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Yet visitors today are struck by Cambodians as being nice, meek, gentle, peaceful people. How could people normally so mild have seesawed into such thoroughgoing savagery? Underneath that meek exterior, many Cambodians must have been seething with repressed fury. Is there anything about Cambodia’s history, and about the world society that enabled Cambodians to erect such a mighty city and empire, that could help us understand the plight and the explosion of modern Cambodia?

Several features of the environment in which the Khmer Empire developed are crucial for understanding the empire’s rise and fall and its capital’s glory. At its maximum extent, the empire controlled one-third of mainland Southeast Asia. While its heartland was the basin of the Lower Mekong River in Cambodia, it expanded to encompass much of the territory of the adjacent modern countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand between latitudes 9 and 20 degrees north. As modern Americans who fought there during the Vietnam War remember painfully well, this is a hot tropical environment in which temperatures are almost constantly above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, even at dawn after the coldest night of the coldest month of the year. Warm clothes and fires for warmth are only rarely necessary.

Angkor’s major environmental challenges were related to rain and water. The area has a monsoon climate, a phrase that evokes images of torrential rain. Actually, the mean annual rainfall of Angkor is only 59 inches, which is barely higher than that of New York City. Compared to some of my New Guinea study sites and my home in Los Angeles, with annual rainfalls of 400 and 15 inches respectively, Angkor is neither especially wet nor especially dry.

Instead, Angkor’s water problems stem from the fact that rainfall varies predictably between seasons and unpredictably from year to year. Most of the rain comes in the so-called summer monsoon from June to November. The winter months, from December to May, are relatively dry, limiting the growing season for crops unless one can store rain falling in the rainy season—which the Khmer did do, as we shall see. As for variation between years, annual rainfall can be as low as 38 inches, or as high as 91 inches. That would expose Angkor’s inhabitants to the opposite risks of crop failures from droughts or from flooding, unless they had systems for storing rain in wet years to release in dry years and for controlling and quickly disposing of rain runoff during flood seasons. As we shall see, the Khmer water management system also coped with those problems for many centuries, until it finally became overwhelmed by extreme weather swings between severe droughts and severe floods.

To the south of Angkor are low mountains rising from the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. As a result, the Khmer Empire was oriented inland rather than toward maritime trade, and only in 1960 did Cambodia finally complete its first coastal seaport accessible to deep-draft oceangoing ships. To the north of Angkor at a distance of about 12 miles are the Kulen Hills, so steep that their slopes are prone to massive soil erosion if they become deforested. (That also emerged as a problem for the Khmer Empire.) From the Kulen Hills southward beyond Angkor, the terrain is extremely flat, with an average slope of only 0.1%. That created big problems of controlling water flows across the plains for the Khmer engineers of Angkor. It also created big problems of sanitation, because water flows across those flat plains were so slow. Rivers and channels in the plains supplied water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, but also functioned as the area’s sewers. A Chinese visitor to Angkor at its height commented on the frequency of cases of dysentery, which (the visitor wrote) proved fatal for 90% of the victims.

An outstanding feature of the Khmer heartland, and probably the main reason for the location of the Khmer capital at Angkor, is Southeast Asia’s largest lake, called the Tonle