In popular imagination, China is a place more to be explored than one that churns out explorers. Ancient stereotypes of the nation often still hold sway today: mysterious, porcelain-skinned women, endless history, arcane religious practices, and cruel torture methods.
Over the last 700 years it is Marco Polo’s account that has contributed most to this feeling of China as a place ripe for exploring. Yet as this most celebrated of medieval explorers returned to Europe, sometime around 1275, ready to tell fantastical tales of his China travels, a lesser-known explorer left the country to set down his own record of a strange and exotic land. Zhou Daguan (周达观)’s A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People (《真腊风土记》)—sometimes translated simply as The Customs of Cambodia—is the only surviving first-person account of the Khmer Empire (802 – 1431). At its height, the empire spanned much of Southeast Asia and built Angkor Wat, now regarded as one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of religious architecture.
Aside from Zhou’s account, there is little more than a smattering of temple carvings and inscriptions to help us understand this remarkable period of Khmer prominence, and as such, his account is of great historical importance. Much of the history of the period taught in Cambodian schools today draws heavily on Zhou’s account of the year he spent there from 1296 to 1297. A Record of Cambodia is fascinating insofar as it zig-zags between detailed and occasionally bland reportage through to the recording of spectacular myth and rumour, such as the Cambodian king’s nightly lovemaking sessions with a nine-headed snake.
Unfortunately, very little is known of our obscure explorer. It appears he was an envoy in a delegation sent to Cambodia on behalf of the Yuan dynasty (1206 – 1368) Emperor Temur Khan, who ruled China between 1294 and 1307. The precise intention of this delegation is unclear, but it was likely a diplomatic one with peaceful aims, Temur being less of a warmonger than his famously aggressive grandfather, Kublai Khan.
Zhou was from Yongjia (present-day Wenzhou), a prosperous port city in transition, only having recently fallen to Mongol invaders, inhabited by traders, soldiers, Muslims, and migrants, among others, all of which should have contributed to an outward-looking nature in Zhou. However, this is not always evident, and Zhou’s sheer sense of Chineseness is heavily brought to bear in the book, not to mention comments often instilled with an innate sense of superiority. But perhaps such thoughts are understandable—it is likely that Zhou, as an educated Chinese, believed that China was the absolute center of the civilized universe, in much the same way that British colonialists several centuries later believed that “God was surely an Englishman.” As translator Peter Harris notes in his introduction:
“Zhou is an observant traveller, but his writings bear the hallmark of a Chinese traveller abroad, with their condescension, sometimes prurient interest in erotica, and earnest efforts to tabulate, elucidate, and observe exotica in language that people back home will enjoy. These qualities are typical of other imperial travellers.”
And so it is that even in something as simple as the chapter titles, Zhou’s intensely Chinese worldview shines through. Chapter five sees Zhou writing about various holy men and monks in Cambodia and is titled “The Three Doctrines.” While the three doctrines—Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—are the main strands of thought that have underlined Chinese philosophical traditions for the best part of two millennia, the only one that could have had any significance in Cambodia in 1296 was Buddhism. The Khmer Empire was a confused mix of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, yet throughout the book Zhou consistently refers to what were, almost certainly, Hindu priests as Daoists. It is unclear if his refusal to look at religion in Cambodia through anything other than a three-doctrine lens is through reverence to “the sacred dynasty,” sheer bloody-mindedness, or simply a lack of belief that anything could exist outside of the three teachings. Another notable chapter heading is “Salt, Vinegar, and Soy Sauce”; in it, Zhou writes, “They do not know how to make soy sauce, either. This is because they have no soy beans or wheat, and have never made a fermenting agent.” That chapter is partly dedicated to a condiment that didn’t even exist in Cambodia, attests to how much its absence was felt by the Chinese adventurer, and no doubt, similar disappointment faces many Chinese travellers in foreign lands today.
Though Zhou diligently logs the food, flora, animals, and buildings of ancient Cambodia, it is invariably the points where a travelogue turns to the esoteric, strange, cruel, sexual, and previously unseen that it truly begins to fire the imagination. And with young Zhou (he was probably in his 20s at the time of writing), there is no lack of this. Perhaps the most unusual practice to grab Zhou’s is zhentan, a ceremony that supposedly involves all the young girls (between the ages of seven and 11) in Cambodia being deflowered by Buddhist monks or Hindu holy men. What jars and horrifies the modern reader is actually presented as a deeply auspicious occasion, but exactly why these girls needed to lose their virginity before marriage in this way is unclear; it is possibly apocryphal. Zhou writes:
“Two pavilions are put up, made of colourful silk. The girl sits inside one, and the monk inside the other. You can’t understand what he is saying because the drums and music are making so much noise…I have heard that when the time comes, the monk goes into a room with the girl and takes away her virginity with his hand, which he then puts into some wine. Some say the parents, relatives, and neighbours mark their foreheads with it; others say they all taste it. Some say the monk and the girl have sex together, others say they don’t.”
Such is his indignation that Zhou even finds time to do a little bit of moralizing on the gay prostitution scene, “There are a lot of effeminate men in the country who go round the markets every day in groups of a dozen or so. They frequently solicit the attention of the Chinese in return for generous gifts. It is shameful, and it is wicked.” As any modern-day backpacker knows, traveling for any length of time inevitably leads to a gamut of conversations about toilets and toilet habits. The 13th century was no different, with Zhou not afraid to get his hands dirty:
“Whenever they go to the lavatory, they always go and wash themselves in a pond afterwards...When they see a Chinese going to the lavatory and wiping himself with paper, they all laugh at him, to the point where they don’t want him in their home. Among the women, there are some who urinate standing up—and that is really funny.”
And Zhou has a point here: it is pretty funny. Today, water is still preferred over paper in Cambodia—toilets coming equipped with small pistols that blast water with varying degrees of power, aka bum-guns.
In his book Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, Pulitzer-winning journalist Joel Brinkley relentlessly drives home the refrain that, today, so many Cambodians live “more or less as they did 1,000 years ago.” If you ask expats in Cambodia today why they choose to live in Cambodia, their answers take on a similar hue: the tropical weather, the simplicity of living, and to live an easy life. As Zhou said seven centuries ago, “Chinese sailors do well by the fact that in this country you can go without clothes, food is easy to come by, women are easy to get, housing is easy to deal with, it is easy to make do with a few utensils, and it is easy to do trade. They often run away here.”
Some things, seemingly, never change.
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