From Cambodia

Hello friends,

Guess where I am writing this essay. I am in Siem Reap in Cambodia. Originally a student of history, I read quite a lot about the history of Southeast Asia and was particularly interested in the history of the Khmer Empire. However, Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were just names to me and I wanted to visit the area one day. Since I am no longer tied with teaching and administrative duties at the university, and since my wife Linda is relatively free during the spring break, we decided to take an organized tour to Angkor.

Our Singapore Airlines flight for Singapore took off from Kansai Internaional Airport on the late evening of February 23 and arrived at Singapore about 4:30 am the following day, where we changed planes and got to Siem Reap about 11:30 a.m. Suddenly I was caught by hot air and began to perspire a lot under the winter clothes.

We were met by a tour guide and a coach and went to the hotel. Siem Reap seems to be still a small city flourishing on tourist industry. There are a lot of hotels and restaurants along the main street. The city is surrounded by a dense tropical forest, but not by what you may imagine by the word "jungle." The people who live outside the city live in traditional houses with elevated floors. Cows and buffalows roam about freely. There are a lot of rice paddies.

In the middle of the forest, there lie a lot of ruins of ancient and medieval temples, some of which are Hindu and others Buddhist, in addition to the ruins of the grand royal capital Angkor Thom, in which there are also ruins of ancient temples. I had learned that these ancient Khmer monuments had been hidden and forgotten until the nineteenth century when some French explores "discovered" them again. Now I understand what this means. When a temple or a town is abandoned, the tropical forest prevails and swallows it up.

Obviously this area was the seat of the Khmer Empire. The rulers and their subjects were proud of the victory over their enemies and expanded the city by cutting down forest trees and burning them to make bricks. Lots of the ruined temples are constructed with bricks.

This site tells us some of the sad realities that have been repeated a number of times in history.
(1) Those who rise must fall some day. The Khmers gradually appeared in history about the first century and attained the peak of their might and prosperity in the 12th and the early 13th century. The great grand temple of Angkor Wat was made by King Suryavarman II in the first half of the 12th century, while the city Angkor Thom was made by his son Jayavarman VII. However, the continuous warfare against its neighboring kingdoms and perhaps the enthusiastic construction activities of temples and towns drained the power of the empire, and the declining trend continued to the nineteenth century, by which time, Cambodia had lost the Angkor area to the Thais and the kingdom itself became a protectorate state under the French colonialism.

(2) The struggle of mankind against nature is always a losing battle. Most ancient civilizations along the great rivers rose to prosperity, taking advantage of the riches provided by the great rivers and their foresty environments. However, their rise to power itself was the cause of their decline. The Khmer Empire was no exception.

(3) It does not seem that Cambodia has not been influenced by modern industrialization yet, partly due to the civil war and partly due to the governemnt inefficiency. However, what happened to Thailand recently tells us that industrialization does not always bring happiness and prosperity to the nation. I hope Cambodia will find a different path. Probably the famous serene "Khmer smile" as you see on the carvings on the walls of the ancient temples is the light that illuminates the path for Cambodians.