorious capital was for the most part abandoned.