In Our Time - Angkor Wat

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the largest and arguably the most astonishing religious structure on Earth, built for Suryavarman II in the 12th Century in modern-day Cambodia. It is said to have more stone in it than the Great Pyramid of Giza, and much of the surface is intricately carved and remarkably well preserved. For the last 900 years Angkor Wat has been a centre of religion, whether Hinduism, Buddhism or Animism or a combination of those, and a source of wonder to Cambodians and visitors from around the world.WithPiphal Heng Postdoctoral scholar at the Cotsen Institute and the Programme for Early Modern Southeast Asia at UCLAAshley Thompson Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of LondonAndSimon Warrack A stone conservator who has worked extensively at Angkor WatProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, early in the 12th century, Suriabaman II commissioned Ankhorn Wat in modern-day Cambodia. It's the largest and arguably the most astonishing religious structure on Earth.

It has as much stone in it as an Egyptian pyramid, yet the surfaces are intricately carved and much is remarkably well preserved. And for the last 900 years, it's been a central religion of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, often together, and a source of wonder to Cambodians and visitors from around the world. When we did discuss, I call what, are Piffel Heng, a post-doctoral scholar at the Cotson Institute and the Program for Early Modern Southeast Asia at UCLA,

Simon Warwick, a stone conservator, who's worked extensively at Angkorwood, and Ashley Thompson, Hiram W. Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at Soas University of London. Ashley Thompson, I mentioned him at the start, but who was Suria Varmann the second? So Suria Varman is, it's actually a Sanskrit compound, and it literally means he who is protected by the sun. So it's the rain name of a man harking from a Khmera royal line whose family heartlands were situated in the Mun River Valley of what is now northeastern Thailand. So this area is just across the what are called the Dongrek Mountains that divide modern Thailand from northern Cambodia, where the Angkorian Empire was centered for some 600 years from the 9th century on. So Encore itself, the word encore, is the Khmer pronunciation of the Sanskrit term Nagara,

which means royal city. And that's the name now given to the ancient Khmer Empire and to its capital. Encore itself was integral to what the Sanskritist, Sheldon Pollock, has named the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. This is a sort of vast region stretching from what is today Afghanistan in the west, all the way to the island of Bali in the east. And it's an area in which Sanskrit culture blossomed in many different manners and in conjunction with many, many different vernacular cultures. So it was a sort of cultural colonialism at work, surely, but quite remarkably it was a cultural

spread without any kind of military force. So think, for example, of the spread of Latin without the Roman Legion. Think of something like the spread of French without the Norman conquest. And Encore was integral to the Sanskrit cosmopolis, just as any state in India proper was. In fact, perhaps even more so. Encore, of course, produced some of the most sophisticated Sanskrit epigraphic composition of the cosmopolis writ large. And, of course, it was what produced what many consider to be the most magnificent Hindu temple ever, the temple of Encore one. And how did Suri Avon, the second, come in?

So, So Riyavama I second. So he was born in this region in the Munn River Valley in the 12th century into a family that had a claim on the royal line, had a claim on the court at Encore. But in an area which had long been Buddhist since the 5th 6th century in an area which had long been Buddhist. And inscriptions tell us that Soraya Varmine II was an ambitious young man. He is said to have killed, actually, the reigning king, his uncle, in battle very swiftly. And shortly thereafter, proceeded to lead military campaigns and expanding Angkorium power out from its center on the Enkorean Plain in what is now northern Cambodia, out east towards to the Cham areas, to the Dai Viet, so what is now Vietnam, and then out west into what is now across central Thailand. Why might you have wanted to build this massive temple?

Ah, well, like all Long Corian kings, he expressed his political will and his political power through the construction of temples, and in particular what are called mountain temples, that is single sanctuaries or a series of five sanctuaries built or even more, built atop either a natural mountain or a man-made constructed pyramid. And inside that temple would be erected a statue or a sculpture, often of a Shiva Linga, so the symbol of the power of Shiva, would be erected in the central sanctuary of that mountain. And that statue, along with that temple, would be assimilated with the king himself. So it's a projection of his own body in a sense and a projection of his power.

