ABSTRACT
Cambodians thought of their country 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 on the Mekong Delta. By the standards of other states in Southeast Asia at the time, Cambodia was poor. French writers in the nineteenth century often denigrated Cambodian society and compared it unfavorably with their own "rational", centralized one or with that of the Vietnamese. Cambodia had a subsistence economy; most of its people spent most of their time growing rice, with men and women working side by side. By and large, monks were widely respected as repositories of merit, as sources of spiritual patronage, and as curators of Cambodia's literary culture. Historical records, on the other hand, have left a good picture of Cambodia's high-ranking officials, or okya.
