One of the more worthwhile sights in the Northern Group of temples at Sambor Prei Kuk (also known as the Sambor Group) is a brick sanctuary known by the distinctly unromantic name of N16. It is situated outside the central group of temples in the Sambor Group, right alongside a dirt road. This square-based brick tower is of interest primarily for the relatively crisp carvings on its outer walls. These brick relief carvings feature the most famous motif found at Sambor Prei Kuk- the so-called flying palace.
The flying palace motif found here is similar to those found on the numerous octagonal shrines of the Southern Group. In the centre of a brick panel is a stylized depiction of a tiered, wooden palace, which literally seems to be hovering in mid-air. These celestial palaces have their roots in Hindu mythology and can be thought to represent the abode of the gods. Mythology aside, they can also be thought to reinforce the temporal power of the Shivaite kings of Chenla. After all, the palace of the king of Chenla is thought to have been located at Sambor Prei Kuk, then known as Isanapura. The devotee coming to this sanctuary would have been reminded that just as the Hindu god lived in a celestial palace, the temporal king lived in an earthly palace. The link between the king and Shiva would have been impressed on the devotee, reinforcing the power and prestige of the ruling king.
By taking a closer look at the weather-beaten carvings, this impression is only strengthened. Firstly, the whole flying palace is said to resemble a palanquin: a covered sedan-chair with a large protuberance on top. This was obviously an elite form of transport, predominately associated with royalty. Palanquins were certainly part of ancient court ritual in ancient Cambodia; while wooden palanquins have not survived in their entirety, bronze palanquin fittings from the Angkorian era still exist. While travelling in a royal procession in a palanquin, the king would literally have been riding in the air, further strengthening the association between the king and the Hindu gods. The iconography we see on the walls of N16 is not merely religious then; it also served to heighten the sense of majesty and awe around the ruling family.
The flying palace motif, carved into the walls of the tower.
While the flying palace motif looks broadly similar between the various sanctuaries at Sambor Prei Kuk, there are some interesting variations in the fine detail. Being unusually crisp, the carvings at N16 offer more than most in this respect. In the crispest and most photographed of the panels, a male figure sits flanked by two shapely women. Presumably this is the king with female attendants, perhaps concubines. Further out you see other attendants, this time male figures, standing with long staffs. Perhaps their peripheral position reflects their comparatively lowly status. In the uppermost tier of the flying palace, there are five figures peering out. Perhaps these are gods or other celestial beings. And the whole structure is elaborately depicted in fine detail, reinforcing the sense of royalty and exclusivity.
Apart from the flying palace motifs, there is also a relatively well-preserved false door on one of the sides of this temple. Overall, this makes N16 one of the more valuable of the Sambor Group sanctuaries for people wanting to get a glimpse of some rare Chenla-era art.
After the Sambor Group, we moved on towards the second ‘group’, The Central Group. Actually, in this case the word ‘group’ is a bit misleading, as there is only one extant temple. The foundations of other structures remain, including the ramparts of what must have been a large and important complex, but there is only a single temple, the famous Lion Temple, Prasat Tao. Before we reached it, there was one other thing to see, however. Just off to the side of this temple is a large, rectangular pond called Srah Neang Pov, measuring approximately 42 x 32 metres. While not on the vast scale of the baray (reservoirs) of the Angkor area, it was certainly a reminder that water storage had been an important part of Khmer civilization from the very earliest periods. Srah Neang Pov had a rather forlorn, overgrown look at the time of our visit, but its basic outline was pretty clear. It had a stepped design, which reminded us of the ghats of India; ritual bathing might have come to Cambodia along with Hinduism. At the time of our visit, the tank was almost entirely dry, with just a little stagnant water in the bottom, but the steps enabled us to imagine something of its former glory. From there we wandered over to the main sight, Prasat Tao, with the urchins still trying to sell us silk scarves. In the end, perceiving that there were not going to give up easily, we paid them a dollar each for the ‘silk’ scarves and they ran off cheering happily.
