For the past seven decades King Norodom Sihanouk has embodied the soul of Cambodia and its people, but his passion for duplicity and intrigue also made him the author of many of the dark chapters in the Southeast Asian nation’s grim history.

Sihanouk died on Monday aged 89 in Beijing, where he spent long periods taking medical treatment after he abdicated the Cambodian throne in favour of one of his sons, Norodom Sihamoni, in 2004.

He was a man of enormous charm and a compelling raconteur, brimming with humorous stories and racy gossip. He had an emotional link to the bulk of Cambodia’s seven million people like no one else on the political stage.

But Sihanouk was also a malevolent political force. As head of government he was incompetent, he blocked the development of multi-party democracy on several occasions, supported the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, and facilitated the creation of what is in effect a one-party state under current Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Yet for all its errors and horrors, the Sihanouk story is compelling. This, after all, is a man who never should have been king, a position he held twice. He was also president once, twice prime minister and twice sovereign prince.

Sihanouk’s rise to dominate public life in Cambodia and from time to time Southeast Asia in the last 70 years began as a mistake.

When Sihanouk’s maternal grandfather, King Sisowath Monivong died in April 1941, the French colonial administrators of Cambodia cast around among the plentiful supply of princes in the royal seraglio for a malleable puppet to put on the throne.

They picked 18-year-old Sihanouk, who at first seemed to be all the French wished for. With the enthusiasm of youth Sihanouk took at least six wives and several concubines. He fathered 14 children and managing the inevitable contests for power among his offspring and their mothers provided a daily family soap opera of epic proportions for the rest of his life.

But even in those early years in the 1940s Sihanouk demonstrated a capacity for political intrigue and shifting loyalties that would characterize his life.

Cambodia was under the control of the Vichy French regime allied to Nazi Germany. With the liberation of France and Germany’s defeat, Sihanouk declared Cambodia independent and an ally of Japan.

But when Japan was defeated in 1945 Sihanouk swiftly re-pledged his loyalty to France and welcomed the returning colonial power with great ceremony and enthusiasm.

When French rule in other parts of its Southeast Asia empire, especially Vietnam, came under attack from communists and nationalists, Sihanouk in 1953 persuaded Paris to give Cambodia independence without violence.

Two years later Sihanouk abdicated the throne in favour of his father and became prime minister, leading his People’s Socialist Community party to overwhelming victories in elections that featured vote rigging and violent suppression of opposition parties.

In 1960 Sihanouk’s father died and he had himself made head of state, as Prince Sihanouk, as well as prime minister.