Ethnic Chinese in Cambodia
Penny Edwards
Ethnic Chinese in the Khmer lexicon
Ethnic Chinese in the Chinese lexicon*2
Methodology
Interview technique
Written sources
Presentation of research findings
Acknowledgements
Part
One--Origins and Development of Chinese Identity in Cambodia p.8
from
Early History to 1970
The journey: weeping villages and golden boats
Nationalism, colonialism and the emergence of a distinct Chinese community in Cambodia
Cambodian nationalism and Chinese identity
Dialects and diversity: linguistic and regional difference among the Chinese community in Cambodia
a) Teochiu
b) Cantonese
c) Hainanese
d) Hokkien
e) Hakka
Bridges and boundaries: interethnic relations
a) Intermarriage
b) Cultural cross-winds: Chinese in Khmer culture
Chinese in the Cambodian economy
Isolationism
a) Schools and language use
b) Newspapers
Part
Two--Denial, Destruction and Discrimination: p. 29
The Suppression of Chinese Identity from 1970-90
Ethnic Chinese under Lon Nol
Ethnic Chinese under Democratic Kampuchea
Ethnic Chinese in Cambodia under the People's Republic of Kampuchea
Ethnic Chinese under the State of Cambodia (SOC)
Part Three--The Reawakening of Chinese
Cultural Identity, 1990-95 p. 41
Transmission of Chinese language and culture
a) Schools
b) Newspapers
Interethnic relations
a) Blurred boundaries: multi-ethnic communities
b) Building bridges: relations between ethnically homogeneous communities
Dialect groups in Cambodia today
a) Teochiu
b) Cantonese
c) Hokkien
d) Hainanese
e) Hakka
Chinese leaves and Cambodian roots: Chinese ethnicity and funeral practice in contemporary Cambodia
Chinese in Cambodian cultural life
Chinese in Cambodian economic life
'Cen-deykok'--the newcomers
Problems faced by ethnic Chinese in Cambodia today and recommendations for their resolution
a) Recognition of Chinese schools
b) The security situation and ethnic identity
Conclusion
Part Four—Appendices p.
55
Appendix A--Extracts from the "Story of Tun Ciy"*8
Appendix B--A Story of Bentougong (oral history from a Hainanese in Kompong Trach)
Appendix C--Khmer oral history of Chinese building the temple at Phnom Attera in nineteenth century Oudong
Appendix D--Khmer history about the Chinese and Wat Nokor in Kompong Cham
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
"My mother sold me. The boat was huge, the waves too, I was sick to
my stomach for three days and three nights…. I knew nobody. Suddenly, here I
was in this country, speaking no Khmer." Like Chong Chim, now in her 80s, most of Cambodia's
ethnic Chinese have their roots in rural China. Bought into servitude by
wealthy emigré families, contracted as coolie labour by colonial agents,
kidnapped in clan wars, or simply on the run from Japanese and Chinese armies,
flood or famine, they reversed their fortunes in Cambodia. They followed a
track beaten by thousands of Chinese sailors, traders, and political refugees
who had found comfort and acceptance in
Cambodia since the dawn of Khmer civilisation. Not until the US-Vietnam war spilled into Cambodia
did the tide turn, unleashing the ghosts of their past. Their communities
fractured by the mass bombing of Cambodia from 1970-73, their numbers decimated by Pol Pot's failed
revolution, and their last hopes trampled by anti-Chinese policies during the
Vietnamese occupation, many of Cambodia's Chinese re-enacted the nightmares of
their childhood and the fate of their ancestors, becoming refugees again. This
study is concerned with those Chinese that stayed, and those that have returned.
Defining Chinese
The title of this chapter implies the existence of clear-cut boundaries between the subject of our inquiry, ethnic Chinese, and their country of domicile, Cambodia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ethnic Chinese are an integral part of the geography and genealogy of Cambodia. While estimates of the size of the Chinese population vary from 300,000-340,000,*1 there is general agreement that at least ninety percent of Cambodia's ethnic Chinese were born in Cambodia. Khmers and Chinese in Cambodia make a clear distinction between long-term Chinese residents of Cambodia and the more transient population of recently arrived immigrants from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, who have settled in Phnom Penh in relatively large numbers since the Paris Peace Agreements were signed in October 1991. In keeping with these perceptions and in line with our mandate, we have maintained the same distinction in our research, focusing on the history, social structure, legal-political status and cultural identity of the established Chinese munity in Cambodia. We have given only the briefest attention to the new ers, on the grounds that Hong Kong Chinese businessmen or Singaporean Chinese doctors, along with the thousands of other such transients, are protected by the passports and laws of their countries of permanent residence, and, unlike the long-standing ethnic Chinese community in Cambodia, do not identify even partially as Cambodian.
Ethnic identity is a complex web of memory and feeling cemented through ties to people, place and time. The transmission of cultural knowledge across generations provides a dynamic for the melding of ethnic identity. The twentieth century nation-state provides a separate dynamic through its social, cultural, legal, and political institutions, which can both shape and suppress ethnic identity. This is particularly true for minority ethnic groups which are vulnerable to adverse policy swings dictated by the ruling majority ethnic group. Over the last fifty years, ethnic Chinese under various regimes in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines have been denied the right to assert their "Chineseness"--through such practices as language use, religious ritual and cultural celebration--precisely because the state has categorised them as Chinese. Trapped in a double bind, Chinese have been (and in some states, still are) punished for an ethnic identity they are no longer allowed to assert. States and scholars may categorise individuals who perform Chinese religious rituals, adopt a Chinese name, celebrate Chinese New Year, or have certain facial features, as Chinese. But none of the above markers are unambiguous symbols of an exclusively Chinese identity. Such pigeon-holing facilitates both research and policy formulation, but creates illusory patterns of ethnicity.
Various politicians in recent Cambodian history have thrived on the myth that ethnic groups in Cambodia are neatly bounded communities afloat on the surface of an all-Khmer nation, as rootless as flotsam and as easily removed. In debunking that myth, this report also challenges the bureaucrat's dream that ethnic groups can be mapped at the flick of a pen. Khmer culture has absorbed important influences from India and China (Népote 1994). Chinese identity is similarly flexible. Mirroring their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand (Yen 1991:174; Chan & Tong 1993:161, 164; Hill 1992:321), most Chinese in Cambodia maintain their historical linkage to China through ancestor worship, embrace Khmer culture through attendance at wats and the celebration of Khmer festivals, and maintain their ties to the Cambodian landscape through burial rites and worship of local territorial gods. The hybridity of Chinese identity is best symbolised in the deity Bentougong. Widely practised by Chinese throughout Cambodia, the cult of Bentougong is at its strongest in Kampot, where he is variously described as "the Ancestor of all Chinese," the "King of the Spirits of Kampot," the "Provincial Chief of Kampot," and the "Lord of all the Spirits in the Mountains around Kampot." Worship of Bentougong thus reinforces "Kampot-ness"--a sense of belonging to Kampot, and by extension, Cambodia--as much as Chineseness. The fact that Khmers also worship Bentougong underscores the inherent difficulty in assigning ethnicity in Cambodia.
The last prehensive survey of Chinese in Cambodia was conducted by anthropologist William Willmott from 1962-63. In his landmark studies, The Chinese in Cambodia and The Political Structure of the Chinese community in Cambodia, Willmott defined a Chinese as "any individual who supports or participates in some or all of the Chinese associations available to him" (Willmott 1970:5). This definition is more closely linked to an individual's self-perception than that adopted by the Cambodian census of 1962, which registered anyone who spoke a Chinese language or possessed Chinese nationality as ethnic Chinese (Willmott 1970:175). However, Willmott's definition is outmoded in the context of recent Cambodian history. The partial closure of Chinese schools and newspapers under Lon Nol (1970-75), the virtual ban on Chinese language and cultural practices under Pol Pot (1975-78), and the repression of Chinese language teaching and cultural celebration from 1979-91 by the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) and its successor the State of Cambodia (SOC), have left a legacy of fear. That legacy is rapidly giving way to a confident assertion of Chinese identity across Cambodia through such vehicles as newspapers, schools, cultural associations and temples as a result of more moderate policies adopted by the Kingdom of Cambodia. Most Chinese have eagerly embraced these new-found freedoms. But others, chilled by the shadow of over twenty years of denial and discrimination, are still wary of claiming a Chinese identity. In these changed circumstances, membership of a Chinese association is no longer a clear ethnological marker. Not all people who consider themselves Chinese will necessarily join a Chinese association. Moreover, not all members of Chinese associations necessarily define themselves as Chinese rather than Cambodian. They are more likely to assume a dual identity, bining sentimental allegiance to their ancestral homeland with political allegiance to the Cambodian crown and country. This complexity of Chinese ethnic identity in Cambodia is reflected in a plethora of Khmer terms.
