Why Angkor, the Largest City of the Medieval World, Was Abandoned

A young man from China counts the stone giants on a bridge, fifty-four on each side, and keeps counting.

⟡ This narration features AI-assisted voice production, carefully crafted for consistency and clarity.

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WHY ANGKOR, THE LARGEST CITY OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD, WAS ABANDONED

In 1296, a Chinese envoy walked into a city of golden towers, lotus-filled moats and reservoirs large enough to hold the rain of a whole season. He stayed eleven months, wrote down everything he saw, and sailed home. After he left, the stones of Angkor stopped speaking, and the greatest city of its age began to empty, one household at a time. This is the story of the city he walked through, and of the century in which its people slowly left it behind.

◈ The stone giants, the golden window and the women who ran the markets, through the eyes of Zhou Daguan ◈ The slaves beneath the houses and the hidden labour that kept the waterworks running ◈ Two great droughts and the violent floods between them, read in the rings of a Vietnamese cypress ◈ The army from Ayutthaya, and the court that moved south to the river

When the last inscription was carved in 1327, only the mud and the trees were left to keep the record.

A historical narrative of Angkor, Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia, the Khmer Empire, Zhou Daguan's journey of 1296, and the abandonment of the Khmer capital in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

History told with space to breathe.

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Sources & further reading Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People, trans. Peter Harris (Silkworm Books, 2007) Buckley, B. M. et al., "Climate as a contributing factor in the demise of Angkor, Cambodia," PNAS (2010) Penny, D. et al., "Geoarchaeological evidence from Angkor, Cambodia, reveals a gradual decline rather than a catastrophic 15th-century collapse," PNAS (2019) Evans, D. et al., "Uncovering archaeological landscapes at Angkor using lidar," PNAS (2013) Fletcher, R. et al., "The water management network of Angkor, Cambodia," Antiquity (2008) Carter, A. K. et al., "Temple occupation and the tempo of collapse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia," PNAS (2019) Day, M. B. et al., "Paleoenvironmental history of the West Baray, Angkor (Cambodia)," PNAS (2012) Klassen, S. et al., "Diachronic modeling of the population within the medieval Greater Angkor Region," Science Advances (2021)

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