Prasat Tao, the Lion Temple, is the largest of the temples at Sambor Prei Kuk. It is a large, red brick tower that is in reasonable state compared to many of the other temples at Sambor Prei Kuk, but it is rather decrepit compared to the best temples of Angkor. Compared to the other temples at this site, it is rather massive; we could not find mention of its height, but it might have approached twenty metres tall. Another distinguishing feature of this prasat (tower) was its rather exposed position. Whereas the other temples of Sambor Prei Kuk were enclosed by the jungle, this temple was in a large clearing and the sun shone directly on its walls on all four sides. Though it cannot have been the case in the past, the relatively open position of the temple seemed to give it a special eminence amongst the temples of Sambor Prei Kuk, and I felt as if I was seeing the main temple at the site.
Apart from its size and position, Prasat Tao was also noteworthy for its stone-carving; it featured some of the most ancient statues and lintels to be found at an archaeological site in Cambodia. Most remarkable of all were two stone lions that stood guard outside the main entrance. They had beautifully rendered manes, which made them one of the most eye-catching sights at Sambor Prei Kuk. With arched backs, raised heads and opened mouths, they almost seemed to roar as they stood there, guarding the scared space within. Sadly, only one of four original pairs was still in situ at Prasat Tao. Traces of the paws of one more lion remain, but apart from that the statues had gone, more victims of the looting which had plagued so many archaeological sites in Cambodia. But while most of the stone lions have disappeared, the lintels and false doors had fared a little better.
The main tower of the Central Group, Prasat Tao
Above the doorway is was another piece of ancient art, in the form of a lintel. This lintel belongs to the Kampong Preah school, featuring vegetal and floral motifs. Garlands of flowers hang vertically across the lintel in a highly decorative style, perhaps suggesting flower votives for religious ceremonies. This style, with contrasted sharply with the mythological scenes of later centuries, was in fashion in Cambodia in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. You could find further examples of these lintels on the other sides of the temple. In addition to these lintels, some of the other sides had false doors. While the doors themselves were rather plain, they were flanked on either side by slender, intricately carved colonettes, which also appeared to support the lintels. All this gave a vivid sense of the artistic skill of the Chenla kingdom, helping to evoke the grandeur of this former capital. It also reinforced a sense of continuity between Chenla and its successor kingdom, Angkor. Many of the temples of Angkor also feature carved lintels, colonettes and false doors.
Finally, we went into the temple itself. The interior was mostly empty though a large hole in the roof meant that it was flooded with sunlight. Though there were no longer any sculptures inside, the cella was impressive just for its scale. Whereas the earliest temples of Java have small, cramped cella, this one was spacious, measuring 8.35 x 5.5 m. Surely so large a sacred space would once have housed a holy image, but what had it been? According to Daniel Michon, who wrote his PhD on Sambor Prei Kuk, Prasat Tao would surely have contained a large and important linga (phallus). While we cannot know for sure what rites were performed within the temple, 11th century inscriptions from the reign of Suryavarman I give us some hint. During his reign, he presided over a sixfold Shivaite rite, in which, as an act of worship, various substances associated with the sacred cow were rubbed on the large, stone linga. These six substances were cow dung, a yellow orpiment, urine, milk, curds and ghee (Indian butter). Whether this precise rite was followed at Prasat Tao, we will never know, but discussing this rite helped us to understand the original purpose of the structure. Furthermore, it gave us a clear sense that long before Prasat Tao had been a quiet ruin, it had been the site of feverish religious rites and devotions.
Prasat Phum Pon (sometimes known as Prasat Phumpon) is a little-known but rather important temple site. These brick shrines are far from the largest or most impressive Khmer temples in Thailand but they are the oldest.
If you want to see magnificent Khmer temples, you had better head to Phimai near the city of Nakhon Ratchasima or to Phanom Rung in the countryside outside the small country town or Buriram. These temples offer magnificent Khmer architecture dating back almost a millennium. Both these temples easily rate among the finest extant Khmer temples anywhere and the most impressive ancient monuments in the kingdom of Thailand. Set in the province of Surin, which still has 26% of the population who speak Khmer despite decades-long attempts to assimilate the ethnic Khmer into mainstream Thai society, Prasat Phum Pon is a much more humble affair altogether; but it does serve as a reminder of the long links of this part of modern Thailand with the Khmer kingdoms to the south of the Dongkrek Mountains.
