Phanom Rung Historical Park

Feel the stone under your feet. It is warm, slightly rough, and the colour of dried clay in some places and pale pink in others. Around you, the air smells of dry grass and dust. Somewhere below, a rooster calls from a village. You are standing on the edge of an old volcano, and in front of you a long stone path leads uphill toward a temple built for a Hindu god.

This is Phanom Rung, in Buriram province in northeastern Thailand. The name comes from the Khmer language and is usually translated as "large hill" or "big mountain". The hill is the cone of a volcano that has been extinct for a very long time. It rises out of a wide, flat plain of rice fields. On a clear day, the land below seems to run on forever. The builders chose this spot carefully. A temple on a mountain was a temple close to the gods.

The people who built it were the Khmer, the same civilisation that later created Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia. Between roughly the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, Khmer kings and local rulers extended their influence across this region. Phanom Rung was built in several stages over that long period. Most of the main sanctuary you see today dates from around the early twelfth century. It was dedicated to Shiva, one of the great gods of Hinduism, the god of destruction and renewal.

Now look at the path ahead. This is the processional walkway, and it is long and straight. On both sides stand rows of short sandstone posts. Each post ends in a carved shape like a lotus bud. In Hindu and Buddhist art, the lotus means purity, because it grows from mud yet opens clean. Walking this path was not just a way to reach the temple. It was a slow ritual of approach, from the human world toward the home of a god.

At the end of the walkway, you reach a raised platform shaped like a cross. Here is the first of the naga bridges. A naga is a sacred serpent in Hindu and Buddhist belief, often shown with many heads. Along the edges of this platform, the stone serpents raise five heads each, fanned out like a hood. The naga was thought to link the world of people with the world of the gods. So crossing this bridge meant crossing a threshold.

From here, a wide staircase climbs the slope in several flights. Take it slowly. The steps are steep, and the sun can be strong on the open stone. As you climb, the temple grows above you and the plain falls away behind you. At the top there is a second naga bridge, and then the outer gallery of the sanctuary. The walls here are made of laterite, a reddish stone full of small holes, and of finer sandstone for the carved parts.

Pass through the gate and you enter the inner courtyard. In the centre stands the main tower, called a prang. Its shape is a little like a tall, rounded bud, built in layers that narrow toward the top. The tower represents Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of the universe in Hindu thought, where the gods live. So here is a symbolic mountain, built on top of a real one. That double meaning is the heart of this place.

Look up at the carvings above the doorways. These horizontal stone blocks are called lintels, and the triangular panels above them are pediments. Above the eastern entrance to the main sanctuary, there is a carving of Shiva dancing. In this form he dances the cosmic dance that destroys and recreates the world. His many arms spread out in motion. Even after centuries of rain and sun, you can still follow the rhythm of the figure.

And here is a story most visitors walk past without knowing. Another famous lintel at Phanom Rung shows the god Vishnu reclining on a serpent, dreaming the universe into being. Thai people call it the Narai Bunthom lintel. Sometime in the 1960s, this lintel disappeared from the temple. Years later it turned up in a museum in Chicago, in the United States. Many Thais campaigned for its return, and in 1988 it finally came home. It is now back above its doorway.

That same year, 1988, also marked the end of a long restoration. For many years, much of the temple lay in pieces, with blocks scattered across the hilltop. Thailand's Fine Arts Department took the structure apart and rebuilt it, using a method called anastylosis. In simple terms, this means putting the original stones back in their original places, and adding new stone only where pieces are missing. If you look closely, you can sometimes tell the newer blocks apart from the old.

The second surprise is about light. The doorways of the sanctuary line up along one straight axis, from east to west. On a few days each year, the rising or setting sun shines straight through all of these doorways at once. Locals count fifteen doors in that line. The effect lasts only a short time, and crowds gather to watch it. A festival takes place here around the spring alignment, with processions and performances on the slope below.

Phanom Rung was not built alone. Not far away, on the flat land below, stands another Khmer temple called Muang Tam, with its own ponds and walls. In the Khmer period, roads connected temples like these across the region, and some scholars believe an ancient route linked this area toward Angkor itself. So this hilltop was part of a wider network of faith, trade and power, not an isolated shrine.

Before you leave, walk to the edge of the courtyard and look out over the plain. The rice fields, the small roads, the scattered trees — this view has changed in its details, but not in its scale. People who climbed here nearly a thousand years ago saw the same wide horizon. The temple was built to be seen from far away, and to let its visitors see far in return.

As you walk back down the stairs, notice how the temple slowly disappears behind you, step by step. Listen to the wind on the hilltop, and the voices of other visitors. Run your hand along the warm stone of a naga as you pass. Then take one last look down the processional path, with its rows of lotus buds, and imagine it lit by torches on a festival night long ago.