A kingdom in the Cambodian lowlands
The Khmer Empire was the dominant state of mainland Southeast Asia from the early 9th century to roughly the 13th, and it continued in reduced form for longer. Its heartland was the plain north of the Tonle Sap, a great freshwater lake in present-day Cambodia whose size changes dramatically with the monsoon. At its height the empire’s influence reached across parts of what are now Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam.
Khmer tradition and inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer trace the empire to a king named Jayavarman II, who around 802 performed a ceremony proclaiming his rule independent and his status as a universal king. Exact details are uncertain, and scholars treat 802 as a traditional date. From this point a succession of kings built capitals around the Angkor region, near modern Siem Reap.
Kings, gods and temples
Khmer kings drew on Indian religion and kingship. Most early rulers worshipped Hindu gods, especially Shiva and Vishnu, and temples served as both holy places and symbols of royal power. A king would often build a “temple-mountain,” a stepped pyramid of stone representing Mount Meru, the mythical home of the gods, with his own deity linked to him. After a king died, such a temple could also serve as his memorial.
Two kings stand out.
- Suryavarman II ruled in the first half of the 12th century and is credited with building Angkor Wat, dedicated to Vishnu. It is a huge rectangular temple surrounded by a moat, with five towers and miles of carved relief. The walls show scenes from Indian epics and the king’s own processions and battles. It is often called the largest religious monument in the world by area.
- Jayavarman VII reigned from the late 12th into the early 13th century, after the Khmer had suffered a damaging attack by the neighboring Cham. He rebuilt the capital as Angkor Thom and built the Bayon, a temple famous for its many towers carved with large smiling faces. He favored Mahayana Buddhism. Inscriptions describe a network of rest houses along roads and many hospitals, a number often given as over a hundred, though precise figures are uncertain. These medieval hospitals in a Southeast Asian kingdom show an official concern with care for the sick that echoes charitable foundations elsewhere.
Angkor’s stone temples are a different tradition from the sacred architecture of Gothic cathedrals going up in France at around the same time. Both involved huge labor, specialized craftsmen and religious meaning, and both took generations. Khmer builders used sandstone and laterite, and their methods owed more to carpentry joints than to the arch.
Water and rice
Angkor was not just a ceremonial site but a working city and agricultural region. Rice was the staple, and the climate presents a challenge: heavy monsoon rains for several months, followed by a long dry season. The Khmer built a landscape of embankments, canals and rectangular reservoirs called barays. The largest, such as the West Baray, are several kilometers long. Their exact functions are debated. They may have stored water for irrigation, helped control floods, supplied the city, held ritual meaning as sacred seas, or all of these at once.
Modern surveys using airborne laser scanning have revealed that the settled area around Angkor was far larger than once thought, with networks of roads, ponds and settlement mounds stretching over hundreds of square kilometers. Estimates of how many people lived there vary a great deal, and any figure should be considered tentative. Angkor was probably one of the largest urban zones of the preindustrial world, but it was a low-density sprawl of homes, rice fields and temples, rather than a compact walled city like those of Europe. The engineering involved was a form of medieval engineering suited to a monsoon region.
An eyewitness
A Chinese envoy named Zhou Daguan stayed at Angkor in 1296 and 1297 and wrote a short account. He describes the king’s processions, markets run largely by women, local customs, and the palace and temples. His work is one of the few surviving descriptions by an outsider, although he could be wrong or biased, and archaeologists compare his remarks with what they find on the ground.
Decline
Historians do not agree on why Angkor declined. Proposed factors include warfare with Ayutthaya, a rising Thai kingdom (a sack of Angkor in 1431 is the traditional date, though sources are thin), a shift in trade toward coastal ports, the spread of Theravada Buddhism that reduced the importance of expensive royal temples, and environmental stress. Studies of tree rings point to severe droughts and heavy monsoons in the 14th and 15th centuries, which may have strained the water system. No single cause has proven convincing, and the move of the Khmer court south toward Phnom Penh probably had several reasons.
Angkor was never fully abandoned. Angkor Wat remained a Buddhist site of worship, which is part of why it survives in such good condition.