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In 1296, the Chinese Emperor Temür Khan despatched a diplomatic mission to Angkor. Zhou Daguan was a member, arriving in August 1296 and leaving the following July. On his return, he wrote a memoir of his visit, a unique eye-witness account of Angkor under the reign of King Indravarman III. Exactly 253 years later, the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto recorded reports from missionaries of a largely abandoned city overtaken by the jungle and occupied as he reported, by wild beasts. A few decades later, in 1586, the monk Antonio da Magdalena wrote: ‘The city is square, with four principal gates. It is surrounded by a moat, crossed by five bridges. They have on each side a cordon held by giants. Their ears are all pierced and are very long. The gates are magnificently sculpted. In the middle of the city is an extraordinary temple.’ He was referring to Angkor Thom, the square, walled city founded by King Jayavarman VII, who reigned from 1181 to 1218. The city today is almost completely covered in jungle: only the central precinct incorporating the royal palace and two temple mausolea is easily accessible. This presents a great challenge to archaeologists, for the description by Zhou Daguan is so detailed, but the actual remains are silent, or have been until very recently.
What does Zhou Daguan tell us? About ten years ago, in a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, I shared a table at a conference dinner with Solang and Beling Uk, and naturally we began talking about matters of mutual interest. It soon transpired that they had translated from the Chinese Zhou Daguan’s story and, within a matter of weeks, a copy of their book arrived in my letter box. Reading it brings the silent city to life. We learn of a royal progress, with the king on a massive elephant holding the sacred sword of state. It must have been quite a spectacle. In the words of Solang and Beling: ‘Every time the king goes out, there are horse-mounted troops in front, and flag carriers, drummers and musicians at the rear. There are 300-500 palace women wearing floral patterned dresses, with flowers in their hair… there are other palace women who carry spears and shields as inner soldiers. From a distance, one sees an overwhelming number of red parasols. Next are the king’s wives and concubines on palanquins or elephants, all with gold speckled parasols.’
Wandering the streets, Daguan noted how the populace at large lived in thatched houses, while the nobility had homes roofed with tiles. The status of officials was signalled by the size of their palanquins and decorated parasols. I empathise with one insight in particular. He wrote that ‘the place is dreadfully hot; one could not be able to endure it without bathing many times a day… two or three houses share a pool’. Having excavated at Angkor with the temperature pushing 40°C, I regularly jumped into the massive Western Reservoir constructed more than 1,000 years ago to cool off at the end of the day. This statement on the houses and the pool resonates with new findings not only about Angkor Thom, but from other sites as well.
Pooling resources
I refer in particular to the temple complex of Beng Mealea. Located about 40km east of Angkor, it is rightfully described as a place of mystery. I visited it some 20 years ago, before an access road brought in the tourist hordes. My friend Liz Raddatz and I had just finished a long season at Ban Non Wat and we thought it would be nice to wind down with a trip to Angkor. On a whim, we found our way to Beng Mealea, meaning ‘Lotus Pool’, but like just about everything about this site, no one knows its original name. It was being used as the location of a movie called Two Brothers, and the film crew had put down some wooden walkways that eased our visit, because, like Antonio da Magdalena, I found myself in a stone temple overtaken by thick jungle. The style of the tumbled stone carvings that one clambers over suggest that this temple was constructed at the same time as Angkor Wat and was dedicated to Vishnu. Its location may have been determined by its proximity to the huge quarries that provided the stone for the construction of Angkor Wat.
As we explored, completely alone, we could only speculate on what purpose Beng Mealea had served in its heyday. How many lived there and serviced the daily needs of the temple, from priests to dancers, cleaners and musicians, maintenance crews and administrators? There are no inscriptions to help us know, as there are at other temples. The foundation inscription, for example, of Rajavihara at Angkor, now known as Ta Prohm, has been left largely as it must have been seen by the first Portuguese: invaded by the jungle and shrouded by trees. In 1885, Étienne Aymonier came across the foundation inscription carved in fine Sanskrit, composed by Sri Suryakumara, a son of Jayavarman, whose name translates as ‘the Sun Prince’. It describes how the temple was administered by 18 high priests and 2,740 officials. There were 2,202 assistants and 615 female dancers, while 12,640 people had the right to lodge there. From rural villages, 79,365 people were assigned to supply the temple with mosquito nets, fine cloth, rice, honey, molasses, millet, beans, butter, milk, salt, and vegetables.
The principal temple housed a shrine covered in precious gems for the king’s mother. There were 260 statues in the many subsidiary shrines, which were dedicated to the ancestors of highly ranked members of the court. This vast, rich, and powerful foundation was responsible for the administration of 102 hospitals built under the orders of the sovereign, and strategically placed across his realm. These, too, called on surpluses generated by the supporting populace. Medicines included camphor, coriander, pepper, mustard, cardamoms, molasses, cumin, pine resin, ginger, and onions. All these offerings, and the rituals of Ta Prohm itself, were intended to create merit for the salvation of the king’s mother, who was depicted as the mother of the Buddha and perfection of wisdom.
We had left Beng Mealea with many unanswered questions, but, at last, some of them have now responded to that amazing new tool LiDAR – short for ‘laser imaging, detection, and ranging’. By directing laser light to a surface and measuring the time it takes to rebound, you can create incredibly detailed maps. LiDAR has prised away the forest cover and jumbled stones at Beng Mealea to reveal a grid of streets laid out with the accuracy of any modern city. Within each sector, one can identify house mounds and rectangular ponds. There are also structures beyond the moat, just as there are at Angkor Wat. And this brings me back to Zhou Daguan’s memoir, when he said that at Angkor Thom, two or three houses shared a pool. By counting the number of pools in that city, it has been estimated that the population of the city was close to 750,000. How about Beng Mealea? I can count 38 sectors and 152 pools. If the average Angkorian family comprised 6-10 individuals, we are looking at a population in the range of 2,800-4,500.
What were their lives like? Again we can draw on Daguan’s sharp eye. If you could enter one of the ordinary people’s houses, as he did, you would notice that there was very little furniture, and no tables or chairs. They cooked on stone-lined hearths set into the ground and ate rice and fish with their hands. The wealthier families had straw mats on the floor, or the skins of tigers or deer. Walk out into the fields and you would see pomegranate trees, sugar cane, and lotuses. There were many scented flowers with ‘vibrant colours’. Go further into the forest and there you find elephants and rhinoceros, valued for their ivory and horns, and you could try to trap kingfishers for their feathers. Wild men in the deep forests were taken as slaves.
There was much work to be done to satisfy the needs of the capital. There can be little doubt that Beng Mealea was constructed to manage the sandstone quarries that lie just 8km to the north. These must have called on a large labour force to cut and dress the stones, and service the canals needed to transport them to Angkor. Indeed, as more and more information emerges about the industrial base of the kingdom, we find that temples were associated with production centres. One of these specialised in salt, another in iron-smelting. Preah Vihear, like an eagle’s eyrie on the summit of the Dang Raek escarpment, was a pilgrimage destination, as was Wat Phu in its magnificent setting overlooking the Mekong River. Those first Portuguese visitors speculated that these monuments were the work of the Romans, or of Alexander the Great. Now we know their roots were buried deeply in South-east Asia’s prehistoric past.
Charles Higham is a Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, and an authority on Cambodia's Angkor civilisation and Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
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