So Encore Wat was the Mountain Temple by Xenos. It is the most extraordinary mountain temple ever built, and it is an expression of his power. Did he set out to build the massive structure we now see? I couldn't tell you, Milvan, that's an interesting question. It seems to have been under construction for the bulk of his reign. It is a temple which is perhaps better constructed than any temple at Encore over the 600-year period of the empire. It is the most intricately sculpted temple of the empire. So certainly he set out to do something special and he did it.

Simon, you've worked on the temple for 30 years. Can you describe it it looks like now as you approach it? When you approach from the west, in the distance you see what looks like three towers. In fact, there's five, but two of them are behind each other. And you see these three towers looming. But as you get closer, they start to disappear behind the West Gate. You start to see less and less as you get closer. And then you get to the moat, which is 200 metres wide.

And you cross along a causeway. And closer and closer, the towers and the temple itself actually disappear, behind the gateway. And all you see is a very small doorway which leads you in. And you get to the doorway intricately carved, beautifully carved, and you walk into the Westgate, which is actually quite dark and gloomy. But in front of you is the light coming in from the internal doorway, which when you go through it, you emerge into this immense space. And suddenly you're in another world. And in the distance, again, at the end of another causeway, is this vast temple with these huge towers and or the light and the landscape around you.

And you walk as you get closer and closer and you get finally into the temple itself and are drawn along a series of corridors, these wonderful galleries. And on the galleries are incredibly detailed and beautifully carved reliefs, telling stories at the beginning from the Mahabharata. While at the same time on doorways and columns to either side are what are known as Devartas, which are these heavenly female deities, which take the form of either princesses or in more remote areas, simple, almost farm girls. And you get an extraordinary sense of society as well as divinity as you walk through the temple. There is that contrast,

or perhaps you could say the harmony between this extraordinary building, which is at such a large scale. It makes such an impact at a distance. It's literally a mountain rising up out of the plane. And then what you have inside of it is you're pulled into it, this intricate, very minute sculpture that is really quite intimate. So it really balances those two. Is this an obviously good location for such a temple? The location in terms of engineering is good. I mean, it's flat and it's relatively close to the quarries. But I think the reason for it being there is that it's halfway between the hills where the waters are sourced and the great lake of Tonle-Sap. So it's on incredibly fertile terrain.

They then mastered the control of the waters. And at the same time, the lake carries an extraordinary phenomena, a geographical phenomena, the river that flows from the lake where it meets the micong. During the monsoon seasons, the minkong becomes too big and the water can not. no longer drain into the Mekong. So it turns around and comes back, making it the only river that I can think of that flows for six months in one direction

and then six months back in the other direction. This means that the lake expands and contracts during the year, depositing silt and making it extremely good terrain for planting rice. Can I come in now to get some people from you, you were brought up nearby? This was by the 13th century, one of the largest agrarian urbanism

in the world. In this region alone, by the 13th century, there were between 700 to 900,000 people inhabited in this area. The central business district, the civic ceremonial centers around Uncle Watt, Uncle Tom, there were around 150,000 people. So you could compare that to Paris at the same times that had 160,000 people. But when you look at what we call greater uncle, this 3,000 square kilometer area, the size of the population was even greater than contemporary Baghdad, which only had 150,000 people, or London at the time had between 20 and 30,000 people. So viewing Anko this way, it was one of the largest populated city on us during that time. When Anko was built, it was a combination of multiple centers. So, you were, you know,

located within an area of 3,000 square kilometer between the Kulin Hill to the northeast and the Dunlisap Lake to the northwest. And imagine Anko as this huge high density area, which we call the civic ceremonial centers where visitors today associated with the major temple. So Anco Wat is a section of that. In our more than sense, it would be the downtown area where you have the business district, you have the palace, you have the major monuments located there, surrounded by the spurs settlements, alternated by rice fields. Ashley Thompson, in more way, is this designed as and is realized as a work of art as much as a complex of buildings for religion. So Encoreat has to be considered, I think, at once, an architectural structure, a temple and a sculpture in and of itself in the first instance.

