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00:00More than a thousand years ago, deep in the jungle of northern Cambodia, a civilization arose that built the largest and most beautiful temples the world has ever seen.
00:16Then mysteriously, they vanished, smothered by the tropical forest.
00:22How did they create such beauty in so hostile a place? And why did they abandon these jewels in the jungle?
00:52The ruins of this lost civilization are so remote that it wasn't until 1914 that European explorers discovered this temple.
01:12Called Bante Shrine, the Shrine of the Women, this temple was built just over 1,000 years ago by the people who call themselves the Khmeres.
01:26From their base in Cambodia, they dominated Southeast Asia.
01:30They were masters of stone carving, taking the local pink sandstone, carving every inch of it until no space was left undecorated.
01:48But Bante Shrine is one of many temples that the Khmer created.
01:52From the 9th to the 14th century, they built hundreds of temples.
02:00They constructed giant cities with vast fortified walls and gates with huge mysterious faces.
02:13And the world's largest sacred building, Angkor Wat.
02:18The moat at Angkor Wat is as wide as two football fields.
02:31The outer wall is two miles long.
02:34And the central shrine is as tall as Notre Dame Cathedral.
02:38But the overwhelming impression is one of grace and beauty.
02:42Scattered over a site the size of Manhattan are hundreds of jungle-smothered temples, giant enigmatic statues, and huge man-made reservoirs.
02:58Clearly the center of a vast and lost civilization.
03:01This is real Indiana Jones territory.
03:05But how could anyone build such temples in dense tropical jungle?
03:12The answer lies in one of the most bizarre natural phenomena in the world.
03:19It's hard to believe, but every year this immense river, the Mekong, one of the largest rivers in the world, stops flowing south towards the sea, pauses, reverses, and flows north for several months into the heart of Cambodia.
03:37This water ends up in this giant lake, the Tonle Sap, which more than quadruples its size for four months each year, drowning whole forests of trees in the process.
04:01The source for this strange event lies in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet.
04:04When the winter snow melts, vast quantities of water rush southward to the sea.
04:11But when this deluge hits the shallow delta at the mouth of the Mekong, it can't all escape to the sea.
04:18And so the river backs up, and the surplus pours into the Tonle Sap lake.
04:22Normally, a modest collection of muddy pools navigable only by the smallest of boats, it expands into a shallow sea 100 miles long and 30 miles wide, and in places 50 feet deep.
04:42Drowning great forests as it expands, the leaves from the trees provide vast quantities of food and spawning grounds for the lake's teeming fish population.
04:53Floating villages on the lake move back and forth, moving miles every year as the lake grows and then shrinks, harvesting the largest crop of freshwater fish in the world.
05:14Here, the Khmer Empire founded its capital on the banks of this extraordinary source of food.
05:31Just like the river Nile created Egypt, the remarkable Tonle Sap lake created the glories of ancient Angkor.
05:41In this hot tropical land, civilization stands or falls by its use of water.
05:59Between the headwaters of the Angkor region and the Tonle Sap, some 40 miles away, the Khmer people created their kingdom.
06:08Thankful for these pure mountain streams, they carved gods in the actual river itself.
06:15And hundreds of lingams, carved on the floor of the stream, assured that the water flowing down to the distant temples of Angkor would be blessed.
06:25The lingam is a representation of the male phallus.
06:29It is an Indian object of veneration, widely worshipped in Indian temples.
06:34But why were they carved on the bed of a Cambodian stream, some 2,000 miles from their spiritual home?
06:45After all, when these were carved some 1,000 years ago, it would have taken many months of extreme hardship and danger to get here from India.
06:53It must have been as difficult as going to the moon in our own time.
06:57And why are all the shrines of Angkor filled not with local deities, but with the familiar gods of India?
07:14The answer can be found in the rhythms of the tropical monsoon.
07:25Indian traders have been coming to Southeast Asia for hundreds of years before the first temple was built,
07:32following the rhythms of the monsoon winds which blew their ships from India to Asia.
07:37Once there, they had to wait 6 months or so before the wind reversed its direction and blew them home again.
