Temples of Angkor Wat
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
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122
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Siem Reap,
Cambodia
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
When the city of Angkor Thom was at the peak of its power in the 12th century under king Jayavarman VII, more than one million people lived within its walls, which stood near the life-giving waters of the Tonle Sap lake. The city was greater than Imperial Rome at the peak of its power in the days of the Emperors. When a traveler from the Chinese court came to visit late in the 13th century, he was wonder-struck at the power and majesty of the Khmer civilization. (As of that date, Rome was a malaria-infested hamlet on the shores of the Tiber with only 25,000 inhabitants.) Over 70 buildings occupied a site of more than 200 square kilometers, larger than the District of Columbia, and all of them were covered with intricate carvings.
Then, within a century, the Khmer empire had fallen
Banteay Srei temple
. The traditional Thai enemy sacked the city. In the years that followed, a simpler form of Buddhism replaced the faith of Jayavarman VII, and the great temples were abandoned. Within a few years, the jungle began its slow, constant assault on the temples and palaces. One by one, the buildings disappeared beneath the vegetation. Roots grew between the great stone blocks. Vines climbed the columns and covered the carvings.For more than 500 years, Angkor Wat was lost. Then in 1861 Frenchman Henri Mouhot, chasing rare butterflies, found the lost city. When he returned to Paris with a tale of a city in the jungle, greater than Paris or London, he was thought insane. Soon afterwards he died of fever.
But others followed Mouhot and found his story was true. The French began to excavate the lost city, finding one wonder after another covered by the jungle. They cleared away the trees and vines and began to put the great stone jigsaw puzzle back together. Their work continued for more than a century, even after they surrendered their empire in Indochina.
Here is a story that illustrates the tragedy of modern Cambodia. The French decided that the great Baphuon temple could not be stabilized without first entirely disassembling it down to its constituent blocks, then re-building it over a new foundation built using modern methods
Tree at Ta Prohm
. They had completed the disassembly by the early 1970s, working with over one thousand Cambodians, from laborers to experts trained in the universities of France. When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, work on Angkor Wat stopped. The French fled. The plans showing how to put the Baphuon back together were destroyed. The local workers, like all others who were educated by or otherwise corrupted through contact with foreigners, were killed. When the Vietnamese invaded and deposed Pol Pot in 1978, the Khmer Rouge retreated to the jungles. Angkor became one of their principal strongholds. Thousands of mines were laid throughout the Angkor Thom complex.
When peace finally returned to Cambodia, when the mines were finally cleared and tourists began to return to Siem Reap, archaeologists began to look for the plans needed to re-assemble the Baphuon. When they learned the plans were gone, they looked for those who had helped take the building apart, hoping they would remember how to put it back together.
Of 1,000 or more workers who had worked on the site in 1972, only two remained alive. Eventually about 20 Cambodians, some of whom had worked on the project in the 1960s and were now in their 60s and 70s, came forward to help the new French team.
Today the Baphuon is only a small part of "the Disneyland of Asia", a vast and diverse set of ancient buildings visited by millions of tourists a year. One of Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider movies was filmed at one of the still jungle-covered temples, and the film crew partied in Siem Reap
Kids at Ta Prohm
. Angkor Wat is a professional photographer's dream and an amateur photographer's humiliation. So much beauty, so many remarkable justapositions of vegetation and intricate carving, so hard to capture. (I'll post later about the tyranny of photography.)
We all enjoyed our days in Cambodia, as much for the people as for the temples. But I could not help thinking back to Monsieur Mouhot almost 150 years ago, when he came upon all of this by himself, without ten thousand backpackers and dozens of tour buses to share it with.
