A Chinese envoy's account of Angkor a century after Jayavarman VII, and the only description of the city and its court by an eyewitness. It describes the walls and temples that the inscriptions of the 1190s record being built, the palace, the king's processions, the officials and their insignia, the Buddhist and Brahman clergy, slaves, trade with Chinese merchants, the calendar, justice, agriculture and the Tonle Sap. Much of this is institutional and slow to change, so it is used, with care, to put flesh on the empire of 1200; but the kingdom of 1296 had lost the Cham and Menam provinces and turned Theravada, and the text should not be read back wholesale.
About this source
- Title
- Zhenla fengtu ji
- Author
- Zhou Daguan
- Author's dates
- about 1270 to after 1346
- Written
- after 1297, from a stay at Angkor in 1296 to 1297
- Language
- Chinese
- Covers
- Angkor and its kingdom in 1296 to 1297
- Kind
- Travel account
Pelliot's 1902 article is also on Persee. The 1992 Siam Society English version (d'Arcy Paul) is in copyright and not linked. The surviving Chinese text is about a third of the original.
Where to read it
Editions
- Chinese text in the Gujin shuohai and Siku quanshu; a Chinese Wikisource text exists but could not be verified in this task (not freely online)
Translations
- P. Pelliot, Memoires sur les coutumes du Cambodge, BEFEO 2 (1902), pp. 123 to 177, French; scan hosted by the Angkor Database
- P. Pelliot, Memoires sur les coutumes du Cambodge de Tcheou Ta-kouan, posthumous edition with notes (Paris, 1951), French; in copyright (not freely online)
- P. Harris, A Record of Cambodia: the Land and its People (Chiang Mai, 2007), English; in copyright (not freely online)