That's one way of thinking of it. the central sanctuary, if you take the central sanctuary, it can be understood as the projection of the body of the divinity inside of it. And that divinity was associated, was conceptually associated with the king himself. So we imagine that originally there would have been a statue of Vishnu, presumably of Vishnu, because the temple itself was dedicated to Vishnu and this was the preferred god of the founder king, Soraya Bama, the second. So we imagine, we don't have the statue now, but we imagine that there was a large statue of the god Vishnu. You have to think of the architectural body there as a kind of substitute body for the king and the divinity

itself and a projection of what was inside. So in and of itself, that's a work of art, right? You can also think of the temple as a system of surfaces, a system of canvases, shall we say, or perhaps a singular, vast, complex canvas that presents sculptures. So most of the surfaces of Encore Wat are sculpted. And you have different types in a sense. You have in what Simon was referring to earlier as the third enclosure, the galleries of the third enclosure. There you have these long expanses, 50 meters or so long,

of tableau, effectively, that represent mythological scenes from Hindu. narratives from Hindu myth, or there are some historical scenes, again, represented in these long reliefs. You also have these kinds of Hindu myths, either particular episodes or particular scenes from particular episodes, represented on lentils and pediments throughout the temple. You also have the Absehah, the female or the Tebada, the female figures that Simon was also referring to, nearly 2,000 of them throughout the temple, animating the temple, in a sense. Those are these exquisite sculptures that are each individual through this extraordinary, improbable hairstyles and dress and jewelry. There are events in and off themselves in a sense.

It was a place for not only for the ruling elite, but a place for dancers, a place for musicians, a place for cooks. Simon, Simon, this was a period of great cathedral building in Europe. Are there any comparisons? Just the area within the moat of Anka-Watt is for. times the size of the Vatican City. So that's 402 acres just inside the mode. And it's 43 metres high. I sometimes as an exercise sort of place it over a city just to give it a size. If you put it on top of London, the bottom corner is by the Tower of London and the top corner is the other side of St. Paul. So it's nearly the size of the whole of the ancient city of London. And that's just Anquot.

What is so interesting to me as a stone mason is the difference. Of course, Everybody works to a plan. There's a design, but the way that the masons carried out the design is completely different. A stone mason and a European cathedral would be given templates to follow, and he would carve each stone on his banker, which would then be assembled to form an arch or a vault, following careful geometric designs that were made by the master mason. The Angkorian technique is almost exactly the opposite. it, they would assemble the mass of stone by incredibly precisely rubbing each joint until the contact was perfect. They didn't use any mortar, so the contact between the top bed and the bottom bed of the next stone had to be absolutely perfect or it would wobble. And also,

it would make this tight joint meant that it was then possible to carve the surface that was eventually created. So they assembled this huge mass, following a design, and then they carved it afterwards. And they didn't just carve the figures, but they carved the doorways, they carved the windows, they carved all of the decorations after the mass was assembled. So when Ashley talks about it being a sculpture, it is, whereas a cathedral is a dynamic structure that's built to a design.

Uncle Watt is in many ways a gigantic sculpture. People, I alluded to it earlier in briskly, but could you develop the idea of people who, who lived on the site, inhabited the site? When it was built in the 12th century, not only was it built as a gigantic religious monument, but it was built as a residential space. So it was part of an urban center.

So the research in the past century shut some light on the construction of the monument itself, but recent archaeological discovery within the enclosure, within the enclosure, the 800,000 square meter enclosure was exciting in a sense that by this time the 12th century, uncle urbanism evolved into something completely different in a sense that when it was built, Uncle what contained a series of 60 urban blocks, square urban blocks, eight square, contain at least four mounds and four ponds, where you could imagine they would have at least four households inhabited these urban blocks. So total inside Ancoa, what, we would easily count

between 2,000 and 3,000 people. We do not have inscription associated with that, but we do have inscription from other temple with large enclosures that they were inhabited by religious students, by learning, by the people who service the temple like cooks, or you have dancers or musicians that perform the rituals inside the temple. You have peace and everything like that. Inside Ancovat itself, we do not have evidence of who lived there, but we do have evidence of people live there continuously from the time it was built until at least the 18th century.

