For visitors to Angkor Wat, this book is a "must". However, it's more than just a late afternoon read after touring Angkor Thom and environs. It's an excellent translation of a valuable work with very helpful footnotes for academics and independent scholars. The excellent footnotes and explanations and inclusion of Chinese characters makes it a valuable reference work for those of us studying Cambodian, Vietnamese (Champa) and Chinese history. Don't let its slim size and popularity with armchair and real visitors distract you from its value. ( )

Occidentalism made in China

Chinese sailors do well by the fact that in this country you can go without clothes, food is easy to come by, women are easy to get, housing is easy to deal with, it is easy to make do with a few utensils, and it is easy to do trade. They often run away here.

Roughly 8,500 Chinese characters or 39 pages of English text remain of Zhou Daguan's (周達觀) report on the Khmer kingdom during the Yuan dynasty. Likely Zhou visited the Khmer kingdom as a member of a team that travelled to Cambodia in 1295, probably to deliver an edict from the new emperor Chengzong (元成宗). Zhou's report is the only contemporary source about life in the Khmer capital (what is now called Angkor Thom, but then called Yasodharapura) that we have. Zhou must have spent about a year in and around the capital of a country that was already in a phase of slow decay.

Originally, the report must have been about three times as long as the version that remains today. It also seems to be in disarray: its 40 sections are of differing length and are not really logically connected. Although you cannot compare it to a modern day CIA country report, the tone of the document is mostly factual with short sentences, rather than evocative. As we may expect it contains an overview of export and import products as well as animals and plants. The military information is very limited, it notes however that the Khmer king's army seems to have little or no strategy or preparation for war. The king is the paramount leader and presides over a system of servitude where he oversees the construction of temples, monuments and lakes, as well as the disbursement of land and resources. The legal system must have been quite libertarian. Many conflicts were left to the two parties involved, and no criminal inquiry took place when a dead body was found. Corporal punishments did not occur, but in certain cases noses or toes were amputated.

But Zhou does not just describe affaires d'état. He also has a keen eye for the life of Khmer citizenry. Khmer citizens live in a stratified society where many families have about 100 slaves, who live below the house. Houses have no tables, chairs, jars, or buckets. Zhou also states that the Khmer used no saws, but chiselled planks with axes. The people are very clean, and wash themselves very often. Unlike the Chinese however, they do not use loo paper.

As the excellent introduction helps explain, Zhou as a product of Chinese culture must have found Khmer culture inferior to that of the Middle Kingdom. He describes these “southern barbarians” as “coarse, ugly, and black”. And not unlike the Victorians, he shows a keen interest in Khmer sexual culture. Women not only go bare breasted, they are also “lascivious”, and enjoy a level of sexual freedom that he seems to find at least interesting. He tells how Chinese men like to go and view Khmer women bathing in rivers, and how Khmer women seem to have their virginity taken by Buddhist monks or important Hindus (pandits?). Whether in such a case these males just use their hand he cannot clarify.

What struck me is how much Zhou’s report illustrates the continuity in the culture of Nanyang, as the Chinese call Southeast Asia. Many of the practices Zhou describes can still be found around Southeast Asia today or could be found there until relatively recently. Bare breasted women could still be seen in Bali until a few decades ago. Women use medicine to make their private parts smaller after child birth, which is a practice still found in Javanese jamu. Elite women are confident and mobile (they ride chariots and elephants), and women do all the trading in markets, as is still quite the practice in Southeast Asia today. People bow to the ground when the king passes. Zhou also describes how king Indravarman III surrounded himself with Theravada Buddhist monks, hindu pandits,and Shivaite priests, as the Thai king still does. The king did not only wear a crown suggestive of tantric power (vajradhara), he also spent the night with a nine-headed snake spirit who is lord of the earth and the country. Each night the spirit turned into a woman and slept with the king. This is not unlike Nyai Loro Kidul, the shakti of the sultans of Mataram in modern day Java.

Unfortunately, Zhou also inspired the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge tried to enforce four harvests a year upon Cambodia’s peasantry, because Zhou described this practice without stating if this was the case for the same plots of land. At least here there seems to be a similarity to (Maoist) China. On the brighter side, now in 2010 more Chinese than ever visit the ruins of Yasodharapura and the surrounding temples. Every day dozens of tour groups march through Tah Prohm, where tour group leaders scream in their megaphones that this is were Angelina Jolie stood in the first Tomb Raider movie. The lure of the Khmer empire is alive and well in China.

In older books like Coèdes' Indianised States of Southeast Asia, the Wade-Giles spelling Chou Ta-kuan is used for Zhou's name. ( )