Work, Markets and Recreation in Khmer Life

Before rice could be cooked, someone had to pound the grain to loosen its husk. Zhou Daguan describes this work in his 1296 and 1297 visit to Angkor, the Khmer capital in present-day Cambodia. Finds from the temple settlements also point to cotton-fiber preparation, and a royal foundry’s tools show how metalworkers cast or hammered copper into objects. Fields assigned to cooks, leaf weavers and musicians connected crops to temple service, while women set goods on mats to sell in the capital.

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Rice and cotton processing

In Zhou’s account, people used mortars rather than millstones to remove rice husks. A mortar held the grain while a pestle pounded it, loosening the husk from each kernel. Archaeologists found rice husks, broken grains and spikelet bases, the points where grains attached to the rice plant, in occupied spaces at Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm. Angkor Wat’s sampled settlement layer dates mainly to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; Ta Prohm was founded in 1186. These remains place grain processing near temples where people lived and worked.

Excavators also found cotton seeds and fragments of seed coat at both sites. A cotton boll is the seed-bearing fruit of the plant; lint is the soft fiber that grows around its seeds. From the seeds, researchers infer that workers brought bolls into temple grounds and separated the lint from the seeds to prepare fiber.

Land and service at a temple

An inscription dated 1025 assigns rice fields to cooks, workers who wove leaves, and musicians attached to a temple foundation. The fields gave them access to rice while they maintained its services. Other Khmer inscriptions list temple personnel by the bright or dark fortnight, roughly half of the lunar month. The bright fortnight is the waxing half, when the Moon grows brighter; the dark is the waning half, when it fades. Historian Eileen Lustig interprets this rotation as allowing some workers to cultivate their own fields during the alternate half.

Making metal goods

A royal foundry near Angkor’s palace operated in the eleventh century. Excavators found furnace walls, air nozzles, heat-resistant crucibles for heating metal, clay mold fragments, slag, pits and basins. Metalworkers heated copper and tin, sometimes remelting old objects, in crucibles over charcoal fires. Leather bellows pushed air through the nozzles to raise the heat. For lost-wax casting, workers formed a model from beeswax mixed with resin and enclosed it in a clay mold; heating removed the wax, leaving a cavity for molten metal. They also shaped copper by hammering. After casting or hammering, workers joined parts, cut details, repaired and polished objects, and sometimes applied a thin gold surface by mercury gilding. Vessel fragments show small cast goods, while large mold fragments point to statue casting as another intended product.

Selling and learning in the capital

Zhou Daguan describes women selling goods from mats at designated market places in Angkor. He says he had heard that sellers paid a local official for their place. In small exchanges, people used rice, other grains and Chinese goods; cloth also changed hands, while larger transactions used gold and silver. The account shows how sellers brought food and imported wares into direct exchange with buyers.

Zhou also describes shops where professional writers prepared formal petitions for customers, written requests to officials. They wrote on black-dyed animal skin with a pale, chalk-like stick. Children from lay families, meaning households outside the monastery, attended lessons with Buddhist monks and later returned to ordinary community life. These services connected writing and instruction with people beyond the temple’s own staff.

Games, music and court gatherings

Bayon, a Khmer temple in Angkor Thom, the royal city at Angkor, preserves carved scenes along its outer gallery, a covered passage around the temple. The reliefs show cockfighting, wrestling and a wild-boar fight among scenes of markets, cooking and fishing. In one carving, a harpist reaches one hand to the strings as if plucking and the other toward the instrument’s curved neck; a dancer appears just below. Other Bayon musicians are carved beside dancers who raise one leg high and lift the opposite arm overhead, a sharply balanced pose. In another scene, a dancer holds a stick. The carvings show music and skilled movement as part of temple and public performance.

Zhou describes a ten-day dancing festival in the eighth lunar month. Each day, selected musicians performed at the palace. The festival also featured pig fights and elephant fights. The king invited foreign envoys, diplomatic representatives from abroad, making the festival a court gathering that joined music, combat and diplomacy.