Angkor Thom

• 1. Introduction

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  Angkor Thom sits at the center of one of the great puzzles of Southeast Asia: how does a city sustaining between 80,000 and 150,000 people simply disappear into the jungle? The name means "Great City" in both Khmer and its Sanskrit roots, and by any measure the name fits. Established in the late twelfth century by King Jayavarman VII as the capital of the Khmer Empire, it would prove to be that empire's last and most enduring seat of power. One inscription found within the city described Jayavarman himself as the groom and the city as his bride. That image of intimate ownership tells us something about what Angkor Thom meant to the Khmers. The city enclosed a full 9 square kilometers, its laterite walls rising 8 meters high and flanked on all sides by a moat. By the time a western visitor arrived in 1609, those walls enclosed nothing but silence. He described an uninhabited city "as fantastic as the Atlantis of Plato." What happened inside those walls, and why the city was abandoned, is a story that reaches from myth to invasion to the slow encroachment of forest.

• 2. A City Built on Older Ground

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  Yasodharapura came first. Angkor Thom was not the original Khmer capital on this ground; an earlier city by that name, dating from three centuries before Jayavarman VII, was centered slightly further to the northwest, and the later city overlapped portions of it. Two of the most notable temples standing inside Angkor Thom's walls, Baphuon and Phimeanakas, belong to that earlier era. Phimeanakas was incorporated directly into the Royal Palace rather than torn down. The Khmers themselves drew no sharp boundary between the old city and the new one. As late as the 14th century, an inscription used the older name Yasodharapura to refer to the site, not the name Angkor Thom. The name Angkor Thom, the "great city" label we use today, only came into documented use from the 16th century onward. Jayavarman's building program was massive, but it was also additive rather than erasive. He built his state temple, the Bayon, at the dead center of the city, and clustered his major new monuments around Victory Square to the north of it. The last temple known to have been constructed within the city was Mangalartha, dedicated in 1295. After that date, the existing structures were modified from time to time, but new buildings went up in perishable materials and none of them survived.

• 3. Walls, Gates, and Sacred Geometry

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  Each of the city's four outer walls runs exactly 3 kilometers long. The walls are built of laterite reinforced with earthen buttressing, topped with a parapet, and they sit about 0.25 miles from the west bank of the Siem Reap River, itself a tributary of Tonle Sap. Roads run from a gate at each cardinal point straight to the Bayon at the city's center. Archaeologists interpret the walls and surrounding moat not merely as fortification but as cosmology: because the Bayon has no wall or moat of its own, the city's outer defenses are read as representing the ocean and mountain ranges that surround the sacred Mount Meru at the center of the Hindu universe. A fifth gate, the Victory Gate, stands 500 meters north of the east gate; a road called the Victory Way runs from it parallel to the main east road, leading to Victory Square and the Royal Palace beyond. The towers at each gate rise to 23 meters and bear large carved faces. Those faces have puzzled scholars for generations. They may depict Jayavarman VII himself, or the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, or cardinal guardians of the empire's four directions, or some layered combination of all three. A causeway crosses the moat in front of each tower, lined on one side with rows of devas and on the other with rows of asuras, each row gripping a giant naga in a pose that mirrors a tug-of-war. This scene echoes the myth, widespread in Angkor, of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, with the Bayon or the gate itself serving as the churning pivot. At each of the city's four corners stood a sandstone corner shrine called a Prasat Chrung, each cruciform in plan and oriented east toward Avalokiteshvara.

• 4. Life Inside the Walls

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  Water moved through Angkor Thom by design. A network of canals directed flow from the northeast to the southwest, and the bulk of the land inside the walls would have been occupied by the secular buildings of daily civic life. None of those buildings remain. Wood and thatch and other perishable materials leave nothing behind for archaeologists, and the area those buildings once occupied is now covered by forest. What does remain in stone is a visual encyclopedia of the world the Khmers inhabited. Most of the great Angkor ruins carry vast bas-relief panels showing gods, goddesses, and mythological creatures from Hindu epic traditions alongside recognizable animals: elephants, snakes, fish, monkeys. But among the ruins of Ta Prohm, near a large stone entrance, the roundels on pilasters on the south side of the west entrance are described as unusual in design. Instead of mythological figures, these roundels show the animals that people actually encountered: pigs, monkeys, water buffaloes, roosters, and snakes. The absence of any supernatural imagery in that particular carving suggests those roundels recorded the everyday fauna of twelfth-century Khmer life. Angkor Thom's location also placed it in relation to the wider Angkor landscape. The south gate sits 7.2 kilometers north of the modern city of Siem Reap and 1.7 kilometers north of the entrance to Angkor Wat. Today the south gate is by far the most visited entry point for tourists.

• 5. Fall and Abandonment

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  The Ayutthaya Kingdom delivered the decisive blow. King Borommarachathirat II led the Ayutthayan forces that sacked Angkor Thom, forcing the Khmer king Ponhea Yat to relocate the capital to the southeast, at Phnom Penh. That exodus did not immediately empty the city, but the trajectory was set. The Poem of Angkor Wat, composed in Khmer verse in 1622, still described the beauty of Angkor Thom, suggesting some living memory or attachment persisted into the early seventeenth century. But by 1609, a western visitor had already found the city uninhabited, comparing it to the mythical lost city in Plato's Atlantis. The population that had once filled those 9 square kilometers, estimated at between 80,000 and 150,000 people, was gone. The secular buildings had vanished with them, leaving only stone temples and walls. The forest moved in and reclaimed the ground that water canals and palace courtyards had once organized. Angkor Thom did not collapse in a single catastrophe but faded across generations, its last stone construction completed in 1295 and its last inhabitants departing sometime before that western traveler arrived to find silence where a great city had been.

• 6. Angkor Thom in Memory and Culture

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  The Angkor complex received a brief mention in the 1933 film King Kong, evidence that it had lodged in Western cultural imagination even before modern tourism opened the site to mass visitation. The 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sent characters into Angkor Thom to recover the first piece of the Triangle of Light. James Rollins included Angkor Thom as a destination in his 2007 SIGMA Force novel The Judas Strain, where characters tracking Marco Polo's route are drawn to the site as part of a search for a plague cure. Peter Bourne's novel The Golden Pagans, published around 1956, imagined Crusade-era prisoners building a portion of what would become Angkor Thom. In an October 1993 interview with the film's director Mamoru Oshii for Animage magazine, the animator Hayao Miyazaki said the opening scene of Patlabor the Movie 2 was based on Angkor Thom. The site also appears as a place in the video game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, as the third city of the Khmer Empire in Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, and as the location of a Pit Stop in the tenth episode of The Amazing Race 32. The south gate of Angkor Thom, the most visited of the five gateways today, stands as a tourist landmark about 30 minutes from the center of modern Siem Reap, with the 23-meter face towers that still pose the same unresolved questions they did when the first scholars encountered them.