Spirit Reset in Stone

At the magical temple of Ta Prohm, 200-year-old trees grow from the ruins, their roots embracing the ancient stone walls like giant snakes. Archeologists from India are trying to preserve the trees -- and the temple’s romantic spirit -- for as long as possible.

Down the road, at the magnificent, sprawling temple of Angkor Wat, a Japanese-led crew grafts newly quarried sandstone onto broken 12th century blocks in a state-of-the-art effort to save the building known as the northern library.

Nearby, 300,000 stone blocks of the dismantled Bapuon temple are spread across 25 acres of grassy fields. The building plans were destroyed by war, but a French-led archeological team is reconstructing the ancient pyramid, stone by stone.

As the horrors of Cambodia’s “killing fields” fade into history, a renaissance is taking place in ancient Angkor. Led by the United Nations, an international coalition of preservationists is working to restore and protect one of the great cities of the past.

“This is a model of cooperation -- more than 10 countries and international organizations coming together in a spirit of solidarity for the work of preserving cultural heritage,” Cambodian Senior Minister Sok An said.

The restoration of Angkor serves as a powerful symbol of unity in a country still struggling to come to terms with the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed more than 1 million people and the decades of civil war that followed.

Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious monument and Angkor’s best-known temple, appears on the Cambodian flag, the national currency and bottles of the country’s top-selling Angkor beer. When a Phnom Penh newspaper falsely reported last year that a popular Thai actress claimed that Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand, Cambodians rioted in the capital, destroying the Thai Embassy and dozens of Thai-owned businesses.

“It is now the first time in 400 years that the Cambodian people are united under one constitution, one king and the leadership of one government,” Sok said. “No rebels, no dissidents, no secession. We have a very unified Cambodia, so we can be proud.”

With the removal of 25,000 land mines, the resurrection of the city and its 1994 designation as Angkor Archeological Park comes a new threat: a population explosion that could overrun the preservation zone.

More than 100 temples, large and small, make up the sprawling ancient city. Almost hidden among the monuments are dozens of dusty villages where some families have lived for generations and others have just arrived. Outside the temples, hawkers try to outshout one another as they offer souvenirs to tourists. The roads are crowded with tour buses, motorbikes and the occasional elephant. Monkeys rest by the roadside.

Tourists who visit Angkor stay in the bustling town of Siem Reap, four miles from the temple city. Hotels are not permitted in Angkor, but 71 hotels and guesthouses have recently opened or are under construction in Siem Reap, according to the local planning department. Provincial Gov. Chap Nhalyvoud said he expects 1 million tourists to visit this year -- more than double last year’s total. Hollywood has contributed to the popularity of Angkor with the movie “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” which was shot at Ta Prohm and Angkor Wat in 2000.

Within the park’s boundaries, the population has surpassed 100,000 as poor farming families leave the countryside, build squatter villages near the temples and search for work in Siem Reap.

“They arrive every day and they want to build, build, build,” said Chau Sun Kerya, director of tourism at Angkor. “It is a very big concern for the government. It’s not too late, but we need to take action quickly.”

It is easy to see why so many people are drawn to Angkor. The historic city, covering three times the area of San Francisco, contains an awe-inspiring collection of temples, monuments and lagoons built over hundreds of years. Some experts believe that as many as 1 million people lived here at the height of the Khmer empire.

Angkor was the center of a great kingdom that spanned much of Southeast Asia between the 9th and 13th centuries. Rooted in Hinduism and Buddhism introduced by Indian traders, the Khmers built more than 100 temples and the walled city of Angkor Thom, which was larger than imperial Rome in its day.

Historians are uncertain why the empire collapsed. Some blame invaders from Thailand. Others say it fell into economic decline. But by the 15th century, the Khmer court had moved south to Phnom Penh.

The French, who colonized Cambodia in the late 19th century, were astounded by the collection of temples and began restoring them more than a century ago.

The work continued until 1975, when the Khmer Rouge began its genocidal campaign to create a simple agrarian society. At Angkor, villagers were forced to move to the countryside and many were slain, but damage to the temples was minimal.

The civil war that followed the ouster of the Khmer Rouge lasted until the mid-1990s. Despite the fighting, some foreign experts returned in the late 1980s to do emergency repair work on some of the temples.

In response to appeals from Cambodia, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declared Angkor a World Heritage site in 1992, and a year later the agency organized an international partnership to protect and restore the temples. Some critics question whether outsiders have too much influence over the project, but foreign officials say the need to preserve Angkor transcends national concerns.

“This is the pride of Cambodia, but it is an international heritage,” Indian Secretary of Culture Dhanendra Kumar said during a recent visit. “It belongs to the world.”

Cambodia has been slow to recover from the genocide, which wiped out a generation of leaders, intellectuals and teachers. The current government, headed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977, has halted the fighting but is divided by frequent squabbles. No former Khmer Rouge leaders have been brought to trial for the slaughter of the killing fields.

Today, the country ranks as one of the world’s poorest. Workers earn an average of $25 a month and corruption is widespread. At some Angkor temples, police make a few extra dollars peddling their badges to tourists.

“It’s very hard in Cambodia because salaries are so low,” one officer at the Ta Prohm temple said as he sold the badge off his shirt to a visitor for $5.

But as Angkor’s revival begins to fuel Cambodia’s recovery, some worry that tourism is having an undue influence in shaping the country’s culture and sense of history, offering an idealized view of European colonialism to travelers who visit the country for an average of only 2 1/2 days.

