60 Fun Facts About Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is in which country?

It sits near the modern city of Siem Reap and is generally reckoned the largest religious complex in the world.

Which Khmer king commissioned Angkor Wat?

Work stopped when he died around 1150, leaving some of the bas-relief decoration unfinished.

Angkor Wat was originally dedicated to which Hindu god?

Its original name may have been Vrah Vishnuloka, 'the sacred dwelling of Vishnu'; the central statue was replaced by standing Buddhas centuries later.

What does the name Angkor Wat mean in Khmer?

'Angkor' comes ultimately from Sanskrit nagara, 'city', and 'wat' from vata, 'enclosure'.

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

Scholars such as Coedès took the orientation as evidence that it was meant as Suryavarman II's funerary temple, since west is associated with death and with Vishnu.

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

The five central towers stand for its five peaks, and the walls and moat for the surrounding ranges and ocean.

How many towers make up the central quincunx at the heart of Angkor Wat?

Four stand at the corners of the inner galleries around a taller central tower that rises 65 metres above the ground.

How tall is Angkor Wat's central tower above ground level?

The tower rises 43 metres above the inner gallery, and unlike earlier temple-mountains it is raised well above the four around it.

Roughly how wide is the moat that surrounds Angkor Wat?

The moat runs more than five kilometres around the outer wall and also served as a reservoir between the monsoon and dry seasons.

From which mountain was the sandstone for Angkor Wat quarried?

The quarries lie about 40 km to the north-east; a 35 km canal linking them to the temple was identified from satellite images in 2011.

What was the maximum weight of the individual sandstone blocks used to build Angkor Wat?

Estimates put the total at five to ten million blocks, and the binding agent between them has still not been identified.

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

Ninety-two asuras and eighty-eight devas heave on the serpent Vasuki under Vishnu's direction.

Which serpent is used as the churning rope in Angkor Wat's Sea of Milk relief?

Eleanor Mannikka counts the figures on each side as the number of days between solstice and equinox.

The bas-reliefs of the outer gallery mainly illustrate episodes from which two Hindu epics?

Charles Higham called them 'the greatest known linear arrangement of stone carving'.

The southern gallery of Angkor Wat contains the temple's only historical relief, showing what?

It sits alongside depictions of the 32 hells and 37 heavens of Hinduism.

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

Brahminic funeral rites are performed in reverse order, and this prasavya direction reverses the normal sequence.

Roughly how many carved devatas (female deities) have been documented at Angkor Wat?

Sappho Marchal's 1927 study catalogued their hairstyles, headdresses and jewellery as evidence of real Angkorian fashion.

Which people sacked Angkor in 1178, about 27 years after the death of the king who built the temple?

The Khmer Empire was then restored by Jayavarman VII, who built a new capital at Angkor Thom.

Which king built Angkor Thom and the Bayon after restoring the Khmer Empire?

His wife Indradevi, a devout Mahayana Buddhist, is credited with encouraging his conversion, which began the shift of Angkor Wat toward Buddhism.

What does 'Angkor Thom' mean?

Its laterite walls are 3 km on each side and 8 m high, and a moat runs around them.

The Bayon temple at Angkor Thom has towers carved with roughly how many giant faces?

Most scholars think the serene faces are portraits of Jayavarman VII himself.

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

Founded as a monastery dedicated to Jayavarman VII's mother, it once needed almost 80,000 people to maintain it, including 615 dancers.

Ta Prohm was originally called Rajavihara, meaning what?

Jayavarman VII founded it as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and centre of learning dedicated to his mother.

Angkor Wat appears on the country's national flag. When was it first placed there?

Cambodia's is one of only four national flags in the world to feature a building.

The Cambodian flag is one of only four national flags to feature a building. Which of these is another?

The others are San Marino and Spain, both of which show castles or towers in their coats of arms.

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

He compared it to Solomon's temple built 'by some ancient Michelangelo'; his notes were published posthumously in 1864.

Where did the French explorer who popularised Angkor Wat in the West die in 1861?

He was 35; his tomb stands just outside Ban Phanom, east of the old Lao royal capital.

Which Portuguese Capuchin friar is one of the first Europeans recorded as visiting Angkor Wat, in 1586?

He described it three years later to the historian Diogo do Couto, who wrote that it was 'like no other building in the world'.

Which Chinese diplomat visited Angkor in 1296 and wrote the only surviving eyewitness account of the Khmer capital?

His roughly forty-page account, written for the Yuan dynasty, describes Khmer society during the reign of Indravarman III.

Seventeenth-century Japanese pilgrims at Angkor Wat believed they had found which Buddhist holy site?

Their inscriptions and maps treat the temple as the monastic garden associated with the Buddha in ancient Magadha; the oldest surviving plan, from 1715, is Japanese.

The oldest surviving plan of Angkor Wat, dated 1715, is credited to whom?