You mentioned the word temple. the idea at that time was that the king was God and God was the king. In what ways was this a Hindu temple or a Buddhist settlement or both or something else? Can we go into the religion of that, actually? The temple was originally constructed by Suryavama and the second for Suryavamun the second and for his association with the God Vishnu. So in that sense, it's a Hindu temple. But I think it's probably most useful to think of Ankurwad as a Khmer temple.

That is, even in Suryavama in the second's time, Vashnavism was not an exclusive religion in any way. The worship of Vishnu was certainly not exclusive of worship of Shiva. It was not exclusive even of worship of the Buddha. And Suryavama himself and certainly his court members and certainly dear in his reign, there was extensive support of Hindu religions in the plural and of Buddhism and, of course, of local iterations thereof, right? That's, in fact, it was only local iterations thereof. That is what some people might call animism was certainly at work and a part of the practices going on.

So in a sense, it's a Khmera temple. So when we say it was originally dedicated to Vishnu, I think that has to be taken within that broader context. As time moved on, certainly we know that by the 15th, 16th century, it was transformed into a Buddhist temple. But I think that also has to be taken, again, not as being exclusive of a temple associated with Vishnu, associated with Suryavama and the second, and understood in the relations between the Buddha and Vishnu, between Buddhism and Vaishnavism, and between the 16th century kings and the 12th century. So we know that because of inscriptions and because of sculptural work, which took place at the temple in the 16th century, it's actually dated in the late 16th century. we know that there was extensive Buddhist work going on there. But we also know that there was completion of continuation of the sculpting of reliefs dedicated to the God Vishnu in the third enclosure galleries. So while the 16th century kings were Buddhist, they sculpted Vaishnavite

reliefs or they commissioned the sculpture of Vaishnavite Reliefs. They also commissioned the sculpture of Buddhist statues. and ultimately we know that the central sanctuary of Encore Wat was converted into a Buddhist stupa. Simon Warwick, Cisternation yourself, what do you most admire about the carvings? Which sections stand out? The most moving and beautiful of the carvings are in the central sanctuary. To the left and the right of each doorway, which would have been open originally and were closed, as Ashley points out in the Buddhist period. But to the left and right of those doorways, are the most exquisite pieces of carving

that I think exist in the temple and maybe anywhere. The thing that is extraordinary from the point of view of someone who's done stone-meson carving is that, of course, they were carved in situ. Now, when we do carvings for a cathedral, we usually do them on a banker, and so if we make a mess of it, we get another piece of stone.

They had to get it right first time, and they could not make a mistake. And they are absolutely perfect and exquisitely carved with tiny jewels. You can see the flowers on the silk dresses that they wear. You can see minute jewelry, all carved in situ and not a single mistake. And so for me, those are. But then again, when you get to the more simple ones on the edges, there's wonderful groups where the girls are more relaxed

and they're sort of embracing each other. and you can imagine them chatting. It's so alive. All of the little groups of the Apsaras are individual. And, I mean, one point I'd like to make is that, you know, everybody always says, oh, it's extraordinary, they're all different. Well, it's normal that they're all different because it's much more difficult to make them all the same.

But the difference in Ankur is absolutely extraordinary, and they're real portraits. I mean, they are portraits of people from their families, from the people that they loved. you can see the difference in each face. And so for me, those are the moving ones on a personal level. But then, of course, the actual reliefs, you know, the churning of the Sea of Milk or the Battle of Kurokshetra are in such detail

that it's mind-boggling as a carver. I mean, in the space, the depth of about three centimetres, you can have three different levels of perspective. You'll have somebody in the foreground, then there'll be the wheel of a chariot, and then be somebody behind that wheel, all carved in this tiny space. It's absolutely wonderful.

How did the Kumar people become wealthy enough to build something so extraordinary, so immense, so complicated? What was their economy? The economy of Anko was built atop what came before them, their predecessor, which built on primarily agrarian economies.