Ethnic Chinese in the Khmer lexicon
The Khmer term cenchaw (raw Chinese) refers to Chinese who emigrated to Cambodia from China at whatever age and irrespective of legal status or level of acculturation. Thus a women of 90 who travelled to Cambodia from Guangzhou at the age of three, who speaks fluent Khmer and has forgotten Chinese, who visits the pagoda and has married a Khmer, will still be known as cenchaw. Second- or third-generation Chinese in Cambodia, whose lineage is Chinese, are known as cen (Chinese), koncen (children of Chinese), or koncawcen (grandchildren of Chinese). A more colloquial Khmer term for Chinese in Cambodia comes from the enormously popular Khmer folk-tale "The Story of Tun Ciy" (See Appendix A for a translation of extracts from this tale). The term cen a-ciy, (Tun Ciy's Chinese) refers to the allegorical boatloads of Chinese presented to the Khmer genius Tun Ciy as a gift from the Chinese emperor. Sino-Khmers are called konkat-cen, but the generic konkat (cut-child--implying "cut down the middle," or "half-and-half") is also widely used as a specific designator for Sino-Khmer, as the majority of mixed-descent progeny in Cambodia are Sino-Khmer, and the "Chinese" is thus implicit. Although ethnic Chinese in Cambodia may refer to themselves by any of the above terms, they will also freely refer to themselves as khmae-yeung (we Khmers), where Khmer indicates not ethnic origin but attachment to the Khmer nation. Those Chinese who are of ethnic Chinese origin but who have be e at least partially integrated into Khmer society, such as through intermarriage, are often described as having col khmae (entered the Khmers) even where they have joined Chinese associations or retained other outward markers of Chinese identity.
Finally, there are Khmer terms for the five major Chinese dialect groups in Cambodia, known as cen-kangtong (Cantonese), cen-hainan (Hainanese), cen-keh (Hakka), cen-hokkien (Hokkien) and cen-teciew (Teochiu). These groups, all from southern China, are considered in detail in Part One. A recent new development is the emergence of a sixth community which defies definition as a dialect group but nonetheless warrants serious scholastic attention beyond the scope of this study. This group comprises recently arrived Chinese immigrants and temporary residents from the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, known collectively as cen-deykok (dry-land Chinese). As this verbal delineation suggests, Khmers make a clear distinction between these recent immigrants, generally regarded as foreigners, and long-term Chinese residents of Cambodia, generally accepted as an integral part of the Cambodian social fabric. Long-term Chinese residents share this view and use the term khmae-yeung to distinguish themselves from cen-deykok. The recent emergence of the cen-deykok community is considered in brief in Part Three, under the heading New comers.
Ethnic Chinese in the Chinese lexicon*2
Until the late 1960s, ethnic Chinese in Cambodia commonly referred to themselves as huaqiao (Chinese living abroad), which carries connotations of temporary residence. However, most ethnic Chinese are reluctant to use this term today. This is partly because huaqiao have been regarded as fifth-columns both in Cambodia (1967-70 under Sihanouk; 1970-75 under Lon Nol; 1973-75 by the Khmer Rouge in some "liberated zones" and 1975-78 in Democratic Kampuchea; 1979-89 under the PRK) and elsewhere in Southeast Asia since the 1960s, with often appalling consequences. There has also been an active renunciation of huaqiao identity by many Chinese who previously looked to China as a "mother figure" but were sorely disappointed by China's failure to save ethnic Chinese lives during the Pol Pot period. Today, most ethnic Chinese in Cambodia refer to themselves not as huaqiao but as jianbuzhai huaren (Cambodian Chinese), huaren (Chinese) or huayi (citizen of Chinese origin). Over ninety percent of Chinese in Cambodia are huayi, that is, at least second-generation Chinese. The term hunxue (mixed blood) is used for Sino-Khmer. Ethnic Chinese often use the term zuguo (ancestral land) to refer to China and not Cambodia. This usage does not indicate that ethnic Chinese owe their first allegiance to China, but simply reflects the importance of ancestor worship in traditional Chinese culture. Finally, Chinese refer to themselves with the terms chaozhou (Teochiu), guangdong (Cantonese), fujian (Hokkien), kejia (Hakka), or hainan (Hainanese), depending on their dialect group.
Methodology
This brief introduction to the complexity of identity formation and assertion in contemporary Cambodia underscores the obsolescence of the associational affiliation model of ethnicity that served Willmott so well in early 1960s Cambodia. Rather than limit our inquiry to members of Chinese associations, schools and temples, we interviewed Khmers, Sino-Khmers and ethnic Chinese from a cross-section of all dialect groups, ages and occupations, giving equal weighting to men and women. However, priority was given to first-generation Chinese (cenchaw) and Cambodian-born Chinese (koncen) in their late 70s, 80s and 90s before their voices are lost. It is often members of this generation who are the driving force behind the grass-roots renaissance of Chinese temples and schools.
In line with the long-term objectives of the IREGC project, namely to promote inter-ethnic understanding, we interviewed as wide a geographic and social spread of Chinese as was possible within the constraints of time and funding. Willmott's, and previous, studies have focused almost exclusively on urban Chinese, especially in Phnom Penh. While it is true that the majority of ethnic Chinese in Cambodia (approximately eighty-five percent) live in Phnom Penh and provincial towns, it should not be forgotten that the majority of Khmers (approximately eighty percent) live in the country. So as to form a nationwide picture of both Chinese ethnic identity and inter-ethnic relations, we paid especial attention to rural Chinese in villages, communes and district towns. We visited Sotr Nikum district (Khum Damdaek), Kralanh district (Khum Kralanh) and the provincial capital of Siem Reap; Banan district and the provincial capital in Battambang; Tuk Meah district, Kompong Trach district (Khum Kompong Trach, Khum Preykuy, Phum Preythom, Phum Sraychea) and Kampot district (Khum Phnomkamchay, Khum Tukchu) in Kampot; Kep town; Kroch Chhmar District (Khum Bo Bi, Phum Preik Cham), Tbong Khmum district (Khum Suong, Khum Phsa Tnal, Khum Chup) and the provincial capital in Kompong Cham; Chhlong district (Khum Chhlong, Khum Chhney) and the provincial capital in Kratie; Takhmau town and Koh Thom district (Khum Koh Tiew, Phum Sampoupun) in Kandal; Oudong, Krang Cheik district (Khum Trapeang Mean) and the provincial capital in Kompong Speu; Angkor Borey district (Phum Preik Bo), Prey Kabbah district and the provincial capital in Takeo; Kraol Ko district (Khum Romieh Haek, Khum Kompong Ro) and the provincial capital in Svay Rieng; and the Municipality of Phnom Penh.
Interview technique
Most Chinese in Cambodia are wary of direct questioning about their ethnic origins, and with good reason. Such questioning has generally been carried out by security forces: government police conducting a headcount as in 1995 in Kompong Cham; PRK cadres and police carrying out the door-to-door investigation of Chinese backgrounds under the "351 programme" from 1980-85; Khmer Rouge cadres rooting out suspected capitalists and spies under Pol Pot; Lon Nol policemen investigating suspected communist sympathisers. In none of these cases has admission of Chinese identity yielded positive consequences. On the contrary, the price of honesty has ranged from fines (for teaching Chinese under Lon Nol) to discrimination in the allocation of jobs, land and housing (under PRK) to hard labour, imprisonment and death (under DK and PRK). This legacy has made ethnic Chinese in Cambodia extremely wary of anyone conducting "research," the Khmer term for which (srawcriew) has been sullied through its long usage to describe research of a more political than social nature. Although we always stated clearly who we were working for and the terms of our mandate, we were frequently asked in early stages of interviews if we had been sent by the government. "You're not going to send us back [to China], are you?" was a perennial refrain, especially from cenchaw, as were unsolicited claims that their identity papers were legal and intact. In order to gain the confidence of interviewees, we conducted our research by way of informal conversation, in Khmer and/or Mandarin, focusing on social, cultural, political, historical, legal and economic issues and inter-ethnic relations. Use of a tape recorder was conspicuously unwelcome and was abandoned at an early stage. We worked from notes, occasionally taking photographs where interviewees did not object. Once we had won their confidence, most of the interviewees proved extremely willing to share their stories.
