59 Fun Facts About Angkor Wat

Which Cambodian city, a few miles south of the temple, is the base for visitors to Angkor Wat?

Siem Reap was little more than a village when French explorers arrived in the 1860s; tourism to the temples just to its north has since turned it into a major tourist hub.

Which Khmer king commissioned Angkor Wat?

Suryavarman II, who took the throne in 1113, commissioned Angkor Wat; work stopped at his death around 1150, leaving some bas-reliefs unfinished.

Angkor Wat was originally dedicated to which Hindu god?

Vishnu's statue stood in the central shrine, which was open on all four sides until the temple turned Buddhist and the doorways were walled up.

What does the name Angkor Wat mean in Khmer?

City of Temples (or 'Temple City') is a later name: 'wat', a Buddhist temple, was probably added once monks took it over, and no inscription records what its builders called it.

Which direction does Angkor Wat face, unusually for a Khmer temple?

West is the direction of the setting sun and of death, so scholars such as George Coedès took the orientation as a sign the temple was meant as its builder's tomb.

The layout of Angkor Wat is generally interpreted as a model of which mythical mountain?

Mount Meru, home of the gods in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology: the five central towers stand for its peaks and the outer wall for the mountain ranges at the edge of the world.

Besides sandstone, which stone was used for Angkor Wat's outer wall and hidden structural parts?

Laterite, a clay-rich rock that hardens on exposure to air, was used for the outer wall and concealed structural parts, while sandstone was reserved for visible surfaces and carving.

Which term describes the arrangement of Angkor Wat's five central towers?

A quincunx is four corner towers around a taller central one, like the five on a dice. The entrance gateway hides them as you approach, so all five show together only from certain angles.

Angkor Wat's moat is generally read as a symbol of what?

The cosmic ocean at the edge of the Hindu universe. The moat also held back the jungle, one reason Angkor Wat survived in better shape than its neighbours.

From which mountain was the sandstone for Angkor Wat quarried?

Mount Kulen (Phnom Kulen), a sandstone plateau north-east of the temple, supplied the stone; the blocks are thought to have been floated down to the site along a network of canals.

Guinness World Records lists Angkor Wat as the largest what ever built?

Religious structure: Guinness counts the whole 162.6-hectare site, though much of the walled ground once held a town's streets and houses rather than shrines.

The most famous bas-relief on the eastern gallery of Angkor Wat depicts which Hindu scene?

The Churning of the Sea of Milk shows rows of gods and demons hauling a giant serpent back and forth, like a tug-of-war, to churn up the elixir of immortality.

The balustrades along Angkor Wat's causeway are carved as which many-headed mythical creature?

A naga, the serpent of Hindu and Buddhist myth, forms each handrail and rears its fan of heads at the ends. Cambodian legend traces the Khmer people to a naga princess who married an Indian prince.

The bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat's outer gallery mainly illustrate episodes from which two texts?

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, India's two great epics, supply most of the scenes; Cambodia made the first its own as the Reamker, its national epic and a mainstay of the Royal Ballet.

The south gallery of Angkor Wat holds the temple's only historical relief, which shows what?

Its builder king on parade with his army: a small inscription names him by his posthumous title, a sign the carving was finished after his death.

Angkor Wat's bas-reliefs run in which direction, taken as evidence of a funerary purpose?

Counter-clockwise: Hindu funeral rites are performed in reverse order, so reliefs that read against the usual direction suggest the temple was built for a king's burial.

The devatas carved by the hundred on Angkor Wat's walls are images of whom?

Female deities: the sculptors gave every one a different hairstyle, headdress and set of jewellery, which a 1927 study by Sappho Marchal catalogued as a record of real court fashion.

Which people sacked Angkor in 1177, a generation after Angkor Wat was built?

The Chams of Champa, in what is now Vietnam, sacked Angkor in 1177, by tradition after sailing a fleet up the rivers; within four years a new Khmer king had driven them out.

Which king restored the Khmer Empire in the 1180s and built the walled capital of Angkor Thom?

Jayavarman VII, crowned in 1181, was a devout Buddhist who is credited with building 102 hospitals as well as roads and rest houses across the empire.

What does 'Angkor Thom' mean?

Great City is the Khmer meaning of Angkor Thom. Its palaces and houses were built of wood, since stone was kept for the gods, so only the walls, gates and temples survive.

Which temple at the centre of Angkor Thom is famous for towers carved with giant serene faces?

