Cambodia's Ozymandias

"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias


The ruins outside Siem Reap are huge. They are spectacular. Their architecture is without equal.

Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom and all of the outlying temples are what remains of the Khmer empire, a tribute to its greatness. These works began with the Khmer belief in the god-king, started by King Jayavarman II and continued by his successors. Furtherance of this divine cult involved reverence of royal ancestors, which led Jayavarman VII to build even more extensively than before.

Cambodia, then, possesses a collection of works in stone, each one of which took tens of thousands of Khmer people to maintain.* Angkor Wat alone, wrote Norman Lewis, could hold "all the monuments of ancient Greece".

More impressive, perhaps, than the size of each temple was the detail and scope of carvings in each one of them. Doors, pillars and walls depicted the Buddha, royal figures and scenes from daily Khmer life - and the carvings were different for each temple.

These works were marvellous to look on. They were, however, also subject to the relentless pressures of nature.

Starting on my first day, I noticed the no-longer-subtle creep of nature's dominance. At Ta Som, a giant tree, growing from the top of the outer wall, draped itself all over the entrance to the temple grounds, roots strangling life out of the stones. Everywhere, the wind and rain and sun had worn away at carvings, faded them almost from existence. Some stones had cracked with decay, laying waste to the face of a forgotten monarch.

In one temple, a pillar lay broken and strewn across the ground. Half a face began at the top, as if the other half had been buried by the dirt and the grass.

"What do you suppose this place will look like in 500 years?" asked Paul, the English guy who had come with me to see the temples.

It was a good question. In 800 years, nature had waged a pitched battle against the stonework here and started to win. In another 500 years, a rock sticking out of the dirt may be all that's left of the great Khmer empire.
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* Ta Prohm, built for the Queen mother, involved the service of 79, 365 people, where Prah Khan, built for Jayavarman VII's father, required the involvement of 97, 840 people (Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent).