Angkor Wat

Almost every temple the Khmer ever built faces east, towards the sunrise. Angkor Wat faces west. Walk in through the main causeway and you are approaching from the direction of sunset, the direction that Hindu tradition associates with death, and you are doing it across a moat that is 190 metres wide and runs for more than five kilometres around the whole complex. Scholars have argued over that orientation for a century. The most common reading is that the temple was built to be two things at once: a house for the god Vishnu and a tomb for the man who paid for it. Some of the bas-reliefs inside are meant to be read counter-clockwise, which is the order of a Hindu funeral rite.

A Model Of The Universe, In Sandstone

The man was Suryavarman II, who seized the Khmer throne by force in the early 1100s and spent the first half of the century turning his capital into the centre of an empire. Angkor Wat was his statement. The outer walls enclose roughly 1.5 by 1.3 kilometres; the five towers stand for the five peaks of Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of Hindu cosmology, and the moat is the ocean that surrounds it.

The sandstone came from quarries at Mount Kulen, about fifty kilometres to the north. For a long time nobody could explain how so much stone was moved so far, until researchers tracing satellite images in 2012 found the remains of a canal network running from the quarries towards Angkor. Much of the temple, it seems, arrived by water. Inside, the gallery walls carry hundreds of metres of continuous carved relief: battles from the Mahabharata, the king reviewing his army, the torments of hell and, most famously, the Churning of the Sea of Milk, in which gods and demons pull on a giant serpent to extract the elixir of immortality from the ocean.

The City Left; The Temple Stayed

The Khmer capital remained at Angkor for generations after Suryavarman's death. A Chinese envoy, Zhou Daguan, spent about a year there at the end of the thirteenth century and left the only eyewitness account of the city in its prime. But the empire was shifting beneath him. Theravada Buddhism spread through the population, and a temple built for Vishnu became, by the fourteenth century, a Buddhist one. In 1431 an army from Ayutthaya sacked the city, and the court moved south towards Phnom Penh.

Here is where Angkor Wat's story separates from the rest of Angkor. The other temples were surrendered to the forest; this one never was. Monks went on living inside the walls, pilgrims kept coming, and the moat held the trees back. A Portuguese friar, António da Madalena, saw it in 1586 and wrote that it was beyond anything a pen could describe. The account that actually caught Europe's attention came later, from the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited in 1860 and died in Laos the following year; his journals, published after his death, helped feed France's colonial appetite for the region.

The twentieth century came closest to destroying it. Under the Khmer Rouge, between 1975 and 1979, the country was sealed off; the temple itself escaped major damage, though there are bullet marks on some walls, and in the years of civil war that followed, statues were beheaded and the heads sold to dealers abroad. Many of the figures at Angkor still stand headless.

The Paintings Nobody Saw

In 2010, an Australian archaeologist named Noel Hidalgo Tan was photographing the inner galleries when he noticed faint red smudges on some of the walls. To the naked eye they were nothing. Run through a digital enhancement technique developed for rock art, they resolved into pictures: elephants, lions, boats, musicians, a sketch of the temple itself. Around two hundred hidden paintings, on the walls of one of the most visited buildings in the world, that nobody had looked at in centuries. Tan's study suggested they date mostly from the sixteenth century, when the temple was being restored as a Buddhist pilgrimage site.

Angkor Wat also appears on the flag of Cambodia and has done so, through monarchy, republic, the Khmer Rouge and the present kingdom, in one form or another since the nineteenth century.

Today

The Angkor Archaeological Park is managed by the APSARA National Authority, a Cambodian state body. UNESCO listed the site in 1992, put it on the danger list the same day, and took it off in 2004. The most serious current threat is one you cannot photograph. The temple rests on a sand foundation that the moat keeps saturated and stable, and the hotel boom in nearby Siem Reap has been pumping groundwater out of the same aquifer for years; engineers have warned that a falling water table could let the sand settle and the stones crack. The ocean that Suryavarman built around his mountain is now the thing holding it up.