These are the discoveries that made us suck in our breath when we realized what we were looking at.
In the Southern Gallery of Angkor Wat, Sūryavarman II sits on his throne. He wears sashes of the finest Ashavali brocade. Gold jewelry, a gold belt, and a magnificent gold crown. He holds an Emblem of Rank in his right hand; the jewel under his index finger - how many karats was it, and where is it now?
There’s a dagger tucked into his belt. But it’s… plain. It looks like the hilt is made of wood. It should be gold, and encrusted with jewels…
Sūryavarman II was very young when he took the throne. The dagger is the one he used to kill his uncle to do it - it has to be. Displayed for all to see, to warn off other would-be usurpers.
In the Procession of the Queens below him, Sūryavarman II’s five queens are on their way to a pūjā. People are passing under the branches of Chan trees. Others are picking the fruit, or eating it (below right), or carrying it in basket-like containers (below left). Just about everyone is wearing the Chan “Flower” pattern. It’s even on the ornate palanquin covers. There are Chan everywhere in this scene. Suryavarman II was trying to tell us something.
It didn’t take too long to figure out what that was. He was trying to tell us the season. Chan fruit ripen late in May or early in June. I looked at the Hindu calendar - the pūjā is Gangā Dussehra.
Gangā (“Ganges”) is the river goddess. For a civilization dependent for its wealth and prosperity upon rivers that made possible the production of three rice crops a year, the most important pūjā of the year. And we know that Gangā was very important to the Angkorians – Jayavarman VII’s Queen Indradevī was portrayed as Gangā in Preah Khan.
Look again at the photo above right. This is one of the six women following the queens. One scholar wrote that she was riding in a “hammock palanquin”. So how is it that we can see her feet? In fact, she’s riding between the two poles of a cart. You can see the wheel of the cart behind her feet, and the scalloped cover behind her head.
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This discovery is from 2011, when Lang and I were doing research for The Smell of Water. He was twelve when he was drafted into the Khmer Rouge army and sent to the front. He escaped from his unit with an older boy when it was routed by the invading Vietnamese - on January 5, 1979. They spent the day of the 6th getting to Highway One, where there was a ferry crossing across the Mekong (but no ferry).
The historical record said that the Vietnamese army was sitting at the ferry crossing on the 6th, all backed up on itself, waiting for their bridging equipment to catch up to them. But Lang and the other boy never ran into them. I couldn’t publish our book until I could explain this. But I knew we would never be able to find an eye witness. The communes had been evacuated, and the Khmer Rouge army had made a complete retreat to the other side of the Mekong. There was simply no one there.
We drove to the area where Lang had escaped, 32 years before. I saw a district police office on the map. We stopped, and asked the officer in charge if he knew of anyone who might have information about what had happened on January 6, 1979. This was just fourteen years ago, but at that time people were still afraid to say anything about the Khmer Rouge. The officer cleared the room before he would talk to us.
“Oh. If you’d just come a few years earlier. My father - he could have given you so much good information… But he died.”
My heart sank. The man either didn’t have the information, or wasn’t going to give it to us. I didn’t see how I would ever be able to publish our book.
He looked around, to be sure no one was listening at a window. “I was in a work camp just north of Highway One. I was ten at the time - and I saw it all!” He went on to tell us that the Vietnamese had gotten across the Mekong on the night of January 5th. And that’s why Lang and his companion never ran into them on the 6th. The historical record was wrong.
I knew nothing about war when I’d started our book, and did ten years of research. But it was from this one interview that I learned my most important lesson. There is so much confusion in war that sometimes no one knows what happened. Although they may say they do. Someone said the Vietnamese were sitting at the ferry crossing on January 6th. When in fact there was no one there at all.
Most survivor’s accounts have been written by Chinese-Khmer Cambodians, and one or two appear to have been written for profit. Lang’s account may be the only one written by a Khmer. And we did not write it for profit.
Which is the best survivor’s account? Stay Alive, My Son by Pin Yathay. From his, you get an adult’s observations. From ours, you get a child’s. We ask you to read them both.