via The Past, 23 January 2024: Charles Higham recounts the journey of Zhou Daguan, a Chinese emissary who visited Angkor in 1296, providing a rare eyewitness account of the city under King Indravarman III. Daguan’s detailed descriptions of the royal processions, daily life, and infrastructure of Angkor, complemented by recent archaeological findings and LiDAR technology, offer invaluable insights into the once-thriving city.
What were their lives like? Again we can draw on Daguan’s sharp eye. If you could enter one of the ordinary people’s houses, as he did, you would notice that there was very little furniture, and no tables or chairs. They cooked on stone-lined hearths set into the ground and ate rice and fish with their hands. The wealthier families had straw mats on the floor, or the skins of tigers or deer. Walk out into the fields and you would see pomegranate trees, sugar cane, and lotuses. There were many scented flowers with ‘vibrant colours’. Go further into the forest and there you find elephants and rhinoceros, valued for their ivory and horns, and you could try to trap kingfishers for their feathers. Wild men in the deep forests were taken as slaves.
There was much work to be done to satisfy the needs of the capital. There can be little doubt that Beng Mealea was constructed to manage the sandstone quarries that lie just 8km to the north. These must have called on a large labour force to cut and dress the stones, and service the canals needed to transport them to Angkor. Indeed, as more and more information emerges about the industrial base of the kingdom, we find that temples were associated with production centres. One of these specialised in salt, another in iron-smelting. Preah Vihear, like an eagle’s eyrie on the summit of the Dang Raek escarpment, was a pilgrimage destination, as was Wat Phu in its magnificent setting overlooking the Mekong River. Those first Portuguese visitors speculated that these monuments were the work of the Romans, or of Alexander the Great. Now we know their roots were buried deeply in South-east Asia’s prehistoric past.
Source: What the emissary saw | The Past
