by John Burgess
Today, Cambodia is at peace again, impoverished and struggling to make a go at democratic government. Guards stand watch at the temples. With extensive international aid, restoration is again underway. Angkor has quickly become a heavily trafficked tourist destination. Today the biggest threat to the monuments may be the millions of pairs of shoes, mine included, that tramp over stones that were intended for just the barefoot tread of kings and their attendants.
Those are the essentials of Angkor’s history, but what was daily life in the ancient times? The Khmers left hints in inscriptions that they carved into stone at many of their buildings. Most announce epic deeds and virtues of gods, kings and other worthies, but reading between the lines you can pick up an idea of popular existence. The most illuminating of these messages, found at the Eleventh Century temple Sdok Kok Thom, inspired an earlier book of mine, Stories in Stone. The purpose of the temple’s three hundred forty lines of Sanskrit and ancient Cambodian is to document a Brahmin family’s long service in the Khmer court. But in telling that story, the great chronicle touches on religious practice, land purchases, the transfer of slaves, the settlement of wilderness, even the labour schedules for the upkeep of the temple.
If the inscriptions let you hear the Khmers, bas reliefs let you see them. King Suryavarman has been holding court in the south gallery of Angkor Wat for the past eight and a half centuries. He sits cross-legged atop a carved dais, looking fully at ease with power and adulation. Fourteen parasols float overhead. The entire Khmer court, it seems, has come together for a group portrait in stone, their jewellery, headdresses and respectful posturings on display. Mostly it’s men who are close to the king – generals, Brahmins, courtiers. But a few steps away a princess rides a canopied palanquin in his direction, the sash of her garment spilling over its side. A woman of lower rank glances backward as she walks in procession, holding a blossom aloft. And there are in fact close to eighteen hundred apsara scattered about the whole expanse of Angkor Wat.
Other reliefs at later temples show the rest of society – fortune tellers, sweetheart couples, cooks, thieves stealing fruit from a dozing market vendor. Further hints of common life come from a Chinese envoy named Zhou Daguan. He arrived in Angkor in August 1296 and wrote a detailed account of a year-long stay. It’s almost as if he walked around with a reporter’s notebook in hand. Curious and perceptive, he reports that the temple towers were gilded, that people got up during hot dry-season nights to cool off with baths, that fireworks brightened night-time festivals.
In imagining the old life, there’s also help to be had in looking at today’s. The fact is that a lot of things haven’t changed much. Markets that you see in bas reliefs look not much different from ones you can find in any Cambodian town today. Ox carts that roll across the reliefs are barely distinguishable from ones you can now see travelling country roads. The lotus blossom remains ubiquitous. Spirits are held to inhabit everything and guide human destiny. Brahmins serve in the royal court in Phnom Penh. And every so often, the Cambodian public becomes enamoured with a particular elephant said to have spiritual powers.
Yet the old times also present countless imponderables. For instance, why was Suryavarman the first king to be depicted in a bas relief? Why does Angkor Wat defy the tradition that a king’s state temple is dedicated to Shiva and faces east? Scholarly exegeses stress the theological. Suryavarman identified with Vishnu, lord of the west, it is said, and therefore the temple faces that direction. But why did he choose that god? The explanations that Sray offers are entirely speculative, but grow in part from my belief that practical concerns and human conniving have their influence even in a society firmly rooted in the supernatural.
As for the temple’s apsara, anyone looking at them today can sense that they are individuals, modelled after real women of the times. For photos of quite a few of the close to 1,800 of them at Angkor Wat, see the website Devata.org. But how did they come to be present in such numbers? Which women got the privilege of lending their likenesses to eternity? And why is there one apsara on the temple’s second tier who looks so different from the others – a bit older, lacking in jewellery and headdress, seeming not to want to pose at all? The answers offered in the story again combine the temporal and spiritual.
Sray’s account of how Angkor Wat was designed and constructed likewise draws on supposition. No building plan survives. But generally we can conclude that basic architectural forms came from India, that draft designs were sketched on palm leaf (the loose-leaf paper of the times), that boats and elephants moved stones from far-away places where sandstone formations jut to the surface. Quarries from the times have been found, with half-cut blocks still waiting patiently to be finished and transported. Many thousands of people, likely a mixture of merit-seeking volunteers and slaves, flocked to Angkor to build the temple.
Other temples that show up in Sray’s story are real as well. Pre Rup, built around 960, is still sprouting shrubs up its towers, its red bricks putting on a light show in the hour before dusk. The Trinity Temple, dating from about 900, is known today as Phnom Krom. A thirty-minute climb up a rocky hill will reward you with the charms of a smaller Hindu monument – you may even get the place to yourself – and a dazzling view onto land and water in all directions. (Other prominent temples of Angkor such as the Bayon and Preah Khan make no appearance in the story because they were built after Sray’s time.)
The Freshwater Sea is known on modern maps by the Cambodian language name Tonle Sap, and the Great Dual Vector River is the Tonle Sap River. In another link with the glories of the past, modern Cambodian kings each year preside at a three-day Water Festival that marks the river’s reversal of course. Geologists attribute the switch to topographical conditions found nowhere else in the world. For most of the year, the Tonle Sap River drains the lake, taking water in a southeast direction to the Mekong River. But in the late spring, the Mekong swells with the meltings of Himalayan ice and snow far to the north. Its waters rise and back up into the lesser river, causing its flow to reverse direction and feed the lake, which then expands and renews surrounding lands.
