THE LOST CITIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA

Uncovering the history and legacy of some of the world's most mysterious locations

- Jame DiBiasio

Southeast Asia is dotted with ancient, often abandoned sites of earlier civilisations. These range from B-52-bombed temples of My Son in the Vietnamese mountains to the magisterial Buddhist stupa Borobudur, surrounded by the smoking volcanoes of Java.

There are countless individual religious sites, some more than a millennium old, peppering the region's forests and mountains. The biggest are the cities of Angkor, in Cambodia, and Bagan, in Burma. Both were abandoned and suffered the encroachment of the elements. This has given them an aura of being lost cities in exotic locations, the sort of places that serve as backdrops to a Lara Croft or Indiana Jones movie.

But these ruined cities are not sets for Western movies. They represent the pre-modern civilisations of Southeast Asia, which still resonate for local people and their sense of nationhood.

Visiting Angkor and Bagan is thrilling, and there's nothing wrong with making them part of your own adventure on TikTok or Instagram. You'll see local people doing the same. But these aren't exotic curiosities for Cambodians, Burmese or other people from the region. These are important symbols of their national or religious identity. To them, these places aren't lost at all, any more than Notre-Dame is lost to Parisians.

Notre-Dame, by the way, was commissioned in 1163, about ten years after the Khmers had already built Angkor Wat, which dwarfs the Vatican, and after the Bagan king Alung-sithu I oversaw the building of Thatbyinnyu temple, which rises just as high as Notre-Dame's towers. It took the French a century to complete Notre-Dame, but the Khmers and Bamars could erect their biggest monuments in a matter of years, and decorate them with magnificent bas-reliefs, murals and statuary.