Angkor Wat

• 1. Introduction

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  Angkor Wat covers 162.6 hectares in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and it is the largest religious complex in the world. A depiction of the temple appears on the Cambodian national flag. More than 2.5 million visitors come to see it every year. Yet the monument raises puzzles that scholars still argue over. Who ordered it built, and for which god? What was it really for? And how did it escape the abandonment that overtook most temples around ancient Angkor?

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• 2. A King's Project

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  Suryavarman II began his reign over the Khmer Empire in 1113, and in 1122 work started on his state temple in the capital, Yaśodharapura, which is present-day Angkor. A man named Divākarapaṇḍita, who lived from 1040 to about 1120, is credited with suggesting the project. The temple honoured the Hindu god Vishnu, and its original religious imagery came from Hinduism. The main structure was finished by 1150, but the work ceased when the king died, and some of the bas-relief decoration was left unfinished.

  The name used today means City of Temples in Khmer. Angkor, meaning city or capital city, is a vernacular form of the word nokor, which comes from the Sanskrit and Pali nagara. Wat means temple grounds and derives from a Sanskrit and Pali word for enclosure. The builders' own name for the place is a mystery, because no foundation stela and no contemporary inscription mentioning the temple has been found. It may have been called Vrah Viṣṇuloka, meaning "the sacred dwelling of Vishnu", after its presiding deity. The same name might also mean "The king who has gone to the supreme world of Vishnu", a reference to Suryavarman II after his death.

  Historians often pictured Angkor Wat as a temple-city, yet modern analyses suggest it housed only between 3000 and 4300 residents.

  Five to ten million sandstone blocks went into the monument, each weighing at most 1.5 tons. By the 12th century, Khmer architects had grown confident with sandstone rather than brick or laterite. Most visible surfaces are Kulen sandstone, quarried at Mount Kulen about 25 miles to the northeast. Laterite was used for the outer wall and for hidden structural parts. Between the Kulen plateau and the Angkor plain lay four major quarry zones, used in phases. The Southern Foothill Belt supplied the early work because it was closest, and the Central Foothill Zone later supplied most of the construction.

  Getting the stone to the site was a feat of its own. One proposed route ran by canal toward Tonlé Sap lake, across the lake, and up the Siem Reap River against the current, about 90 km in all. In 2011 Etsuo Uchida and Ichita Shimoda of Waseda University in Tokyo spotted a shorter 35 km canal in satellite imagery. They believe the Khmer used that route instead. LIDAR scans have also shown that the temple sits on roughly 3 million cubic meters of fill.

  The binding agent that joined the blocks has still not been identified, though natural resins or slaked lime have been suggested. Experiments suggest that the labour force ran into the thousands, including many highly skilled artisans. Some of the carving skills they used were developed hundreds of years earlier, and artefacts dated to the seventh century show it, before the Khmer came to power.

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• 3. Mountain of the Gods

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  The moat around Angkor Wat is 190 m wide and more than 5 km in perimeter. It extends 1.5 km from east to west and 1.3 km from north to south. Inside it stands an outer wall measuring 1024 m by 802 m and 4.5 m high, set back behind a 30 m apron of open ground. Visitors cross by an earth bank on the east or by a sandstone causeway on the west. The western causeway is the main entrance, a later addition that may have replaced a wooden bridge.

  The western gopura, or gateway, is the largest of four, one at each cardinal point. It consists of three partially ruined towers, and the scholar Maurice Glaize noted that it both hides and echoes the form of the temple behind it. Two further entrances beside it are called the elephant gates, because they are large enough to admit those animals. Under the southern tower stands a statue known as Ta Reach, originally an eight-armed figure of Vishnu that may once have occupied the central shrine.

  The outer wall encloses 203 acres. This space was once occupied by people from the city and by the royal palace to the north. Those buildings were made of perishable materials, so only the outlines of some streets survive, mostly under vegetation. The enclosure was laid out on a grid of residential blocks, with mounds for houses and ponds for water storage, in the pattern of a basic Khmer hamlet.

  A 350 m causeway runs from the western gopura to the temple proper, lined with balustrades shaped like nagas, the mythical serpents. A library stands on each side, and a pond lies between each library and the temple. The ponds are later additions, as is the cruciform terrace guarded by lions where the causeway meets the central structure.

