Why do we find Thailand so exciting?
Temples, beaches, spas, scuba diving, deep sea fishing, trekking, elephant back riding to remote hill tribes, and so much more. But there’s something else, the unexpected. In past stories for Weekly Travel Feature I wrote about diving for lost wrecks, exploring the caves of Thailand and exploring deep jungles. Now here’s another one, right out of Indiana Jones. Searching for a lost city. In Thailand it is possible.
   But how can a city possibly become lost?  Two hundred years ago, or even a hundred years, maybe, but not in our modern 20th and 21st centuries. Still, only three years ago, a farmer tilling his land near the village of Ban Wang Haad in northwest Thailand accidentally discovered the archaeological site of an ancient city that predates the rise of the great Sukhothai Kingdom.  A few years earlier, on the other side of the world in the remote jungle of the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola, archaeologists discovered a long-lost city once inhabited by the Taino Indians. The Tainos were also the ones who welcomed Christopher Columbus to the New World at San Salvador Island. 
    Two recent discoveries of lost cities within just a few years. How can this be? How is it possible that a city can be lost in our modern-day 21st Century? How does it become lost in the first place?
   Ever since man learned to build great cities, he also developed the knack of losing them. It’s true, cities simply disappear. What we have left are stories, legends and myths, all of which keep our imagination fired up.
   In the Western world, the Book of Genesis tells of disasters in which whole cities were swallowed up. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote in his Dialogues about the disappearance of Atlantis, and the search for Atlantis has never stopped.
   In Asia, early Chinese chronicles tell not only of lost cities but lost kingdoms as well. Strange and mysterious as it may sound, lost cities in Asia still do exist.
   The lure of discovering a lost city in Southeast Asia has led adventurers and men and women of science to probe the earth, to dive to the bottom of the seas, to scale mountains and to hack through jungles. More often than not, the dreams end in disillusion, even tragedy—but not always. Some cities, no doubt, did once exist but their sites have been lost for centuries.
   Centuries before Europeans built their ships and struck out to find the sea routes for themselves, China had a lucrative sea trade with the spice islands of Indonesia which she carried in her vast merchant fleet to the markets of India. Goods that did reach Europe had first to pass through India.
   Such trade routes were long established. In many cases the merchants found it more profitable to ship their wares to the Malay Peninsula and, from there, transport them overland to where Indian merchant vessels were waiting. The route was not only shorter but vessels did not have to contend with unpredictable winds and raging piracy at the southern tip of the peninsula, where Singapore lies today, and the Strait of Malacca.
   The first Europeans to arrive by ship were the Portuguese. They brought their cannons and swords with them. Malacca, on the western Malay coast, fell to them and became a Portuguese stronghold. The port, with its fortifications, gave them control of the East-West trade routes. But they did not yet have the source of that trade, so they set out to find the cities of which Marco Polo and the Chinese chronicles spoke so glowingly.
   From 1583 to 1593 they explored eastern Malaya and all of southern Thailand and Cambodia. They could find no great cities but only ruins—and ruins they were not after. They had arrived 300 years too late.
    After the Portuguese expeditions ended, lost cities and kingdoms of the world were once again forgotten. The age of discovery was passing. Man came to believe that all lands of the Orient and South Pacific were accounted for. Then, not much more than a hundred years ago, a great archaeological discovery was made. Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, exploring in remote Cambodia, heard tales of a lost Khmer city in the jungles north of Siem Reap. Was it merely rumor? He persuaded a local missionary to guide him to where it was rumored to be. They traveled first by dugout and then by foot. Finally, after chopping the last few kilometers through dense jungle, they came to a stone wall which was completely overgrown. Mouhot was stunned. Could this really be? He followed the wall until he came to an opening, and after cutting his way through tangled vines and thorny creepers he stepped through.   
   What he saw surpassed the wildest imagination of any explorer. Indiana Jones would have turned green with envy. Before him was a city, forgotten for centuries, almost totally devoured by the jungle. Great arches and lintels were heaved upwards. Roots of banyan trees held the stone heads of gods and goddesses in their powerful grip. Massive walls had been split open not by earthquakes or violent eruptions but by the slow overpowering might of the jungle. And where were the inhabitants? There was not a soul, only the cry of birds and the humming of insects as they probed the eerie ruins.
   Because it was so overgrown, neither man could fathom the magnitude of the discovery—the kilometers of roads, hundreds of temples and walled courtyards and an intricate network of canals, moats and waterways.
   The Frenchman's discovery was, of course, the famous Angkor Wat. Men of letters who followed pieced together the tragic story of the city. It was built by the Khmers between 1181 and 1218 and prospered for 200 years, but in the 15th century King Pona Yat decided to abandon his all-too-splendid capital which was vulnerable to the war-like Siamese tribes.
   King Pona Yat and his people left the city and went south to the great lake where Phnom Penh is today. Angkor was soon overrun by the Siamese but they did not remain. In time the jungle reclaimed its own.
   Khmer ruins are found not only in Cambodia but also in northern Thailand and in southern Laos. Excavation of a major lost city near Champasak was begun by the French prior to World War II but continuous fighting through the years has halted all progress. Occasionally, heads and carved lintels from these ruins show up in antique shops in Paris.

