Vyadhapura

Vyadhapura is the old name tradition gives to the country around Ba Phnom, a 139-metre mound on the east bank of the Mekong in Prey Veng, about seventy-eight kilometres east of Phnom Penh. Excavations show it was a cultural centre of Funan and a sacred hill where Shiva was worshipped, and it kept its sacred character through the Angkor age, with traces of Buddhist and spirit rites.

When the Khmer kings left Angkor under Siamese pressure in the fifteenth century, they settled east at Phnom Penh, Longvek and Oudong. Prey Veng itself was thought dangerous because it lay too near Annam, yet an army was raised at Ba Phnom in 1473 to defend against a Siamese invasion. From the seventeenth century the Vietnamese pushed down the Mekong delta, and the king in Cambodia swung between his two big neighbours. In late 1833 a Siamese army marched through Cambodia to install rival princes against the pro-Vietnamese king Ang Chan, but Vietnamese forces threw it back at the battle of Vam Nao in January 1834. In 1835 Vietnam annexed Cambodia as Tran Tay province.