CHAPTER 9
The Remains of Imperialism
Angkor has been abandoned so many times, in so many ways, that loss has become synonymous with the city’s identity. But we can place at least some of the blame for its “lost city” reputation on the French explorer Henri Mouhot, who wrote a famous account of visiting Angkor Wat in 1860. His travel diaries, published posthumously, became a sensation and sparked a fascination for Cambodian culture in France. But it was a very specific kind of fascination. Shortly after Mouhot’s journey there, the French claimed Cambodia as a protectorate. Stories of how a brave French naturalist “discovered” the riches of France’s new colonial acquisition played well back home, especially because Mouhot implied that present-day Cambodians didn’t appreciate their own treasures.1 In fact, Mouhot suggested modern-day Cambodians were too savage to have made such a city, and that it must have been built by ancient Egyptians or Greeks. Only European scientists could possibly be trusted to study Angkor, given that the Cambodians themselves had allowed it to rot away in the jungle. It was archaeology as the white man’s burden.
That’s the feeling that steered conversations about Angkor in the West for the next century or so. Not only was this line of thinking factually incorrect, but it also erased the complicated history of Angkor’s transformation from a massive capital city to a remote pilgrimage site occupied by Buddhist monks. It’s important to understand that the city never stood empty, even after the royal family left in the early 15th century.2 During the 16th century, when the city was supposedly “lost,” the Cambodian king Ang Chan commissioned the completion of some reliefs at Angkor Wat. A few decades later, the city was described by a Portuguese friar named Antonio Da Magdalena, who was likely its first European visitor, roughly 300 years before Mouhot. In the 17th century, a Japanese pilgrim drew a map of Angkor Wat, and in the 18th century a Cambodian dignitary built a stupa for his family on the grounds of Angkor Wat. All these pieces of evidence suggest that people all over the world knew about Angkor, and it was a thriving pilgrimage destination. When the French colonizers arrived in the 19th century, they had to clear out a community of monks living on site. Mouhot’s account was an act of revisionist history as audacious and long-lasting as Suryavarman’s sweeping erasure of old Angkor beneath the West Baray.
The French craze for Southeast Asian civilization, inspired by Mouhot, reached a peak in 1878. In that year, the Paris World’s Fair featured an exhibit of ancient Khmer art that French scholars had removed from Angkor and other Khmer Empire sites. In 1900, a group of French researchers made a permanent home in Southeast Asia by founding the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. Then, in 1907, the EFEO took over supervision of archaeological work at Angkor, and their role continues to this day. In the early 20th century, this added academic credibility to the popular notion that the French had discovered Angkor and knew the most about it. It also led to French scholars mistakenly assuming that Angkor Wat was a European-style walled city, and that the Khmer lacked their own distinct cultural traditions.
A lot has changed since 1907. Damian Evans was affiliated with the EFEO when he led the lidar mapping project, which provided evidence to contradict European scholars’ claims that Angkor wasn’t as large as its inscriptions suggested. Meanwhile, many modern scholars have debunked the idea that Angkor had somehow gone missing, and it just so happened that a member of its colonizing nation “found” it in time for his colleagues to loot its temples for the world’s fair.
As always, the truth is weirder and more complicated than the legend.
The first flood
Written into the ancient footprint of Angkor are dramatic signs of what went wrong in the city. Both lidar scans and excavations show frenetic—and increasingly complex—repairs and modifications to the city’s canals, embankments, moats, and reservoirs over the centuries. As Evans pointed out when we visited the West Baray, some of these modifications were necessary because kings and their priests wanted the cityscape to line up with the idealized proportions of a cosmology. But some were responses to climate instability, as well as the usual wear and tear that infrastructure suffers when it’s used by hundreds of thousands of people. Still, when the devastating floods finally came to Angkor in the 14th century, it might not have been obvious to people that their city would never fully recover. That’s because Angkorians had been through much worse, and had come out of it with an even bigger empire than before.
