Angkor Wat: facts and history, from the largest temple on Earth to the city the jungle took back

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Angkor Wat is a Hindu, later Buddhist, temple in Cambodia built by King Suryavarman II of the Khmer Empire between about 1113 and 1150, the largest religious monument in the world by area at about 400 acres (162 hectares), and the centre of Angkor, a city that at its height around 1200 covered some 400 square miles (1,000 km²) and held perhaps a million people, the largest urban area on Earth before the industrial age. The temple was never lost: it was in continuous use by Buddhist monks when the French naturalist Henri Mouhot published his account in 1863, and it appears on the Cambodian flag. Below are the facts in order: the builder, the design and its meaning, the construction, the reliefs, the city around it that laser mapping revealed in 2012 and 2015, the fall of Angkor, and a separate section for the theories.

Who built it and when

Suryavarman II took the Khmer throne in 1113 after killing his great-uncle in battle, and began the temple in the same decade as his state temple and future mausoleum, dedicated to Vishnu rather than to Shiva, the god of most earlier Khmer kings. Building took about 37 years and was still incomplete at his death around 1150; some reliefs were finished in the 16th century. The temple's original name is unknown; "Angkor Wat" means "city temple" in Khmer and dates from the Buddhist period. The Khmer Empire at the time ruled most of present-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam. Angkor Wat overview.

The design and what it means

The temple is a model of the Hindu universe. Five towers shaped like lotus buds stand for the five peaks of Mount Meru, home of the gods; the central tower rises 213 feet (65 m) above the ground. Three rectangular galleries, each higher than the last, are the mountain ranges around Meru; the moat, 620 feet (190 m) wide and 3.4 miles (5.5 km) around, is the ocean at the edge of the world. Unlike almost every other Khmer temple it faces west, the direction of Vishnu and of death, which supports its use as a mausoleum. The proportions were laid out in Khmer cubits so that the distances along the main axis encode the four ages of the world in Hindu cosmology, an alignment first worked out by Eleanor Mannikka; at the spring equinox the sun rises directly over the central tower when seen from the western gate.

How it was built

The temple contains between five and ten million sandstone blocks, the largest weighing about 1.5 tons, with a total volume comparable to the Great Pyramid. The sandstone came from quarries at Mount Kulen, 30 miles (50 km) to the northeast; in 2012 Japanese researchers traced a network of canals and embankments that carried the blocks by raft most of the way, cutting the journey to about 22 miles. Blocks were dressed so finely that the joints are nearly invisible, and set without mortar; the surfaces were then carved in place. The foundations are laterite, a local iron-rich clay that hardens in air, and the whole structure sits on a bed of sand that lets the water table rise and fall beneath it without cracking the stone. With the workforce of a state that could field armies of tens of thousands, 37 years is a plausible span; inscriptions elsewhere at Angkor record temples staffed by thousands of servants and supplied by hundreds of villages.

The reliefs

The outer gallery carries about 13,000 square feet (1,200 m²) of bas-reliefs, the longest continuous carved narrative in the world. On the south side Suryavarman II is shown in procession with his army, the only portrait of the king; on the east the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, where 92 demons and 88 gods pull a serpent to churn the elixir of immortality; elsewhere the battles of the Mahabharata and Ramayana and the 32 hells and 37 heavens of Hindu belief. Nearly 1,800 apsaras, celestial dancers, are carved on the walls, each with a different hairstyle and headdress. Traces of red, black and gold paint show the reliefs were once coloured.

The city around it: what lidar found

Angkor Wat is one temple in a landscape of hundreds. Angkor Thom, the walled capital built by Jayavarman VII after 1181, lies a mile north, with the Bayon and its 216 stone faces at its centre; Ta Prohm, left in the grip of the trees, and Banteay Srei, the pink temple of the finest carving, are nearby. In 2012 and 2015 airborne laser scanning by Damian Evans's team stripped the forest away on the map and showed a grid of streets, house mounds, ponds and canals covering the whole area between the temples: the temples were the stone core of a low-density city of wood and thatch spread over hundreds of square miles, watered by two huge reservoirs, the barays, each several miles long. The population estimate of around a million comes from that survey. Angkor.

Why Angkor fell

The Khmer capital moved south to Phnom Penh in the 15th century, and the usual date given for the fall of Angkor is the Siamese sack of 1431. The reasons now favoured are environmental. Tree-ring records show decades of drought in the 14th century punctuated by monsoon floods; sediment in the canals shows the water system silting and failing; the city depended on that system for rice. Add the shift of trade to the coast and the conversion to Theravada Buddhism, which had no use for god-king temples, and the capital emptied gradually rather than in one catastrophe. Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned: monks maintained it, Japanese pilgrims drew plans of it in the 1630s, and Portuguese and Spanish visitors described it in the 1580s.

Versions and theories

Everything below is a version, not a fact. These are the claims that appear in search next to Angkor Wat, each with who made it and what the evidence says.

A lost city discovered by Mouhot

Version. The French explorer Henri Mouhot "discovered" Angkor in 1860. Reply. Mouhot himself wrote that the temple was inhabited by monks; Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese visitors had described it centuries earlier, and it had never left Khmer memory. He publicised it in Europe, which is different.

Built by Romans, Greeks or a lost race

Version. 19th-century Europeans, unable to believe the Khmer had built it, credited Alexander the Great, the Romans or a vanished people. Reply. Some 1,200 Khmer inscriptions name the kings, the temples, the donors and the servants; Suryavarman II's portrait is on the wall.

Angkor Wat mirrors the constellation Draco

Version. Graham Hancock and John Grigsby argued in 1998 that the temples of Angkor are laid out like the constellation Draco as it appeared in 10,500 BC. Reply. The temples were built over four centuries by different kings on sites chosen for water and roads, and the match requires selecting some temples and ignoring others; no Khmer source mentions Draco. Hancock.

The stegosaurus carving

Version. A small relief at Ta Prohm shows an animal with plates on its back, offered as proof that people saw living dinosaurs. Reply. The "plates" are the leaf background used behind many animals on the same pillar; the creature is most likely a boar or rhinoceros, and it sits among monkeys, deer and water buffalo carved in the same decorative style.

Machines or aliens moved the stones

Version. The usual. Reply. The quarries at Kulen, the canal route traced in 2012 and the tool marks on the blocks account for the transport; the reliefs show elephants and men hauling, not machines.

What is in the archive

Angkor Wat, the Bayon, Ta Prohm, Banteay Srei and Preah Vihear are in the Ancient temples of the world collection beside the other great monuments of Southeast Asia: Borobudur and Prambanan in Java, the temples of Bagan in Myanmar and Wat Phou in Laos, the Khmer temple older than Angkor Wat itself.

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