   If Khmer ruins like those of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Wat Phu in Laos and Pimai in Thailand have been uncovered, why not the kingdoms of Tambralinga and Langasuka? In all probability they did exist, but finding them will take more than a river excursion through the jungle by longboat or aboard a flight over the treetops by light plane. It will take some deep, hard probing. The jungles have seen to that!
   It is difficult to imagine the sheer might and complete destructive force of a tropical rainforest. Leave a seed unmolested on a pavement overnight and it will start to grow by morning. This minuscule seed carried by a light breeze and dropped into the crevice or crack in a boulder and left to nurture under a tropical sun will, in time, split the boulder in two. It can turn palaces and cities into ruins within the short span of a few decades.
  

Although the jungle destroys, it can also protect. Lost in its midst, a city or a single building may be devastated but it goes untouched by man. Some years ago while researching a book on Malaysia, I read about a Scotsman, Kellie-Smith, who had started building a European-style castle on his estate south of Ipoh. He was a rubber planter and very wealthy. What sort of mad idea was this—a European castle in the Malay jungle? I decided to try to locate the castle, if there was one. I had a rough idea where to look but the area was no longer a rubber plantation. It had returned to jungle.
   On the afternoon of the second day I saw the topmost parts of ramparts on the opposite bank of a muddy river. I crossed the river by a swinging bridge and followed an old trail through the jungle to the ruins. The first sight was disappointing. A gate or guard house of sorts had collapsed into a heap of rubble. I had to push aside vines and cobwebs to pass. It was eerie, like stepping on an unknown grave. Beyond the gateway the castle unfolded before me, an unbelievable sight. A spacious courtyard was flanked by arches with parts of the wall and gateways lifted up from their foundations. Trees with trailing vines and creepers grew wildly in the garden. I had to look hard to see the walls of the castle before me, stretching skyward.
   I worked my way to the building. Within the massive stone structure there were passageways, dining halls and salons. One stairway led down into darkened cellars, another to more chambers above. Through windows, some twelve meters above ground, the arms and fingers of the jungle were reaching out, grabbing, taking root with fan-like tentacles, and spreading over the thin fabric of the brick and plaster walls. The castle stood like a minor Angkor Wat, and, like at Angkor Wat, gone too were the people.
   I pieced together the story of Kellie-Smith with the help of an old Tamil rubber tapper who had once worked for the Scotsman. It seems that Kellie-Smith began building his brainchild at the turn of the century. But then came the Great War and Kellie-Smith returned to Britain. He never returned. The rest is history. Since then, Kelley's Castle, as it is now called, has been placed on the tourist map. The jungle has been chopped down, lawns and flower beds planted and the walls of the castle have been marred with 'Johnny loves Mary' scribbled in half a dozen languages. Kelley’s Castle had beauty and mystery when I first re-discovered it; today it looks like an unfinished brick building. 
  
   Could Tambralinga and Langasuka have been consigned to a similar fate as Kelley’s Castle, abandoned to the ravages of the jungle? A British scholar and professor of history, Dr. W. Lineham, went to Malaysia with the government service and decided to find out. He gave credence to the existence of the two cities mentioned in the Chinese chronicles and placed their location along the mighty Pahang River in central Malaysia. In a report he wrote, "I enlarge upon the importance of Chini as the starting point of a section of one of the ancient trans-peninsular routes to the west of the Peninsula. It is possible that the lake did not always exist in its present form and that it covers the site of an ancient town. I now write in hope that archaeological investigations will be carried out in the Chini region.”
His findings sparked off several investigations. Discoveries, made by J. N. McHugh in 1960 and 1961, provided conclusive evidence that there was a settlement of importance at Lake Chini. He found pieces of glazed stoneware "in the glutinous mud" around the lake. These were of Siamese origin and perhaps came from the Sawankhalok kilns. Other fragments with crude dragon-type designs were of the same origin and date back to the 14th and 15th Centuries. In addition, he found a 16th-Century Celadon bowl, Ming blue-and-white export ware and a few pieces of Dutch porcelain.
   A later expedition that received considerable publicity was undertaken by a Cambridge University group under the leadership of Stewart Wavell.
   My interest in the lost kingdom developed when I was exploring the upper reaches of the Endau River in search of a reported prehistoric carving of an elephant on a mountain top. Around our campfire at night, the orang asli, who were our guides, told tales of an aquatic monster which guarded an ancient city beneath a lake to the north. I was skeptical but curious. Back in Singapore I began delving into old records, unpublished manuscripts and endless rolls of microfilm. Most interesting to me were Stewart Wavell's accounts of his expedition to Lake Chini, the same lake mentioned by the orang asli who were my guides on the Endau.
   According to Wavell, his research into the old Chinese chronicles indicated that the kingdom of Langasuka was situated somewhere up one of the rivers in Malaysia. It was a walled city of great importance. I then checked the aerial maps of the region taken during the Emergency in 1950. One map was of the Lake Chini area. For all practical purposes, I could have been looking at a plan of Angkor Wat. Beneath the surface of the lake were squares, possibly walls or canals, a pattern of Khmer cities. I found another item. It was a report by a government surveyor who, while camped at the lake one night, swore he saw a Loch Ness-type aquatic monster come from the lake and escape into the reeds on the shore.
   Aside from possible dragons and aquatic monsters, and the criticism of skeptics, indications still pointed to the possible existence of a lost city at the bottom of Lake Chini.
   There was only one way to be certain; I had to find out for myself.  Next week you will find the answer when I take readers on the search.