For hundreds of years, they lay in darKness.
Their creators had been destroyed, but their spirit could not be killed.
Gods had built them, some said.
Others insisted... they had built themselves.
Yet most believed that powerful spirits protected the vast stone city
deep in the Cambodian jungle.
And woe would come to whomever disturbed its slumber.
Centuries apart, two men would fall under Angkor's spell.
One was a naturalist,
lured by tales of exotic creatures and a fabulous lost city.
The other was a diplomat, sent to demand tribute
from a civilization far richer than he'd ever imagined.
Their epic tales would inflame the world's curiosity,
and light a fire in the darKness of Cambodia's lost world.
The mystery of Angkor is what is not Known.
We don't Know much about the people.
Think about it with people, when it was filled with worshippers,
the community were out in the fields growing rice.
What was it like when it was active and alive?
It's absolutely extraordinary,
the mystery is basically what is this thing?
Why is it so big? Why is it glittering in the sun like this?
What's it for?
It's mysterious, you feel that something went on here
that's not going on there today,
but something went on there that's different
from much of the rest of the world.
In Southeast Asia, an abandoned city sprawls magnificently
across the heart of Cambodia.
Its hundreds of monuments
contain more stone than the Egyptian pyramids,
and cover more ground than modern paris.
This is Angkor,
the capital of an empire that once controlled most of Southeast Asia.
They were called the Khmere.
And more than five hundred years ago, they vanished
To the outside world, the city existed only in obscure travelers' tales.
Until a Frenchman in the 19th century brought Angkor to light.
He was a naturalist,
searching for unKnown species of plants and animals.
Almost by accident he uncovered one of man's greatest creations.
In the 1850's Frenchman Henri Mouhot might have been well
on his way to becoming the world's first wildlife photographer.
A naturalist and a portrait painter,
Mouhot dabbled in the new, devilish art of photography.
Mouhot was a born roamer
by age 30 he'd crisscrossed Europe and Russia.
But it was the tales of those who ventured further abroad
that would lure him to the jungles of Cambodia.
A book had just been published in 1857
about the area of Southeast Asia.
In a sense it was the focus that drew him.
The first Europeans to explore Africa and Asia
were usually marginal people in their own societies.
They didn't quite fit in.
And so they went to these other places and explored them.
But in the process of exploring them, they opened up new areas,
wrote about them, and provided the raw information
that the European countries needed to exploit these areas as colonies.
In 19th century Europe,
models for undaunted courage were heroic explorers,
like Henry Morton Stanley.
While searching for the source of e Nile,
Stanley watched most of his companions
die of fever and warfare with hostile peoples.
Stanley lost 60 pounds and his hair turned white.
"We have wept so often we can weep no more," he wrote.
But there was one more blow ahead.
In his absence his fiance had married another man.
For late 19th century explorers, it was all in a day's work
What they lost at home they hoped to doubly gain abroad...
as the front line troops of a new surge of colonialism.
The revolution in manufacturing that would transform Europe
was fueled in part by adventurism abroad.
Great Britain, France, and Germany
had developed huge appetites for raw materials
and markets for their products.
This set off a land grab for Asia and Africa, where minerals,
farmland, even labor could be taken by force of arms.
They also wanted to bring European culture
to the peoples of these regions.
It was a sort of cultural imperialism.
They wanted to, in a sense,
bring what they considered the best culture in the world
to people who they thought had inferior cultures.
These allegedly 'inferior' cultures
weren't always happy to see the Europeans.
Along with hostile armies,
explorers had to battle disease, madness, and starvation.
Some were military men
who brought much needed professionalism to the trade.
Others were doomed amateurs brimming with enthusiasm...
Henri Mouhot would take his place among these.
Mouhot decided to devote his life
to studying new species of flora and fauna.
It seemed likely he'd combine his passions,
and become history's first photographer of wildlife.
But fate stepped in.
He met and married an Englishwoman, Anna park
She was a relative of one of the great explorers of West Africa,
Mungo park
perhaps Anna pressed Henri to match Mungo's feats of daring
or maybe Henri wasn't suited for domestic life.
