The ancient temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia(photo by Vasudha Narayanan)
July 19, 2006
Published by The Australian
The inscriptions on Angkorian ruins posed riddles that cried out for solutions CAMBODIA is the only country that has a ruin on its national flag and it's perhaps the only country to praise a ruin in its national anthem. The ruin is Angkor Wat, and these two facts say something about the way Angkor has become a key element in Cambodia's national identity and its collective unconscious, especially since the country gained its independence from France in 1953.
The effect of the temples and of the myths surrounding them has been enormous and by no means entirely beneficial. Many of the myths surrounding Angkor and the Khmer developed in the colonial era (1863-1953) and only recently have been called into question. Contrary to much popular writing about Angkor, for example, the ruins were never forgotten by the Khmer, nor were the temples lost in the jungle, as many early writers suggested.
Buddhist inscriptions at Angkor Wat date from as late as 1747. When Siam annexed much of northwestern Cambodia in the 1790s, one of the provinces it took - the one containing the Angkorian ruins - was called Mahanokor or Great City. A Cambodian royal seal from the 1840s depicted a three-towered temple, much as the Cambodian flag depicts Angkor today.
In 1860, when French botanist Henri Mouhot supposedly stumbled across Angkor Wat, he was led there by a Cambodian guide and found a flourishing Buddhist monastery on the temple grounds.
The French visitors found Angkor Wat filled with Buddha images, placed there through the centuries by the faithful.
Another myth, recently called into question, asserted that Cambodia declined precipitously after the city of Yasodharapura, where the temples were located, stopped being a royal capital at some point in the 1500s, when several temples at Angkor, including Angkor Wat, were artistically enhanced.
Cambodia did became a smaller kingdom, but throughout the 16th and 17th centuries it traded profitably with foreign powers and in the mid-16th century was self-assured enough to launch a military campaign against Siam. The masterpieces of Khmer literature, The Reamker and the normative poems of chbab date from this period.
Together, these two myths minimised the continuities in Cambodian history between the Angkorian era and the pre-colonial period. The continuities were hard for the French to locate in the 1860s, when Cambodia was emerging, as it did in the 1990s, from decades of invasions, foreign occupation and prolonged civil war. It was to all intents and purposes a failed state.
In the 1860s Cambodians had not lost the temples or the sense that a great city had once flourished in the northwestern part of the kingdom. But they had lost the sense that their Khmer-speaking ancestors had hauled the stones, carved them and set them into place. They did not know that the monarchs, whose names they had lost, spoke Khmer.
They knew nothing about the sequence of reigns and temples or about the religious, historical or literary significance of much of the art. One hundred years later, when I first lived in the country, many Cambodians, especially those with little formal education, were unwilling to accept the idea that ordinary men and women had built the temples and had inhabited the landscape that surrounded them. Instead, they happily assigned the task to giants.
French historians, linguists and archeologists, familiar with European architectural accomplishments, were less bemused by the engineering skills involved in building the temples than the Cambodians were. To French savants, the Angkorian ruins and the inscriptions discovered across the country posed tempting riddles that cried out for solutions. When had the temples been built? Who had built them? What did the inscriptions say? To decipher the inscriptions, scholars concentrated first on the Sanskrit ones, reflecting a top-down, royalist bias that persisted among French scholars of Cambodia for many years.
Once the ruins came under Franco-Cambodian control in 1907, French colonists and scholars were drawn to the grandeur of the temples and the artistic and engineering talents of the people who had built them, rather than to the sociology of Angkor or to the people who lived there.
Sanskrit inscriptions, and the larger temples, led scholars away from ordinary people and made Angkor inaccessibly grandiose. The Khmer language inscriptions, all in prose, are only now being dealt with in a systematic way and, while they are less rewarding in some ways than the Sanskrit ones, they are rich in data about issues such as land ownership, taxation and administrative procedures.
Until the 1960s, no excavations were carried out at Angkor, and these were a much lower priority for the French than their admirable work of maintaining and restoring the main temples, and examining Angkorian art. It is only in the past decade or so that a serious effort has been made to start excavating residential and burial sites, in an effort to put ordinary people back into the flourishing city of Yasodharapura. This welcome trend has occurred alongside the growing popularity of Angkor as a destination for Cambodian visitors, who are admitted to the temples free of charge.
Yet in the early '60s hardly any Cambodians visited the site. As tens of thousands of Khmer visit and revisit the temples, they become less mysterious, less grandiose, and they also become in a sense the property of the Cambodian people, as they were in the Angkorian era.
