Archaeologists have found a network of ancient temples close to Angkor Wat, providing a window into the remarkable history of Cambodia.
I was told that this was the beginning of the empire, but from where I was standing, it was difficult to picture the location as the hub of anything, much less a powerful nation. On a decaying stone pyramid in the middle of the Cambodian forest, my guide Thon Aradhana and I were standing. We were surrounded by a wall of lychee trees, and the spaces between the iron-red stones beneath our feet burst with flora. We rode motorbikes through a tangle of winding woodland tracks, evading creepers hanging over our path and bouncing over exposed roots, because there were no highways leading there. Whatever it had been before, nature had long since taken it back.
But after that, I saw a change in the scenery. I thought that's what we were strolling across when we descended from our perch and crossed the woodland floor. Convoys of black ants were moving aggressively through the tinder-dry leaf litter at our feet. The sandy orange soil was covered in termite mounds. We reached the crest of a steep slope that initially appeared to lead to a 10 foot drop into a denser jungle. Varathana pushed me to look closer, and when I did, I saw that I wasn't actually on the ground at all, but rather a perfectly square platform that, in his words, encompassed 212 acres and served as a sort of massive concourse.
It was somewhat similar to staring at one of those Magic Eye photos and watching a scene materialise from a kaleidoscope of colour as I took in the enormity of this construction concealed beneath the trees, of which the stone pyramid represented just a small centre piece. The temple I had just left wasn't some remote artefact. It served as the focal point of a crowded city.
The temple, known as Rong Chen, is located at the top of Phnom Kulen, a high plateau that rises from the northern Cambodian plains. Historians connect the beginnings of the Khmer empire, which controlled over a vast portion of Southeast Asia in the middle ages and constructed Angkor Wat, the biggest temple complex in the world, to Kulen, whose name means "lychee." Angkor Wat is located about 30 miles southwest of Kulen.
Since a French epigrapher read a stone inscription in what is now northern Thailand that detailed the coronation of Jayavarman II, the king who founded the empire in 802, archaeologists have known for more than a century that the kingdom's capital was on Kulen. The ruins at Kulen had been catalogued by French explorers in the late 19th century, and the location had been mapped between the 1930s and 1960s. The overgrown remains of Kulen appeared modest and inaccessible in comparison to the magnificent magnitude of Angkor Wat and the dozens of other temples that are close by in the Angkor Archaeological Park. Digging there was postponed until the following day.
When the French archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Che Vance started seriously excavating Kulen in 2008, that time had come. By the year 2012, Che Vance and his Australian coworker Damian Evans were employing lidar, a type of radar that can scan through vegetation to identify concealed buildings. With the aid of this technology, thorough study was able to reveal the ancient city's intricate network of streets, temples, reservoirs, and earthworks. The team presented their findings in late 2019 just before COVID closed Cambodia's borders to tourists: they had finally mapped out the layout of Jayaraman's capital, Mahendraparvata.
In March of last year, just after Cambodia had reopened and tourists had started filtering back in, I went to the location. Nearly all of them were travelling to Angkor Wat, which at the height of its popularity before COVID was drawing more than 2.5 million visitors annually and turning its grounds into a sea of selfie sticks. With the discovery of Kulen's past, more of those visitors might start making an attempt to visit there. The Archaeology & Development Foundation of Cambodia has been preparing local villagers to serve as tour guides while the government of Cambodia is constructing a new road to improve access to the sites. But for now, not many people visit there. Kulen is Cambodia's undiscovered kingdom, if Angkor Wat is the country's most popular tourist destination.
The ambience of Kulen's temples more than makes up for their lack of scale. Varathana and I were among the woods when we noticed Rong Chen's pile of mossy stones. We peered back through the greenery. Only a cicadas' chorus could be heard in the silence. We were the only ones there, save for the lone guard dozing off in a hammock during the hot day.
Rong Chen is likely the most significant of the mountain's 40 or more stone temples, which are scattered throughout the jungle in varying degrees of deterioration and entanglement. The reason was stated by Aradhana, a rake-thin man in his mid-thirties with a delicate, singsong voice. Pyramids stood for regal authority, he argued. "They were constructed for the king's adoration." This area has been a patchwork of warring statelets up to the ninth century. They were conquered by Jayaraman into an empire that was under his rule.
So this is where Angkor began, said Varathana. In relation to this temple, Jayaraman declared, "I am in command."
