Sorry for being late with this but other stuff has gotten in the wayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CambodiaAn ancient kingdom, once one of the most powerful states in South East Asian history and the builder of the great Angkor Wat, it had collapsed obscurity when it decided to submit to French authority in 1863 after centuries of waning Khmer influence over the region against the more powerful Vietnamese and Thais. Today it is a relatively small (pop: 15.5 million) country dwarfed by its neighbours. It is one of the most Buddhist countries in the world and is about 90% Khmer ethnically. As elsewhere in South East Asia (apart from Bali and the Cham) Hinduism has effectively disappeared, with no real modern legacy to Angkor or the medieval Khmer Empire except the name. Its recent history and society is known in the west for three things: 1) child sex tourism, 2) being a theatre in the Vietnam War in which the Americans bombed and napalmed large parts of the country for no discernible reason and 3) the murderous dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge which ran, if that is the right word, the country between 1975 and 1979. The KR tried to turn Kampuchea (the country's Khmer name) into a sort of communal agricultural utopia while knowing nothing about agriculture, economics or anything that could be described as knowledge (and if someone did, they had them executed). The KR also tried to kill off the Vietnamese minority and cut off all communication with the world. The result was the mass murder of people running into the millions before being chased out of the country by invading Vietnamese forces. What followed is little known in the west perhaps because it is so inglorious. Pol Pot and his forces retreated into the interior where they got support from China, the United States, Thailand and the United Kingdom who wanted him to fight the bigger menace: Vietnam. China invaded Vietnam in 1979 in a war that nobody in this part of the world ever talks about partly as a response (and got defeated in doing so). Pol Pot continued the fight into the countryside (and became a convert to free market economics in the process) until his death in 1998, by which Cambodia had turned into the ultra corrupt third world autocracy it is today. Its Prime Minister, since 1998, Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge Commander turned turncoat to Vietnam (and was also PM in the 80s) turned turncoat into pseudo-Democrat turned coup leader turned again into a pseudo-democrat. The situation is as stable as it sounds. Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia.
Below is a map of the Khmer Empire near its supposed peak in 900AD:
The States in Yellow and Light Green were those belonging to groups now stateless and in one case, the former, a diminishing people, the Champa and the Mon respectively.
