Khmers- From Kemet to Asia

Of all the kingdoms of early Southeast Asia, one of the most recognised and magnificent has to be Angkor, located in northern Cambodia. Angkor’s beauty is illustrated by thousands of lavish temples, wonderfully built with laterite, brick and sandstone, and a massive hydrological system of reservoirs and lakes, all of which cover a huge area of some seventy-seven square miles.¹ The people responsible for building these tremendous structures were an industrious Black Africoid people known as Khmers. Roland Burrage Dixon, an anthropologist at Harvard, described the ancient Khmers as physically “marked by distinctly short stature, dark skin, curly or even frizzy hair, broad noses and thick Negroid lips.” ²

“In remote antiquity the Khmers established themselves throughout a vast area that encompassed portions of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Laos.” ³ In addition, some of the earliest Buddha statues from neighbouring regions such as Thailand and Vietnam have clearly discernable African features, such as broad noses, thick lips and woolly hair in cornrows, they have the appearance of any African found in sub-Sahara Africa today. This was at a time when the region was not subject to foreign domination and race infusion, and it had reserved the purity of this type.



 

The builders of the earliest kingdoms in Southeast Asia, the Funanes, who were essentially the same as Khmers, were described in a Chinese historical document as “ugly and Black...their hair is curly.” The men were described by the Chinese as “small and Black.”⁴ There are, however, much more complimentary descriptions from earlier Chinese records. The Chinese chronicler Nan Ts’i Chou more flatteringly and probably reflecting earlier and less prejudice times, expressly stated:

“For the complexion of men, they consider Black the most beautiful.  In all the kingdoms of the southern region, it is the same.”⁵
From as early as 192 A.C.E. the people of the Southeast Asian kingdom Champa (Vietnam), known to the Chinese as Lin-yi, which meant the “land of Black men” were described by Chinese scribes as possessing: “Black skin, eyes deep in the orbit, nose turned up, hair frizzy.”

Chinese scribes also stated that the people of Cham adorned themselves:

“In a single piece of cotton or silk wrapped about the body...They are very clean; they wash themselves several times each day, wear perfume and rub their bodies with a lotion compounded with camphor and musk.