Preah Khan

Listen for a moment. Somewhere above you, a branch creaks. A gecko clicks in the shadows. Under your feet, the sandstone is uneven, worn soft at the edges by centuries of rain. The air inside these corridors feels cooler and damper than the road outside. It smells of moss, wet earth and old stone. You are standing in one of the largest temple complexes of Angkor... and much of it is still slowly returning to the forest.

This is Preah Khan. The name is usually translated as the Sacred Sword. It sits a short ride northeast of the walled city of Angkor Thom, on the route that guides call the Grand Circuit. Many visitors arrive with low expectations, because it lacks the famous towers of Angkor Wat. Then they step inside and lose their sense of direction completely. That is part of the experience here.

The temple was built by Jayavarman the Seventh. He was the great Buddhist king of the Khmer Empire in the late twelfth century. He also built the Bayon, with its smiling stone faces, and Ta Prohm, the temple wrapped in tree roots. Preah Khan belongs to the same burst of building. An inscribed stone found here dates its dedication to 1191. The king dedicated the main image to his father, shown in the form of a compassionate Buddhist being called Lokeshvara.

That inscription is one of the most useful documents from the whole Angkor period. It describes the temple as a living institution, not just a shrine. It lists the villages that supplied it with rice, honey, wax and cloth. It counts the people who served it, in the tens of thousands. It mentions a large community of teachers and students. Historians believe Preah Khan worked as a Buddhist university, a monastery and a royal centre, all at once.

There is another story about this ground. According to a widely repeated tradition, the temple stands on the site of a decisive battle. Here, it is said, Jayavarman's forces defeated the Cham, rivals from the coast of present-day Vietnam, who had sacked the Khmer capital. The temple's ancient name included the word for victory. Whether the battle truly happened on this exact spot is uncertain. But the idea of a city of victory clearly mattered to the king.

If you came in from the west, you crossed a causeway over a wide moat. Look back at its railings. Rows of stone figures hold the body of a giant serpent, a naga. Gods sit on one side and demons on the other. They are churning the cosmic ocean, an old Hindu story about the creation of the elixir of immortality. Many of the heads are missing. Some were lost to time. Others were taken by looters.

Now look at the outer wall of laterite, the rough, reddish, porous stone. At regular intervals, huge figures of Garuda stand against it. Garuda is the mythical bird, half man and half eagle, who carries the god Vishnu. Here he grips serpents in his hands and seems to hold up the whole enclosure. Walk slowly along the wall and you will see one Garuda after another, like guards on a very long watch.

Inside, the plan is a maze of galleries, doorways and small shrines. The main axis runs east to west, through door after door. Each doorway is a little lower and narrower than the last. Stand in the centre and look down the line. The frames stack up into a long stone tunnel, with a square of daylight at the far end. Keep your eyes on your feet, too. Thresholds are high here, and fallen blocks lie everywhere.

Here is a detail many visitors walk straight past. On pillars and walls, look for small seated figures that have been carefully chiselled away. These were once images of the Buddha. After Jayavarman's death, a later ruler returned the state to Hindu worship. Across his temples, thousands of Buddha carvings were defaced. Sometimes the stonecutters turned a seated Buddha into a Hindu hermit or a lingam, a stone symbol of the god Shiva. The marks of that change are still visible.

At the heart of the temple, the central sanctuary holds a bell-shaped stone stupa, a Buddhist monument. It was added long after the original statue disappeared. Look closely at the sanctuary walls around it. They are covered in small, regular holes. One common theory says these held fixings for metal plates, perhaps bronze, that once covered the interior. Imagine this dim room lined with polished metal, catching the light of oil lamps. Nobody knows for certain.

Toward the east side, find the Hall of Dancers. Above the doorways, rows of apsaras, the celestial dancers of Khmer art, raise their arms and bend their knees. They are carved with real lightness. Nearby stands an unusual two-storey building with thick, round columns. Round columns are rare in Khmer architecture, and this structure looks almost Greek to modern eyes. Its purpose is unclear. Scholars have suggested a library or a granary.

The trees are the other great presence here. Tall silk-cotton trees and strangler figs grow straight out of the walls. Their pale roots pour over doorways like poured wax. Since the early 1990s, the World Monuments Fund has worked to conserve the site. They chose a careful middle path. They stabilise the stone where it is in danger, but they leave many trees in place. Look for wooden props and metal braces holding up a leaning wall.

Beyond the east gate, the temple once faced a vast reservoir. In its centre sits a small island temple called Neak Pean, linked to ideas of healing water. Preah Khan was never an isolated building. It was one part of a carefully engineered landscape of water, roads, villages and fields. The scale of that world is hard to picture now, when the forest has closed in on all sides.

Before you leave, stand still in one of the long corridors. Watch the light fall through a gap in the roof. Notice the green moss on the carvings and the line of ants crossing a fallen block. Somewhere ahead, another visitor laughs and the sound bounces off the stone. Eight centuries ago, monks and students walked these same passages. As you head for the gate, look up once more at a Garuda on the wall... still holding on.