The immediate grievance was a scheme called the rammassage du paddy. Cambodia's economy leaned on taxing rice exports, and by the mid-1960s farmers were quietly selling their crop across the border where buyers paid better. In early 1967 Lon Nol had the army take over the buying, and Battambang province went first. Households saw their earnings collapse at the prices offered, and many were made to hand over their harvest at gunpoint. Layered underneath were older resentments. From 1965, thousands of Khmer Krom families displaced by the war in Vietnam had been resettled in Cambodia, with the largest settlement in Battambang, and local people - many of whom held no formal title to the land they farmed - found themselves pushed off it. Around Pailin, arable land was being bought up and converted into fruit plantations, leaving Khmer farmers as day labourers on ground their families had worked. The historian David Chandler summed up the revolt as springing from local grievances against injustice, corruption and ham-fisted government behaviour. Nobody in those villages was executing a plan from Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk was in France. Lon Nol answered with paratroopers and national police, who by some accounts were offered a bounty for every severed head of a rebel or leftist sent back to the capital. Seventy-three people were captured at a hideout in the first sweep; within three weeks nearly two hundred had been taken and nineteen killed. It did not work. By June more than four thousand villagers from southern Battambang had abandoned their homes and walked into the forest - families, not fighters, choosing the malaria and the wild animals over the soldiers. On 22 April Sihanouk publicly blamed five leftist deputies, among them Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim; two of them vanished into the maquis rather than answer. A second, far better organised rising followed in January 1968 and spread across multiple provinces. Ben Kiernan called Samlaut the baptism of fire for Cambodia's revolutionary movement. The men who fled into these hills in 1967 would be running the country eight years later.

War kept coming back here. When Cambodia conducted its national census in 1998, enumerators could not work in Samlout at all - the official record notes simply that conflict prevented it. This was one of the last corners of the country still contested, three decades after the shooting started, and the ordnance left behind has not gone anywhere; northwestern Battambang remains among the most heavily mined ground in a heavily mined country, and clearance teams are still at it. Today the district is administered as seven communes - Ta Taok, Kampong Lpou, Ou Samrel, Sung, Samlout, Mean Chey and Ta Sanh - and forty-nine villages, farming the same red soil their grandparents were arguing over in 1967.

What survived all this, improbably, is the forest. In 1993 King Norodom Sihanouk designated the Samlaut Multiple Use Area, 599 square kilometres classed under IUCN Category VI for sustainable use - the last remaining tropical rainforest in northwestern Cambodia, holding Asian elephants and the headwaters of the Stung Sangker, whose water reaches around a million people downstream before it drains into the Tonlé Sap. From 2003 the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation worked here in partnership with the Ministry of Environment, and in 2006 the reserve entered a sister-park agreement with Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California to trade technical knowledge. In 2009 talks opened on a transboundary Peace Park linking Samlaut with two Thai protected areas, roughly 110,000 hectares between them. Then in 2021 Angelina Jolie announced that the next chapter of the Women for Bees programme would come to Samlout - a scheme to train fifty women as beekeepers over five years and build 2,500 hives across twenty-five UNESCO biosphere reserves worldwide. It is a modest thing to set against this district's history. It is also, for once, something starting here that is not a war.