Political power in those earliest Indianized kingdoms of Cambodia was concentrated in the lower Mekong Delta, permitting access to coastal trade. By around A.D. 600, though, power shifted inland, where competing kingdoms were building surprisingly large towns, temples, and reservoirs. In A.D. 802 the independent kingdoms were finally unified under King Jayavarman the Second, regarded as the founder of the Khmer Empire, who chose the Angkor region for his capital’s site. For the next five centuries the empire was ruled by a succession of 24 kings, all with long Indianized names like “Udayadityavarman the Second,” “Dharamindravarman,” and “Jayavarmadiparameshvara.” Every half century or so, a king’s death led to a contest over his succession, and the empire disintegrated into several pieces before being put back together again.
Successive kings outbid each other by taking the large building projects of pre-unification kings as models and scaling them up into huge, then gigantic, and finally world-record humongous projects. For instance, the third king after unification, Indravarman the First, inspired by the big reservoirs of pre-unification kingdoms, broke previous records by launching the construction, five days after he was crowned, of a rectangular reservoir 2.3 miles long and 0.5 miles wide, modestly named after himself as the Indratataka (“Sea of Indra”). His successor, King Yashovarman the First, then built another rectangular reservoir eight times larger, 4.7 by 1.1 miles, also modestly named after himself as the Yashodharatataka, or East Baray. Another century had to pass before King Suryavarman the First could barely top that record with the 5-by-1.4-mile West Baray, one of the largest structures built by humans before the modern industrial era. Two centuries later, King Jayavarman the Seventh, busy with other construction such as the city of Angkor Thom and the Bayon temple, had to swallow his pride and attach his name to a humble new reservoir, the Jayatataka (“Sea of Jaya”), measuring a mere 2.2 by 0.6 miles. These are among the Khmer structures visible to aliens out there who might be viewing the Earth from space.
At the same time as Indianized names, writing, and religion were thriving at Angkor, Chinese influence continued. The Khmer sent embassies to the imperial court in China, which reciprocated by sending embassies and products to Angkor. Stone carvings at Angkor depict Chinese inventions such as pontoon bridges and multi-projectile artillery. Remains of Chinese Tang, Song, and later pottery are scattered all over Angkor.
Angkor’s grandiose royal courts and construction did not come cheaply to the empire’s peasants, who were taxed in the form of rice deliveries and labor. It’s estimated that construction of the West Baray would have taken the efforts of 200,000 peasants working for three years. One king required 4,000 concubines, and just one medium-sized temple had to be staffed by 1,000 administrators, over 600 dancers, 95 professors, and assorted others, adding up to a total of 12,640 functionaries, all of whom had to be fed. When I first heard these numbers, I began to get a glimmering of how centuries of exploitation of Cambodian peasants by extravagant elites could have had something to do with the repressed fury that exploded under Pol Pot.
We shouldn’t be deceived by all those temples, statues of Buddha, and beautiful reservoirs into thinking of Angkor’s kings as a peace-loving bunch. The Khmer were constantly fighting against each other and against their western neighbors the Thai, their eastern neighbors the Cham of South Vietnam, and their northeastern neighbors the Vietnamese of North Vietnam. The empire eventually conquered not just the areas of modern Cambodia and Laos but also much of southern Vietnam and Thailand and a sliver of southeastern Myanmar. Abundant stone carvings depict in vivid detail artillery, shields, armor, war chariots, cavalry mounted on horses and elephants, infantry battles, and naval warfare using ships with grappling hooks and dozens of rowers. Like ancient Rome, Angkor became filled with war plunder, including bronze, silver, and gold from conquered towns and shrines.
The distribution of population in urbanized societies familiar to us is inhomogeneous and hierarchical. That is, within a given area most of the landscape is used for farmland or industry and occupied at low population density, while a much smaller fraction of the landscape is urban and occupied at high density. The urban areas form a hierarchy, with at the top a large metropolis, below which in size and population come some medium-sized cities, then small cities, towns, and villages, surrounded by farmland which is clearly distinct from cities.
However, in the Khmer Empire, at least in its well-studied central core, all of those middle levels of hierarchy were missing: the only major city was Angkor, below which there were only small provincial centers. In that vast urban core the distinction between urban areas and farmland was blurred or absent. Angkor was instead a low-density city in which rice fields lay immediately outside the walls of temples, and the city itself consisted largely of rice fields with farmers’ houses spread out in clusters and lines across the landscape. Angkor’s area, of about 400 square miles, was thus far greater than that of the familiar high-density pre-industrial cities of Eurasia, such as 19th-century Tokyo (known as Edo), medieval Constantinople, 7th-century Baghdad, Rome during the Roman Empire, and other European cities before the 16th century, all of which were less than 40 square miles in area and mostly less than 10 square miles. While Angkor’s population density was lower than that of these high-density cities, its vastly greater area resulted in Angkor’s total population, estimated at about 750,000, approached that of a great contemporary Chinese capital.
