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Vorn is still a young man. I never asked his age, but he was in his twenties when I first met him a few years ago.

M and I were travelling together.

“How many sons you have?” he asked M, whom I had briefed on the rigours of Southeast Asian etiquette.

“No sons,” she said, smiling.

“Girls?” he said without contempt, as he prides himself on the sensitive understanding of Western culture he has gained through being what once upon a time, in China, would have been called a comprador, a Portuguese word: adviser, translator, and, most important of all, fixer.

“No girls, either.”

He then turned to me and said accusingly, “You never worked enough!”

M and I had just returned from a wild boat trip under the guidance of one of Vorn’s brothers-in-law or cousins. These are almost without number. Whatever item or service one needs, whatever deal one is looking for in fields as different as consumer electronics, physiotherapy or the foreign-exchange market, he knows the ideal person, a relative by marriage if not by blood, located, as luck would have it, only moments away.

The boat-operator looked nothing whatever like Vorn, but spoke of him warmly, as far as we could tell. We were in a long-tail boat at the southern end of Tonlé Sap. This is to say, the largest lake in Southeast Asia by far. It becomes still larger during the summer wet season when we were there, going from an area of about 2,500 square kilometres to at least thirteen thousand, inundating the surrounding forests and reversing the flow of Tonlé Sap, the river of the same name, testing the very safety of the elaborate dikes at Phnom Penh, two hundred or so kilometres away. The lake supplies fish to the majority of Cambodia’s people.

The lake is a spooky place when in flood. With the motor off, we sat holding onto the gunnels, rocking in the thick of a forest that the sun barely penetrates. Or rather the top half of the forest, the rest being underwater for the next few months. We carefully tiptoed, so to speak, into the open water, where the lapping sound has the power both to put people to sleep or drive them mad. There were no other sounds, in fact, no other signs of life. The water and the sky were grey. But retreating into the mouth of the river, travelling down the river that usually runs up, there was humanity everywhere: men building a large wooden vessel along the bank using only hand tools, children swimming naked, people stepping gingerly from one flat-bottom boat to the next. On the lake itself, there is one entire floating city of about ten thousand people who rarely, if ever, set foot on land and have no reason to.

As we proceeded slowly to where Vorn waited in the second-hand car of which he was so proud, we peered into all the bamboo baskets full of fish, meat, and vegetables along the way and stopped to go aboard a barge that served as a weird sort of floating zoo. It contained, among other creatures, some type of aggressive lizard I had never seen before, rather more than a metre long. It responded with a fierce lunge when I tapped gently on the bars of its cage. Farther along, some enormously ugly birds were sitting atop old pilings driven into the mud and the pitched ends of thatched-roof dwellings. From a distance, I thought they were vultures, though they were much too big. No, they were storks. They looked like soldiers guarding a train. Only their eyes moved, rather too suspiciously, it seemed to me.

Tonlé Sap is one of two sites that Cambodians enjoy showing off to Western visitors. The main one, of course, is Angkor, the temple complex that is the hearthstone of Khmer culture. The civilization was at its rather troubled zenith when the structures were being built, between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries CE. It once stretched northward into the lower reaches of China and both eastward and westward into what are now Vietnam and Thailand respectively. Such incursions into neighbouring cultures were of course reciprocated. Siem Reap, the city one must go to in order to access Angkor, is sometimes translated as “raped by the Siamese.”

If not a deeply spiritual person, I am certainly not an unspiritual one, but in any case am in no position to explain or pass judgment on the magnetic attraction Angkor holds for the West’s many time-share Buddhists and similar faddists. They swarm over the site season after season, many of them staying weeks at a time, making complete circuits of the intricate but often fragile carvings that decorate individual walls and buildings. Certainly Angkor is an architectural and archaeological marvel, comparable on those scores to Bagan in Burma and Borobudur in Indonesia, which are much less famous in the world at large. (I’m not embarrassed to say that I first became aware of Angkor from the poem “Angkor Wat” written by Allen Ginsberg in 1963.)

Here I could interject a capsule history of Angkor, having digested the relevant books, but I would risk boring readers until they sobbed. Instead I’ll quote, with her permission, from M’s telegraphic notebook entries about the bas-relief stone carvings, for her memory-prompts are all the more vivid for being so impressionistic. She writes:

Angkor Thom [building] — snake monument gates, elephants!, earthworks surrounding.