Written sources
A wide range of Chinese, English, French and Khmer publications informed the sections on history and background. Sources included official documents, refugee accounts, newspapers, radio broadcasts, journals, school textbooks, and a variety of academic journals and books on both Cambodia and overseas Chinese. Most of this material is available at Monash University, Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From September to December 1995, we monitored Cambodia's two Chinese-language newspapers Huashang Ribao (Chinese commercial News) and Yazhou Bao (Asia News). These papers give valuable coverage of Chinese cultural and educational activities throughout Cambodia. The Huashang Ribao carries a daily letters page which gives useful insight into the opinions of Chinese school students.
Presentation of research findings
This study is organised in three sections. Part One charts the emergence of a Chinese community in Cambodia from early history to the demise of the Sihanouk regime in 1970. Part Two examines the repression of Chinese identity by the forces of war, revolution and discrimination from 1970 to 1990. Part Three explores the renaissance of Chinese cultural identity from late 1990 to 1995.
The historical and political background in Part One is designed to highlight the shifting definitions of "Chineseness" in Cambodia, and so to explode the myth of mutually exclusive "ingroups" and "outgroups" in Cambodian society. This history examines when and why Chinese migrated to Cambodia and introduces the main dialect groups. It explores the integration of Chinese into Cambodian political life prior to French rule, the construction of a sharply delineated Chinese munity under colonial rule, and the stabilisation of the Chinese community under Sihanouk. Part Two examines the destruction and denial of Chinese identity under Lon Nol, DK, PRK and SOC, highlighting the often arbitrary way in which regimes assign and manipulate ethnic identity. Part Three examines the opportunities and problems faced by ethnic Chinese in Cambodia today. The Appendix contains translations and transcriptions of relevant Khmer and Chinese folklore.
In the interests of protecting our interviewees, we have deliberately omitted dates, names and places in a number of cases. Much of the information gained in interviews is woven into the analytical narrative. Some interviews complement background material, some contradict previously published theories, some offer completely new information on the recent, and poorly documented, history of ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. In the interests of accessibility, we have had to summarise many fascinating stories. However, we would like to stress that there is no one Chinese voice in Cambodia: this paper serves as a vehicle for the many disparate voices we heard.
Acknowledgements
In addition to our interviewees, a number of people outside the Center for Advanced Study gave generously of their time. The unstinting energy and local knowledge of Cheang Huy of CARERE in Battambang gave us a valuable entrée to many Chinese families. Diane Elkas of the UN Centre for Human Rights (UNCHR) in Cambodia was extremely helpful in coordinating our visits to Battambang and Kompong Cham. UNCHR Provincial Officers Lakpa Tsering, Kim Sohore, and Denis provided generous hospitality, as did Genevieve Merceur of the Office of the UN Special Representative to Cambodia in Phnom Penh. In Tbong Khmum and Kroch Chhmar districts of Kompong Cham, the local government offered us free accommodation. Stephen Heder of the School of Oriental and African Studies gave generous access to his archives, and Professor David Chandler of Monash University kindly edited a first draft of this paper.
Part One--Origins and Development of Chinese Identity in Cambodia from Early History to 1970
The journey: weeping villages and golden boats
Khmer civilisation has been described as an "oral civilisation," where the gift of the gab counts for more than the written word (Ponchaud 1989:158-159). While documentation on the growth of a Chinese community in Cambodia is scarce, stories of early Chinese immigration live on in a rich oral tradition, in Cambodian place names, and in Khmer folklore. One Khmer myth of origin tells how the "Naga Queen" attracted many Indians and Chinese and other foreigners to Cambodia through her astute control of land and water in the first century AD (Pun 1994:22). While Cambodia has offered a new beginning to Chinese throughout the centuries, uprooting was not always easy. A monument to the dislocation of new arrivals lives on in "Weeping Chinese Village" (phum cen-yum) in Krang Cheik district of Kompong Speu, a historic entry-point for Chinese emigrating to Cambodia, named after the Chinese who wept and wailed as they searched in vain for familiar landmarks. Legend has it that this village was the first point of arrival for many Hokkien Chinese centuries ago. Formerly known as Sampoupun ("Fleet of Boats"), Koh Tiew commune in Koh Thom district of Kandal province is remembered in local lore as a port for Chinese trade with the embryonic Cambodian state of Funan. Oral history recounts how successive waves of Chinese migrated to Sampoupun in the first, sixth, thirteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Similar legend, passed on by a Sino-Khmer in Kampot, holds that Tuk Meah (meaning "Golden Boat") earned its name centuries ago from Chinese shipments to Tuk Meas. After offloading the goods, the boats would take a cargo of gold back to China.*3 Such stories point to the widespread acceptance of ethnic Chinese as a continuous feature of Cambodian historical, economic and cultural life.
These tales of boats and water mesh with the few surviving written records. Among the first recorded emigrés were Chinese sailors who swapped the poverty of life in southern China for the ease of Cambodian living. "Chinese sailors often desert to these parts," wrote the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan in 1296-97. These settlers did not form an ethnically distinct community, but integrated into Cambodian society where they "took advantage of the easy availability of food, women, housing, furniture and trade." (Xia 1981:181; Willmott 1966). But already these rewards were claimed at risk of life and limb. In choosing Cambodia, these early immigrants had abandoned China, for in the lore and law of ancient China the very act of forsaking one's ancestral homeland was seen as the lowest form of crime, punishable by death. Such perceptions were not coloured by culture alone. The fall of the Song dynasty in 1276 saw China's first wave of political refugees. Refusing to surrender to their new Mongol rulers, many Song loyalists fled to Indochina, where some of them attempted to raise a local army to recapture the lost territories of China (Yen 1985:6). Their flight was echoed some three hundred years later, when a Manchu invasion toppled the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Ming loyalists fled southward. By this time, as a Ming dynasty archive notes, there was already a Chinese settlement in Cambodia in the shape of a "wooden city" in Lovek (Xia 1981:181). Ming resistance leader Zheng Chengkong (known in the West as Koxinga) reportedly enlisted the support of overseas Chinese from Vietnam, Cambodia and Siam in his campaigns against Manchu rule (Yen 1985:19; Crozier 1977:11-17). In 1679, a Cantonese general gave up his struggle against the Manchus and settled his troops at Mytho in what was then southeastern Cambodia (Willmott 1967:6). Four years later, Koxinga was routed in Formosa and most of his followers took refuge in Southeast Asia. Many of these Ming loyalists were scholar-officials. Educated in Confucian values, they were more inclined to preserve Chinese traditions than sailors and traders, particularly now that China had fallen prey to "barbarian" usurpers (Yen 1976:2-3). These early waves of immigration saw the coalescence of a Chinese community in Cambodia (Willmott 1966). Over the next few centuries, the munity expanded to include refugees from the warlordism, famine and drought that ravaged China's coastal provinces, and Chinese fleeing the punitive taxes and discrimination of nineteenth-century Vietnam.
