Thailand rejects the map, which contravenes a Franco-Siamese agreement in 1904 stipulating a demarcation along a watershed line separating the two countries. Moreover, the French mapping effort took place just a decade after Siam ceded a clutch of territories – much of today’s western Cambodia – to France, which was then perched above Indochina as the colonial master At that time, a vulnerable Siam was compelled to sign a host of unequal treaties with European powers in exchange for maintaining its independence.