What makes Prasat Phum Pon such a rarity is that it is a Chenla temple. We are unaware of any other Khmer temple in Thailand which is attributable to the Chenla kingdom, a pre-Angkorian Khmer state whose capitals were centred in the present Cambodian province of Kampong Thom. All the other Khmer shrines in Thailand date from the world-famous Angkor Empire, which reached into Northern Thailand at the height of its power. This comparatively humble shrine shows characteristic Chenla style architecture from the seventh century, with orange brickwork, a sparsely carved exterior and a pyramidial roof. Encouragingly, a Khmer language school has now been established at the site to help promote the use of the long-suppressed language amongst Surin’s sizable ethnically Khmer minority.
According to the Chinese records, Chenla at its peak was a large and powerful kingdom. It was also immensely wealthy. During the reign of Isanavarman, which corresponds roughly to the years 619-636, Chenla diplomatic missions presented many rich and luxurious presents to the Emperor of China. By some point in the seventh century, Funan had disappeared altogether from the world of Asian diplomacy, and it was reported by the Chinese that the upstart empire of Chenla, invading from the north, had ‘conquered’ Funan. It was during this period that Chenla took over the ancient Funanese city of Angkor Borei- either through war or, as others argue, more peaceful methods of absorption- and a large and impressive brick temple in the Chenla style was built atop Phnom Da, complete with a monumental sculpture of Vishnu. By this point their kingdom stretched from what is now the Isaan region of Thailand all the way to the Mekong Delta, in what is today’s Vietnam. Evidently Isanavarman’s Chenla was a far larger and more powerful entity than Funan had ever been.
When a Chinese pilgrim-traveller of the Sui Dynasty, known as Hsun-Tsang, arrived at Isanavarman’s court, he left a long and tantalizing report of the kingdom at its height. He had a little to say about the geography and climate, rightly describing the country as a searingly hot land which never saw ‘snow or hoar frost’, but it was his observations on Isanavarman’s fabulous capital city of Isanapura, captured right at the height of its glory, which give his report real zing. Hsun-Tsang’s report is full of interesting and revelatory details:
The prince makes his residence in the city of I-she-na (Isanapura),which contains more than twenty thousand families. In the middle of the city is a great hall where the king gives audience and holds court. The kingdom includes thirty other cities, each populated by several thousands of families, and each ruled by a governor; the titles of state officials are the same as in Lin-yi.
A root-entangled brick shrine from Chenla
Now even allowing for a degree of hyperbole in the headcount, Isanapura would have been a city of some fifty-thousand people or more, meaning it dwarfed the cities of Europe of the day, then plunged into the Dark Ages. And this was just the centre of a large kingdom containing many subsidiary centres. We by no means know the location of all these ‘thirty other cities’, but we can presume that one of them would have been Angkor Borei, another would have been the ancient centre of Prey Veng, a third would have been the riverside settlement of Hanchei, of which a single Chenla-era temple remains on a hill above the Mekong, near the modern city of Kampong Cham, and a very important final inclusion would have the sacred city at the base of Mount Phu in what is now Southern Laos. But of all these vanishes centres, none would have matched the grandeur of Isanapura, which had served as the capital of his uncle , Bhavavaraman and then his father Mahendravarman, but which was brought to its fullest development during the two-decade reign of Isanavarman.
Every three days the king proceeds solemnly to the audience hall and sits on a couch made of five kinds of aromatic wood and decorated with seven precious things. About the couch there rises a pavilion hung with magnificent fabrics; the columns are of veined wood and the walls of ivory strewn with flowers of gold. Together this couch and this pavilion form a sort of little palace, at the back of which is suspended, as in Chih-tu, a disk with gold rays in the form of flames. A golden incense-burner, held by two men, is placed in front. The king wears a dawn-red cloth of cotton that falls to his feet. He covers his head with a cap laden with gold and precious stones, with pendants of pearls. On his feet are leather sandals; in his ears, pendants of gold. His robe is always made of a very fine white fabric called pe-ti. When he appears bareheaded, one does not see precious stones in his hair.
