| Abstract: |
Linkages with China and South Asia were underway by the first centuries CE (Estève 2023; Hendrickson et al. 2023; Soutif and Estève 2023, this volume), at first overland and later through a maritime network that intensified in the 10th to 12th centuries CE. By the late 12th century, Chinese merchant ships were so familiar to Khmers that one was represented on the walls of the Bayon temple in Jayavarman’s Great City. Cambodia was never colonised, yet its millennium-long sporadic diplomacy with China’s changing dynasties led to rich economic, cultural, and technological interactions. When China attempted to bring its southern border provinces and their Yue inhabitants into its sphere of influence, it also pursued diplomatic missions further south with Nanyang, the coastal polities around the Nanhai (South China Sea) region, to create a ring of ‘tributary states’ that provided China with increasingly desirable exotica. Although 3rd-century Funan populations would not submit to Chinese political control, they seem to have welcomed diplomatic ties that brought them prestige goods. Sixth-century Chinese, in turn, sought products from Southeast Asia’s forests, and their embrace of Buddhism also brought needs for materia medica from Southeast Asia’s subtropical forests. We divide our discussion into two general periods: the 1st to 10th century Nanhai trade period that Wang Gungwu (1958) first described to the West and the 11th to 14th century Angkor Period, using Chinese dynastic histories and evidence from Cambodia’s archaeology, art history, and epigraphy. The chapter concludes by considering how China and Cambodia viewed each other’s respective polities through time. From the start of China’s Ming dynasty in 1368, interaction with China remained a constant, despite changes within Cambodia indicated by the court’s relocation from Angkor closer to the Mekong Delta
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