So like I mentioned earlier, Ancoe was one of the largest agro-urbanism, in the world during that time. So the settlements actually were interspersed with rice field. But for Anko, it's not only the surrounding rice field. What we know from the inscriptions is that rice were collected as tribute or tax from the provincial centers, as far down as the Mecon Delta in southern Vietnam,

along the Mecon River through Cambodia, through Laos to Vianchan, And we also know from the inscriptions that they exploit forest resources like hires, capture elephants, like ivories, like gold mine or silver mine from the northeastern regions, as well as the western regions. They had access to cotton and beeswax from the Mecon Delta, mineral salt from the Kodat Plateau in northeast Thailand. So these sort of intricate sectors of economy intertwining an encro through interconnected highways or system of roads that link Uncle to their provincial centers. And that's what helped facilitate Anco as this giant cities. And their temples also like Ancoa, they had extended settlements or people that worked for them in the province.

provincials areas. So in a sense, uncore economies and religions and politics intertwine. Thank you. Ashley, did the temple reflect in any way or even contain physical elements of the people who used it? Yes, it certainly did, and it certainly does today, actually. So we don't know if the remains of the founder king, Soria Bama and the second, were contained or are contained

in some way inside the temple. What we do know is that in later years when we have inscriptions telling us what was going on. So again, in the late 16th century, we know that a king died and his wife, along with his son, went to the temple and deposited his remains at the temple. It's quite likely, and this was a process bearing the deceased king was a process then of bringing the new king to the throne, his son, the new king to the throne. And we believe that from the inscriptions and from the sculptural work that was done at the temple at that time, we believe that the king's remains, this would have been ashes. He would have been incinerated. We believe that his remains were deposited inside the central sanctuary in some way. And the four doors originally opening up to the four cardinal directions were blocked up with. sandstone sculpted in large colossal standing Buddhas and so closed off to the world, so converted into a Buddhist stupa. We also know that that same queen, that same queen mother, as it were, that she, in her devotional practices at the time, she recounts that she cut off her long hair.

This is a common Buddhist practice today still, actually, to cut off your hair and make it an offering. to the Buddha. So she cut off her hair and that hair was burned and the ashes were mixed with resin made into a sort of lacquer that is then used to coat Buddha statues. So effectively, not only is the deceased king or is a deceased person integrated into the sculptural body that Encorwat is, but also living people. So through this devotional practice and the restoration effectively of Buddha statues, the body of the donor is integrated. integrated into the body of the statue, and that statuary body is, of course, held at Encore Wat. So this is an extraordinary event, of course. It was a royal event. But we also have traces.

There are other traces at the temple, very interesting ones, of a similar funerary ritual happening at the temple. So, yes, I think it's something that is quite integral to the monument. Simon Warwick, how did successive generations change, or did they, the shape or design of the temple? Well, Ashley already referred to the king who came back, who finished the northern quadrant, the galleries in the northern quadrant. And he also did quite a few changes. The basic shape of the temple didn't change, but the doors were closed. But what is particularly interesting from the point of view of a stone mason or conservator was that, in many ways what he was actually doing was restoring the temple, but he was doing it in respect of his ancestors.

So again, as actually pointed out, he was Buddhist, but he finished the galleries still telling the Hindu stories on the reliefs. And so in some ways, that was a first restoration of the temple. We also know that he brought in a lot of sculptures from other temples. and we know that we were actually able to date the restoration because of the lacquer that was on the sculpture because referring to the inscription, which actually mentioned and the Queen Mother burning her hair

and mixing it with the lacquer, the whole statue is covered with lacquer, but it's also restored with new pieces of stone, new feet, and so on. And the lacquer is over those joints. So that enables us to say that that restoration was actually carried out by the king in the late 16th century. Simon, I've been referring to its immensity and its uniqueness. I feel it's unique, so I'd given the game away.