This description of the prince is, of course, King Isanavarman, the king who the Chinese credited with conquering Funan. His namesake city was founded early in the early seventh century by his uncle Bhavavarman, several kilometres away from the flood-prone Stung Sen River, which ran down from the Chenla kings’ spiritual homeland in the Dangkrek Mountains, past the site of Sambor Prei Kuk (home of ancient Isanapura) and finally entering Tonle Sap, the vast lake at the centre of modern Cambodia. It may have been the first temple-city in all South-East Asia, with the kings of Chenla- only a generation or two removed from the Dangrek Mountain chiefs who were their ancestors- installed in the fabulous city as the supreme ruler of their worldly realm. The depiction of the splendour and luxury in which the king lived shows that Chenla was a highly striated society in which Isanavarman stood as a highly revered and mysterious figure at the top of an enormous hierachy.
By this point the more egalitarian world of the farming village had been left far behind. In his grandeur and fabulous wealth, the king of Chenla must have far surpassed the prestige and glory of his recent ancestors, who ruled small, mountain chieftancies: he was already well on the way to becoming something like the Hindu deva-raja (God kings) who were to rule over Angkor. And befitting a semi-diety of his magnificence, the furnishings, clothing and rituals of his palace were all imbued with immense, almost mystical, significance. In reading the description of Isanavarman’s court, we see the South-East Asian kingdom coming into its own. We see in it all the religious symbolism and luxurious trappings that today surrounds the Kings of Thailand and, on a somewhat more modest scale, Cambodia. Like today’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, who is viewed by many Thais with a devotion and reverence that borders on the religious, Isanavarman’s presence was invested with supernatural significance.
For the traveller who is unimpressed by the crumbling brick towers of Sambor Prei Kuk today, these descriptions can a lot of the missing colour and lustre of Chenla civilization, confirming that what remains is just a faint hint of what the city once was. Apart from giving a vivid sense of a gilded royal court, steeped in ceremony and ritual, we also gain a sense of a general populace who have fulfilled assimilated a Hindu-Buddhist mindset, making this kingdom very the predecessor of Angkor and the later kingdom of Cambodia, where religion and ritual are deeply imbued in every day life. It adds the missing human face which sculptures and crumbling brick shrines cannot properly convey:
Funerals are conducted in this way: the children of the deceased go seven days without eating, shave their heads as a sign of mourning and utter loud cries. The relatives assemble with monks and nuns of Buddha or the Hindu Priests, who attend the deceased by chanting and playing various musical instruments. These corpses are burned on a pyre made of every kind of aromatic wood; the ashes are collected in a gold or silver urn to be thrown into deep water. The poor use earthenware urn, painted in different colors. There are also those who content to abandon the body in the mountains, leaving the job of devouring it to the wild beats.
As we set off into the jungle-fringed site of Sambor Prei Kuk, already thronged by children wanting to sell us traditional cloths and various trinkets, I marvelled to think that Khmer people had occupied this site for fourteen centuries, making pottery, playing instruments, singing and chanting, and mouring the passing generations. The city was already three hundred years old when Angkor civilization began to rise and was almost six-hundred years old when Angkor Wat was completed. Sixty generations had come and gone since the city was founded and though Sambor Prei Kuk was now just a small village in the midst of jungle-clad ruins, Khmer daily life still went on there, following its own unique rhythms.
From Phnom Bokor we rode back down the mountain, with panoramic views of the coastal plain and the Gulf of Siam appearing at each bend of the road. A couple of times we pulled over and tried to get our bearings by the major landforms and waterways: that over there was the Kâmpôt River, that was the centre of town and that down there was the limestone spine of the Kep Peninsula. Thinking of Mount Jerai in Malaysia, which ancient Tamil seafarers had once navigated by, I concluded that Phnom Bokor too would have been visible far out to sea and that visitors to ancient Cambodia must once have made their way towards this cloudy mountain, knowing it as the shoreline of the kingdom of the Khmers.
