King Suryavarman II built many other temples besides Angkor Wat in the early 12th century. All these monuments reinforced each other in people’s perceptions of
People often appreciate ancient Khmer temples, including Angkor Wat, one by one, but they existed together in a natural environment and a cultural landscape that
“Seeing that in the middle of Jambudvipa, the home of the gods, there rose up a golden mountain. He made a golden mountain in the
I was in a restaurant in a city in central Java called Yogyakarta and met an American couple who had just arrived in Indonesia. America’s
My attraction to northern Thailand strengthened when I visited minority groups in the hills. Many non-Thai minorities live in northern Thailand, and they offer a
The first kings in Thailand’s new Chakri Dynasty grounded Bangkok in Thai traditions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by erecting monuments in
Thais needed to rebuild their world after Burmese armies traumatized them by sacking Ayutthaya, the capital of their largest kingdom, in 1767. The first king
Wat Pho is the second of the three monuments that the first Chakri kings established in Bangkok’s center to reaffirm traditional Thai ways of perceiving
The horrors of the sack of Ayutthaya in 1767 made old Thai traditions seem like a lost haven. The siege dragged on for more than
Confucians from the royal court in Hue probably would have found Hoi An chaotic if they had ventured there. Although the Nguyen Dynasty’s kings tried