ABSTRACT
There have been Chinese in what is now Cambodia for at least 700 years. The Chinese diplomat and Ming dynasty emissary Zhou Daguan documented in detail his visit to the Angor kingdom in 1296, where he reported a Chinese community in what is now Siem Reap (Harris, 2007). Others have postulated a Chinese presence in Cambodia as early as 140 BCE as part of a Han Dynasty conquest of the southern territories, including parts of Vietnam and Cambodia (Schliesinger, 2011a). Willmott suggests as least some Chinese contact with Cambodia from the time of the region’s earliest written history. In fact, Chinese were the first to chronicle the Kingdom of Funan (first–sixth century CE), which included parts of present-day Cambodia. However, it is not clear that there was a significant Chinese settlement per se in Funan or that the presence was more than a trading mission (Willmott, 1967, pp. 3–4).
