The story most people know ends with a French explorer parting the vines in the nineteenth century to reveal a forgotten temple. Angkor itself was abandoned in the early fifteenth century. What happened to the largest religious structure in the world in between is the part the story skips.
No. Theravada Buddhist monks maintained Angkor Wat after Angkor was abandoned, and it remained an important pilgrimage site that continued to attract European visitors. Henri Mouhot “rediscovered” it only after the French colonial regime was established in 1863, and it appears on the Cambodian flag today.
Angkor Wat is a temple complex near Siem Reap in Cambodia, built in the 12th century by King of the Khmer empire. It comprises more than a thousand buildings and covers some 400 acres, or 160 hectares, which makes it the world’s largest religious structure.
The design is a cosmology in stone. The five central towers symbolize the peaks of , the moat suggests the surrounding ocean, and a bridge of 617 feet gives access. The walls carry bas-relief sculptures of very high quality showing Hindu gods, Khmer scenes, and episodes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Its religion changed once. After the Cham sacked Angkor in 1177, concluded the Hindu gods had failed him and dedicated his new capital to Buddhism. Angkor Wat became a Buddhist shrine, and many of its Hindu deities gave way to Buddhist art.
The city was abandoned in the early 15th century, and later had to undo the damage of the century that followed. The temple itself was never left. Theravada Buddhist monks maintained it, it remained an important pilgrimage site and continued to attract European visitors, and Henri Mouhot rediscovered it only after 1863.
wat. The monks never left the temple the explorer claimed to find.
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Calling a continuously used shrine a rediscovery says more about who was doing the discovering than about the site.
How do we know?
Britannica sets out the construction, the change of religion, the abandonment of the city and the sequence of restoration programs down to the present.
What is still unknown
An encyclopedia account, compressing centuries where the documentary record is thin.
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