Angkor Wat Trivia
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59 free Angkor Wat trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Angkor Wat trivia covers the largest religious monument on Earth and the empire that built it. Suryavarman II's temple to Vishnu went up in the first half of the 12th century, faces west when almost every other Khmer temple faces east, and is carved with the longest continuous stone frieze ever made, including 92 demons and 88 gods churning an ocean of milk with a giant snake. This quiz walks through the whole story: the etymology of the name, the Khmer kings from Jayavarman II to Jayavarman VII, the sandstone quarried at Mount Kulen and floated down canals, the moat and the quincunx of towers standing for Mount Meru, the slow conversion to Buddhism, Japanese pilgrims and Portuguese friars, Henri Mouhot's 1860 visit, the Khmer Rouge years, UNESCO listing and modern tourism. It also takes in the neighbours: Angkor Thom, the 216 faces of the Bayon, and the tree-strangled Ta Prohm of Tomb Raider fame. Easy questions suit anyone planning a trip to Siem Reap; the expert tier is for archaeology nerds. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Angkor Wat, Angkor and the Khmer Empire, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01Which Cambodian city, a few miles south of the temple, is the base for visitors to Angkor Wat?
Siem Reap
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.
Q 02Which Khmer king commissioned Angkor Wat?
Suryavarman II
Suryavarman II, who took the throne in 1113, commissioned Angkor Wat; work stopped at his death around 1150, leaving some bas-reliefs unfinished.
Q 03Angkor Wat was originally dedicated to which Hindu god?
Vishnu
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.
Q 04What does the name Angkor Wat mean in Khmer?
City of Temples
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.
Q 05Which direction does Angkor Wat face, unusually for a Khmer temple?
West
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.
Q 06The layout of Angkor Wat is generally interpreted as a model of which mythical mountain?
Mount Meru
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.
Q 07Besides sandstone, which stone was used for Angkor Wat's outer wall and hidden structural parts?
Laterite
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.
Q 08Which term describes the arrangement of Angkor Wat's five central towers?
A quincunx
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.
Q 09Angkor Wat's moat is generally read as a symbol of what?
The cosmic ocean
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.
Q 10From which mountain was the sandstone for Angkor Wat quarried?
Mount Kulen
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.
Q 11Guinness World Records lists Angkor Wat as the largest what ever built?
Religious structure
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.
Q 12The most famous bas-relief on the eastern gallery of Angkor Wat depicts which Hindu scene?
The Churning of the Sea of Milk
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.
Q 13The balustrades along Angkor Wat's causeway are carved as which many-headed mythical creature?
A naga
Q 21Which temple at the centre of Angkor Thom is famous for towers carved with giant serene faces?
Bayon
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.
Q 22Which tree-root-tangled Angkor temple appeared in the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider?
Ta Prohm
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.
Q 23Ta Prohm was originally called Rajavihara, meaning what?
Royal Monastery
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.
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.
Q 14The bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat's outer gallery mainly illustrate episodes from which two texts?
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata
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.
Q 15The south gallery of Angkor Wat holds the temple's only historical relief, which shows what?
Its builder king on parade
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.
Q 16Angkor Wat's bas-reliefs run in which direction, taken as evidence of a funerary purpose?
Counter-clockwise
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.
Q 17The devatas carved by the hundred on Angkor Wat's walls are images of whom?
Female deities
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.
Q 18Which people sacked Angkor in 1177, a generation after Angkor Wat was built?
The Chams
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.
Q 19Which king restored the Khmer Empire in the 1180s and built the walled capital of Angkor Thom?
Jayavarman VII
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.
Q 20What does 'Angkor Thom' mean?
Great City
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.
Q 24Which former US First Lady toured Angkor Wat in November 1967?
Jacqueline Kennedy
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.
Q 25Which type of vault roofs the galleries of Angkor Wat?
Corbelled vault
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.
Q 26Which French naturalist popularised Angkor Wat in the West after visiting in 1860?
Henri Mouhot
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.
Q 27A French explorer of the 1860s called Angkor Wat 'grander than anything left to us by' which two civilisations?
Greece and Rome
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.
Q 28A friar from which European country was among the first Westerners to see Angkor Wat, in 1586?
Portugal
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.
Q 29Which Chinese envoy stayed at Angkor in 1296 and wrote the only surviving first-hand account of Khmer daily life?
Zhou Daguan
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.
Q 30Seventeenth-century pilgrims from which country took Angkor Wat for the Buddha's Jetavana monastery?
Japan
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.