Far from the madding crowd of Angkor Wat, in a remote southern province in the Mekong floodplain, Lawrence Osborne wades d eep into Cambodia’s misty past—and the
source of some of the country’s most magnificent and mysterious art
The Mekong is a river I have always
feared a little—it is sea-like, sinister, inscrutable. It breeds some
of the world's largest freshwater beasts: Irrawaddy dolphins, giant
catfish, and stingrays. It begins in Tibet and is the earth's most
productive freshwater fishery. In November, it turns into a floodplain,
and as I crossed it then its waves were thick with rotting flowers and
roots and knotted floating grass. Birds swooped around the boat,
following it, and their nests could be seen in the tops of drowned
trees. After forty minutes, a silhouette came into view as if rising out
of this temporary and demented unnatural sea: the forbidding "sacred
mountain" of Phnom Da, its tower black against the storm and stark in
its enforced solitude.
Steps rose up steeply through still-wet jungle. At the top, the
Mekong waters appeared on all sides and an imposing brick-and-stone prasat (the
Khmer word for a tower or pagoda) stood alone in a froth of
wildflowers, its walls dark rust-red and black. Beautiful carvings
soared above the doorways, and the chiseled plinths were still firm and
elegant. But the prasat itself was clearly empty: looted, or gutted by archaeologists—one never knows in Cambodia.
A cowherd stood with his cattle before the main doorway. As I
appeared, he simply held out a casual hand and said, “One dollar”—that
Khmer refrain which every traveler guiltily repels. With him was a man
suffering from some kind of illness, his hands twisted and his eyes
lopsided. He seemed to be in informal charge of the shrine within. They
watched me silently. Inside, there was a lingam stand (an emblem of the
god Shiva) with two bowls of incense sticks, now exposed to the sky:
Concentric brick rectangles rose vertiginously upward to an opening
through which the rain fell. The tower was engulfed in forest, intimate
amid its surroundings, and inaccessible to historical knowledge. The
guardian came rolling toward me on his misaligned hips, his hand
outstretched.
He croaked out a greeting, which sounded like, “B’muray.”
“B’muray,” I said.
“No,” he repeated. “You Bill Murray. You give me five dollar.”
For years, and especially when I
lived in Phnom Penh, I had been coming to the National Museum and
admiring a strange group of statues. They are kept in a gallery to one
side, a little ignored, and are unlike any other in Cambodia. Dark green
in color, far older than the masterpieces from Angkor Wat which
otherwise crowd the museum, these huge pieces possess a style and sexual
grace that seem to come from an entirely different civilization. They
were discovered in the ruins of Phnom Da in 1935, by Henri Mauger, and
were dated to about the sixth century A.D. In the middle was a gigantic
figure of Vishnu with eight arms, his hands clutching a flame, an
antelope skin, and a flask, and on either side of him two smaller
figures of Rama and Balarama. To me, they were the most beautiful and
imposing things in the museum, and the most emotionally appealing. And
so I had always wanted to get to know the place where they had come
from—the remote southern Cambodian province of Takéo. How could a site
so unknown have produced art so great?
The “Phnom Da style” is the most ancient sculptural genre in what
is now Cambodia. The ten-foot figure of Vishnu is carved from a single
block of sandstone, and only five of his eight hands are still attached
to surviving arms. But all of them are carved with finesse, the
individual nails carefully delineated. Like a young pharaoh, the god
wears a tall cylindrical hat and a folded loincloth. His physique,
too—slender and lifelike, with wide shoulders and a little bulging belly
fat below the navel—reminds one of Egyptian figures. This is the oldest
known Cambodian sculpture. Even the dark-green polished, shiny surface
of Vishnu seems different from the texture of later styles.
Where do these oval faces, aquiline noses, and almond-shaped eyes
come from? Even the tear ducts, the pupils, and canthi of the eyes are
perfectly carved. The figure of Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna,
whcih stands to the right of Vishnu, is particularly moving. His left
eye has been obliterated, but his gentle smile is still intact, as is
the symbolic plow he carries. His figure is boyish, tilted at the hips.
