Yaśodharapura

Listen first. A dry rustle of leaves overhead, the call of a bird somewhere in the canopy, the soft crunch of red earth under your shoes. The air smells of warm stone and damp forest. Nothing here looks like a city. And yet you are standing inside one of the great capitals of the medieval world. Its name was Yaśodharapura, and for centuries it was the beating heart of the Khmer Empire.

The name comes from Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India. It means, roughly, the city that bears glory. It was named after its founder, King Yasovarman the First, who ruled at the end of the ninth century. Before him, the Khmer royal court lived at Hariharalaya, a short distance to the southeast, near the modern village of Roluos. Yasovarman chose new ground. He wanted a capital that would announce a new reign to gods and people alike.

Here is the first surprise. When most visitors hear the word Angkor, they picture Angkor Wat, or the smiling stone faces of the Bayon. But Yaśodharapura came first. It predates Angkor Wat by more than two centuries. Much of what later kings built here grew on the foundations of this first plan. In a real sense, the whole of Angkor is a long conversation with Yasovarman's original city.

So where is it? The answer is all around you, though it is easy to miss. Khmer cities were built mostly of wood, thatch and other materials that do not last. Palaces, homes, markets and workshops have all returned to the soil. What survives is what was built for the gods, in brick, laterite and sandstone. Laterite is a reddish, porous stone, full of small holes, that hardens when it dries in the air. You will see it everywhere at Angkor.

At the centre of the city, Yasovarman placed a temple on a natural hill. Today that temple is called Phnom Bakheng. It rises in five stone terraces, one above another, like a stepped pyramid built over the rock. This was a temple mountain — a model of Mount Meru, the sacred peak at the centre of the universe in Hindu belief. The king dedicated it to Shiva, one of the great Hindu gods. The temple marked the cosmic centre of his new world.

The design carries careful number symbolism. The terraces were once lined with many small towers, and scholars have long noted that their count ties to sacred numbers in Hindu cosmology. From the ground, a viewer could never see all of them at once. Some researchers read the layout as a kind of stone calendar, linked to the cycles of the moon and the years. Whatever the exact meaning, the precision shows a court that thought in terms of heaven and time.

Around the temple hill, the city spread outward in a vast square. Earth embankments and a moat marked its edges. Within that boundary lived priests, officials, artisans and servants of the court. Ordinary farmers lived further out, among rice fields fed by water. Archaeologists today use airborne laser scanning, which can see the shape of the ground beneath the forest. These scans show old roads, ponds and house mounds that no one could see from the surface.

Water was the secret of this place. To the east, Yasovarman ordered the construction of an enormous reservoir, now known as the East Baray. It was dug and banked by hand, and it held water through the long dry season. Today it is dry land, used for fields. But imagine it full — a flat, shining surface stretching almost to the horizon. Khmer kings were rulers of water as much as rulers of land.

Here is the second surprise. Yaśodharapura did not stay the capital without a break. In the tenth century, a king named Jayavarman the Fourth moved the royal court north to Koh Ker, far from here. For a generation, this city stood in the shadow of another. Then a later king, Rajendravarman, brought the court back. The pull of this landscape, with its water and its sacred hill, was simply too strong.

The name itself outlived its founder by centuries. Later kings rebuilt and expanded the capital again and again. At the end of the twelfth century, King Jayavarman the Seventh built the walled city we now call Angkor Thom, with the Bayon at its heart. He still called his capital Yaśodharapura. So the name you are hearing today belongs to a whole idea of a city, renewed across many generations, not to a single set of walls.

Take a moment with the stone close to you. Look at how the blocks sit together, without mortar, held in place by weight and careful cutting. Notice the dark lichen, the pale scars where carvings have worn away, and the roots that push between joints. Notice too the modern repair work, where conservation teams have reset fallen blocks. Every visible surface carries two stories at once — the builders who raised it, and the people who now keep it standing.

If you climb to the top of Phnom Bakheng, the reason for this location becomes clear. The land around you is almost perfectly flat. From the upper terrace, the forest rolls away in every direction, broken by the towers of Angkor Wat to the southeast. On a clear day, you can see the low line of hills to the north. A king who stood here could see his whole kingdom, and his kingdom could see his temple.

As you walk on, keep listening. The bird calls, the hum of insects, the voices of other travellers drifting between the trees. Somewhere under this forest floor lie the lanes where people once carried rice, water and offerings. Look down at the red earth on your shoes. It is the same earth that Yasovarman's builders moved, basket by basket, more than a thousand years ago.