Recognising the economic and cultural value of diverse ethnic groups, successive Cambodian monarchs maintained an "open-door" immigration policy, offering asylum to Chinese refugees from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Unclouded by the virulent ethnic nationalism that has coloured so many twentieth-century regimes, kings such as Ang Duong appointed Chinese, Sino-Khmer, Vietnamese and Cham provincial governors (oknya), often to reward their loyalty in backing claims to the throne (Le Clère 1907:837). While recognised as a separate economic munity subject to special taxation and privileged by the king's leasing of opium and gambling concessions, Chinese were seen as an integral part of the Cambodian kingdom. The kram srok (laws of the land) promulgated in 1693 established indirect rule by the Cambodian king over Chinese, Vietnamese, Javanese-Malay and Japanese populations via a chautea (chief) and allowed foreigners to be heads of provinces provided they were born in Cambodia and spoke Khmer fluently (Willmott 1967:65). When the French missionary C. E. Bouillevaux asked a Chinese chautea whose side he would take if he was forced to choose between his French friend and the Cambodian king, the Chinese replied that he would naturally choose his king, and die for him if necessary. Although Chinese participating in Cambodian political life were sometimes encouraged to conform to such cultural norms as hairstyle (Le Clère 1907:838), they were free to dress in Chinese style and to worship Chinese deities by staging Chinese opera (Bouillevaux 1874).
Willmott has described this policy as "assimilation" (Willmott 1964:109). However, "assimilation" does not accurately describe the process by which Chinese became integrated into Cambodian political and cultural life. Rather, the process was one of cultural tolerance and mutual exchange, whereby--contrary to Willmott's assertion that Chinese had to "become" Cambodian before they could take office as the king's appointees, be it as tax-farmers or provincial governors--Chinese were able to maintain a distinct cultural identity which was not perceived as a threat. In sum, political loyalty and cultural identity were not confused, as they would later be e through the lens of twentieth-century nationalism.
Nationalism, colonialism and the emergence of a distinct Chinese community in Cambodia
Not until the late nineteenth century did the Chinese government recognise overseas Chinese. Prior to this time, Chinese government records depict the overseas Chinese as pirates, traitors and deserters (Yen 1985:16-19). In 1603, the Ming government tacitly endorsed the massacre of 25,000 Chinese in the Philippines, on the grounds that the victims were "scum, ungrateful to China, to their homeland, their parents and ancestors, for they failed to return to China for the New Year." A similar response greeted news of the Dutch massacre of Chinese in Java in 1740 (Yen 1985:22). These statements reflected a world view which saw Chineseness as commensurate with China's territorial borders: and yet these borders were not mapped in a simple horizontal matrix separating China from barbarian lands, but also reached upwards through the thirteen storeys of a heavily bureaucratised heaven and downwards to the ancestral graves. To abandon the ancestral homeland was to abandon one's place in the Chinese cosmos.
The mid- to late nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift in the mapping of China in the minds of the Chinese imperial government, giving rise to new policies which recognised emigrés not as pirates or deserters but as Chinese subjects in need of Chinese protection. Several factors contributed to this. Most obviously, China's defeat by foreign powers in the Opium Wars challenged traditional ways of thinking about China as the all-powerful centre of the world. China was no longer seen as "the Pole Star which mands the homage of the multitude of stars without leaving its place" (Confucius 1983:63). This changed consciousness led to the establishment of China's first embryonic foreign office, the Zongli Yamen, in 1861. Increased overseas travel by Qing government officials began to change traditional hostile attitudes, while the establishment of Chinese consulates overseas in the 1870s and 1880s led to increased awareness of the economic value of overseas Chinese (Yen 1985:206, 249). The abolition of the world slave trade in 1814 and the rise of a substitute trade in Chinese "coolie" labour also forced a revision in Qing government attitudes. The first shipment of Chinese coolies under contract to foreign lands was made in 1844 to the French colony of the Islands of Bourbon. Emigrés were no longer castaways who had disappeared into the great barbarian yonder, but people who reflected China's image back at it like fragments of a broken mirror. Once "deserters" and "traitors," Chinese living overseas were now seen as "Chinese subjects" and "Chinese merchant gentry" (Yen 1985:33). In 1860, its hand forced by allied troops, the Qing government signed conventions with Britain and France recognising the rights of Chinese subjects to emigrate and assuring colonial contract labour its recognition and protection (Yen 1985:39, 42, 99-100). The Convention of 1860, signed just three years before the establishment of the French protectorate in Cambodia, opened the way for a new wave of Chinese emigration which changed the complexion of Chinese society in Cambodia.
Under French rule, the need for cheap labour, the use of Chinese as economic middlemen, and the strict monitoring of Chinese traffic into and through French Indochina led to the emergence of rigid ethnic boundaries. Legislation on immigration, taxation, social organisation and labour created notions of "ingroups" and "outgroups," impeding the crystallisation of a nationwide, inclusive, anti-colonial identity. All Chinese arrivals were processed through a congrégation system, designed to ensure maximum surveillance and ease of revenue collection. Until 1907, Chinese fingerprints were taken and craniums measured on arrival in Indochina, the implication being that today's coolies were tomorrow's felons. Effectively debarred from participation in Cambodian political life, Chinese were increasingly cursed in French colonial reports as greedy traders or vice-ridden workers whose greatest pleasures in life were opium, gambling and extortion. Although the French reaped huge sums from the Chinese population in discriminatory poll taxes, many colonial officials plained that the Chinese were returning nothing to Cambodia, and remitting all their earnings home. The French enjoyed a romantic obsession and a paternalistic relationship with the majority Khmer population, as reflected in numerous academic treatises and colonial novels. By contrast, the culture and society of the Chinese community in Cambodia attracted little scholarly attention. In French eyes, Chinese were little more than a necessary evil whose thrift and industry would oil the wheels of colonial capital.
But the French administrators were not the only ones with a vested interest in reinforcing a separate identity among the overseas Chinese. By far the most important factor in shifting definitions of emigrés from the flotsam and jetsam of pirates and criminals to a consolidated "overseas Chinese" community was Chinese nationalism. This worked both to refigure the status of overseas Chinese in the government calculus and to alter the frame of identity of Chinese overseas. While the late Qing government had an economic and prestige interest in the overseas Chinese, Sun Yatsen's revolutionaries and Kang Youwei's reformers were the first to recognise their political capital. From the late nineteenth century, overseas Chinese were refashioned in the eyes of the Chinese government and intellectual elite as much as they were fashioned through the lenses of colonial officials. Attachments to China in the nineteenth century had existed among overseas Chinese communities "in such mild forms as remitting money to the kin in the southern provinces, retiring to rest and dying on Chinese soil, and shipping remains to the birthplaces of the deceased for reburial" (Yong 1992:83). The rise of nationalism channelled these long-standing emotional and psychological sentiments into political, economic and educational activities. Building on the basis of their social and cultural cohesion manifested in such institutions as Chinese opera, religion, health-care, food and education, ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia were increasingly encouraged to forge lines of political identity with China.
Led by Sun Yatsen, Chinese nationalists encouraged the development of Chinese schools and cultural organisations in Southeast Asia. The Qing dynasty courted overseas Chinese communities with a contesting nationalism, and in 1909 registered a sweeping change to its traditional view of overseas Chinese in its Nationality Law. From now on, Chineseness was no longer seen as a uniquely territorial condition conferred by birth in the ancestral homeland. The new Nationality Law established the principle of jus sanguinis, mapping the Chinese nation as it had never before been mapped, on a genealogy of blood (Fitzgerald 1972:6). Henceforth you were a Chinese by blut, not boden. Any person born of a Chinese father, or of a Chinese mother where the nationality of the father was unknown or indeterminate, became a Chinese citizen regardless of the place of birth. The Nationality Law thus gave overseas Chinese formal legal recognition while creating an "imagined community" of Chinese scattered across Southeast Asia who, born in Borneo or Battambang, now turned their faces to a mythical motherland (Wang 1991:223; Anderson 1983:133).
Cambodian nationalism and Chinese identity
While Chinese governments and intellectuals encouraged Chinese in Cambodia to cultivate national loyalty to China, the nationalist movement in Cambodia moved away from the generous vision of pre-colonial rulers, distilling myth and memory into a fiercely ethnocentric vision of nation. Ignoring the multi-ethnic composition of Cambodian society, the nationalists drew their moral authority from old sayings fused with new meaning. The newspaper Nagaravatta spoke of "we Khmers," (khmae-yeung), "masters of the country" (mcah srok), "our country" (srok yeung), "Khmer race/nation" (ciet khmae), and depicted Vietnamese and Chinese as outgroups.