07:48So while they settled down to wait for their passage home, they passed on their ideas of religion, art, dance and architecture to the local population.
07:59The Indian influence explains the layout of Angkor Wat.
08:11Because it was the home of a god, the temple and the vast entrance and long causeway leading to the central shrine had to be as splendid as possible.
08:20The endless corridors provide space for all the minor gods of India also living in the shrine.
08:26Unlike a Christian or Muslim holy place, this wasn't a meeting place for the faithful.
08:39These final steps leading up to the main shrine would have been barred to almost everyone.
08:45No great religious processions walked up here, just devout priests looking to the everyday needs of the god to anoint and clothe it afresh every morning.
09:01And so when you reach its heart, the shrine at the very center of Angkor Wat, it is absolutely tiny.
09:18Smaller than most people's living room.
09:20And unlike Greek or Egyptian ruins, these shrines are still holy places, worshipped every day by thousands of devout Buddhists.
09:36The close connection with India explains why Indian mythology dominates Angkor Wat.
09:49Endless miles of carvings tell both Hindu and Buddhist myths.
09:55Probably the most fascinating of all the stories is the churning of the sea of milk, where the gods work together to generate the elixir of life.
10:03Gods and demons compete in a cosmic tug of war, using a giant serpent as a rope.
10:10Vishnu, in the form of a tortoise, offers his back as a pivot for the churning.
10:17As this continued for a thousand years, the fish and crocodiles underneath the pivot are cut into pieces by the turmoil.
10:32But it's all worth it, for one of the side effects of the churning is the creation of Angkor Angels, thousands of beautiful female deities called Apsaris.
10:42Like angels, they lived in the sky, floating gracefully between the water and the clouds, feasting on the celestial elixir.
10:54They could change their shape at will, and often visited mortals.
10:58In Angkor, over three thousand of these wonderful mythological beings decorate every shrine.
11:11And each and every one of them is different.
11:13Different hairstyle, different dress, different expression.
11:18They catch your eye everywhere.
11:20But the Apsaris didn't only exist in stone.
11:34Girls selected from the whole empire were sent to the palace to be taught the secret movements of these divine dances.
11:50This ritual has its origins in southern India.
12:02But at the Khmer court, it became the root of all modern classical dance in Southeast Asia.
12:08These dancers are one of the very few links we have to this lost civilization.
12:26When the first Westerners reached the site, they found that the Cambodians had no records of their past.
12:32We think these buildings were once libraries filled with ancient manuscripts.
12:53Like these modern Buddhist texts in a Cambodian temple.
12:57These holy books, written on strips of palm leaf, are the greatest treasure this Buddhist monastery possesses.
13:09They are used to teach the monks, and have been carefully preserved through all the modern tragedies of Cambodia.
13:16But in a jungle climate, nothing made of palm leaf lasts very long.
13:21These texts are some of the oldest in Cambodia, but were created about the same time when the first American troops went into action in the First World War.
13:31So they are no help in understanding the glories of ancient Angkor.
13:35But one form of record has survived. Carved stone inscriptions in Sanskrit, the sacred language of India.
13:47Sanskrit was the language of the Hindu gods, for whom they built their beautiful temples.
13:54Over 1200 inscriptions have been translated.
13:58Many of them were in praise of the kings of Angkor.
14:00And they did lay it on a bit thick.
14:04One inscription reads,
14:05In all the sciences, and all the sports, and in the arts, the languages, and writings, and dancings, and singings, and all the rest,
14:14he was as clever as if he had been the first inventor of them.
14:17And God, in seeing the king, was astonished and said,
14:22Why did I create a rival for myself in this king?
14:26Sure, it's flattery.
14:28But it is still useful to modern historians.
14:31From these ancient words, they built a detailed chronological list of all the Khmer kings and the temples.
14:37This is how we know of the beginnings of the great Khmer empire.
14:44Angkor's rise to greatness all began here in 800 AD.
14:50Among these sacred streams, an event occurred that would shape the Khmer empire for the next 500 years.
