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Angkor's Wooden Palaces: The Architecture That Vanished
Description
When Zhou Daguan arrived at Angkor in 1296, he described a city of gold towers and vast stone temples. But the everyday palaces, the royal residences, the houses of the nobility — those were built of wood, and they've rotted away almost without a trace. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the lost wooden architecture of the Khmer Empire: how the elite lived in timber compounds that have left only faint imprints in the soil, what the stone carvings and bas-reliefs tell us about these structures, and how the Greater Angkor Project's excavations are slowly piecing together a world that's vanished. They trace the shift from perishable materials to permanent stone as a statement of divine power, and consider what Angkor's wooden legacy means for how we remember the city today. If you've ever wondered why we only see the temples and not the homes, this one's for you.