Representaciones gráficas

Th e society that Khmer kings ruled was fundamentally agricultural.

And they controlled their farming subjects through two administrative networks: one religious, the other secular. In the case of temple lands,

which were not automatically tax exempt like Pagan, appointed offi cials

had to satisfy the throne about the proper use of resources, human and animal. Powerful families endowed local temples, often dedicated to the ancestral spirits, whose priests maintained contact with the large temples

in Angkor. Th rough these central religious institutions a proportion of the

wealth generated in the provinces was funnelled to the royal exchequer.

Th e king sanctioned each family’s control over local temples and, if

dissatisfi ed with their running, he could revoke that authority.

Th e second network focused on non-temple farming communities

which were liable for taxes in kind—labour work and military service.

Th eir lives were also dominated by the great provincial families, but they

were at the beck and call of the monarchy, whose demands for manpower could be heavy when temples, reservoirs and embankments were under construction. “Like a father cherished by his children,” claimed

Jayavarman V, “he dried the tears of his affl icted subjects.” Th at this ruler

actually admitted the harsh lot of the peasantry should not be overlooked; well might farmers acknowledge how prosperity was guaranteed by their semi-divine kings, but they also knew the extent of their own eff orts in bringing it to fruition.

Khmer rulers were more careful in their handling of the aristocracy.

honours and the revenues from newly acquired territory. It is more than likely that almost constant warfare was driven by the need for kings to buy loyalty afresh in every generation. High rank would mean nothing without the means of conspicuous display. Expensive parasols with fringes falling almost to the ground distinguished nobles from the rest of the population. At festivals celebrated nearly every month in Angkor, the cost of lavish entertainment fell upon their purses. According to Zhou Daguan, the New Year was welcomed with incredible extravagance:

A large stage is set up in front of the royal palace. Th ere is room for over a thousand people. Everywhere they are lanterns and fl owers. Facing the stage, on a bank more than a hundred metres away, are tall wooden structures, like the scaff olding used to make a pagoda. Th ey must be over seventy metres high. Every night they put up three or four of these, or fi ve or six of them, and set out fi reworks and fi recrackers on their tops. Th e various provincial offi cials and the great houses cover all the costs. When night comes the king is invited to watch, and he lights the fi reworks, which can be seen many kilometres away. Th e fi recrackers shake the ground. All the offi cials and members of the royal family give their share of huge candles and betel nuts, and spend a very great deal. Th e king also invites foreign envoys as spectators. Th ings go on in this way for fi fteen days before coming to an end.

Lesser events doubtless took place in the provinces, where the peasantry enjoyed a respite from back-breaking work in the fi elds. Below these free farmers were the enslaved.

Slavery remains a thorny problem because slaves in the Khmer kingdom had many levels of social status, diff erent origins, and a variety of duties. “All family slaves,” Zhou Daguan reports, “are savages purchased to work as servants. Most families have a hundred or more; a few have

ten or twenty; only the poorest have none at all. Th ese savages are people

from the mountains.” It was not until a French protectorate was imposed on Cambodia in 1863 that slave raids ceased.

Domestic slaves formed the lowest rank in Khmer society, whether they worked indoors as servants or as labourers in the fi elds. Above them

was a whole series of gradations that culminated in “temple slaves”, who

may have enjoyed priestly status. Th e enslaved at temples could have

duties ranging from manual labour to ritually important tasks such as

the preparation of food for the gods. Th ere are records of “temple slaves”

buying land and even owning their own slaves. Because it was regarded as an honour to enter temple service, well-born women were known to have voluntarily given up their freedom to work in the largest temples. Other Khmers became slaves through poverty: either sold as children by impoverished families or enslaved as debtors when adults.

To what extent was Angkor founded on slavery? No precise answer can be given. In every Southeast Asian country there were slaves, although in Upper Burma their numbers always tended to be small. In Angkor, the free and the enslaved lived together. Yet Zhou Daguan points out how a respectful distance was carefully preserved between Khmer masters and their slaves, who on entering a house “must kneel, join hands in greeting, and bow down to the fl oor before they can venture forward”.

