Review: Khmer: The Lost Empire of Cambodia

Khmer: The Lost Empire of Cambodia by Thierry Zephir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was planning on saving this until I could travel to the region, but since it looks like all travel is on hold for a while, I thought I'd read it anyway and live vicariously through the book and its pictures.

I was surprised at how little I knew of the Khmer empire. I mean, I knew I knew nothing about it, but I figured it would have been more tied into East Asian history. But this wasn't the case. In fact, it was influenced much more by India. First with Hinduism and then Buddhism. It was also fascinating to read about the general weather, and how that affected the people, and the rulers.
Probably the most interesting section was under "documents" at the end, where a Chinese man, Zhou Daguan, who lived among the Khmer for over a year (from 1296-1297), wrote about the country, its people and its customs.

Having said that, the format of the book is quite annoying. It is chock full of pictures, which is nice, but they each have captions and I found myself interrupting the main narrative over and over to read these captions and to look at the photos. This made it difficult to just go through the text and get into it.

Regardless, it's been a good primer, albeit a bit cursory. If and when I actually make it to Cambodia I'll probably try to find another book to add onto this.

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