Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


	S.P. Publishing Group Co., Ltd. 11/1 Soi 3 Bamrungburi Rd., T. Prasingh, A. Muang., Chiang Mai 50200 Tel. 053 - 814 455-6 Fax. 053 - 814 457 E-mail: guidelin@loxinfo.co.th

ANGKOR AS IT WAS, ALIVE AND BUSTLING
Zhou Daguan's Memorial Sumptuously Republished

Text & Images : John Cadet

[Zhou Daguan's "The Customs of Cambodia", translated from the Paul Pelliot rendering by Michael Smithies, is published by the Siam Society at B. 1,295].

At the end of the 13th C., the Mongol Emperor of China, a grandson of Genghis Khan, no less, was affronted. A Southeast Asian state he regarded as a tributary - that of the Khmer, based on Angkor - had failed to acknowledge its subordinate status in the customary way. Even worse, it had seized his representatives and their seals of -office. He decided something needed to be done, and dispatched an embassy with the object of recalling this state to its sense of duty.

Whether the mission was a success in that respect is now not known, but the mandarin assigned to report its progress, Zhou Daguan, wrote a description of Angkor that has come down in a variety of translations as the most complete description of the court, economy and customs of the Khmer people ever made: one of the few to survive, in fact.

The extensive and spectacular temples of the Khmer are of course still with us, celebrated as one of the world's most remarkable architectural treasures. The Khmer Empire, on the other hand, has gone the way of all flesh. Not long after Zhou Daguan's visit, following some centuries of gradual decline, it was given its quietus by the Ayuthian Thai.

Now, as Omar Khayam says elsewhere, the Lion and the Lizard keep the courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep."

Except that in the Khmer case, it was the forest and the bats that took over, and while there's no shortage of stelae extolling the achievements of the god-like chakravan'in ruler, without Zhou's lively and observant report, we should know almost nothing about the human realities at the back of Angkor's architectural magnificence.

Zhou and the mission travelled by sea down the Chinese coast, up the Mekong River and across the great lake of Cambodia, the Tonle Sap, spending about a year in the Khmer capital and returning by the same route. His description understandably centres on the ruler, his court and the country's products, but his observations of the splendours and pomp of the elite are vividly counter-pointed by informative, often amusing, vignettes of customs, beliefs and everyday behaviour that colour and animate the already expressive stones.

And if not every last item in the report is accurate - the odd doubt has been raised about the validity of his description (at second hand) of the ritual deflowering of Khmer maidens - few historians question its general reliability, consonant as it is with the overall picture mainland Southeast Asia has presented to other travellers, and still presents to us.

Take for example the one particular ethnographic feature that impresses just about every visitor to the region: the relative dominance of the female. Even the chakcavartlp is subject to it, all the more remarkably in that either as a bodh/satfva, or as an avatar of Shiva or Vishnu, he himself is a divinity, and as such is suitably attended by consorts, concubines and palace maids in their thousands.

Nevertheless, "Concerning the golden tower inside the palace," Zhou tells us, "the sovereign goes to sleep at its summit every night. All the natives maintain that in the tower is a spirit which is a snake with nine heads, and is the possessor of the land of the whole kingdom. This guardian appears every night in the form of a woman. It is with this that the sovereign sleeps first of all and couples... If one night the spirit does not appear, then the time has come for the barbarian king to die."

The tenure of this universal emperor, in other words, was believed to be at the discretion of the female form of the spirit-owner of the land: a significant indicator of gender disposition in Southeast Asia, surely, when we consider that Western kings and emperors are invariably legitimated by their accord with a male divinity.

But that's only the icing on the Khmer cake, where gender's concerned. At the ordinary level, we're told, when a girl is born, her parents express the wish, 'May you become the wife of a hundred, a thousand husbands.' Not the sort of invocation a Christian, Muslim or Confucian parent is likely to come out with. And like just about every other historical visitor to Southeast Asia, Zhou notes that in these regions, "women take charge of trade," and that if the outsider wishes to succeed at trade, he had better marry one of them. On a more piquant but still significant note he tells us: "This country is terribly hot and one cannot pass a day without bathing several times." And having pointed out that the rivers make the perfect bathing location, frequented even by the nobler ladies, whose custom is to strip off entirely, he adds, "The Chinese", (shades of Reginald le May in Thailand some seven hundred years later), "when they have nothing to do, often give themselves the pleasure of going to see them." Some even join them in the river, "to profit by what may occur." Zhou is of the opinion that the native women are, as he puts it, "highly sexed. One or two days after giving birth, they couple with their husbands. If their husband does not respond to their desires, he is abandoned Furthermore, if the husband's business takes him away from home a couple of nights - well, not to worry. "But after a dozen nights, his wife does not fail to say, 'I am not a ghost; how can I sleep alone?" Doing them a certain back-handed justice though, he adds, "Their licentious instincts are very strong; but I have also heard say that some remain faithful."

And where female managerial capacities are concerned, anyone who's graduated from enthralment to the tranquil stone apsaras of Angkor, to the more complex relationship with their living and tempestuous counterparts in the region, is likely to feel that where gender relations are concerned, Zhou tells it like it is.

As he does in other respects. "In this country there are many gay young men who daily go in a group of ten or more to the market place. They constantly try to attract the attention of the Chinese, hoping for rich presents, he says, adding rather comically (what would he have made of Pataya's Tiffany, we might ..wonder), "It is dreadful, quite shameful."

But at the other end of the range of human experience, his observations are equally acute.

"There are no coffins for the dead," he says. "They just use some kinds of matting, and cover this with a i textile.. .They carry the body outside the city, to some remote and uninhabited spot, where they abandon it and then return. They wait for the vultures, dogs and other animals to come and eat it. If all is over and done with quickly, they say that their father or mother had acquired merit and therefore received this recompense..."

Now this is interesting in that until recently, there was a similar though less generally performed Thai practice. Apart from providing an unceremonious way of getting rid of the remains of executed criminals, according to nineteenth and twentieth century observers, 'abandonment of the body' was seen by serious Buddhist practitioners as a method of acquiring merit following their own decease, while ascetics might also make progress along the karmic road by performing an esoteric rite with just such an corpse.

It is though with a grand flourish that Zhou ends his report, describing the glittering ceremonials attending the ruler's public appearances -their richly-caparisoned elephants, armed and serried troops, flag and standard bearers, the palace women, inner palace female guards, gold-encrusted implements and parasols, along with the musicians, more troops and attendants who ensured the onlookers prostrated themselves, and not forgetting the sovereign himself, standing on a gold-tusked elephant, with his ceremonial sword drawn - street theatre at the very highest level of the state...

"One can see that, even in a barbarian kingdom," Zhou informs his own divine ruler, "these people do not fail to recognise what is due to a king."

This is not of course the first appearance in English of this fascinating historical document. Renderings into the European languages go back to the early 19th century, many of them, as with this one - edited and newly translated by the indefatigable and omni-competent Michael Smithies - from the French of Paul Pelliot's version. What distinguishes this latest edition, apart from the incorporation of another text on Angkor of Louis Finot, is the lavishness with which it has been produced: splendidly printed, abundantly illustrated with photographs of Angkor Wat and its superb reliefs, sumptuously incorporating four-page fold-outs of Delaporte's 19th century drawings of the temple...

All this at less than the price of a one-way airline ticket, Chiang Mai to Bangkok.

The fact is that Customs of Cambodia is a treasure in its own right, a credit to the Siam Society and all involved with its production, and no-one who has visited this greatest of ancient architectural marvels - no-one who has not yet been there - will want to be without it.

From his own little niche in eternity, Zhou must be looking down admiringly.