  The temple itself rises as three rectangular galleries, each higher than the last, toward a central tower. The two inner galleries each have four towers at their corners around a higher fifth. This pattern is called a quincunx, and it is believed to represent the peaks of Mount Meru, the home of the gods in Hindu mythology. The walls and the moat stand for the surrounding mountain ranges and ocean. The central tower rises 43 m above its base to reach 65 m above the ground, and unlike earlier temple mountains it towers over the four around it.

  The design carried meaning in its steps and its rooms. The steep stairways may represent the difficulty of climbing to the kingdom of the gods, and access grew more exclusive as one went up. Ordinary worshippers were admitted only to the lowest level. Eleanor Mannikka interprets the galleries as dedicated to the king, Brahma, the moon, and Vishnu. The second-level enclosure, measuring 100 m by 115 m, may originally have been flooded to evoke the ocean around Meru.

  The design also did practical work for the empire. Its dam and moats linked the temple to the Angkor water network and stored water between the monsoon and the dry season. In 1934 the conservator George Trouvé excavated the sand-and-water-filled pit beneath the central shrine. Robbers had already taken its treasure, but he still found a sacred foundation deposit of gold leaf.

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• 4. Walls That Tell Stories

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  Charles Higham has called the inner walls of the outer gallery "the greatest known linear arrangement of stone carving". Nearly 1,000 square meters of bas-relief cover the gallery wall, and the scenes mostly show episodes from the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Walking anti-clockwise from the north-west corner, the western gallery shows the Battle of Lanka, in which Rama defeats Ravana. It then shows the Kurukshetra War, in which the Kaurava and Pandava armies destroy one another.

  The southern gallery holds the only historical scene, a procession of Suryavarman II. Beside it the carvers set out the 32 hells and 37 heavens of Hinduism. On the eastern gallery is one of the most celebrated scenes, the Churning of the Sea of Milk. Under Vishnu's direction, 92 asuras and 88 devas use the serpent Vasuki to churn the sea. Mannikka counts only 91 asuras and explains the uneven numbers as the days from the winter solstice to the spring equinox and from the equinox to the summer solstice.

  Reliefs of Vishnu defeating asuras follow the churning scene, and they were a 16th-century addition. The northern gallery shows Krishna's victory over Bana. Elsewhere, surfaces, columns, lintels and roofs carry unicorns, griffins, winged dragons pulling chariots, and warriors following an elephant-mounted leader.

  More than 1,796 depictions of devatas are documented in the research inventory, along with small apsara images used as motifs on pillars and walls. Larger devata portraits appear at every level, from the entry pavilion to the tops of the high towers. In 1927 Sappho Marchal published a study cataloguing the variety of their hair, headdresses, garments, stance, jewellery and flowers. She concluded that these were based on real practices of the Angkor period.

  Angkor Wat gave its name to a whole architectural style, the classical phase of Khmer building. Its marks include ogival, redented towers shaped like lotus buds, half-galleries that broaden passageways, and cruciform terraces along the main axis. The statuary is considered conservative, more static and less graceful than earlier work. Glaize judged the whole to be "a work of power, unity, and style." The architect Jacques Dumarçay sees Chinese influence in the galleries that join at right angles to form courtyards.

  Much of the original finish is gone. Gilded stucco on the towers, gilding on some relief figures, and wooden ceiling panels and doors have been lost to looting and time. Holes in some walls suggest that bronze sheets once decorated them, prized in ancient times and prime targets for robbers.

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• 5. The Westward Puzzle

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  Maurice Glaize and George Coedès both hypothesized that Suryavarman II meant Angkor Wat to be his funerary temple. Most Khmer temples face east, but this one faces west. The bas-reliefs also proceed counter-clockwise, a direction called prasavya in Hindu terminology and the reverse of the normal order. Rituals in Brahminic funeral services likewise run in reverse.

  Charles Higham describes a container recovered from the central tower that may have been a funerary jar. Some have nominated the temple as the greatest expenditure of energy on the disposal of a corpse. Freeman and Jacques, however, point out that several other Angkor temples also depart from the usual eastern orientation. They suggest that the alignment reflects its dedication to Vishnu, who was associated with the west.

  The stars and sun may offer another layer. Lines of sight from terraces inside the temple show particular towers at the exact point of the sunrise at the solstice. Several studies observe that at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the rising sun lines up with the central tower when viewed from the western causeway. Scholars generally regard that alignment as intentional.

