Angkor: The Hidden Glories, by Michael Freeman & Roger Warner

This is the sort of book that would make an ideal coffee table book, despite the fact that its photos are perhaps a bit out of date. For me, that is enough to make the book a fantastic one, for although this book’s written information may be a bit obsolete in light of advances in understanding the history of Angkor, and though restoration efforts in the area have advanced beyond what was the case when these photos were taken with years of relative peace and calm in Cambodia, this book is full of glorious photography as well as generous-minded description of the rigorous but immensely pleasurable nature of visiting the ruins of the many sites at Angkor. Looking at the ruins, especially the authors’ gaze on the topless and nubile asparas that are everywhere to be found in this book, one can see that the relation between religion and sexuality in Angkor society is not likely very separate, though this is not something that most books (perhaps understandably) tend to dwell upon. Given that this book is focused on visual matters, though, the reader can fully understand the fondness of Angkor’s builders for the portrayal of these supernatural maidens, even if they had a hard time representing their feet accurately (150). Similarly, the authors dwell long on the way that banyan trees have wound their way into the ruins of Angkor and simultaneously destroyed and preserved aspects of the ruined sandstone (mostly) that the temples of the building are made of.

Of the facts of Angkor’s construction, and one that bears repeating, is that all of the structures which survive are the ruins of temples that have endured, even as ruins, over the course of centuries. The syncretistic religious ways of the Khmer people found it relatively straightforward to mix their own native animism with first Hinduism and then Buddhism from India (likely from merchants active in the area between India and Indonesia), and to repurpose temples built to honor one religious tradition as temples of a different kind whenever the religious climate within the area changed, as it did several times over the course of the centuries of classical Angkor. While we might want to see the palaces or even the buildings of common people in the area, all that remains are religious structures, since even palaces were build of wood and not of stone, which was reserved for religious architecture. As a result, what survives at Angkor and what has been preserved and refurbished and rehabilitated is but a partial glimpse of what Angkor would have liked to the people who lived there and traveled there, and among the more important roles of surviving bas-reliefs in the temples that remain is the information that historians and archaeologists can use to try to reconstruct Khmer society and culture as it existed during the times of Angkor, in the absence of material remains that show the lives of people aside from elite religious devotions.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 250 pages, divided into four large chapters, mostly containing large and gorgeous photographs along with commentary written by the authors. The book begins with a discussion of Angkor as a “lost city (1),” even though it always had a resident group of monks to tend and care for the core temple of Angkor Wat. Even so, despite this, a great deal of the temple did become overgrown and ruins resulted from the lack of care that was available to preserve all of the outlying temples of the Angkor complex. This is followed by photography and comments about the Angkor Empire (2), which at its peak ruled over the area from Southern Vietnam well into Laos and Thailand, where the later Thai and Lao buildings, which copied Angkorian models, serve as examples of what certain buildings looked like in Angkor at its peak. This is followed by a discussion of the “magic mountain,” and the way that Angkor was designed in part to mimic the sacred architecture of Hindu mythology and religion (3). This is followed by a discussion of Angkor Wat, filled with numerous photos that discuss the art and architecture that is found there (4). The last chapter examines the Bayon, named after a misunderstanding of the banyan tree that made its home among the ruins there (5). The book then ends with an afterword, glossary, bibliography, and acknowledgements.