An employee of Cambodia's National Library studies a battered book as he sits in a hammock slung ...

An employee of Cambodia's National Library studies a battered book as he sits in a hammock slung in one of the Library's corridors. Behind him, an uneven pile of books sits in a corner near an open window. Founded in 1921 in the Don Penh district of Phnom Penh and run by French administrators until 1953, the Library suffered immeasurable harm at the advent of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, which saw Phnom Penh forcibly emptied of its 2,000,000 residents and refugees and most of the capital's cultural institutions ransacked and their staff killed or forced to work in paddy fields. Books and records were destroyed as part of a deliberate Khmer Rouge policy which aimed to 'abolish, uproot and disperse the cultural, literary and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists and all of the other oppressor classes' and the gardens of the National Archives and Library used to raise livestock. In 1979, two staff members returned to the Library and started the heartbreaking work of attempting to work some order from the chaos, rescuing many titles from the gardens, streets, ruined bookshops and abandoned houses around Phnom Penh. The work of cataloguing and sorting still continues, hampered by lack of government funding but surviving through assistance provided by a number of countries, including Australia, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the United States and England.