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National Geographic : 1960 Apr
Contents
KODACHROMEBY JOHN KESHISHIAN© NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY Fievet with contemporary scenes of everyday life, as real as action photographs. For the history of the Khmers' rise, full flowering, and decline, we are indebted prin cipally to French archeologists and scholars of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, who stripped the jungle from many of the ruins and patiently sifted clues to their puzzles. The native Khmer genius was sparked from its misty beginnings by traders and scholars from India. There developed an elaborate Indianized culture-particularly among the court and clergy-such as sprang up elsewhere in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. But the Khmers bent this culture to their own charac ter and with deft chisels reshaped its art to one distinctively their own. Oddly, most of our knowledge of the early Khmers comes from Chinese chronicles. About the beginning of the Christian Era the Khmers emerged in two separate states, which the Chinese called Funan, located in the lower Mekong River delta, and Chenla, farther in land (painting, page 526). "The men are all ugly and black. Their hair is curly. They go naked and barefoot," states one 3d-century Chinese report on Funan. Later dynastic records, however, relate: "The sons of the well-to-do families [wear] sarongs of brocade.... The people of Funan make rings and bracelets of gold and vessels of silver." Many Chinese trading and diplomatic mis 524 Cleared ruins of Phnom Bakheng, on which Yaso varman I built his tem ple, thrust above the for est. Angkor's south wall appears as a cleft in the jungle at upper right. Bush and rice cover the moat. Yasovarman's suc cessors twice shifted Angkor's center, so that hill and shrine finally lay outside the city walls. Octopuslike silk-cotton trees strangle and pry apart the sculptured stone galleries of Preah Khan, one of Angkor's 12th-century Buddhist shrines. Slowly, imper ceptibly, pavements heave and walls topple. sions visited Funan, and even in those days cultural exchange occurred. In the third cen tury the Funan king dispatched a troupe of musicians to China, where they fascinated Em peror Sun Ch'uan with their odd music. Angkor Wat Climaxed Khmer Art About the middle of the 6th century the inland kingdom of Chenla absorbed its delta neighbor, Funan, to form a single state Kambuja, or Kambujadesa, whence the West ern adaptation, Cambodia. Then, two centuries later, began the so called Angkorean period of the Khmers. It was to flourish under more than 30 monarchs for 600 years, climaxed by the architectural grandeur of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat (city temple). Abandonment followed a de structive attack by the Thai in 1431, and Angkor was left to the ravages of the jungle for more than four centuries, to await the excited gaze of Henri Mouhot. Today Angkor no longer lies tangled in jungle isolation. Roads afford access to the principal shrines. The Grand Hotel at Siem Reap, closest town to the ruins, even runs bus tours on "grand" and "petit" circuits. As is inevitable, too, vendors cluster at the ruins. They sell postcards and guidebooks and tempt visitors with perforated buffalo hide lampshades, crossbows, knives, and other souvenirs. A few offer Cambodian riels for (Continued on page 533)
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