Once we were back downhill, we stopped off in town for lunch at one of the restaurants along the waterfront. The proprietor was an Australian retiree who had set up a bar with some of his superannuation founds. We were the only customers but he said that the kitchen was open and promised that we’d have our meals within half an hour. In the meantime Cam and I took turns playing pool with Donal. Presuming, correctly, that Cameron and I were gay and incorrectly that Donal was one of our boyfriends- many Western men in South-East Asia have much younger partners- he produced a photo album which included many photos with his Cambodian boyfriend, who appeared to be in his twenties, and also with the young man’s extended family. Judging by appearances, he seemed to have been accepted as one of their own. He told us that he loved Cambodia and especially Kampot, which he described as a wonderfully peaceful place to live, and hoped that the costs of running a bar and restaurant here wouldn’t bankrupt him in his old age. I recognized in the note of anxiety which appeared at this moment the underlying insecurity of the long-term expat in South-East Asia. While they are often comparatively wealthy and are afforded a high degree of respect within their adoptive communities, they are not citizens and there is much they do not understand: they often live in a state of material comfort and legal and cultural uncertainty.
By the time we finished lunch, it was already three o’clock and the day seemed to be slipping away from us. We had decided over dinner the night before to head on to Sihanoukville the following day and head back to Phnom Penh from there; the road between the capital and the city’s main port was said to be one of the best in the country. This meant that we had to get a move on if we were to catch a glimpse of one of the Cave Temples of Kâmpôt before sunset. After topping up the bikes at the service station, we asked again for directions and then set off along the road to Kep.
We had been told to continue about eight kilometres out of town until we saw a large Cham mosque on the left hand side of the road. Sitting behind Donal I tried to interest him in the fact that not only were the Cham Muslims like himself but that they were of Malay stock and their language was from the Aceh-Chamic subgroup of Malay languages, whose speakers were oddly split between Sumatra and Indochina. This proved to be too much information for Donal, who was enjoying the simple pleasures of driving a motorbike and didn’t appear to be paying me any attention. So I gave up the history lesson and kept an eye out for the mosque myself. Just before we reached it, I saw a woman walking down the road with her husband, her hair concealed beneath a jilbab, the Muslim head-dress. Her husband was wearing a sarong a long-sleeved shirt. This seemed a scene right out of rural Jambi or Kelantan, and then the mosque appeared beneath a grove of coconut trees, completing the impression that we had returned to the Malay world.
“That’s it, that’s the mosque, Donal”, I said in Indonesian and he turned off the main road onto a dusty track which headed off through the fields. Passing houses we noticed more people in Muslim dress and I realized that there must be have been a whole Cham kampong around these parts. Past these group of houses we continued for a couple of kilometres until we arrived at a limestone outcrop, which seemed to be a likely location for a cave temple. There was also a shed on one side of the road and a few youth hanging about, which seemed to indicate that this might be the entrance place to a tourist site.
A man came forward to introduce himself as the ticket-seller and we forked out one dollar apiece for the right to visit the cave. It was around this point that we realized that we had come to the wrong cave temple! The one we had been looking for was Phnom Chhnork, which was promoted in all the tourist literature on Kâmpôt. Like this one, it was set a couple of kilometres off the main road through the rice paddies and contained within a limestone outcrop, but this, we were assured, was not Phnom Chhnork. This one was known as Kbal Romeas Archaeological Site (according to the metallic sign mounted just ahead) and it had yet to find its way into any of the guidebooks. Still we figured that if tickets were being sold and there was a sign in English, there must have been something to see here. It turned out, we learned much later, that there were several cave temples in the vicinity of Kâmpôt, of which Phnom Chhnork was merely the most famous and best-preserved. The main distinction of the Kbal Romeas site, apparently, was that some precious gold jewelry, including a splendid gold girdle, had been excavated here before the Khmer Rogue takeover, only to be looted during the chaos of the 1970s. It was thought to date to the Funan or possibly the Chenla period, demonstrating the absorption of Indian art styles by the earliest Khmer kingdoms.
Ornate gold jewelry in this style was unearthed at Kbal Romeas and later lost
But we knew nothing about the gold at this point; instead, our guides were pointing out the quarry, which had cut away a large chunk of the hill. Apparently limestone was being quarried all around the district, chiseling away at the very hills which contained the caves and their ancient temples. We were once again left with a very distinct impression that the nation’s heritage was in a very precarious state, threatened by the desperate poverty of the people who lived there. Apart from sharing these thoughts with Cameron, we went about introducing ourselves to the group of four teenagers who had appointed themselves as our guides. They said that the lived thereabouts, so I asked if they were Cham, but they seemed rather offended by the suggestion: the Cham lived in the next village; they were all Khmer.