I mean, is there any way that anything attempted to emulate it at all around the time in a few centuries? I would say they focused essentially on Uncle What, because the other thing that is extraordinary about it is it was built incredibly quickly. We referred to the cathedrals in Europe And most of them took two or three hundred years to build Whereas Anka Wat was built in 32 years And the only cathedral in England that was built that quickly was Salisbury But I don't think we can compare it

So because we know that it would have been started When the king ascended to the throne And it would have stopped Shortly after his death because there was a war So they managed to do this extraordinary feet in an really exceptionally small amount of time. And that, for me, is one of the great, I wouldn't say mystery, but it's something that I explore with great enthusiasm to try and find out how on earth they did it.

They were great engineers, and one of the reasons they have this huge moat going around it would have been for them to be able to unload the stone from four sides. Because the amount of stone that was coming into the temple would have been around 200, large two or three ton blocks per day. And there was almost nowhere in Europe today, which could quarry that much stone. I spoke with the quarry masters in Carrara, and when I told them the extent of the stone

that was arriving in Angkor, they said, no, where can we do that today, even with modern machinery? So they had an extraordinary organizational capacity and a huge amount of people. And I'm certain that they were, that they had to stay there because they were working full-time. When the French, talking over to people now,

when the French arrived in the 19th century, there was an idea that they were rediscovering a temple that had been lost, and that idea, romantic idea, they lost and then found, did that sustain itself as an idea for very long? Well, from our understanding, so, like Ashley had mentioned, We have consistent evidence that Anko, especially Anco, was never abandoned. And from archaeology, I had mentioned earlier, we work on settlement inside AncoWat

that show continuities from the 12th century onward to the 18th century. And with the French document themselves, those who came to Ancoe, they also describe people living there. They described Buddhist monks practiced their religious rituals there in Anko, the stale pagodas in Anko. But the idea of the contrast between the grandeur of Anco, this large stone monuments, and the contemporary Cambodia in the 19th century was so sharp that through the eyes of the colonial explorers, there's no way modern Cambodia could build, modern Cambodians could build these temples. So that came the idea of lost, lost civilization, the degenerated race from the Kmao-Wanko to the modern Cambodia. But that was the colonial ideal because that ideology of unexplored civilizations, the civilization that was in need of the French colonial help

to restore it back to its glory in competition with the British possession of India drove the French colonization to Cambodia. So the idea of loss sort of being carried over to the academic realm where you have the distinction between the Angkorian Hindu, Hinduism, Hindu practice and the post-uncorean rupture of Buddhist practices. From our understanding today, we do not have that ruptures.

So I would refer to Ashley for that, actually. Well, Ashley, can I ask you a slightly different question? Is it challenging to conserve this massive, unique place? if so how how changed it? Yes, very much so. I would link that question actually to what Pippal was just saying about the notion of encore being abandoned and the discourse, the colonial discourse that created this massive rupture to the extent actually of at times assuming or projecting the notion

that the Cameras themselves had not built this temple, and they were not the legitimate inheritors of it. So that, of course, conservation discourse, conservation practices change over time. But when the French colonial services were first beginning work in Cambodia, they came on the back of a discourse that had already been established through early explorers and then early colonial administrators that the temple had been discovered and that the Khmeras themselves,

did not know of it, did not know anything of the history of it, et cetera. So the first, the first engravings, the first images that you see produced by the French of the temple are of a temple more overgrown than it was and depopulated with nobody there, some sort of savage figures looking out at the temple with the French colonials. So you have a very distorted view of the Khmer relation to the temple from the beginning. There were also initiatives in early on to, there were, of course, practicing the first photographs that we see of Encore Wat in the 1860s. They show us that there was a functional Buddhist monastery on the temple grounds. And we know that when the French first began clearing the temple sites at Encore and first began working at Encore Wat.

