Angkor is not one lone iconic wat but approximately a hundred temples, major ones not counting the many more smaller sacred sites and shrines, rock-strewn ruins scattered across the water-logged and sun-baked plains of northern Cambodia.
When Europe adumbrated its future greatness through the Middle Ages, Angkor became the fertile fulcrum of a succession of God-kings with fantastic Indian names who built magnificent monuments, planted civilisations and lorded over Southeast Asia’s original and oldest inhabitants – the Khmer.
A few years back Tripadvisor, the online travel site, voted Angkor Wat the world’s number one destination. Today locals lament that tourists are arriving in lesser numbers despite the opening of a big brand new airport an hour’s drive away. Every day carloads of foreign tourists are regularly herded into a museum-looking building to be processed, photographed and charged a hefty ticket to get into Angkor. Despite the air-conditioned efficiency, Angkor is no tourist park or ancient temple ruins of a dead and forgotten civilisation. Unlike Egypt’s Giza and Valley of the Kings or Peru’s Machu Picchu, in Angkor Cambodians still eat the same food, dance to the same music and pray to the same stone statues like their ancestors did a thousand years ago. Marvelling at the mysterious beauty and mystical artistic genius of Angkor, I murmured a prayer that more hand-crafted monuments like these be preserved for our grandchildren and that historical places around the world be protected from globalisation’s destruction and defacement in the name of economic progress and cultural tourism.
Angkor is very much alive and has been pretty much so continuously since its construction, contrary to popular history that was written by colonial Europeans about mysterious lost and abandoned faces of idols that they discovered peering at them from the jungles. Angkor still pulsates and breathes particularly through the modern day descendants of artisans, farmers and slaves who live their simple lives around and outside the small touristy city of Siem Reap.
I took these pictures during the dry comfortable season of Christmas 2023.
Kerk Boon Leng Photographs & Notes 