A Scroll Carried by Wind
“I came by sea, but the wind knew more than I did.”
— Zhou Daguan (revoiced)
When the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan arrived at Angkor in the late thirteenth century, he did not come seeking legend. He came with a royal charge—to observe, to record, and to return to the Yuan court with a faithful account of a distant land known as Zhenla.
He came by ship. He was received by strangers. He crossed rivers wide as forgetting, followed roads that disappeared into jungle, and entered a city without walls.
And what he found there astonished him.
He found women who wore gold but not shame. Markets that closed at moonrise. Kings who moved like shadows and stone towers that breathed incense. He found spirit-houses, silence, and a way of living that slipped between the lines of what he had been taught to see.
He wrote what he saw—but not always what he felt. That feeling now returns in this revoicing.
The Wind That Carried Me to Zhenla is a poetic resurrection of Zhou Daguan’s journey—told entirely in his imagined voice, with reverence, beauty, and quiet wonder. It is not a literal translation. It is a scroll rebreathed. A remembering. A way to walk once more through the temples and courtyards of Angkor, not as a historian or tourist, but as a witness guided by wind.
Each chapter in this series offers a standalone meditation drawn from Zhou’s original record—recast as refined poetic prose and accompanied by red-and-black chalk illustrations. These writings form both a digital offering and a printed volume: a companion for pilgrims of stone and seekers of spirit.
If you have ever walked the sacred paths of Angkor and wondered what once was seen there, may these scrolls open gently in your hands.
Begin where you like. The wind carries all things.
Also in Library
The Silence of Scales
A staircase inhales, and silence thickens between stone scales. Each step remembers serpents once carved, pearl-light gathering in its breath. In this luminous flash gem, a traveller climbs toward hush and revelation, where silence itself becomes flame. A tale brief as an exhalation, yet lingering like pearl-light beneath moss.
The Crocodile and the Moon Eel: A Tide-Bargain
A crocodile waits in hush where river bends to moonlight. From the silt, a pearl-lit eel rises, whispering a bargain of scale and tide. What is given is never returned whole: hunger meets silence, storm keeps watch, and the river writes its law in breath.
Field Note: Blue Hour at Angkor
The blue hour settles over Angkor like a hush in stone. Naga coils dissolve into shadow, carvings soften into silence, and hunger without teeth endures. A sketch becomes listening. Each fracture is a hymn, each hollow a river. A field note on patience, memory, and the stillness that lingers.
