The world of the dancers had a less glamorous side. During King Monivong’s time, the women lived in an insalubrious warren of huts and cabins inside the royal compound. They passed their time gossiping and scheming, having their fortunes told and playing cards, telling off-color stories and waiting for preferment—frittering away their youth. Some had their children with them, but no nonroyal boys over twelve were allowed to live inside the palace compound. For a few dancers, like Meak, a career in the ballet led to royal patronage, prestige, and financial independence. For those who failed to catch the king’s attention, it was an impoverished, unhealthy, dull existence. A dancer’s life involved total dedication for limited rewards—a hermetic way of living that resembled the life of a Communist militant adopted by Saloth Sar after he came back to Cambodia from France in 1953.9

It is impossible to say which impressions of the palace prevailed among Saloth Sar’s memories once he came to power. In the DK period, his policies seemed to reflect a deep resentment at the injustice and exploitation that many Cambodians endured daily. He may have been thinking about the dancers or about the peasants he encountered later on. He may have been thinking of his own uprooted childhood in a potentially hostile city. In any case, he appears to have had no use for the ballet as a cultural institution, perceiving it as a corrupt, counterrevolutionary element of Cambodian life—like money, rank, and property. The corps de ballet was disbanded when the Communists came to power.

The Weight of the Past

To the west of the palace not far from Meak’s house was the museum of Khmer archaeology, built in Cambodian architectural style and opened in 1920. Here the French had assembled examples of sculpture, pottery, and bronzeware gathered from hundreds of ruined Hindu and Buddhist temples built in what became “Cambodia” between the seventh and sixteenth centuries A.D. This ancient civilization, “rediscovered” by the French, had culminated in the Angkorean empire, which flourished in northwestern Cambodia between the early ninth century A.D. and 1400. For a time, this empire dominated much of what are now southern Laos, eastern Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam. Near Angkor, the French uncovered impressive waterways and the remains of several hundred Hindu and Buddhist temples. In its heyday, around 1200, the Angkorean region, covering 100 square miles or so, sheltered more people than all of Cambodia did in the 1930s. The twelfth-century temple Angkor Wat, built to honor a Cambodian king, is the world’s largest surviving religious building.