14:57It was from India that the first great king of Angkor got the idea to crown himself not only as king, but as a god king.
15:10And if you were a god king, you have to do great things.
15:20First, he had to build a temple that was a copy of the home of the Indian gods, Mount Meru.
15:27But this wasn't easy.
15:29Mount Meru had five peaks and was surrounded by an ocean.
15:33So god kings constructed temple mountains with five towers, faithfully copying the Indian original.
15:40And inside the shrines was the symbol of the king's power, a stone lingam, a phallic symbol.
15:51The ocean around Mount Meru was mirrored by a moat.
15:58So at Angkor Wat, you have a gigantic moat surrounding a temple with five distinct towers.
16:04In addition to moats, Cambodian god kings built giant reservoirs.
16:11This one to the west of Angkor is five miles long, one and a half miles wide, and contains enough water to fill 17,000 Olympic swimming pools.
16:21In a bizarre twist of fate, these magnificent achievements of the ancient Khmer world played their part in one of the 20th century's worst crimes.
16:34The ancient Khmer civilization built huge temples deep in the jungles of Cambodia, surrounded by huge moats and vast reservoirs.
16:48The great French archaeologist Bernard Grolier thought he knew what these reservoirs were for.
16:55They were part of a giant rice growing system.
16:58But there is a problem.
16:59So far, no archaeological evidence has been found to back the theory.
17:08In recent years, water engineers like James Goodman have searched every inch of the reservoir walls looking for clues as to what they were for.
17:17He has not found a single ancient outlet from the reservoir into the surrounding fields.
17:21It begins to look like this vast area of water was used for something other than growing rice.
17:30A recent survey by a NASA satellite using radar imaging has also failed to show channels leading out from the reservoirs into the fields.
17:39It is a difficult idea for the late 20th century to grasp vast building programs, enormous quantities of water, and no practical use for it whatsoever.
17:52The idea that the reservoirs were huge rice growing schemes may have had its own grisly effect on the modern history of Cambodia.
18:01When the Americans finally pulled out of Vietnam in the spring of 1975, the pro-Western government of Cambodia had no chance of surviving.
18:14On the morning of April 17th, the communist army of Pol Pot moved into the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
18:21Pol Pot grew up near the great National Museum and knew how glorious the early history of Cambodia had been.
18:34He was fond of saying that if the Khmer people could build Angkor, they could do anything.
18:39He had read about the great rice growing success in ancient times and wanted to revive this glorious period of Cambodia's history.
18:46The result was one of the worst tragedies in this century of horrors.
18:52Within hours of Pol Pot's coup, the people of Phnom Penh and other cities were being told to leave their homes and march out into the country.
19:01Without exception, young or old, toddlers or disabled, sick or pregnant, were on their feet.
19:08For the next four years, the horrors of the killing fields continued with almost everyone in the country forced to grow rice.
19:25Any sign of dissent meant instant death.
19:28And maybe as many as two million people, a quarter of the total population, perished.
19:34It was a tragedy based in part on the mistaken idea that the ancient reservoirs were giant rice growing machines.
19:48But the more specialists examine the reservoirs and temples, the more mysterious they become.
19:53James Goodman has been taking precise measurements of the heights of all the ancient buildings.
20:06Okay, 1.365.
20:08This ruin was once an early ancient capital of the Khmer but was soon abandoned.
20:14Why? James thinks he found the answer.
20:16The site is too low and would flood badly every few years.
20:25What the ancient Khmer kings were looking for was a site near to the expanding and contracting Tonle Sap Lake,
20:32but on high enough ground to stay dry even in the wettest of years.
20:35The Tonle Sap, not the ancient reservoirs, provides the answer to how the ancient Khmer's grew so much rice.
20:48As the lake gradually expands and shrinks, the Khmer used the newly exposed wet lake bottom to plant new rice.
20:55At Angkor today, you can see rice being harvested in one spot and only a few miles away being planted.
21:06It is a system that allows for almost continuous rice production and was almost certainly the economic backbone of Angkor's glorious achievements.
21:14So why build reservoirs at such huge cost of men and materials?
