Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is a vast temple complex near Siem Reap in north-western Cambodia, raised during the first half of the twelfth century by the Khmer king Suryavarman II, who dedicated it as a Hindu temple to Vishnu in his capital, Yashodharapura. Over the following centuries it became a Buddhist sanctuary, and unlike most of the monuments around it, it was never entirely deserted. Covering about 162.6 hectares, it is often called the world's largest religious structure, and its image has appeared on every version of the Cambodian flag since 1863.

Suryavarman II, who ruled the Khmer Empire from 1113 until about 1150, commissioned the temple as his state sanctuary. Work is reported to have started in 1122 and ended around 1150, and some relief carving was left unfinished at his death. Its original name is unknown, as no foundation inscription has been found, but it may have been called Vrah Vishnuloka, "the sacred dwelling of Vishnu". The design merges two Khmer forms, the temple-mountain and the galleried temple. A moat 190 metres wide and an outer wall surround three rising galleries crowned by five towers arranged like the five dots on a die, the central one standing 65 metres above the ground. Most scholars read the plan as a model of Mount Meru, home of the gods, with the moat as the encircling ocean.

The temple faces west, which is unusual for Angkor. George Coedès and Maurice Glaize argued that this marks it as Suryavarman's funerary temple, pointing also to reliefs that run anticlockwise, the order used in Hindu funeral rites; others explain the orientation simply by Vishnu's link with the west. The galleries carry almost 1,000 square metres of bas-reliefs, including scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, a royal procession and the Churning of the Sea of Milk, along with more than 1,796 carved female divinities. The sandstone came from Mount Kulen, perhaps by canal.

In 1178 Cham forces sacked Angkor. The Khmer king Jayavarman VII restored the empire, built a new capital at Angkor Thom with the Bayon as its state temple, and favoured Mahayana Buddhism. Angkor Wat was gradually converted, with many Hindu images replaced by Buddhist ones, and from the late thirteenth century it was chiefly a Theravada Buddhist site; the central shrine, once home to a statue of Vishnu, was walled in and decorated with standing Buddhas. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan was among the foreign visitors of this period. Defences added to the temple may reflect the rising threat from the Ayutthaya Kingdom, to which the Khmer Empire fell in 1431. Even so, the temple remained inhabited and its ponds maintained. Japanese Buddhist pilgrims, who took it for the Buddha's Jetavana monastery, left inscriptions in the seventeenth century, and the oldest surviving plan of the complex was drawn by a Japanese visitor around 1715.

Portuguese traders and missionaries reached the ruins in the sixteenth century; the Capuchin friar António da Madalena visited in 1586. Wider European fame came after the French naturalist Henri Mouhot travelled there in 1860, his notes appearing after his death in 1864. France made Cambodia a protectorate in 1863, later part of French Indochina, and in 1907 Siam returned the Siem Reap region, which it had held since 1795. The École française d'Extrême-Orient set up the Conservation d'Angkor in 1908, clearing the forest and restoring the temple until the early 1970s, while full-size replicas were shown at colonial exhibitions in France.

The civil war and Khmer Rouge rule halted this work, and in 1975 the Conservation d'Angkor was dissolved. Soldiers burned remaining woodwork, fighting left bullet marks in some reliefs, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s art thieves cut away many sculptures. The Archaeological Survey of India restored the temple between 1986 and 1992, though its use of chemicals and cement, like earlier French methods, has been criticised. Angkor became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992 and was placed on the danger list until 2004. Cambodia created the APSARA authority to manage the area in 1995, and teams from France, Japan, India, Germany, China and other countries continue to work there. Visitor numbers grew from 7,650 in 1993 to about 2.6 million in 2018, raising concerns about graffiti, groundwater extraction and pressure on Siem Reap itself.