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The Temples of Angkor: The ancient city of Cambodia’s Khmer God-kings is now one of the world’s hottest travel destinations

By Jack Souther

You have a choice Bunat told us as our van pulled into a busy local market at the base of Phnom Bakheng. “You can either hire an elephant or walk.” Betty and Heather chose the elephant, I elected to walk — a long sweaty climb that left me doubting the wisdom of my choice. The elephant docked near the top shortly after I arrived and the two women, still fresh and raring to go, led the way up a series of incredibly steep stone steps to the third terrace of the summit temple where we settled down on a comfortable west-facing ledge and waited for the sun to set.

Below us, about a kilometre to the southeast, the cone-shaped towers of Angkor Wat rise high above the forest, and still farther south the town of Siem Reap is barely visible in the distance. To the north the Bayon with its multitude of towers and giant stone faces resembles a small, many-pinnacled mountain at the very centre of Angkor Tom. And off to the west the waters of West Baray reflect the first blush of the setting sun. Bunat points out a few other temples but most of Angkor’s ancient structures are hidden beneath the jungle canopy. “A thousand years ago” he tells us, “when Angkor was the capital of Cambodia’s vast Khmer Empire, more than a million people lived here. Their wooden houses disappeared long ago. Only the stone monuments dedicated to their Gods have survived.”

No one knows exactly when or why the god-kings and their subjects abandoned the great city of Angkor or when the pilgrims and holy men, who briefly occupied it later, also departed. What is known — the temples of Angkor lay empty, at the mercy of the encroaching jungle for centuries — until they were “rediscovered” by French explorer Henri Mouhot in 1860. But though the decline of Angkor is shrouded in mystery and speculation its rise to power and long period of glory is not. Each of Angkor’s all-powerful rulers made sure that his achievements — his wars, his public works, his gods — were duly recorded in stone. The history of Angkor, carved into the walls of its temples, is the history of one of Southeast Asia’s most powerful empires.

The Archeological story begins with Jayavarman II, who unified Cambodia’s competing states and declared himself supreme sovereign of the Khmer Empire in AD 802. He was the first in a mind-boggling succession of devaraja or “god-kings” who exercised absolute power over an empire that once extended over much of Southeast Asia. One of his successors, Yasovarman I (899-910), moved the capital to Angkor and built Phnom Bakheng, the temple where we have come to watch the sunset. Literally carved from the sandstone of the mountain itself, it was the first of Angkor’s temple-mountains. But as successive devaraja strove to build ever more extravagant monuments to themselves and their gods the number, size and complexity of Angkor’s temples continued to grow along with its burgeoning population.

I tried to imagine what it must have looked like before the wooden houses had rotted away and before the jungle had reclaimed the fields and rice paddies that once sustained more than a million people who lived here. The temples, now all that remain, were then surrounded by a vast city, and beyond the city a sophisticated irrigation system fed water from reservoirs onto the intensively cultivated land. West Baray, the largest of these, is an incredible 8km long and 2.3km wide. It was excavated by hand, and as I watch the fading sunset reflecting from its surface, I wonder how many lifetimes were spent in its making.

My daydreaming is interrupted by Bunat, who reminds us it’s time to go. There are no elephants for the trip down and it’s already dark. We stumble back to the van and head back to Siem Reap. “Tomorrow,” Bunat tells us, “we will see the sunrise over Angkor Wat.”

Bunat, a professional freelance guide with an encyclopedic knowledge of Cambodian history and a knack for avoiding the crowds, greets us at 4:30 the next morning. Sustained by a cup of strong coffee we pile back into the van and head for Angkor Wat. It is still pitch dark as Bunat leads us through a stone archway, along a narrow corridor and up a flight of stone stairs to a terrace directly in front of Angkor Wat. There is no one else around as we watch the ornate towers emerge from the dark — at first just ghostly outlines and later dark silhouettes against a brilliant red sunrise. It is a magical moment, well worth missing a few hours sleep for.

Built as a funerary temple for Suryavarman II in the early 12th century Angkor Wat is arguably the largest religious structure on earth, dwarfing even the great cathedrals of Europe. It is also the best preserved of Angkor’s temples. During the 16th century, when the rest of Angkor lay empty in the grips of the jungle, Angkor Wat was restored and occupied by Buddhist monks who helped preserve the thousands of magnificent bas-reliefs carved into its stone corridors. As we wander through one of the cavernous inner courtyards past ornate scenes of battles and feasts, gods and demons we pass a young schoolgirl busily sketching one of the apsaras. There are thousands of these bare-breasted heavenly nymphs adorning the walls of Angkor Wat, each one different, yet each an unmistakable work of Khmer art.

Angkor Wat may be the largest of Angkor’s many temples but it is only one of hundreds of magnificent stone structures that sprawl across an area of more than 100 square kilometres. The Bayon, which sits at the very centre of the fortified city of Angkor Tom, is a strange agglomeration of face-towers, walled courtyards and dark inner chambers. Thirty-seven of the temple’s original 54 towers are still standing, each bearing the gigantic faces of the god-kings they were built to honour. Beneath the enigmatic stare of the giant stone faces the detailed bas-reliefs carved into the courtyard walls depict centuries of Khmer history. Scenes of battles, military processions, victory parades, and everyday life in Angkor are recorded in minute detail. According to Bunat there are more than a kilometre of bas-reliefs incorporating at least 10,000 figures carved into the walls of the Bayon.

In the years since Henri Mouhot stumbled onto the jungle-covered ruins of Angkor in 1860 most of its temples have been cleared of vegetation and at least partially restored. But at Ta Prohm, a relatively small temple complex a few kilometres east of Angkor Tom, just enough clearing has been done to allow access. Many of its narrow corridors are still choked with rubble, lichen and moss still cling to its walls, and many of its buildings are still held in the grip of towering strangler fig and silk-cotton trees whose giant roots both engulf and support the crumbling structures beneath them. Ta Prohm is a confirmation of the ultimate power of nature to reclaim the land from human occupation. I found it one of the most fascinating of Angkor’s many ruins.

The first wave of tourists, archeologists and restoration crews began flocking to Angkor in 1907, the year that Cambodia came under French control. But during the civil war and subsequent takeover by the Khmer Rouge regime the temples of Angkor were either occupied as military barracks or returned again to the jungle. Siem Reap, gateway to Angkor, was little more than a sleepy little village until a stable peace was restored in the mid 1990s. Today, with Angkor as one of the hottest tourist destinations on the globe, Siem Reap is Cambodia’s fastest growing town, and the Temples of Angkor are both a source of national pride and a huge source of tourist revenue.