Ancient Civilisations - Angkor

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Built by the Khmer kings centuries ago, Angkor in modern Cambodia had a footprint bigger than present-day New York. But after it fell into ruin, much of its unique architecture and intricate carvings were swallowed by the jungle. So, who raised this vast city, and why? What caused their civilisation to fall? And how were parts of it maintained, right up to the present day?  This is a Short History Of Angkor. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Michael Falser, architectural historian and author of Angkor Wat, a Transcultural History of Heritage. For ad-free listening, exclusive content, and early access to new episodes across the Noiser network, join ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Noiser+⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠noiser.com/subscriptions⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is around the year 1550. In a dense stretch of jungle in Southeast Asia, the morning is alive with birdsong and the trill of insects. Startled by a crash of footsteps in the river, a pair of parakeets burst from a wild papaya tree. A group of men and women wearing cloth sarongs tuck the fabric around their hips to keep it dry as they splash through ankle-deep water.

A kingfisher flits away with a warning cry. The leader of the hunting party holds up one fist and the group pauses. He has spotted something in the forest. It is difficult to see through the ferns and hanging orchids that tumble down to fringe the river. But the leader, Ang Chan, finds a route out of the water and slips into the forest. Ang Chan is king of the Khmer people, but he's far from the safety of his capital city near Phnom Penh. He's in the countryside, on a hunt for an elusive white. elephant and his attention has been drawn to something deep in the undergrowth.

He creeps forward, keeping his footsteps light. Reaching a vast Kapok tree, its roots running like silver snakes over the ground, he climbs up onto a bow so he can see over the bushy ferns. Shafts of sunlight penetrate the canopy to highlight details of the jungle. There is something hidden in the foliage. It is huge and gray-brown. grey brown, much taller than a man, though it's definitely not the elusive beast they've been tracking. Ang Chan's group creeps up behind him, but he tells them to put down their weapons.

Then he jumps down from the Kapok tree and uses his machete to hack away branches and vines that block his way. His entourage join the effort, and soon they've cleared enough greenery to reveal a tumble-down stone archway, as tall as two men. The blocks are weathered to a mottled grey, the colour of an elephant, and streaked with orange algae. Ferns and saplings burst from between the stones, simultaneously dislodging the masonry and binding it together. Bang Chan tells everyone to stand back. All that is holding up this structure is a webbing of roots and branches. But he is too full of curiosity to leave it alone. The king peels away a skin of the skin of the structure.

of ivy and gasps at what lies beneath. It's a face carved in stone. He runs his fingers over a nose as big as his hand, curved lips, elongated earlobes decorated with jewels. The face of the Buddha. The white elephant is forgotten in the excitement. The temple is more important. It is the domain of his ancestors, the mighty Khmer kings,

who ruled over the empire at the peak of its power. Legend says they built a capital of holy places and palaces, surrounded by high walls and a moat, most of which was consumed by nature when the civilization collapsed. But after a century, it seems the jungle has given up its secrets. King Ang Chan has rediscovered the lost citadel of Angkor. From the 9th to the 15th century, the Khmer kings tamed the tropical environment in order to build one of the largest cities in the world. Ankor, in modern Cambodia, had a footprint far beyond that of present-day New York. In its heyday, it was on a par with the vast metropolises

of Baghdad, Constantinople, or Hangzhou. By comparison, London or Paris were mere market towns. But unlike those cities, much of Ancor fell into ruin. Jungle enveloped the intricately carved stones. For centuries, only a small number of religious pilgrims made their way to the site to pay their respects at Angkor Watt, a temple that survived under the dedicated care of Buddhist monks. Though the rest was never forgotten by the people of Southeast Asia, the ingenious secrets of its construction were lost to the forest. A Buddhist legend says Ankur was built by the god Indra in one night. Scholars say it took many phases of construction over centuries, a marvel of engineering. Now we know that Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure ever built, that Angkor City was one of the most populous in the world,