East side — bas-reliefs at entrance, Chinese soldiers, banners and parasols, cockfighting!, tortoise eats man!

South side — elephant troops, horse troops, ground troops, boat soldiers. Man falls off boat, crocodile eats him. Men hunting tigers.

Daily life in Cambodia — baskets for vegetables, picking lice from hair (especially after harvest), Jayavarman VII built 102 hospitals for all people, birth scene, Khmers v Chinese, wild boar fighting, Khmer wrestling (with helmets), Cham v Khmer (ground battle).

Celebration — grill meat, carry pig. Quarry work 42 km from here …

And later, in another part of the site, a structure called

The Terrace of the Elephants. Had a roof of tile & wood. Received groups of people (VIPs waiting for king).

Families came to see — Victory Road, Victory Gate.

[Then the famous Angkor Wat itself] New Year’s celebrations here, dance, 12 towers. Elephants carrying tree trunks.

Filmed here few years ago: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Angelina Jolie.

W.C. 500 riels. (4,000 riels = $US1).

The most blatant example of colonialist and Orientalist thinking is to say that Angkor was discovered by the French, for of course it had never been misplaced much less lost. It hadn’t even been abandoned, not permanently. Nor were the French the first outsiders on the scene. Portuguese travellers saw it in the sixteenth century, Japanese in the seventeenth. After spending two days at Angkor, a French missionary, Father Charles-Émile Bouillevaux, wrote about its wonders in Ma visite aux ruines cambodgiennes en 1850 without attracting the world’s attention. That was left to the resolute French botanist and explorer Henri Mouhot (1826–61). So evocative was his prose in Voyage dans les royaumes de Siam, de Cambodge, de Laos et autres parties de l’Indochine, and so fascinating its illustrations, that a great vogue for Angkor developed in Europe and Britain, an excitement kept on the boil by the work of Francis Garnier and others. Mouhot’s book was published seven years after his death from a fever near Luang Prabang, following the fourth of his expeditions, all of them marked by terrible suffering and hardship.

Unlike many who followed, Mouhot was a scientist who seems to have been without serious political or commercial ambitions. Yet his work came at the right moment to dovetail with France’s construction of its Indochinese empire. It also, whether consciously or not, advanced the notion of Indochina as exotic — romantic, enticing, and dangerous, a region of strange cultures and forbidden customs. A place, in other words, that had much in common with French possessions in North Africa, the South Pacific, and elsewhere, at least in the minds of their European masters. Gauguin might easily have done what he did in Indochina rather than Polynesia. Artists and intellectuals in particular continued to fall for such thinking decade after decade. Consider André Malraux.

In 1923, the intense young literary johnny went out to Cambodia to make his fortune, having already squandered the one that came with his first wife. He had always been able to earn a little extra money in the art galleries and auction rooms of Paris as a commission-based go-between linking artists and collectors. Now he resolved to become his own supplier. He knew that a certain type of statuette of a Buddhist apsara, for example, could bring twelve thousand American dollars in New York. So he and a colleague, posing as serious archaeologists, went to the ruins of Banteay Srei, northeast of Angkor, and pried loose seven sandstone bas-reliefs.

French intelligence agencies were already on to him (just as their British and American opposite numbers would be in subsequent years). He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to three years. Back in Europe, his wife orchestrated a campaign of getting leading intellectual figures to petition for his release. Surprisingly, the effort was successful. A couple of years later, Malraux returned to the colonies to start a pro-independence newspaper called L’Indochine, which the French authorities closed down. Out of his temple-robbing experiences came his famous novel La voie royale (1930).

The other side of the coin was that Paris became the world centre of genuine scholarship about Indochina, just as London became so with respect to the parts of the world it was colonizing. Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam owe much to France’s intellectual institutions. European colonialism, already such a complex and often contradictory proposition, was complicated still further by cultural differences that distinguished one colonizing power from another within their common goal of making money. What was the first project undertaken by foreign masters when imposing their authority over a new place? The Chinese would build a market, the Americans a gaol, the Spanish a cathedral, the British a library, and the French an opera house. This statement, of course, is not in the least scientific, but only the accurate recounting of what a wise-cracker might suppose while travelling.