The Water-world of Kompong Phluk, is a tiny village at the mouth of the Roulos River, whose waters gave birth to the Khmer empire of Angkor more than 1,000 years ago. There is no sign of that ancient glory in this poor village, where palm-leaf houses rise above the surface on 30-foot stilts, pigs and crocodiles lounge in floating pens and quavering Cambodian melodies ripple from radios across the Tonle Sap lake.
During the wet season, the lake expands to more than double its dry-season surface area, submerging farms and forests. When it drains in summer, fish course down the river by the millions, and villagers abandon their tall stilt houses to pursue its receding banks to new fishing grounds. At its largest during the midyear monsoon, the lake is 30 feet deep and covers more than 4,500 square miles. In the opposite season it shrinks to less than 1,100 square miles and the water that remains is just waist-high.
In the 5,000 years since it was abandoned by a drying ocean, the lake has given birth to a complex, self-contained world in which rivers, plants, wildlife and human beings sustain each other through the changes. It is the Mekong, flowing south from China, that feeds the life cycle of the lake. Roaring with floodwaters during the rainy season, it meets Tonle Sap River that drains the lake, just as they both reach the capital, Phnom Penh.
In southern China, ambitious plans are under way to transform the landscape by damming the Mekong and its tributaries. No one can say exactly what will happen then downstream. But the annual floods and the regular rise and fall of the lake here will be affected, threatening its finely tuned environment. Most of Cambodia's protein comes from the fish of Tonle Sap and more than a million people make their livings directly from the lake.