Word: khmers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stand atop elephant terrace and gaze east across the Royal Square of Angkor Thom - the last capital of the Khmer empire that dominated Southeast Asia for some 600 years until the Siamese sacked the city for good in 1431 - you feel a bit like Shelley's traveler, standing before Ozymandias' half-sunk, shattered visage. All around are lifeless things - retaining walls of blotchy laterite, and sandstone temples that speak little of Angkor's former grandeur and its golden spires. There's no hint of the regal festivals that once took place right here, viewed from this same vantage by mighty...
...southern barbarians," frighteningly "coarse, ugly and very black," according to Zhou) before sailing back to China in July 1297. He was born in the 1270s in the bustling, cosmopolitan port of Wenzhou and was recruited, possibly as an interpreter, for an official mission to deliver an imperial edict to Khmer King Indravarman III on behalf of the Mongol Yuan Emperor Chengzong in 1295. That was the same year that a ragged, unrecognizable Marco Polo arrived back in Venice, jewels sewn into his grimy pants, from the court of Kublai Khan - Chengzong's grandfather and predecessor, who had died the year...
...prurient Zhou far more relishes (to our unending entertainment) relaying strange customs and fantastical tales he's encountered, like the Khmer women who urinate standing up ("and that is really funny"); the ceremonial, contracted deflowering of young girls by priests, which Zhou details in one of his longest passages; the stealing of human gall bladders; and the nine-headed serpent spirit that turns into a woman and with which the King must couple each night in a chamber at the top of the Phimeanakas (which is still standing). "If for a single night he stays away," Zhou tells...
...news and opinion." But it's not exactly a surprise. The Vietnamese government has long been extremely sensitive about its relationship with neighboring China. The two nations have battled for centuries, last going to war in 1979 when Beijing sent troops into Vietnam to punish Hanoi for ousting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and installing a Vietnamese-backed government. Today, China is a huge trading partner and investor in Vietnam - providing cash that the country desperately needs. (See pictures of the China-Vietnam border...
...Sleepwalking is dedicated to the memory of those fallen artists, and is a more than fitting tribute. Dengue Fever meet and jam with musicians who have attempted to preserve the Khmer sound. Together, in the film's lively finale, they perform a concert in a Phnom Penh slum. The crowd initially gawks but ends up being thoroughly charmed. Spend a summer afternoon listening to Dengue Fever's bittersweet corpus and you just might be won over yourself...