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1999 When monuments have few descendents
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Siem Reap is the nearest town to the Angkor ruins. It's the only practical
base for anyone wanting to visit this huge archeological site, and you need to
be based here for at least 2-3 days to even begin to do it justice. Except maybe
as a commercial centre for the farming families around, the main economic reason
for Siem Reap's existence is Angkor and the tourism it generates. Yet at the end
of your stay, two things strike you: for all its splendour, Angkor gets very few
visitors, and because tourist traffic is so low, Siem Reap is a remarkably small
town -- more like a big village -- just about 4 paved roads, and a population of
16,000 according to my driver.
Yet the Angkor ruins are incredible. There are 20-30 temple complexes spread over an area up to 30 km away, the most famous of them being Angkor Wat, but that's just one of many. Each king built his own; some built more than one. Even in three days, you can barely visit 12 sites. As you go through the sites, you can trace the evolution of architectural styles from the earlier kings' works to the later ones, stretching over 400 years. Towards the end of the dynasty, the designs got so complex, each temple was a little city in itself. The sculpture in many places remains in fine condition. You can see the facial expression of each and every soldier in a 300-metre long carving containing hundreds of soldiers. Some temples, like the Bayon and the Angkor Wat, contain hundreds and hundreds of metres of bas-reliefs. It would take you a day to read through their stories. Over the years I have seen all sorts of old stones in many places around the world, but in all honesty, the Angkor ruins are the most breathtaking I have ever seen. They have an aesthetic elegance and a craftsmanship unparalleled anywhere. Yet it receives but a fraction of a fraction of the visitors trampling all over the Parthenon, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, The Tower of London, Ellis Island, the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an or the Colosseum in Rome. The security situation in Cambodia certainly has something to do with it. With protests marches, rocket-launched grenades and riot police shooting away, it is difficult to entice people to come. But that is hardly the first problem, when you think about it. The first problem is that Angkor means nothing to people. They don't feel a need to come. Why not? Why do some places have an inexhaustible following of eager visitors, while Angkor can barely attract a hundred a day, despite it being of superior beauty and preservation?
I think it has to do with cultural descendents -- people who identify with a culture, of which the monument forms some part of its history. Except for the present 7 million people of Cambodia, Angkor has none. The Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City and the Terracotta Warriors have over a billion cultural descendents, plus millions more in the West and elsewhere who have been exposed to and fascinated by China. The Parthenon and the Colosseum have the entire Western world as their descendents, plus westernised Asians like me. Ellis Island has nearly all the offspring of immigrants in the United States holding it dear in their hearts. They have learnt about it in school, they keep reading about it even as adults, it gets featured in the occasional movie, and friends talk about having been there. But of Angkor -- it has no place in our conception of our history. Whether a monument is beautiful, magnificent or intact, will not predict its
popularity. A monument is popular when it features in a culture's iconography,
and when that culture is dominant among world cultures today. In other words,
what we laud of the past tells us nothing of the past, but of the balance of
cultural power, of the present. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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Angkor
Wat
