One figure especially strides across modern Cambodian history – Norodom Sihanouk. But this is not a biography of Sihanouk; the focus is upon the final decades of the French protectorate, the rise of a counter-elite and winning of Cambodia’s independence. Deeply embedded Khmer cultural conventions, the interplay of charismatic power and patronage, and manipulation of the 1,000-year-old monarchy are central to this book, as is indigenous resistance, Buddhist activism, French cultural creationism, radical republicanism, Thai recidivism and wartime Japanese machinations. The skill of the young Sihanouk in navigating between Vichy France, Japanese militarists, republican opportunists, armed rural insurgency and French proconsuls is brought to life by a range of new archival documentation – but so too how a country of such grace and natural bounty became associated with mass murder and genocide. The long political prelude as exposed in this book makes the now clichéd ‘tragedy of Cambodian history’ much more comprehensible.