Is there a lost Khmer city in Pahang?

First the lost city of Johor, now the lost city of Pahang? The existence of seven pyramid-like hills near Lake Chini is believed to be the remains of a lost city – but could this city be part of the Khmer empire? And if so, what was it doing so far south?

Lost city of the Khmer empire?
New Straits Times, 10 December 2007

The key point in linking the lost city (if there is one) is this:

Although many people have made claims of a sunken city, little effort has been made to unravel the mystery. Based on pieces of porcelain found in the area, the city could have been built when the Khmer empire was at the height of its power.

That’s not very much to go by, I think. So what if you find Khmer ceramics in the region? It doesn’t prove the ethnicity of the previous inhabitants. If we did, we should be able to state that the Chinese were living all over Southeast Asia based on the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasty types we find -quite literally- all over the place.

More likely, the presence of exotic ceramics would imply some sort of interaction with outside civilisations, likely to be in the form of trade and commerce. Unfortunately, the NST article doesn’t state much on what kind of ceramics they were so we don’t have narrower date scale.

Perhaps there could be a lost city, but I highly doubt that it was Khmer. Remember also that while we know a great deal of the classical civilisations in Southeast Asia – about 8th-15th century AD – relatively less is know about the same period in Peninsular Malaysia.

Read about the alleged lost city of the Khmers here.

Related books:
– Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula by P. M. Munoz
– Udaya Journal of Khmer Studies, Issue No. 1: Khmer Ceramics
– Khmer Ceramics (Oxford in Asia Studies in Ceramics) by D. Rooney
– Early History (The Encyclopedia of Malaysia) by Nik Hassan Shuhaimi Nik Abdul Rahman (Ed)
– Khmer ceramics, 9th-14th century by the Southeast Asian Ceramics Society