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António da Madelena, a Portuguese Capuchin friar, was one of the first Western visitors to Angkor Wat, the monumental and moated 12th Century Hindu- Buddhist temple in what, today, is northern Cambodia. It “is of such extraordinary construction”, he told the historian Diogo do Couto in 1589, “that it is not possible to describe it with a pen, particularly since it is like no other building in the world. It has towers and decoration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive of.

“One of these temples – a rival to that of Solomon and erected by some ancient Michelangelo might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings,” he wrote. “It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.

Recent discoveries using modern LiDAR techniques “reveal perhaps the first low density city with its ambitious network of roads and canals, reservoirs and dams carved from the forest. From its moated temple with its lotus-bud towers, its courtyards and galleries, friezes of warriors, kings, demons, battles and three thousand heavenly nymphs, all shaped in thirty-seven years by 300,000 workers and 6,000 elephants, or so inscriptions say, from millions of sandstone slabs floated down from Phnom Kulen, Angkor stretched for miles around.

“Khmer cities were connected to one another, so the “built-up” area of Angkor seems to have been bigger than anyone today, much less barefoot 16th Century Portuguese friars, has been able to figure. An enormous and intricate irrigation system mapped by Evans and Chevance provided Angkor with food – rice for the main part – and yet the ever-increasing scale of this engineered and well populated landscape was, it seems, its undoing.”

- Excerpts from The surprising discovery at
Angkor Wat, 14 March 2017, By Jonathan Glancey, BBC.En savoir plus