These visions were translated into reality with the end of colonial rule in Cambodia in 1953. With independence came nation-building and the Chinese were seen in a new light--as outsiders. "In the French period they never worried about who you were or where you came from," said one first-generation Hakka in his 80s. "They'd live and let live." He recalled the colonial period with nostalgia as a time when Chinese New Year celebrations in Battambang had gone on for a week. However, after independence, people "began to mind about such things," and Chinese New Year celebrations were cut back in Battambang. A 72-year-old second-generation Chinese in Kompong Cham shared these views. The French colonial regime had not placed any cultural restrictions on the Chinese, but they had taxed the Chinese (thveu-ey thveu-to aoy-tae mien luy). Life had been easy (sapbay) under French rule. However, while Cambodia's ethnic Chinese under Sihanouk were not incorporated into displays of nationhood unless visits by Chinese dignitaries so required, and although discriminatory laws against Chinese were passed, including restrictions on business practices and Chinese schools, these restrictions were seldom rigorously enforced.
Citizenship was regulated by Kram 913-NS of 30 November 1954, which conferred citizenship on both jus sanguinis and jus soli bases. By this law children of at least one Cambodian citizen gained Cambodian citizenship, as did anyone born in Cambodia of parents also born in Cambodia, no matter what the nationality of the parents. Like future citizenship laws, Kram 913-NS failed to define nationality. A naturalisation law of 1954 was amended in 1959 to restrict naturalisation to people fluent in Khmer who demonstrated "a sufficient assimilation to the customs, morals and traditions of Cambodia," but failed to cast legal light on the term "nationality." This vagueness had important ramifications for those laws conferring rights on the basis of nationality, such as the Civil Service Law of 1953. This law restricted admission to the Civil Service to those who could prove that they had Cambodian nationality. Since Cambodian nationality was not normally interpreted as equivalent to Cambodian citizenship, the net effect of this ruling was to ban ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese from participation in the Civil Service (De Benardi 1975:30-32). According to some interviewees, the new fiscal regime established soon after independence taxed Chinese at higher rates than under colonial rule. Seeing this as an omen that worse was yet to come, and lured by the promises of Mao Zedong's unified China, a number of Chinese returned to the PRC in the mid-1950s.
While Cambodian legislation on employment and nationality reinforced notions of a separate Chinese identity, the PRC introduced a new policy towards overseas Chinese, urging Chinese in Cambodia to identify with their host country. Cast as outsiders by both China and Cambodia, the Chinese fell between two stools. Formal relations between China and Cambodia were established in 1956. Under its Constitution of 1956, the PRC pledged to protect "the just rights and interests of Chinese residents abroad." However, as history would later stand witness, the Chinese authorities applied this principle selectively, in line with wider strategic and ideological interests. During his visit to Cambodia in 1956, Zhou Enlai made a public bid to Chinese to respect the laws, customs, habits and religion of the Khmers, and to intermarry with them, become Cambodian citizens and, if they did so, to refrain from further involvement in overseas Chinese organisations. Despite this open plea, the Beijing leadership was also quick to exploit the presence of powerful ethnic Chinese in Cambodia.
Although the majority of Chinese in Cambodia were "capitalist" and thus stood to lose from a munist revolution inside Cambodia, many welcomed the establishment of close relations with the PRC and were active in forming Chinese associations, sports associations and schools. When Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi visited Cambodia in 1956 and 1963, Chinese were mobilised nationwide, through the Chinese associations, to travel to Phnom Penh to stage a mass welcoming ceremony. Sihanouk, who excluded the Chinese and Vietnamese groups from the choreography of nation on other occasions, drafted them in for celebrations of Sino-Cambodian friendship and state visits from the PRC (Cambodge d'Aujourd'hui 1963:3). Ethnic Chinese were thus drafted in to give concrete expression to Sino-Cambodian friendship, as seen in Sihanouk's mobilisation of the Chinese munity to construct Mao Tse Toung Boulevard in Phnom Penh (Yu 1981).
However, Sino-Cambodian relations soured in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution. In 1967, Sihanouk took firm measures to "end Chinese interference and to stop the Khmer Reds' communist subversion." The General Association of Khmer Students and the Khmero-Chinese Friendship Association were dissolved. The three "pro-Chinese" deputies of these organisations (Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Phouk Chhay) went into hiding, and raids on their houses reportedly "produced a great quantity of propaganda materials" (Kambuja(b) 1967:11). So Nem, head of the Khmero-Chinese Friendship Association, was dismissed from government.
Dialects and diversity: linguistic and regional difference among the Chinese munity in Cambodia
Although literate Chinese can comunicate with each other irrespective of dialect group through a uniform Chinese script, the major Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible. Chinese in Cambodia have historically comprised five main dialect groups, all from southern China: Cantonese, Hainan, Hakka, Hokkien and Teochiu. Hainan and Hokkien associations were active in Phnom Penh by 1884 (Bouinais & Paulus 1884:32). Two scholars noted "frequent disagreement" between the two "rival" Chinese associations in Phnom Penh during the 1880s (Boulanger 1887:36; Delaporte 1880:31). Yet prior to French legislation in 1891, neither the colonial government nor the Cambodian crown legally required Chinese communities to group along dialect lines. It thus appears that Chinese emigrating to Cambodia in the nineteenth century spontaneously gravitated toward their dialect groups.
This tendency was driven by a natural desire for communication and for continuity with the abandoned homeland. Chinese cultural imperatives, which emphasise the importance of group belonging and acceptance in contrast to the Western emphasis on individual recognition and ambition, also played a part. Equally important was a system of emigration organised along regional lines. Whether travelling as contract labour or free men, voyagers from China would almost always arrive in Cambodia in the company of their dialect group. Most commonly, passage would be arranged through a toukey (sponsor) from their district. A 91-year-old Teochiu told us how, not long widowed, she had left China with her only son in 1938 to join relatives in Cambodia. A toukey had guided her and other villagers overland to Hong Kong, by boat to Saigon, and then by car to Kompong Cham. Toukeys took passengers on credit, and the indemnity was paid off as soon as the emigrant had made enough money in Cambodia. This system lasted until Mao's takeover of China in 1949, by which time the Chinese loanword toukey had gained mon currency in Khmer. It is still used in Cambodia to mean "big boss" or "store manager."
The bonds generating unity among China's dialect groups are not generated by speech alone. For the Chinese in Cambodia, as for their counterparts in Australia, the United States and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, dialect associations functioned as extensions of "the little country, their birthplace. [Their] aim was to remedy, in a foreign country, the lack of mutual aid associations which the emigré was used to relying upon in China" (d'Enjoy 1907:443; see also Pan 1990:20-21). Regional variations in social and religious traditions underpin the different dialects, generating group identity (Fong 1995:2). Religious beliefs and ritual offerings are prime ponents of this subculture. For example, in Cambodia today, as over the last century, Cantonese make religious offerings of chicken, goat, and egg-bananas (ceik pong-moan), which they consider a sacred fruit; Hainanese offer goat; Hokkien and Hakka offer roast pig, and Teochiu make a wide range of offerings. The majority of Chinese temples in Cambodia were built by dialect groups, often to venerate gods which had held particular sway in their native place. Some, like the Hainanese in Kampot, founded new gods. In addition to temples, many dialect groups built their own burial sites, such as the Teochiu burial ground, one of two historic Chinese cemeteries in Chhlong district of Kratie. Often the earliest form of social organisation by overseas Chinese, temples functioned both as places of worship and social clubs (Tan 1990:8-16). From the turn of the century, temples also became the locus of Chinese schools in Cambodia (Wu 1993:848). Until the 1950s, these schools taught in the dialect of their founding munity. Largely banned from the classroom for fear that they would learn to write love-letters, and conspicuously absent from the boards of Chinese community associations, Chinese women nonetheless played a central part in the transmission of dialect group identity through language use, attention to ritual and their traditional role in the kitchen. Hainanese are associated with "Hainan chicken rice," now a popular breakfast dish at Khmer and Chinese restaurants. Teochiu allegedly introduced fine rice-noodles to Cambodia (rice-noodles and rice-noodle soup are known in Khmer as kuy-tiew, a Teochiu loanword) and some Teochiu families still run kuy-tiew cottage industries. Stoves, schools and temples were thus further vehicles for the perpetuation of dialect group identities.