They also worked to bring the monastics off of the central pyramid to come. clear out anything that might put the original temple in danger in their view in a sense, and to clean it up and to begin conservation work from their point of view. So there have always been tensions between the local monastics in particular and local populations who use the temple for devotional purposes and the conservation practitioners. The French also built a small hotel in front of the temple. and at times there was a gift shop selling statuary, etc. Now, this practice changed and it changed very quickly,

and the French colonial powers themselves instituted laws to protect the cultural heritage and worked quite closely with each other and with the Khmer elite in a sense to protect the temple sites. But this is a, it's a movable feast. It changed over time. et cetera. One of the major, major challenges, I think today still, is to prioritize how do we find ways of prioritizing local relations with the cultural heritage. So that can be the temple of Encore Watt. That can be the statues. That can be the rituals that are practiced there. How do we do that at the same time that we look to enable the local populations to benefit from

the tourist revenue that comes in, which is quite important for the local economy. That's a balance which has not yet been reached, but I think it's on many, many people's minds. We're near the end now, but Simon, could you make a comment on that, reaching that balance? Talking of the conservation of the temple, Anco-Watt was actually one of the better conserved temples for two reasons. One, it's built better than any of the others. And two, it was never abandoned, as we've, I hope we've managed to point out. quite clearly now. The other temples of which there's about 200 in the immediate surroundings were very badly damaged by overgrowth. So actually the French activities largely concentrated

on the very badly damaged temples and not to such an extent on Angkor. The work, the problem at Angkor is actually different from the other temples. The problem at Angkor is that because it's exposed, because it was never engulfed by the jungle, the sandstone has been subject to weathering which the other temples were not subject to. So a lot of the reliefs and the carvings in the more exposed areas are damaged by natural decay, stone decay. So the conservation that is carried out, that we've carried out on Ancourt, is much more on the conservation of surfaces than it is on the conservation of the structure. The other temples had much more structural problems

and was subject to dismantling and reassembly, and that was never really necessary at Angkor. Finally, people, what's the status of Angkor now for people in Cambodia and people from Cambodia who are now overseas and come back to it again and again? What's the status? Yeah, so let me add to both what Ashley and Simon had mentioned and that balance between conservation and local,

practices. So as we had mentioned that Uncle was never abandoned, people around, still live around Uncle. People in Sierra, like myself, who grew up going to Uncle, mostly for rituals, not really for sightseeing. So I, from my, the memory of my childhood's always been going to Uncle, especially Uncle Wat, to offer, make offerings to the monks inside the Pagod. or going to worship the local spirit in Ankova, we call it Thari. And so the relationship between Cambodians and Anko still persist as a place of ancestors, a place of ancestor worship, a place to conduct religious rituals, which we believe that Anko is the most sacred.

space in Cambodia. So if you make it offerings, it would go toward our ancestors, you know, so on and so forth. But also, Ashley and Simon had mentioned the post-Ankorean kings return to Uncle to restore Uncle. Uncle has always been this symbol of Cambodia power, especially among the elites. So the restoration of Uncle Wat itself has always been. equating to restoration of Cambodian political power, political entity, as a stable country. So emerging out of over 30 years of civil war, the conservation of uncle of our national symbol itself still continue to mean the restoration of Cambodia,

to have a stable political system, to have enduring peace so that people can live in prosperity. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for Ashley Thompson, Biffel Heng and Simon Warwick, and to our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's the figure of John Bull, created in 1712 in a satire and his afterlife as an English everyman. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we missed out that we should have kept in? Starting with you, Simon. working in the temple, and this leads on from the last things that we said, the life-changing and genuinely life-changing moment for me was actually to understand

how to work side by side with the local community and to respect their needs, because we are working on a living temple. It's not an archaeological site. It's a living temple. And so thanks to Ashley and her colleagues, Angtralian and other people, I was able to actually sit down in the villages and speak with the shamans and the, the, what the, the chas, as they're called, and to listen to them and to find out their needs that were absolutely fascinating. And I learned a huge amount from that because one of the things that tends to happen is that people arrive in such an wonderful sight and say, okay, this needs to be done, that needs to be done. And the exercise that I learned to carry out in my head is do we get Cambodians arriving at the Vatican City in Rome and saying,

OK, we're going to deal with the Pieta or we're going to fix the Benini-Baldacina or something? And of course we don't. And we have to ask ourselves that question and respect the religious and ethical and spiritual needs, which go side by side with conserving the structure. And that was when I learned that when you're restoring something, you're not just restoring the stone, but you're restoring the use. And you're restoring, as people said, even more in a place like Cambodia, which has suffered so much.