Popular legend has it that the ancient city was lost to the jungle for hundreds of years until French naturalist Henri Mouhot rediscovered it in the 1860s. But that is a myth propagated for the benefit of tourists. Although many of the temples were overgrown with trees, the city was never abandoned and people have lived in or near the temples for 1,000 years.

“Tourism at Angkor is about the production and consumption of nostalgia, where history is romanticized,” British Academy researcher Tim Winter wrote in a recent paper on the impact of tourism. “In place of a Cambodian heritage, tourists from all over the world are visiting Angkor today to consume a partial, and in many cases even fictitious, memory of a 19th century French Indochina.”

Most of the tourists pay little attention to the villages in Angkor park, where houses with wood siding and thatched roofs are perched on stilts and scrawny chickens scrounge for food in the dirt.

Indeed, it often seems that foreign visitors and local residents lead parallel lives, oblivious to one another. It is common to see tourists taking photos of an ancient statue of Buddha or Vishnu while a few feet away Cambodians prostrate themselves in prayer and leave offerings of food, cigarettes or cash.

With Angkor’s promise of a better life in mind, Houn Sarat and his family moved here last year from their rice-growing village near the Thai border. Now, 14 family members live in a corrugated metal hut they built in the squatter settlement of Mundol 3 inside the archeological park. The hut, erected on government land, measures about 20 feet square. Inside, it is boiling hot at midday.

Houn worked for a time on construction of the Victoria Hotel in Siem Reap, but jobs have been hard to find since the building’s completion. Outside their home is a pile of cheap plastic shoes they bought and hope to sell, but there have been few takers. Often, the family goes to Angkor Wat to pray for good luck.

“Angkor Wat is the best thing about being here,” Houn said. “I worry that we might have to go back to our village.”

Poor farmers from the countryside are not the only squatters. Some well-connected military officers have been building villas and restaurants in the park without permission. Authorities bulldozed one illegal karaoke bar three years ago, but other builders are too influential for park officials to challenge.

For the government, it is getting more difficult to protect the monuments while maintaining Angkor’s historic status as a populated city.

“We have problems caused by rich people, by poor people, by every kind of people,” said Ang Choulean, director of the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap. “We tolerate them because we want to see this preserved as a living site.”

More than a dozen countries have sent teams to aid Angkor’s restoration. France, Japan, China, India and the private U.S.-based World Monuments Fund are among those that have taken responsibility for key monuments and spent millions of dollars to repair and preserve them.

The UNESCO system gives the foreigners considerable autonomy to manage the sites. Some wonder if the donors have too much control.

“The French have their way, the Japanese have their way, the Americans and so on. But who is asking the Cambodians?” said Philippe Paycam, executive director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap. “We are back in the 19th century, with the games of the big political powers.”

Over the centuries, many of the temples were converted from Hindu to Buddhist, and the structures were altered accordingly. Most restoration efforts are aimed at conserving the temples as the partial ruins of today, not rebuilding them as they once were.

“When you are dealing with historic buildings, you have no right to decide what period you should return to,” said John Sanday, Cambodia project manager for the World Monuments Fund, which is conserving the Preah Khan and Ta Som temples. “History began yesterday.”

India is in charge of maintaining the Ta Prohm temple, where dozens of spong trees grow from the walls and roofs, towering over the structure. In some places, their massive roots hold the stones in place. But many of the trees are nearing the end of their life span, and when they go, they will take parts of the temple with them.

To some Hindus, the trees represent an invasion of a sacred site and should be removed. But for many Western visitors, they make Ta Prohm one of the most beloved temples. Many restoration experts advocate maintaining the temple’s romantic feel for as long as possible. After years of debate, Indian officials announced this year that they will preserve the trees as “a living monument.”

At Angkor Wat, several reconstruction projects are underway, including the Japanese-led restoration of the crumbling northern library. Many of the original sandstone blocks are broken, with some fragments too small to salvage. Using sandstone identical to the original material, workers are carving new pieces to replace missing parts, gluing the blocks together and restoring them to their original places.

For preservationists, the Bapuon temple poses one of the biggest challenges.

Centuries after it was built in 1060, Bapuon was considered a spectacle. The five-tiered temple mount was bigger than the pyramids of Mexico. Originally Hindu, it was partially dismantled in the 16th century and the stones used to construct one of the world’s largest Buddhas, a reclining figure extending 250 feet on the upper portion of the temple.

After the temple partially collapsed in the 1940s, French archeologists decided to dismantle it stone by stone, build a new concrete foundation and reassemble it. Work began in 1960. Crews took the stones, weighing from 400 to 5,000 pounds, and began placing them in fields around the temple.

But in 1975, war interrupted their work, and the French experts fled. Unfortunately, no one thought to take a set of plans. During the ensuing turmoil, Khmer Rouge soldiers destroyed all records identifying the stones’ original locations.

For 20 years, the stones sat untouched. In 1995, a French-led team began the mind-numbing work of figuring out where each block goes. Pascal Royere, the French architect who heads the project, calls it the world’s biggest puzzle.

“Today, after eight years of work, we are reaching a very important stage,” Royere said. “We now know 75% to 80% of the stones that are scattered around, and we are in a position to reassemble them.” Royere hopes the restoration will be finished by 2007.

Cambodian officials say the international effort to preserve Angkor is a model for restoring monuments in other war-torn parts of the world, including Afghanistan’s giant stone Bamian Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

“This should be viewed as an example for all countries that have had such a catastrophe of destruction and genocide,” said Vann Molyvann, King Norodom Sihanouk’s representative for Angkor.

“This applies to Afghanistan, Iraq and many countries that have suffered their heritage destroyed by war.”

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Paddock was recently on assignment in Cambodia.