Angkor Thom

Listen first. Under the cicadas there is the soft scrape of sandals on old stone, and somewhere behind you an engine idles under the trees. Ahead, a gateway rises out of the forest, and from the top of it, four enormous stone faces look out in four directions. They are calm. They are smiling slightly. And they have been watching this road for more than eight hundred years.

You are standing at the edge of Angkor Thom, a name that means, quite simply, the Great City. This was not a single temple. It was a royal capital, a walled square that held palaces, terraces, shrines, and the homes of an empire's elite. Most visitors arrive through the South Gate, and that is a good place to begin. Before you pass through, take a slow look at the causeway that leads across the moat.

On both sides of the causeway, a row of stone figures holds the body of a giant serpent, like a team in a tug of war. On the left stand the gods, with serene faces. On the right stand the demons, with fierce eyes and heavier brows. The serpent is a naga, a sacred snake in Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Many of the heads you see are restorations or replacements. Some originals were damaged or stolen over the last century... so look closely, and you may notice the difference in the colour and finish of the stone.

This scene comes from a Hindu creation story called the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. In the story, gods and demons pull on a serpent wrapped around a mountain, churning the sea to release the elixir of immortality. Here, the idea is turned into architecture. The moat becomes the ocean. The walls become the edge of the world. And when you walk across this causeway, you are walking into a model of the universe itself.

The city was built under King Jayavarman the Seventh, in the late twelfth century and into the early thirteenth. His timing matters. Not long before his reign, Angkor had been attacked and sacked by the Cham, a rival kingdom from what is now central and southern Vietnam. Jayavarman drove them out, took the throne, and then built on a scale few rulers have ever matched. Roads, rest houses, hospitals, and temples spread across his kingdom. Angkor Thom was the heart of it all.

Now look at the walls themselves. They are made of laterite, a reddish, pitted stone that hardens when exposed to air. Up close it looks almost like a sponge, full of small holes. The walls run for several kilometres around a near-perfect square, with the moat outside them. Five gates break through the wall. Four face the cardinal directions, and a fifth, on the eastern side, leads toward the old royal palace. That one is often called the Victory Gate.

Here is something many visitors miss. Look at the lower part of the gate tower, on either side of the passage. Carved there are three-headed elephants, their trunks reaching down to the ground and wrapping around lotus flowers. They seem to grow straight out of the wall. The passage itself is narrow. It was wide enough for an elephant or a cart, and today it creates a small traffic jam of tuk-tuks, bicycles, and the occasional bus, all squeezing through a medieval doorway.

Follow the road inward, and after a while the trees open onto the Bayon. This is the temple at the exact centre of the city, and it is unlike anything else at Angkor. From a distance it looks like a pile of rough stone. As you come closer, the piles turn into towers, and the towers turn into faces. Dozens of towers rise here, and most of them carry great carved faces looking out in different directions. Wherever you stand, someone is watching you.

Who are these faces? Nobody knows for certain. Many scholars connect them to Avalokiteshvara, a compassionate figure in Mahayana Buddhism, the form of Buddhism that Jayavarman followed. Others suggest the faces may also carry the features of the king himself. Perhaps both ideas are true at once. A ruler who presented himself as an image of compassion would have had good reason to place his calm smile above every road into the capital.

Before you climb toward those faces, walk along the outer gallery at ground level. The walls here are covered with carved scenes, and they hold the second surprise of the Bayon. Alongside battles with the Cham, including boats full of warriors, the carvers recorded ordinary life. You will find people cooking over fires, men watching a cockfight, traders at a market, fishermen with their nets, and even a woman giving birth. These walls are one of the best records we have of how people in the Khmer empire actually lived.

North of the Bayon, the Baphuon rises in a steep stone pyramid. It is older than the city around it and dates from the eleventh century. Its modern story is extraordinary. In the twentieth century, French archaeologists took the temple apart, stone by stone, so that they could rebuild it on a stronger base. Then war came to Cambodia, and the work stopped. Many of the records that showed where each stone belonged were lost. Teams returned decades later, and the temple was finally rebuilt and reopened in 2011. Locals sometimes call it the largest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

Further north lie the Terrace of the Elephants and the Terrace of the Leper King. The first is a long platform lined with carved elephants, where the king could watch parades and ceremonies. The second carries a statue of a seated figure, and its name comes from local legend rather than history. Close by stands Phimeanakas, a small temple pyramid inside the old palace grounds. A Chinese envoy named Zhou Daguan visited Angkor in the late thirteenth century and wrote down a story about it. According to the tale he recorded, the king had to meet a serpent spirit in the form of a woman at the top of this tower every night. If he failed, disaster would fall on the kingdom.

As you walk, notice what is no longer here. The houses, the markets, and the palaces were built from wood, and they have long since returned to the forest. Only the stone remains, and stone was mostly reserved for the gods. That is why the city can feel so quiet now. The tall trees around you grow where streets and homes once stood. The monkeys you see near the roads are newcomers to a very old address.

So take a moment before you move on. Find one of the faces above you and watch how the light changes on it as the clouds pass. Notice the moss in the cracks, the smoothness of stone worn by countless hands, and the sound of the forest pressing in at the edges. When you walk back out through the gate, turn around once more. The four faces will still be there, looking out across the moat, the way they have looked out every morning for eight centuries.