Destroying the Largest City on Earth

how do you talk about the greatest city in the world is it it's art and architecture its economy its military its politics is it the people or the rulers is it the environment there's just too much this is the farthest reaches of Greater India this is where Hinduism became Buddhism where French Colonials surveyed the jungles there are still bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge in the walls of these temples there's carvings from tourists it's truly Cambodia every story you tell from Cambodia is rooted here in Angkor but it's just too much so I'm gonna focus on golden ages specifically how they end because North America is in a golden age right now at least the tail end of one and I think that there are patterns around the world that we can look at to sort of help stave off our own decline so let's look at the story of Angkor in the early 800 s a rebel by the name of Jaya varman the second declared independence from the Champa Kingdom and began conquering his way north once he got to the Tonle Sap Lake he decided to set up his capital actually not far from where we're standing now and begin the Khmer Empire you kind of have to trust the architecture just as much as you do the text to find out the real story here but Jaya varman wasn't exactly a builder and neither was his son it was only in the time of his grandson Indra varman where a vision was seen he needed people to believe that his ancestors were gods and therefore he himself would be a god it wasn't that big of a stretch honestly because his ancestors had claimed they were gods and the people had believed them but the problem was they'd been buried so plainly you can't put dirt on top of a god they need a temple all their own so he constructed temples for his ancestors and started a pattern that would continue throughout the empire but future kings weren't going to rely on their successors to show their glory they built the most impressive temples for themselves but you know how it is with building you started and it can be hard to stop you know you build a temple here a tomb there and all of a sudden you've got yourself a city and then you have to feed those people indravarma ordered his subjects to dig a reservoir at that time the largest reservoir in human history controlling such an unprecedented amount of water would have allowed him thousands more farms and rice meant security prosperity and power the era of builders is generally what's considered the golden age of the Khmer period Angkor means City and accurately so their cities were beyond impressive far more populated grand than anything that existed on earth at that time in the Angkor system each King built the temple in which they would be buried as you can see with Angkor Wat here they all had to kind of be better than the last one you had to one-up the previous King of course so they cleared out a big section of the jungle they expanded a big mega structure right in the middle they started pushing out reservoirs and irrigation to build the farms that surround it they took a symbol of the Kings virility plugged it right in the center of the temple and that was now the new spiritual capital of the Empire and over the next few hundred years this one-upmanship would fill this region with some of the most impressive mega structures ever produced and they are impressive but they must have been so costly it would have taken thousands of stonemasons artists laborers craftsmen just to build one of these and on top of that it would take thousands more to upkeep the temples that already existed and somebody had to feed them so the farming community got new reservoirs new irrigation and they began pushing further and further back into the jungle and there's no denying that the Angkor Golden Age was magnificent it was incredible what they did here recent archaeology suggests that there were a million people living here at a time when London had 30,000 it was the biggest city on earth it would be industrialization and hundreds of years before any other civilization got close to this level of city building the architecture here is stunning it can be even hard to fathom there are hundreds if not thousands of temples dotting this landscape each of which would be a tourist destination in their own right but here they're window-dressing we've been filming for days and we've barely even seen a tiny percent of it simply put this place is enormous but the seeds of an cores destruction were built into the very walls of the temples themselves as the Empire grew larger its enemies wanted to invade it more its administration became more complex and the irony of a finely tuned machine is that the more finely it's tuned the easier is for it to break down if you have genius administration well you hope that your next administrators are geniuses as well but there were only so many jungles that you could burn into farmland deforestation quickly became a very serious problem it was increasing floods it was increasing instability and yet even though the irrigation system was ingenious that meant it was incredibly complicated an unexpected shock ripped through the system like a virus and interconnected computers while resources weren't exactly scarce they were being consumed just as fast as they could be produced the higher the taxes the better the temple for the King the world's largest mega structures don't come cheap taxes can only really be raised so far with administrators already planning grain before it was harvested everything relied on stability there's no one thing that took down the Khmer Empire at least as far as we know the Thai invasion of 1431 certainly was a death knell but the decline had been evident for generations before that what we do know is that some point in history the greatest city on earth was all but abandoned and given back to the jungle and I think that there's a strong argument that the same things that had built up the Khmer Empire are what collapsed it it's just such a huge and intricate system and the bigger they are the harder they fall so a period of poor administration with religious upheaval and royal coos it just was too much for this intricate complicated administration war weather and weak leadership led to an environment that was ripe for invasion after all there's plenty of historical evidence to support this if you look at Easter Island for example they cut down every single last tree in an attempt to sustain a system past the point when that would have been considered irrational with no external powers to invade they simply withered from within it's amazing how many societies collapsed simply because they couldn't handle change if you are using 95 percent of your production and you have a production loss of 10 percent it's not 5 percent of your society collapse everything goes but a growth system can't stop growing it can't even stand still the larger and more intricate the organization the more vulnerable it is a bad leader will destroy a new technology will replace it an invading army will take it over or as is perhaps the best analog to modern-day it simply won't be able to keep up with the climate changing around it so in short if you are in that golden age there's a couple of things you're gonna want to watch out for don't use your resources to the max don't vote in bad administrators for no reason don't fall behind on technology and don't get into so many resource Wars and perhaps most of all keep an eye on the climate clearly we have some things to work on this is rare earth [Music] [Music]

Channel: Rare Earth

Views: 421,792

Keywords: Chris Hadfield, Hadfield, YouTube Documentary, Documentary, History Documentary, History, Unique Places, Unique, Tom Scott, Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Crash Course, Vsauce, Scishow, angkor, angkor thom, angkor wat, siem reap, tourism cambodia, tourism, cambodia, bbc, pbs, nova, natgeo, documentary, rare earth, evan hadfield, largest city on earth, ruins, cities in ruins, world history, crash course, UNESCO, world heritage, seven wonders of the world, world wonder

Id: jfZsi5lgjuE

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2017