21:22No practical reason, it seems. It was simply what god-kings had to do.
21:28And this glorification of the king through gigantic building projects reached its zenith with Angkor Wat,
21:34the single most astonishing achievement of the entire Angkor period.
21:47Angkor Wat, the greatest of all Khmer temples, was built in the middle of the 12th century,
21:54at the same time as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
21:57As a building, it is as impressive as the Great Pyramids of Egypt,
22:03with its vast outer moat, causeway and giant central towers,
22:08and as artistically distinctive as the Taj Mahal.
22:15Angkor Wat, the name simply means Temple of the Capital,
22:19is a glorious mixture of qualities.
22:21Its wide, smooth, grassy exterior is balanced by the sculpted loveliness of its carved interior.
22:31Its highest tower is as tall as any cathedral in Europe,
22:35and yet the building never overwhelms the visitor.
22:38And the final touch of genius,
22:41the towers all imitate the shape of the closed-up bud of a lotus flower.
22:45And here is the man who built it all,
22:58sitting under the fifteen parasols that denote a Khmer king,
23:02surrounded by his court, his army, and his Upsaras, the court dancers.
23:07King Suryavarman spent most of his life atop of a war elephant fighting Cambodian's traditional enemy,
23:17the Vietnamese.
23:20But from the loot gained from these wars, he created a masterpiece.
23:26For many, Angkor Wat is simply the finest ancient building ever created.
23:31But Angkor Wat, astonishing though it is, isn't the only great Khmer temple.
23:41The empire that produced Angkor Wat was about to produce a king who would eclipse even this glory.
23:47And we know what he looks like.
23:54This is the famous statue of Jayavarman VII,
24:00being carefully restored in the National Museum of Cambodia.
24:04It's a portrait of a devout Buddhist deep in meditation.
24:10His head gives an instant impression of power,
24:13with hair so closely cropped that the shape of the skull is revealed.
24:19The eyes remain closed, serene, meditative,
24:23and the mysteriously smiling lips convey a sense of spiritual peace.
24:28Yet the firm square jaw is the mark of a man of iron will.
24:35The greatest king the Khmer ever produced,
24:38the Napoleon of Angkor.
24:43And he needed to be a fighter.
24:47Only a few years earlier, the Vietnamese attacked and looted Angkor.
24:51But Jayavarman got his revenge.
24:53And in a great battle on the Tonle Sap Lake,
24:56he defeated his enemies.
24:58These are Cham soldiers from what is today southern Vietnam
25:02and their distinctive helmets resembling an upside-down lotus.
25:05As losers, they are being eaten alive by crocodiles.
25:08To prevent any future Vietnamese invasion,
25:15Jayavarman fortified his capital with immense walls
25:19and filled the moat with crocodiles.
25:21Within the walls, in what is now tropical jungle,
25:25was once a thriving city of over a million people.
25:28This at a time when London had fewer than 30,000.
25:31And at each of the city's five gates, he built soaring towers
25:37with their great entranceways of gods and demons wrestling with sacred snakes.
25:42And on each tower, a vast enigmatic face with the famous smile of Angkor.
25:47Archaeologists debated for decades whose face it is.
25:54It is now generally agreed that the face is a composite of Jayavarman's own face
25:59and the compassionate face of the Buddha.
26:02Right at the center of his city of Angkor Thom,
26:15the greatest of all Khmer kings, Jayavarman VII,
26:18built his temple mountain, the strangest of them all.
26:21Look closely at its 54 towers.
26:32Staring down at you are 216 large faces carved in stone.
26:38All Jayavarman.
26:44The faces with slightly curving lips,
26:46eyes placed in shadow by lowered lids,
26:50utter not a word,
26:52and yet force you to guess much,
26:55wrote a visitor here in the 1920s.
26:58Around the time the Madna Carta was being signed in an English meadow,
27:03Khmer sculptors were carving these heads,
27:06some of the greatest works of art ever created.
