of City the Gods
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Cambodia’s bewitching temples are the legacy of its medieval rulers, but they also illuminate the turbulent modern history of this extraordinary country
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Words Marcel Theroux | Photographs Philip lee harvey
Shrouded by dense jungle, Bayon, in the fortified city of Angkor Thom, is a place of stooped corridors, precipitous flights of stairs and a collection of 54 gothic towers
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‘As remote and grandiose as the Angkorean structures appear, they are also a distant mirror of the modern nation’ OPPOSITE The temple of Preah Khan (Sacred Sword) is one of the largest complexes in Angkor but tends to see fewer visitors than Ta Prohm. LEFT A bas-relief carving at Bayon temple – its bas-reliefs incorporate 11,000 figures, and those on the outer wall depict vivid scenes of everyday life in 12th-century Cambodia
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N the pre-dawn darkness, the 1,000 year-old steps to the top of the hill temple at Phnom Bakheng seem high and treacherously steep. I use both hands to scramble up the last few. It’s the dry season and the night air is almost cool. There’s birdsong from the forest below us, and a faint smell of wood smoke and elephant dung. Gradually, as the sun rises, the five central towers of Angkor Wat appear in a milky mist about half a mile to the south. To the west glimmers a huge man-made lake, constructed more than 900 years ago, which still supplies the nearby town of Siem Reap with water. At their peak, the Angkor kings ruled over an empire that included parts of modern-day Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Malaysia, but its capital stood here on the plain between Tonlé Sap Lake and the Kulen mountains. Angkor – from the Sanskrit word nagara meaning ‘city’ – was the largest city of the preindustrial age, with perhaps 750,000 inhabitants. There are the remains of more than 1,000 temples here, some Hindu, some Buddhist in inspiration. In the early morning, there is raucous birdsong, and the sandstone and laterite – a kind of spongy volcanic rock – turn pink in the dawn light. This is the time when saffron-robed Buddhist monks come to place offerings in the shrines. Even during the centuries when the
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‘There’s something ominous about the silk cotton trees whose trunks have enveloped the sandstone’
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AMBODIA rose from the ocean 5,000 years ago, an eyeblink in geological time. It was formed in a bay of the South China Sea from the silt laid down by the Mekong River. There’s still something elemental about life here: red dust, green foliage, a burning yellow sun. And water. The Angkor kingdoms depended on the successful husbandry of water. It’s recently 36
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been argued that their decline and eventual collapse in the 15th century was due to a period of prolonged and severe drought that their irrigation systems were powerless to moderate. The very design of their buildings proclaims their dependency on water. Huge moats around the temple complexes symbolise the ocean. Vast swimming pools within were reserved for the use of the kings and their concubines. One of the sources of the Siem Reap river rises in the Kulen mountains and flows through the jungle at Kbal Spean, an Angkorian site about 15 miles from the main complex. Gold-green shafts of light glint through the canopy of teak trees. The river floor is solid sandstone and the water is glassily clear. Lingams – representations of the Hindu god Shiva’s manhood – have been carved into the riverbed. The water bubbles over them then drops seven metres in a foaming white blur before flowing out to water the paddy fields. As symbolism it’s not subtle: the water is made potent by the touch of the divine phallus. But its frankness is somehow moving: as though this is a subject too important to be coy about. Without the water that makes rice cultivation possible, without the rainy season, without Tonlé Sap – the Great Lake – that lies at the heart of the country, life in Cambodia is unthinkable. At Chong Kneas fish market at dawn, barely 40 minutes from Siem Reap, women sort catches by the light of a string of bulbs, run from a generator on wires looped over the thoroughfare. A tonne of tiny catfish is still twitching on a tarpaulin. It’s part of
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other monuments were overgrown and neglected, Angkor Wat itself remained a Buddhist temple and a place of pilgrimage. By mid-morning, the main sites are awash with visitors. Cambodian guides speaking English, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Dutch and Italian lead tour parties through the ruins. Even during this busy time, the scale of the monuments is such that one moment you can be cursing an exasperating crowd of slow-moving sightseers, and the next you can be alone in an environment so unsettlingly spooky that you wish a tour party would appear and break the mood. By the end of the day, most of the ruins have emptied out. One evening, I seem to be the only visitor in the centre of Angkor Thom – the Great City, a huge fortified complex of temples and a royal palace. Another time, I stand alone in the rubble-filled corridors of Ta Prohm and hear nothing but a cicada, buzzing like a circular saw. There’s something ominous about the swampy evening light and the silk cotton trees whose massive trunks have enveloped the sandstone.
