Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is the standard example of a religious site changing tradition without being destroyed, abandoned or seized, and the reason it survives at all.

Built for Vishnu

Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the twelfth century as his state temple, dedicated to Vishnu rather than to Shiva as most Khmer state temples had been. It is the largest religious monument in the world by area.

It faces west, unusual for a Khmer temple. West is the direction of death, and some scholars read this, together with the counter-clockwise reading order of the galleries, as evidence it was also intended as Suryavarman's funerary temple. Others dispute it. The argument is not settled.

The galleries carry narrative relief of the first order, including a churning of the sea of milk running for close to fifty metres.

The change

Khmer religion moved towards Theravada Buddhism over the following centuries. Angkor Wat moved with it.

What did not happen is the point. The temple was not levelled, converted by conquest, or abandoned to the forest. Theravada monks took it over, Hindu images were removed or recarved, Buddha figures were installed, and worship continued without a break.

Some niches emptied of their Hindu images are still empty, which is a plain physical record of the transition.

Why it survives

This is why Angkor Wat is standing while most of Angkor was swallowed. A building in continuous use is maintained, cleared, re-roofed and repaired. The great temples that lost their communities, Ta Prohm, Beng Mealea, are the ones the strangler figs took apart.

Continuous use, not stone, is what preserved it.

The twentieth century

The temple came through the Khmer Rouge period, during which the Cambodian monkhood as an institution was very nearly destroyed: monks defrocked, killed, or forced into labour, and the monastic education system dismantled. The buildings survived better than the people who used them.

UNESCO inscribed Angkor in 1992 and placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger in the same moment, removing it in 2004. The APSARA authority has managed it since 1995.

Monks are resident again, offerings are made at the images, and the building appears on the national flag, the only national flag depicting a building.

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.