So for me, it was the link between working and listening and living with the people in the communities and trying to reflect their needs in the work that we did on the side. And that, for me, was the most moving and most exciting. moment that I've had in my career, I think. One section that I would add more, just because it's my interest now, it's just talking about Anco as a city itself. So Ancouad is only one section of a greater Ancocan city where you have multiple temples, where you have many, many people living surrounding Ancola.

Personally, I want people to view Uncle not as a dead city. But imagine if we were to live in Uncle back in the 13th, 14th century at its peak. We had these giant temples like Uncle Bart, Uncle Tom, the Bayon, as different landmarks. People would navigate the cities like we do today. You go to this landmark, you see this temple on the left, you go to that one kilometer, to the east, you see the giant reservoir. So it's created this counterbalance to the last narrative that we can't only look at Angkor as a dead city.

In fact, if we approach it slightly differently, what Angkorian people had experienced and what we are experienced today in our modern city is actually quite similar. Ashley? I think carrying on from this question of Onkoy, Encore and Encore Wat in particular is a living site, I would look to explore the way in which Encore Wat itself has been generative. At some point, Melvin, you asked, has there ever been an imitation of it? There have been Thai imitations of it, you know, models of Encore Wat built. You can consider a lot of the architecture that was developed in what became Thailand

in different sites in Sokata even or in Ayutia to be developed and so on an encorean architecture and encoreing concepts of what architecture means in building the state. There's a very beautiful and interesting map of Encore Wat drawn by Japanese pilgrims in the 17th century, which is kept in a museum in Japan. But Encore has also been generative of cultural production more broadly, so not just imitations of the temple itself, but so if you look at Khmera literature, some of the earliest literature written in the Khmerer language. So in the Angkorian period, there was Sanskrit was used, and the Khmer language was used for composition.

But there was a clear division of labor. Sanskrit was used for poetic composition, and the Khmer language was used for documentation, so how many people were assigned to this temple and what the taxes were and this sort of thing. But in the very early post-Hunquarian period, you get a development of the use, use of the Khmer language as a tool of poetic composition. And some of the first literature there

that you have of that order is called the poem of Encore Wat. And actually I could translate that not only as the poem of Encore Wat, but I could also translate it as the construction of Encore Wat. So that word poem is the same as the word for a construction such as a temple construction. So it's the story of the building of Encore Wat. And this is a story which is still taught in schools today. And so it gave literature. It literally, it literally generated Khmerer literature. On the other hand, what we have, we were talking about inscriptions on the temple, the bulk, we have just a few very short inscriptions from the 12th century, from the time of the king or shortly after his death on the temple. The bulk of the inscriptions on the walls of Ankorwatt

themselves date to the post-oncoran period, so from the 16th century on. We have the first, the first Khmer epigraphic text written in verse, very early 18th century, is a long poem written in three types of Khmer verse in the vernacular Khmer language on a wall of Encorewad, and it's a man recalling, commemorating, praising his wife and his two children who have all died. And so it's a very literary poem. It's full of literary allusions to Buddhist literature, to Hindu literature, and it's a eulogy to his family members. So that, too, the walls of Encore Wat have generated Khmerverse in that way. So it's a very productive site.

I think you also have to think about the way that the image of Encore Wat, the icon, it is an icon. You asked is it an architectural structure? Is it a piece of sculpture? It's a piece of sculpture also, insofar as it's an icon, which is reproduced and reproduced across Cambodia, across the Cambodian diaspora. It's the image on the flag. It's the image on the early coins. It's the image you see all over the place and it is an image which has been generative

as the embodiment, the sort of microcosmic embodiment of the country itself. So I think that's quite important in understanding how Encore functions for Cambodians. Thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Greg Jenna

and you're dead to me from Radio 4 is back. Yes, we're the comment. show that takes history seriously. And this series get ready to hear about Frederick the Great of Prussia with Stephen Fry. I'm just thrilled at this history lesson. Learn a fair old amount about an ancient Egyptian queen with Kima Bob.

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