In the '60s and early '70s, Angkor filled Cambodia's past and Norodom Sihanouk filled the present. Ordinary people, in both eras, except in the sense that they were Sihanouk's children, were whited out. Sihanouk allowed himself to be compared with the kings of Angkor, especially with the supposedly benevolent ruler Jayavarman VII, whose overblown reputation has diminished somewhat in the light of recent scholarship.
In the '60s, in other words, it was as though nothing of significance had occurred between one era and the other. Leading a country of barely six million people, with almost no known mineral resources, the prince considered himself to be a leading player on the world stage.
Then the disconnect between Angkor and Cambodia's limited potential became sharper under Democratic Kampuchea. As Pol Pot and his colleagues claimed to be leading an unprecedented revolution, of a sort that had never occurred anywhere else, they turned their back on nearly everything that was known about Cambodia's past. At the same time, as with Sihanouk and his successor, the mystical Buddhist general Lon Nol, they were unable or unwilling to disown Angkor. The temples were too impressive to ignore and an image of Angkor reappeared on the new Cambodian flag.
In a speech delivered over the radio in October 1977, Pol Pot said: "Long ago there was Angkor. Angkor was built in the era of slavery. Slaves like us built Angkor under the exploitation of the exploiting classes, so that these royal people could be happy. If our people can make Angkor, they can make anything." While the phrase "slaves like us" has an ironic relevance to the Khmer Rouge era, the last sentence in the passage connecting the capacities of the two civilisations suggests that Pol Pot had been so dazzled by Angkor and by what the temples suggested were the intrinsic virtues of the Cambodian people that he felt Cambodia to be a place of almost limitless potential, fuelled by a revolutionary fervour unique to the Cambodian race.
French colonialism and the Cold War isolated Cambodia from the rest of Southeast Asia, and scholarship about Cambodia often has been reluctant to place Cambodia's so-called Middle Period, to say nothing of the history of Angkor and more recent times, into the context of regional history.
Angkor weighs heavily on Cambodia's consciousness and on Cambodian notions of the past. This has been the case since the temples were discovered by the French.
However, as work opens up to show us Yasodharapura as a place not only crowded with temples and ruled by kings but crowded with people - as many as 750,000, it's now estimated - the period becomes more accessible, more humane and, in a pleasing sense, not only a wonder of the world and a World Heritage site but also the property of ordinary Khmer.
David Chandler is emeritus professor of history at Monash University.
The effect of the temples and of the myths surrounding them has been enormous and by no means entirely beneficial. Many of the myths surrounding Angkor and the Khmer developed in the colonial era (1863-1953) and only recently have been called into question. Contrary to much popular writing about Angkor, for example, the ruins were never forgotten by the Khmer, nor were the temples lost in the jungle, as many early writers suggested.
Buddhist inscriptions at Angkor Wat date from as late as 1747. When Siam annexed much of northwestern Cambodia in the 1790s, one of the provinces it took - the one containing the Angkorian ruins - was called Mahanokor or Great City. A Cambodian royal seal from the 1840s depicted a three-towered temple, much as the Cambodian flag depicts Angkor today.
In 1860, when French botanist Henri Mouhot supposedly stumbled across Angkor Wat, he was led there by a Cambodian guide and found a flourishing Buddhist monastery on the temple grounds.
The French visitors found Angkor Wat filled with Buddha images, placed there through the centuries by the faithful.
Another myth, recently called into question, asserted that Cambodia declined precipitously after the city of Yasodharapura, where the temples were located, stopped being a royal capital at some point in the 1500s, when several temples at Angkor, including Angkor Wat, were artistically enhanced.
Cambodia did became a smaller kingdom, but throughout the 16th and 17th centuries it traded profitably with foreign powers and in the mid-16th century was self-assured enough to launch a military campaign against Siam. The masterpieces of Khmer literature, The Reamker and the normative poems of chbab date from this period.
Together, these two myths minimised the continuities in Cambodian history between the Angkorian era and the pre-colonial period. The continuities were hard for the French to locate in the 1860s, when Cambodia was emerging, as it did in the 1990s, from decades of invasions, foreign occupation and prolonged civil war. It was to all intents and purposes a failed state.
In the 1860s Cambodians had not lost the temples or the sense that a great city had once flourished in the northwestern part of the kingdom. But they had lost the sense that their Khmer-speaking ancestors had hauled the stones, carved them and set them into place. They did not know that the monarchs, whose names they had lost, spoke Khmer.