In 928, mere decades after Yasovarman moved the capital city to its present location at Angkor, a king named Jayavarman IV took the throne. For reasons we don’t fully understand, he uprooted the entire court and moved the capital again—this time, northwest to a bustling city called Koh Ker. There, the king ordered his khñum to build palaces and public works from enormous blocks of locally quarried sandstone. His crowning achievement, of course, would be a baray the likes of which nobody had ever seen. Workers erected a 7-km embankment across the Rongea River valley, blocking several large rivers, and creating what looked like a vast sea. Lined up perfectly to the south of the embankment, Jayavarman IV’s workers built the tallest temple in the kingdom, Prasat Thom. An impressive pyramid, its stepped sides create the illusion that each level is receding into the distance, as if it were a tiered slope. At the top of Prasat Thom was an enormous linga, possibly made of bronze or wood, that disappeared long ago. Only the pyramid remains, each tier bursting with greenery, next to a river valley still strewn with the bricks blasted across the land over 1,000 years ago when the river overtopped the embankment twice within a few years, and then broke through completely.
It seems clear that Jayavarman IV wanted to create a very specific experience for travelers entering his city. Koh Ker was along a major highway between Angkor and Wat Phu in today’s Laos. The embankment wasn’t just a water retention feature; it was also a stunning promenade that led straight from the road to Angkor into the heart of Koh Ker’s temple district. People traveling south along the baray to the capital city would soon see the giant linga that topped Prasat Thom directly in their line of sight. It would have loomed in the distance for the entire 7-km walk, a sign of fertility, sanctity, and power.3 Needless to say, it’s clear that Jayavarman IV’s intentions were as much about political theater as they were practical. He wanted his dike to connect to existing roads, and he wanted it to line up with his temples. Like the West Baray, it was aspirational water management rather than solid engineering.
Why did Jayavarman IV put so much energy into building yet another city, when he could have kept expanding Angkor? One theory, put forth by French archaeologist George Cœdès, was that Jayavarman IV had usurped the throne and didn’t care about Angkor. But Royal University of Phnom Penh historian Duong Keo argues that this once-popular idea was an example of Western scholars misunderstanding the rules of succession in Southeast Asian civilizations. Expecting that the “proper” order of things would be for a king’s sons or brothers to take the throne after his death, historians failed to notice that this type of family succession was the exception rather than the rule at Angkor.4 Duong suggests a more realistic possibility, which is simply that Jayavarman IV was from Koh Ker and had already built a fancy palace there. Why move? This interpretation also fits with recent environmental studies of the region, which show that people were farming and clearing the land with fire for centuries before and after it was the capital of the Khmer Empire.5
Assuming that Jayavarman IV wasn’t an Angkor local, that would put him in the same category with many of the empire’s expansionist kings, like Suryavarman I and II, who also hailed from distant regions. Usually these outsider kings were able to unite disparate regions in part because of personal connections to the provinces. At Koh Ker, we see evidence of a similar kind of allegiance-forming, but with a very different set of allies. We find those “interminable lists of slave names” at Koh Ker—there are thousands of them—and inscription expert Eileen Lustig believes they hint at where Jayavarman IV’s sympathies lay.
It was a period of great unrest and infighting in the region, and the Khmer Empire had shrunk dramatically. Aspara National Authority researcher Kunthea Chhom6 describes how the lists of names at Koh Ker reveal a richly textured social structure in the city, including a wide variety of titles for the khñum.
Lustig believes it’s possible that Jayavarman IV allied himself with a class of commoners called si, who are represented in Koh Ker inscriptions as being superior to commoners called gho. Jayavarman IV may have been elevating certain working-class people to serve as his allies. Suddenly those lists of slave names no longer seem “interminable” but instead a way to understand hierarchy among the working classes. The king’s alliance with si may also have represented a larger shift in the Khmer social hierarchy, similar in some ways to the changing roles of liberti in early Imperial Rome. Lustig writes:
The move of the centre from Angkor to Koh Ker might be best understood as a strategy by Jayavarman IV to weaken an opposing group and bolster his power base, allied with si [commoners]. Following the return from Koh Ker to Angkor, a change in the socio-political power structure, perhaps seen in the rising influence of many officials and gho commoners, becomes apparent.7
While his aristocratic neighbors squabbled among themselves, Jayavarman IV retreated to live among the commoners at Koh Ker. His next move may have been to ally with a subset of his own khñum, the si, to create a new kind of city, and to shore up his power. After his reign, when the capital returned to Angkor, a different group of khñum called the gho rose to power. Paying careful attention to slave names allowed Lustig to discern how elites allied themselves with different groups of laborers.
