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Angkor's Canals: The Ghost Infrastructure of a Sunken City
Description
Long after the last Khmer king left Angkor for Phnom Penh, the great city's stone temples stood abandoned, but its canals and reservoirs kept working. In this episode, Lucas and Luna follow the water through Angkor after its fall—how the baray, the moats, and the massive hydraulic network held the city together for centuries, and how the jungle slowly took it back. They examine the engineering that let the Khmer Empire move water across the floodplain, the slow decay of those systems after the capital moved south, and the strange afterlife of Angkor's waterworks: farmers using ancient channels, Angkor Wat's moat becoming a lifeline for a new village, and the way the city's skeleton has shaped modern Siem Reap. With a nod to Zhou Daguan's own observations and the work of the Greater Angkor Project, this episode looks at the city that refused to die, the water that refused to leave, and the ghosts still flowing through Angkor's veins.