Bayon: its faces, four to a tower, are usually read as a bodhisattva given the features of the king who built it, watching over his realm in every direction.

Which tree-root-tangled Angkor temple appeared in the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider?

Ta Prohm was deliberately left much as it was found, as a 'concession to the general taste for the picturesque', so great tree roots still grip its galleries and towers.

Ta Prohm was originally called Rajavihara, meaning what?

Royal Monastery: the king who founded it in 1186 dedicated it to his mother, and its foundation stele says nearly 80,000 villagers were needed to supply and serve it.

Which former US First Lady toured Angkor Wat in November 1967?

Jacqueline Kennedy's tour, hosted by Cambodia's head of state at the height of the Vietnam War, was seen as the first step in repairing broken relations with Washington.

Which type of vault roofs the galleries of Angkor Wat?

Corbelled vault: each course of stone juts out a little further than the one below until the sides meet. It is weaker than a true arch and cannot span wide spaces, which is why Khmer stone galleries are so narrow.

Which French naturalist popularised Angkor Wat in the West after visiting in 1860?

Henri Mouhot is often wrongly credited with discovering Angkor, which was never lost; what he did was publicise it, in vivid journals published after his death.

A French explorer of the 1860s called Angkor Wat 'grander than anything left to us by' which two civilisations?

Greece and Rome: he could not believe the Khmer had built such a temple, and wrongly dated it to around the age of ancient Rome, many centuries too early.

A friar from which European country was among the first Westerners to see Angkor Wat, in 1586?

Portugal's António da Madalena told a chronicler that the temple was 'like no other building in the world', nearly three centuries before French explorers made it famous.

Which Chinese envoy stayed at Angkor in 1296 and wrote the only surviving first-hand account of Khmer daily life?

Zhou Daguan spent eleven months at the Khmer court as an envoy of the Yuan emperor; his Customs of Cambodia later helped scholars piece together the true history of Angkor.

Seventeenth-century pilgrims from which country took Angkor Wat for the Buddha's Jetavana monastery?

Japan's pilgrims followed its merchant ships to Cambodia until the shogunate banned travel abroad in the 1630s; one left an ink inscription dated 1632, and a later copy of a plan one of them drew is kept in Mito.

Stone statues of which animal guard the terraces and stairways of Angkor Wat?

Lions: the animal never lived in South-East Asia, so Khmer sculptors, who had probably never seen one, carved stylised beasts from imagination.

After Angkor fell in 1431, the Khmer court moved to the area of which present-day city?

Phnom Penh: the kings left Angkor after its capture, but Buddhist monks stayed behind and kept Angkor Wat in use, so it never fell wholly to the jungle like its neighbours.

What is a baray, such as Angkor's vast West Baray?

A man-made reservoir: the West Baray is the largest at Angkor, yet scholars have long argued over whether such basins were built to water rice fields or mainly for religious reasons.

A 2007 study using satellite photographs concluded that medieval Angkor was the largest what?

Pre-industrial city in the world by area: the 2007 map traced a low-density sprawl covering more than 1,000 square kilometres, and suggested that overworking the landscape helped bring Angkor down.

A Cambodian legend says the god Indra had Angkor Wat built within what span of time?

One night, in the legend, as a palace for the god's son; in fact the work took about three decades and was still unfinished when its royal builder died.

Which lake lies just south of the Angkor temples?

Tonlé Sap is South-East Asia's largest freshwater lake: each monsoon the river that drains it reverses direction and the lake swells, feeding the fisheries and farmland that sustained Angkor.

Which institution set up the Conservation d'Angkor in 1908 to restore the temples?

The École française d'Extrême-Orient cleared the jungle from 1908 and, from the 1930s, rebuilt ruined temples out of their own fallen stones, a method known as anastylosis.

Which country's Archaeological Survey began restoring Angkor Wat in 1986, when Cambodia was diplomatically isolated?

India had reopened its embassy in Cambodia in 1981, when most countries shunned the Vietnamese-backed government, and its Archaeological Survey took on the temple at Cambodia's request.

In 2024, tourists filming themselves re-enacting which mobile game at Angkor Wat drew criticism from conservationists?

Temple Run: clips of visitors sprinting and leaping through the ruins to the game's soundtrack drew millions of views, while conservators warned of damage to the centuries-old stonework.

Angkor Wat's main tower aligns with the rising sun on which day?