For less than two years after they were wed,
Mouhot set out for Southeast Asia.
Mouhot intended to keep a diary of his adventure
while documenting the natural world.
But on his quest for facts, he'd encounter a profound mystery...
an abandoned city in the jungle...
a rival among the greatest creations of man.
On the 27th April, 1858 I embarked at London,
in a ship of very modest pretensions...
Mouhot books passage on a small boat.
The very first part of this trip was bad.
The boat was small, the captain was drunk all the time
and he writes of his perils on the ship and the passengers being sick
Mouhot is really interesting to me
because he went there without a clearly defined program.
He was also went there on his own funding.
In a sense he took a real chance but there was just this wanderlust.
This, this chance to open up a new area
to the rest of the world and he in a sense seized the moment.
After pausing in Singapore and paKnam,
Mouhot recovered his land legs in Bangkok,
famous in Europe as 'the Venice of the East.'
At Bangkok's Royal palace,
the Frenchman dined with Siam's monk turned monarch, King Mongkut.
The cultured king grilled Mouhot for news of Europe.
He'd become an expert in foreign affairs,
in order to defend his nation.
While countries around Siam fell to European powers,
Mongkut would sign trade treaties with many of them,
Knowing that this would discourage any one
from invading his kingdom.
To teach English to his children, he'd hire the tutor Anna Leonowens.
Her memoirs would inspire the musical The King and I.
Its clownish portrait of Mongkut
would become the modern world's sole impression of a ruler
who almost single handedly saved Siam from colonization.
Mongkut's gifts were all but lost on Mouhot as well.
Barely acquainted with Asia,
he was distracted by its 'peculiar' customs.
Every inferior crouches before a higher in rank
He receives his orders with abject submission and respect.
The whole of society is in a state of prostration...
Despite such attacks on his sensibilities,
Mouhot relished his journeys by boat and even elephant
through uncharted regions of Siam,
and in time, to the frontier of Cambodia.
He was warmly received by lesser kings,
and met with enthusiastic curiosity by all those unaccustomed
to having a farang, or white man, parade into their midst.
Mouhot wasted little time on making friends;
his goal was Science.
My principal object...
is to benefit those who in the quiet of their homes
delight to follow the poor traveler
who with the sole object of being useful to his fellow man...
crosses the ocean and sacrifices family, comfort, health,
and all too often their life itself.
Nature has her lovers,
and those alone who have tasted them Know the joy she gives.
In the 19th century, the science of natural history was in its infancy;
studying exotic species meant shooting them,
or dunking them alive in jars of spirits.
Mouhot's zoological treasure included seven types of mammals,
ten reptiles, eight freshwater fish, fifteen land shells, and a spider.
The spider still bears his name.
While Asia's animals enchanted Mouhot,
its people bewildered him.
Their languages were gibberish to his ears
their religion had many spirits, not one.
The people played music in alien keys,
and filled their dances with nightmarish creatures.
Yet the cultural divide that separated Mouhot from his hosts
was about to be crossed... by the most unlikely of people.
When Mouhot traveled throughout southeast Asia,
he employed several helpers who went with him.
Mouhot became attached to one particular manservant called phrai.
He even helped him with some of his collecting.
He was a guide, he was an interpreter, he said up the camp.
Phrai started out as a servant of Mouhot,
but became his comrade and his constant companion.
In fact we owe to phrai our Knowledge of the expeditions of Mouhot.
On his expeditions
Mouhot kept meticulous records of plants and animals,
and made charts of rivers and mountains unheard of in Europe.
He catalogued the peoples he encountered,
noting differences in their looks and customs.
He turned himself into a one man research team.
And, in the tradition of great explorers before him, he suffered...
Insects are in great numbers
several of my books and maps have been almost devoured in one night
We suffered terribly from mosquitoes,
and had to keep up the incessant fanning
to drive off these pestilent little vampires.
There is a small species of leech...
you have to be constantly pulling them off you by the dozens...
but you are sure to return home covered in blood.
