Suryavarman II and the Building of Angkor Wat
Suryavarman II took the Khmer throne around 1113 after killing a rival claimant, reunified an empire that had fragmented, and campaigned against the Chams and into the Mon lands. He also sent the first Khmer embassy to the Chinese court in a century. Angkor Wat was begun early in his reign and took several decades. Unlike his predecessors' Shaivite foundations it was dedicated to Vishnu, with whom Suryavarman associated himself; its bas-reliefs run for hundreds of metres, including a panel of the king in procession and one of the Churning of the Sea of Milk. Alone among the great Angkorian temples it faces west, which is the main reason it is generally read as a funerary temple. The temple was possible because of what surrounded it. Angkor's barays — reservoirs several kilometres long — and its canal network supported intensive rice cultivation and a population that airborne laser survey has shown occupied a low-density urban sprawl of roughly a thousand square kilometres. When Zhou Daguan visited in 1296 the city was still functioning and he described it in the only surviving firsthand account. The capital was abandoned after 1431; Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned, passing into Buddhist use and remaining a place of worship continuously.
- Year: 1113 CE
- Category: Architecture