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From Siem Reap, the metropolis that has developed up around Angkor Wat, we had left early that morning. After being dormant for two years due to COVID, it has just started to resurface. Without tourism, many of the locals would not have had jobs, and thousands would have moved away.
Among them was Varathana. He had been employed in the hotel industry up until COVID hit. Yet, he claims that he "didn't have a lot to do" throughout the pandemic. My interest in archaeology developed into an obsession. In order to conduct study on temples, he began to traverse the entire nation and even met with a group of academics. In the past, Cambodians have always participated in archaeological study less than foreigners. Nearly all of the nation's historians and archaeologists were among the 2 million victims Pol Pot, the homicidal communist tyrant who governed the country between 1975 and 1979, slaughtered. With them, their wisdom passed away. When we were heading towards Kulen, Varathana said to me with a tinge of annoyance, "It is much simpler to study about our history if you are French than if you are Cambodian. He claimed he was involved in an initiative to translate academic articles into Khmer because he wanted his countrymen to have easier access to this knowledge.
Mysterious lost city discovered in Cambodian jungle https://t.co/pjCqCdzIhp pic.twitter.com/d3oZiV3EMp
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We travelled through a scene of rice fields and stilted-house settlements, which have historically been raised to avoid flooding during Cambodia's heavy rainy season. We arrived at the base of the mountain after an hour and started to climb the dirt path to the top. Mahendraparvata may seem like a lost city to those from outside of Cambodia, yet even as the jungle reclaimed its structures and its history faded, Cambodians continued to visit them as sites of devotion. Natural springs that flow down to the plains below and irrigate crops of rice, mango, and cassava are all over the mountain. These springs have made sure that the mountain has maintained its sacred status, which was presumably one of the reasons Jayavarman II decided to locate his capital there in the first place. Cambodians still worship and cool off in the rivers and waterfalls today.
We made a pit break at the River of a Thousand Lingas, an ancient pilgrimage site, high on the mountain. Lingas are carved priapic dome-shaped fertility emblems made of stone that honour the god Shiva. They are typically found in temples where water is poured on top to sanctify it. Yet in this place, they cover the entire riverbed. We all understand that this is a holy location, Varathana stated. "My grandma would visit and bring water back to our home. According to legend, water can bring us luck.
We rented motorcycles in a neighboring community. I was riding pillion behind Thon Choi, a man who lives on the mountain and is familiar with its winding routes as well as New Yorkers are with the subway, as Kulen is not a place for inexperienced riders like me. We rode along the freshly laid concrete for a few kilometres while passing crews of workers polishing it and amid clouds of black and yellow butterflies. Then we made a U-turn and vanished into the forest. The going wasn't easy. Choi would instruct me to get off the bike and walk when we reached a steep or rutted incline before he blasted the motor and accelerated up the hill.
Our route was a difficult mystery to me. Every pathway, thicket, and orchard had a similar appearance. People seeking a place to vanish have been drawn to the mountain at various points in Cambodian history by its maze-like appearance. The Khmer Rouge fled to Kulen in 1979 when they were being forced from power. They planted a huge number of land mines all over the mountain to further defend themselves. Prior to the most recent archaeological excavations, the area had to be cleared of unexploded munitions, which allowed for public access to the site.
We eventually found ourselves in a bright clearing with one of the mountain's most impressive ruins, seemingly out of nowhere. A trio of brick towers with tiers make up the temple Damrei Krap, which was built in the late eighth century. The central tower is complete, and the outer towers are incomplete stumps. Cambodia is a Buddhist nation today, but its kings adopted Hinduism between the fifth and the 12th centuries after traders from India introduced it there. Elephants that are carved and placed throughout the main temple at Damrei Krap serve as a tribute to the Hindu goddess of fortune and regal authority, Gaja Lakshmi.
We briefly paused to chat with the elderly guard, who gave us lychees that had been plucked from the nearby trees. We entered into the dim, dusty room after ducking our heads under the entryway. Nesting bats flapped above us in the gloom. The Hindu god Vishnu would have once graced the stone plinth on the floor in front of us, but like the majority of the sculptures that formerly adorned the temples at Kulen, it has long ago vanished. Some of the best items were brought home by the French, where they are currently shown in museums like the Musée Guimet in Paris. Then, for financial gain, the Khmer Rouge and other political groups stole the nation and sold thousands of pieces of art created in Cambodia to dishonest merchants who then sold them to foreign collectors. Thankfully, some items were transported to Phnom Penh's National Museum of Cambodia. But no one is sure where the statues from Damrei Krap ended up.