Rama, meanwhile, holds a tall bow and gazes down at us with a haughty
gentility. As an avatar of Vishnu, he is associated with chivalry and
virtue.
I knew where Phnom Da was on the map—it lies a few miles from the
Vietnam border, in the Mekong floodplain. This means that in winter it
turns into an island and one has to get there by boat. This was
forbiddingly appealing. Since none of the Khmer temples outside the
tourist circuit of Angkor Wat are well known, I was well aware that it
would be more arduous than simply taking a plane to Siem Reap and
staying in yet another Royal Angkor Village boutique lodge with an
Anantara spa. But there are only so many times you can walk around
Angkor Wat at dawn with fifty thousand Korean tourists, searching for
mystical solitude. People said that the temples of Takéo were like
Angkor fifty years ago, even if they were nowhere near as grand. It was,
I thought, unlikely to be true, but it would be enough for me if they
were merely different.
When I arrived in the port town of Takéo, the waters were so
high that the longtails for hire at the jetties were almost level with
the street behind them. Takéo is always a lethargic proposition: a
market caked with fruit skins, a few lok-lak restaurants with nightly
song and dance, a handful of wretched guesthouses with those balconies
of oddly plasticated columns that Cambodians love. They were now
milky-brown under storm clouds. The tops of submerged mango trees
swarmed with swallows, grasses floating between them. It’s about a
fifty-dollar longtail ride to cross this strange landscape that does not
promise hospitality. On the far side of it can be found both Phnom Da
and a very different place called Angkor Borei, a village in a lagoon
with some unusual remains. They lie within an area known as "the cradle
of Khmer civilization."
Sixteen hundred years ago, Angkor Borei was a huge city named
Vyadhapurya, the capital of a state that Chinese chroniclers of the
third century A.D. called Funan. In A.D. 240, two Chinese ambassadors
named Kang Tai and Zhu Ying visited the kingdom and provided a few
fragmented descriptions of it. The Chinese gave the title "Fan" to the
Funan kings, so their names have come down to us in Chinese forms—the
founder king was known as Fan Shi Man. Funan was the first great state
of Southeast Asia—and is also the least known, with much of its
architecture having all but disappeared.
Photos
Kenro Izu captures the magic of Cambodia's ancient temples in this gallery of photos and digital extras.
As I stood there on top of Phnom
Da, I recalled that Rudravarman, the last significant king of Funan, is
believed to have built the temple in the sixth century. The prasat,
though, is thought to date from the eleventh. It is therefore likely to
be a reconstruction of an earlier original. Lower down the hill are
five man-made caves filled with Shiva lingams that were used as
cremation sites during Pol Pot genocide. Farther down still stands an
even more haunting building, a small seventh-century temple known as
Ashram Maha Rosei, or the Sanctuary of the Great Ascetic. It is
considered architecturally unique in Cambodia because of its use of
stone at a time when stone was not readily accessible in the region
(most Khmer temples of this antiquity are brick). From Maha Rosei came a
magnificent statue of Harihara, a fusion of Shiva and Vishnu, that is
now a star exhibit at the Musée Guimet in Paris. But today the shrine
is empty; its beauty lies in the massive size of its single inner vault
and its exterior. The effect is that of a cave holding a single image of
a god—such as might be used by an ascetic—and is very like the austere
seventh-century temples of Sambor Prei Kuk, a hundred miles to the
north. Like Prei Kuk, it is one of the few Khmer temples where you can
be alone, undisturbed by a chattering tourist machinery.
One thinks of the thousands of people who gaze at the Harihara of
Maha Rosei every year in Paris, and of the quiet desolation of the
place where it once belonged. A less war-torn land might have been able
to keep its treasures. But Cambodia is a looter’s paradise, and its more
obscure temples have proved easy prey because they are not guarded.