They knew nothing about the sequence of reigns and temples or about the religious, historical or literary significance of much of the art. One hundred years later, when I first lived in the country, many Cambodians, especially those with little formal education, were unwilling to accept the idea that ordinary men and women had built the temples and had inhabited the landscape that surrounded them. Instead, they happily assigned the task to giants.
French historians, linguists and archeologists, familiar with European architectural accomplishments, were less bemused by the engineering skills involved in building the temples than the Cambodians were. To French savants, the Angkorian ruins and the inscriptions discovered across the country posed tempting riddles that cried out for solutions. When had the temples been built? Who had built them? What did the inscriptions say? To decipher the inscriptions, scholars concentrated first on the Sanskrit ones, reflecting a top-down, royalist bias that persisted among French scholars of Cambodia for many years.
Once the ruins came under Franco-Cambodian control in 1907, French colonists and scholars were drawn to the grandeur of the temples and the artistic and engineering talents of the people who had built them, rather than to the sociology of Angkor or to the people who lived there.
Sanskrit inscriptions, and the larger temples, led scholars away from ordinary people and made Angkor inaccessibly grandiose. The Khmer language inscriptions, all in prose, are only now being dealt with in a systematic way and, while they are less rewarding in some ways than the Sanskrit ones, they are rich in data about issues such as land ownership, taxation and administrative procedures.
Until the 1960s, no excavations were carried out at Angkor, and these were a much lower priority for the French than their admirable work of maintaining and restoring the main temples, and examining Angkorian art. It is only in the past decade or so that a serious effort has been made to start excavating residential and burial sites, in an effort to put ordinary people back into the flourishing city of Yasodharapura. This welcome trend has occurred alongside the growing popularity of Angkor as a destination for Cambodian visitors, who are admitted to the temples free of charge.
Yet in the early '60s hardly any Cambodians visited the site. As tens of thousands of Khmer visit and revisit the temples, they become less mysterious, less grandiose, and they also become in a sense the property of the Cambodian people, as they were in the Angkorian era.
In the '60s and early '70s, Angkor filled Cambodia's past and Norodom Sihanouk filled the present. Ordinary people, in both eras, except in the sense that they were Sihanouk's children, were whited out. Sihanouk allowed himself to be compared with the kings of Angkor, especially with the supposedly benevolent ruler Jayavarman VII, whose overblown reputation has diminished somewhat in the light of recent scholarship.
In the '60s, in other words, it was as though nothing of significance had occurred between one era and the other. Leading a country of barely six million people, with almost no known mineral resources, the prince considered himself to be a leading player on the world stage.
Then the disconnect between Angkor and Cambodia's limited potential became sharper under Democratic Kampuchea. As Pol Pot and his colleagues claimed to be leading an unprecedented revolution, of a sort that had never occurred anywhere else, they turned their back on nearly everything that was known about Cambodia's past. At the same time, as with Sihanouk and his successor, the mystical Buddhist general Lon Nol, they were unable or unwilling to disown Angkor. The temples were too impressive to ignore and an image of Angkor reappeared on the new Cambodian flag.
In a speech delivered over the radio in October 1977, Pol Pot said: "Long ago there was Angkor. Angkor was built in the era of slavery. Slaves like us built Angkor under the exploitation of the exploiting classes, so that these royal people could be happy. If our people can make Angkor, they can make anything." While the phrase "slaves like us" has an ironic relevance to the Khmer Rouge era, the last sentence in the passage connecting the capacities of the two civilisations suggests that Pol Pot had been so dazzled by Angkor and by what the temples suggested were the intrinsic virtues of the Cambodian people that he felt Cambodia to be a place of almost limitless potential, fuelled by a revolutionary fervour unique to the Cambodian race.
French colonialism and the Cold War isolated Cambodia from the rest of Southeast Asia, and scholarship about Cambodia often has been reluctant to place Cambodia's so-called Middle Period, to say nothing of the history of Angkor and more recent times, into the context of regional history.
Angkor weighs heavily on Cambodia's consciousness and on Cambodian notions of the past. This has been the case since the temples were discovered by the French.
However, as work opens up to show us Yasodharapura as a place not only crowded with temples and ruled by kings but crowded with people - as many as 750,000, it's now estimated - the period becomes more accessible, more humane and, in a pleasing sense, not only a wonder of the world and a World Heritage site but also the property of ordinary Khmer.
David Chandler is emeritus professor of history at Monash University.
2 comments:
Thank you David for writing this article!
You deserve Khmer citizen from our King.
I'm holding your Cambodian history book for reference, David. Thank you for helping us reveal our own story.
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