Scorpions, centipedes,
and above all, serpents, were the enemies we most dreaded...
But remarkably, while phrai and the native bearers were frequently ill,
Mouhot's health couldn't have been better.
I drank nothing but tea,
hoping by abstinence from cold water from all wine and spirits,
to escape fever.
In spite of the heat, the fatigue,
and the privations inseparable from such a journey,
I arrived among the Cambodians in perfectly good health...
The people flocked to see my collection,
and could not imagine what I should do with so many animals and insects...
I offered the children my cigar ends to smoke,
in return for which they would run after butterflies
and bring them to me uninjured.
Once more in boats,
the Frenchman and his companions journeyed north.
Their destination the rumored lost city of Angkor,
which interested Mouhot less than the rare birds he hoped to collect there.
On the way they paused at a lonely wilderness outpost
a Catholic mission run by a French priest.
Years of isolation, and dysentery,
had soured the priest's view of the tropics,
and made him gloomy about Mouhot's final push to the lost city.
Do you Know where you're going?
The rains have begun and you are going to almost certain death,
or will at least catch a fever,
which will be followed by years of languor and suffering.
May God be with the poor traveler!
Mohout said he'd abide by God's will but was going nonetheless.
After another leg of his river journey
he reached a landmark he Knew only from legend
the Ton LeSap Lake,
and marveled as the shorelines grew apart by some five miles.
By now it'd been more than a year
since Mouhot had dined in Bangkok's Royal palace.
Rough travel had left him ill prepared
for what he was about to see,
a vision few Europeans had shared.
The lost city of Angkor was not a rumor, but overwhelmingly real.
There are ruins of such grandeur, remains of structures
which must have been raised at such an immense cost of labor,
that at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration,
and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race,
so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works!
He came looking for insects,
came looking for flora, fauna, new species.
He didn't come looking for Angkor but he found it
and I think if any of us who may have stumbled on Angkor as he did
would have been excited.
But whether we could have recorded it in such detail
with such precision as Henri Mouhot did is unlikely.
One of these temples a rival to that of Solomon,
and erected by some ancient Michaelangelo
might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings.
It's grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome!
The natives enlightened the stunned Mouhot
it's the work of angels, they said, or giants.
It was built by a magician king. It built itself.
Mouhot was not an archeologist,
nor an art historian, nor could he read the Sanskrit engravings
that adorned the monuments of Angkor.
Yet he was an illustrator.
With his customary zeal
he set out to sketch the most magnificent
of the lost city's some 1,000 temples,
and describe them inch by inch.
The west side the gallery is supported
by two rows of square columns,
on the east, blank windows have been let into the wall,
with balconies of twisted columns fourteen centimeters in diameter...
In the center of the causeway are two elegant pavilions,
one on each side, having at each extremity a portico
thirty three meters sixty six entimeters in length...
Mouhot was a very keen observer.
He was a collector of information.
He had this natural history background to describe things
in a very careful way.
So when he found the monuments at Angkor,
he went ahead and approached them
in the same way he would approach his zoological specimens,
with careful description.
The vaulted ceilings of the galleries
are raised six meters from the ground;
those of the second roof are four meters thirty centimeters high...
The bas reliefs represent combat and procession...
Fabulous animals are busy devouring some;
others are in irons and have had their eyes put out.
He could tell that it was the results of an ancient civilization
that had flourished in this area He could also tell by the inscriptions
on many of the, many of the monuments
they were mostly in Sanskrit and old Khmere.
He could tell by these inscriptions, even though he couldn't read them,
that these were a very learned people
who had built all this and yet they were gone without a trace.
Sad frailty of human things!
How many centuries and thousands of generations
have passed away, of which history will never tell us anything.
What treasures of art will remain forever buried beneath these ruins.
How many distinguished artists,
kings, and warriors are now forgotten.
Mouhot was deeply frustrated
by the mystery of who had created the city of Angkor.
He noted the similarity between the faces in the carvings
and the people living in the surrounding forests.
