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83 earth. It compresses the earth and sand, and is an advanced version of the temple building technique. Roads having a width of 3 to 5 meters and heights of around 2 meters were built all over the territory from the 10th to 12th centuries. They inter-linked the local cities, starting with the five major archaeological sites. Stone bridges were also built in accordance with the terrain, and even in the rainy season when the environs were submerged in water, it was an all-weather road whereby ox carts could steadily pass. The existence of this road was fictionally referred to in the novel “The Royal Way” (A. Malraux’s grave robbery novel, published in 1930), but it was known in an incomplete manner. We clarified the fact that beginning with the survey of the five major sites of our research team, there have been large and small routes with a total length of several thousand kilometers, from the coast of the South China Sea in the east in Vietnam, to the west to the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Myanmar. We did indeed grasp the historical truth of that time, namely that “all roads led to Angkor.” As research and enquiry progressed on the five huge archaeological sites in the rural areas, and topographical analysis using satellite images advanced in the 1990s, the all-weather embankment rammed-earth road that was built by kings during the Angkor era (where some parts had stone bridges), was confirmed. Ox cart caravans travelled back and forth along this road, linking the Angkor castle town and the five archaeological sites, and port cities of both the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea were confirmed on the extension of these five archaeological sites. The “Ayutthaya Dynasty Chronicles” of a later period state that there existed a special village along the highway, wherein cows of the ox cart caravan were fed with forage, and it states also that at the same time the toll tax was levied. At the time of its zenith the territory of the Angkor dynasty covered the entire continent of Southeast Asia. Sukhothai in central Thailand lay about 650 kilometers

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