portuguese goa india 1589 a historian
writes furiously trying to capture every
detail of what the friar is saying he's
just returned from a remote land called
Cambodia where he saw something
incredible local people had taken him to
see a city a metropolis half swallowed
by the jungle canals choked with vines
towers made from blocks of incredible
size and carvings depicting the history
of a vanished Kingdom but there was more
half a league from this city here's a
temple called anger it is of such
extraordinary construction that it is
not possible to describe it with a pen
particularly since it is like no other
building in the world
it has towers and decorations and all
the refinements which the human genius
can conceive of there are many smaller
towers of similar style in the same
stone which are killed it and the temple
is surrounded by a moat and access is by
a single bridge protected by two stone
Tigers so grand and fearsome as to
strike terror into the visitor his
account will help inspire a new myth in
the European mind the myth of the lost
city
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watch a few documentaries or read a book
or two and you'll often hear about the
ancient lost city of Angkor but neither
of those descriptions are accurate
Angkor was a medieval city its glory
days in decline happening roughly in the
same timeframe as the Hundred Years War
and crucially Angkor was never lost
in fact the first Westerner to see it
was led there by local people making him
essentially just as much of a tourist as
the people visiting Angkor Wat today yet
both of these ideas survived from how
the Western discovery of Angkor shaped
opinions about it and let's just say
mistaken beliefs about who built it the
truth is Angkor was never wholly
abandoned true it would never again be a
major population center rivaling its
past the closest modern city has a
hundred and forty thousand people but
farming communities living around Angkor
continued to inhabit the former city
often they repurpose structures and
salvage fallen blocks for their own
constructions after all Angkor has
always been a low-density metropolis
with farmland within its borders so it
was no great stretch to practice
agriculture inside the walls of the old
temples religious life also continued
with local people and Buddhist monks
continuing to worship and conduct
rituals at the site and pilgrims from
wider Southeast Asia still made their
way to this ruined metropolis that
however does not mean people knew the
history of the place
many of Angkor stories were forgotten
with local people unable to read the
Sanskrit inscriptions or accounts in old
Khmer and the Empire's literature
written on Scrolls woven out of dry
leaves decayed without a scholarly elite
to care for and recopy them early
Western visitors to Angkor heard
folkloric tales about how the temples
were built by magic in a single night or
half remembered histories about how they
were erected by foreigners indeed if
these tales were even translated
correctly it's possible that the locals
actually saw the Khmer elite as
foreigners who'd come from a different
part of Cambodia as a result when early
visitors speculated about enkorz
construction they got imaginative
because everyone wanted to know who
built this one of the early theories was
that the Thai kings had founded Angkor
before migrating north to build the city
of Ayutthaya
was totally wrong like wildly wrong the
Kings about you taya had destroyed
Angkor not created it but you know
that's actually not a bad guess for a
Spanish missionary writing in 1601 the
city's at least have some architectural
similarities but other Western scholars
knew that that was just silly the guy
who really built Angkor was Alexander
the Great
huh because check this out he went to
Western India right check and Asia is
Asia after all so there's that plus
they're only separated by like 3,000
miles of bad Road and he had the Great
in his name huh so how hard would that
be no others argued that was silly it
was clearly built by the Roman Emperor
Trajan because dubbed Trajan built
really big buildings seriously that was
it that was the whole of the theory
Angkor Wat was big and Trajan built big
stuff there for Trajan built ankor wat
clearly this great city was a millennia
old built by some important European and
had subsequently been forgotten to
history and definitely it wasn't just a
few centuries old very well known in the
region and work of Cambodian kings
they'd never heard of the ugly truth is
most early European visitors refused to
believe local people had built Angkor
Wat because they looked down on
Cambodians and assumed they were
incapable so they basically did the 17th
century version of saying it was built
by aliens as weird as all this sounds
popular culture and folklore of the time