The spring equinox: seen from the main causeway the sun rises directly over the central tower, as it does again in autumn, an alignment generally thought to be deliberate.

Angkor Wat's five towers are shaped like the buds of which flower?

Lotus buds: the flower rises clean from muddy water, which made it a symbol of purity in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the two faiths the temple has served.

What lay in the pit beneath Angkor Wat's central shrine, opened in 1934?

A foundation deposit of gold leaf, with two pieces of crystal, lay far down the shaft; buried offerings like these were meant to give a temple its sacred power.

What does Preah Poan, the name of Angkor Wat's cruciform cloister, mean?

The Thousand Buddhas: for centuries pilgrims left Buddha images in the cloister, though only a few remain there today.

Which Angkor-area temple, built of pink sandstone in 967, is nicknamed the 'citadel of the women'?

Banteay Srei was built not by a king but by a court Brahmin, a royal tutor; its small scale and delicate carving are thought to lie behind its modern name.

The side entrances flanking Angkor Wat's main gateway are nicknamed after which animal?

Elephants: the 'elephant gates' stand at ground level and are wide enough for the animals, and carts, to pass straight through.

Colonial exhibitions in which two cities featured pavilions modelled on Angkor Wat between 1889 and 1937?

Paris and Marseille: France staged the fairs to show off its empire, and the 1931 Paris exhibition housed its Indochina pavilion in a full-scale replica of the temple's central towers.

Which hilltop temple just north-west of Angkor Wat is the classic spot for watching sunset over it?

Phnom Bakheng is two centuries older than Angkor Wat: a king built it around 900 as the centrepiece of the new capital when he moved his court to the Angkor area.

Angkor Wat is today an active temple of which branch of Buddhism?

Theravada Buddhism, the school of Sri Lanka and mainland South-East Asia, took over the Hindu temple gradually; its monks' unbroken presence is a big reason Angkor Wat was never abandoned to the jungle.

Which French writer was arrested in 1923 for removing carvings from a temple near Angkor?

André Malraux cut four devata carvings from the temple and was soon arrested; he turned the episode into his novel The Royal Way and later became France's first culture minister.

Which king led Cambodia, and with it Angkor Wat, out of French rule in 1953?

Norodom Sihanouk declared independence in November 1953, then gave up the throne two years later so that he could run the country as a politician instead.

Which regime's 1975 takeover closed the Conservation d'Angkor?

Khmer Rouge rule ended decades of French-led restoration; fighting later left bullet holes in the temple's walls, and thieves hacked off sculptures in the years that followed.

Angkor Wat appears on banknotes of which Cambodian currency?

Riel notes such as the 500 carry the temple. Cambodia had no money at all from 1975 to 1980, when currency was abolished, so today's riel is the second of that name.

The Angkor Wat half marathon was founded in 1996 to campaign against what?

Landmines: the first race was run to help their victims, and part of its entry fees has gone to artificial limbs for Cambodians maimed by them.

What is the name of the Cambodian authority set up in 1995 to protect and manage the Angkor area?

APSARA, whose acronym echoes the apsaras carved on the temple walls, oversees research, conservation and tourism at Angkor, while much of the restoration is carried out by teams from other countries.

Which monument made the New Seven Wonders in 2007, when Angkor Wat missed out?

The Taj Mahal was voted in while Angkor Wat, one of 21 finalists, missed the seven; UNESCO, which lists both sites, distanced itself from the poll as a private campaign.

Researchers from which Australian university found buried, demolished towers beneath Angkor Wat in 2015?

University of Sydney archaeologists also traced roads and homes inside the moat, a sign that ordinary workers lived in the precinct and not only priests and the elite.

Which survey technology, flown over the forest in 2012, revealed a hidden grid of city blocks around Angkor Wat?

Lidar fires laser pulses from a helicopter and filters out the tree canopy; the 2012 scans showed Angkor Wat stood inside a planned grid of streets, house mounds and ponds.

A 2015 study found that Angkor Wat was adapted late in its history to serve as what?

A fortress: archaeologists found traces of wooden defences added to the enclosure, the only known case of an Angkorian temple turned to defensive use, perhaps as a last stand against Ayutthaya.

Which Indonesian monument became Angkor Wat's official 'sister site' at the 2012 ASEAN Tourism Forum?

Borobudur, the vast Buddhist monument in central Java, lay buried under volcanic ash and jungle for centuries until Stamford Raffles brought it to the world's attention in 1814.