Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (Ancient Peoples and Places)

"Angkor is an extraordinary site. I saw it in the early sixties when it was beautifully restored but almost deserted in terms of tourists. I was impressed by the incredible artistic achievement. When I went back next in 1992 I thought- what is this business of an individual king ordering a mile square tomb for himself? There is an element about the temple which is really quite shocking in some ways. People just went off and built this tomb: it took 30 years to complete—all for one man, this wasn’t really for the state, this was no Lincoln Memorial. There are certainly plenty of continuities between Angkor and the next periods. In Angkor you find a tremendous authoritarianism and also a tremendous willingness to go along with what was being offered by those in charge. I won’t say that this was the case with the Khmer Rouge. Angkor was a very co-operative but also a very coercive society, a strange combination for some. The temples weren’t comparable to the cathedrals of Europe, which were built co-operatively and the workers were paid. There was no monetary system in Angkor; the building was done by unpaid, slave labour. Michael Coe’s study is a very clear-headed book that summarises a lot of interesting scholarship by other people. He hasn’t done original research. He is an anthropologist who has worked mainly on the Mayas, a somewhat similar civilisation. You can’t read about Cambodia without reading something on Angkor, so this is the best book to read on Angkor. It also happens to be in English, but I think this is still the best book in French or English for an introduction to Angkor. People always say that. I’m not so sure if I agree. They continued building up to the point when it stopped. Saying that they were exhausted as an institution, I’m not sure if that works. One author says that the supply of stones ran out: that that amount of limestone was simply no longer available, so they just stopped. Pol Pot was not a huge personality. It is just a matter of herding people into a certain way of behaviour. This has happened in Cambodia a fair bit and people go along with it in order to survive. This is true of world history . We tend to personalise what happens, but I don’t think Pol Pot is the personality to pick. He was very anodyne, a nothing character. He and his colleagues got onto something and they were able to mobilise enough of a police force to administer the country for five years, and the three years when he was actually in power."