With Angkor as its capital, the Khmer empire ruled over what is now central and southern Vietnam, southern Laos, Thailand and part of the Malay Peninsula. Now dwindled to Cambodia, Angkor's colossal ruins are the major reason people come to view its remains.
Gone are the days when, as late as the end of the 16th century, a visiting Spanish missionary could remark that there were indeed so many precious things in the country that "when the king fled to Laos, he scattered gold and silver coins along the road so that the Siamese would be too busy gathering them up to capture him."
Yet Cambodia is now recovering from its vicissitudes. Michael Freeman tells us in this book that when a department store in the capital last year installed the country's first escalator "the Phnom Penhois queued to try it out, and the store had to appoint instructors to show people how to use it." True, but it did have the escalator, one of the many comforts of the "first world," and more is to follow.