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People of Cambodia
About 90% of the population is made up of ethnic
Cambodians or Khmer and the remaining 5 percent consists of people having Vietnamese origin and 1 percent of Chinese. The remaining 4% is made up of semi-nomadic tribal groups, who are mainly concentrated in the mountainous northeast. The official language is Khmer, or Cambodian.
Around eighty percent of the people live in rural areas, where their principal occupation is farming, basically practiced on family-operated holdings.
Arts, Culture and Music of Cambodia
Cambodia's art and culture reflect the religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, wherein stone temples, symbolizing the cosmic world, created by Angkor's architects and sculptors are decorated with wall carvings and sculptures of Hindu gods and the Buddha. Cambodian dances are symbolized by women, dressed in brightly colored costumes with elaborate headdresses. The dances are usually slow, accompanied with graceful movements. The music is created with the help of drums, gongs, and bamboo xylophones. Plays are very famous in the villages of Cambodia, where actors perform with masks. Shadow plays, performed using black leather puppets are also quite famous.
Flag of Cambodia
The flag of Cambodia consists of three horizontal bands - blue at the top, red, double the width, at the center and blue again at the bottom. The red band, in the center, has a white three-towered temple representing Angkor Wat, which is outlined in black.
Please click here to view the Flag of Cambodia
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Economy of Cambodia
Despite relatively low yields and a single harvest per year, Cambodia annually exported hundreds of
exportable surpluses of its principal crops of rice and corn. But the civil war from 1970 to 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, and the Cambodia-Vietnam War from 1978 to 1979 shattered Cambodia's economy. By 1974, rice had to be imported, and production of Cambodia's most profitable export crop, rubber, fell off sharply. The war also had a negative impact on the country's fledgling manufacturing industry and severely damaged road and rail networks.
The 1975 regime of Khmer Rouge nationalized all means of production in Cambodia. Money and private property were abolished, and ownership of agriculture was transferred to the people as a group, represented by the state. A Khmer Rouge Four-Year Plan decided upon multiple plantings of rice and a vastly expanded irrigation system. The plan also aimed to increase income from exports of rice and other products and to use this income to buy machinery with a view of industrializing the country. However, the plan fell flat and though rice production rose slightly, thousands of people died from malnutrition and overwork.
After the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in early 1979, and as the government lost grip on the lands, millions of Cambodians attempted to resume their lives as subsistence farmers. By the mid-1990s, Cambodia once again achieved self-sufficiency in rice production and began to export small quantities of rice. The country's infrastructure improved gradually in the 1990s, mainly through foreign aids and in 2001, its total gross domestic product (GDP) was estimated at $3.4 billion.
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