It is becoming apparent to archaeologists that such low-density agriculturally based pre-industrial cities used to be a more widespread phenomenon in the moist tropics than we had realized. The growing list of examples includes the great Classic Lowland Maya cities until the 9th century A.D., such as Tikal and Copán; the Sri Lanka cities of Anuradhapura and Pollonaruwa, from around the 4th century B.C. until the 12th century A.D.; Bagan in 13th-century Myanmar; two cities of Angkor’s enemies, the Cham capital of My Son in Vietnam until the 13th century and the Thai capital of Sukhotai from A.D. 1238 to 1438; and perhaps also the 9th- and 10th-century Javan center around the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan. We have no European eyewitness account of any of those low-density tropical cities at their peaks, because all had declined or been abandoned by the time that Europeans began to explore the world, around A.D. 1500. Evidently, in the long run there was something apparently unstable about this city model: what was it? I shall return to this question for the case of Angkor.
Despite the lack of contemporary European descriptions of Angkor, we do have a lengthy account by a Chinese visitor, the commercial attaché Zhou Daguan, who spent a year in Angkor, from A.D. 1295 to 1296, at the end of King Jayavarman the Eighth’s reign. By astonishing good fortune, a copy of part of Zhou’s account was rediscovered in Beijing in the 19th century. His detailed descriptions of daily life at Angkor complement the inscriptions that tell us about the temple administrations and the depictions of ceremonies and wars on Angkor’s temple bas-reliefs that provide our only other information. Imagine how much more we would understand about ancient Maya life if we had an account such as Zhou’s for the Maya city of Tikal at its prime! To give you a flavor of what Zhou saw, here are some quotes from his Memoirs on the Customs of Cambodia:
On the extravagantly luxurious architecture: “In the center of the capital is a gold tower (the Bayon). . . . To the east of it is a gold bridge flanked by two gold lions . . . about a Li [0.3 miles] north of the gold tower there is a bronze tower [the Baphuon] . It is even taller than the gold tower, and an exquisite sight.... Ten Li [three miles] to the east of the city wall lies the East Lake [East Baray]. It is about 100 Li [30 miles] in circumference. In the middle of it is a bronze reclining Buddha with water continually flowing from its navel.” Zhou’s account was confirmed by the spectacular rediscovery of part of that colossal Buddha statue in 1936, actually in the West Baray; Zhou seems to have reversed his compass directions.
As a commercial attaché, Zhou was especially interested in trade between Angkor and China. He lists the main expo
rts from Angkor to China, in descending order of preference, as: bright blue kingfisher feathers, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, beeswax, wood incense, cardamom, resin, lacquer, medicinal oil, and pepper. Angkor’s main imports from China were gold, silver, silk fabrics, tin goods, lacquered trays, celadon ware, mercury, paper, and saltpeter for making gunpowder.
On slaves: “If young and strong, slaves may be worth 100 pieces of cloth; when old and feeble, they can be had for 30 or 40 pieces. They are permitted to lie down or be seated only beneath the floor of the house. To perform their tasks they may go upstairs, but only after they have knelt, bowed to the ground, and joined their hands in reverence.... If they have committed some misdemeanor, they bow their heads and take the blows without daring to make the least movement. If a slave should run away and be captured, a blue mark would be tattooed on his face; moreover, an iron collar will be fitted to his neck, or shackles to his arms or legs.”
On interrogation and punishment of criminals: “If an object is missing, and accusations brought against someone who denies the charge, oil is brought to boil in a kettle and the suspected person forced to plunge his hand into it. If he is truly guilty, the hand is cooked to shreds; if not, skin and bones are unharmed. Such is the amazing ways of these barbarians.... [For punishment of serious offenses], a ditch is dug into which the criminal is placed, earth and stones are thrown back and heaped high, and all is over.”
On the strong sex drive of Cambodian women: “One or two days after giving birth to a child they are ready for intercourse: if a husband is not responsive he will be discarded. When a husband is called away on matters of business, they endure his absence for a while; but if he is gone as much as 10 days, the wife is apt to say, ‘I am no ghost; how can I be expected to sleep alone?’ Though their sexual impulses are very strong, it is said some of them remain faithful.”
Zhou’s brief dismissive assessment of Khmer military skills: “Generally speaking, these people have neither discipline nor strategy.”
The Khmer also had books of their own. Religious books were made of palm-leaf fronds inscribed with a stylus, and the incisions were then filled with black pigment. Secular books were written with either white chalk pencils or black ink on accordion-like screenfolds of either black or white paper, respectively. Alas, those materials are perishable in a hot humid climate, and all of Angkor’s books without exception are lost. We can only guess what those books would have told us about Khmer history, society, science, and philosophy. It’s as if we were trying to evaluate the ancient Greeks despite having lost all the writings of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Sappho, and Sophocles.
At the time when France established a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, Angkor was largely overgrown by jungle, but the huge temples and reservoirs and major canals were visible. Over the following century, as French archaeologists cleared and mapped the area and reconstructed ruined structures, a debate arose over the reservoirs’ function. In the 1980s British and American scholars began to favor the view that they were ornamental and used just for rituals, while French scholars (especially after the work of Bernard-Philippe Groslier) viewed Angkor as a “hydraulic city” dependent on the reservoirs for irrigating rice fields. A strong objection to Groslier’s view was that the reservoirs appeared to lack inlets and outlets, and that lack would have made them useless for distributing water to fields.