and that the Khmer Empire shaped a region. So who were these dynamic kings? How did they raise vast monuments to art, religion, and power? And what caused such a mighty civilization to fall? Were the Khmer destroyed by their own lofty ambitions, or the very nature they worked? so hard to control. I'm John Hopkins, and this is Angkor. The Angkor civilization, also called the Khmer Empire, ruled over a large swath of Southeast Asia during its classical period. Its territory

crossed modern-day borders to encompass all of what is now Cambodia, plus parts of southern Thailand and Vietnam. Angkor also means capital city in the Khmer language, so that is the name given to the metropolis that grows over centuries close to a vast lake called Tonle Sap. But the Khmer people haven't always lived here. Around the year 790, a Khmer prince returns to his homeland after being exiled to Java, the main island of modern-day Indonesia, and an important spiritual center for Buddhists. The prince conquers other contenders for the throne to become ruler of his kingdom called Cambuja. He is crowned Jaewarman II, but for the ambitious prince, a throne isn't enough.

It is 802 AD. The king is leading a procession up a steep slope in the Kulin hills. He is flanked by battle elephants carrying warriors armed with shields and swords. But his musicians set a festive atmosphere, playing a lilting rhythm, on score drums, accompanied by a tune from a two-string fiddle, finger symbols, and bamboo flutes. Soon the procession reaches a brick temple, nestled among the shade of trees. A stream runs nearby. This is a holy place. These mountains are believed to be the home of the ancestor spirits. People have lived here for thousands of years, beyond living memory, leaving behind only rock paintings. The streams that flow down from the hills are also sacred.

Many of the stony riverbeds carved with images of Hindu gods like Shiva, so that the waters are blessed as they flow. Jaivaman and his group gather in a paved courtyard where a stone plinth stands in the center. The elephants settle and most of the musicians fall silent. A Brahmin priest from India steps forward and summons the king. Speaking in the ancient Sanskrit language, the holy man starts his blessings, marking the king's face with red paste. The people kneel as the ceremony reaches its climax. The king sits upon the stone plinth where he is named Shakravatin, a universal ruler.

Now he's not just a king, but also a god. This holy hill temple, called Mahendra Pavata, lies in ruins today, but is recognized. by UNESCO as an important heritage site. It is here that Jayavaman declares his independence from the kingdom of Java, which holds influence over the whole region as a powerhouse of trade and religion. Crucially, for the empire that he founds, Jayavarman rejects their Buddhist religion in favor of Hinduism. He starts a tradition of Angkorian god kings or Diva Rajas,

a dynasty that will rule for the next 600 years. We know about this initiation ceremony in the Kulin Hills from inscriptions left on the stones. The rest has been lost to time and the environment. Michael Fauser is an architectural historian and author of the book, Ancour Watt, A Transcultural History of Heritage. This is one of the challenges when it comes to the Khmer culture

that the classical written documents are missing in a sense because most of them were written on, let's say, palm leaves or paper that has not been survived in such a humid climate. And what we know from the deep culture of the Khmer civilization, then when it comes to Angkor, has been written on the stone plens and the stone lintels and the entrance gates of the Angkorian temples in an ancient script. But again, this is more the viewpoint of the leading elites writing about their accomplishments and praying to God and dedicating it to gods. So what we know about the written scripts written in stone is more a royal dynastic viewpoint of what Khmer should be,

but we don't know so much about the daily life of people. Around the year 900, a Khmer king named Yasser Vaman decides to move his court to a new site where there is room to build his own monuments. Yasser Vaman identifies an area of land between the Kulin Hills and the lake at Tonle Sap, which has potential. It is forested but criss-crossed by streams running down from its mountains. Yesovarman commissions a step pyramid to be built on top of a hill overlooking the plain. Known as Bakeng, the monument is constructed in layers like a wedding cake,

with staircases flowing up three levels to a flat top. Rising from here are five towers resembling lotus flowers. This is a so-called mountain temple, designed to honour the five peaks of Mount Merrill, Meru, home to the Hindu gods. Although Bakeng is abandoned after only a few decades of use, its hilltop position is unique. Today, tourists often climb up onto the high platform to watch the sun set over the five towers of Angkor Wat. But in the days of Yassavaman, that future temple is still a distant dream. For a society reliant on rice production, the streams from the Kulin hills are a godsend. Irrigation is crucial for agriculture.