Other places in the story are imaginary. These include the temple and estate house at Chaiyapoom, though Khmer ruins can be found in the modern-day Thai province of that name. Bronze Uncle’s shrine is an invention, though all evidence is that there were countless such places around the empire. And all residences in the story, whether palace or hut, are by necessity imaginary, because none have survived into present times. All were made of wood or bamboo and fell victim to the region’s humid air. As far as I know, no kilns have been found near the spot where I placed the architect’s house. But kilns have been found in many spots around Angkor and are being excavated as scholars try to expand understanding of life outside aristocratic circles.
Finally, the four members of the story’s central family in the story are entirely fictional. There is no record of a pious woman named Sray endowing monasteries or deflecting royal attentions, nor of a one-eared man named Nol being recalled to service as a parasol master. No diffident young woman named Bopa is known to have become a favourite concubine. And no headstrong young man named Sovan can be shown to have created Angkor Wat. But as Henri Mouhot wrote in his diary: ‘Was this incomparable edifice the work of a single genius, who conceived the idea, and watched over the execution of it? One is tempted to think so; for no part of it is deficient, faulty, or inconsistent.’
– John Burgess
Washington, D.C.
September 2012
Acknowledgments
This book took shape over the course of many years, with quite a few people lending a hand along the way. Ambassador Um Sim educated me on (among many other things) Cambodia’s all-purpose length of fabric, the krama. Beatrice Camp and David Summers took me to a village in northern Thailand where people make parasols the old way with knives and bamboo. Sos Kem advised on Cambodian language and lore. Angkor guides Saron Soeun and Koy Vy showed me many of the places that appear in t
he story and shared their deep knowledge of the region’s history, culture and nature. Other help came from people whose names I neglected to write down. A monk in Luang Prabang brought out for my inspection his temple’s best ceremonial parasol. A curator at the National Museum in Bangkok shared knowledge of royal court regalia. All of these people helped me, but any flaws in the resulting depiction of Twelfth Century Khmer society and history are my responsibility alone.
As writing progressed, I imposed on a generous group of volunteer manuscript readers. They included Cheryl Buck, Heather Cass, Peter Eisner, Sos Kem, Patrick Keown, Tim Patterson, Vornida Seng, Ambassador Um Sim, and Sharon Zackula. I feel special gratitude to Barry Hillenbrand, who did a meticulous read and scrub of the final draft, and to Ivy Broder, who read not once, but twice, three years apart. Other help in the long slog toward completion came from Steve Kroll, Mollie Ruskin, Tomasina Galiza and Somboon Sornduang.
My thanks go to M.R. Narisa Chakrabongse of River Books for taking an interest in a piece of historical fiction with an unusual period and setting. Managing Director Paisarn Piemmattawat and the River Books staff saw to their usual job of elegant design and production.
My family played a big role too. It was my parents who first introduced me to Khmer antiquity. My late father David Burgess visited Angkor in the mid-1960s and brought back an entrancing set of temple rubbings that were hung in our home. A year or two later, my mother Alice Burgess took me to see the place for myself. My daughters Katharine and Sarah, who came along on a family trip to Angkor in 2002, read drafts and helped me fine tune. Finally, thanks go to my wife Karen, who from the start encouraged me to run with the story. She read, she helped on tone, characters and structure, publication and promotion. The book exists as much through her efforts as mine.
– John Burgess
Washington, D.C.
September 2012
Further Reading
Michael D. Coe, 2003. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization, New York, Thames & Hudson
Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, 1995. The Khmers, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass. Blackwell Publishers
Claude Jacques and Philippe Lafond, 2007. The Khmer Empire: Cities and Sanctuaries from the 5th to the 13th Century, Bangkok, River Books
Charles Higham, 2001. The Civilization of Angkor, Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of California Press
All of the above books offer solid introductions to Khmer history and culture.
John Burgess, 2010. Stories in Stone: The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription & the Enigma of Khmer History, Bangkok, River Books. This book recounts French linguists’ recovery of Angkor’s lost history by cracking the code of stone inscriptions, notably one great text found at Sdok Kok Thom temple.
Zhou Daguan, translated by Peter Harris, 2007. A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books. This is the full text of the writings of Zhou, the Chinese envoy who visited Angkor in 1296 and is quoted in almost every book about the Khmer Empire.
Henri Mouhot, 1966. Henri Mouhot’s Diary: Travels in Central Parts of Siam, Cambodia and Laos during the Years 1858-61, Oxford, Oxford University Press. This classic of Khmer history literature, translated into English and reissued, recounts Mouhot’s travels in his own words.
Vittorio Roveda, with photographs by Jaro Poncar, 2003. Sacred Angkor: The Carved Reliefs of Angkor Wat, Bangkok, River Books. Using scenes from the great bas reliefs at Angkor Wat, this book delves deep into Khmer mythology.