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ANGKOR THOM
After the Khmers had abandoned their
capital Angkor, the structures were claimed by the jungle. Unlike other parts of
Angkor, Ta Proum Temple, shown here, has remained overgrown as it had been found
in the 19th century by the French explorer, Henri Mouhot.
All many publications create unnecessary confusion by citing the construction of
a "new capital" again and again, whenever a new Khmer king constructed a new
palace a few kilometers from the former palace and transferred his government
there. (The construction of new palaces is treated similarly as a move of the
capital in many guide books about Myanmar.)
To Consider the case of the Angkor realm it can be read, that its first king,
Jeyvarman II, set up his capital in Rolous, the fourth Angkor king, Yasovarman,
in Angkor by the name of Yashodharapura, the seventh Angkor king, Jeyvarman IV,
at Koh Ker, the ninth Angkor king, Rajendravarman, again at Angkor; and the 21st
Angkor king, Jeyvarman VII built the royal town of Angkor Thom.
Almost all of these so-called new capitals are only a few kilometers apart: the
distance between Rolous and Angkor Thom is just 15 kilometers; only the distance
from Angkor to Koh Ker is more than 50 kilometers.
Because the Angkor kingdom, as the most powerful state of Southeast Asia of its
time, must have commanded a significant permanent army and a large centralized
administrative apparatus, and because thousands of workers were needed for the
construction and maintenance of the enormous building complexes, it can safely
be assumed that around the stone constructions of the palaces and temples an
appropriate city with a substantial population must have existed.
The city probably covered large areas of the empty terrain between the
remainders of the temples and palaces. But there is nothing left of these
surrounding settlements, probably because wood had been used as construction
material, which has long since rotten, and jungle or rice farmers have reclaimed
the former urban area.
Another cause for confusion is, that the entirety of the attraction is often
named Angkor Wat. But strictly speaking, Angkor Wat is only a single temple
within a total complex of many others, even though it is the most impressive
one.
About one kilometer north of Angkor Wat is Angkor Thom, the royal town
constructed during the reign of Jeyvarman VII towards the end of the 12th
century (about 400 years after the founding of the Angkor kingdom). The
quadrangular palace area, enclosed by a wall and a moat running three kilometers
on each side, roughly compares to the forbidden city of Beijing.
Angkor Thom was not built on open terrain. Numerous buildings within the area,
which after the construction of the wall and the moat became Angkor Thom, had
already existed earlier, parts for centuries. However, many older buildings had
been partially or fully destroyed by a Cham armies when they occupied Angkor for
some time.
Newly built by Jeyvarman VII was the Bayon: a colossal central temple exactly in
the middle of Angkor Thom.
East and west of Angkor Thom are two large artificial lakes, so-called Barays.
The lakes are of about equal size measuring some 8 kilometers in east-west and
about 2 kilometers in north-south direction.
It has earlier been assumed that those artificial lakes served as water
reservoirs to irrigate the rice paddies around Angkor during the dry season, to
be refilled during each rainy season. But current opinion is that the lakes are
much too small for this purpose. It is now presumed that the lakes were created
primarily with artistic intentions, just like the enormous temple buildings. At
the same time, they may have served to raise fish. Even today the western Baray
is used for fish farming; the eastern Baray is dry.
Numerous structures in the plain of Angkor are worth a visit - way too many for
all of them to be accounted for in this summary. The most interesting structures
certainly are Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom with the Bayon.
Angkor Thom is the inner royal city, built by the end of
the 12th century during the reign of King Jeyvarman VII, shortly after Angkor
had been conquered and burnt down by the Chams. This inner royal city was built
as a quadrangle and bordered by a 100-metres-wide moat and an 8-metres-high
wall. Angkor Thom is geometrically oriented: it covers an area which is an exact
quadrangle; the sides of this quadrangle run exactly in North-South and
East-West direction. A gate opens exactly in the middle of each wall,
connecting, through a bridge over the moat, the royal city with the outside.
Exactly in the center of Angkor Thom are the temple grounds of the Bayon.
The temple grounds have puzzled archaeologists because they do not fit the Hindu
religion as does Angkor Wat. Therefore it is assumed that King Jeyvarman VII
introduced elements of the Buddhist faith into the religious system of Angkor,
though it is assumed they were lost after his death.
The palace area of Angkor Thom is located directly to the North of the Bayon.
Its basic features were laid out during the reign of King Suryavarman I, 150
years before the construction of Angkor Thom. From the center of the palace
complex rose the Heavenly Palace, Phimeanakas. The king of the Khmer always used
to spend the first part of each night in the uppermost part of this Heavenly
Palace, where according to legend he had sexual intercourse with the sun queen.
Several high terraces inside Angkor Thom served primarily ceremonial purposes,
among them cremations.
Angkor, a few kilometers to the north of the town of Siem Reap, is indisputably
the most famous, most enormous, most impressive and most important attraction
not only in Cambodia, but in all of Southeast Asia, and maybe even in all of
Asia.
Compared to Angkor the old Royal Palace of Bangkok, the Shwedagon Pagoda of
Rangoon or the Citadel at the old Vietnamese Emperor's town of Hué fade.
Compared to Angkor many of the attractions, monuments or archaeological sites of
other places appear small, if not irrelevant. Angkor is truly overpowering.
In its dimensions Angkor is best compared to the Egyptian Pyramids. But Angkor
is far more than merely an agglomeration of huge geometrical structures. Despite
its enormous constructional dimensions, it is ornamented in detail like Notre
Dame of Paris and tells of an ancient art of architecture and sculpturing on a
level of the Acropolis of Athens.
From the early 9th century, after the first independent Khmer kingdom was
founded by King Jeyvarman II, until 1431, when a large part of the population
emigrated a few hundred kilometers to the Southeast, Angkor was the capital of a
Khmer state, which in its prime covered the major part of Southeast Asia from
present-day Myanmar to present-day southern Vietnam, from today's southern
Chinese province of Yunnan deep down the Malayan peninsula.
Angkor
Wat (see header photo) is the most famous temple ground in the entire Angkor
plain. It was built by King Suryavarman II in the middle of the 12th century
over a period of about 30 years. Like many other Khmer temples, Angkor Wat was
built as architectural allegory of the Hindu religion. The central tower stands
for Mount Meru, the center of the universe according to Hindu mythology; the top
of Mount Meru is considered the home of the gods.
The temple ground is surrounded by a wall and a moat, not only for demarcation
purposes, but also because in Hindu mythology Mount Meru is surrounded by other
mountain ranges and oceans.
The main entryway to Angkor Wat is a street of roughly half a kilometer length,
ornamented with balustrades and fringed by artificial lakes, so-called Barays.
This entryway resembles the rainbow bridge in Hindu mythology, the link between
heaven and earth, or the realm of the gods and the realm of the mortals.
Angkor Wat is in better structural condition than many other temples on the
Angkor plain because it has been converted into a Buddhist temple probably even
before the Siamese conquest in 1431, and because it has been used as such
continuously after (in the 13th century Buddhism became an important religion in
originally pure-Hindu Angkor).