Varathana was a treasure trove of architectural lore. He showed me an archway and said it resembled those in Champa, a former kingdom in what is now Vietnam. Champa was included into the early Angkor empire along with other adjacent states, which had an impact on the flourishing architectural style of Jayavarman's capital. Some models arrived all the way from Java, which is now in Indonesia.
These various architectural styles came together in Mahendraparvata structures to create the global "Kulen style." Varathana offered me a tour of the hill, pointing out temples with carvings and others with white plaster that had been worn into curly and flowery designs. There were single buildings and groups of smaller shrines. The mountain was where the empire's aesthetic identity emerged; an identity that would peak at the 12th-century temple complex known as Angkor Wat. I called Chevance afterwards, who described Kulen as "a laboratory of architectural forms that will come to be employed repeatedly in the Angkor region," and he agreed.
It was a relief to get back to Siem Reap and the two hotels I stayed at each night after a long day of riding about on a motorbike. Both places were appropriate stops on a trip that focused on Cambodian architecture. The construction of Jaya House is in the New Khmer style, a popular kind of tropical modernism in Cambodia during the 1950s and 1960s. The hotel's restaurant looks onto one of several courtyards with covered pools and has a ceiling in the shape of a stepped pyramid, a nod to the temples of the Khmer kingdom. At Shinta Mani Angkor, I also slept in a private villa that Bill Bensley, an American architect based in Thailand, created. His richly nostalgic hotels are consistently infused with local culture. A sizable plaster relief that resembled the carvings at Angkor Wat was located in the villa's tiled courtyard next to a tiny private pool.
I then went outside to observe the development of Kulan's architecture. I travelled to Koh Ker, which is about 75 miles from Siem Reap, to witness the enormous stepped pyramid built there by a Jayavarman II successor in the tenth century. Each king created his own city in an effort to surpass his forebear, and Koh Ker's pyramid is a massive version of Rong Chen. The kings were a competitive lot. Nearer to home, I hopped in a tuk-tuk one evening and left my villa for the Angkor Archaeological Park. Angkor Wat and the ruins of numerous ancient imperial capital towns are located in this region, which covers an area of around 154 square miles.
Pre Rup is a temple that was built in the 10th century, not long after the king had descended to the plains from Phnom Kulen's top. I wanted to go there. I noticed echoes of Rong Chen, where Varathana and I had began, as soon as I turned to look across the dried grass on its grounds. Pre Rup is made up of a huge, three-tiered pyramid constructed, like Rong Chen, out of red stone blocks. There are five tower temples comparable to those at Damrei Krap standing on its upper platform. At Pre Rup, I understood why pyramids like the one at Kulen are also referred to as "mountain temples." It appeared as though Kulen itself was being recreated by the architects.
At the base of the pyramid, I moved along the lofty walls before ascending the stairway. The portals of the towers were flanked by carvings of female attendants wearing long skirts and ornate hairstyles, and the towers were guarded by stone lions. I looked out over the park's trees from the top, hoping to spot Angkor Wat in the distance. Pre Rup is an expansion of the mountainside temples, whereas Angkor Wat is a spectacular exaggeration that is bigger, grander, and more ornate in every way. I felt as though I were standing on a bridge connecting the beginning of the empire with its height as I sought in vain the line of trees for its lotus-shaped towers.
Mahendraparvata was no longer the royal capital when Pre Rup was constructed, but it was still used as a religious centre. The next day, I went back to the mountain and hopped back on the motorbike, but this time, I wasn't going to the temples; instead, I was going to see a sort of jungle cave. The cave was carved out of a boulder the size of a house and was located in a steep valley. A pond in front of it included various carved stones in the shapes of elephants, serpents, and turtles, as well as a flat stone that was once a pedestal for a statue.
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The location appeared older to my inexperienced eye than the earlier temples we had viewed; because of its ad hoc simplicity, it appeared nearly prehistoric. Yet in reality, it was constructed between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, many years after the royal architects had departed the mountain. Hermits, drawn by Kulen's sanctity, took their place. They lived in small communities, shared their knowledge of meditation with the travelers who followed them, and carved out caves and other sacred locations from the surrounding mountains.
I spotted a boulder that was covered with recently melted wax as I made my way back to my bike by climbing out of the gully. The candle stubs, set in little foil holders, were still visible. As a place of devotion, this wet, fern- and root-covered nook of the hill was still active. It was cut out by hermits who departed hundreds of years ago. But the charm still exists for its contemporary travelers.