Tucked away in the mountains of western Cambodia are the remnants of a once-thriving Myanmar community known as the Kula, whose decline is a little-explored mystery involving gems, dreams and the Khmer Rouge.
By DANIEL ZAK | FRONTIER
When Ji So made the long journey from Shan State to Cambodia’s Pailin province in 1994, he expected to be greeted by a large community of people like him.
“I walked across the mountains and forests to come to the land of stones,” he said of his approximately 2,000 kilometre trip, which involved a week of trekking, two days on a bus, and another day on foot.
For centuries, the western province of Pailin on the Thai border had attracted Myanmar people who hoped to dig up a better life in soil dyed reddish-brown by deposits of aluminium and iron. Beneath this earth lay pockets of even greater treasures – vibrant blue sapphires and fiery red rubies, some worth more than diamonds.
Most Myanmar who followed the call of the stones never returned to their home country, instead settling in Cambodia, where their descendants became known as the Kula. The new arrivals established schools, pagodas and social structures copied from their homeland. During a recent visit to Pailin town, Frontier saw many buildings of a distinctly Myanmar design, including pagodas piercing the canopy of forested hilltops like gold and silver daggers.
But when Ji So arrived 30 years ago, he found only a shadow of the community that built this area. A dozen or so Kula people, mostly poor labourers in the mines, were all that remained, and no others arrived after him and his cousin. The once steady stream of Myanmar migrants had reduced to a trickle and then stopped entirely.
Today there are none left who claim to be a full-blooded Kula. The Kula structures that haven’t been repurposed by the Khmer community lie rusting and cracking in the undergrowth. But everywhere in Pailin, from the architecture to the cuisine, there are traces of the Kula. Almost everyone seems to have heard of them and proudly claims their heritage.
Who they were exactly and how they disappeared so suddenly remain murky. Descendents of the Kula insist they were targeted for extermination by the Khmer Rouge, but many others in the province have yet to come to terms with Pailin’s legacy as the final stronghold of one of Asia’s most brutal regimes.
Keeping the culture
“When we walked down the main street, almost everybody was Kula,” said Nang Kham, aged 58. Her name means “Golden Lady” in the Kula language, which is of unclear origin but has striking similarities with Shan. Though she is only half Kula on her mother’s side, she was raised in the Kula culture until the age of nine, when the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975.
She remembered fondly that when her mother stepped out of the shower, her hair came down almost to her ankles, as was typical for Kula women. She described her mother’s long process of wrapping her hair around her head like a turban, and dressing in magnificent traditional clothes, even if she wasn’t going out that day.
Fortune teller Choem Davy, 74, is only a quarter Kula and was raised in the Khmer tradition, but said she learned some of the language from the many Kula at her school.
“We would usually speak half Khmer, half Kula,” she said. “There were never any problems between our two communities.”
She remembers how the Kula made their food much spicier than the Khmers, and taught her how to make a sticky rice dessert that she still sometimes prepares for her children. She also remembers their fascination with gems, and how their outfits would glitter with freshly mined stones.
Today, there are government-sponsored efforts to preserve the Kula heritage. Khmer youths Visakha, 25, and Naroth, 22, perform Kula traditional dances professionally, including at government events.
Early one foggy morning, two youths were rehearsing for a wedding on top of Yat Mountain. Behind them rose Wat Yat, the most prominent and best preserved Kula temple. Dressed in elaborate peacock costumes, accompanied by Myanmar music on a portable speaker, and with a typical Myanmar-style golden stupa behind them, it felt like a scene from thousands of kilometres away.
But nobody involved was of Myanmar heritage.
“The bride and groom are not Kula,” said But Chanti, the dancers’ director. “But they are from Pailin, and they know that this is part of our culture.”
Chanti was sent by the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts to help keep Kula traditional dance alive, teaching it in public schools in Pailin alongside more typical Khmer dances. The pagoda complex where they were rehearsing is being maintained in the Myanmar style, with engineers from Myanmar coming periodically for maintenance and renovations.
In another pagoda at the bottom of the mountain, an elderly Khmer man named Sa Soen keeps old photographs of the Kula in a lockbox. He explained that he does not know exactly what year the photographs were taken or who took them, but one shows a group of Kula, mostly young adults dressed in 1960s clothing in front of an elaborately decorated crematorium in the Wat Yat compound.