27:09A century ago, a French visitor wrote,
27:11I shudder suddenly with an indefinable fear
27:15as I perceive falling upon me from above
27:18a huge fixed smile,
27:20and then another smile again,
27:22beyond, on another stretch of wall,
27:25and then three, and then five, and then ten.
27:30They appear everywhere, and I realize
27:33that I have been overlooked from all sides
27:36by the faces of the quadruply face towers.
27:38The heads, with their friendly yet ironic smiles,
27:42make the Bayan Temple an extraordinary building
27:45to ponder in the daylight.
27:47But at night, under a full moon,
27:49it becomes a temple from another world,
27:52built by aliens,
27:54whose ideas and conceptions
27:56are entirely unfamiliar and strange
27:59to the 20th century.
28:00are entirely unfamiliar and strange
28:03to the 20th century.
28:04The Bayan Temple is also a window into the past.
28:05Its carved stone walls are the key to the life of the
28:0720th century.
28:08of a lost civilization.
28:09Here, a woman gives birth.
28:11A fire is also a window into the past.
28:15The Bayan Temple is also a window into the past.
28:18Its carved stone walls are the key to the life of a lost civilization.
28:22Here, a woman gives birth.
28:23A fire is blown alight.
28:24A pig is cooked.
28:25Lice removed from a friend's hair.
28:26Just after these murals were finished,
28:27a Chinese visitor to Angkor
28:28was making his way through the Tonle Sap,
28:30through the sunken forest,
28:31to spend nearly a year in the past.
28:32The Bayan Temple is also a window into the past.
28:34The Bayan Temple is also a window into the past.
28:35Its carved stone walls are the key to the life of a lost civilization.
28:37Here, a woman gives birth.
28:38A fire is blown alight.
28:39A pig is cooked.
28:41Lice removed from a friend's hair.
28:42Just after these murals were finished,
28:45a Chinese visitor to Angkor
28:47was making his way through the Tonle Sap,
28:49through the sunken forest,
28:51to spend nearly a year at the Cambodian capital.
28:55His name was Chu Ta Kwan,
28:57the year 1296.
29:00And by great luck,
29:01he kept a diary that has survived.
29:04From the diary,
29:05we can tell that the houses of ordinary folk were on stilts,
29:08very similar to houses in the Cambodian countryside today.
29:12We know that ordinary people had palm leaf roots.
29:15Tiles were forbidden to them.
29:17They cooked outside,
29:19and inside their houses,
29:20they had no tables, benches, basins, or buckets.
29:30Evil spirits were so prevalent in everyday life
29:33that parents would never give a beautiful name to their children.
29:36On the contrary,
29:37they would call them bracelet,
29:39cooking pot,
29:40or even dog or pig.
29:42to discourage and disgust ill-disposed spirits.
29:49And what's so amazing is how little has changed
29:52since he described the everyday life of 800 years ago.
29:58Thanks to Chu's diary,
30:00we know what happened here when you try to enter Angkor.
30:03Guards were placed at each of the city's five gates
30:05to closely examine the feet of those wishing to enter the city.
30:10Why?
30:11Well, criminals had their toes chopped off.
30:14So, no toes, no entry.
30:20Chu had all his toes,
30:22but he was not allowed to enter the inner palace.
30:24That was reserved for the concubines,
30:26and an army of two thousand female servants.
30:29He was told, however,
30:30how the king spent his night.
30:38By the palace rises a golden tower,
30:40which the ruler climbs every night to sleep.
30:43It is a common belief that in the tower dwells a genie,
30:50formed like a serpent with seven heads,
30:53which is the lord of the entire kingdom.
30:59Every night the snake appears in the shape of a woman
31:02with whom the king is forced to make love.
31:03Should he fail for just one night to copulate with the snake,
31:08it is a sign that the king's death is at hand.
31:16He also had a strange tale to tell about these towers,
31:19still standing eight hundred years after he wrote about them.
31:22If two men are in a dispute about something,
31:25they are both imprisoned in one of the towers for several days.
31:28When allowed to emerge,
31:30one of them will be found to be suffering some illness,
31:31ulcers, swollen glands, or fever.
31:34The other man will be in perfect health.
