National Geographic: Glories Of Angkor

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For hundreds of years, they lay in

darkness.

Their creators had been destroyed,

but their spirit could not be killed.

Gods had built them, some said.

Others insisted...

they had built themselves.

Yet most believed that powerful

spirits protected the vast stone city

deep in the Cambodian jungle.

And woe would come to whomever

disturbed its slumber.

Centuries apart, two men would fall

under Angkor's spell.

One was a naturalist,

lured by tales of exotic creatures

and a fabulous lost city.

The other was a diplomat, sent to

demand tribute

from a civilization far richer than

he'd ever imagined.

Their epic tales would inflame the

world's curiosity,

and light a fire in the darkness of

Cambodia's lost world.

The mystery of Angkor is what is

not known.

We don't know much about the

people.

Think about it with people, when it

was filled with worshippers,

the community were out in the

fields growing rice.

What was it like when it was

active and alive?

It's absolutely extraordinary,

the mystery is basically what is

this thing?

Why is it so big? Why is it

glittering in the sun like this?

What's it for?

It's mysterious, you feel that

something went on here

that's not going on there today,

but something went on there that's

different

from much of the rest of the world.

In Southeast Asia, an abandoned

city sprawls magnificently

across the heart of Cambodia.

Its hundreds of monuments

contain more stone than the

Egyptian Pyramids,

and cover more ground than

modern Paris.

This is Angkor,

the capital of an empire that once

controlled most of Southeast Asia.

They were called the Khmere.

And more than five hundred years

ago, they vanished

To the outside world, the city existed

only in obscure travelers' tales.

Until a Frenchman in the 19th century

brought Angkor to light.

He was a naturalist,

searching for unknown species of

plants and animals.

Almost by accident he uncovered

one of man's greatest creations.

In the 1850's Frenchman Henri

Mouhot might have been well

on his way to becoming the

world's first wildlife photographer.

A naturalist and a portrait painter,

Mouhot dabbled in the new,

devilish art of photography.

Mouhot was a born roamer

- by age 30 he'd crisscrossed

Europe and Russia.

But it was the tales of those who

ventured further abroad

that would lure him to the jungles

of Cambodia.

A book had just been published

in 1857

about the area of Southeast Asia.

In a sense it was the focus that

drew him.

The first Europeans to explore

Africa and Asia

were usually marginal people in

their own societies.

They didn't quite fit in.

And so they went to these other

places and explored them.

But in the process of exploring

them, they opened up new areas,

wrote about them, and provided

the raw information

that the European countries needed

to exploit these areas as colonies.

In 19th century Europe,

models for undaunted courage

were heroic explorers,

like Henry Morton Stanley.

While searching for the source of

e Nile,

Stanley watched most of his

companions

die of fever and warfare with

hostile peoples.

Stanley lost 60 pounds and his hair

turned white.

"We have wept so often we can

weep no more," he wrote.

But there was one more blow

ahead.

In his absence his fianc had

married another man.

For late 19th century explorers, it

was all in a day's work.

What they lost at home they

hoped to doubly gain abroad...

as the front-line troops of a new

surge of colonialism.

The revolution in manufacturing

that would transform Europe

was fueled - in part - by

adventurism abroad.

Great Britain, France, and

Germany

had developed huge appetites for

raw materials

and markets for their products.

This set off a land grab for Asia

and Africa, where minerals,

farmland, even labor could be

taken by force of arms.

They also wanted to bring

European culture

to the peoples of these regions.

It was a sort of cultural

imperialism.

They wanted to, in a sense,

bring what they considered the

best culture in the world

to people who they thought had

inferior cultures.

These allegedly 'inferior' cultures

weren't always happy to see the

Europeans.

Along with hostile armies,

explorers had to battle disease,

madness, and starvation.

Some were military men

who brought much-needed

professionalism to the trade.

Others were doomed amateurs

brimming with enthusiasm...

Henri Mouhot would take his

place among these.

Mouhot decided to devote his life

to studying new species of flora

and fauna.

It seemed likely he'd combine his

passions,

and become history's first

photographer of wildlife.

But fate stepped in.

He met and married an

Englishwoman, Anna Park.

She was a relative of one of the

great explorers of West Africa,

Mungo Park.

Perhaps Anna pressed Henri

to match Mungo's feats of daring

- or maybe Henri wasn't

suited for domestic life.

For less than two years

after they were wed,

Mouhot set out for Southeast Asia.

Mouhot intended to keep a diary

of his adventure

while documenting the natural world.

But on his quest for facts, he'd

encounter a profound mystery...

an abandoned city in the jungle...

a rival among the greatest

creations of man.

On the 27th April, 1858 I

embarked at London,

in a ship of very modest

pretensions...

Mouhot books passage on a

small boat.

The very first part of this trip

was bad.

The boat was small, the captain

was drunk all the time

and he writes of his perils on the

ship and the passengers being sick.

Mouhot is really interesting to me

because he went there without a

clearly defined program.

He was also went there on his own

funding.

In a sense he took a real chance

but there was just this wanderlust.

This, this chance to open up a new

area

to the rest of the world and he

in a sense seized the moment.

After pausing in Singapore and

Paknam,

Mouhot recovered his land-legs in

Bangkok,

famous in Europe as 'the Venice

of the East.'

At Bangkok's Royal Palace,

the Frenchman dined with Siam's

monk-turned-monarch, King Mongkut.

The cultured king grilled Mouhot for news of Europe.

He'd become an expert in foreign

affairs,

in order to defend his nation.

While countries around Siam fell

to European powers,

Mongkut would sign trade treaties

with many of them,

knowing that this would

discourage any one

from invading his kingdom.

To teach English to his children,

he'd hire the tutor Anna Leonowens.

Her memoirs would inspire the

musical The King and I.

Its clownish portrait of Mongkut

would become the modern

world's sole impression of a ruler

who almost single-handedly

saved Siam from colonization.

Mongkut's gifts were all but lost

on Mouhot as well.

Barely acquainted with Asia,

he was distracted by its 'peculiar'

customs.

Every inferior crouches before

a higher in rank.

He receives his orders with

abject submission and respect.

The whole of society is in a

state of prostration...

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