The resolution of this debate had to await the end of the Cambodian civil war and Pol Pot era, the application of new mapping techniques, and the launch in 2002 of a joint project between Australian, French, and Cambodian archaeologists. The research teams involved are from the University of Sydney and the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (teams headed by Roland Fletcher and Christophe Pottier respectively), in collaboration with the Cambodian authority that manages Angkor. A key advance involved the use of aerial radar imaging, which can penetrate clouds and detect variations in surface roughness and vegetation and moistness, and thereby recognize features invisible to observers on the ground. Those radar images can then be followed up by ground searches for remains of bricks, ceramics, and other direct evidence of crumbled and buried structures. The first radar images of Angkor, obtained in 1994 from the space shuttle Endeavor, were greatly expanded by a NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) airborne radar survey in September 2000 after intensive fieldwork by Christophe Pottier in the 1990s. When the radar images are combined with aerial photography and other surveys, the results are a high-resolution map for the whole of the 400-square-mile core area of the Greater Angkor urban complex.
The map reveals a web of canals with raised banks serving as roads, reservoirs of all sizes from the gigantic baray down to small ponds for each house, and a fine grid of rice fields hidden below the present-day land surface with its modern rice fields. The entire landscape from Lake Tonle north to the Kulen Hills was cleared of its original forest and converted into a low-density city whose land was devoted to rice production, houses, and temples. From the central area with the largest temples radiated six highways on large embankments, fitted with bridges. Ground surveys located the long-sought inlets and outlets of the baray, connecting them to the canal network. In addition to the famous major temples such as Angkor Wat, Baphuon, and Bayon, there were hundreds of minor local temples, each on top of a square mound 65 feet long on each side, surrounded by a moat that was crossed by a causeway on the eastern side.
Angkor’s landscape was divided into three zones, each with different roles in water management. The northeastern zone, including the Kulen Hills, served to collect water from the rivers running off from the hills. The central zone, including the big baray, stored the collected water. The southwestern zone was crisscrossed by canals that either distributed water over the rice fields or disposed of it quickly to the lake, depending on needs at the moment. One large channel, following the shortest route from the West Baray to the lake, would have served to dump excess water after heavy rains. The canals included right-angle turns and cross channels to slow the water flow, decrease erosion of the channel banks, remove suspended sediment, and prevent channels from silting up. The system’s plan and its components’ dates allow one to trace its development from the 8th to the 14th century A.D., as rivers successively farther north and west became tapped for collecting water.
The whole system represents engineering on a vast scale. Rivers were re-engineered to flow north to south instead of their original natural course of northeast to southwest. The direction of flow in one stretch of river was reversed. The big reservoirs were on a modern industrial scale, with in one case banks over 300 feet wide and 30 feet high. The resulting system is so complicated that we are only beginning to understand its operation, and there remain large elements whose function is still a mystery. Obviously, it was designed to manage water, and not just to look pretty and serve as ritual sites, as some archaeologists formerly assumed. The system’s most obvious purpose was for risk management: to smooth out fluctuations in water availability between seasons and years, and to ensure adequate water supply for rice farming even if the monsoon rains should be poor or fail in one year. The system thus served to guarantee the food supply for the capital’s inhabitants, and it illustrates systems used throughout the empire to fuel its population and its power.
By the early 1200s the Khmer Empire under King Jayavarman the Seventh was Southeast Asia’s largest and most powerful state, with its capital at Angkor. In the 1860s the French arrived to find the Khmer kingdom small and weak, with its capital 140 miles south of Angkor at Phnom Penh and only a handful of small villages in Angkor’s former urban area. What happened between the early 1200s and 1860s to produce that result?
A century after Jayavarman the Seventh, the empire underwent a slow decline. While its gold towers and pompous ceremonies still impressed the Chinese visitor Zhou Daguan in 1295-1296, construction of big stone monuments had ceased, the last traditional temple was dedicated in 1295, and the last Sanskrit text was inscribed in 1327.
At some time after the early 15th century, new capitals began to develop east and south of Lake Tonle in the vicinity of Phnom Penh, and people seem to have gradually moved away from Angkor. While a Khmer ruler in the 1600s still boasted that he had re-gilded the towers of Angkor Wat, Angkor’s urban area became abandoned after about 1660, and the Khmer kingdom continued to shrink.
One cause of the Khmer decline was the rise of powerful enemies. From the 1200s, both the Thais and the Vietnamese pressed southward, the former on the west from southern China and the latter on the east of Angkor, squeezing the Khmer Empire in a vice. The Thais claimed to have captured Angkor for a while in the 15th century, while the Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta from the Khmer in the 1700s.
Another cause was a change in the focus of the Khmer economy, from its original inland agricultural emphasis to an increasing involvement in the maritime trade along Southeast Asia’s coast between China, India, and the Islamic heartland. That would have provided a motive for shifting the capital from inland Angkor toward Phnom Penh, with a more direct connection to the coast down the Mekong River. But the Vietnamese expansion later made that Khmer maritime involvement more difficult.
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