An hour later, I was in Angkor Borei. It is a very
different place, soporific and outwardly plain but charmingly
approached through narrow, curving waterways overgrown with jungle,
where knee-high shrines and upturned boats sit inside the
mangroves. These are the ancient, clearly man-made canals of Funan, as
far as anyone can tell. Aerial photographs taken by the French
geographer and photographer Pierre Paris in the 1930s show that there
was once a vast system of these canals connecting Angkor Borei to the
Mekong Delta city of Óc Eo, sixty miles away in Vietnam.
Funan, after all, was a maritime state controlling the seaborne
trade between India and China that hugged the coastlines all the way
between the Ganges and the Champa kingdom of Vietnam. Water was its
lifeblood. The state declined in the mid sixth century—most probably
because improvements in naval technology finally enabled ships to cross
open ocean and so avoid Funan’s tax collectors—and was absorbed into the
more northerly kingdom of Zhenla. But one of its paradoxes is that its
greatest art seems to have come from the very period of its terminal
decline. No one knows why.
Angkor Borei retains a lost-world atmosphere from its past. The
boat dropped me off at a museum on the water, next to a decomposing
French mansion of moss-thickened vaults and balconies not dissimilar to
some antebellum plantation house. I wandered through the rooms while the
curator turned on the fans one by one. “A visitor!” his eyes seemed to
cry.
“You look familiar,” he said slyly. “I have seen you before.”
I prepared my one dollar in my pocket, but it was never asked for. Instead, we went together through the museum.
“Have you ever heard of Funan?” he politely inquired.
“Never heard of it before.”
“Cambodians never heard of it either.”
He told me about the Funanese—a mysterious people, a lost
people—and showed me exhibits of piled human bones from funerary sites,
beautiful pottery and stone friezes depicting Vishnu. Out in the garden
stood massive replicas of Funan-era Vishnu and Shiva statues (some of
the originals are in Phnom Penh), but they were less interesting to me
than the remains of the city walls, which are practically the only thing
of brick left of ancient Vyadhapurya.
A short ride on a motodop, a hired motorbike, took me to
where pieces of the massive brick and masonry walls (parts of it were
damaged by the American bombing of Cambodia) stand festering in weeds,
wildflowers, and damp, and are happily incorporated into the texture of
village life. I thought of the Roman walls in Istanbul, which are
similarly neglected and casually worked into the daily life of the city.
The University of Hawaii and the Cambodian Royal University of
Fine Arts have come together in the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project
to unearth more of this culture’s remains, convinced that they hold the
key to later Khmer culture. All over town, orchards and empty lots and
backyards are quietly being dug up. The archaeologists are enticed, no
doubt, by Louis Malleret’s famous excavations at Óc Eo in the 1940s,
during which he discovered Roman coins. Funan was where the Romans came
to trade with the Chinese. It was as far east as they ever got, and
maybe they also left their coins and fibulae in Angkor Borei. It’s a
strange thought: a Roman of the Augustan empire standing by these same
canals, eating a mango.
A cultural crossroads, then. But no one knows what the people of
this ancient state called themselves. Historians are not sure if they
were entirely Khmer. Their writing was Sanskrit, but their enigmatic
inscriptions do not refer to a vernacular tongue. What we do know is
that although Funan is murkily revealed to us through the Chinese, it
was Brahmin Indian emissaries who shaped its Hindu culture.
According to one legend, Funan was founded by a Brahmin prince
called Kaundinya, who married a local princess named Soma, the daughter
of a serpent king, or naga. To Kaundinya, it is said, the kingdom
owed its Indian laws, itsSanskrit writing, and its Hindu pantheon. The
Indianization of Southeast Asia— which reached its culmination in Angkor
Wat—began here, in the watery landscape of the Mekong Delta.
I took my boat back to Takéo at
dusk. There are few places to stay in town—ten-dollar-a-night
guesthouses offering windowless cells to Khmer traveling salesmen—but I
found the Meas Family Home Stay, just outside town, run by two Khmer
schoolteachers, Siphen Meas and Im Mach. They gladly host Peace Corps
volunteers who come here to build toilets for local farmers and the odd
wandering archaeologist. Bill Murray, I discovered, had not yet sampled
its charms.