Yasovarman harnesses the water by constructing a huge reservoir called the East Barai. It's a labor-intensive process of digging out a man-made pool that is over two miles long and half a mile wide. It is naturally filled by the CM-Rep River and filters through a complex series of channels to nourish the land. It was certainly a major, major water system with giant water tanks which still exist today. I mean, one has no water inside again, it's the eastern one. And the western one, the barai, is still partly filled with water. One theory is that these barais were bringing water into the agricultural system, whereas other theories say, no, the barais themselves,

they're not directly used for agricultural reasons, but they're more related to the symbolic earth, water, underground, above-ground kind of relationship of power and God and kings, and so on. So more symbolic religious reasons. But in any sense, what we know is that there was a giant water system regulated by smitten of water, water ways into the rice fields. So all this worked in relationship to the giant lake,

which is rather close to the area, the Tonle Sao, which is important because this lake now has some ecological problems for many reasons, but back then it doubled his size once a year in the rainy seasons and going up and down. And the river, going to Plompent to the present capital, the river changed his directions once a year. And in this very fragile ecological system of water levels and rainy seasons, etc.,

Angkor could be taking profit of all this richness of soil, water, climate, several harvests of rice a year. And this was on the basis of the enormous wealth. The turn of the first millennium is a time of expansion for the Ankor civilization. Successes on the battlefield see its territory stretch from the north of the Malay Peninsula up to present-day Laos. Each successive Khmer king strives to leave a legacy in the form of monuments. The construction of temples has two purposes, to demonstrate piety and to perpetuate the cult of the Devaraja, or God King. The majority of homes and civic structures are now made of wood and thatch, but these succumb easily to the brutally humid tropical climate.

For landmark buildings, the Angkorians prefer stone, which is brought by boat or elephant from a quarry 50 miles away. Around the year 1120, King Siria Varman II orders the construction of his legacy, Angkor what? It is the largest building yet at Angkor, even though the place, is already dotted with temples built by his forebears over the previous two centuries. Some say the monarch's most famous design is a temple to the Hindu gods, and there are dedications to Shiva and later Vishnu. But temples tend to be orientated to the east. Angkor Wat faces west, which is associated with death.

So the site also seems to serve as the king's mausoleum. Indeed, he dies before it is finished. The construction takes almost 40 years and involves 5,000 workers, including hundreds of carvers and slaves. It is simply vast, the largest religious building ever constructed. And visiting Angkor Wat in the early 12th century is quite an experience. One Hindu pilgrim here for the first time is overwhelmed by the scale of the temple complex. In the heat of the day, he is regretting his decision to walk all the way around the outside of the walls. The perimeter is almost three and a half miles long, and his feet are complaining.

At least there is cool air coming off the moat, a wide body of murky water festooned with blossoming lotus flowers. Eventually, he sees the throng of people up ahead. The pilgrim steps up onto the pale stones of the causeway over the moat. children run over selling refreshments. He buys a fresh coconut and tips it up to sip the juice as he crosses the roadway lined with market stalls. Ox carts carry produce and stones, while richer visitors ride comfortably on elephants. The pilgrim walks the 300 metres, wrapped by the temple up ahead. It looks perfectly symmetrical, higher than the tallest trees of the surrounding forest, almost unreal.

