Southeast Asia is dotted with ancient, often abandoned sites of earlier civilisations. These range from B-52-bombed temples of My Son in the Vietnamese mountains to the magisterial Buddhist stupa Borobudur, surrounded by the smoking volcanoes of Java.
There are countless individual religious sites, some more than a millennium old, peppering the region’s forests and mountains. The biggest are the cities of Angkor, in Cambodia, and Bagan, in Burma. Both were abandoned and suffered the encroachment of the elements. This has given them an aura of being lost cities in exotic locations, the sort of places that serve as backdrops to a Lara Croft or Indiana Jones movie.
But these ruined cities are not sets for Western movies. They represent the pre-modern civilisations of Southeast Asia, which still resonate for local…
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All About History (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 151