For written sources, historians rely especially on observations made by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese official dispatched to Angkor in 1296 by the Temur Emperor, who produced a detailed account of the city and its inhabitants. These surveys provide the spatial foundations for any subsequent reconstruction of the city’s architectural and environmental landscapes. Together, they have produced detailed, multilayered maps of temple complexes, rice fields, roads, canals and settlement mounds throughout the Angkor Archaeological Park. The more important source comes in the form of extensive archaeological surveys of Angkor undertaken by the French School of Asian Studies ( École française d’Extrême-Orient), the Greater Angkor Project, and the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium. Apart from inscriptions on temples, no written records from the period have survived the ravages of time and the monsoonal environment. While the name Angkor conjures up immediate images of crumbling stone temples in a verdant jungle, reconstructing the city represents a huge challenge. This means that Angkor was, in the words of one archaeologist, “the most extensive city of its kind in the pre-industrial world.” At its peak in the twelfth century, the city is estimated to have been home to around three-quarters of a million people. Together, these form one of the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia. Stretching over some 400 square kilometers, the Angkor Archaeological Park in Cambodia contains the remains of successive capitals of the Khmer Empire including an extensive network of stone temples. Today, the Khmers are most famous for the remarkable architectural sites they left behind. Located in modern day Cambodia, it was unique in the history of the region, extending direct influence across a vast swath of territory, encompassing most of present-day Thailand and the southern provinces of Laos and Vietnam.
For approximately 500 years from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, the Khmer empire dominated the politics and economy of Southeast Asia.
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