Angkor Wat faces west, the direction Khmer temples otherwise avoided, and nobody who built it left a note explaining why.
An orientation out of pattern
Most Khmer state temples face east, toward sunrise. Angkor Wat, built under Suryavarman II in the early twelfth century and dedicated to Vishnu, faces west instead. One long-standing theory ties the reversal to funerary symbolism, since west is the direction of sunset and some scholars have read the temple partly as a mausoleum for its founder; other scholars point to the temple's dedication to Vishnu, a god sometimes associated with the west, as sufficient explanation on its own. Neither reading is settled.
Stone that tells the Hindu epics
Nearly 600 metres of bas-relief carving lines the temple's outer gallery, including a widely reproduced panel of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, gods and demons pulling a serpent to churn the cosmic ocean for the elixir of immortality, alongside scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata and a historical procession of Suryavarman II's own army.
Never actually lost
The temple is often described in Western accounts as "discovered" by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot in 1860, but Khmer Buddhist monks had continuously maintained a presence there for centuries and local communities never lost track of it; Mouhot's writings simply brought it to European attention.