They led us in through the narrow cave mouth, pointing the way with battery-powered torches. They were obviously prepared to guide visitors like us as they had memorized all the main features of the cave, both natural and cultural, and had learned a few simple English phrases to accompany each ‘sight’. They gestured at the stalagmites and stalactites, the most glittering of the crystal formations, and the mineral formations which resembled human or animal forms. Those with better English repeated the key phrases, while the others shone the torches on the objects being described. There were numerous small passages and in a couple of places there were fissures in the roof of the caverns, allowing daylight to penetrate. In one of this caverns, the light shone on a few tea bushes which had managed to survive in one well-lit corner of the cave. These were attributed to the activities of early inhabitants of the caves. There were also small bats on parts of the ceiling, which began to fly about if the torch was shone on them.
Really the most memorable things about the excursion was the guides themselves. They were clearly very proud to be showing foreign tourists around the cave and were perfectly kind and courteous. This was the kind of welcome which is only possible in a small village which has seen very few visitors to date; mass tourism and the resultant commercialization of relations soon leaves both sides a lot more jaded and weary. But apart from the kindness of the guides, there was a small cave temple to report on. Unfortunately, unlikely the better known example at Phnom Chhnork, which had apparently survived in an excellent state of preservation, this was one was little more than a pile of rubble.
All that remained of the cave temple at Kbal Romeas was the base of the temple and a section of staircase leading up to a higher level of the shrine. The rest of what had once been an ancient brick shrine, some two or three metres tall, had been reduced to a pile of rubble. According to our guide, this place had been a sacred place since the time of Funan, fifteen or sixteen centuries before, and Buddhist monks had come here to pray and meditate. But after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia, they had come here as part of their war against religion and forced the locals to drop a large boulder through the hole in the roof directly onto the temple. The destruction we saw today was the result. Again we were confronted with the wanton destructiveness of the Khmer Rouge against their own people and heritage. Being Buddhists, the Khmer guides seemed just as aghast as us and explained that there had been many killings in all of their families.
After we left the cave, we returned to our bikes and gave a tip to each of the guides, which they seemed very happy with. This seemed to us the best kind of tourism in that the benefits of directly flowed to people from the local area, giving them a reason to preserve the cultural remains. It was also just a pleasant interaction on a human level, with everyone smiling widely at the end of the visit. Donal finished it all by making his obligatory comment on how similar Khmer (or ‘Khmai’) people were to Indonesians, which the guides all agreed with good-humouredly. I asked about Phnom Chhnork, sorry to have missed an intact cave temple, and they said it would be closed now- it was already getting dark- but we could try the following day. It was just a few kilometres away they said: not a long ride.
As we headed back into town, I wondered about these cave temples of Kâmpôt. After visiting Phnom Da and Angkor Borei, following the views of Professor Dowling, I had accepted that the statuary and temples from Phnom Da dated to the seventh century, not the sixth, meaning that the oldest Hindu temples and statues from Cambodia dating from the period when Chenla was in its ascendancy and Funan was already in the process of submission to the new kingdom. This left open the possibility that rather than being culturally similar, Funan and Chenla were markedly different, with the earlier kingdom being much less endowed with ‘Indian’ cultural attributes. However, the cave temples of Kâmpôt were clearly Hindu shrines and they were usually said to be the work of Funan. I wondered how firm the dates were in this part of Cambodia. Could these cave temples really have been the work of Chenla too? Or were these early simple cave-temples really the product of Funan, after all, indicating that Hinduism had penetrated this region earlier than the floodplains of Takeo? Was this region even controlled from Angkor Borei at all? Perhaps, I speculated, it had been allied only loosely, if at all, to the cities of the Mekong Delta and these cave temples had marked a separate chapter in the history of Hindusim in Cambodia? Our trip here had raised many unanswered questions about these elusive early kingdoms.
