Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [333]
Political power in those earliest Indianized kingdoms of Cambodia was concentrated in the lower Mekong Delta, permitting access to coastal trade. By around A.D. 600, though, power shifted inland, where competing kingdoms were building surprisingly large towns, temples, and reservoirs. In A.D. 802 the independent kingdoms were finally unified under King Jayavarman the Second, regarded as the founder of the Khmer Empire, who chose the Angkor region for his capital’s site. For the next five centuries the empire was ruled by a succession of 24 kings, all with long Indianized names like “Udayadityavarman the Second,” “Dharamindravarman,” and “Jayavarmadiparameshvara.” Every half century or so, a king’s death led to a contest over his succession, and the empire disintegrated into several pieces before being put back together again.
Successive kings outbid each other by taking the large building projects of pre-unification kings as models and scaling them up into huge, then gigantic, and finally world-record humongous projects. For instance, the third king after unification, Indravarman the First, inspired by the big reservoirs of pre-unification kingdoms, broke previous records by launching the construction, five days after he was crowned, of a rectangular reservoir 2.3 miles long and 0.5 miles wide, modestly named after himself as the Indratataka (“Sea of Indra”). His successor, King Yashovarman the First, then built another rectangular reservoir eight times larger, 4.7 by 1.1 miles, also modestly named after himself as the Yashodharatataka, or East Baray. Another century had to pass before King Suryavarman the First could barely top that record with the 5-by-1.4-mile West Baray, one of the largest structures built by humans before the modern industrial era. Two centuries later, King Jayavarman the Seventh, busy with other construction such as the city of Angkor Thom and the Bayon temple, had to swallow his pride and attach his name to a humble new reservoir, the Jayatataka (“Sea of Jaya”), measuring a mere 2.2 by 0.6 miles. These are among the Khmer structures visible to aliens out there who might be viewing the Earth from space.
At the same time as Indianized names, writing, and religion were thriving at Angkor, Chinese influence continued. The Khmer sent embassies to the imperial court in China, which reciprocated by sending embassies and products to Angkor. Stone carvings at Angkor depict Chinese inventions such as pontoon bridges and multi-projectile artillery. Remains of Chinese Tang, Song, and later pottery are scattered all over Angkor.
Angkor’s grandiose royal courts and construction did not come cheaply to the empire’s peasants, who were taxed in the form of rice deliveries and labor. It’s estimated that construction of the West Baray would have taken the efforts of 200,000 peasants working for three years. One king required 4,000 concubines, and just one medium-sized temple had to be staffed by 1,000 administrators, over 600 dancers, 95 professors, and assorted others, adding up to a total of 12,640 functionaries, all of whom had to be fed. When I first heard these numbers, I began to get a glimmering of how centuries of exploitation of Cambodian peasants by extravagant elites could have had something to do with the repressed fury that exploded under Pol Pot.
We shouldn’t be deceived by all those temples, statues of Buddha, and beautiful reservoirs into thinking of Angkor’s kings as a peace-loving bunch. The Khmer were constantly