ABSTRACT
The pattern that emerges is one in which Cambodia drifted first away from Thai control then into the hands of the Vietnamese and finally back to Thai protection. By the early 1840s, much of its territory, the capital region in particular, was administered as a component of Vietnam. Three events in the drift can be singled out for study. These are the Thai absorption of northwestern Cambodia in the 1790s in exchange for putting Eng on the throne, the anti-Vietnamese millenarian rebellion that broke out in southeastern Cambodia in 1820, and the succession crisis of 1835 following a disastrous Thai military expedition. The first sixty years of the nineteenth century form the darkest portion of Cambodia's recorded history prior to the Armageddon of the 1970s. In the 1860s, in fact, a French official in Cambodia, seeking information about the Thai claims, reported to his superiors that Siam is unable to present any documentation about the cession.