An Angkor Wat depiction of Suryavarman II giving orders to his ministers

And these servants were “never allowed to sit or sleep indoors”. Rulers of course made extensive use of slaves taken in raids as well as prisoners of war: they worked on projects beyond the strength of the Khmers, and especially for Jayavarman VII’s reconstruction of Angkor after the water-

borne Cham attack of 1177. Th is king’s bloody revenge against Champa

and his building programme appears to have imposed a crushing burden

on his subjects, already under pressure from the migrating Th ai.

Angkor Th om is the present-day name given to the moats and

enclosures that Jayavarman VII built to redefi ne the capital. Despite subscribing to the Buddhist faith himself, the king had to assert in a physical form his entitlement to reign as a divine favourite. Faces of Jayavarman VII as a bodhisattva might decorate the 23-metre-high entrance gateways, and his temple tomb refer to the Buddha rather than

Shiva or Vishnu, but the approach to Angkor Th om speaks of Hinduism

with gods, nagas and demons carved on balustrades alongside the four main roads. From these traditional representations alone the city derived its cosmic signifi cance. Without this public reference to Hinduism, and by implication to the devaraja ceremony, Jayavarman VII’s own ritual circumambulation of the new capital would not have been accepted as that of a king taking rightful possession of both the new city and the

old kingdom. Th e carved balustrades allowed him to integrate Buddhist

concepts with Khmer ideas of kingship: a future Buddha’s compassion for his subjects explained his occupation of the throne. It was a view of

monarchy that the Th ai would fi nd most attractive.

Jayavarman VII was the last of the great Khmer warrior-kings. His most illustrious predecessors, Suryavarman I and Suryavarman II,

ruled from 1006 to 1049 and from 1113 to 1150 respectively. Th e fi rst

Suryavarman—the royal title means “favoured by the sun god”—was a usurper. He dated his accession to the year 1002, when in fact two rivals also claimed the throne. Inscriptions tell of a civil war in which sacred buildings were damaged before Suryavarman I “seized the kingdom in the

midst of a host of other kings”. Th is happened no later than his installation

at Angkor in 1009. One new element in his rise to supreme power was patronage of Buddhism, which has led to a belief that some of the temple destruction then arose from religious conviction. Given the inclusive Khmer approach to imported Indian beliefs, it seems incredible that

iconoclasm was ever perpetrated in Suryavarman I’s name. Th e new king had, for a start, powerful allies among the priestly families that dominated Angkor, then a partly depopulated capital. Any disdain that he may have shown towards certain religious establishments was probably the result of political and economic factors: he deliberately punished aristocrats who were slow to side with him by confi scating much of their wealth and curtailing their support of religious foundations.

Suryavarman I’s sponsorship of Buddhism in no way interrupted the Hindu-based reverence for kingship. “During his reign,” an inscription

tells us, “members of the priestly families offi ciated for the devaraja as

before.” Th e king even persuaded a brahmin to give up his priestly duties

and marry one of his sisters-in-law. Th e favoured courtier “restored the

temples that had suff ered damage when the king led forth his army”. Yet the newly installed ruler was so keen on the issue of loyalty that he

obliged 4000 offi cials to publicly swear a solemn blood oath. Its text was

inscribed on the walls of a new palace, a key part of which was as follows:

We offi cials of the fi rst, second, third and fourth division, cut our hands at the moment of swearing in the presence of the sacred fi re, the sacred jewel,

the brahmins and the Buddhist monks, off ering our lives and our devotion totally to His Majesty Sri Suryavarmandeva, the legitimate king… If we continue to live in the service of the king, we will die in our devotion to him when the time comes. If a problem arises for His Majesty the King that involves our travelling afar, we will investigate it according to our oath. If there should be one among us who does not keep faith with this oath, let royal punishment chastise him severely. If there are among us any traitors who do not keep faith with this oath, may they be reborn in the thirty-two places of hell forever. If we faithfully keep this oath, may our Sovereign Lord who enjoys absolute legitimate authority, give orders for the upkeep of worthy foundations in our villages and for the support of our families. May we obtain in this world and in the future the just recompense of those who are devoted to their master.