He passes the stone heads of a mythological Naga snake. Two stone lions guard the steps of the end of the causeway. He gets glimpses of the main site that are tantalizing, but he can only make out three towers, when he knows there must be five, like Mount Meru. The full view is blocked by a large archway. He hurries inside and is momentarily plunged into darkness. He blinks to make out the famous.

carved asparas or voluptuous nymphs who decorate the walls. In the low light, they almost seem to dance. And then he moves on. His eyes adjust again to the bright sunlight as he steps out into the courtyard. Now he gets the full impact of the mountain temple. His experience has been carefully controlled for maximum effect and awe. Five towers rise up to an incredible height, far taller than the tallest trees surrounding it. Every surface is carved, every stone is perfectly hewn. The walls surrounding him resemble sacred mountains, and the moat outside is the legendary ocean. Angkor Wat takes his breath away. The little that is known about the founder of Ankor Wat, Saria Varman II, is depicted on the walls of his legacy monument. He has shown in a procession,

sitting cross-legged and adorned with jewels such as bracelets and a waist chain. He's holding an object that appears to be a dead snake, but the meaning of this detail has been lost. Clearly the king is returning home to Angkor in a state of triumph, perhaps after seeing off the Cham people of Vietnam in one of their many battles. These bar-relief decorations are carved so that they stand out from the background stones, giving a sense of realism and movement. In places they are ten centimetres deep

and run for almost half a mile around the temple walls. As well as the exploits of the king, they depict scenes from the epic Indian texts the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The intricate detail of the bar relief gallery provides a balance in contrast to the scale of the mighty towers. But how are the workers able to create

such a vast temple with such limited technology, and in an inhospitable tropical climate of extreme heat and humidity. Well, it was built, first of all, by thousands of slaves. A lot of research has been done where all these millions, tons of stones were brought. So there are giant sites where the stone was brought over, most probably on boats, but also by elephants. But the overall decorative patterns were just carved onto the stone surface after the building had been erected. So you would see the whole surface of Akkawat was then shipped or carved up to a death of 10 centimeters.

And so this is a major work. And all this was made, of course, by we could call them master masons or carvers being responsible for the barley leaves because they are really high art. Soraya Varman the second dies around 1150. The construction of his unfinished monument continues, but two decades later, the kingdom is in trouble. A cham army from Vietnam invades Ankur and seizes the city.

For ten years the people must bide their time and live under foreign rule. But in 1177, a Khmer prince raises an army to oust them. When he is victorious, the prince takes the title of Jaivaman the seventh, As ambitious as the namesake who founded the empire, he will become known as the builder king. He was maybe the most powerful king of all of them in the whole genealogy, but also the most ambivalent one in just getting out of control of his building program, because it could not simply be accomplished. It just was too large. And historians deciphering the genealogies and agendas of the kings had been describing this very often as a moment when the pressure for, from the surrounding empires.

So the Vietnamese, today, the Chamon, in the Southeast, and the Siamese, today Thailand from the West, had been kind of a giant force getting over major battlefields, major battles against the Khmer. So he was very busy with this kind of warfare around him. But on the other hand, he was building more and more temples.

And what is also important is, when we talk about Ankur as a civilization, as a giant urban kind of configuration where hundreds of thousand people lived. He had to take care about the giant infrastructure, which has been not only roads, but also the giant water system by tanks, lakes. So his task were so demanding that in a sense,

we speculate that all this brought him into big troubles. You could not build so many temples, costly temples, and on the other hand, being successful in warfare. So in a sense, all this collapsed were rather soon because the neighboring empires put so much pressure in him. Jaewroman constructs another of the most famous sites of the Angkor complex, the walled town known as Jaisoara Pura. It is now called simply Ankhort Tom, which means in Khmer, big city. The citadel lies two miles north of Angkor Wat. The fortified town is laid out in a square pattern, with each side almost two miles long and surrounded by a moat. Inside are temples,

