Angkor Wat

At dawn the five lotus-bud towers of Angkor Wat rise as black silhouettes against a pink sky and double themselves in the still water of the reflecting pools. Built in the twelfth century as a Hindu model of the universe, the temple is the largest religious monument on Earth and the masterpiece of the Khmer Empire, which ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia from its capital at Angkor. It has never been fully abandoned. Buddhist monks have worshiped here for some 700 years, its silhouette sits at the center of the Cambodian flag, and it remains the single image most people carry of Cambodia, a country that rebuilt its tourism around it after decades of war.

The temple stands about 6 kilometers north of the town of Siem Reap, inside a moat roughly 190 meters wide that frames a rectangle of about 1.5 by 1.3 kilometers. A sandstone causeway leads from the west, the direction associated with Vishnu and with death, through a gateway and along a raised avenue to three stepped galleries that climb toward the central tower, which rises about 65 meters above the ground. The outer gallery carries hundreds of meters of continuous bas-reliefs, among them the Churning of the Ocean of Milk and the armies of the Mahabharata, and the walls are thick with carved apsaras, celestial dancers. Hundreds of other temples, among them the Bayon and the jungle-gripped Ta Prohm, lie scattered across the surrounding archaeological park.

King Suryavarman II began the temple soon after taking the throne in 1113 and dedicated it to Vishnu, probably also as his funerary monument, and work continued for about three decades. As the empire turned toward Buddhism from the late 1100s, the temple was gradually converted to Theravada Buddhist use. Angkor declined as a capital after the fifteenth century, but Angkor Wat stayed in use, and the French explorer Henri Mouhot's accounts of the 1860s made it famous abroad. UNESCO inscribed Angkor in 1992 and placed it on the danger list until 2004, while the APSARA National Authority manages the park today. The park drew nearly 1 million international visitors in 2025, but foreign arrivals fell by around 30 percent in early 2026 amid Cambodia–Thailand border tensions.

• Borobudur
  The ninth-century Buddhist monument in central Java, a stone path to enlightenment another great temple of Southeast Asia
• Mekong River
  Southeast Asia's lifeline, from the Tibetan Plateau to the sea in the basin of
• Cambodia
  The land of Angkor on the Mekong floodplain located in
• Indochina
  The mainland Southeast Asian peninsula, and a name under review located in
• South-Eastern Asia
  A mainland peninsula and 25,000 islands between two oceans located in