When the French naturalist Henri Mouhot was shown some of these ruins by his Cambodian hosts in 1860, he started a love affair between French scholars and Cambodia’s medieval past that has lasted to this day. Starting in the 1870s soon after their protectorate had been established, French savants deciphered over one thousand ancient Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions, named Cambodia’s kings, and placed them inside a precise chronology. Although Angkor Wat had been a Buddhist sanctuary for several hundred years, many Cambodians believed that the temples had been built by supernatural creatures rather than by earlier Khmer.

French scholarship gave the Cambodians a prestigious history that as a colonized people they were not prepared to handle. The French stressed the contrast between the glories of the Angkorean empire and what they perceived as its decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between Angkorean mastery and the protectorate’s dependence, between the grandeur of Angkor’s kings and the impotence of those like Monivong who were selected by the French to govern colonial Cambodia. These contradictions produced a crisis of identity among educated Khmer in the 1930s and 1940s that acted as a catalyst for Cambodian nationalism. Sovereignty was a major theme in Red Khmer ideology, as it had been for previous regimes. It was thought that because the people who had built Angkor were Khmer, their descendants had extraordinary talents. “If our people were capable of building Angkor,” Pol Pot said in 1977, “we can do anything.” Since the 1940s, an image of Angkor Wat has appeared on nearly all Cambodian flags.10

In his youth Saloth Sar would certainly have been aware of Cambodia’s past grandeur and French ideas about it. He would have wandered through the museum more than once. Although he probably did not visit the ruins, he would have known the figures and scenes carved on the temple walls from the gestures and costumes of the royal dancers. The Indian myths the dancers reenacted, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, had been recited and performed since Angkorean times. As he grew up, Sar may also have noticed the gap between the grandeur of Angkor Wat (and these legends, for that matter) and the shabby, crowded quarters of the royal dancers, between the “godkings” of the Angkorean empire and the middle-aged monarch of the 1930s who often dressed in a French military uniform and who reigned over only a few acres of palace compound.