palaces and elite residences. Its centerpiece is a new temple called the Bayyon. In a break from his predecessors, Jayavaman loses faith in Hinduism, because the kingdom has suffered such a long period of strife. He feels forsaken by the old gods. He turns instead to Buddhism. The religion rejected by his namesake when he declared independence from Java almost 400 years previously. His Bayon Temple is made of sandstone, and its distinctive design features towers with huge faces of Buddha on all four sides. Inside the citadel is also a 300-meter terrace of elephants, where life-size animals are depicted in stone, alongside mythological creatures like the bird-shaped Garuda. This long platform may have been used as a viewing stand for elephant fights, rather like medieval jousting.

Ankhortom is effectively the downtown area of a much larger city that sprawls over the surrounding countryside. Jaivamen also builds roads with staging posts so that people can travel to and from the capital in comfort from the outlying villages. In addition, he founds hundreds of hospitals throughout the kingdom. By now, Angkor is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, with all the latest facilities. It is famous across the region. It is August 1296, and a young Chinese man named Cho Daguan has just arrived in Angkor. He is a diplomat, a guest of the king, as the Angkor Kingdom is an important trading partner of its northern neighbors in China. Today, Cho enters the citadel of Jaiso Harapura for the first time.

Being a writer, Joe pays attention to details as he walks past the busy market stalls and dodges ox-carts. He notices the official buildings decorated in tiles made of lead, others in yellow-colored ceramics. Carvings or painted buddhas feature on every column, every lintel. Soon, Cho hears the sound of music and the trumpeting of elephants. Perhaps to impress the foreign visitor, the king is on parade. Along the central causeway, a procession is led by warriors holding shining shields. Next, troops carry flags and banners, flanked by musicians playing a rousing march on drums and symbols. There are carts drawn by goats and horses carrying women decorated in gold from the palace.

Finally, comes an elephant with a king standing astride its back, holding aloft his sacred sword. The elephant, Cho notes, as the beast thunders past, making the stones tremble under his feet, as its tusks encased in gold. The diplomat, Cho Daguan, stays in Angkor for almost a year. Each day, he keeps a detailed diary, and when he returns to China, he writes a book called The Customs of Cambodia. Published in the late 1290s, the account is the only written source about the Khmer Empire. Although Cho recounts how he was amazed by the walled citadel of Angkor Tom, its temples and

palaces are not built with the same level of care and quality as neighboring Angkor Wat. As time passes, the Bayon, with its Buddhas facing in each direction, sags under its own weight. Its carvings suffer from erosion in the monsoon rains. While the earlier construction of Angkor Wat is maintained throughout the centuries by monks, The big city is one day given over to the encroaching jungle. In the century that follows the visit of Cho Daguan, the Khmer Empire goes into decline. Some say the kings stretched themselves too thin by building these ambitious temples. Others say it was the maintenance of the ingenious but labor-intensive water system that wore the kingdom down.

Or there may have been catastrophic climate change. perhaps the shrinking of the lake at Tonle Sap, or failure of the rains to support the paddy fields, or the degradation of topsoil that ruined the agriculture. Certainly, the constant conflict with warring neighbors proves costly for the Khmer. Chau Dagwan's journal notes that the entire population of Angkor was at one point required to fight against invaders from a neighboring kingdom of Siam, but is now Thailand.

By the 15th century, Siam is watching Angkor with Enver, obvious eyes. After several attempted raids, they gather their forces and ransack the city after a long siege. The invasion means that 1431 is generally given as the end of the Angkor civilization. But the Khmer people, as they have done so often in the past, move on and establish a new capital. One of the major earthquakes, political earthquakes happened at the 15th century when the famous decline of Angkor, classical Angkor, happened with the lost battle against the Siamese. And Angkor, as an entire area, was then abandoned. But again, it didn't happen overnight. I mean, we reproduce this narrative because we love archaeologists telling the stories. But of course, you cannot move from one capital to the other by hundreds

of thousands of people just in one week. So it certainly took a lot of time. But when the capital moved southwards into maybe more secure areas, Angkor still stayed the major religious, a of veneration, of temples, of pilgrimage, and of Buddhist activities. And this brings me to Anka Wat because in Ankawat, there was always, as far as we know, a living monastery, a site. The site was still venerated very actively. It's still also visible in stone in the history of the inscriptions, because part of the unfinished barreliefs of Ancovad were just accomplished in the 16th century.

