front of Ayutthaya.
Cambodian history presents the reason for the next Thai attack because King Ang Chan refused to give King Maha Chakkraphat a white elephant when he asked for it, it is indicated that King Ang Chan declined any symbol of vassalage to Thailand. King Maha Chakkraphat's attention was now turned towards Cambodia. He put Prince Ong, the Governor of Sawankhalok and Srey’s son, in charge of an expedition against Cambodia. King Ang Chan counter-attacked, and shot Prince Ong dead on an elephant’s back, and routed the Thais and captured no less than 10,000 Thai troops. It was because of this victory over the Thais that King Ang Chan baptized that battle area as “Siem Reap” meaning “the flate defeat of Siam”. However most of sources mentioned the final defeat of Angkor Kingdom by the Thais from Ayutthaya in the fifteenth century. The city was abandoned since then.
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the feuds among the Cambodian lords caused the interventions and domination from the more powerful neighbors, Vietnam and Siam. Siem Reap, along with Battambangand Sisophon, major cities in the north western part of Cambodia, were under Siamese rule from time to time until the French rule.
In 1901 the École Française d'Extrême Orient (EFEO) began a long association with Angkor by funding an expedition into Siam to the Bayon. The EFEO took responsibility for clearing and restoring the whole site, then Angkor ruins were rediscovered. In the same year, the first tourists arrived in Angkor - an unprecedented 200 of them in three months. Angkor had been 'rescued' from the jungle and was assuming its place in the modern world.
Siem Reap was little more than a village when the first French explorers re-discovered Angkor in the 19th century. With the acquisition of Angkor by the French in 1907 due to the Franco-Siamese agreement, Siem Reap began to grow, absorbing the first wave of tourists. The Grand Hotel