It is now thirty-seven years since the end of the Vietnam War came to an end. Yet everywhere you go in Indochina, the war and its aftermath can still be felt. The crashed bombers and missile casings may have been collected and sold for scrap metal, most of the Communist ideology of the victors has been cast off as scrap as well, yet you cannot travel long in this region without being somehow reminded of the apocalypse which engulfed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the middle part of the twentieth century. This is especially the case in Cambodia, where the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia heralded the arrival of one of history’s cruellest and most murderous regimes: The Khmer Rouge. We hardly expected to encounter the region’s violent Cold War history while climbing Phnom Da, a sacred hill known for its ancient temples and statuary rather than its associations with twentieth century events, but almost everywhere you go in Cambodia the landscape is littered with the wreckage of the war, and here was to be no exception.
It didn’t start out that way, however. At first we were just excited to have arrived in this remote part of Cambodia and looking forward to seeing the temples on the hill. As the boatman tied up our rental, we walked up towards a collection of buildings ahead. Like everywhere else in rural Cambodia, there seemed to be small children everywhere: the country’s population had almost tripled since the ousting of the Khmer Rouge- as if the locals were trying to repopulate the land after the mass-killings. In their dirty, disheveled clothes, these children seemed even poorer than the village children we had encountered along the main roads, and I think we all felt some of the awkwardness that well-fed tourists feel on entering a deeply impoverished community.
We bought three entrance tickets to the hill for $2 apiece, and a very small girl attached herself to us and appointed herself as our guide. She appeared to be only six or seven years old but malnutrition is a scourge in rural Cambodia, and we considered that she may have been considerably older and that her growth may have been stunted. Having spent many years living in Indonesia, I was somewhat surprised that a young girl should have been permitted to guide foreign tourists up a scrubby hill. It would have been unimaginable in Indonesia, especially in a traditional rural community.
The path up the hill was surrounded by thick shrubbery on all sides and there were some tall trees, casting the path into shadow. As we climbed up the winding path, views backwards towards the canal opened and by the time we had reached the crest some ten minutes later, we were afforded magnificent views out over the floodplain. Having come for the history, we had not anticipated much in the way of scenery, but the glowing green of the floodplain, stretching away towards the border with Vietnam, a mere eight kilometres away, was a magnificent sight in its own right. In most parts of the world, Phnom Da would have been classed as a mere hill, but in the low-lying, waterlogged lands on the edge of the Mekong Delta, it commanded views far across the landscape and it was possible to sympathize with the ancients who had regarded the place as a ‘sacred mountain’.
The temple itself was on a more massive scale than I had expected. In Java, the oldest Hindu shrines are small, boxy and tentative. This Hindu temple, the oldest surviving in all of Cambodia, was already monumental in its size and conception. Now our sources told us that what we see today may date from the 10th or 11th centuries and be an Angkor-era restoration, but the foundations are said to date back to the 6th or 7th century and have long been attributed to Funan- though this is contested. It may well be that the original temple was already on a grand scale, showing that the early Khmer rulers of the region were already ambitious builders.
Prasat Phnom Da, damaged by the Vietnam War
The temple faces northward but the path comes up at the rear, arriving at a ‘false door’, as shown in the picture. This motif was to be repeated innumerable times over the centuries in Cambodia and it is worth mentioning that stone imitations of wooden architecture are a common theme in the architecture of this kingdom. There are also some elaborate lintels over some of the doors but the interior of this brick and sandstone monument is empty, its central image long since removed. Despite being empty, the interior of the temple does boast one surprise- a large missile hole in the roof.
With the border with Vietnam being within sight, Viet Cong soldiers often slipped into Cambodia during the war, and it seems that the once-dark interior of this ancient temple was one of the favorite hiding spots. Yet if they thought that American respect for history was a magic talisman against raining missiles, they were mistaken. The Americans had sent a missile straight through the roof of Prasat Phnom Da, obliterating everything inside. While we don’t want to compare the destruction of a single temple to the vast human suffering of the war, it is surely a great folly to destroy a 1500 year old historical site for the gain of killing a few enemy combatants. It is said that the Head of the Louvre personally contacted the CIA after they bombed Mi Son, a former Cham temple complex in Vietnam, and asked them to stop the devastation of Indochina’s cultural heritage, which took a heavy toll during the 60s and 70s. It seemed that in the height of that war, not even holy mountains were sacred.
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