But he couldn't bring himself to believe
that these Cambodians were descended from Angkor's peerless artists.
In fact, the artistry of Cambodia had never died.
Though it never again reached the heights of Angkor,
Khmere art flourished throughout Southeast Asia.
Demand for replicas if its most famous works
grows with Angkor's fame.
Oblivious of Cambodia's past, Mouhot saw France in its future.
Only a full scale takeover,
he concluded, could correct the nation's 'deplorable' condition.
The sooner the better.
European conquest wise and protecting laws, and experience
would alone effect the regeneration of this state.
I wish France to possess this land,
which would add a magnificent jewel to her crown!
Though Mouhot wouldn't live to see it,
France did intervene soon after his expedition,
making Cambodia a protectorate in 1864.
It would last nearly a century.
Mouhot's diary wasn't the cause.
But like explorer's tales before, it fueled interest and imitation.
King Mongkut's tutor,
Anna Leonowens, was so moved by Mouhot's description of Angkor
she'd later copy it for her own book
Angkor was never a lost city in Asians' eyes.
They Knew about it and from the 16th century onwards,
Jesuit priests wrote it in their diaries.
It's just that their diaries were so confidential
it didn't reach a wide public.
Mouhot was the first person to popularize Angkor.
And it was his sketches, his descriptions
that really is why he was credited with the discovery of Angkor.
With a saber in one hand, phrai pursues the fishes in the stream.
He and his shadow reflected on the rocks and water
might easily be mistaken by the natives for demons.
It is pleasant to the man devoted to our good and beautiful mother Nature
to think that his work, his fatigues,
his troubles and dangers, are useful to others.
I doubt not others will follow in my steps,
and gather an abundant harvest where I have
but cleared the ground.
Mouhot had been traveling for the better part of three years.
The amateur enthusiast had become an expert naturalist,
a skilled outdoorsman, a hardened explorer.
He treated phrai and his other servants as his family,
whom he alternately nursed and scolded,
and with whom he shed tears at parting.
Yet even as his letters home turned wistful and sentimental,
and his journey stretched from two years to three,
he couldn't seem to turn back
only on the trail was he at peace.
Do not be anxious when you think of your poor friend the traveler,
for you Know that up to the present time
everything has prospered with him.
And truly I experience a degree of contentment, strength of soul,
and internal peace, which I have never Known before.
But the French priest's dire warning finally came true.
The weather and mosquitoes were the worst yet.
First phrai fell sick
For five days we were compelled to remain in the forest;
it rained a great part of the day, the torrents overflowed.
I never in my life passed such wretched nights.
My poor phrai was seized with a dreadful fever,
and I myself felt very ill.
October 29, 1861.
Overcome by fever
the 35 year old Mouhot scratched out his last journal entry.
Have pity on me, oh my God!
Phrai recovered and made sure his master received a proper burial.
Then he brought Mouhot's possessions out of the forest,
and put them on boats for Europe.
Most of the zoological samples
the naturalist had collected during his journeys
had already been lost at sea.
But his journal made it safely back to England.
Henri's widow Anna persuaded the Royal Geographical Society
to publish Mouhot's diary.
The first edition did not sell;
there were no profits to share with Anna.
Yet, owing chiefly to its description of Angkor,
Mouhot's work remained in print for a full century.
Generations of travelers and explorers have encountered
the treasures of Khmere culture with Mouhot's journal in hand.
And perhaps some took heart in one of Henri's last letters home,
a fitting epitaph for Mouhot, and his generation of explorers:
Courage, then, and hope!
Our perseverance and efforts will be recompensed.
Adieu, adieu, Au revoir. Do not forget me.
Shortly after Henri Mouhot alerted the world to the wonders of Angkor,
the work of recovering its treasures began.
Mouhot's meticulous descriptions
had inspired Europe to take a closer look
But the questions had only just begun.
Who were Angkor's builders, the empire called the Khmere?
What were their lives like?
Archeologists had no written record to go on
If the Khmere had chronicled their story,
they probably did so on palm leaves and paper.
Time had turned the perishable history to dust.
