The only eyewitness description of Angkor while it was a living capital, by a member of a Yuan embassy who spent almost a year there. It begins with the city walls, the central golden tower and the palace, and goes on to houses, dress, officials, festivals, trade and daily life.
Zhou Daguan came from Wenzhou and travelled with an embassy sent by the Mongol emperor Temür to the Khmer king in 1296. His short book, in some forty sections, is written with a merchant’s eye for goods and prices and a traveller’s delight in oddities, but its opening sections are a careful description of the city we call Angkor Thom and its monuments.
He describes the square city wall about twenty li round, with five gates and a broad moat crossed by bridges lined with stone giants hauling on serpents; the gold tower at the exact centre of the city (the Bayon), the bronze tower to its north (the Baphuon), and the royal palace beyond, with its gold tower (Phimeanakas). He tells how houses were graded by rank: tiles for the palace, for the family temples and main halls of officials, and thatch for everyone else.
The text was translated into French by Abel-Rémusat in 1819 and, with a great commentary, by Paul Pelliot in 1902; modern English versions followed. Archaeologists still test their finds against it.
The book, part by part
I 1: The city walls
The square wall and moat, the five gates, the causeways with their fifty-four giants a side; the gold tower at the centre, the bronze tower, the palace.
Rules: A square wall, a moat and five gates · The golden tower at the centre
II 2: Dwellings
The palace roofed with lead and yellow tile; officials’ houses sized by rank, only temple and hall tiled; commoners’ houses thatched.