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Angkor Wat

The ancient city of Angkor sat at the center of the once powerful Khmer Empire of Southeast Asia. Located north of Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, the capital city flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries. The royal family abandoned the city in the 15th century, and the city was swallowed by the surrounding jungle, though never entirely abandoned. Now a World Heritage Site, the ruins of the ancient city cover some 400 square kilometers. Angkor has been called one of the most important archeological sites in Southeast Asia by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the vestige of its prosperity can be found in the Angkor ruins.

Perhaps the most famous site in Angkor is Angkor Wat, a vast temple complex built by Suryayarman II in the early 12th century to honor the Hindu god Vishnu. The temple complex is clearly visible in the above image as the small black frame just below the image center. The frame is created by a 190-meter wide causeway, which encircles three galleries and five central shrines that tower up to 65 meters. The entire complex occupies an area of 1.5 x 1.3 kilometers.

To the north of Angkor Wat is the larger square of Angkor Thom, the inner royal city built in the 12th century. The now dry moat around Angkor Thom is still visible as a pale pink square cut through the surrounding green vegetation. Within the square is a palace, homes for priests and government officials, and government administration buildings.

West of Angkor Thom is the vast Western Baray, a reservoir built in the 11th century. The earthen walls constructed to hold water form a perfect rectangle, oriented exactly east-west. It is thought that the Western Baray and its predecessor, the Eastern Baray, were built to provide water to the city, control water levels on the Siem Reap River, and provide irrigation water to the surrounding plain. Though filled with silt today, the smaller Eastern Baray earthen walls form a 1.8 by 7.5 kilometer rectangle east of Angkor Thom. Constructed in the 9th Century, the Eastern Baray was probably about 3 meters deep and held an estimated 37.2 million cubic meters of water.

By the time European traders found Angkor in the late sixteenth century, however, the site, including the famous Angkor Wat temple, had been largely abandoned. In the centuries that followed, archaeologists have struggled to understand the city and what happened to it. A study published in September 2007 added weight to the 1950s hypothesis of Bernard-Philippe Groslier that the medieval city had been built for irrigation, especially to counter the region’s unpredictable monsoons, and that it had supported a human population in excess of one million. According to the 2007 study, the Angkor site is the largest pre-industrial city so far known.

The study published in 2007 concluded that the perimeter of Angkor’s urban complex enclosed roughly 900 to 1,000 square kilometers (350 to 385 square miles)—nearly four times the size of twenty-first century New York City. Angkor was a low-density city, meaning the settlement was spread out over a fairly large area, more closely resembling a modern suburb than an inner city. The Angkor perimeter identified in 2007 established Angkor as the largest pre-industrial city yet known to exist anywhere on Earth, several times the size of the Mayan metropolis of Tikal.

Besides giving a sense of the medieval city’s size, the 2007 study also suggested causes for Angkor’s demise. The extensive water management system built at Angkor enabled its inhabitants to overcome the vicissitudes of nature—for a time. However, those same human-engineered changes to the landscape also created a new set of problems, including deforestation, degradation of the topsoil, and erosion. Evidence of impromptu changes to the water management system, and breaches and failures within the system suggested to archaeologists that the waterways became harder to manage as the years wore on. Although some residents remained after the fifteenth century, they comprised only a tiny remnant of Angkor’s population at its peak.

While the epicenter of Cambodia’s culture and society firmly resided in Angkor up to the 12th century, from the 13th through the 16th centuries Cambodian society saw a shift to the area around present day Phnom Penh. The last recorded period of Cambodian history at Angkor took place from the 1550s and 1560’s when restoration efforts were undertaken by a Cambodian king named Chan (1). The period’s evidence for this shift to modern day Phnom Penh is thin and sporadic, but by the time the evidence becomes more reliable, the move had already taken place.

Most of the evidence regarding this relocation comes from Chinese sources during the 13 and 14 hundreds; however some additional references have come from Cham and Thai writings. Arguably one of the major reasons for the southern shift in Cambodia’s societal center could have been due to the rapid expansion of Chinese maritime trade in South East Asia during that time. Regardless of the reasons, by the 16th century, Angkor was no longer the center of Cambodian life. While Angkor has never truly been abandoned, as witnessed today by more recent Buddhist writings and shrines, it would be almost 400 years before Angkor once again entered the world stage.

Henri Mouhot is often credited with discovering Angkor in 1860, although the location and existence of the entire series of Angkor sites was always known to the Khmers and had been visited by several westerners since the 16th century. The Khmers seemed to have only in part abandoned the immense site of the former capitals; only the temple of Angkor Wat, flanked by its two pagodas, remained really alive. On Phnom Bakheng s plateau, there was only one Vietnamese pagoda, of which monks became the guardians of the Buddhapada, dug on the plateau, in the middle of the ceremonial route.

Cambodians for centuries had been living in the vicinity of the temple complex, and its history formed an integral part of their intellectual background. King Ang Duong, who reigned from 1846 until 1859, decreed that a silhouette of Angkor Wat be engraved on the coins of the era. He also decreed that it should appear on the national flag.

Although the ruins of Angkor were first discovered by Portuguese missionaries in 1570, they were revealed to Europeans by Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist who was subsidized by the English. Mouhot left London in April 1858 for a voyage to Southeast Asia. He visited Siam (Thailand) and then worked his way around the south coast to Cambodia and arrived in Battambang late in 1859. He learned from a French missionary of the existence of some ancient ruins which could be reached in a few days' march. In January 1860 he left for the site and finally arrived in the vicinity of present-day Siem Reap, where he found the Angkor Wat temple complex - partially covered by jungle growth. Angkor Wat and the nearby Bayon of Angkor Thom, with their water reservoirs, irrigation canals, temples and a planned city, represent the most magnificent construction program ever conceived in ancient Southeast Asia.

Mouhot popularized Angkor among the western public. Perhaps none of the previous European visitors wrote as evocatively as Mouhot, who included interesting and detailed sketches. In his posthumously published "Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos", Mouhot compared Angkor to the pyramids, for it was popular in the west at that time to ascribe the origin of all civilization to the Middle East.