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household of King Norodom, and around
    the year of Sâr’s birth, her daughter, Meak, was chosen as a royal concubine for the heir apparent, Monivong. The Lady Meak, as she was now known, bore him a son, Prince Kossarak, and after Monivong became king, was appointed Head of the Royal Bedchamber with overall responsibility for all the palace women. With her help, in 1930, Loth’s eldest son, Suong, secured a grace-and-favour appointment as a palace officer. Soon afterwards Meak summoned his sister, Roeung, then sixteen years old, to join her in Phnom Penh, where she, too, became one of Monivong’s favourites, remaining at the King’s side until his death in 1941.
    This was not such an unusual story in Cambodia in the early part of the twentieth century. The mother of Sâr’s contemporary Keng Vannsak was another of Monivong’s concubines. The King handed her on to his brother, but she then fell in love with Vannsak’s father and persuaded her royal master, who had a surfeit of women already, to restore her liberty. Monivong had more than thirty wives. King Norodom, who died in 1904, had 360 — as Sihanouk, his grandson and spiritual heir, was forever pointing out to justify his own philandering. Even a lesser figure, like the Lord Governor of Battambang, had more than a hundred consorts and insisted, to the dismay of the Buddhist clergy who visited him, that all the women in his household, from the lowest serving girl to his principal wife, should go about the official mansion nude from the waist up. Polygyny was a sign of virility, guaranteeing the fruitfulness of the realm.
    Cambodian life has an earthy, elemental quality. Nature teems and fructifies. The sun beats like an iron hammer, the jungle steams, the land pulsates with the heat and colour of the tropics. In late spring the countryside is blotted out by dense, palpitating clouds of orange butterflies, several miles wide, which float across plains of lotus blossom and bright green paddy-fields. Girls flower into women as soon as they enter their teens, and fade when they reach twenty. Small boys run about naked; girl children stagger under the weight of their brothers, almost as big as themselves. In the days when Sâr and Nhep were young, herds of elephant used to pass by Prek Sbauv, heading for the water-meadows beside the Great Lake. At flood time, the villagers organised hunts on buffalo-back, usingjavelins to spear wild boar. When Loth’s eldest son, Suong, travelled for the first time to Phnom Penh, a hundred miles to the south, the choice was between an eighteen-hour journey in a Chinese merchant’s steam launch or three days in an ox-cart — but only during the dry season. During the rains, the roads disappeared.
    The landscape, and the lifestyle, were, and are still, closer to Africa than China. Substitute baobabs for bamboo, and papyrus for lotus, and you could be in Kenya or Tanzania. Dark-skinned Cambodian peasants proudly call themselves ‘black Khmer’. At the country’s eastern border, the subtle,
    sinicised world of the Vietnamese scholar-official — sustained by a meritocracy based on Confucian notions of propriety and virtue — butts up against the sensual harshness of Brahminism, against Buddhism and the mind-set of the Indian states.
    Cambodia, even more than the other nations of the region that the French named Indo-China, lies on the fault-line between Asia’s two great founding civilisations.
    Loth’s family, like many Cambodians, including the Royal House, was of Sino-Khmer extraction. Sâr derived his name from his light ‘Chinese’ complexion — the word
    s
    â
    r
    means ‘white’ or ‘pale’ — a characteristic shared by his brother Nhep. But race in Cambodia is determined by behaviour rather than blood line. Loth — or Phem Saloth as he later called himself, to satisfy the colonial authorities’ insistence that everyone must have a family as well as a given name — did not practise the Chinese rites. He and his