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LEFT Angkor Wat draws in the crowds, including schoolkids, but visit outside peak hours (6am-7am and 3pm-5pm) and you may be able to find a quiet spot. OPPOSITE Ta Phrom, the most atmospheric ruin at Angkor, has been swallowed by the jungle – its crumbling towers and walls locked in the embrace of vast root systems
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the daily harvest from Tonlé Sap. Out on the water, you get a sense of its scale: the lake is vast. As still and shiny as a pool of mercury, it joins the sky at the horizon. The monsoon rains have doubled its size – 185 by 35 miles, and up to 10 metres deep. It’s the most fertile fishing ground in the world. Tonlé Sap is all that remains of the bay from which Cambodia rose, its ecology having changed from salt to freshwater. The Great Lake is to Cambodians what the Nile is to Egypt – a life-giver. The flooded mangrove swamps on its edge support a huge variety of life, including human. Palm-thatched houseboats are moored in the creeks. Inside, people cook, swing in hammocks, beat out fishing nets. Grocers row from house to house in boats stacked with pumpkins and cauliflowers. Schoolchildren paddle to their floating school past water hyacinths. About 600 families live in the village of Kompong Phhluk, one hour by boat from Chong Kneas. Most of them live in stilt houses that resemble those carved into 38
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sandstone on the walls of Bayon, the mysterious temple within the ramparts of Angkor Thom. Paddling through the sticky heat with a guide, I see other vignettes from those 800-year-old basreliefs brought to life: someone searches a child’s long hair for lice; a boy of about seven guts and skins a fish; an elderly lady paddles sedately past the water hyacinths; a monk in saffron robes rinses his hands on the water’s edge.
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T’S impossible to travel around Cambodia and not be stunned at the contrast between the solidity of the Angkorean buildings and the simple palm-thatched huts on stilts where most people live. And yet, as remote and grandiose as the Angkorean structures appear, they are also a distant mirror of the modern nation. At Bayon, within the walled city of Angkor Thom, a forest of carved heads creates an oppressive sense of surveillance. Their vaguely smiling faces have been classified into three distinct types: serene and noble with a rounded
shape and almond eyes; slightly narrow with upward slanting eyes; and squarejawed with bulging eyes. All of them remind me of a more famous, equally enigmatic smile. Pol Pot – born Saloth Sar – was notoriously fun-loving and easy-going. ‘He never said very much. He just had that smile of his,’ a former comrade would tell one of Brother Number One’s biographers. In most surviving photographs, Pol Pot is smiling. He flashes a toothy grin in a blurry snap as a young man, and as an old man, dandling the child he fathered in his exile. But in other pictures, the pensive curve of his lips is the smile of the Bayon heads: watchful, evaluating, non-committal. Angkor was an inspiration to Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge leaders. They pledged to build a future for the country ‘more glorious than Angkor’. When they seized power in 1975, the entire nation was set to work in the paddy fields and on Angkor-inspired irrigation schemes. Sambath Pang, a guide at Angkor, was born in 1964. His experience is typical of his generation. Like many families, his
‘Out on the water, you get a sense of its scale: the lake is vast. As still and shiny as mercury, it joins the sky at the horizon’ ABOVE AND OPPOSITE Tonlé Sap, the Great Lake, is at the heart of the country. At the floating village of Chong Kneas, an easy excursion away from the temples, life revolves around the harvest from the lake
thought the Khmer Rouge victory would bring respite from civil war (he had lost a baby brother during the American bombing raids). But it quickly became clear that the Khmer Rouge were not the saviours they had hoped for. Sambath was separated from his family and housed by the Khmer Rouge in a special children’s centre for re-education. They slept 10 to a room. At 4.30am, seven days a week, they jogged in formation to the rice fields where they worked for 12 hours. Lunch was a thin rice porridge, served in the fields from a communal basin. Sambath was 12. The work was unrelenting. Evenings were spent repairing dykes in the paddy fields by the light of the village generator. Sambath remembers being constantly hungry. ‘Young children today think it’s funny when I tell them,’ he says. He remembers digging through layers of mouldy rice bran for useable chunks, which they washed clean of insects and cooked in banana leaves. ‘Very bad smell!’ he laughs. They split open papaya trees for the tasteless pith inside them. Someone else I spoke MAY/JUNE 2010
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‘When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, the entire nation was set to work in the paddy fields’ BELOW AND OPPOSITE Under the Khmer Rouge, Sambath Pang, who was 12 when they came to power, worked in the rice fields for 12 hours a day, before spending evenings repairing dykes in the paddy fields. Sambath is now a tour guide at Angkor
to remembered being so hungry that he caught live frogs with his toes as he was working and ate them on the spot. Cambodians who experienced this era, who suffered, who lost relatives, recall the period with an incredible lack of self-pity, but when you ask them how long the Khmer Rouge was in power, the reply is tellingly exact: ‘Three years, eight months, 20 days’. Between 1975 and 1979, 1.7 million people died – a fifth of the country’s population at the time.