It was a farm of sorts, with paddies spread around it. I spent
much of the early hours awake, listening to night birds, to funereal
music rolling out of the darkness, and to the demented Cambodian
cockerels that begin their chorus at 1 A.M. A cacophony of pure life, of
life before electricity. ("We are being hooked up to the electricity
grid next week," Siphen said. "What an unprecedented event!")
Yet no one forgets here that this is a wounded land and that the
wounds have not yet healed. Earlier, by candlelight, Siphen told me how
the Khmer Rouge had murdered her brother back in the 1970s and that the
family had discovered this fact only the week before. And so a murder in
1977 had now resurfaced to cast its shadow upon the living. It was a
past that was not at all passed.
"Forty years after the event, we begin our morning. It's a strange relation to the past, don't you think?"
"Perhaps it's a denial."
“Yes, it is. This country is only just beginning to get back to
its past.” As with the personal past, so with the archaeological.
We sat by a large fish pool that had been carved out by a huge
American bomb. The Khmer are masters of improvisation. They had also
looted most of the temples that lay scattered around the province, and
it was a blessing, Siphen had to admit, that so many of the sacred
artworks had ended up in the Musée Guimet, thousands of miles away.
Most had been spirited off to the illicit antiques stores of Bangkok and
Cambodia and would never come back. Even the lintels and pieces of
lathed columns had been carried away—it was like an army of nocturnal
mice nibbling at an unguarded granary. Takéo, she suggested, was too
poor not to loot its own heritage.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I took a car
down to the border of Vietnam to visit one of Cambodia’s most remote
temples: Phnom Bayong. Route 2, which connects Takéo to Phnom Penh,
takes you all the way there. The turnoff for the temple lies off a small
side road near the village of Kiri Vong.
On this road, schoolgirls in navy skirts were riding their bikes,
glancing down at the foreigner sweating in the heat with his can of
soursop juice. Their expressions were hard to gauge. There was amusement
in their distant and hesitant curiosity, as well as a subtle surprise.
The grinning farmers in their pickups looked as if they were armed, and
they probably were.
It's a lonely three-hour walk up to the summit of the holy hill
Bayong, where the temple stands with its views of the flooded Mekong and
the mountains of Vietnam. On the way, the footpath winds through
towering banyan trees. Music was coming from little radios in the huts
of the farmers; in a clearing, dark stones lay underfoot like the
threshold of a massive gate that had been torn apart. Black-silk
butterflies swarmed across the path.
A few Buddhist pilgrims still make their way up the monumental
steps that lead to Phnom Bayong, but the site, like so many in Cambodia,
is open and wild, unstructured by either tourism or archaeology. It
feels religious in a way that a tourist temple never could, but this is
also because of its setting. Unled, unguided, you are left to piece it
together by yourself.
The site itself is heavily damaged, though it is thought to have
been built to celebrate a victory of the kingdom of Zhenla over Funan.
Halfway up to it, as I slithered along small gullies of rock and mud,
tailed by black butterflies, a boy appeared out of nowhere, a kind of
Khmer Huck Finn chewing a piece of grass, and suggested that I give him a
dollar to avoid getting lost. Because the path was looking less and
less like a path, I paid.
“Good job, you,” he said grimly. “Otherwise, lost ever so long time.”
Places + Prices
Most of the temples in Takéo Province can be reached handily from Phnom Penh.
The walk to the summit proved the accuracy of this pessimism.
It’s little wonder no one comes here. Surrounded by cliffs and ruined
walls, Phnom Bayong is reached by a near-vertical staircase and is
infested with murmuring bats. The boy told me that the mountain was
sacred and that Buddhist nuns were looking after the ruins. They browsed
the jungle surrounding it in search of ingredients used in traditional
folk medicines. If I wanted, they would paint spells on my body to
protect me from illness. It would be one dollar more. I readily agreed
to this and paid up, but instead of visiting the spell-writing nuns, for
some reason we ended up trudging down to another little temple nearby,
from where the great delta waters could also be seen, a pale-brown
brightness reaching to a somberly green horizon.
