The Khmer Empire of Angkor

Long before Angkor, the lower Mekong was home to trading kingdoms. Chinese visitors called the earliest one Funan. Its port at Óc Eo, in today’s Vietnam, traded with India and even received Roman coins.

From India came ideas: Sanskrit, Hindu gods, Buddhism, and the idea of the king as a universal ruler. Local peoples reshaped them into something new.

In 802, according to an inscription carved 250 years later, a ruler named Jayavarman II held a ceremony on the Kulen hills, declaring himself a chakravartin, a “universal monarch”.

The ceremony declared independence from “Java”, which scholars interpret in different ways. Historians now treat 802 as a traditional date rather than a sudden beginning.

Jayavarman II and his successors built their capitals on the plain north of the great lake, the Tonle Sap.

Around 889, King Yasovarman I founded a new capital, Yasodharapura, at Angkor. Next to it his workers dug a reservoir seven kilometres long, the East Baray.

Later kings dug even larger reservoirs and canals. The system stored monsoon water and spread it across rice fields.

Airborne laser scans show that Greater Angkor covered around a thousand square kilometres, the largest city of the world before the industrial age by area.

Khmer kings extended their power across the Khorat plateau and into the Chao Phraya basin. Roads with bridges and rest houses linked Angkor to its provinces.

Great temples were built at Phimai and Phanom Rung, in today’s north-east Thailand, and Lavo, today’s Lopburi, became a major centre.

These places were not simply “Khmer” or “Thai” in the modern sense: they were home to many peoples, including Mon and Khmer speakers, under shifting overlords.

King Suryavarman II ruled from 1113 to around 1150. He built Angkor Wat, a temple for the Hindu god Vishnu, and possibly also his funerary temple.

Its five towers represent Mount Meru, the centre of the universe. Its moat and walls enclose about 160 hectares.

Its galleries carry hundreds of metres of carved scenes, from Hindu epics to the king’s own armies on parade.

In 1177 a fleet from Champa, in today’s central Vietnam, sailed up the Mekong and sacked Angkor.

A prince, Jayavarman VII, drove the Cham out and was crowned in 1181. A Mahayana Buddhist, he built a new walled city, Angkor Thom, with the Bayon temple at its centre.

His inscriptions list 102 hospitals and 121 rest houses along the roads. Under him the empire probably reached its greatest extent.

In 1296 a Chinese envoy, Zhou Daguan, arrived from the Mongol Yuan court and stayed about a year.

He described golden towers, royal processions, markets run by women, bathing in the rivers and the king appearing at a palace window.

His short book is the only detailed eyewitness description of Angkor from the time it was a living capital.

In the 1200s and 1300s Theravada Buddhism spread among ordinary people across the region, replacing the costly royal temple cults of Angkor.

Tai-speaking kingdoms rose on the empire’s western and northern edges: Sukhothai around 1238, Lan Xang in 1353, and Ayutthaya, founded in 1351.

Much of their court culture, from royal vocabulary to ceremonies and the Thai script itself, grew out of Khmer models.

Ayutthaya attacked Angkor several times. Chronicles date its capture to 1431, and that year is often given as the “fall of Angkor”.

Most historians now see a slower change. Tree rings show severe droughts and floods in the 1300s and 1400s that may have damaged the water system.

Trade was also shifting to the sea. The Khmer court moved south to the area of Phnom Penh, on the Mekong, closer to the sea routes.

Angkor was never truly abandoned. Buddhist monks kept Angkor Wat as an active monastery, and pilgrims came from across the region.

From 1795, the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, which includes Angkor, were administered by Siam. In 1860 the French naturalist Henri Mouhot made the ruins famous in Europe.

Under a treaty of 1907, Siam ceded those provinces to French-ruled Cambodia. Episode 12 tells the wider story of that colonial era.

In 1992 Angkor became a UNESCO World Heritage site. Angkor Wat appears on Cambodia’s national flag.

Since 2012, airborne laser scanning, lidar, has revealed whole cities hidden under the forest around Angkor and on Phnom Kulen.

The temples, the art and the ideas of kingship of Angkor are a shared heritage of mainland Southeast Asia.

At its height, the Khmer Empire was the strongest power in mainland Southeast Asia, at the same time as the Song dynasty in China and the Crusades in the Middle East.

Its temples still stand in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.

Next: the Mongols, who built the largest land empire in history.