An interesting fact I learned today about Angkor (where I currently am): the only surviving eyewitness account of the city at its height is that of a Chinese emissary to the Khmer empire, Zhou Daguan. Which is pretty extraordinary given that it was, by any measure, one of the... greatest cities in the world at the time, with a population estimated at 1 million people and an urban area covering something like 1,000 square kilometers ( making it the largest low-density pre-industrial urban agglomeration ever identified. And larger than most large cities even today. For comparison, Paris, the largest European city at the time, was estimated at 200,000 people, one fifth the population of Angkor. And a tiny little fraction the area of Angkor (less than 1%!). Zhou Daguan recorded meticulously the life and customs of Angkor in a book he published in 1297 upon his return to China called "The Customs of Cambodia" ( For instance he describes how "the city was surrounded by a wide moat crossed by bridges with sculptures of 54 figures pulling a nine-head nāga" and how "on top of the city gate there were five Buddha heads, four of them facing four directions, the one at the centre was covered with gold." Bridges and city gates that still exist today and that we happen to have crossed today on our rental scooters (see video)! How come no actual record remains from the Khmer people themselves? The Khmer were not an illiterate people - they were an incredibly sophisticated civilization that left thousands of stone inscriptions across their temples. But these inscriptions are largely dedicatory or religious in nature - stuff like religious dedications, military victories, royal lineages - they don't describe what daily life, customs or governance was like. There's in a way something a bit sad about this: the fact that a civilization - one of the greatest in history - can collapse so thoroughly they themselves don't have any record of what they used to be. And a lesson perhaps that record-keeping is never a luxury - it can literally be the only thing that prevents your civilization's total oblivion.show more

Arnaud Bertrand

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