Angkor's Climate Refugees: The Exodus That Ended an Empire

Episode 67 takes you beyond the familiar collapse narratives to uncover the mass migration that emptied Angkor. Using tree-ring data from Vietnam's conifer forests, archaeologists now date a decades-long drought that struck the Khmer heartland in the 1300s—a drought so severe that the great barays failed and the rice fields turned to dust. But the real story is what happened next: the silent exodus of commoners, not armies, that depopulated Yasodharapura. Lucas and Luna trace the journey of a hypothetical farmer family fleeing south to the Mekong Delta, where new trade networks and Theravada monasteries offered survival. They examine the Angkorian road system as a two-way funnel—first for tribute, later for refugees—and argue that Angkor was already a ghost city before the Ayutthayan siege of 1431. Drawing on paleoclimate studies from the University of California Irvine, this episode reframes the fall not as a sudden conquest but as a slow, quiet abandonment driven by climate change. #KhmerEmpire #AngkorCollapse #ClimateRefugees #MekongDelta #Yasodharapura #TheravadaBuddhism #Drought #TreeRingData #UCIPaleoclimate #SoutheastAsianHistory #AngkorianRoads #MassMigration #14thCentury #Ayutthaya #TonleSap #GreaterAngkorProject #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo