Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you've
Speaker 1: been listening to the podcast, you know how much Katie
Speaker 1: and I love a good lost city. We've talked about
Speaker 1: Atlantis recently, and a little while before that we talked
Speaker 1: about the North Chico in South America. So these cities
Speaker 1: that disappear, or empires that appear out of nowhere and
Speaker 1: then disappear again seemed to fascinate us. So today we're
Speaker 1: going to do the lost city of Anchor. And when
Speaker 1: Sarah said this earlier, I was like, oh, you want
Speaker 1: to talk about Anchor Watt and she said, no, there's
Speaker 1: a lot more to it than that's just one temple, Katie.
Speaker 1: So today it's ruins and peasants who grow rice in
Speaker 1: northwestern Cambodia. That's what you think of when you're thinking
Speaker 1: of Ancre Watt. But back in medieval times it was
Speaker 1: something else. It was a very impress us, a very
Speaker 1: huge city with a lot of amazing works of engineering.
Speaker 1: But what went wrong? Well, to do that, let's start
Speaker 1: out with a little bit of background on Anchor, which
Speaker 1: starts in a D. Eight hundred and Sarah was saying,
Speaker 1: it's lovely to be able to start with one person
Speaker 1: instead of the people from this river came and exactly
Speaker 1: nice to have one warrior type guy coming into the
Speaker 1: picture early on. And in this case it's a powerful
Speaker 1: regional king named Jaya Armand Too. And Jaya Armand consolidated
Speaker 1: the chiefdoms in Cambodia and he formed the Kingdom of Anchor,
Speaker 1: and he's the one who decides that the Khmer royalty,
Speaker 1: the Cambodian royalty, would be linked to the gods, creating
Speaker 1: the cult of the devil Rajah, which is literally the
Speaker 1: god king or king of the gods. So this proves
Speaker 1: to be a very important part of our story, this
Speaker 1: close relationship between the the king's and the gods, and
Speaker 1: the monuments they would build to both themselves and to
Speaker 1: the gods. Right and Anchor is his capital, the capital
Speaker 1: of the Khmer or Cambodian Empire from the ninth century
Speaker 1: to the fifteenth century a d. Which is known as
Speaker 1: the Classical era of Cambodian history. And we are going
Speaker 1: to have a little bit of river people descendant. So
Speaker 1: we started with the king, but the people were descended
Speaker 1: from the Funan of the Mekong Delta and the Khmer
Speaker 1: Empire is highly influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and that
Speaker 1: comes from centuries old contact with Indian traders, but they
Speaker 1: still retain some of their traditional religions. They kind of
Speaker 1: blended blended it all together, right. And this is a
Speaker 1: huge territory, we should add. It goes from the tip
Speaker 1: of the Indo Chinese Peninsula north to the modern Yunnan
Speaker 1: Province in China and from Vietnam westward towards the Bay
Speaker 1: of Bengal, which all sounds completely insane. But the city
Speaker 1: of Anchor was bigger than Rhode Island, if that gives
Speaker 1: you an idea. Yeah. And for such a huge city,
Speaker 1: they fund huge construction projects. And the biggest one that
Speaker 1: Katie mentioned earlier, Anger Watt, probably the most famous um.
Speaker 1: It's a temple complex that was built in the twelfth century.
Speaker 1: There's also Anchored Tom, another temple complex which was built
Speaker 1: in twelve hundred by King Jaya Armand the seventh. And
Speaker 1: it's after that King Jai of Armand the Seventh when
Speaker 1: Angor starts to go downhill, and by fourteen thirty one
Speaker 1: it's been partially abandoned. By the time the Portuguese come
Speaker 1: on the scene Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, the
Speaker 1: empire is thoroughly on its way out. The kings of
Speaker 1: Anchor do come back for a little bit in the
Speaker 1: sixteenth century, but not for long. So we're wondering what happened.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, Angor lies. I don't want to
Speaker 1: say forgotten, because Anchor Watt is maintained by um monks
Speaker 1: and hermits, and it's considered an important pilgrimage site in
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia all through these sort of down years. But
Speaker 1: I think the um vastness of the city of Anchor
Speaker 1: is forgotten, at least ignored. Some travelers who um quote
Speaker 1: unquote discovered Anchor thought they'd found a lost city founded
Speaker 1: by Alexandra the Great or the Roman Empire. They knew
Speaker 1: nothing about it. But the French colonial regime in Cambodia
Speaker 1: uh found the site, not found it, but they started
Speaker 1: getting interested in it in the eighteen sixties and they
Speaker 1: partially restored the temples and the reservoirs and canals that
Speaker 1: lays through this mammoth complex of anchor and published a
Speaker 1: French explorer Andri Muo actually reintroduces the temples to the
Speaker 1: West with a journal travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos
Speaker 1: and to bring it up to the present time and
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. Of course, there's a lot of war
Speaker 1: and upheaval in Cambodia, and there's war damage done to
Speaker 1: the site. There's theft, but mostly a lot of neglect
Speaker 1: because it's too dangerous of a place for most people
Speaker 1: to go to. Yeah, and take care of it, right.
Speaker 1: There's engulfing vegetation and erosion, and Sarah made me look
Speaker 1: at pictures of strangler figs, which are completely insane. Just
Speaker 1: imagine um, it's like a vine flash tree just engulfing
Speaker 1: these stone temples. It's ridiculous, So google image that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen two becomes a World Heritage Site, which
Speaker 1: is a great step to preserving any kind of cultural
Speaker 1: monument like this. And by nine it was scammed by
Speaker 1: the radar of space Shuttle Endeavor, which turns out to
Speaker 1: be a very important key to anchors understanding later on
Speaker 1: in the podcast, because there's so much more that we
Speaker 1: didn't know about. But let's go back and figure out
Speaker 1: what Anchor was like and why we should care about it.
Speaker 1: So during the medieval times, the canear erected thousands of
Speaker 1: shrines and Anchor and went on a building spree. And
Speaker 1: the city it's not just built haphazardly. It's very much
Speaker 1: tied to the Hindu idea of the universe. The city
Speaker 1: of Ankor actually was a symbolic universe itself that was
Speaker 1: structured according to the Hindu cosmology. So, for example, the
Speaker 1: outer walls of the temples are meant to recall mountains
Speaker 1: that were believed to edge the world, and the reservoirs
Speaker 1: and canals and moats that lace through the cities are
Speaker 1: meant to symbolize the waters of the cosmos. So it's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool idea to to model your city on
Speaker 1: the universe. Yes, city planners take note. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: Atlanta wasn't designed that, though I don't think so. The
Speaker 1: temples weren't only religious centers. They were also commercial centers,
Speaker 1: and many of them operated as small cities, while other
Speaker 1: ones as larger cities. There were up to swhere around
Speaker 1: seven in fifty thousand people in Anchor, which was the
Speaker 1: capital of the Khmer Kingdom, and it is the most
Speaker 1: extensive urban complex of the pre industrial world, so small accomplishment.
Speaker 1: We only have one firsthand account, though, of what Angor
Speaker 1: was really like, and that's from Zo Daguan, a Chinese
Speaker 1: diplomat who visited at the end of the thirteenth century,
Speaker 1: and you can find parts of his account on Google
Speaker 1: Books if you searched for it. But he discusses a
Speaker 1: little bit about the city itself and some about city life.
Speaker 1: He talks about entering the city and there's a moat
Speaker 1: surrounding it with a border of fifty four giants holding
Speaker 1: a snake. There's a golden bridge, gilded lions, a pavilion
Speaker 1: supported by stone elephants, um a bronze Buddha in a
Speaker 1: lake with water coming out of its belly button. We've
Speaker 1: also got stories about fireworks and bore fighting, royal processions
Speaker 1: with elephants, horses clad in gold, palace women and flowers.
Speaker 1: It all sounds very a luxurious We shouldn't only look
Speaker 1: at that side of the account, though. The life for
Speaker 1: your average peasant in Anger probably wasn't really great. You
Speaker 1: would likely work really hard on the temple because constant
Speaker 1: building freeze require constant work from peasants. Uh, you grow
Speaker 1: a lot of rice to pay tributes because the whole
Speaker 1: system relied on rice's currency. And you'd also probably be
Speaker 1: drafted into war because there were constant wars with the
Speaker 1: armies in Thailand and Champa, which is Vietnam today. But
Speaker 1: he also does talk a little bit about middle class life.
Speaker 1: So that would be me and you, Sarah. And the
Speaker 1: house he's staying at has matting but no tables, chairs,
Speaker 1: or beds. They cook rice over a clay stove and
Speaker 1: they sit on mats and eat from ceramic plates and
Speaker 1: drink wine from tin cups that's made out of honey,
Speaker 1: rice leaves, and water. They sleep on mats on the floor,
Speaker 1: and apparently it's so hot people got during the night
Speaker 1: to bathe, and a few families all share a ditch
Speaker 1: as a latrine, and when it's full, they would dig
Speaker 1: another one or have a slave to it. Apparently wealthy
Speaker 1: families had more than a hundred slaves each, which they
Speaker 1: got from the uplands, and they spoke came here, but
Speaker 1: they had no rights. And the other thing I thought
Speaker 1: was really interesting was what happened when two families fought.
Speaker 1: They would take a member from each family and stick
Speaker 1: them each in a tower, and then after a certain
Speaker 1: period of time, you would get to come out of
Speaker 1: confinement and they would look to see what sort of
Speaker 1: ailments you'd had. You know, perhaps you'd had a fever
Speaker 1: or some other sickness, and that's how they determined who
Speaker 1: was guilty. It's so weirdly passive. I keep thinking of
Speaker 1: Funny Python and the Holy Grail because I tried to
Speaker 1: apply that to most things. But you know, I figure
Speaker 1: out whether she's a which, figure out who's guilty, and
Speaker 1: the king's punishments could range from a fine to crushing
Speaker 1: your limbs. So I hope you weren't the one who
Speaker 1: got the fever. And they also collected human goal from
Speaker 1: I've read that too. That was weird with the thought
Speaker 1: to give both men and elephants courage. And if you
Speaker 1: were a person who needed courage, you could drink it
Speaker 1: mixed with wine. If you were an elephant, you would
Speaker 1: have it poured over you in a different mixture. But
Speaker 1: they had a commoner way would be the best way
Speaker 1: to go. There was someone who was supposed to drink,
Speaker 1: so you know, human goal courage for elephants. Things you learned,
Speaker 1: but Unfortunately, this amazing account we have from Zoo is
Speaker 1: that's it. We have things that were carved on the
Speaker 1: stone temples, but all of the administrative buildings and the
Speaker 1: homes from the highest person to the lowest were made
Speaker 1: of wood, and consequently you haven't survived. So we have
Speaker 1: very little to go on when we're trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how ankor fell. What happened, and the historically suspected
Speaker 1: causes are invaders, religion changes, maritime trade kind of shuts
Speaker 1: down the coastal city, and um, so we have to
Speaker 1: get us, which is one of those use your own
Speaker 1: ending podcast. We're going to give you some options and
Speaker 1: you can pick what you think makes the most sense.
Speaker 1: So one option is rivalry. The Canary kings each had
Speaker 1: a few wives and several children, and so there were
Speaker 1: constant battles over which baby would be the king, and
Speaker 1: plenty of usurpers to the throne. As Sarah said, it
Speaker 1: was like the War of the Roses times Azilian. Imagine
Speaker 1: just never knowing who was going to be the next king.
Speaker 1: That puts a lot of no clear line of succession. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then another potential problem was war. Some think that
Speaker 1: the warriors from the Iataiah state sacked Anchor in and
Speaker 1: they did invade the city and made off with a
Speaker 1: lot of treasure in women, but they probably didn't completely
Speaker 1: destroy the city. Well, obviously they didn't completely destroy We
Speaker 1: have some less um, they didn't damage it severely, And
Speaker 1: some historians think that's unlikely because as the ruler of
Speaker 1: the Aetayah installs his son on the throne, So why
Speaker 1: would you completely sack the city and destroy most of
Speaker 1: it if you're installing your son on the throne. And
Speaker 1: that brings us to option three, which is religion. Anthropologists
Speaker 1: call Anchor the regal ritual city. They love religion, it's
Speaker 1: a big part of their daily lives, and the kings
Speaker 1: are the world emperors of Hindu lore. But by the
Speaker 1: thirteenth and fourteen centuries, Terravada Buddhism starts to surpass Hinduism,
Speaker 1: and it preaches social quality, which isn't something that was
Speaker 1: a big part of life in Anchor. So perhaps slaving
Speaker 1: away at growing rice just to give it to the
Speaker 1: king for his um gilded elephant processions doesn't sounds so
Speaker 1: appealing anymore. No, it really didn't, because that whole regal
Speaker 1: ritual thing relied on tribute and taxes, so you were
Speaker 1: paying for these insanely luxurious ceremony and as we already said,
Speaker 1: the currency is rice, so you're growing huge amounts of
Speaker 1: rice to feed priests and the dancers and the concubine, yeah,
Speaker 1: the temple workers. And it just, uh, this is a
Speaker 1: plausible explanation for why this society would collapse bolts. But
Speaker 1: we have another option. That's that it was just plain abandoned,
Speaker 1: that the royal court ditched the city. And this is
Speaker 1: plausible because the rulers were obsessed with building their own
Speaker 1: new temples, they wouldn't take care of the old ones.
Speaker 1: Most of our kind of cultural monuments, at least public monuments,
Speaker 1: there is a certain amount of upkeep and um, and
Speaker 1: you know people people like things that are old. But
Speaker 1: that was not the case with the Anchor rulers. You
Speaker 1: knew they would just let the old ones fall into
Speaker 1: into decay. Kind of reminded me a little bit about
Speaker 1: the It kind of reminded me a little bit of
Speaker 1: the Egyptian pharaoh's pilfering the rocks from the old pyramids
Speaker 1: and stuff. But so it's possible that the rulers just
Speaker 1: left the town headed to a location closer to the
Speaker 1: Mekong River, which is near Cambodia's modern capital of PanAm Pen,
Speaker 1: and that way they could have easier sea trading and um,
Speaker 1: just move on with the times. But there is an
Speaker 1: even more modern theory, which is water trouble. The empire's
Speaker 1: growth depended on huge rice harvests, and to do that,
Speaker 1: of course, you need a steady water supply. And we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier how good it engineering this particular empire was,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't just engineering amazing tempo complexes and things
Speaker 1: to worship their rulers and gods. We were talking about
Speaker 1: all the canals and the reservoirs, and that does more
Speaker 1: than symbolize the Hindu cosmology of oceans and water. They
Speaker 1: also were legitimate reservoirs and the uh. There's a great
Speaker 1: article in the National Geographic from a few months back
Speaker 1: by Richard Stone which puts forth the idea that the
Speaker 1: civilization rose because they figured out a way to manage
Speaker 1: the monsoon season, which you know, it's kind of an
Speaker 1: on or off rain switch, right, And once you're not
Speaker 1: dependent on the weather like that, you have time to
Speaker 1: do things like build great civilizations. Yeah, because you can
Speaker 1: increase your rice yields. You can grow during times of
Speaker 1: year where you normally wouldn't be able to grow rice.
Speaker 1: And so this theory suggests that they rose to prominence
Speaker 1: because they figured out how to manipulate this, and that
Speaker 1: maybe they fell because they lost that control. They built
Speaker 1: one reservoir you talked about. I think that's what five
Speaker 1: miles long by one and a half miles wide the Westbury. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these aren't huge. If you see a picture of it,
Speaker 1: it I mean, I can't even compare it to a
Speaker 1: pool or something like that. It looks like a lake,
Speaker 1: except that it's perfectly rectangular. And here's how it worked.
Speaker 1: During the summer monsoon months, the overflow channels took care
Speaker 1: of the excess water to save it for later. The
Speaker 1: rain stopped in October November, and the irrigation channels dispensed
Speaker 1: the stored water. So, yeah, you can grow rice when
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be able to, and you're not going to
Speaker 1: be quite as flooded as you normally would be during
Speaker 1: the monsoon season. And one of the ways that we
Speaker 1: figured out how these reservoirs worked, where those NOWSA images
Speaker 1: we were talking about or endeavor, and they were great
Speaker 1: because they showed areas that were still inaccessible because of
Speaker 1: violence and Cambodia or just lawlessness in certain areas. And
Speaker 1: the images showed that the berets or these big reservoirs
Speaker 1: had inlets and outlets, so that proved that they were
Speaker 1: for irrigation, they weren't just for religious purposes. But by
Speaker 1: the early thirteenth century, the waterworks began to deteriorate, and
Speaker 1: we're not quite sure why that happened. It might have
Speaker 1: been that floods broke some of the masonry, or it
Speaker 1: just became two massive a system for the engineers to handle.
Speaker 1: You can kind of think of Atlanta's own sewer system,
Speaker 1: which a massive overhaul. Yeah, there's there's not much you
Speaker 1: can do about it unless you embark on a massive overhaul,
Speaker 1: and they might have not been equipped to do that,
Speaker 1: as we're not either. But um, the thirteenth century surprised
Speaker 1: people because it was a little early for the trouble
Speaker 1: to start. If you're paying attention to the timeline anchor
Speaker 1: was still around in the sixteenth century. Yeah, but here's
Speaker 1: what suspected to have happened. So while the waterworks are
Speaker 1: in disrepair. That's a problem, but maybe manageable if you
Speaker 1: still have a regular monsoon season. But unfortunately their disrepair
Speaker 1: coincides perfectly with the beginning of the Little Ice Age,
Speaker 1: and that's something that people have long known happened in
Speaker 1: Europe starting in and going on for a couple of centuries.
Speaker 1: It contributed to really abnormally cold winters and unseasonably cold summers,
Speaker 1: and but until recently people didn't know if this also
Speaker 1: extended to Asia, and it definitely did, and it made
Speaker 1: Anchor experience these mega droughts. Sometimes there was no monsoon
Speaker 1: at all, sometimes there was huge monsoon. Basically nothing you
Speaker 1: can plan against, and if you're already falling apart, you're
Speaker 1: not equipped to handle it. So if you have an
Speaker 1: unstable monsoon season and um water works that are failing,
Speaker 1: you can't guarantee a harvest. And we know that the
Speaker 1: Little Ice Age did hit Asia in part because of Poemu.
Speaker 1: I think that's how you say it. Cypress tree rings. Um.
Speaker 1: Some of these trees are nine centuries old, so they
Speaker 1: were around in the height of anger and in its fall,
Speaker 1: and they show stress, like major stress from the monsoons.
Speaker 1: Heavy monsoons, no monsoons, and of course with all of
Speaker 1: this water trouble, we end up with a low rice yield,
Speaker 1: which could lead to starving turmoil, a week army and
Speaker 1: so on. And so that's why they choose your own ending.
Speaker 1: Any of them could really be right because we can
Speaker 1: have this water centered answer. But if your people are
Speaker 1: starving because there's no water to grow rice, or you know,
Speaker 1: you're flooded out and you can't grow rice, um your
Speaker 1: army is underfed, you're more susceptible to the Iataia invaders.
Speaker 1: And it kind of ties all the all the endings
Speaker 1: together in an interesting way. And there's another environmental theory
Speaker 1: about environmental degradation causing the fall of Anchor, which was
Speaker 1: about deforestation and over using the land, which some people
Speaker 1: think led to flood and silted canals, which are really
Speaker 1: no good. Yeah, if you silt silt up your water works,
Speaker 1: they're not going to really do you any good anymore. Well,
Speaker 1: all of these possibilities are interesting to ponder. Hopefully we'll
Speaker 1: have a chance to figure out the real answer. Now
Speaker 1: that Cambodia is open for tourism. Yeah, it's actually a
Speaker 1: big source of money for Cambodia. Now, which you know
Speaker 1: couldn't really have much of a tourist trade for decades
Speaker 1: because of war and internal strife. But um unfortunately the
Speaker 1: tourism also threatens the structural integrity of the temples. There's
Speaker 1: always a double down. But the same thing about POMPEII.
Speaker 1: We're reading about people coming to see POMPEII and then
Speaker 1: touching every Yeah, they're winning it. Erosion problems from just
Speaker 1: physical contact, but also new resorts and hotels springing up
Speaker 1: are supposedly sucking the groundwater dry beneath Ancor, which weakened
Speaker 1: some of the foundations of the buildings. And if you're
Speaker 1: looking to go loot some antiquities, there actually aren't many
Speaker 1: left after sent reads of people doing so. Some are
Speaker 1: in France and some are in Cambodia's National Museum very
Speaker 1: far away. Well, I for one, would definitely like to
Speaker 1: visit Anchor and Anchor Watt and the whole Shabang. So
Speaker 1: would I, and I think it would be a lot
Speaker 1: easier to visit than Atlantis, considering we don't know where
Speaker 1: it is, or the north to Chico, considering that they're gone. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that about wraps it up, unless we think
Speaker 1: of any more lost cities to talk of in the future,
Speaker 1: So if you'd like to read more, check out our
Speaker 1: article five abandoned Cities, and don't forget to check out
Speaker 1: our blog, which you can find on the homepage at
Speaker 1: www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
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