A few weeks ago, I received an email from one of the staff of a firm called Context Conversations. Apparently, they organised travel to interesting destinations before the world ground to a halt with the COVID-19 plague. To survive, they have changed tack, and now bring such destinations to your living room via Zoom meetings. They enquired if I would be interested in giving a lecture on a subject of my choice. I replied that I would be happy to update a lecture I have given to many live audiences, on the civilisation of Angkor. The updating has involved climate change, as I have written on in previous issues. Essentially, we now have intriguing evidence that social inequality was bound in with an agricultural revolution involving the creation of irrigated and ploughed rice fields, which rapidly led to the formation of early states in South-East Asia as a period of aridity set in. The six centuries of the civilisation centred on Angkor enjoyed climatic stability as rainfall returned to normal levels; but in the 15th century, the monsoon went haywire, with storm deluges interspersed with further aridity that so affected the delicate and complex Angkorian water-distribution system that the court and much of the population decamped, leaving the great urban complex at the mercy of the elements as the forest regenerated. By the end of the 16th century, Portuguese missionaries encountered a massive, deserted stone city in the jungle.
It is a dramatic story that is germane to the modern ear because of the impact of climate change, and a story therefore with a strong moral basis. My first Zoom presentation was soon followed by a repeat, and then, a third. I have grown accustomed over the years to the requirement in my university to encourage student feedback on what I say and teach, but their comments are limited to a handful of colleagues. This is, however, the first time that feedback opinions are there on the internet for all to see. So far, I have not been embarrassed, and in the question time after I had finished, the issues raised by my listeners have been many and varied, and invariably insightful.
Context Conversations has now lined up four more Zoom talks. One is entitled ‘The Imperial Tombs of China’, and the next, ‘The Western Han Dynasty’. Both are now being programmed and the PowerPoints are ready to screen. They will be followed by the Silk Roads, and the origins of Chinese civilisation. Some of these turn on a remarkable stroke of good fortune. In 1899, a Chinese scholar, Wang Jung, went down with a dose of flu and visited his local apothecary for some suitable Chinese traditional medicine. While being served, he noticed a box containing turtle carapaces: one of the ingredients. He picked one of these up and saw some faint scratch marks on the surface, and came to a startling conclusion – they looked like some form of written script. The owner of the shop was reticent to disclose his source of these but, finally, Wang traced them to a place called Anyang. I recall waking up on the sleeper train from Beijing to the Shang Dynasty capital of Zhengzhou in 1986, and looking out of the window to find that we had halted at a railway station labelled Anyang. And here, over the years, the last Shang capital has been slowly revealed.