Still, the glory days of Koh Ker were short-lived. To figure out what happened to the empire’s greatest baray, a group of archaeologists and civil engineers used their knowledge of present-day dam structures to re-create what went wrong with the embankment/road that marked the northern boundary of the city. Though there were myriad problems, it appears likely that the main issue was that engineers hadn’t built an adequate spillway. During a rough monsoon season, the waters ran faster and higher than expected. In the end, the dike wasn’t just overtopped: its damaged stone structure was eaten away by fast currents and torn apart.8 There’s evidence that people tried to shore up the failing spillway afterward, raising the wall’s height for hundreds of meters around the breach, but repairs were never completed. Within a couple of years, the water overtopped the spillway again. Parts of the city were completely inundated, and it seems that the king gave up on his mega-baray. In 944, the capital returned to Angkor. A small number of people continued to live and farm in the diminished version of Koh Ker for centuries, connected by road to the capital at Angkor.
The story of Koh Ker is a microcosm for what happened eventually at Angkor itself. Beset by political woes from outside, facing a crumbling infrastructure inside, the city transformed from a dense hub to a rambling sprawl of farming villages. Still, it would be several centuries of expansion before Angkor went full Koh Ker. During that time, Suryavarman’s laborers built up the empire’s trade routes and bureaucracy, while Suryavarman II improved its infrastructure.
And then, in 1181, Angkor underwent its most profound urbanization. A new king rose, Jayavarman VII, who is still often called “the great king.” His workers built thousands of roads, hospitals, and schools. His reign is referenced so frequently in Angkorian history that archaeologists refer to him by the nickname J7. He was Angkor’s most successful expansionist. He was also an outsider who spent many years in exile among the Cham people in what is now Vietnam, before returning to Angkor during the Khmer-Cham war. Working with allies from within the Cham forces, he brokered peace, stopped a Cham invasion of Angkor, and took the throne. J7 ordered his temple scribes to create inscriptions about his commitment to peace, but he also conquered vast parts of Cham territory by force. He was a mass of contradictions, but J7 remade the Khmer Empire, and it’s his city plan whose remains archaeologists study today. After his regime ended, we enter the final phases of Angkor’s transformation.
The king of a thousand faces
Piphal Heng’s fascination with Angkorian archaeology started when he was growing up in Cambodia. He told me that when he was a kid in the early 1990s, there were very few tourists at Angkor Thom, where King J7’s famous Bayon temple resides. “When I was 11, my family went to a pagoda nearby,” he recalled. “While they were doing rituals, I went up to the temple. By the time I reached the central tower, I got lost. I was frightened. There was nobody there, and I was surrounded by huge faces.” I immediately understood what he meant. When I visited nearly three decades later, the Bayon was full of tourists, but the place was still magnificently disturbing.
One of Jayavarman VII’s many architectural achievements, the Bayon has no walls. Its sprawling galleries are held up with a thick forest of pillars, topped with swollen, flower bud–shaped towers of different heights. From a distance, it looks like a jungle skyline. During J7’s time, the place would have been painted in white and gold, gleaming like a pale lotus flower in the center of a manicured neighborhood for the hundreds of priests, artisans, servants, and family members in the king’s retinue. Today, its algae-riddled sandstone9 is the gray-brown of aging tree trunks. Wild trees have overtaken the gardens and pools where locals and pilgrims once strolled. But climbing to the upper terrace is an exercise in awe and dread. It’s because of the faces.