And it proves that the 16th century kings were still venerating this site. So you would see that the site was still active and was always active into the 19th century. It's, of course, a colonial European invention of sites got totally abandoned, totally in a jungle, and then rediscovered by European explorers. I mean, we have to know that this is all, has to be a bit more nuanced. The Siamese invaders occupy Angkor Tom for a short time, but they eventually depart and the metropolis falls into ruin. The displaced Khmer court establishes a new capital around 200 miles to the south,

which will develop into the modern-day Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The tropical rainforest moves quickly to take back land that had once been laboriously cleared to build Angkor. The irrigation system of water canals fills up with silt. The barrage dry out. rapidly growing roots of figs and cotton silk trees envelop the stones. A group of monks act as guardians of the sacred Angkor Wat. Over the centuries there are many visitors to that temple, including both Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. And in the 16th century, the Khmer king, Ang Chan, is credited with rediscovering parts of the city during an elephant hunt, including perhaps the site of Angkor Tom.

Later come Europeans. Portuguese trader Diego Dakota finds his way to Angkor in 1550. His fellow countryman Antonio de Madelena visits 30 years later. De Madelena says Angkor Wat is like no other building in the world. He describes it as a feat of human genius. But even he fails to appreciate the sheer size of the city of Angkor, unable to envision the low-density metropolis that once dominated the plane. Even today, that is best appreciated from the air, or better still, from space. A satellite study by NASA found in 2007 that ancient Angkor may have sprawled over 350 square miles. Back on the ground, a young French explorer called Henri Muot arrives by foot and horse cart in 1860.

He's shown around the temple and ruins by local guides and monks. But in his writings about his travels, he claims that Ankor Wat must have been built by what he calls some ancient Michelangelo, and not the local Khmer people, whom he refers to as barbarians. The Frenchman can't accept that the ancestors of local farming folk could be responsible for buildings as impressive as the pyramids of Egypt or the monuments of ancient Greece or Rome. He claims that Ankur must date to an earlier, more sophisticated civilization. When his reports reach Europe, his patrons at the British Royal Geographical Society popularized the idea that Muo discovered Angkor, lost and forgotten in the forest.

Also, his theory that the site could not have been built by the Khmer catches on. Now, so-called experts claim that Alexander the Great founded the city, or it was home to a lost tribe of Israel. More plausibly, but still incorrectly, others propose, that Brahmin warriors from India built it. The Frenchman doesn't live long enough to clarify the fact that he didn't actually discover Ankor Wat while adventuring through the jungle. He dies of malaria soon after visiting.

But his writings and intricate drawings of the temples are published posthumously, and they spark a craze for ancient Angkor. Back in France, the École de Bozard is the seat of learning for fine art and architecture in Paris. Located across the River Sen from the Louvre Art Museum, the school is arguably the most influential in the world. The 19th century Beaux-Ar movement idealizes the style and form of classical antiquity, traditionally the monuments of Greece and Rome, but now also Ankur. When Muo's drawings of the perfect symmetry and stylistic balance of Ancor Wat reach Paris, they are embraced by aficionados of the Beaux-Arts.

The site triggered some desire, certain longing for the site. In the French, particularly French, mindset, the French were totally fascinated by the Angkorian civilization, doing the first sketch maps by archaeologists with the symmetries of the temples and etc. This was the period of bazaar architectural formation back in France and in the second half of the 19th century.