  Eleanor Mannikka goes further. Drawing on the alignment, the dimensions, and the arrangement of the reliefs, she argues that the structure proclaims a new era of peace under Suryavarman II. In her reading, the solar and lunar time cycles built into the sacred space anchored what she calls a "divine mandate to rule". Academic circles have received her ideas with a mixture of interest and scepticism. She distances herself from Graham Hancock's speculation that the temple represents part of the constellation Draco.

  Some scholars add that the unusual westward orientation may have made later Buddhist reinterpretation easier, rather than reflecting the temple's original function. The oldest surviving plan of Angkor Wat dates to 1715 and is credited to Fujiwara Tadayoshi. It is kept in the Suifu Meitoku-kai Shokokan Museum in Mito, Japan.

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• 6. From Vishnu to Buddha

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  In 1177, about 27 years after the death of Suryavarman II, the Chams sacked Angkor. They were the traditional enemies of the Khmer. Jayavarman VII then restored the empire and founded a new capital at Angkor Thom, with the Bayon as its state temple to the north. His wife Indradevi, a devout Mahayana Buddhist, encouraged him to convert. Angkor Wat was gradually turned into a Buddhist site, and many Hindu sculptures were replaced by Buddhist art.

  The central shrine shows the change most clearly. It once held a statue of Vishnu and stood open on every side. When the temple became Theravada Buddhist, the shrine was walled in, and the new walls bear standing Buddhas.

  In the cruciform cloister called Preah Poan, "The Thousand Buddhas" gallery, pilgrims left Buddha images over the centuries, though most have been removed. The cloister carries many inscriptions about the good deeds of pilgrims. Most are in Khmer, but some are in Burmese and Japanese.

  The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan and the traveller Zheng He are recorded as visiting between the 13th and 14th centuries. Zheng He studied the temple architecture, which was later incorporated into the Dabaoen Temple and Glazed Pagoda. Archaeologists have also theorized that the temple served as a fortification in this period. Blocked gateways and holes in the outer wall hint at a defensive structure, possibly built in response to the threat from the Ayutthaya Empire.

  The Khmer fell to Ayutthaya in 1431, yet Angkor Wat continued to be inhabited, and dating shows regular maintenance of its ponds. It was largely neglected after the 16th century but never completely abandoned, which is unusual among the Angkor temples. Fourteen inscriptions from the 17th century describe Japanese Buddhist pilgrims who set up small settlements beside Khmer locals. One inscription tells of Ukondayu Kazufusa, who celebrated the Khmer New Year at Angkor Wat in 1632. Findings also suggest that several towers were demolished in the mid 1600s.

  Those pilgrims gave the place a new identity. In the 17th century Japanese visitors identified Angkor Wat as Jetavana, the monastic garden associated with the Buddha in ancient Magadha, in present-day India. Surviving Japanese inscriptions and maps depict it as a Buddhist holy site, and some accounts describe the Buddha visiting or living there.

  Cambodian folklore adds its own layers. Local traditions describe the temple as a place of merit-making, meditation and spiritual ascent, sometimes called a gateway between human and divine realms. Other myths claim that the bas-reliefs encode hidden Buddhist teachings, even though they show Hindu epics. By the 18th and 19th centuries, a Buddhist monastic presence was continuous, and myths of that period portray the temple as a working monastery guarded by nāgas and devas.

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• 7. Lost and Found Again

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  António da Madalena, a Capuchin friar, explored the ruins in 1586, and three years later he described them to Diogo do Couto, the official historian of the Portuguese Indies. Do Couto wrote that the temple was "like no other building in the world". He recorded a moat, a single bridge guarded by two stone tigers, and gilded towers. Portuguese traders and missionaries had come upon a vast stone city in the northern Cambodian forests that seemed to have been abandoned for over 150 years.

  In 1860 the French naturalist and explorer Henri Mouhot effectively rediscovered the temple, with the help of the French missionary Father Charles-Émile Bouillevaux. Mouhot brought the site to Western readers through his travel notes. He wrote that a temple like this one might stand beside the finest buildings in the West and was "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome". The Royal Geographical Society published his work after his death, in 1864, as Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China, Siam, Cambodia and Laos.

