Customer Reviews

Khmer

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This book is a wonderful companion on a trip to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. It makes excellent use of a wide variety of historical anecdotes and images to convey a sense of the feeling of rediscovery of Angkor temples in in the early 20th century.

The production quality is also quite high, with glossy reproductions of color drawings of the temples. This book is not a mainly a text explanation of the temples at Angkor, nor is it a primary guide for a visit there. But with its images and written history of the temples, it describes the history of Angkor as a wonder of the world, and places the temples in the context of archaeology and travel. And it includes numerous cool little details about for the curious traveler, that more scholarly works would leave out.

Wonderful small little book that contains information about the origins of Angkor that once the ancient Khmer former capital from the 9th-15 century A.D. The book contains wonderful photographs from old photo archives and some from art galleries. Those who have help to make this book have gone to extraordinary lengths to get the right details as well has translations from steles and inscriptions praising the great works the ancient powerful god kings of many centuries ago. This is rare because most books on Angkor that I have read don't usually have translations or excerpts of inscriptions whatso ever. Seeing the photos of temples and ruins buried in the jungle for centuries is enough to make me want to understand more about the Khmers and their ancient civilization of centuries ago. What has happened to their art which is still a question of who owns it since there temples are plundered for their wonderful carvings of stone etc... Yet the book is great to have small and easy to read and talks about royal powerful from the founder of Angkor right through to the classical age which was the height of it's power in the 12th century A.D. with the famous construction of Angkor Wat the symbol to the Khmer people of the past and present through to the decline and instability of Angkor during the last few decades before it was abandoned. With wonderful photographs and drawings, maps and artifacts this book is just one of the many great books published about Angkor.

I've always liked those National Geographic maps and charts which resemble three ring circuses--several things are going on on each page or in each corner. There are so many things to explore, you feel a sense of discovery while still curled up on your sofa. This small book is like that--loaded with good photographs, a few (perhaps too few) maps, and insets of all kinds. The text is probably on the slight side, but if you read and absorb what the author writes, you will come away with a good grounding in the Khmer empire of the period 800-1400. Always strongly influenced by India, the Khmer civilization came and went, like Pharaonic Egypt, without any ongoing influence in the world today. The Cambodians of our times preserve the architectural heritage of their ancestors, but their culture is different. A reader may find out about the great kings, the organization of their kingdom, and peruse some interesting excerpts from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese traveler of the 13th century; George Coedes, a French scholar of Southeast Asian history, and Bernard Groslier, the last French curator of Angkor and an art historian. There are many other, more scholarly books on the Khmers, Angkor, and Southeast Asian history, but if you want a relatively painless introduction with a lot of basic facts, you should give this one a try. I thought that it was like a kind of pill to be swallowed. After a short time, you know something about Southeast Asia ! However, despite the title, you will discover that neither Angkor nor Cambodia were ever lost. The Europeans didn't know about the temples and palaces in the jungle, but Cambodians did. Another myth crumbles. Oh, well.

At 120 pages (5" x 7") and approximately 20,000 words, this book is so short that it is really more like an illustrated essay.
However, it is well-written and illustrated with good color photographs on every page. Beginning with the geographical situation and early origins of the Khmer empire, successive chapters take the story through the foundation of Angkor by Jayavarman II (800 AD), the construction of Angkor Wat by Suryavarman II (1113-1150), the iconic "face temples" of Angkor's Buddhist king, Jayavarman VII (1181-1219), and the post-Angkor period (14th-15th centuries). The book concludes with twenty pages of excerpts from other works, including the diary of Zhou Daguan (Chinese envoy to Angkor in 1296-7) and several inscriptions. The emphasis throughout is on cultural developments and the building programs of the kings at Angkor.

Because the size and format of this book may mislead some readers to expect a "guidebook" to Angkor, it is worth emphasizing that this is a history rather than a site guide. However, it does include a map of Angkor that usefully identifies the most important structures and the reigns in which they were built.

Because the book is so very short, the amount of information that could be included is necessarily limited. It seems that the most likely audience for the book includes: (1) those who are unfamiliar with ancient Cambodia and wish a brief introduction, and (2) elementary and secondary education, where the book would be suitable as a learning module on SE Asia.

The book is very nice done,with beutiful pictures and illustrations. One thing that I mised was the concentration to Cambodia, very little was mentioned about for example the big sites in Thailand.However it's worth the money just for the nice pictures.