Endless, leaning piles of bundled and battered books give some indication of the magnitude of the ...

Endless, leaning piles of bundled and battered books give some indication of the magnitude of the job facing staff at Cambodia's National Archives and Library, also known as the Archives et Bibliotheque Nationales, which was founded in 1921 in the Don Penh district of Phnom Penh. The advent of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1975 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 Archives and 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.