"Brief greatness, a decline without end"

About this time last year I read a book about the recent history of Cambodia. It was really interesting and helpful and now I'm reading it again. Its by a journalist called Henry Kamm. "Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Nation"

Here is a passage I read today that is a summary what has happened in Cambodia:

"I know no other country like Cambodia. Its glory was great, its suffering enormous. With the backbreaking toil of millions of men and women, aided by vast herds of beasts of burden, the Khmers constructed between the ninth and thirteenth centuries the great royal capital of Angkor, one of the wonders of the world. 

But in the fifteenth century, at the sight of invaders, they abandoned this marvel of art and architecture to the jungle. A mighty nation, a master in its region, became almost helpless fodder for covetous neighbours until the nineteenth century. 

Then France, the colonizer , subjected the faltering kingdom to its rule. Independence was restored in 1953. 

There followed an interlude of seventeen years of relative peace, the only "good" years that Cambodians of our time have experienced, before the Indochina War and its aftermath of Pol Pot's genocide made their country's name a synonym for incomprehensible horror."