Th e comprehensive nature of this oath was necessary for Suryavarman I,

whose tenuous claim depended on his maternal forbears. What he endeavoured to achieve through it was the prevention of any other prince making a claim to the throne.

In the provinces Suryavarman I underlined his authority by erecting linga shrines, situated at the four cardinal points to signal his dominion over the four quarters of the Khmer world. His realm was evidently as extensive as that of his predecessors, since his writ extended to Lopburi

in the lower Chaophraya valley. Th e

city appears to have been a provincial centre of administration. Before his accession and after his death, Lopburi asserted its own independence from Angkor, sending diplomatic missions to China requesting recognition as a separate Southeast Asian state. But it was restored to the Khmer kingdom in the 1130s by Suryavarman II. As far as the Khmers were concerned, Lopburi comprised a vassal kingdom

of Mon and Th ai peoples. Bas-reliefs

at Angkor depict the levies that its kings were compelled to send as a reinforcement of the Khmer army. With the waning of Angkor’s power, Lopburi once again enjoyed a certain eminence until it was taken over in

the fourteenth century by the Th ai state of Ayudhya.

Under Suryavarman I Angkor expanded from its heartland in the Mekong valley and round the Tonle Sap to incorporate the Mun valley, north of the Dang Grek mountain range. Inscriptions discovered near Ban Khamoy refer to the donation of rice, cloth, slaves, buff aloes and cattle to a Buddhist temple set up by the king. Remains of several reservoirs show that it must have once been a substantial foundation. A further Buddhist

complex at Phimai, also now in Th ailand, mentions Suryavarman I

making an off ering of rice for its support. Like the land around the Tonle Sap, farmers growing rice in the area drained by the Mun river relied on seasonal fl ooding as well as water from artifi cial lakes and ponds. At Angkor itself, Suryavarman I dug the largest reservoir of all, which still

A striking portrait of the monkey god Hanuman at Angkor Wat

holds a considerable body of water today. Measuring 8 by 2 kilometres, its capacity of 70 million cubic metres was urgently required to sustain a resurgent population. It seems that during his reign there was a marked increase in the numbers living in the kingdom as a whole, so that possibly the Khmer were more numerous than their slaves.

On the death of Suryavarman I in 1049, he received the posthumous title of Nirvanapada, “the king who has gone to nirvana”. He was believed to have achieved the goal of all Buddhists; namely, escape from the suff erings involved in the endless round of rebirth. Few of his successors exercised much authority beyond the city of Angkor until, in 1113, Suryavarman II came to the throne by force of arms. Even though he was related to a sister of two previous kings, he had no hesitation in slaying his great-uncle, the aged Dharanindravarman I. Another unifying monarch, Suryavarman II was a young man when crowned. According to one of his inscriptions, he won a crucial engagement against a rival prince by an act of bravery, when “leaving the body of his army on the battlefi eld… he rushed towards the elephant of his enemy, killing him as a garuda on the slope of a mountain might kill a deadly serpent”.

Th e reference to “the golden sun bird Garuda”, the vehicle of the

saviour god Vishnu, is telling for Suryavarman II built Angkor Wat, the most spectacular of all Khmer monuments, as a thanks off ering to this deity. Angkor Wat’s spacious galleries exhibit the chief mythical exploits of Vishnu in a series of bas-reliefs, side by side with representations of the court and the army. Because Suryavarman II envisaged himself as a partial incarnation of Vishnu, rather than Shiva, he arranged for Angkor Wat to be an earthly replica of Vishnu’s celestial home, Vaikuntha. A Hindu temple has always been a copy, on a reduced scale, of the heavenly paradise of the god being worshipped.