Like Phnom Bayong, it was enigmatic, fragmented in some way, and
on the point of disappearing into forest. The Hindu images had long ago
been removed. My dollar-sucking guide explained that there were four
other temples on the sacred mountain and that there was a Buddhist
hermit whom I could meet. The hermit would also paint spells on my body,
and they would be even more powerful than the spells painted by the
nuns. It would be one dollar more. What about the nuns? I asked. The
nuns had run away, he said. They were afraid of foreigners. “Can’t we
pay them to come back?”
“Pay? They nuns. Come to hermit.”
I paid up again, but as with the nuns the Buddhist hermit could
not be found, and we ended up wandering all over the mountain as the
afternoon waned. No one ever painted any spells on my body, but the boy
did tell me the most famous legend of Phnom Bayong, which goes something
like this:
Once upon a time a king called Preah Bat Bayong Kaur lived on
this mountain with his wife, Neang Sak Kra’op (meaning roughly “the lady
with perfumed hair”). The nefarious King of Siam—the Thais are always
the bad guys in Khmer stories—heard of her beauty and sailed to the
mountain in a ship. He threw a party for the queen, and while the Khmer
guests were distracted, he made off with her and never returned. Years
later, her son, Dey Khley, went in search of her and happened to come
across her without knowing who she was. He fell in love with his mother
and married her. But when they returned to Bayong, the king recognized
his former wife and sentenced his son to build twelve huge ponds. The
prince, said the king, could be reincarnated only when the twelve ponds
ran dry. But even today they are full of water, and so the luckless son
is still waiting in the afterlife for a drought. Thus are punished even
the unwitting perpetrators of royal incest.
The Cambodian countryside is filled with such myths, which are
like the rumors that come out of a past that recent history has all but
obliterated. This is a land of submerged memories—a secretive and wary
land which is mindful that bad things can always happen again. On the
way back to Phnom Penh the next day, I stopped at the magnificent
Angkorian-era temple of Phnom Chisor, built in the eleventh century by
King Suryavarman I of Angkor. It’s the closest and most forbidding
large-scale temple complex to Phnom Penh, apart from the lovely ruins of
Ta Prohm on the Tonlé Bati lake. There is a kind of imperial swagger
to it, a sense of overarching power. Both Ta Prohm and Phnom Chisor are
more spectacular than the older Takéo temples—especially Chisor, with
its superb terraces and richly carved reliefs. But now Chisor seemed to
me less poignant than mysterious Phnom Da or Phnom Bayong.
Two other temples are connected to Chisor by a monumental
staircase that winds its way down the side of the mountain, and the
whole complex possesses a coherent splendor that Bayong cannot match.
Yet Chisor feels more like what one experiences on a larger scale at
Angkor. Coming down the enormous staircase, I enjoyed watching the boys
playing soccer in a field of motionless cows that seemed not to notice
the football flying between their legs. I was glad there weren’t five
thousand tour guides ready to explain what this meant.
I TOOK MY CAR back to Route 2 and
on the way stumbled upon two neglected brick towers that stood at the
edge of a modern shrine. They are the remains of a place called Prasat
Neang Khmau, or “Black Lady” in Khmer, a tenth-century temple whose name
perhaps alludes to Kali, the dark destructive goddess. I knew that from
here had come two enigmatic statues that are now also in the National
Museum in Phnom Penh. Like the sculptures of Phnom Da, they have
fascinated me for years, and when I returned to Phnom Penh I went in to
look at them. One is an equine avatar of Vishnu known as Vajimukha, a
male body with a horse’s head, and the other is a female divinity of
some kind dressed in a fluted robe that is tied above a lustrous, smooth
navel. Her head is missing, and her surface is now a dark-jade color.
They stand in the same room as the great pieces from Phnom Da,
and although they are from a later century, they have the same archaic
otherness about them. They are more beautiful, more human somehow than
the masterpieces of Angkor that occupy the foreground of our perceptions
of Cambodia. And like the place from which they were torn long ago by
French experts, they are something of a quiet secret—a civilization
within a civilization, waiting to be rediscovered when Cambodia can
finally afford the splendid luxury of memory.
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