It is kept in a museum in Mito, Japan.

In what year did Angkor fall to Ayutthaya, traditionally marking the end of the Khmer Empire?

The population migrated south to Longvek, though Angkor Wat itself was never completely abandoned.

In what year did a Khmer prince declare himself chakravartin, conventionally starting the Khmer Empire?

He proclaimed himself chakravartin in the Phnom Kulen mountains, the same hills that later supplied Angkor Wat's stone.

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

Its infrastructure connected an urban sprawl of at least 1,000 square kilometres.

Modern analyses suggest the walled enclosure of Angkor Wat itself housed roughly how many residents?

Their houses were built of perishable materials, so only the outlines of streets, mounds and ponds survive.

Which lake lies just south of the Angkor ruins and was used to float building stone toward the site?

One suggested route ran 35 km by canal to the lake, 35 km across it, and 15 km up the Siem Reap River.

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

It was disbanded in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power, and camping soldiers burned the remaining wood for fuel.

Which country's Archaeological Survey carried out restoration at Angkor Wat between 1986 and 1992?

France did not recognise the Cambodian government at the time; the Indian work was later criticised for its use of chemicals and cement.

In what year was Angkor declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site?

It went straight onto the List of World Heritage in Danger after an appeal by Norodom Sihanouk, and came off it in 2004.

How many visitors did Angkor Wat receive in 1993, before the tourism boom?

By 2018 the figure had climbed to 2.6 million foreign tourists a year.

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

Lines of sight from the terraces also pick out specific towers at the solstice sunrise positions.

Which lotus-bud-shaped feature is characteristic of the 'Angkor Wat style' of Khmer architecture?

Other hallmarks are half-galleries, axial galleries and cruciform terraces along the main axis.

What did conservator George Trouvé find in the pit beneath Angkor Wat's central shrine in 1934?

The pit had already been robbed of its main treasure and was filled with sand and water.

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

Pilgrims left Buddha images there for centuries, and its inscriptions include Burmese and Japanese ones.

Angkor Wat's eight-armed statue known as Ta Reach depicts which god?

It may originally have stood in the temple's central shrine before the conversion to Buddhism.

The side entrances beside the western gopura are nicknamed after which animal, big enough to admit them?

Their outer galleries have square pillars on the west side and a closed wall on the east.

In which two cities did French colonial exhibitions show life-size Angkor Wat replicas from 1889 to 1937?

Plaster casts also filled Louis Delaporte's musée Indo-chinois in the Trocadéro Palace.

Which company rented and managed the Angkor site from the Cambodian government between 1990 and 2016?

As of 2000 only about 28% of ticket revenue was spent on the temples themselves.

Which devout Mahayana Buddhist encouraged Jayavarman VII to convert, leading Angkor Wat's shift to Buddhism?

Hindu sculptures at Angkor Wat were gradually replaced with Buddhist art, and the site has served as a Buddhist centre ever since.

Which Chinese admiral studied Angkor Wat's architecture, later echoed in Nanjing's Glazed Pagoda?

Envoy Zhou Daguan visited in 1296; Zheng He's design borrowings went into the Dabaoen Temple as well.

In which year did Cambodia gain independence from France and take control of Angkor Wat?

The French-run Conservation d'Angkor kept working on the temples until the early 1970s, with major restorations in the 1960s.

In which year was the Conservation d'Angkor disbanded under the Khmer Rouge?

Camping Khmer Rouge troops burned what wood remained for fuel, though art thieves in the late 1980s did far more damage to the reliefs.

Why was it India, not the usual colonial-era experts, that restored the temple from 1986 to 1992?

Both the early French and later Indian work drew criticism for damaging stone with chemicals and cement.

In which year was Angkor removed from UNESCO's World Heritage in Danger list?

It had been listed as endangered in 1992, the same year it became a World Heritage Site, after an appeal by Norodom Sihanouk.

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

Zoning came in 1994 and a heritage law in 1996; the German Apsara Conservation Project separately protects the carved devatas.

A German survey found roughly what share of Angkor Wat's reliefs in very poor condition?

Natural erosion, microbial biofilms and earlier restorations were to blame; a Japanese team restored the north library in 2005.

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

They also found a wooden-fortified structure to the south and signs of ordinary residents, not just priests, inside the moat.

LIDAR scans show Angkor Wat rests on roughly how much fill?

Five to ten million sandstone blocks sit on top; the binding agent between them is still unidentified, with resins or slaked lime suggested.

In 2011 Waseda University researchers found a shorter canal from Mount Kulen to Angkor Wat of what length?

The old theory had stone travelling 90 km via canal, across Tonlé Sap and up the Siem Reap River.

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

Tourism reached 2.6 million foreign visitors in 2018 but slumped to 280,000 in pandemic-hit 2022.