In the half century or so before the arrival of the French, who established
a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, Cambodian ideas about political
geography did not include the notion that "Cambodia" was defined pri-
marily by the lines enclosing it on a map.¹ Maps were rarely used, and no
locally drawn map of Cambodia in the early nineteenth century appears
to have survived.² Instead, to the people who lived there, "Cambodia"
probably meant the sruk where Cambodian was spoken and, more nar-
rowly, those whose leaders (chaovay sruk) had received their official titles
and seals of office from a Cambodian king.

Cambodians also thought of their country, metaphorically, as a walled
city with several imaginary gates. One chronicle places these at Sambor
on the upper Mekong, Kompong Svay north of the Tonle Sap, Pursat in
the northwest, Kampot on the coast, and Chaudoc, technically across the
frontier in Vietnam in the Mekong Delta.³ Fittingly, these gates were the
places where invading armies traditionally swept into Cambodia. The
territory they enclosed, in the form of a gigantic letter "C" (there was no
eastern gate, for armies did not cross the Annamite cordillera), covered
roughly half the area of Cambodia today.

Inside this imaginary wall, sruk varied in size and importance. Al-
though boundaries were generally vague, some, like Pursat and Kom-
pong Svay, extended over several hundred square miles; others, like Koh
Chan or Lovea Em, were islands in the Mekong or short stretches along
the river.

Little information about the size and composition of Cambodia's popula-
tion in this period has survived. During the period of Vietnamese
suzerainty in the 1830s, a census was taken, but the Vietnamese dis-

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