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The Silk Road of the Khmer Empire (9th-15th century)

At the height of its power, the Khmer Empire covered a massive amount of land estimated to be around 1,000,000 square kilometers; extending from present-day Cambodia to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and parts of Myanmar, Malaysia, to southern China. Angkor was within a well-established regional network of trade and diplomacy with China, India, and other minor Southeast Asian regions. India was a vital trading partner exchanging not only goods, but also cultures, and religion with the Khmer people. While China offered an abundant amount of opportunities for trade since the Chinese traders viewed Angkor as a lucrative destination where a range of foreign products could be bargained. This exchange of commodities, ideas, and culture shows the economic benefits of international trade.


For all of Angkor's splendor, there’s a minuscule amount of information about the Khmer Empire due to records that were kept on paper made from wood, leaf fibers, rice paper, or vellum (parchment made from calfskin) decayed due to the humid weather. As such, most of what modern scholars know of the majestic Khmer empire comes from the abundant stone carvings on the temple walls or records from foreign visitors. The most comprehensive record of the day-to-day life record of the Khmer people came from Zhou Daguan who was part of a diplomatic mission sent to Cambodia to trade in 1296. Excerpts from Zhou Daguan's A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People


‘The local people who know how to trade are all women. So when a Chinese goes to this country, the first thing he must do is take in a woman, partly in a view to profiting from her trading abilities.
‘There is a market every day from around six in the morning until midday. There are no stalls, only a kind of tumbleweed mat laid out on the ground, each mat in its usual place. I gather there is also a rental fee to be paid to officials. The marketplace of Angkor contained no permanent buildings; it was an open square where the traders sat on the ground on woven straw mats and sold their wares. There were no tables or chairs. Some traders might be protected from the sun with a simple thatched parasol. A certain type of tax or rent was levied by officials for each space occupied by traders in the marketplace. The trade and economy in the Angkor marketplace were mainly run by women. The women age very quickly, no doubt because they marry and give birth when they are too young. When they are twenty or thirty years old, they look like Chinese women who are forty or fifty.
‘Small market transactions are paid for with rice or other grain and Chinese goods. The ones next up in size are paid for with cloth. Large transactions are done with gold and silver. In years gone by local people were completely naïve, and when they saw a Chinese they treated him with great respect and awe, addressing him as a Buddha and falling prostrate and kowtowing when they saw him. Lately, though, as more Chinese have gone there, there have been people who have cheated and slighted them.’


During the grandeur of the Khmer Empire, the trade industry was thriving due to the country's access to valuable raw materials collected by hunters and foragers in the Khmer jungle such as Blue kingfisher feathers, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, beeswax, rosewood and cardamom (a type of spice) and ability to grow huge quantities of rice. In fact, during that time, Historians estimated that approximately 80% of the population were farmers since the fertile lands in the Mekong Delta were suitable for growing crops, and the inland areas to the north were used for large-scale rice production. Additionally, the advanced irrigation system resulted in agricultural surpluses, enabling specialization in rice production. The Mekong River connected the empire to the outside world by allowing Angkor to trade and travel with distant countries such as India and China. They traded these commodities with neighboring kingdoms leveraging their comparative advantage to acquire other goods and services making them able to consume beyond their production possibility curve.


Additionally, the Khmer Empire was blessed with prosperous land filled with precious stones and metals. Gold and silver, in particular, were highly valued in ancient times by the nobility and monarchs, serving as a symbol of wealth, power, and currency. The advantage here is the fact that Angkor has abundant and relatively easy access to those resources. Their comparative advantage in gold, silver, and other precious stones was rooted in their lower opportunity cost meaning that in terms of other potential production possibilities. The Khmer Empire had a more favorable trade-off when it came to mining, refining, and crafting these precious stones, so they specialized in producing gemstones. Skilled artisans and craftsmen were the specialized labor force who honed their skills and expertise over generations working with those jewels resulting in the creation such as exquisite jewelry, decorative items, intricate stone carvings, sculptures, religious artifacts, and architectural marvels that still baffle historians to this days cementing the Khmer Empire's reputation as a center of artistic excellence.



The Khmer Empire thrived because they were able to effectively apply the principle of comparative advantage in their resource endowment, fertile lands, and abundant minerals, which allowed for specialization in the production of agricultural and luxury goods resulting in rapid economic growth.


However, the Khmer Empire met its untimely end to centuries of gradual decline from reasons ranging from the religious conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism that disturbed the state order built under Hinduism, insistent internal power struggles from the Khmer prince, revolt from the population, neighboring invasion, plague, deforestation and the deterioration of the irrigation system, and economically, the Khmer Empire economic prosperity was heavily reliant on trade which means the empire surely factors such as the decline in long-distance trade and the loss of control over key trade routes due to countries' invasions.


So, what are important lessons we can learn throughout the passage of time? Countries must be adaptable to changing circumstances and a long-term successful economy must be resilient and requires long-term strategic planning that takes into account not only the economic factors but also the geopolitical and environmental variables. Additionally, trade patterns will not be static, and the routes and partners involved in international trade will survive change over the course of time. Nations must be flexible in responding to shifts in demand, supply, and transportation routes.

 


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