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
Hands of the Sculptor — The Craft as Meditation
In the hush of the galleries, the sculptor listens rather than strikes.
Each breath, each measured blow, opens silence a little further.
Unfinished reliefs reveal the moment when mastery becomes meditation—
when patience itself is carved into being,
and the dust that falls at a mason’s feet becomes the residue of prayer.
The Asura Within
At the gates of Angkor Thom, gods and demons share a single serpent.
Across this bridge of struggle the pilgrim learns that the asura is not evil but unfinished — the restless force within each of us still grasping for light.
To cross the naga is to balance passion with compassion, struggle with stillness, shadow with dawn.
Garuda and the Serpent · Flight and Surrender
Between Garuda’s wings and the Nāga’s coils, Angkor breathes its oldest truth: flight and surrender are one motion. In the carvings where sky and water entwine, the pilgrim learns that freedom depends upon gravity, and that stillness itself is a kind of flight.
