Downfall of the Empire

The collapse of Angkorean civilization and the dismemberment of the Khmer Empire began in the fourteenth century, but this was a piecemeal process, with multiple causes. One of these was the arrival of the Thai from south China, one of a number of peoples pushed south in a ripple effect by the Mongol conquests.

To the northeast, the Lao, close kin to the Thai, overran Khmer territory, and built their capital, Luang Prabang, on the Mekong. Concurrently, Khmer and Cham lands in what is now Vietnam were absorbed by the Dai Viet state. Kambujadesa or Cambodia was now a very small state.

While these geopolitical changes were taking place, Thera vada Buddhism arrived in mainland Southeast Asia, and rapidly became the state religion of all its inhabitants except the Cham, the Vietnamese, and tribal peoples. The Khmer Empire had gone through a paroxysm of anti-Mahayana iconoclasm following the death of the great Jayavarman VII, but this Hindu extremism was not to last long. Compared to Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism, Theravada or Hinayana (“Lesser Vehicle”) Buddhism as developed in Sri Lanka is a conscious return to the sayings and precepts of the Founder, Siddharta Gautama Buddha. Unlike ei­ther Hinduism or Mahayana Buddhism, Theravada is strongly congregational in nature and is centered upon communities of mendicant monks.

Only the great, once-Hindu complex of Angkor Wat and its moat-surrounded “island” remained in use, now as a Theravada Buddhist temple right through the post-Angkorean period down to our own time, and while much of the city was progressively abandoned, it continued to receive the attention of devout Buddhist pilgrims from as far as China and Japan.

One further cause of the decline of the empire, and especially its capital, was partly cultural and partly climatic. During the height of the empire, Angkor was a vast dispersed-urban complex in which as many as 750,000 people were supported by the rice production of fields irrigated from an enormous system of reservoirs and canals.^[1250] As archaeologists of the Greater Angkor Project have proved, in time the deforestation of the forest cover in the Kulen hills to the northeast, as they became densely urbanized, had led to extensive siltation and flooding, with which the king and his engineers were less and less able to cope.^[1251] Concurrently with these failures of the water management system, mainland Southeast Asia suffered severe megadroughts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; tree ring records from the Vietnam highlands and a core taken in the West Baray of Angkor have demonstrated the occurrence of these ecological events.^[1252]

As result, Angkor was largely abandoned, and the capital moved southeast to several successive sites on the Tonle Sap River, and finally to Phnom Penh on the Mekong. By the seventeenth century, due to its position with ready access to the trading ports of the South China Sea and Indonesia, Cambodia was tied in to what has been termed the “Age of Commerce.” The country had lost its empire and the glories of Angkor, but was reasonably prosperous. Unfortunately, how­ever, its area shrank even further as it became an unwilling pawn between the rival courts of Siam (Thailand) and Vietnam. Only the arrival of the French in the mid-nineteenth century saved it from being swallowed up altogether by its powerful neighbors.