Prologue Three: Ancient Cambodia Angkor, circa 1295   A young Chinese diplomat named Zhou Dagnan had a life destined to pass unremarkably as a footnote in history, but this idea quickly evaporated in the thirteenth century, when he boarded a great junk leaving south-eastern China. He sailed down the two thousand kilometres of coastline of what was to become Vietnam, turned up the mighty Mekong Delta and followed its Tonle Sap river tributary heading up into Cambodia’s heart. Here he found