31:37Thus is right and wrong determined by what is called a celestial judgment.
31:46Everyone I talked to said that Cambodian women are highly sexed,
31:50wrote the Chinese visitor in his diary.
31:52It wasn't only their sexual freedom that shocked the conservative Chu.
31:56He was also amazed at the amount of political and commercial freedoms
31:58women had in ancient Angkor.
32:01The wife of Jayavarman VII was responsible for founding over a hundred and two hospitals,
32:10like a modern day First Lady might do.
32:12Chu also refers to the ancient practice of using sorcerers to heal the sick,
32:24probably referring to a ritual still practiced in the Cambodian countryside to this day.
32:29The healer dances herself into a trance,
32:31and then changes into the clothes of the spirit whose help she is trying to invoke.
32:36Once transformed into the grandfather spirit, the healing process can commence.
32:52It may take several sessions for the cure to work, but mediums like this have a high success rate,
33:11and a long list of patients awaiting cures.
33:14Chu is the only witness we have to this vanished age.
33:21No other written record of everyday life has survived.
33:24And from his diaries, we can glimpse the magnificence of ancient Angkor.
33:30But by Chu's time, it was a culture facing catastrophe.
33:34After five hundred years, the glory of Angkor came to an end.
33:47The collapse of these stunning temples in Cambodia was caused by the Mongol hordes.
33:53Their military success pushed the Thais south into Khmer territory.
33:58Once the Thais had been portrayed on the walls of Angkor Wat as allies of the Khmer,
34:02their soldiers parading in long pleated skirts and braided hair.
34:07Now they became the final threat.
34:11After a siege of seven months, the city fell,
34:15and the days of glory were finally over.
34:23After this siege, the Thai victors carried off the entire dance corps of the city,
34:28which is where one can trace the beginnings of classical Thai dance.
34:33As northerners, they wore thicker court dress than the more tropical Khmer's.
34:38That's why today both Thai and Cambodian dancers wear the court dress of Thailand,
34:44rather than that of the Khmer's,
34:46whose topless dancers are represented in thousands of carvings and statues.
34:50After the siege, the tropical jungle crept back over the statues and shrines.
35:11Trees put their roots down into the cracks between stones.
35:20And as the centuries passed, the roots became vast,
35:25pushing aside great blocks of stone as though they were weightless.
35:29It has been said temples were held in a stranglehold of trees.
35:38Stone and wood clasp each other in grim hospitality.
35:42Yet, all is silent and still, without any visible movement to indicate their struggle.
35:58As if they were wrestlers, suddenly petrified, struck motionless in the middle of a fight.
36:03But the rounds in this battle were not measured by minutes, but by centuries.
36:23Eventually Cambodia threw off its Thai invaders.
36:26But the final fatal blow to Angkor was dealt by a different kind of enemy.
36:32Religion.
36:34In a land exhausted by war and over-ambitious building programs,
36:38the people were ready for a new message.
36:42And it came in a new, kinder form of Buddhism.
36:49These new priests didn't require great temples to be built,
36:52and shared the poverty of the Cambodian peasant.
36:56Just as the new Christian cult of simplicity undermined Roman imperial glory,
37:01so the new Theravada school of Buddhism offered a gentle religion of resignation,
37:07well suited to an exhausted and discouraged people.
37:17They were only too happy to see the old temples left to nature.
37:20the old temple.
37:23Sleeping jewels in the jungle.
37:31The person most responsible for bringing these temples to world attention
37:35was the Frenchman Henri Mouot.
37:40A brilliant amateur artist, his lively and accurate drawings of his 1860 expedition
37:45brought the scholarly world's attention to focus on the temples of Angkor.
37:50In his footsteps came several other explorers,
37:56and their descriptions of these lost jewels in the jungle revealed Angkor to the world.
38:06These are the ruins as the first explorers found them.
38:09An immense amount of work needed to be done.
38:11The jungle had had some 500 years to do its work, and clearing it was a slow and painful process.
38:23The French, who now dominated all Southeast Asia, put their archaeological resources into restoring the smothered temples.
