The Customs of Cambodia

The Customs of Cambodia (Chinese: 真臘風土記; pinyin: Zhēnlà Fēngtǔ Jì), also translated as A Record of Cambodia: the Land and Its People, is a book written by the Yuan dynasty Chinese official Zhou Daguan during his stay at Angkor between 1296 and 1297. Zhou's account is of great historical significance because it is the only surviving first person written record of daily life in the Khmer Empire. The only other written information available is from the inscriptions on temple walls.

The book is an account of Cambodia by Zhou who visited the country as part of an official diplomatic delegation sent by Temür Khan in 1296 to deliver an imperial edict. It is not certain when it was completed, but it was written within 15 years of Zhou return to China in 1297. The work that survives today however is believed to be a truncated version, perhaps representing only around a third of the original size. A 17th-century bibliophile, Qian Zeng (錢曾), noted the existence of two versions of the work, one a Yuan Dynasty edition, the other included in a Ming dynasty anthology called Sea of Stories Old and New (古今说海, Gu jin shuo hai). The Ming version was described as "muddled and jumbled up, six or seven tenths of it missing, barely constituting a book at all". However, the Yuan dynasty original is no longer extant, and the surviving versions appear to be largely based on the truncated Ming version.

Texts from the book were collected in various other anthologies. Excerpts were given in a lengthy compilation Boundaries of Stories (说郛, Shuo fu) first compiled at the end of Yuan dynasty, and a second version was published in early Qing dynasty. Truncated text was also given in Lost Histories Old and New (古今逸史, Gu jin yi shi) from the Ming dynasty, and this same text was used in other collections. A major modern Chinese versions of the book is an annotated edition, which was compiled by Xia Nai from variants of the text found in 13 editions, completed in 1980 and published in 2000.

The work is written in classical Chinese, however, there are occasionally words and sentence structures that appear to have been influenced by Zhou's Wenzhou dialect.

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