The Khmer Empire and Angkor: the Greatest Civilization of Southeast Asia

Introduction

In the dense tropical forests of what is today northwestern Cambodia, there lies a ruin of such staggering scale and beauty that it has inspired wonder in every generation of visitors who has encountered it. The temple-complex of Angkor Wat -- the world's largest religious monument -- is only the most celebrated jewel in a crown of monuments left by the Khmer Empire, the most powerful and sophisticated civilization that mainland Southeast Asia has ever produced. Yet even Angkor Wat, astonishing as it is, represents only a fraction of the Khmer achievement. Beneath the jungle canopy surrounding it lie the traces of a vast urban landscape, revealed by modern laser-scanning technology to have been the largest pre-industrial city complex on earth, covering more than a thousand square kilometers and supporting a population that may have numbered in the millions.

The Khmer Empire endured from 802 to 1431 CE -- more than six centuries of continuous imperial rule centered in the region around the Tonle Sap, the great lake of Cambodia that swells to four times its dry-season size every monsoon, creating one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world and making the surrounding plains among the most fertile rice-growing lands in all of Asia. At its height, the empire controlled an enormous territory encompassing modern Cambodia, much of Laos, large parts of Thailand, and portions of Vietnam -- a dominion that made it the paramount power of mainland Southeast Asia for centuries.

What makes the Khmer Empire genuinely astonishing is not merely its size but the nature of its achievement. The Khmers were master builders who constructed temple-mountains of a grandeur that rivals the greatest architectural achievements of any civilization on earth. They were hydraulic engineers of genius who built the largest man-made water management system of the ancient world, creating an infrastructure that fed millions of people and sustained one of the densest populations in the preindustrial world. They were artists who covered thousands of square meters of stone with bas-relief carvings of extraordinary delicacy and narrative power. And they were synthesizers of culture who absorbed the great traditions of India -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Sanskrit literature, Indian cosmology -- and transformed them into something distinctively, powerfully, unmistakably Khmer.

The story of the Khmer Empire is also a story of transformation and adaptation -- from Hindu to Buddhist, from monarchy to near-theocracy, from expansion to contraction, and ultimately from a great imperial power to a kingdom that abandoned its capital and retreated before the pressure of its neighbors. And then there is the final chapter: the slow reclamation of the temples by the jungle, and their rediscovery by the outside world, and the ongoing struggle to preserve these irreplaceable monuments of human civilization.

The Origins: Funan, Chenla, and the World Before the Khmers

The Khmer Empire did not emerge in a cultural or historical vacuum. The region of mainland Southeast Asia where the Khmers built their civilization had been inhabited for thousands of years and had witnessed the rise and fall of earlier polities that shaped the world the Khmers inherited.