While the above strongly suggests that dialect group identity is an intrinsic feature of Chinese immigrant communities, it is equally evident that colonial rule in Cambodia--as in other French possessions from Cochinchina to Madagascar--further entrenched dialect group identities with the divisive congrégation system, decreed in 1891. Henceforth, Chinese in Cambodia were required by law to join the congrégation representative of their dialect group. Five congrégations were established in Phnom Penh: Teochiu, Hainan, Hokkien, Hakka and Cantonese; congrégations arose elsewhere according to the size of Chinese communities. In Kampot, for example, only the Teochiu and Hainanese congrégations were active; in Battambang, Teochiu and Hokkien formed single-dialect congrégations, while the third largest group, the Cantonese, joined forces with Hakka and Hainanese; in Stung Treng, Hakka formed a congrégation. Congrégation leaders, hand-picked by the French, were responsible for policing and taxing their constituents and for ensuring the enrolment of all new immigrants (Willmott 1967:69). This administrative mechanism inevitably reinforced boundaries between dialect groups.
Dialect-based associations, schools and temples survived the transition from colonial rule to independence in 1953. However, the adoption of Mandarin Chinese as the official language of the PRC in 1956 paved the way for the popularisation of Mandarin teaching in Cambodia's Chinese schools, not least because this was also a landmark year in Sino-Cambodian relations. Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai's visit to Cambodia in 1956 was the first government-level delegation of Chinese to Cambodia for centuries. His visit sparked the exchange of numerous technical, economic and friendship delegations, while Sihanouk's high-profile pro-media campaign gave added impetus for the adoption of Mandarin teaching in Chinese schools. From the 1950s to 1970, an unprecedented number of Cambodia's Chinese learned Mandarin, and communication barriers between dialect groups were gradually relaxed.
Socio-cultural barriers were more resistant to change. Some mixed-dialect communities lived in harmony, as in Tuk Meah in Kampot, where residents remember how the two hundred and fifty families of Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochiu, Hakka and Hainanese origin respected each others' different religious ceremonies and united for Chinese New Year celebrations, organising street processions, lion dances and Chinese opera during the Sihanouk era. However, many respondents from across Cambodia recalled how dialect groups held taboos about intermarriage until the end of the Sihanouk era. In the colonial period, Hokkien Chinese in Battambang formed a separate congrégation, whose emblem was a tiger. Cantonese, Hainanese and Hakka grouped under a goat banner. Teochiu had their own congrégation, whose symbol was the horse. From the early years of this century until the social engineering of Pol Pot's DK regime, patterns of marriage differed from group to group. A Hokkien respondent in his 60s told us that Cantonese, with their goat sign, shied away from marriage with Hokkien "tigers" and tended to marry within the Cantonese munity. Teochiu "horses" "did not dare to marry with Hokkien." An 83-year-old Hakka man remembered how, even in the 1960s, "Some of the old folks who made a fuss about such things said Hokkien tigers shouldn't mix with Cantonese goats."
By the end of colonial rule, different dialect groups had cornered different economic niches. Teochiu were prominent in business and trade; Cantonese specialised as craftsmen and in the building industry; Hainanese dominated the food and catering industry, and Hokkien traditionally followed careers in government, or were traders in books and cloth. Hakka, the smallest group, specialised in running coffee shops and peddling fruit in the blue wooden carts that are still a landmark of Phnom Penh street-life. There were regional variations on these dominant trends: in Kompong Cham, many Teochiu and Cantonese specialised in tobacco-farming, a major regional industry. In Kampot, rural Hainanese have historically specialised in pepper-farming and urban Hainanese in the sale of hardware, while urban Teochiu specialise in trade in gold, currency and other business transactions. In Battambang, Cantonese traditionally sold kuy-tiew and coffee, Hainanese ran restaurants, and Hokkien specialised in distilleries and trade in scrap metal. While dialect-group livelihoods varied from province to province depending on particular regional economic or agricultural opportunities, some degree of economic specialisation has been a constant characteristic of dialect groups in Cambodia as in other overseas Chinese settlements (see Tan 1990, Fong 1995). Economic competition between different dialect groups, as between Teochiu and Hainanese over the control of gambling, fish farming and the sale of fish in early twentieth century Kampot, led to friction and sometimes violent clashes (Forest 1980: 478).
Economic specialisation among dialect groups is not an intrinsic cultural characteristic. It is generally acquired after emigration, and is influenced by opportunities and obstacles in the land of settlement, the demographic spread of a given dialect group and its corresponding level of access to resources. Colonial economic planning and labour policy also shaped dialect-group economic specialisation. In colonial Cochinchina, for example, the Cantonese managed huge interests in industry and commerce, specialising in export, construction and river transport; Hokkien were prominent compradors of European and Chinese businesses; Hakka specialised in the sale of tea, and Teochiu were at the bottom of the pile as boatmen and stevedores (Teston & Percheron 1931:398). In Cambodia, by contrast, Teochiu dominated big business and were the earliest investors in Chinese schools.
a) Teochiu
In China, Teochiu are concentrated around the port of Swatow in Guangdong province, where they had settled in successive migrations from their original homeland of Fujian between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. These roots are today reflected in the Teochiu dialect, which is related to Hokkien, and in some of their customs. Although Swatow is a relatively small area, it has been the source of large waves of emigration to Southeast Asia and beyond, largely due to the bitter clan wars that have ravaged nearby Guangzhou for centuries, a history which may have triggered Teochiu-Cantonese feuding in Kampot in the 1900s (Forest 1980:478). Since the half-Teochiu King Taksin of Siam encouraged Teochiu immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, Bangkok has become "the turf of the Teochius," while Teochiu in Hong Kong have won dubious distinction as founders of the largest, oldest and most aggressive triads with historic links to global drug networks (Pan 1990:15, 341-342).
Although there is evidence of a Teochiu community in Phnom Penh from at least the 1880s, and in Kampot and Kompong Cham from the early 1900s, the bulk of Teochiu immigration to Cambodia occurred in the wake of the Thai annexation of Battambang in 1941. Thousands of Teochiu Chinese poured in from Thailand, radically changing the Chinese demography of Battambang, where Hokkien and Cantonese had previously held sway. When Battambang was returned to Cambodia in 1945, the majority of these Teochiu settlers stayed on to escape the stringent anti-Chinese restrictions operative in Thailand since the 1930s. In the words of one long-term Hokkien resident of Battambang, now close to 90: "At that time… Chinese in Cambodia suffered no such discrimination, and [we] did all right as long as [we] had some money and initiative." Some Teochiu Chinese then fanned out across Cambodia: residents of Tuk Meah in Kampot still remember seventy Teochiu families moving to the area in the Sihanouk era.
Soon the Teochiu outnumbered the earlier Hokkien and Cantonese settlers in Battambang, and dominated business. By the 1960s, Teochiu had become the language of commerce in the town. "Teochiu were very strong then," said a Hakka respondent in his 80s, who remembered one funeral ceremony where the offerings to the dead from one Teochiu family were "fit to feed forty." But then came the Lon Nol regime with its crackdown on Chinese schools and newspapers, the Pol Pot regime with its ban on Chinese language, and the PRK with its suppression of Chinese ethnicity and its drive to push Chinese out of the towns in the early 1980s. "By that point, those Chinese who'd lived to see the fall of Pol Pot lost all hope," said one Teochiu respondent now in his 50s. Today there is no apparent rivalry between the different dialect groups, and all have worked together to establish Battambang town's first Chinese school since 1970, where students from all dialect groups, and Khmers, learn Mandarin.