So all archaeologists going to the site and later the conservators of Anko were being trained architects by the Buzard School. And in Bazaar school, you would be trained by, think about the Paris Opera House, by symmetry, by a dramatic kind of amassing of the building in terms of vertical extension. And this is the architectural affords

where in a sense in the French Imagineer, Ancor, what was the perfect bazaar building aesthetically, a central passageway leading to the central core of a building, rising into the sky with different levels, and the central symbolic representation of the whole thing is the core elevated from the ground. And this is perfectly the bazaar imagination. During the 19th century colonial expansion, France claims a vast area of Southeast Asia, including what is now Cambodia. By this time, Angkor is no longer a capital or even a city. The temples still hold sacred importance, but the local people farm and live in the shadow

of the ruins. The site is no longer the heart of a nation. But as colonial powers seek to justify their occupation, the significance of Angkor is heightened. France claims the need to conserve the site for the Cambodians to bring a civilizing influence. They want to rescue Ankur. Conservation becomes a colonial endeavor for the French government. They were not allowed to do very systematic restoration work until 1907. 1907 is the moment when not only the territory was coming over to the French colony, but also

when the Ankur Conservation Office in a sense was established. The major temple is still in place, partly decayed, so part of the of the towers collapsed maybe, but still an active monastery, whereas other parts were, yes, maybe partly in this jungle, ruin kind of, you know, a status. So it was a mix between both. So by archaeological investigations and by mapping, they would justify their civilizing mission and political diplomatic missions by incorporating Angkor into the French hemisphere. They invented, in a sense, a strategy to already appropriate the site. This was cartography.

This was also bringing some original artifacts from the site, illegally, we have to say. And they invented another strategy of appropriation through the medium of plaster casts. When establishing the first museums with Cambodian collections, you would have artifacts, original artifacts, being brought over and put into place. But you would also have parts of the actual artifacts. architectural surfaces represented through plaster casts. Large copies of the stone surfaces through moldings and took these moldings, because you could put them in boxes and ship them back, very fragile but still working,

and then recast the molds, negative molds, into positive stone surfaces. It is 1931, Paris. A woman is strolling through the crowds of the international colonial exhibition at the Bois de Vincennes. Bois de Vincennes. Heads turn as she passes. She cuts quite a figure in a two-piece zebra-print suit with a pencil skirt and fitted jacket. Her outfit is topped off with a black straw boater against the May sunshine. She stops to greet an artist sitting at an easel. He is wearing a white suit and a casque colonialal. What English colonialists on safari might call a pith helmet. In front of him is a half-complete painting of Angkor Wat, the ancient temple that looms before them, right here in Paris.

For the colonial trade fair, the organisers have constructed a life-size replica of the vast monument. It has been reproduced stone for stone and sprawls over 5,000 square meters. For people unable to take a trip to the French colonies of Indochina, the most famous temple of, of its empire has come to them. A line of elephants marches along the reconstructed causeway towards the temple. The crowds clap and cheer. But the woman is more interested in the artist's brushwork that captures the intricate towers, reminiscent of lotus flowers.

He notices her and starts to explain that the five towers represent the five lands that are being subdued and civilized by the colonial mission. Cambodia, Cochin China, Anam, Tonkin and Laos. The woman listens politely and wishes him well, but quickly moves on. Because she has studied the history books and knows he is wrong. She approaches the great archway and soon beholds the five towers rising as tall as the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The organizers can recreate and reinterpret Angkor, but she knows.

knows that the five towers of the temple represent the peaks of Mount Merro, the abode of the Hindu gods. The 1931 colonial fair in Paris is deemed a success with over 33 million visitors during the six-month exhibition. Its display of exotic animals founds the zoo that remains in the Bois de Vincent to this day. Its art gallery develops into a permanent museum of indigenous culture, now housed in the museum of Ke Bronle near the Eiffel Tower. But other exhibits from the 1931 colonial exposition do not fare so well. A Dutch pagoda of treasures brought over from Indonesia catches fire and burns to the ground, destroying the cultural artefacts inside.

