In July 2024, it was confirmed that the National Archives in Copenhagen holds a letter sent from Cambodia in 1699 to the Danish East India Company. A study note published the following year, “UN RAPPROCHEMENT DÉLICAT: note sur une correspondance diplomatique entre la royauté khmère et la Compagnie des Indes orientales danoise (1699),” provides a preliminary report on this document. According to the study, the letter consists of two paired versions, one written in Khmer and the other in Portuguese. At present, this document represents the earliest surviving original Khmer-language manuscript other than inscriptions.

Comparable materials have previously been identified in Japan (in November 2013). We have reported on these documents in earlier studies, and their English version is cited in “UN RAPPROCHEMENT DÉLICAT” as an important comparative reference. Unlike the Khmer letters found in Japan—which are poor-quality copies and so difficult to read that no complete transliteration has yet been presented—the 1699 document preserved in Copenhagen is well preserved and can be deciphered in its entirety. However, only the letter sent from the Cambodian side survives, making it impossible to clarify the full course of negotiations. By contrast, the early seventeenth-century letters preserved in Japan constitute reciprocal correspondence, allowing the positions of both the Tokugawa shogunate and the Cambodian royal court to be traced over several years.

In Cambodian historiography, the post-Angkor period—termed the période moyenne (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries) by Mikaelian and others—has received far less scholarly attention than the Angkorian period. One reason for this relative neglect is the prevailing view that the Angkor period represented the peak of the Cambodian state. Moreover, the scarcity of contemporary sources has made empirical research on this era difficult. Since the late nineteenth century, the principal sources for narratives of the post-Angkor or middle period have been the Royal Chronicles, compiled from the late eighteenth century onward. Although these chronicles are later compilations whose use raises issues of source criticism, narratives derived from them have strongly influenced Cambodian nationalism and have often been adopted as background history in other fields of Cambodian studies.

The main author of “UN RAPPROCHEMENT DÉLICAT,” Grégory Mikaelian, has actively sought out contemporary sources for the middle period and has produced numerous studies of Cambodian history based primarily on materials other than on the Royal Chronicles. Because many of these works are written in French, however, they remain little known in Japan outside the field of Cambodian history. This article, therefore, introduces and examines “UN RAPPROCHEMENT DÉLICAT,” which offers a preliminary report on an important new document and new insights into Cambodia (as well as the broader regions of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean) in the late seventeenth century. It also suggests the possibility of a new historiographical approach to post-Angkor Cambodia based on contemporary sources such as legal codes and inscriptions rather than on the uncritical use of the Royal Chronicles.

The Annam sect, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist denomination in Thailand, has long been regarded as the Buddhist sect most closely associated with the afterlife, largely because it has been responsible for royal memorial rites and other ceremonies linked to the world beyond death. As a result, its monks regularly perform afterlife-related rituals and speak about spirits, cultivating a reputation for spiritual efficacy. This paper examines the spiritualism and salvific practices of Abbot Bao An (องบ๋าวเอิง, Bảo Ân, 寶恩, 1906–1964), a Vietnamese monk who served as abbot of Thailand’s Samananam Borihan Temple from the 1940s to the 1960s. He summoned spirits and interpreted their oracles, which he supplemented with scholarly studies on the languages of spirits and published. Through this process, he conferred Buddhist and academic legitimacy on exchanges with the afterlife, demonstrating both the perceived superiority of Annam sect spiritualism and its capacity to offer salvation for souls after death. These efforts earned him fervent support from the Vietnamese diaspora, the Thai public, and members of Thai royalty and other influential figures. Simultaneously, the occult popularity of these practices provided cover for the temple’s secular activities in support of the Vietnamese independence movement. After Bao An’s death, however, and amid rising anticommunist sentiment, the Annam sect deliberately severed its political role in supporting Vietnamese independence, thereby preserving the sect’s survival.