![]() A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.At Smarthistory, the Center for Public Art History, we believe art has the power to transform lives and to build understanding across cultures. ![]() Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Even so, what Angkor has that will keep drawing the crowds is the world’s biggest temple – and one that remains enigmatically magnificent. Its decline is damaging the very stones of the 12th-Century temple meanwhile, visitors take photographs of themselves and shout into theirΩΩ mobile phones.Īs laser-mapping technology becomes more readily available, perhaps archaeologists might help to divert some of the millions heading to Angkor Wat to elsewhere in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. Such is the use of water by the millions of tourists heading this way each year that the water table of the area under sandy soil is threatened. Already, brash new ‘luxury’ air-conditioned tour-group hotels, featuring swimming pools, hot tubs and spas, dominate the once small French Colonial town of Siem Reap, no longer a walk, but now an air-conditioned coach ride from Angkor Wat. This, perhaps, was the first low-density city – a phenomenon normally associated with the railway age, the car and the spread of suburbia – a vast-reaching conurbation, its parts linked by an ambitious network of roads and canals, reservoirs and dams carved from the forest.Īngkor today, along with such romantic temples as Jayavarman VII’s Ta Prohm, where enormous cotton silk trees and their fairy-tale roots appear to hold the architecture in wild embrace, and known to cinema goers through the film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), is threatened anew not by invading armies but by mass tourism. From its moated temple with its lotus-bud towers, its courtyards and galleries, friezes of warriors, kings, demons, battles and three thousand heavenly nymphs, all shaped in thirty-seven years by 300,000 workers and 6,000 elephants, or so inscriptions say, from millions of sandstone slabs floated down from Phnom Kulen, Angkor stretched for miles around. If the discovery of the scale and ambition of Mahendraparvata was a remarkable event, the uncovering of the sheer scale of Angkor has been mind-bending. It may have been possible to make such discoveries some years earlier in Cambodia, but until 1998 Phnom Kulem was the last refuge of Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge, the fanatical Communist organisation that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979, executing and starving to death some two million people, or a fifth of the population. The seat of the remnant Khmer kingdom moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital today.Īlthough Angkor Wat and its attendant cities, temples, reservoirs, terraces, pools and palaces have been a magnetic 21st Century tourist attraction – when I came here in the mid-1990s I would have been one of around 7,500 annual visitors last year there were 2.5 million, very many from China. But, the Khmers did build Angkor Wat at the zenith of their once dynamic empire that, founded in 802, fell in 1431 when the rival Ayutthaya (Thai) kingdom to the north sacked Angkor. ![]() It seemed inconceivable to Mouhout that the “barbaric” Khmers could have built Angkor Wat, let alone the other temples and palaces spread around it across some 500 acres (2 sq km). “It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.” ![]() ![]() “One of these temples – a rival to that of Solomon and erected by some ancient Michelangelo might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings,” he wrote. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |