Sampot

People from Takéo Province have woven silk since the Funan era and records, bas-reliefs, and Zhou Daguan's report have shown that looms were used to weave sompots since ancient times.

[5] However, little is known about the Old Khmer vocabulary for these fabrics, and if the sampot today was simply changed over time from the original Angkorian textiles.

[6] In George Groslier's Recherches sur les Cambodgiens (1921), a French director of Cambodia Arts during the French protectorate of Cambodia, observed the sampot: The word sampot must be a very old word, as old as the garment because it means: "star" and not a special part of the Khmer costume.

Women wear a sarong and we know that the fashion for the sampot common to both sexes is modern and probably a Siamese innovation.

[7][note 1] In Angkor Empire (1955) by George Benjamin Walker, recorded the origin of the modern sampot, which was compiled from these historian authorities: R. C. Majumdar, Reginald Le May, Kalidas Nag, Horace Geoffrey Quaritch Wales, George Charles Brodrick, Lawrence Palmer Briggs, Cedric Dover, and French scholars of the French School of the Far East: Her dress is the sampot.

The sampot is like the Indian lungi or the Malayan sarong; a length of cloth, often gaily coloured, tied around the waist and hanging down like a skirt.

[8] In the run-up to the 1993 Cambodian general election, Khmer leader Son Sann in a heated debate called for a sampot test to be used to establish whether or not women could vote or not in the election; walking a few yards in a tight sampot would be a sign of true Khmer identity, in contrast with the Vietnamese women who would usually wear pants under the áo dài.

[citation needed] Patterns are made by tying natural and synthetic fibers on the weft threads and then it is dyed.

The material used by poor and rural Cambodians is not hand-woven silk but printed batik-patterned cloth imported from Indonesia.