Invisible Builders

I have just returned from a month long cycling tour of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. This is the second trip I have undertaken with Bangkok based Spiceroads Cycle Tours. There is a part of me that resists organised tours but this company is excellent and employs local guides who take you to places which are so far off the beaten track that it feels like an adventure.

I find that a bike is the ideal way to see a country. The speed of travel allows you to see all kinds of things that you miss in a car but it is fast enough to make the scenery ever changing and around every corner is a new surprise.


Being a builder I am interested in how people construct their homes with local materials. In the Mekong Delta they build timber houses on stilts to avoid the rising flood waters of the rainy season. This is something we could learn from in certain areas of Britain. Naturally corrugated iron sheets now play a big part in any number of buildings throughout the developing world and they have replaced the straw roofs of the past.

Getting a roof over your head in the rainy season is a priority and a lot of the building is very crude and makeshift with no real regard for the aesthetic. It would be all too easy to dismiss the Cambodians, for example, as fairly primitive in building terms but then you see the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat which are on a breathtaking scale. The roofs built of overlapping and interlocking stone blocks are unbelievably sophisticated.

You can see that even though they had the idea of the pitch in the roof they hadn't discovered the arch or dome so there are no grand rooms. They have inner courtyards and meeting areas open to the elements which for most of the year is fine. The carvings and illustrations rival any in the world and give some idea of how life was in those days. This complex of temples must surely rate among the greatest wonders of the world, but what happened to all that building expertise after the temples were completed? There is very little evidence that building of this sort continued to produce further great architecture. Perhaps they just got bored with all that stonework.

Of course you have to have the means and a very good reason to build on such a scale in the first place and apart form serving the ego of a despot, providing a place of worship has been one of the most compelling and productive causes of great architecture throughout history.

Whether all the participants were willing and justly rewarded for their efforts is doubtful but it is difficult to believe that they didn't take pride in their work and possibly believe that their efforts were buying them a place in a better world.

Their lives here on earth certainly couldn't have been much fun. Looking at those great temples I tried to imagine the kind of shanty towns which must have built up around those construction sites. Countless lives would have been spent on the various projects. Families would have been raised and children introduced to the task of breaking and hauling stone from a very early age. Unlike the Pyramids very little is known about the people who built the Cambodian temples or even how they managed to transport such huge quantities of stone from the quarries to the various sites.

A great deal is written about the various myths and religious beliefs depicted in the temples but as interesting as this is, it is just another form of mumbo jumbo. Gods with four heads and ten arms are useful for keeping an eye (or eight) on the masses and possibly for directing traffic but they didn't build the temples. Gods never do. For me the real history is of the everyday people and how they lived and worked and, as so often occurs in history, this has largely disappeared without trace.