Teochiu have been a driving force behind Chinese education in Cambodia. The Xinmin Xiaoxue (New People's Primary School), Cambodia's earliest recorded Chinese school, was founded by Teochiu in Kompong Cham in 1901. Cambodia's most famous Chinese School, Duanhua, was founded in 1907 as a private school under Teochiu management in Phnom Penh (Wu 1993:848). In 1914, the Teochiu congrégation took over Duanhua and from then until Lon Nol, the school's fame grew (Willmott 1970:47). Duanhua attracted the brightest students from across Cambodia, offering scholarships to those who could not afford the fees. It was also one of the first schools in Cambodia to encourage education for girls. Many Chinese in Cambodia today remember how it became a hotbed of revolutionary debate in the late 1960s, and a number of its alumni supported, and joined up with, the Khmer Rouge. Duanhua was closed on the orders of Lon Nol in 1970.
b) Cantonese
Cantonese brick kilns fuelled the expansion of Phnom Penh in the 1880s. By the 1960s, Cantonese were the second largest dialect group in Cambodia. Some of Cambodia's Cantonese are descended from Chinese who took refuge in Cambodia in the mid-nineteenth century to escape punitive tax laws and other discriminatory measures directed at the Chinese in imperial Vietnam. Others settled in colonial Cambodia, such as the munity at Phum Katang ("Cantonese Village") in Kroch Chhmar, Kompong Cham, founded in 1910 and serviced by its own school and temple. "In the past, the Cantonese were racist, and would not marry outside of their dialect group," a leading Cantonese community member reported, echoing sentiments expressed by many interviewees. The Cantonese community in Phnom Penh had its own temple and a middle school which had approximately 1,200 students by the late 1960s, and offered supplementary lessons in Khmer (Su 1966:53-54).
Although serviced by its own school and temple, the Cantonese community at Phum Katang did not conform to the exclusive stereotype. The village's Peng Tang Pu temple, built in 1939, was open to the neighbouring Teochiu community. The first Cantonese settlers moved there in about 1910, and as the munity expanded, the area earned the name Cantonese Village. One villager told us how his father, a trader, had got wind of the village after emigrating to Kompong Cham in the 1920s, then moved there and married a koncen of Cantonese parentage. Most Cantonese in the village grew tobacco, corn and beans, staple livelihoods today. Cantonese was taught at the temple school, which had about twenty students in 1940, all male. Cantonese in Phum Katang buried their dead in a Chinese cemetery, apparently for use by both Cantonese and Teochiu, near the bridge. After independence, when Chinese immigration to Cambodia fell off sharply, the munity stabilised, and there were about twenty Cantonese families in Phum Katang by the end of the Sihanouk era. There are now only a handful of Cantonese families in the village; others have died or moved away. Cantonese, Teochiu, Sino-Khmer and Khmer from Phum Katang and two neighbouring villages contributed to renovating the temple, as did ex-residents now in Kompong Cham or Phnom Penh. The villagers make offerings of food at the temple, but offerings of duck are taboo, because local lore has it that Bentougong was once shipwrecked and a duck saved his life. In this rural Cantonese community, intermarriage with Khmers was apparently common, "partly because many of our ancestors had married Khmer women." As time went by, Cantonese and Khmer villagers observed each other's festivals: the Khmers attending Chinese New Year and Qingming, the Cantonese celebrating Phum Ben and Khmer New Year.
c) Hainanese
Although one of the earliest dialect-group communities in Cambodia, and one of the most cohesive, Hainanese prise only a fraction of Cambodia's Chinese community. Hainanese accounted for only four percent of Chinese immigration under colonial rule. By the 1960s, Hainanese comprised an estimated ten percent of Chinese in Cambodia. Their cohesion as a dialect group stems from their geographic concentration and historic occupational specialisation.
Hainanese refer to themselves as "Hai Nam Khang" or "Kheng Chew Nang," Kheng Chew being the old name for Hainan Island. Although Hainan did not open up to foreign trade until Hankou was made a treaty port in 1870, there was a steady stream of emigration from Hainan throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties (Yu 1981). Hainanese have been described as reluctant emigrants (Tan 1990:14). However, Canadian scholar Robert Garry cites "adventurousness, desire for gain" and demographic pressures as factors leading to Hainanese emigration to Cambodia (Garry 1963: 374). In many overseas Chinese communities, Hainanese have specialised in the food industry as bakers, cooks, coffee shop operators and, in the colonial era, as domestic servants to European families (Fong 1995:65-66; Pan 1990:84; Tan 1990:15). Unintelligible by the other dialect groups, the Hainanese language has hampered the development of trade and commerce between Hainanese and other dialect groups in some overseas Chinese settlements.
Widely known as "the second Hainan" by Cambodia's Chinese community, Kampot is home to two historic settlements of Hainanese, in Tuk Meah and Kompong Trach. The trail-blazer of Hainanese emigration to Kampot was a man named Mac Cuu, a Ming patriot who arrived in Cambodia in 1675 and built up such wealth and reputation that he was appointed a provincial governor (oknya) by the Cambodian king in 1708 (Willmott 1967:6). Another impetus to Chinese immigration to Kampot were discriminatory measures in nineteenth century Vietnam, forcing some Chinese to move to Kompong Trach. Among them were pepper planters and money-lenders, who combined forces to establish plantations. By the dawn of colonial rule, a small but cohesive Hainanese community of pepper planters had emerged in Kampot. Under colonial rule, this community rapidly expanded, as did the plantations. Historic transhipment points for trade with China and the long-term haunts of smugglers and pirates, Kep and Kampot were the chief channels for the import of Chinese labour in colonial Cambodia. By 1899, Kampot had close to 3,000 Hainanese, and the Hainanese and Teochiu were the only two dialect groups in Kampot large enough to warrant their own congrégation (Garry 1963:377; Raquez 1903:955).
From 1905-10, Chinese working the plantations in Kampot, ruined by a pepper crisis, left Cambodia, often in secret, without having paid their debts. But from 1911, the pepper plantations again made good and a fresh wave of Hainanese immigration began. Over the next ten years, the Chinese population of Kampot tripled (Forest 1980:472). In 1939, the Japanese occupation of Hainan, the conscription of Chinese by Japanese troops to work on the Kampot airfield at Pong Tuk, and the wartime shortage of certain agricultural products, crippled pepper production in Kampot. Pepper production fell from 6,000 tons in 1938 to 1,300 tons in 1956, and after Cambodian independence in 1953, the number of Chinese pepper planters gradually declined. By 1963, Cham and Khmer pepper planters outnumbered Chinese (Garry 1963:380-381). During this period, Hainanese farmers diversified into salt production, with considerable success (Su 1966:32).
In addition to occupational specialisation, schools and temples played a major role in strengthening dialect-group solidarity. Kampot's Hainanese community prides itself on the genealogy of Bentougong, a divinity specific to Cambodia and closely tied to Kampot, who allegedly came into being along with his holy trinity of siblings upon the death of three Hainanese brothers in Kompong Trach centuries ago. In the late 1860s, August Pavie witnessed the "deafening performances" of Chinese opera at the "temple of their cult in Kampot" (Pavie 1947:19-20). A century later, Willmott noted two Hainanese temples in Kampot (Willmott 1970:54). Both were dedicated to Bentougong, "variously described as the original ancestor of all Chinese in Cambodia or as the God of the local area" (Skinner 1957:138). Three temples to Bentougong were erected in Kompong Trach district alone. The first and biggest was built in 1915, leading to the establishment of Juequn School on the same site some years later; the second was integral to a school built in Phum Sraychea (now known as Kompong Trach Khang Lic) in 1920, and the third on the shores of a small lake in 1923. Shrines to Bentougong are a conspicuous feature of Chinese communities throughout Kampot. Closely associated with the forests and mountains of Kampot, Bentougong is normally depicted with an escort of wild animals, including snakes, tigers, crocodiles and geese. Seen as the ancestor of Hainanese, Bentougong worship has had the dual effect of strengthening Hainanese dialect group difference and rooting the groups firmly in the Cambodian landscape. Khmers and Hainanese in Kampot thus share in Bentougong worship in a way Hainanese and Teochiu communities do not. Other centres of Bentougong worship are Kompong Cham and Kratie. By the end of the Sihanouk regime, there were approximately 1,000 Hainanese cenchaw families in Kompong Trach, about six hundred Sino-Khmer families, and five Chinese schools holding 2,000 students. Respondents in Tuk Meah remembered only one Bentougong temple, built by the Hainanese in 1927 together with Peiying School, which had close to two hundred students by 1970. In Phnom Penh, the Hainanese Association's Jicheng School had about four hundred and fifty students by the late 1960s (Su 1966:53-54).
d) Hokkien
Now in her late 80s, Diu Kimtieng set sail from Fujian province in 1916 aged four. "My mother and father were with me. We travelled by boat from Xiamen to Singapore, then on to Saigon, Phnom Penh, and finally Battambang. We settled in Phum Kbal-khmaoch (now known as Phum Hei Sa) in Khum Chivi. At that time about twenty to thirty families lived there, all Hokkien, and Hokkiens were the majority dialect group in Battambang. Now Hokkiens still live in the village, but two Teochiu families have moved there. It's not like before when the dialect groups didn't mix." Diu Kimtieng made fans and sold them from village to village, together with drinks, which she carried on a pole. She would get up at dawn, leave home at eight o'clock, and return home at dusk.
