S1 Ep4: The Rise of the Khmer and Angkor (Part Three)

(This is a new release for the first season - designed to be the third and final part of a replacement of the first Angkor episodes. If you are a long time listener, please make sure you've got the new longer versions of part one and two before listening to this part or watch the full documentary on YouTube).Time Period Covered: 1296 – 1600 CEWhat was Angkor actually like to walk through? What really happened to the Khmer Empire — and why is the standard version wrong? And was Angkor ever truly lost?In this episode, Lachlan spends an hour inside the living city of Angkor in 1296 with Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomat who lived there for eleven months and wrote it all down. The dock, the ox cart through the suburbs, Angkor Wat, Phnom Bakheng, the south gate, the Bayon, the palace precinct, the justice towers, the market, the food, the wine, and Zhou announcing he is going to write a book.Then we examine what actually happened to Angkor between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. We work through the explanations one by one — religious shift, overextension, the Siamese wars, disease, trade and the pull of the coast — and find that none of them alone is sufficient. The hydraulic city theory, largely dismissed for decades, turns out to have been pointing at something real. New climate data from stalagmites collected in a Cambodian cave extends the picture across the entire Angkorean period, and reveals that the same monsoon system that may have helped build Angkor at its twelfth century peak was part of what the empire could not survive.We end by dismantling the lost city myth entirely.Watch the full 5 hour documentary on YouTube SourcesChandler A History of Cambodia Coe and Evans Angkor and the Khmer Civilization Hendrickson, Stark and Evans (eds) The Angkorian WorldTully A Short History of Cambodia Zhou Daguan trans. Peter Harris A Record of Cambodia Penny et al Geoarchaeological evidence from Angkor reveals a gradual decline. Zhao et al Hydroclimate and Paleoenvironmental Variability from the Tonle Sap Lake Basin 2024 Carter Alison in Cambodia (blog) SOSORO Museum of Economy and Money Phnom PenhVisit www.shadowsofutopia.com/support