  The German anthropologist Adolf Bastian began a four-year trip through Southeast Asia in 1861. His account, The People of East Asia, ran to six volumes and appeared in 1868. It described the Angkor monuments but lacked drawings of them.

  France adopted Cambodia as a protectorate on the 11th of August 1863, partly because of the artistic legacy of Angkor Wat and other Khmer monuments. Siem Reap, where the temple stands, had been under Siamese rule from 1795 to 1907. The first version of the Cambodian flag in 1863 already carried a depiction of the temple.

  French colonial heritage-making did much to turn the temple into a national emblem. Between 1889 and 1937, the pavilion of the French protectorate of Cambodia recreated a life-size replica of Angkor Wat for colonial and universal exhibitions in Paris and Marseille. Casts of Khmer sculpture were also displayed in Louis Delaporte's musée Indo-chinois in the Trocadero Palace in Paris, which existed from about 1880 to the mid-1920s.

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• 8. War, Theft, and Repair

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  The École française d'Extrême-Orient established the Conservation d'Angkor in 1908 to clear plant overgrowth and restore the temple. It handled research, conservation and restoration at Angkor until the early 1970s, with major works in the 1960s. Cambodia gained independence from France on the 9th of November 1953 and has controlled Angkor Wat ever since.

  The Khmer Rouge took control of the country in the 1970s, and work on Angkor was abandoned. The Conservation d'Angkor was disbanded in 1975. Khmer Rouge forces camping in the temple burned whatever wood remained in the structures as firewood. A shoot-out between Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces left a few bullet holes in the bas-reliefs. War damage at Angkor Wat was limited compared with the rest of Cambodia's temple ruins.

  Far worse harm came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when art thieves working out of Cambodia lopped off many sculptures and other structures, including earlier reconstructions. Between 1986 and 1992, the Archaeological Survey of India carried out restoration because France did not recognise the Cambodian government at the time. Both that work and the earlier French attempts have drawn criticism for the chemicals and cement used on the stone surface.

  In 1992 the site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and simultaneously placed on the World Heritage in Danger list, after Norodom Sihanouk appealed for help. It was removed from that list in 2004. The International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor was established in 1993 under UNESCO. Zoning to protect the area followed in 1994, the APSARA authority was created in 1995, and a law protecting Cambodian heritage passed in 1996. Contributors have included France, Japan, India, Germany, the United States, South Korea, China and Italy.

  The German Apsara Conservation Project was launched to protect the devatas and other reliefs. Its survey found that around 20% of the reliefs were in very poor condition, mainly from natural erosion but partly from earlier restoration. Microbial biofilms have also degraded the sandstone. In 2002 the west facade of the upper level was buttressed with scaffolding. A Japanese team completed the restoration of the north library of the outer enclosure in 2005, and replicas have replaced some lost sculptures.

  In December 2015 a University of Sydney research team announced a previously unseen set of buried towers that had been built and demolished during construction. They also found a massive structure with wooden fortifications, of unknown purpose, on the south side. Evidence of low-density residential occupation, a road grid, ponds and mounds suggested that the precinct may not have been reserved for the priestly elite.

  The crowds are now both the funding and the threat. In 1993 only 7,650 people visited the site. By 2004 government figures counted 561,000 foreign visitors to Siem Reap province, about 50% of all foreign tourists in Cambodia. The total passed a million in 2007 and two million by 2012, and it reached 2.6 million in 2018. SOKIMEX managed the site from 1990 to 2016, renting it from the Cambodian government.

  Tourists have left graffiti on the walls, so ropes and wooden steps now protect the bas-reliefs and floors. As of 2000, approximately 28% of ticket revenue across the entire Angkor site went to the temples, and foreign government teams carry out most of the work. In 2001 the concept of an "Angkor Tourist City" emerged, with hotels built around traditional Khmer architecture. APSARA and the ICC worried that earlier developments had ignored building regulations. They also noted strain on the town's water, sewage and electricity, and on the underground water table, which affects the stability of the temples. At the ASEAN Tourism Forum in 2012, Borobudur and Angkor Wat were named sister sites.

  In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic left the usually crowded complex almost deserted. Only 280,000 tourists visited in 2022, against 2.6 million in 2018, and by late July 2023 the count had passed 400,000. In mid-2024, tourists reenacting the game series Temple Run for social media drew criticism from conservationists. They warned that the stunts risk damaging the structures and carvings and are culturally insensitive.

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