When J7 took the throne, he became the Khmer Empire’s second Buddhist king after Suryavarman. There was one key difference. Suryavarman had tolerated Hinduism among his subjects. J7 made Buddhism the official state religion.10 Inscriptions suggest J7 declared himself Buddha incarnate, much the way his distant predecessor Jayavarman II had anointed himself a Hindu god-king in 802. During his reign, J7 ordered his court sculptors and engineers to fill the kingdom with Buddhas that many scholars believe wear the king’s face. More likely, the intention was to merge the face of J7 with that of a bodhisattva, suggesting a perfect blend of state and religious power. Over 200 of these blended faces fill the Bayon, most stretching to the height of a full-grown person.
Pillar after pillar is built from four J7 faces, each pointing in a cardinal direction, projecting a sense of blissful repose. When I first saw them from a distance, they encouraged a sense of peaceful reflection. But as I picked my way up to the central tower, always reencountering that face, I began to feel like I was under surveillance. It was as if J7 wanted the Khmer to know they were under his watchful eye, subject to his judgment. By the time I reached the top of the shrine, it felt like every surface was a face. J7 hadn’t merged with a bodhisattva. He’d merged with the city’s infrastructure itself.
If Miriam Stark is right that people were drawn to Angkor for its pageantry, we have to assume that the Bayon was one of the places they most wanted to see. Millions of people were exposed to its message over the centuries. But that message wasn’t just in the king’s omnipresent faces. It was also in the pathways everyone took through the city to reach the Bayon. For distant aristocrats who were in J7’s circle of patronage, he devised a clever plan to keep them returning to his domain. According to Stark, the Bayon held 439 niches for individual statues. “Scholars suspect these statues were Jayabuddhamahānātha images (statues of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara), distributed by the king to at least 23 provincial centres named in inscriptions,” she writes. “Their caretakers were required to bring the images to Angkor for annual consecration.” It was the perfect excuse to require local leaders to report to J7’s home turf, and it turned Angkor Thom into a site of holy pilgrimage. Angkorians witnessing the ritual would have understood that distant leaders traveled to the Bayon to pay homage the same way they did. Everyone was a servant to the king.
From the air, the Bayon looks like a stack of square blocks inside the bigger square wall of Angkor Thom, J7’s sumptuous palace located directly between the West and East Barays. Ordinary pilgrims would likely pass through the eastern gate of t
he walled enclosure around Angkor Thom, following a perfectly straight road connecting the gate to the Bayon. They would stroll by a dizzying number of statues—nagas with their many snake heads forming fan shapes, proud garudas with their fierce eagle wings spread wide, rows of demons and gods—and in the distance they would glimpse the fancy gardens, pools, and homes of J7’s household. Before entering the Angkor Thom enclosure, however, visitors would already have crossed part of the city itself. To the south was the far punier walled enclosure of Angkor Wat. North of the sprawling rectangles of the city’s two biggest reservoirs, the east and west Barays, J7 added his own baray, the Jayatataka. Plus there was a wide canal running along the eastern wall of Angkor Thom that was actually a diverted branch of the Siem Reap River.
People coming to the city in J7’s time would have also noticed that neighborhoods in the city center were as orderly as the upscale, walled temple neighborhoods. Like previous expansionist kings, J7 brought labor power to the capital. It appears these people altered the city’s layout, creating a distinct tic-tac-toe-style grid that would be familiar to anyone who has hiked through Manhattan. Streets would have been lined with dense but orderly rows of wooden houses. This degree of coordination, Heng speculates, would have required a centralized urban planning authority. In one short inscription written by J7’s son, we see a hint of what this meant. “It says Jayavarman VII took the land by force,” Heng said simply. To transform the city’s more organically shaped neighborhoods into a grid, the king’s forces relocated his subjects. This kind of coercive urban planning was also a good way to suppress rebellion, which was a constant problem for the expansionist king. “One way to crush rebellion is to take people’s property and make their families into servants of the temple,” Heng mused.
Four Lost Cities Page 17