Page 7 - Cambodia Destination Guide - Alluring Asia

THE PEOPLE Cambodia (Khmer) stock accounts for over 90% of the extraction. All this changed in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge total population- a strikingly high homogeneity unique in initiated a ruthless campaign to rid Cambodia of all foreign Southeast Asia and the source of Cambodia's strong sense influence, including the Vietnamese, the West, and the Chinese, of national identity. The Khmers belong to the Mon- who abandoned the economic engines of the country. Khmer ethno linguistic group, which migrated into the fertile Mekong delta from southern China, the Korat Cham Muslims were horribly persecuted during the Pol Pot Plateau in northeastern Thailand, and perhaps from regime, when, according to some experts, half of their Indonesia prior to the Angkorian period. Influenced over population was exterminated and over 80% of their mosques the centuries by Indian and Javanese kingdoms, the destroyed. The survivors regard Chur Changvra near Phnom Khmers have intermarried with successive waves of Penh as their spiritual center and follow their traditional roles immigrants from Thailand during the 10th to 15th as cattle traders, silk weavers, and butchers (Theravada centuries, Vietnamese from the 17th century, and Chinese Buddhism prohibits most Khmers from slaughtering, though in the 18th to 19th centuries. Despite this racial not consuming animals). admixture, Khmer stock remains the dominant feature of Cambodian society. Cambodia's Khmer Loeu, or Upland Khmers, traditionally lived in the forested hills of the northeast until the Vietnam Prior to 1975, Cambodia's most important racial minority War forced many down to the plains and into more sedentary were the Chinese, who controlled the national economy lives. Today, the surviving groups not assimilated into modern and maintained their high degree of ethnic distinctiveness Cambodian society include the Saoch in the Elephant despite widespread intermarriage with local Cambodians. Mountains, the Pear in the Cardamom Mountains, the Brao As in Thailand, the Chinese were able to integrate into along the Lao border, and the Kuy in the far northwest. Like Cambodian life without the racial tensions and other tribes in Southeast Asia, these peoples are animist, government discrimination promoted in other Southeast seminomadic farmer who practice slash-and-burn agriculture. Asian nations. In fact, many of the leading political figures in Cambodian society are of partial Chinese