Cambodia is a land-locked country in south east Asia which borders Vietnam to the East and Thailand to the West. The traditional form of religion is the Theravada branch of Buddhism. The first recorded Christian missionary contact with Cambodia was in 1555/6 by a Portuguese Roman Catholic missionary and member of the Dominican Order called Gas par Da Cruz. He is said to have only baptised one convert who died shortly afterwards. Later, Cambodia was under French colonial rule (1863 to 1953), but the Christian church made little impact. Those who were Catholic believers were mainly of Vietnamese heritage. The first Protestant missionary contact came in 1923 with missionaries from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The New Testament and later the whole Bible were translated by 1954. (The Cambodian language belongs to the Austro-Asiatic language family, the same language family as Vietnamese.) The evangelical church saw some growth in the period ...