Khmer Markets, Trade and Exchange

At Angkor, the Khmer capital in present-day Cambodia, Zhou Daguan, a Chinese visitor, observed women selling goods from mats in 1296-1297. Buyers paid for small purchases in rice, grain and Chinese goods, while larger transactions involved cloth, gold and silver. Earlier inscriptions preserve other exchanges, including land payments and the movement of cloth and produce to temples.

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Selling in Angkor

Zhou describes women as the people who conducted trade. Sellers spread mats on the ground, each using a place in the market instead of a permanent shop. He had heard that a local mandarin, an official, charged rent for these pitches. Zhou also says a Chinese man who married locally could benefit from his wife’s experience in commerce.

The goods used in a purchase depended on its size. Zhou says small transactions were paid in rice, grain or Chinese objects; cloth came next, and gold and silver were used for the largest deals. His list of goods sought from China includes fine silk and blue porcelain as well as tin, lacquer trays and iron cooking pots. He reports that Chinese merchants brought gold and silver to exchange for agricultural products.

Payments and temple supplies

A Khmer inscription from 1042 records a land transaction paid in goods. One senior titleholder received a gold half-ring set with three sapphires and a textile; other recipients in the same list received cows or vessels such as a tin bowl. Scholar Eileen Lustig interprets the record as a collective land sale whose payment was apportioned by rank, so recipients with higher titles received more than lower-ranking recipients.

Temple records show another route for provisions. A late-twelfth-century inscription from Ta Prohm, a temple at Angkor, says clothing and produce could be drawn from a weaver’s shop, villages and the market. The list links a specialist’s work, village supplies and market purchases to a major temple foundation. A Chinese trade report dated 1225, cited by Lustig, also notes that rice in Cambodia could be purchased with lead, a metal.

Forest goods and long-distance exchange

Some goods traded over long distances began with labor in forests and upland areas. Zhou describes a way to catch kingfishers for their bright feathers: a hunter hid beside a forest pond with a caged female bird and a small net, waiting for the male to approach. He also reports that collectors took beeswax from decayed trees and that boats carried two to three thousand cakes of it. Cardamom was cultivated in mountain areas.

Lustig’s study of Chinese trade reports identifies exports from Angkor such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, kingfisher feathers, beeswax, aromatic woods, cardamom and resins. These valuable products also supplied local elites and temples. Inscriptions from the late twelfth century list aromatic woods and resins among goods used by Jayavarman VII’s temples and hospitals.

Roads, rivers and trading centers

Angkor’s overland connections worked alongside its waterways. Archaeologist Mitch Hendrickson describes more than a thousand kilometers of raised roads linking the capital to regional centers, with a river network carrying people and goods as well. A 1191 inscription at Angkor’s Preah Khan temple records fire shrines along routes from the capital. Archaeologists interpret these small roadside shrines as stopping places; Hendrickson links a group of seventeen to the northwest road reaching Phimai, in present-day Thailand.

Scholar Eileen Lustig reconstructs other communication corridors that joined roads with waterways, including a southern route across Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s Great Lake, and the Mekong River. These corridors connected Angkor with regional centers and with longer routes to the coast. Hendrickson argues that roads probably remained in use after Angkor ceased to be the capital in the mid-fifteenth century.