Tradition

Preah Thong and Neang Neak

ព្រះថោង និងនាងនាគ

Preah Thong and Neang Neak (ព្រះថោង និងនាងនាគ) are the prince and the naga princess of a Khmer founding legend. A prince from abroad meets the princess and marries her. Her father, the king of the nagas, then takes away the sea so that the couple have land for a kingdom.[1][2] Many Khmers tell it as the beginning of their people, and the traditional Khmer wedding re-enacts it.[3][4]

Retellings often treat the couple as one with two older pairs: Kaundinya and Soma, and Hun Tian and Liu Ye, the founders of Funan in Chinese records.[3][5] The historian Michael Vickery argued that the three pairs come from separate stories of different periods, and that the Preah Thong form is the latest of them.[6]

The story

In the version the archaeologist Miriam Stark summarizes, Preah Thaong is a Brahmin from India who lands on the shore of the Mekong delta and sees a local princess there. The two fight for the land. He defeats her, and they fall in love and marry. Her father, the naga king, then drinks the waters that cover the country, and Preah Thaong builds a kingdom he names Kambuja.[1] A Khmer telling on the culture site of Apsara Media Services (AMS) has the naga king give Neang Neak to Preah Thong in marriage. He then sucks up the sea and spits it far away to win ground for the couple's kingdom. That story belongs to the realm of Kok Thlok (នគរគោកធ្លក).[2]

Radio Free Asia's Khmer history series says the royal chronicles give the couple the names Preah Thong and Neang Neak, and that the customs they left behind are still part of Khmer life.[3]

Three couples

Hun Tian and Liu Ye

The oldest form of the story is in Chinese reports on Funan. Chinese envoys who visited in the 3rd century, among them Kang Tai, wrote down a founding tale.[5][6] In the Khmer retelling of Radio Free Asia, a deity gives the stranger Hun Tian a magic bow in a dream. The queen Liu Ye attacks his ship, his arrow pierces her boat from one side to the other, and she submits and becomes his queen.[3] The name Liu Ye means "willow leaf" in Chinese.[6] The historian Lawrence Palmer Briggs, writing in 1947, followed the older reading that Hun Tian was an Indian brahmin, the same man as Kaundinya.[7] Vickery disagreed. He noted that the Chinese versions name Mo-fou, Ki and Kiao in the South as Hun's home, and found no evidence that the first foreign ruler came from India. He added that the name Hun cannot stand for Kaundinya.[6]

Rüdiger Gaudes, writing in 1993, took Hun Tian for a rendering of the name Kaundinya, and held that he and Liu Ye may both have been real people.[8] In that reading the founder is Kaundinya I, set apart from Kaundinya II, a later king of Funan whom the Chinese chronicles call Jiao-chen-ru.[8] Gaudes also retold a popular summary that he describes as a blend of several sources and names. It dates the arrival of the stranger by ship from India to about 68 CE. He conquers Kok Thlok, marries Liu Ye and names her Soma, and he is also called Kaundinya and, in older Khmer tellings, Preah Thong.[8] A 2022 history of Funan places Hỗn Điền in the first century CE and describes the first rulers as a partnership of Liễu Điệp, a local leader, and Hỗn Điền, a foreigner, who ruled together.[9]

Kaundinya and Soma

The pair Kaundinya (កៅណ្ឌិន្យ) and Soma (សោមា) appears first in an inscription of Champa at My Son, which Radio Free Asia dates to 658.[3][6] Radio Free Asia adds that the inscription makes Soma a child of the Moon.[3] In the telling Maurice Glaize gives, set at Mison in Champa, the Brahman Kaundinya marries the naga Soma and throws his magic spear, and founds a royal city where it lands, from which the lunar dynasty would rule.[10] Vickery wrote that the name returns centuries later in inscriptions of the Angkor period.[6] Gaudes held that the Kaundinya of those inscriptions is Kaundinya II, not Kaundinya I, who lived about three hundred years earlier.[8] In his reading, Soma is a goddess and Neang Neak half human and half naga, while Liu Ye in the Chinese reports is a fully human leader of her people.[6]

Preah Thong and Neang Neak (ព្រះថោង និងនាងនាគ)

Vickery held that the names Preah Thong and Neang Neak date from after the Angkor period. He explained that thong is a Thai word for gold that could not have entered Khmer before the 14th century, and he took the story to be a Cambodian form of the founding legend of Prince U-Thong of Ayutthaya.[6] He also wrote that neither name appears in any document connected with Funan.[6]

Kok Thlok and Angkor Borei

Stark writes that many Khmers see Angkor Borei, in Takeo province, as the cradle of Khmer civilization, partly because it is linked with Kok Thlok and the story of Preah Thaong. Khok Thlok district lies just southeast of the site, and a reservoir in its center bears the name Preah Thaong. She adds that no local inscription links the site directly to the founding of Cambodia.[1]

In the Khmer wedding

Cambodianess calls the rite of Preah Thong holding the sbai (ស្បៃ) of Neang Neak the "most iconic scene" of a traditional Khmer wedding ceremony. The groom holds the bride's sbai as the two walk together. The cloth stands for the naga princess's tail, and the gesture for the groom joining her family line and her land.[4] Visit Banteay Chhmar, a community tourism site, describes the groom's procession to the bride's home as Preah Thong's journey to meet Neang Neak.[11] The ethnomusicologist Kathy McKinley, who studied weddings in Phnom Penh in 1994, describes that procession: the groom, his family and friends walk with musicians to the house of the bride's parents.[12] A standard song for it is "Caiw Priehm", whose title refers to the legendary male ancestor of the Khmer.[12]

Vickery quoted a program of dances from the national culture day in Phnom Penh on April 3, 1999, which said the traditional Khmer wedding reflects the union of all three couples. He called this folk history that reverses the order in which the stories arose.[6]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Miriam T. Stark, New Perspectives on Early Cambodia from the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project, The Khmer Institute (2001)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Apsara Media Services (AMS), AMS Khmer Civilization, Hean Sovannmorokot, ជំនឿលើព្រះគម្លង់មុខវត្តឧណ្ណាលោម (updated December 13, 2022)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, History of the Khmer in the time of the kingdom of Phnom, part 3 (February 5, 2014; in Khmer)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Cambodianess, Wonders of Cambodia, Sbai in Cambodia: the Graceful Shoulder of Khmer Culture (March 17, 2026)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Angkor Database, summary of Michael Vickery, Funan Reviewed: Deconstructing the Ancients (undated)
  6. ↑ 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 Michael Vickery, Funan Reviewed: Deconstructing the Ancients, Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient 90-91 (2003-2004)
  7. ↑ Lawrence Palmer Briggs, A Sketch of Cambodian History, The Far Eastern Quarterly 6(4) (August 1947)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Rüdiger Gaudes, Kaundinya, Preah Thaong, and the Nagi Soma: Some Aspects of a Cambodian Legend, Asian Folklore Studies 52 (1993)
  9. ↑ Minh Giang Vu, Funan (Phu Nam) from a new perspective, VMOST Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 64(3) (2022)
  10. ↑ Maurice Glaize, The Monuments of the Angkor Group (1944; English translation)
  11. ↑ Visit Banteay Chhmar, Khmer Wedding Ceremony (undated)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Kathy M. McKinley, Tros, Tevodas, and Haircuts: Ritual, Music, and Performance in Khmer Wedding Ceremonies, Canadian University Music Review 19(2) (1999)


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This page was last edited on 12 October 2026, at 07:34.