Historical figure
Ang Duong
ព្រះបាទអង្គឌួង
Ang Duong (ព្រះបាទអង្គឌួង)[1] was king of Cambodia from the 1840s to about 1860, ruling from the royal capital at Oudong.[2][3] He came to the throne after years of war between Siam and Vietnam on Cambodian soil, and he spent his reign rebuilding a poor and shrunken kingdom.[3][4] His son Norodom I followed him as king.[2]
Coming to the throne
Theam Bun Srun writes that Ang Duong and Prince Ang Im were sons of the same mother, Neang Ros, while King Ang Chan and Ang Snguon were sons of Neang Out.[2] Briggs calls Ang Duong the youngest brother of Ang Chan.[3] Before 1841 he lived in exile in Bangkok, at the Siamese court.[2]
In early February 1841 he reached Battambang. There King Rama III of Siam gave him the style Neak Preah Ang Duong, along with royal robes and regalia.[2] A Siamese army placed him on the throne at Oudong in 1842. For four years he ruled from Oudong with Siamese support, while Vietnamese forces held Phnom Penh. Peace came in 1846.[3]
The Vietnamese emperor Thieu Tri then sent envoys to invest him as king. They brought a gilded silver seal inscribed "the Official Seal of the King of Cambodia" and an imperial decree granting the title.[2] He was crowned in 1847[3] or in early March 1848.[2][4] The historian Lawrence Palmer Briggs wrote that envoys of both Siam and Vietnam took part, and that Cambodia resumed its vassalage to both countries.[3]
Francis Garnier wrote that after the coronation Siamese influence seemed overwhelming at Oudong, where a Siamese official lived to pass on the wishes of Bangkok to the king.[2]
Reign
Ang Duong set out to rebuild the country with an empty treasury.[3] He ordered a road from Oudong to the seaport of Kampot, built with the yearly unpaid labor that every able-bodied man owed the king. The road gave Cambodia a way to the outside world that did not depend on Vietnam's goodwill on the Mekong. A second road linked Kampot to Phnom Penh by way of Pochentong. Near the end of his reign, paid workers built a road from Oudong to Phnom Penh.[2]
In 1853 he put coins minted at Oudong into circulation. They replaced the Vietnamese and Thai coins and the barter that Cambodians had used until then.[2]
He also revised laws that had stood almost unchanged since 1690. The new laws covered the titles of officials, marriage, disputes, appeals, debts and slavery. Under the new law on debts, a loan needed a written contract. Lender and borrower set their fingerprints beside their names before an official, who sealed it as witness. Under the older rules, a powerful man could falsely claim that someone owed him money, and the person he named, with his family, could be forced into slavery to pay it.[2] Cambodge Mag wrote that his reforms banned debt slavery and let people buy back their freedom.[4]
Letters to France
Ang Duong feared that Siam and Vietnam would one day divide what was left of his kingdom, and he looked to France for protection.[3] With help from the French bishop Miche, he sent a delegation to Singapore toward the end of 1853. It carried a letter and gifts for Emperor Napoleon III, to be passed on by the French consul. The gifts never reached the emperor, and no reply came.[2]
Napoleon III's envoy, Charles de Montigny, came briefly to Kampot in early October 1856.[2] A letter from Ang Duong to Napoleon III, dated November 25, 1856, and sealed at his palace in Oudong, thanks the emperor for the visit. It says the king sent three senior and 15 junior officials to Kampot to welcome the envoy. The letter then lists the provinces that Vietnam had taken from Cambodia, among them Donnai, Saikong, Sadec and Chaudoc. It asks the emperor not to accept these lands if Vietnam ever offered them to France, because they were Cambodian.[5]
The approach did not succeed. Briggs wrote that Montigny handled the contact badly and let Siam learn of the king's plans.[3]
Succession
The sources differ on the date of his death: Theam Bun Srun gives October 1860,[2] and Briggs gives November 1859.[3]
The council of ministers chose his son Prince Ang Vodey, who took the name Norodom as king.[3] Briggs and Theam call Vodey the eldest son,[3][2] while Cambodge Mag calls him the second.[4] The historian Bun Srun Theam names two younger half-brothers, Sisowath, born in 1840, and Votha, born in 1841.[2] Norodom signed the treaty that made Cambodia a French protectorate in 1863.[4]
Legacy
Theam calls his reign a time of relative peace and prosperity for the kingdom.[2] His remains lie in one of the royal stupas on the main hill at Oudong.[6]
A folk story links his reign to a Khmer sweet. Sabay News retold an account handed down by elders that in his reign people fixed rice cakes onto branches of trees or bamboo set in banana trunks. Lined up in rows, the cakes looked like fruit on a tree, which gave the sweet its name, num plae ai (នំផ្លែអាយ).[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Sabay News, article on the history of num plae ai (October 19, 2016; in Khmer)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 Australian National University (PDF via Angkor Database), Bun Srun Theam, Cambodia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Quest for Survival, 1840-1863 (master's thesis, 1981)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 Lawrence Palmer Briggs, A Sketch of Cambodian History, The Far Eastern Quarterly 6(4) (August 1947)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Cambodge Mag, Cambodia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Heroic Quest for Survival (1840–1863) (undated)
- ↑ cambodgeinfo, Lettre du Roi Ang Duong à l'Empereur Napoléon III du 25 Novembre 1856 (September 8, 2023; in French)
- ↑ Tourism Cambodia, Phnom Odong, Kandal travel guide (undated)