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INCE Cambodia’s civil war ended 11 years ago, the town of Siem Reap has grown rapidly as tourists flock to see the treasures of Angkor. It has all the amenities you would expect from a major tourist centre, but driving out of it at first light, you are quickly plunged into a world that the builders of Angkor would recognise. It is a world of rice fields and stilt houses, where there is no electricity, and refrigeration is of the most basic kind: a big block of ice steams in the early morning air as men carve off and sell chunks of it. There are bullocks in harness in a paddy field and not a car in sight. Big green jackfruits are on sale by the roadside. Children pedal down the dusty red road clutching sickles. We follow them for a couple of miles and join a group of villagers harvesting rice. There are about 20 of them, moving in rough formation over the fields. There’s a tray of snacks and rice wine by a fence-post to fortify them through the morning’s work. The villagers have gloves and long-sleeved shirts on to guard against the constant chafing of the rice stalks. There is a teasing banter among them and they’re intrigued to have
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‘She doesn’t say it but it’s clear that this collective effort is the community’s way of making sure her family get fed’ OPPOSITE In Siem Reap, villagers, including Phon Keow (pictured), work together to harvest rice in fields. RIGHT Koh Ker, once one of Cambodia’s most inaccessible temple complexes, has been opened up and deserves your attention – in particular the seven-tier Prasat Thom
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visitors. A woman hands me a sickle. Her name is Phon Keow. She tells me these fields belong to her. She’s 31, a mother of three, and recently widowed. She doesn’t say it, but it’s clear that this collective effort is the community’s way of making sure her family gets fed. The sickle is razor sharp. I cut a sheaf of rice tentatively, worried that I’ll lose a finger. The villagers work at astonishing speed, binding the finished sheaves with a stalk and whirling them tight before dumping them on the levelled stubble. It’s a scene that can have barely altered in the centuries since Angkor rose and fell. These villagers’ instinctive communism – collective, light-hearted, mutually supportive and so hard working – is what the Khmer Rouge idolised to tragic effect. Even after being forced out of power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the Khmer Rouge clung on as a guerrilla force. It wasn’t until Pol Pot’s death in 1998 that Khmer Rouge resistance finally ended. Cambodia is still coming to terms with the years of genocide. Most of the main Khmer Rouge leaders have yet to face trial and throughout the country, Khmer Rouge victims still live alongside their torturers. Still, peace has brought huge changes for the better. Mines have been removed from swathes of the countryside, making life safer for Cambodians and opening up ancient sites that were once off limits.
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emined fields flank the road around the ruins of Koh Ker, three hours outside Siem Reap. For a time in the 10th century, the kings of Angkor moved their capital here. During more recent years of upheaval, it was impossible
to visit. There are a number of important ruins spread widely in this area, but their centrepiece is the 10-acre site of the former state temple. Archaeologists have only just begun to study it once more. The long path to its centre passes through tumbledown gateways in an almost undersea palette of green and grey. From time to time, sunlight bursts through the canopy of teak trees onto the moss and faded stone. Creatures from Hindu mythology guard the ruins. In the deep silence, birdcalls echo across the dark pools of water that surround the site. There is an eeriness here, a strong sense of what Angkor must have been like during its long occultation in the jungle. At its centre is Prasat Thom, an astonishing 40-metre-high pyramid that towers over the landscape. With its stepped sides, it uncannily resembles a Mayan temple. This whole site was constructed in a matter of decades at the whim of an Angkorean ruler, and then
just as suddenly abandoned to the jungle. Time and neglect are the co-authors of all the Angkor monuments. This sense of decay is both part of their charm and deeply unsettling. They evoke a scale of cosmic time in which human lives are poignantly brief. But there is also solace in them – a feeling of peace and wonder, and the knowledge that this beauty will outlive us. I’m the last out at closing. I want to savour my last moments – the birdsong, the mossy stonework in the fading light. Many of the carved apsaras, the celestial dancing girls, have grown blurry with the passage of time, but every now and then one startles with its pristine edges: a dancer holding a lotus, as clear as it was when the sculptor laid down his chisel more than 1,000 years ago. LP Marcel Theroux’s recent book, Far North (Faber and Faber), was a finalist for the US 2009 National Book Award. He also presented BBC Four’s documentary In Search of Wabi Sabi. MAY/JUNE 2010
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