"My mother was a seamstress in the Battambang market. My father's dead now. He left my mother and went to live with a Khmer wife." Diu Kimtieng married a Hokkien who had come to Cambodia at the age of 14 and had learned Khmer. She and her husband visited the wat on Phum Ben and had always honoured Khmer festivals. "When my husband lay in bed dying he told me, 'Don't put me in the Chinese cemetery; take me to the wat.' I did as he said and bought a grave-site in the wat. You wouldn't get Cantonese doing that kind of thing." Diu Kimteng had never had the opportunity to study at either a Khmer or Chinese school. She had sent her children to Khmer school, and raised them to aspire to government office. Today, one of Diu Kimtieng's grandchildren attends the Chinese school in Battambang town, but she only consented to this because the child had failed his exams at the Khmer school. She keeps an ancestral shrine to her husband in her home.
Diu Kimtieng's story encapsulates the sentiments, and self-perceptions, of many Hokkien in Cambodia. Many Hokkien pride themselves on integrating into Cambodian society better than the other dialect groups. The Hokkiens wanted their children to "be Khmer," as one Hokkien woman put it, and to rise through the ranks of local government. As a result, many Hokkiens have profound knowledge of Khmer and serve in government posts. Thus, in a curious paradox, Hokkiens typically rate the most important marker of their Hokkien identity as their willingness to lose that identity and mix with Khmers (liey-ciet). A common response was that Hokkiens had now "vanished" or "disappeared" (ah-roling, rok mun-kheunh-te) because they were so willing to intermarry and to adapt to local society. A third-generation Hokkien aged 12 was quite indignant when asked if she spoke Chinese. "I was born in Cambodia and I study Cambodian," (kaut now srok khmae, rien phiesa khmae) she responded, a statement which her mother and grandfather applauded as "typically Hokkien."
Some third- and fourth-generation Hokkien learned from parents and grandparents that Hokkien were the first Chinese settlers in Cambodia. Others point to the number of old temples dedicated to Hokkien deities as proof that their ancestors were the earliest Chinese settlers in Cambodia. Certainly, the Hokkien's worship of Cheng He, the Chinese admiral who mesmerised fifteenth century Southeast Asia with his fantastic array of naval strength, indicates that Hokkien Chinese were in Cambodia from at least this period. Deified as Sanbaogong ("Three Jewel Lord"), Cheng He is worshipped by Chinese across Southeast Asia, but one medieval monument indicates that Cheng He worship arose within Cambodia and was not a foreign import. Inscriptions on the Chinese temple at Wat Nokor in Kompong Cham (see Appendix D) are dedicated to Cheng He (Su 1966:100). The largest Chinese temple in Cambodia, the Xietiangong Temple was founded by the Hokkien congrégation early this century. Cambodia's wealthiest businessmen and most important officials flocked to this famous temple, and each year the procession of spirits organised by the temple was invited by King Sihanouk to parade through the grounds of his palace. Despite the professed Hokkien emphasis on learning Khmer, the Hokkien community ran its own Chinese school in Phnom Penh. Situated in the large walled grounds of Xietiangong Temple, Minsheng Zhongxue (Peoples' Livelihood Middle School) had over one thousand students and over twenty teachers by the late 1960s (Su 1966:53-54).
Outside Phnom Penh, Hokkien historically concentrated in Svay Sisophon district of Battambang (where they specialised in distilling rice wine), in Chhnok Trou in Kompong Chhnang, in Kompong Cham and Srok Stong in Kompong Thom, home to the largest Hokkien community in Cambodia.
e) Hakka
Hakka means "guests" or "stranger families." Unlike the Teochiu, Hainanese, Hokkien and Cantonese, who are all named after places of origin, the Hakka have no single native place in China they can call their own, but are scattered across Guangzhou, Fujian, Chaozhou, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Hainan Island, Sichuan and Hunan as a result of successive migrations from the tenth century. The majority of Hakka in Southeast Asia today emigrated from Fujian and Guangzhou, where they had lived in concentrated settlements, often in huge circular walled compounds. Here they preserved a distinct language, observed communal living and eating, and rejected such widespread Chinese practices as foot-binding for women. The Hakka have been described as the gypsies of China and are stereotyped by non-Hakka Chinese as yokels (Pan 1990: 16-17). However, Hakka have produced an impressive array of famous statesmen and businessmen including Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuanyew, Sun Yatsen, and Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, founders of the "Tiger Balm" empire (Constable 1994:5-6, 12-13; Tan 1990:12-13). In Hong Kong, Hakka have earned a reputation among non-Hakka for honesty and hard-work; Hakka women in particular are renowned for their stamina. By contrast, many Hakka view members of other dialect groups as lazy, dishonest, and wasteful. Their major economic roles in Southeast Asia range from construction workers in Hong Kong, pepper and gambier cultivators in Singapore, spice farmers in Malaysia, to pawn-brokers, pharmacists, bakers and woodcutters (Fong 1995:64, 66; Constable 1994:129).
Hakka form a tiny proportion of Cambodia's Chinese community, and have historically concentrated in Stung Treng, where their pre-eminence had led to the adoption of Hakka as the lingua franca of the Chinese community there by the 1960s (Su 1966:81). Outside Stung Treng, Hakka are scattered: numerous Chinese communities we visited had one or two Hakka families. Kong Khieu travelled to Cambodia in 1926 with about thirty other Hakkas. "It took seven days," he recalls, carving huge waves in the air with his hoary hands. "The sea was so rough, I couldn't keep down a thing. By the time I made it to Saigon I was starving." The head of the Hakka congrégation met the boat. Kong Khieu had then paid thirty-six piastres for his identity card and, after a few months in Phnom Penh, made his way to Battambang. Starting out as a hired hand, he then set up on his own baking cookies. After six years he had saved enough to marry Chong Chim, his childhood sweetheart from his native village. By the late 1960s, about six hundred students in Phnom Penh had enrolled at the Zongzheng Xuexiao, a primary school founded by the Hakka Association in the 1950s (Su 1966:53-54). Hakkas worshipped at a temple near the Old Market (Phsa Chah).
Bridges and boundaries: interethnic relations
a) Intermarriage
From early Cambodian history until the beginning of the twentieth century, virtually all Chinese emigrants to Cambodia were male, and most settled permanently in Cambodia, marrying Khmer women and establishing families. Intermarriage was not only common, it also provided a crucial entry to Cambodian commerce and society. The entrenchment of colonial rule and its attendant use of Chinese contract labour saw an expansion of the Chinese population and the creation of a mobile, transient labour pool who would typically work in Cambodia for a few years before returning to China. Before the 1911 Revolution, Chinese law and custom prohibited women from following their husbands overseas (Fong 1995:5). After the change in this law in 1911, and doubtless influenced by worries in some colonial quarters that a rapidly expanding, all-male Chinese population might adversely affect the "morals" in their adoptive country, French legislators began to encourage the immigration of Chinese women. The widespread propagation of Sun Yatsen's creed of race and nation ("To save China we must certainly promote nationalism. The Chinese people are the Han or Chinese race with common blood, common language, common religion, and common customs--a single race"; see Purcell 1967:211) adopted as the basic principles of China's new Kuomintang government in 1927, may also have played a part in changing emigré attitudes towards intermarriage and miscegenation. While many permanent settlers in Cambodia continued to marry Khmers as their forerunners had done, the overall proportion of mixed marriages gradually decreased and increasing numbers of Chinese children were born in Cambodia of two Chinese parents.
Struck by the preponderance of Sino-Khmers in the pepper plantations of 1860s Kampot, Pavie noted that "Outside their country, Chinese ma