What is accurate and what is not
The popular story says that Angkor was a great city lost in the jungle for centuries until a French explorer found it in 1860. The accurate version is more interesting. Angkor stopped being the permanent royal capital of the Khmer kings in the fifteenth century, and many parts of the wider city were gradually abandoned or reduced. But Angkor Wat was never entirely abandoned. It continued as a Buddhist temple, was visited by pilgrims and travellers from different countries, and was well known to Cambodians. What the nineteenth century added was not discovery but publicity for a European audience.
How the capital moved
Angkor was the main centre of the Khmer kingdom for roughly six centuries, from the early ninth century. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the situation had changed. The traditional date for the end of the capital is 1431, when forces from the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya are said to have captured Angkor. Later Cambodian chronicles are not always reliable on such dates, but there is wide agreement that the Khmer court moved south and east soon afterwards, settling in the region of Phnom Penh and later at places such as Longvek and Oudong.
It is better to think of a gradual shift than a single sudden event. Several pressures seem to have worked together.
- Military pressure from Ayutthaya, which had been founded in the mid-fourteenth century and grew into a strong rival.
- A change of economic orientation. A capital further south, near the Mekong and closer to the sea, was better placed for the growing maritime trade with China and other regions.
- Religious change. The spread of Theravada Buddhism reduced the royal ideology that had supported the massive temple-building of earlier kings.
- Environmental stress. Research using tree-ring dating of long-lived trees in the region has pointed to severe droughts and heavy monsoon swings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These may have strained the water system on which Angkor depended.
- Maintenance and the water system. The canals and reservoirs needed constant upkeep, and there is evidence of blockages and damage in the later period.
Scholars argue about how much weight each factor deserves, and no single cause is accepted by everyone. Similar debates surround other great centres, such as the Classic Maya collapse and the Indus decline theories, where the idea of one dramatic cause has also given way to a combination of pressures.
Angkor after the court left
The city did not become empty. Archaeological and written evidence points to continuing settlement and use, though on a smaller scale than before. Angkor Wat in particular remained a Buddhist monastery and pilgrimage site, kept up by monks and local communities. Inscriptions and accounts record visits and donations through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the sixteenth century, a Cambodian king is reported to have taken an interest in Angkor and in completing some unfinished carvings. A Portuguese traveller, Antonio da Madalena, is said to have visited in the 1580s, and the chronicler Diogo do Couto wrote about Angkor around 1600. Japanese visitors left inscriptions at Angkor Wat in the seventeenth century, one of which is dated to 1632. These sources show that outsiders reached Angkor long before the nineteenth century.
Henri Mouhot and 1860
Henri Mouhot was a French naturalist who travelled in Siam, Cambodia and Laos. He visited Angkor in early 1860, made drawings, and wrote about what he saw. He died of fever in Laos in 1861, and his travel journal was published after his death in 1863. The book was widely read and its illustrations of Angkor Wat reached a large audience in Europe.
Mouhot was not the first European to see the ruins. Earlier visitors included Portuguese and Japanese travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a French missionary, Charles-Émile Bouillevaux, who is reported to have visited around 1850. Nor did Mouhot find anything that local people did not know. His real importance lies in the influence of his book. It helped create the image of a mysterious city overgrown by forest, a picture that suited Western ideas of romantic ruins and remains common. The notion of jungle-swallowed cities, applied elsewhere to places such as the rainforest ruins at Tikal, has affected how many people think of Angkor.
Colonial scholarship and a changing view
After Mouhot, French scholars and officials took up Angkor. From 1907, when the region around Siem Reap came back under Cambodian administration within the French protectorate, the École française d’Extrême-Orient began systematic clearing, mapping, recording and restoration. Their work, along with the study of Sanskrit and Old Khmer inscriptions, established the chronology of the Khmer kings and the sequence of the monuments. It also had a colonial context, and some early ideas about the origin of the monuments, including doubts that the Khmer ancestors of modern Cambodians could have built them, have been rejected by later scholarship. The builders were the Khmer, as inscriptions and archaeology clearly show.
What research is showing now
Recent research has changed the picture of Angkor as a city. Aerial laser scanning has revealed networks of roads, canals and house-mounds across a much wider area than the temples alone, and this work indicates that the settled landscape was larger than previously thought. Questions about the pace and causes of decline are being re-examined with new data, including evidence from lake sediments and tree rings.
The word forgotten, then, is better understood as a story about outside attention than about local memory. Angkor was remembered, used and venerated throughout the centuries by the people who lived near it, and today it is a central symbol of Cambodian identity.