With nothing Known about their builders,
Angkor's monuments seemed destined to hold their tongues forever.
Then in 1902 a remarkable document came to light
and a most unlikely voice reverberated across eight centuries.
The fantastic civilization of the Khmere,
thought to be forever beyond reach, came to life in all its grandeur.
In about 10,000 words
this report captured the heart of the lost kingdom of Angkor.
Its author was a diplomat sent to Cambodia
by China's fearsome Mongol Dynasty.
The Mongols are famous for their deadly mounted warriors,
and for tactics that routed European armies.
At the end of the 13th century,
however, they took aim at Southeast Asia.
In 1286 the Mongols struck deep into what's now Vietnam.
A year later the capital of Burma fell to the hordes.
Yet the infamous horsemen didn't like fighting
in the alien jungle terrain
perhaps this alone saved Angkor from being next.
Instead, Mongol Emperor Timur Khan gave orders for diplomats
to go to Angkor and collect tribute from the Cambodian king.
This would appease the Khan while allowing the envoys
to size up Angkor for possible future attack
one of these diplomats was Zhou Dagoun.
Zhou Dagoun in his writing, never said why he was there.
He was part of an embassy
which obviously meant that it was some, trying to check out on trade,
check out, get the intelligence on what this kingdom was like.
To show to Mongol Emperor
what sorts of people lay at the far boundaries of his empire,
what sorts of products they had, what they looked like.
The inhabitants are rude and ugly and very black
The indigenous women are very lustful.
If a husband has to leave for a distant mission,
that's alright for a couple of nights.
But after a dozen nights the woman will certainly complain,
"Who am I, a ghost that needs no one to sleep with?"
He was a keen observer, telling us about the people, the daily lives.
Zhou Dagoun left us something very special.
He has left the only first hand record that we have of Angkor.
He was here when Angkor was a kingdom.
But we have to always keep in mind he was a foreigner,
so he was perceiving the kingdom and what he Knew
in his background which was Chinese.
About Zhou Dagoun little is Known.
He was probably about thirty years old,
a diplomat, perhaps an aristocrat.
>From the details he reported to the Khan
emerge a character fascinated with earthy pleasures.
He came from an obsessive prudish kind of culture
and he saw in this tropical climate
and enjoyed seeing, women taking off their scanty costumes
and getting into the river to bathe with nothing on at all,
and he commented on this
not only because it was so barbarian and rare and un Chinese
but I think also because he enjoyed watching the spectacle.
Every three or four days
the women go and bathe in a river outside the city.
Even the women from the noble families
take part in these baths and aren't ashamed.
Everyone can see them from the to of their heads
to the bottom of their feet.
The Chinese, on their day off, go and see it.
I've heard that there are those who enter the water
to take advantage of the situation.
The water is always as hot as fire.
For Zhou Dagoun, his year in Angkor
would be full of such surprises and contrasts.
He was Chinese, but from the frigid plains,
a Mongol whose race worshipped war above all things.
By contrast, the Khmere had embraced Buddhism,
and its creed of compassion and rebirth.
The city of one million enjoyed a calendar
full of parades, festivals, and holy days.
The Chinese who arrive as sailors find it comfortable
that in this country one doesn't have to wear clothes.
And since rice is easy to earn, and women easy to persuade,
there are many who desert to stay.
As he catalogued Angkor's marvels,
Zhou Dagoun himself may have thought about deserting for a life
in the jungle paradise.
As a spy of sorts, he no doubt soon discovered
that all the Khmere's might and majesty
largely depended on one thing water.
Three rice harvests a year fed the city of about one million,
and paid for everything from temple building to defense.
To grow the rice, they had to tame the water.
They harnessed the water from the Ton Le Sap Lake
by building a series of canals, dikes, and moats
from the lake up to the city of Angkor.
During the rainy season,
when the lake began to rise
water was forced up these canals, up above the city,
and collected in large reservoirs, called barays for year round use.
And in fact the system that was employed at Angkor
a thousand years ago
is more advanced than any irrigation system
used in Cambodia today.
