Angkor Wat at dawn

The largest temple in the world

Angkor Wat was built in the early twelfth century, between roughly 1122 and 1150, as the state temple of the Khmer king Suryavarman II. It remains the largest religious monument ever constructed: about 160 hectares within its moat.

Its form is a model of the Hindu cosmos: a stepped temple-mountain standing for Mount Meru, home of the gods, ringed by a moat standing for the cosmic ocean. The five towers are its peaks. The whole is oriented to the west, unusual for Khmer temples and one reason it is often linked to Vishnu and to funerary symbolism.

From Vishnu to Buddha

The temple was dedicated to Vishnu, but the Khmer Empire's faith shifted, and by the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries Angkor Wat was a Buddhist sanctuary.

That continuity is why it survived so well. While the surrounding city of Angkor was abandoned to the forest after the fifteenth century, Angkor Wat was never wholly deserted; Buddhist monks kept it in use, and it remained a living pilgrimage site through the centuries when European visitors "rediscovered" it and assumed, wrongly, that such a thing could not have been built by the ancestors of the people living around it.

The carvings and the moat

The outer galleries carry more than half a kilometre of continuous bas-relief: the Churning of the Sea of Milk, scenes from the Hindu epics, and Suryavarman II's own army on the march.

The moat is not only symbolic. It is part of a vast hydraulic landscape of reservoirs and canals that fed Angkor, one of the largest pre-industrial cities in the world. Today the temple is the emblem on Cambodia's flag and one of the most visited monuments in Asia, and the crowds that gather before sunrise to watch the towers blacken against a reddening sky are doing something pilgrims have done here for nine centuries.