Angkor Wat

GIGANTIC WORKS
Antonio da Magdalena at Angkor Wat, 1586-1589

At Angkor, there are … ruins of such grandeur … that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works?

HENRI MOUHOT Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China, Cambodia, and Laos during the years 1858,1859 and 1860.

Antonio da Magdalena, a Capuchin monk from Portugal, traveled to the Far East with a mission. It was 1586 and the Portuguese empire was rapidly expanding into new overseas territories. For the merchant of the Portuguese fleet, this meant access to new wealth, to luxuries that would certainly fetch a high price in Europe. But for Antonio da Magdalena it meant access to new souls.

Converting what most Europeans considered to be the barbaric and heathen natives of their colonial empires went hand in hand with their subjugation. Little attention was paid to the indigenous culture, which was usually more convenient to bread as ‘primitive’ and hence suitable for conquest. But when Antonio da Magdalena returned from his journey to the interior of Cambodia, he had a very different story to recount to the official historian of the Portuguese Indies, Diogo do Couto. He told him that on trekking into the jungle interior they had come across a ruined city:

“… surrounded by a moat, crossed by five bridges. These have on each side a cordon beld by giants. Their ears are all pierced and are very long. The stone blocks of the bridges are of astonishing size. The stones of the walls are of extraordinary size and so joined together that they look as if they are made of just one stone.”

It seemed to him to be a city of Goliath, filled with elaborately decorated palaces and watercourses, now all slowly disappearing back into the enveloping jungle. But just under 2 miles (3 km) beyond it lay something yet more wonderful: a temple, which his local guides told him, was called ‘Angar’.

“It is of such extraordinary construction that it is not possible to describe it with a pen…it is like no other building in the world. It has tower and decoration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive of. There is a much smaller tower of similar style … which is gilded. The temple is surrounded by a moat, and access is by a single bridge, protected by two stone tiger so grand and fearsome as to strike terror into the visitor.”

The place de Magdalena had stumbled on was the ruins of the Khmer temple of Angkor Wat, a vast structure surrounded by 2.2 miles (3.6 km) of wall and moat, crowed with five huge towers. In the minds of Westerners, this was an almost impossible find and it seemed beyond belief that it was the work of any native civilization. Hypotheses were put forward concerning its origins, including that it was a lost Roman city built by the emperor Trajan or perhaps a Greek outpost. Marcello de Ribadeneyra, another Portuguese missionary who visited the site at the end marveled, ‘… no-one lives there now, it is inhabited by ferocious animals, and the local people say it was built by foreigners’ 

In fact, the city these Portuguese missionaries ‘discovered’ had been abandoned for only about a century when da Magdalena visited, and parts of the temple were still in use. And it had not been built by foreigners but by an indigenous civilization which had flourished in the region from the ninth to the 15th centuries.

High peaks and bas-reliefs 

It has taken many years of excavation and restoration to uncover the story of Angkor and even in the 19th century, it was widely believed in the West to be Roman work. By restoring and studying the miles of bas-relief that decorate the main temple of Angkor Wat, now we know that it was built early in the 12th century by Suryavarman II (r.1113-1150), king of the Khmer empire, who dedicated the temple to the Hindu god Vishnu. It stood as the centerpiece of his great city of Angkor, a representation in the sandstone of Mount Meru, the home of gods. Built-in three rising rectangular galleries, the temple was topped by five towers representing the five peaks of that mythical mountain. The beautifully carved bas-reliefs that line the walls depict stories from the ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, along with a processional scene showing Suryavarman II and episodes from the life of Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu). Pilgrims visiting the temple would walk past these familiar tales, something leaving inscriptions telling of their own good deeds, before climbing steep stairs (which represent the difficulty in climbing to the kingdom of the gods) to the next level of terraces, cloisters, and galleries. Those who were allowed to climb to the top saw the five towers standing before them, the central tower raised above the rest, its shrine containing a statue of Vishnu who started out over one of the greatest cities on earth.