A description of the Khmer people has survived in the thirteenth-century journal of a Chinese envoy who spent a year in Angkor, and his words could be applied just as well to the Cambodians of today. The women are very lovely when young, with full-breasted figures and graceful movements, but lose their looks quickly through overwork and bearing many children. The men are average height for that part of the world, around 1.6 metres (5 feet 5 inches) tall. Both sexes have rather short legs and thick ankles. Their skin is a pale brown, their heads are rounded and their typically Oriental features are strongly moulded.

Bernard Groslier, in a perceptive passage in his book Angkor-Art and Civilization, has written of their realism combined with sensuality and strong sentiment, and of their preference for concrete thought, rather than abstract. He has observed, too, their liking for the fantastic, their manual skill, obedience to anyone who gains their loyalty, and liability to sudden outbreaks of brutality when stirred to abandon their usual goodnatured ways.

These are the descendants of the union between the decadent Funan plains people and the fierce Kambuja from the nearby mountains, who came together first as the small kingdom of Chenla and then, under King Bhavavarman around A.D. 550, extended into the wider kingdom of Khmer. The first 250 years of Khmer rule are confused by civil wars and it was only after A.D. 800 that comparative stability was established. In 790, the exiled Jayavarman II returned from Java. He fought for many years for the kingdom of his ancestors, spurred on by Javanese ideas of a monarch's duty to impose orderly government. By 802 he was victorious and founded his capital and his dynasty in the area around Angkor, to the north of the Cambodian Great Lakes.

Over the following four centuries a large city grew up here. The spreading timber dwellings of the ordinary people and their busy thoroughfares have long since vanished beneath the undergrowth. But the ever larger temples which Jayavarman's successors added and their network of canals and huge reservoirs can still be made out.These large-scale public works to irrigate the land were at the core of Angkor's prosperity, for the Khmers had no strong urge to trade overseas, unlike the earlier Funan people. The Khmer were farmers and, above all, rice farmers.

They took the great gift of the Mekong river's annual flood and multiplied its benefits by storing the water in huge reservoirs. As their skills became increasingly refined, they learned the right times to release water along the canals and channels to flood the paddy fields. The annual rice crop was increased to two, three and even four crops a year in this way, enough to feed their growing population. It was the proper duty of each new monarch to put in hand a major enlargement of this system, as well as to build his own temple-mountain.

These large-scale public works to irrigate the land were at the core of Angkor's prosperity, for the Khmers had no strong urge to trade overseas, unlike the earlier Funan people. The Khmer were farmers and, above all, rice farmers. They took the great gift of the Mekong river's annual flood and multiplied its benefits by storing the water in huge reservoirs. As their skills became increasingly refined, they learned the right times to release water along the canals and channels to flood the paddy fields. The annual rice crop was increased to two, three and even four crops a year in this way, enough to feed their growing population. It was the proper duty of each new monarch to put in hand a major enlargement of this system, as well as to build his own temple-mountain.

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