The reproduction of Angkor Wat also has a long-term impact. It influences conservationists, who then travel back to Cambodia to reconstruct the ruined parts of the real monument. So when it comes to restoration, you have to know that all restorers of Angkor began, Bazaar architects, most of them, had this ideal vision already seen as a one-to-one scale executed super-perfect temple site. And then traveled back to Angkor and said, well, we know how it looks. We already tested it. Let's execute it. The French colonial impact lasts through the Second World War until Cambodia gains independence

in 1953. The first leader of an independent Cambodia, its former king, Norodom Sienuk, is inspired by his ancient forefather, Suria Vaman the 7th, the builder king, who constructed the citadel of Angotom. During the 1950s and 60s, Sienuk instructs a massive building program of hospitals, schools, and roads, what is often described as the best design in Asia. The result is a movement known as New, Khmer architecture, which mixes modernist ideas with Angkorian traditions such as moats and raised

walkways. But peace in Cambodia is short-lived. Soon it is dominated by the Khmer Rouge, a totalitarian communist regime that leads to famine and genocide. An estimated two million people die, a quarter of the entire population. Remarkably, for a nation torn apart by conflict, the ancient site of Angkor escapes serious damage. So 1970, we have to know, is that a king's year was deposed by a Republican military coup. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge established a terror regime

for just three or four years between 1975 and 79, with Pol Pot as a leader. And so the Khmer Rouge installed a regime with the narrative of coming back to ancient Khmer, Angkorian Gondur, abolishing cities, abolishing money, coming back to a free industrial agricultural society, and they tried to implement this in the most dramatic, violent, genocidal kind of manner.

They did not touch upon the temples. They did not destroy the temples. They did not harm the temples. That is very important to know. So this Khmer Rouge period was not particularly impactful on the temples. Conservation is still a key consideration at Angkor. The ancient city is more popular than ever. At a site called Tarproam, tree roots snake over the temple,

and create a magical image of ancient stones held in the wild clutches of nature. It's like an adventure story come to life, and it catches the eye of Hollywood filmmakers, who send the actor Angelina Jolie to Angkor to play the explorer Lara Croft. In 2001, the movie Tomb Raider does for Tarprom, what the French explorer Henri Mouot did for Ancourt 150 years earlier. Whereas Ancourt attracted tens of thousands of visitors per year in the 1990s. After the film's release, the number rapidly increases to 2.5 million tourists per year today.

Ankur Wat is one of the most visited temple sites on the planet, suffering from this extensively and falling apart. In all parts of the temple, a staircases, the park system, etc., is falling apart through all the tourism today by 2 million visitors per year. So you can imagine the very core central pyramid of the temple was just meant to be visited once a year by the king. And now we have 2 million people climbing the staircase per year. So you can imagine the temple is suffering a lot. Ankur maintains a magical appeal. For foreign tourists, it is a fairy tale experience.

of tumble down jungle tombs, where visitors can clamber over the sprawling roots of banyan trees and play it being Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. For historians, it is a site that is still giving up its secrets, sometimes from space. But for Cambodians, it is a reminder of their deep Khmer heritage, the heyday of the Diva Rajas, the god kings. So you will see that the Ankor and Ancouad is a major important temple was appropriated through very different regimes, from French colonialism to independent nation state, to the Khmer Rouge, and then by UN, today and to UNESCO World Heritage Park, through different regimes.

And Ancowat always stayed in the very center of legitimization, because it's just the most astonishing largest temple in the whole area. Next time we'll bring you Budica. Boudicca is the personification of Britannia. It's one person and one woman against the world. Somebody living in a rural backwater in Britain taking on the might of Rome. And there was so much firepower in the Roman army. And here was somebody who just said, excuse me, I'm not having this.

And that's wonderful. That's next time.