Because no inscription mentions Angkor Wat, we are ignorant of its original name. Angkor Wat, to present-day Cambodians, means a city

turned into a Buddhist monastery. Th is Vishnu temple remains the most

famous of all Angkor’s monuments, its outer enclosure measuring 815 by

1,000 metres with a moat 200 metres wide. Th e main entrance is on the

western side, a direction associated with the Hindu god. Apart from the bas-reliefs that refer to Suryavarman II’s own reign, the rest are reminders of Vishnu’s all-pervading presence: the root of his name, vish, means “to

pervade”. Just how potent his powers of preservation and restoration were believed to have been in Angkor is evident in the avatars, or “descents”, celebrated by Suryavarman II. “When order, justice, or mortals are

endangered,” Vishnu remarked, “I come down to Earth.” Th ough devotees

of Shiva propose no less than twenty-eight incarnations for their own deity, the avatars of Vishnu hold centre stage in Hindu mythology.

At Angkor Wat, Vishnu appears among other incarnations, as the tortoise Kurma, the boar Varaha, as well as the heroes Rama and Krishna.

Th at on his death in 1150 Suryavarman II received the posthumous title

of Paramvishnuloka, “he who has joined the realm of the great Vishnu”, can leave us in no doubt as to the function of Angkor Wat. It was a public statement of the king’s own divinity and of his close kinship with the gods. After he passed away, his remains were placed in the central tower so that it was transformed into a temple-tomb, a bakong. In 1934 archaeologists recovered an empty stone container from this tower that may have once held Suryavarman’s body or his bones. It was placed beneath a statue of Vishnu, where worship of the dead king would have begun as soon as his spirit had entered the stone image.

Angkor was at the peak of its glory under Suryavarman II. He re- established diplomatic relations with China; extended Khmer infl uence

into what is now northern Th ailand, in the west to the border of Pagan,

and southwards as far as the Malayan peninsula; and, fi nally, overran Champa and sacked its capital Vijaya, near modern Da Nang. He even got the better of the Vietnamese, whose kingdom of Dai Co Viet the Chinese had grudgingly accepted as an independent state in the late tenth

century. Yet Angkor’s supremacy was not to last. Th e Chams recovered

enough strength to assault Angkor itself in a seaborne invasion, sailing up the Mekong river and across the Tonle Sap. Jaya Indravarman V, the Cham king, launched this surprise campaign against the Khmers in 1177. A Chinese source relates how

the king attacked the capital of Zhenla without warning with a powerful fl eet, pillaged it, and put the king of Zhenla to death without listening

to a single peace proposal. Not surprisingly, these events produced a lasting hatred.

And the “fruit” of this deep hatred “ripened” in 1190, when Jayavarman VII returned the compliment with an equally unexpected invasion of Champa.

Prince Jayavarman was away from Angkor when he heard that his father had died and a cousin who succeeded him had been killed by a non-royal usurper. Perhaps it was not entirely such a misfortune for the prince that the Cham king Jaya Indravarman V decided to take advantage of the situation and attack Angkor then, for his execution of the usurper left the way open for Jayavarman VII to ascend the throne four years later. Having restored the capital, encircling it with the moat and walls that

now constitute Angkor Th om, the new king prepared to wreak vengeance

on Champa. 0 5km N Si em R eap Puok Roluos

Tonle Sap (dry season)

Yasovarman’ s Road Preah Ko Bakong Angkor Wat Angkor Thom Bayon Lolei Phnom Bakheng

Th e walls of Angkor Th om, or “Great Angkor”, are about 3 kilometres long on each side, and are pierced by elaborate entrances, which lie at the end of a row of gods and demons engaged in a tug of war using as

a rope a nine-headed serpent, or naga. Th is reference to the myth about