The relationship between the king and water has a very long history.
The whole reason that Angkor is located on this plain
is because of the access of water.
So the king could provide fish and rice
and therefore his people would prosper
and his genealogy would continue.
Not surprisingly the symbol of water a snake
is key to Khmere faith.
In Angkor, Zhou Dagoun would have found
the revered reptile depicted countless times,
in scenes said to reveal the secret of immortality.
The churning of the ocean of milk is Known in Hindu mythology
its much loved in Cambodia in their art.
It's depicted with gods on one side and demons on the other
and they're holding a large scaly body of a serpent.
They pull left and right and left and right
in a way that we would call a tug of war.
They're churning to try to yield the elixir of immortality.
Immortality was a daily pursuit inside the Royal palace,
the abode of Khmere Kings.
Kings had more than a thousand concubines
the most beautiful women of the empire.
Scores are depicted at the Royal Terrace... no two alike.
Concerning the concubines and the girls of the palace,
I've heard that the number is between three and five thousand.
When in a family there's a beautiful girl,
she's immediately sent to the palace.
As a foreigner, and an oddity,
Zhou Dagoun wasn't permitted to enter the Royal palace...
but he heard a legend about the magic that took place inside.
In the Golden Tower
inside the palace the sovereign goes to sleep in its highest part.
All the locals assert that inside the tower there's a genie
master of the whole territory of the kingdom.
This genie appears every night in the form of a woman.
Its with her that the sovereign lies with and then has sex.
If one night the genie doesn't appear,
this is because the time for the barbarian king's death has come.
If the king doesn't show up even for one night,
something terrible will happen.
He would comment on some of their unusual customs
but then he would always draw comparisons back to the way
we do things in China.
So I think he saw commonalties between the Khmer and the Chinese.
In this country it's the women who Know about commerce.
If a Chinese arrives here and immediately takes a woman,
its because he wants to take advantage
of the woman's trading skills,
[which could easily exceed his own.]
Zhou Dagoun disapproved of most Angkor customs
but praised one the status of women.
The envoy noted that women ran commerce throughout the city,
and women intellectuals were among the king's most trusted counselors.
Women figure prominently in engravings on a temple at Angkor
called the Bayon.
They depict dozens of types of business
and the daily activities of Khmere life.
In fact everything the Mongols wanted to Know about the Khmere
was right here agriculture, slaves, rare goods.
For Zhou Dagoun it would have been an intelligence goldmine.
Valuable products are the feathers of the kingfisher,
elephant tusks, rhino's horn, and beeswax.
The white rhinoceros horn is veined and is the most precious;
the black one is inferior.
In general, the people of this country are very simple.
When they see a Chinese,
they are respectfully frightened and call him "Buddha".
Seeing him, they throw themselves to the ground and bow low.
>From Zhou Dagoun's reports we Know about the fact
that there were astronomers there.
We Know about the fact that,
that various groups of people within the court were scientists.
So this was an area of discovery.
This was the Renaissance area of southeast Asia.
More than five centuries before Europe's Renaissance,
Cambodian Michaelangelos sent their masterpieces soaring skyward.
Reliefs at the Bayon acKnowledged the builders;
but one monument at Angkor made them immortal.
The Chinese envoy Zhou Dagoun was probably barred
from Angkor's greatest marvel, a funery temple built for a king.
He skipped over it in his report,
mentioning only that a Chinese artisan had probably built it.
No doubt the envoy coveted the Khmere's timeless masterpiece
Angkor Wat.
Over a century before Zhou Dagoun arrived,
the last stone was fitted into place.
Archeologists have determined
that it took almost thirty years to complete,
and was finished in time to bury the king.
Some historians believe Angkor Wat is a funery temple.
The main basis for this is that the entrance is at the west.
In Hindu mythology this signifies death.
When you enter you feel you're moving from the world of man
to the world of the deities.
Look to the left. It's a battle. It is a battle of war
and massacre and slaughter and pillage and fire.
But at the east is the famous story of the churning of the ocean of milk,
the beginning of life.