38:29Struggling against malaria and wild tigers, it took the French school of the Far East years to clear the dense vegetation.
38:40But in 1923, a new danger emerged from an unexpected source.
38:45The more Angkor was publicized, the more desired its art became, and museums and private dealers vied for better pieces.
38:58Looters began hacking the temples to bits, but protecting the remote sites was a problem.
39:03The Bante Shrai Temple wasn't even discovered until 1914.
39:12Its discovery gave a young French man the idea to make some quick money.
39:16His name was André Malraux, later to become France's most famous Minister of Culture.
39:21He was considered to be one of Europe's greatest promoters of arts and culture.
39:36And when he died, he was buried as a hero.
39:39But in 1923, that was a long way ahead, and young Malraux was broke.
39:52The temple was a jungle-covered ruin in those days.
39:56But Malraux noticed that if he broke off these corner blocks, he would have two statues for the price of one.
40:01Using, as he later wrote, saws and chisels on any blocks that remained wedged in the walls, Malraux hacked out the corner blocks as well as several roof ornaments from the upper stories.
40:16Then he loaded all the blocks onto ox carts for the journey back to civilization.
40:23Luckily for the temple, Malraux was caught and the blocks returned to their rightful place.
40:33Malraux himself was tried and convicted.
40:36And the incident led to a general tightening of the laws to protect the temples from future thieves.
40:48Armed with these new laws and larger budgets,
40:50the French school of the Far East pressed ahead.
40:55The site was cleared,
40:57revealed once again in all its splendid strangeness.
41:02Some temples were so completely restored,
41:05you might think their original occupants had only just left.
41:11But some temples were left largely untouched,
41:14so that the visitors could experience the thrill of jungle-covered ruins,
41:18just like the first explorers to the area.
41:32Their most ambitious project was the restoration of the Bapuan,
41:36a typical pyramid temple whose foundations were very unstable.
41:39The only way to save the temple was to dismantle all the outer stones,
41:45lay them around the temple,
41:47and put it all back together again like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
41:54They got to the stage where all the outer stones,
41:57some half a million of them,
41:59were laid out around the base of the mound,
42:00when a catastrophe beyond human comprehension destroyed all their plans.
42:06All that is left of the great civilization of the Khmer are their mysterious jungle-shrouded temples.
42:19In the 20th century, the French labored for years restoring these jewels in the jungle.
42:23Then, in 1975, Cambodia's Holocaust had arrived in the shape of Pol Pot and his victorious soldiers.
42:34A disaster for both people and monuments.
42:38All foreigners were expelled, all work at Angkor ceased.
42:43Working for the French was an automatic death sentence,
42:45and of the thousand Cambodians who had worked at conserving the temples,
42:50only two were alive when Pol Pot's reign of terror came to an end.
42:57Most victims were first tortured near here,
43:00and their bodies scattered on the outer fringe of the Angkor conservation area.
43:05This memorial stands as testimony to their fate.
43:08And a Buddhist monastery has been built over their bones.
43:16Day and night, the monks pray for the souls of the men, women and children,
43:22who fell foul of one of the 20th century's worst crimes.
43:29After the Vietnamese deposed Pol Pot,
43:33civil war prevented anyone from returning to Angkor for many years.
43:36And when they did, they faced a very 20th century problem.
43:46Mines. Tens of thousands of them, planted by all sides in the Cambodian conflict.
43:53And few, if any, maps as to where they were planted.
43:57The cost to Cambodia was hundreds of casualties every week,
44:01as people tried to rebuild their lives after the killing fields.
44:10But slowly and surely, thanks to the work of groups like Princess Diana's Halo Trust,
44:16demining teams are getting on top of the problem.
44:18Once they had to work in the very ruins of Angkor.
44:31Now having cleared that, they've moved on to new areas.
44:34Carefully probing every inch of earth, an ancient village is searched and cleared of mines.
44:41So quick to plant, so slow and dangerous to remove.
44:52But once found, another mine joins the many tens of thousands already destroyed.
45:05When the French returned to restoring the Bapuan,
45:09they were faced with every archaeologist's worst nightmare.
