The largest city on earth, and almost none of it was made of stone. The temples that survive today were only the skeleton. The living city was an ocean of thatched rooftops and cooking smoke stretching to the horizon, threaded with canals and fish ponds, anchored by the daily rhythm of fermented fish paste and rice and incense offered at ancestor stones beneath silk‑cotton trees. This is a story about the city that vanished around the monuments that remained.

Spend a single dry‑season morning inside the great enclosure, where an elderly grandmother descends her twelve‑rung ladder to tend the family spirit stone, her daughter balances a basket of prahok jars on her head and walks to the open‑air market where all commerce is conducted by women on mats on the bare ground, and a seventeen‑year‑old folds palm leaves into watertight bowls that wi ...