Angkorអង្គរ

Khmer history is usually dated from 802, when Jayavarman II had himself consecrated universal ruler on the Kulen hills north of Siem Reap, breaking with Java's overlordship. Earlier kingdoms, known to Chinese chroniclers as Funan and Chenla, had already built brick temples along the Mekong; Angkor was the region where the new dynasty settled for the next six centuries.

The first great building phase came under Indravarman I at Hariharalaya, today's Roluos group, in the 870s. His son Yasovarman I moved the centre north around the hill of Phnom Bakheng around 900 and created the first Yasodharapura. Kings after him added state temples on the flat plain, each a new centre for the realm, and a short-lived break took the court to Koh Ker in the 920s–940s.

Suryavarman II (ruled about 1113–1150) built Angkor Wat, dedicated to Vishnu and probably meant as his own funerary temple. A generation later the Cham sacked Angkor in 1177. Jayavarman VII drove them out, made Mahayana Buddhism the state religion, and built at a pace no earlier king matched: the walled city of Angkor Thom with the Bayon at its centre, Ta Prohm for his mother, Preah Khan for his father, plus hospitals and rest houses along the roads.

After Jayavarman VII the building slowed. A Hindu reaction defaced many Buddha images in the 13th century, and Theravada Buddhism, a simpler monastic form, spread among the people. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who spent about a year here in 1296–97, still described a rich city. Ayutthaya's armies took Angkor in 1431, the traditional end date, and the court moved south towards Phnom Penh; the temples were never fully abandoned, and Angkor Wat stayed a Buddhist pilgrimage site.

A Khmer state temple is a model of the universe. The central tower stands for Mount Meru, home of the gods; the lower towers are its surrounding peaks; the walls are the mountain ranges at the edge of the world; the moat is the ocean. Climbing towards the centre means climbing towards the gods, which is why the stairs get steeper and the spaces smaller as you rise.

Two plans recur. The temple mountain stacks terraces into a pyramid, as at Bakong, Pre Rup, Ta Keo and Angkor Wat. The flat temple spreads out in concentric enclosures linked by long galleries, as at Ta Prohm and Preah Khan. Builders used laterite for foundations and cores and sandstone for facing and carving, quarried at Phnom Kulen and floated or dragged some 40–50 km; they did not use true arches, so corridors are narrow and roofs corbelled.

Angkor Wat faces west, unusual for a Khmer temple and often read as a link to Vishnu or to death. Its outer galleries carry about 800 m of bas-reliefs: the battle of Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata, Suryavarman II's army on parade, heavens and hells, and the Churning of the Sea of Milk, in which gods and demons pull the serpent Vasuki around Mount Mandara to churn the elixir of immortality from the ocean.

The same myth reappears in stone across the park. The causeways into Angkor Thom are lined with gods on one side and demons on the other, each row holding a giant naga. Inside, the Bayon's towers carry more than 200 large faces, usually identified with the bodhisattva Lokeshvara and perhaps with the king himself. Its outer galleries swap myth for daily life: markets, cockfights, childbirth and the naval war with the Cham on the Tonlé Sap.

Angkor's landscape is shaped by water. The West Baray, a reservoir about 8 km by 2 km, and the now-dry East Baray were dug in the 11th century; canals, embankments and moats tied them to the Siem Reap river and the rice fields to the south. In the 1950s–70s the French scholar Bernard-Philippe Groslier argued that this network irrigated the fields that fed the city, and that its failure explained Angkor's decline.

Others doubted the barays were irrigation at all, seeing them as religious symbols of the ocean around Meru. The debate moved on when airborne lidar surveys, from 2012 and on a larger scale in 2015, mapped the ground under the forest. They showed a low-density urban sprawl of house mounds, roads, ponds and field grids stretching across roughly 1,000 km², one of the largest pre-industrial settlements known.

Tree-ring studies from the region add a climate chapter: decades of weak monsoons in the mid-14th century were followed by extreme floods in the early 15th, which could have wrecked canals already choked with sediment. Most researchers now describe a slow shift rather than a sudden fall: trade moved to the Mekong and the sea, the court moved south after 1431, and people kept farming around the temples.

You can still see the system at work. The West Baray holds water most of the year and is a local weekend swimming spot. The Angkor Wat moat is maintained as it was designed, and its level affects the temple's sandstone foundations, which is one reason the site authority manages it closely.

Angkor was never lost to Cambodians; monks lived at Angkor Wat, and 16th-century Portuguese and Spanish visitors described it. Europe's romantic picture of a city found in the jungle comes from Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist whose travel notes were published after his death in 1861 and widely read in France.

After France took the region from Siam in 1907, the École française d'Extrême-Orient set up the Conservation d'Angkor and began clearing vegetation. From the 1930s it used anastylosis, dismantling a structure and rebuilding it with its original stones, first at Banteay Srei. Ta Prohm was deliberately left with its trees as a picture of how the temples looked when found.

War stopped most work from the early 1970s. The Khmer Rouge and the fighting that followed left the park mined in places, and looting fed the art market through the 1980s and 1990s. Restoration resumed in the early 1990s with international teams from France, Japan, Germany, India, the United States, China and others, coordinated by an international committee from 1993.

UNESCO inscribed Angkor on the World Heritage List in 1992 and placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger the same year because of looting, mines and lack of management. Cambodia set up the APSARA authority in 1995 to run the park, and Angkor came off the danger list in 2004. The pressure now is tourism itself: millions of footsteps, groundwater use by the city, and the traffic of tuk-tuks, which is why some stairs, levels and viewpoints are limited.