45:21Pol Pot's army had destroyed every single bit of paper in their archaeological headquarters.
45:27They had half a million individual stones lying around the mound,
45:30and no record of where any of them fitted.
45:38It took them two solid years to work out the world's largest jigsaw puzzle.
45:47First, they had to clear the area of landmines,
45:50then cut down the jungle to get at the stones,
45:53and then make a drawing of each individual stone.
46:00Then, using computers, they matched each stone to its neighbor,
46:10and to its original place on the pyramid.
46:12Then, and only then, they could carry on the reconstruction,
46:16putting a concrete belt in the pyramid to prevent future slippage,
46:20and then carefully replacing each stone.
46:22Eventually, forty years from the day they started,
46:32they will have brought the Bapuan back to its original glory.
46:43Just a few miles away at Prah Khan,
46:46a temple being restored by the World Monument Fund,
46:48faces a different set of problems.
46:54Prah Khan was a large monastery,
46:56one of the many buildings put up by Jayarvanum.
46:59When Angkor was abandoned, it was left to the jungle.
47:03In recent years, it was decided to leave some of the jungle in place
47:06to retain some of the magic of its deep tropical setting.
47:13But the World Monument Fund's teams are now faced with difficult choices.
47:16How much jungle do you allow to grow?
47:20And how much do you chop down to provide access for visitors,
47:24and save buildings from being strangled and broken by the trees?
47:27You obviously repair buildings that might fall down and injure someone.
47:32But how much do you rebuild?
47:34The solution at Prah Khan is to treat the site as a partial ruin.
47:38A local team of Cambodian archaeologists and technicians have been trained to repair buildings that are in danger of collapse.
47:54But using only a minimum of concrete and high-tech solutions.
47:57New trees are prevented from growing up through the ruins.
48:05Trees in danger of collapse and damaging the ruins are chopped down.
48:10But old, well-established ones are left alone.
48:13A delightful balance of nature and ruin.
48:16But the dangers of the future are all too clear at Prah Khan.
48:30Collectors are hungry for the newly fashionable and expensive Khmer art.
48:34During Cambodia's recent political troubles, many statues were crudely attacked in an attempt to steal their heads of foreign collectors.
48:47Here, looters started their work, but were interrupted and the statues saved.
48:53For the moment.
48:54The Angkor sites are many and cover vast areas.
49:03And they now face a new threat.
49:09Their very popularity.
49:11As Cambodians put their nightmare years behind them,
49:15more and more tourists, both foreign and Cambodian, are flooding in.
49:19Carving their initials over some of the greatest art ever created.
49:22Wearing away staircases walked by priests of long ago.
49:27And leaving reminders of an all-too-modern world.
49:36It is crucial that these problems are solved quickly, before the magic of Angkor is lost.
49:43It is crucial that these days have not been doświad.
49:44How much is destroyed?
49:46Did you find that the treasure of stone!
49:49Look among the ruins, but you will find no lost science, no undiscovered ethics.
49:52Unlike China, the elusive Khmer's left us no record of their administrative genius.
49:58Unlike India, no philosophy or religion.
50:00no philosophy or religion. But here at Angkor, art and architecture reached their finest expression.
50:11That all came to an end five and a half centuries ago when Angkor fell.
50:15But there is one fragile link back to this culture that time forgot.
50:20This little girl is going to be the greatest dancer of her generation, just like her mother.
50:35Her mother's career ended when Pol Pot tried to destroy all traditional culture and she was forced to work in the rice fields.
50:42If her guards had known of her past, it would have meant instant execution.
50:47But she survived and the skills she learned from an earlier generation survived as well.
50:55Now her only daughter can pass on the wisdom.
51:02The Angkor ruins have survived as well, despite Pol Pot and despite the theft of its statues,
51:09despite the tourists and the tropical climate.
51:12It is still the most beautiful and most exotic ancient site in the world.
51:17As one of its first visitors wrote,
51:19Go to Angkor, my friend, to its ruins and to its dreams.
51:24To be continued...
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