That crematorium still stands but, unlike the neighbouring temple, has not been maintained. Its spire has fallen off and vines strangle the broken stones around its base. Behind sits a pile of discarded urns, some shattered, others seemingly still with ashes inside. Nearby, in a half-overgrown cemetery, Kula graves seem to be sinking into the soft soil, barely visible through the thick undergrowth, with some cover slabs cracking.
Sitting at a market, Soen and other town elders said that the last visibly Kula couple in Pailin met a tragic end about 10 years ago. They dressed traditionally, spoke Kula to each other and wore gemstone jewellery – which made them a target in impoverished Cambodia.
“Cambodia was less stable back then,” Soen said sadly, claiming that the husband was shot dead and robbed by unknown assailants. Afterwards his wife fled the province and hasn’t been heard from since.
Shadow of the Khmer Rouge
Loem Khun, who oversees the maintenance of the structures on Yat Mountain, said more could probably have been done to preserve the memory of the Kula, but it was not easy. He said that there were efforts to establish a small Kula community area, but they couldn’t find enough people who identified as Kula to populate it.
When asked how the Kula had disappeared so quickly, he said many fled to Thailand when the Khmer Rouge seized control during the Cambodian Civil War and others died of mercury poisoning in the mines.
But this was one of several explanations given by locals. Some said the Kula had died from malaria, while others said they had been rescued and sent to Australia, the United States and even France.
The descendants of the Kula, for their part, insisted the group was targeted for extermination in a similar way to other minorities like the Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese. (While Khmer Rouge leaders were found guilty of genocide for their treatment of the Cham and Vietnamese-Cambodians, those communities survived – unlike the Kula.)
This view was largely rejected by their non-Kula neighbours. While most of them acknowledged that the civil war was a contributing factor, very few believed the Khmer Rouge had more than an indirect role in the Kula’s demise.
The belief is unsurprising, given the history of Pailin province. When the Vietnamese military toppled the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, communist holdouts fled to a few isolated strongholds, most notably Pailin, which became the Khmer Rouge headquarters. The province remained largely under its control until 1997.
In exchange for their surrender, the Cambodian government promised Khmer Rouge members amnesty, so many of the leaders retained local government positions.
When Frontier arrived in Pailin town following a long bus journey, a security guard approached. After a brief exchange of greetings, he said, “Have you heard of the Khmer Rouge? We are the Khmer Rouge. We fought here.”
While public schools teach youth the truth about Khmer Rouge atrocities, much of the older generation in Pailin still defends the old regime, downplaying its violence or blaming it on Vietnamese subversives.
Besides the more prosaic explanations described above for the fate of the Kula, one local folktale insists that legendary monk Loek Sain saved them from the war with a prophetic vision.
“In his dream he saw a great black cloud coming from the east. He told the Kula they must run to the west, to Thailand. If they ran to the east, they would die,” said monk Loek Kdeang Sarath, Loek Sain’s successor at the Rotanak Saophoan Monastery, built in 1942 by Kula and Myanmar engineers.
Locals disagreed on whether Loek Sain was half Kula himself, or just a Khmer who learned the language due to his great affinity with the Kula community.
But Kula descendents themselves deny their community was saved by a monk. “No way!” said Davy, the fortune teller. She said that she only survived by hiding her Kula identity and going east on foot to the town of Battambang while carrying her two young children. After a Khmer Rouge cadre threatened to shoot one of the hungry children for crying too loudly, she had to gag her with a scarf for the rest of the journey.
She claimed that the Kula were massacred by the communist regime because of their traditional trade of gem mining, an occupation associated with wealth. Many of the killers still likely live alongside her back in Pailin, but she declined to comment on this, saying she doesn’t like to discuss politics.
Nang Kham remembers, as a nine-year-old, being ordered to evacuate to Thailand when the Khmer Rouge took over Pailin. But she said this was a trap. At the border town of Phsar Prum, they were rounded up and brought to the nearby village of Sala Krau.
“Then they started shooting,” she said, overwhelmed with emotion and unable to continue the story.
She said over time, Kula traditions have faded, and even her children didn’t learn the language or customs.
“If they [the government] preserve this area, people who come to Pailin will know that we were the Kula,” she said. “If they don’t, we will be forgotten.”
Sitting beneath the gaze of Kula-sculpted Buddhas at his temple, Kdeang Sarath said the Kula will always be a part of Pailin’s heritage. Often in his dreams, he said, he sees a vision of a Kula man in traditional clothing, watching him. When asked what this means, he smiled slightly.
“I’m not sure yet, he hasn’t said anything.”
