What Was Angkor? The Largest City of the Medieval World
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When Angkor Wat was built in the 1120s it was the largest religious building on Earth, and it still is; around it, invisible under the forest until radar and lasers mapped it, lay a city of a thousand square kilometres, larger than modern Los Angeles, laced with canals and holding, at its height, something like a million people at a time when Paris had fifty thousand. The Khmer capital ran for six hundred years on an engineered water system that fed its rice, floated its stone and filled its moats, and the best current explanation of its end is that the water stopped behaving.
The empire
The Khmer state was founded in 802 when a king named Jayavarman II had himself consecrated as universal monarch on a hill north of the Tonle Sap lake, and for the next six centuries his successors ruled from the plain below it a realm that at its peak covered Cambodia, most of Thailand and Laos and part of Vietnam. Each king built: a state temple at the centre of his capital, representing Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of the Hindu universe, a reservoir, roads, hospitals and rest houses. The religion was Hindu, Shaivite and then Vaishnavite, and turned to Buddhism under Jayavarman VII around 1200, and the art of the temples, the bas-reliefs of battles, processions and the churning of the ocean of milk, is among the finest carving of the medieval world anywhere.
The temples
Angkor Wat, built by Suryavarman II in the first half of the twelfth century as his state temple and probably his tomb, is a stone model of the cosmos: five towers for the peaks of Meru, enclosures for the mountain ranges, a moat 190 metres wide for the ocean, and a kilometre of relief carving around the galleries; it faces west, toward the setting sun and the god Vishnu, where every other Khmer temple faces east. Angkor Thom, the walled city Jayavarman VII built after the Chams sacked the capital in 1177, holds the Bayon, whose 54 towers carry some 200 serene stone faces, and the Terrace of the Elephants; Ta Prohm, a monastery of the same reign, has been left with the forest growing through it. The scale:
- •Angkor Wat covers 162 hectares, with a central tower 65 metres high, and used some five million tonnes of sandstone quarried 40 kilometres away and floated down canals
- •The West Baray, the largest reservoir, is eight kilometres by two and held about 50 million cubic metres
- •The urban area mapped by airborne laser scanning in 2012 and 2015 covers at least 1,000 square kilometres, with roads, canals, house mounds and ponds in a grid
- •Inscriptions record that Ta Prohm alone was served by 80,000 people from 3,000 villages
- •The population of greater Angkor is estimated at 700,000 to 900,000 at its peak around 1200
The water
The Khmer plain has a monsoon, with a wet season of floods and a dry season of drought, and the city's engineers built a system to hold the one and spend the other: rivers diverted into canals, canals feeding the great barays, barays feeding a network of channels through the rice fields and the city, and the whole sloping gently from the hills to the lake so that gravity did the work. The system fed two or three rice crops a year on land that would naturally give one, and it was also the city's transport and its sacred geography, since the moats and reservoirs were the oceans of the temple-mountains. It required constant maintenance, silted easily and, as the mapping has shown, was repeatedly rebuilt and extended as it failed in one place and was patched in another.
The end
Angkor was not destroyed. The Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya sacked it in 1431, and the court moved south to the region of Phnom Penh, which was nearer the sea trade that had become the source of wealth, and the older story of a city abandoned in a stroke has given way to one of a long decline. Tree rings from the region record a series of severe droughts and violent monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the excavated canals show the damage: channels choked with sand from floods, embankments breached, a water system that had been tuned over centuries to a climate that stopped cooperating. Buddhism's turn from the god-kings weakened the ideology that had built the temples, the trade routes shifted, and the population drifted away over decades; Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned, and Buddhist monks were living in it when a French naturalist, Henri Mouhot, published the account in 1863 that brought European visitors.
Angkor now
The temples were restored by French archaeologists from 1907, damaged and looted through the wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and listed as a World Heritage site in 1992; they receive two million visitors a year and are the image on Cambodia's flag, the only national flag with a building on it. The laser mapping has changed what the site means, from a group of monuments to the remains of a low-density city that spread across the landscape as modern cities do, and its history, of an engineered environment that fed a million people until the climate shifted and the engineering could not keep pace, is read with some attention by the engineers of cities that depend on the same monsoon.
The takeaway
Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire from 802 to the fifteenth century, a low-density city of up to a million people spread over a thousand square kilometres, centred on temple-mountains such as Angkor Wat and fed by an engineered system of canals and reservoirs that turned the monsoon into two or three rice crops a year. It declined rather than fell, as droughts and floods broke the water system, trade moved south and Buddhism replaced the cult of the god-kings, and its temples were never wholly abandoned.