Never in his life would Zhou Dagoun have seen anything like it.
The austere Mongol religion had nothing to compare
to sacred mountains of stone.
Angkor Wat was built to please a Hindu god,
but came to draw the devout of many faiths.
Climbing the staircase reveals levels of increasing holiness.
Then you continue to the next level.
The walls are bare in total contrast to these reliefs, totally bare walls.
Why?
Because you look at the top and what do you see but the pinnacle,
the image of Vishnu that would have been housed inside this.
And so the bare walls provide a quiet background
to carry your eye upward to the very most sacred point of the temple.
According to tradition, priests placed the king's ashes
inside the temple he built for himself.
Yet the monarch didn't dwell in the next world alone.
Attending him are 1700 enchanted beings, called Apsaras.
The Apsaras are the celestial nymphs, the beautiful women
that fly through the heavens and dance for the gods.
And they stand ready
dressed in theirjewelry and beautiful costumes
to do whatever the gods would need to make them happy
and for the kingdom to prosper.
These celestial nymphs were born simply to please the gods,
can you imagine?
Angkor Wat had hardly claimed its place on the horizon
when disaster struck
Drawn by its increasing splendor the Chams, from what's now Vietnam,
attacked and burned the city.
Countless inhabitants were killed, or forced into exhile.
By the time the capital was rebuilt, a sea change had taken place.
His people had suffered...
so the king built a walled city, Angkor Tom,
to protect them in time of war.
Like their king most of the Khmere people abandoned Hinduism,
and followed in the Buddha's path.
Zhou Dagoun was familiar with Buddhism,
a popular religion in China.
But he was awed by its Cambodian face.
Above each gate of the enclosure,
there are five big Buddha heads carved in stone,
their faces turned towards the four cardinal points;
at the center is placed one of these heads,
but this one is decorated in gold.
It's a kind face, it's a god of compassion and wisdom.
This art feature had never before been seen at Angkor,
and in fact there's not a prototype Known.
Some say that it represents the king looking in all directions,
north south east and west,
and that makes him the Ruler of the Universe.
Everyday the king holds audiences for affairs of state.
The king, sword in hand, appears in the golden window.
All present join their hands and touch the earth with their foreheads.
It is plain to see that these people, though barbarians,
Know what is due to a prince.
Zhou Dagoun arrived in Angkor
when its king had undisputed control over an empire
of seemingly limitless potential.
Despite his glowing account,
his master, Timur Khan never plundered the nation's treasures.
Perhaps Cambodia's climate was too similar to that of Vietnam,
where the Mongols had tasted rare defeat.
Or perhaps the Khmere seemed too strong to tame.
Zhou Dagoun may have painted too fine a portrait for invasion.
Maybe Timur decided it wasn't really worth invading.
Or maybe there were plans
but other things were happening in the middle kingdom
that in a sense blocked any future expansion.
Yet the Khmere's story would soon come to an end
whether the Mongol Khan invaded or not.
Archeologists and historians have pieced together the final chapter.
By Zhou Dagoun's time,
22 kings over 500 years had worked the land until it began to fail.
Rice harvests dropped, and stone monument building... ceased.
Maintenance of the reservoirs and canals suffered.
The kings' sacred covenant with the water... was broken.
Early in the 15th century the kingdom of Siam
made profitable raids into Khmere territory.
A climactic battle in 1431... brought about the end.
All but abandoned,
the Khmere capital was lulled into a centuries long sleep
by the encroaching jungle.
Fortunately, Zhou Dagoun had long since
carried his chronicle to safety.
Angkor had won the envoy's admiration,
and he repaid it with the only surviving portrait
of Cambodia's ancient treasures.
Coming to Angkor for most people
is a bit of a pilgrimage to a sacred place.
Somehow it just touches your soul.
Every time you see it looming out of the forest
it hits you very, very hard.
The mystery is it doesn't explain itself.
We don't Know much
except from reports of Zhou Dagoun of how they lived.
Yet, we can still see the monuments they left and we can speculate
and we can dream about the greatness of this civilization.