had actually prepared the ground for
early modern Europeans to expect ancient
ruins in Asia in medieval Europe
fantastic stories circulated about a
king in India known as Prester John a
Christian who ruled over a land of
wonders
that dated back to Jesus and stories
about the fictional exploits of
Alexander the Great filtered into the
popular consciousness as well and were
confused with real history making a lost
city seem more probable in other words
there was already this idea that ancient
mysterious cities lay undiscovered in
the East and the scattered reports of
Angkor fed into this romantic idea and
then in 1860 a French naturalist named
Al Murray mahute visited the city and
though he wasn't to the first European
to see Angkor he did popularize it with
the
series of travel journals and
illustrations that were published after
his death from malaria one of these
temples arrival to that of Solomon and
erected by some ancient Michelangelo
might take an honourable place beside
our most beautiful buildings it is
grander than anything left to us by
Greece overall and presents a sad
contrast to the state of barbarism in
which the nation is not launched as the
first view one is filled with profound
admiration and cannot but ask what has
become of this powerful wrath so
civilized so enlightened the authors of
zis gigantic works though he didn't
attribute it to Trajan or Alexander
mahute insisted Angkor was at least
2,000 years old and though he didn't
claim to have discovered it the way he
wrote about the city led people to
believe he had this further embedded the
romantic notion of an adventurer coming
across a forgotten ruin swallowed by the
jungle mewho tithings also alerted the
French government to anchors existence
and the drive to investigate this
cultural site played a role in the
French pressuring of the king of
Cambodia to make his country a French
protectorate weakened since the fall of
Angkor under pressure from his neighbors
and effectively a puppet for Thailand
the King accepted these ancient temples
had now helped bring colonialism to
Cambodia French academics got to work
cataloging and translating finding an
account by a Chinese diplomat that
revealed anchors true history and
restoration teams cleared the trees that
had began bursting through and
dismantling the structures they began to
beat back the jungle but not everywhere
in de prohm the roots of Banyan and silk
cotton trees had wound their way through
the blocks so thoroughly and
spectacularly that they decided to leave
the structure as it was an artifact of
what the site looked like before
reconstruction and a way for visitors to
feel like they'd truly visited the lost
city of imagination this reconstruction
and romance however had a dark side
French Colonials including government
officials looted the temples
decapitating statues and carting away
ball reliefs to sell or display in Paris
it's a process that sadly would continue
throughout the violence of the 20th
century and one of the greatest threats
to the site today yet a funny thing
happened as the Fallen City was pieced
back together it raised Cambodia's
national
Angkor Wat had appeared as part of the
Khmer flag since 1850 but seeing the
temples soar again and learning about
their glorious past made Cambodians
eager to govern themselves and memories
of Khmer power fed to the anti-colonial
movement that won the country its
independence in 1953 but the 20th
century would not be kind to Southeast
Asia and its heritage the Cambodian
Civil War and genocide arraign of the
Khmer Rouge who killed over 20 percent
of the population in four years would
drive away anchors maintenance teams for
decades deteriorating the site ironic
considering how the Khmer Rouge idolized
the old Khmer Empire and other sites
fared badly as well me--some the capital
of Ankur's great rival the kingdom of
Champa would be partially leveled by
American carpet bombing during the
Vietnam War and today the fight to
preserve Angkor continues wear and tear
from tourists clamoring over the ruins a
dropping water table from climate change
and international gangs of looters
hacking at the site with chainsaws and
wires all threatened the great city's
future so if you go and visit Angkor
please heed the posted signs don't climb
where you're not supposed to and don't
touch the carvings also try not to waste
the precious water in the local aquifer
and definitely don't buy stone statuary
if you suspect it might be genuine trust
me a modern reproduction is good enough
for any of our bookshelves because
Angkor was never a lost city and with
your help we can keep it from becoming
one special thanks to our educational
tear patrons Ahmed zo Turk Joseph Blaine
and Dominic Valencia
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you
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