Chapter 4: Angkor Wat

If you look at the centre of the Cambodian flag, you will see a picture of a building. It is the most famous building in Cambodia, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It is called Angkor Wat.

The story of the city of Angkor is like the story of many old cities. A long time ago, Angkor was one of the largest cities in the world, and many people lived there. There were a lot of houses, which were made of wood, and many temples made of stone. But the world changed, and people moved away.

The houses fell down, but the temples did not

fall down, because they were made of stone. But the forest around the city grew quickly. Trees grew up over the temples and hid them. Only one temple, Angkor Wat, could defend itself against the forest. Angkor Wat had canals full of water around it, on all four sides, and the forest could not cross the canals. The forest destroyed many of the temples in Angkor, but it did not destroy Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat was for some time the temple and capital city of one of the old Khmer kings. From AD 802 to 1431, they were kings of the country which was later called Cambodia. We know very little about that time, because there are no old Khmer books about it. The only person who described Khmer life was a Chinese traveller, Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor in AD 1296. He wrote about the different temples, and about the Khmer people and life in Angkor. But we still have the temples. We have learned a lot from them, because they are full of pictures.

The Khmer kings thought that they were gods, not men like other people. And because they were gods, they thought that they could never die. So the kings built large temples with pictures of their gods and of themselves. The first kings built their temples for the Hindu god Siva.

In about AD 1150, Angkor Wat was built by King Suryavarman the Second for another Hindu god, Vishnu. And the people who built Angkor Wat cut pictures into the stone walls of the temple. There are pictures from Hindu stories – from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – and there are pictures of King Suryavarman and of his life in Angkor. And there are also pictures from Buddhist stories. After the death of King

Suryavarman the Second, a later king changed Angkor Wat into a Buddhist temple.

But like all the temples in Angkor, it was built as a Hindu ‘mountain’ temple. ‘Mountain’ temples were built to look like Mount Meru, the home of the Hindu gods. The five towers of Angkor Wat are the five mountain tops of Mount Meru. The walls of the temple are the smaller mountains around Mount Meru. The canals around the walls are the seas around the mountains. And like a real mountain, it is hard to climb to the top of the temple at Angkor Wat.

There is a lot to see in Angkor. Angkor Wat is the most famous of the temples, but the favourite temple for many people is a few kilometres away at Ta Prohm. The trees that grew up over the temple at Ta Prohm are still there – just like they were hundreds of years ago. The kings of Angkor were rich and strong, but they have all died, and their temples will all fall down. In the end, nothing is as strong as the forest that grows

around Angkor.