Worship, Festivals and Burial in Khmer Life

At Angkor, the Khmer capital in present-day Cambodia, worship involved daily temple service as well as court ceremonies and public festivals. An 1186–1187 hospital foundation connects offerings to patient care, while Zhou Daguan’s account of Angkor in 1296–1297 describes annual performances and funerals.

Daily offerings and temple work

The Say Fong hospital inscription, dated 1186–1187 and found in present-day Laos, describes a healing sanctuary and the people who maintained it. Two cooks supplied food, fuel and water, collected flowers and darbha, a grass used in ritual, and cleaned the sanctuary. Storekeepers handled medicines and received rice and firewood from donors.

The inscription also assigns a daily measure of white rice to worship. After the ritual offering, the remaining rice went to sick patients. Food presented to divinities thus also became part of the hospital’s practical care.

Festivals around the royal calendar

In the account of Angkor by Zhou Daguan, a fifteen-day celebration takes place in the first month. The month corresponds to the tenth month of the Chinese calendar; editor Paul Pelliot places it roughly around November. In front of the palace, workers assembled a broad platform decorated with flowers and lanterns, then raised tall wooden frames for fireworks. Provinces and noble households paid for these structures. After dark, the king came to watch rockets and firecrackers, while officials and nobles brought candles and betel, or areca nut. The ruler also invited foreign ambassadors.

Zhou’s other monthly events followed seasonal and court rhythms. In the fifth month, Buddha images from across the kingdom were washed in the king’s presence. In the seventh, when new rice ripened, women traveled by cart or elephant outside the southern gate and burned rice in honor of the Buddha; Zhou says the king did not attend. In the eighth month, selected musicians performed daily at the palace for a ten-day dance festival. Pig and elephant fights accompanied the performances, and ambassadors were invited to watch.

The Bayon, a state temple begun under the Buddhist king Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth century, preserves carved musicians and dancers. In its northern sanctuary tower, one relief shows a harpist above a temple dancer. The harpist’s right hand rests on the strings and the left reaches toward the neck. Plucking a taut string makes it vibrate and produce a tone. A separate carving in the eastern outer gallery places a woman harpist on a pilaster opposite a sacred dancer on a pillar, beside a passage leading to the dancers’ hall. Elsewhere, a different Bayon dance scene shows a performer with one leg raised vertically and the opposite arm lifted overhead. The carvings place music and dance in temple towers, galleries and passages leading to a dance hall.

Processions and care for the dead

Zhou describes funerals in which relatives placed a body on a mat, covered it with cloth, and carried it in a procession with flags, banners and musical instruments. Mourners scattered roasted rice along the route, then left the body outside the city for vultures and dogs. Zhou says the family read the animals’ response as a sign of the dead person’s merit or fault. He also reports that some people cremated their dead, whom he calls descendants of Chinese.

A seventh-century Chinese history, the Sui shu, already describes cremation in Cambodia: people carried the dead in a funeral procession, burned the body with fragrant wood, collected the ashes in a gold or silver vessel, and cast it into flowing water. Pelliot cites this earlier account in his notes, showing that Zhou’s report was not the first record of Cambodian cremation. For a ruler’s burial, Zhou mentions a tower but says he did not know whether it contained a body or bones.

At Sras Srang, mortuary jars containing cremated remains provide archaeological evidence for cremation in the Angkorian period. In the Cardamom Mountains, a distinct highland practice placed human bones in ceramic jars and hand-hewn wooden coffins set on natural rock ledges. Radiocarbon dating at Phnom Khnang Peung places its earliest burials around 1420–1440. These were secondary burials: bones were reburied after earlier treatment of the body, a later highland practice distinct from lowland Angkorian burial customs.