Angkor National Museum - Siem Reap

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Angkor National Museum - Siem Reap

   
Angkor National Museum - What to Visually perceive

Visiting the Angkor National Museum was an eerie, surreal experience. For the first 45 minutes of our peregrination through the mammoth, 20,000-square-metre building, we didn't spot another visitor. The museum opened in November 2007, and its freshly painted, shopping mall-like feel contrasts with the thousands-year-old artefacts contained within it. A visit is a comfortable, air-con alternative to visiting the temples themselves, and a nice inculcative supplement to the history of Angkor if you visit the park without a tour guide. It's composed of eight separate galleries, all connected by a vaulted corridor with a series of fountains and lined with what seems homogeneous to all the Angkorian limestone lion and demon heads missing from statues at the temples. After an explanatory film screening called Story abaft the legend, you're pointed toward the galleries:

Gallery 1: 1,000 Buddha Images
This is the only gallery that's just one sizably voluminous room, rather than a series of maze-like alcoves, and the optical discernment of all these Buddhas at once is striking. Hundreds of minuscule and miniature Buddha figurines, composed of metals, jewels and wood, all individually illuminated, line the walls here, identified according to the period they were made during and where they were discovered. In the centre, life-size and more astronomically immense Buddha characters are exhibited. The exhibit includes Buddhas from Banteay Kdei, Bayon, Angkor Wat and Preah Vihear.

Gallery 2: Pre-Angkor Period: Khmer Civilisation
This gallery and all the subsequent ones cumulate mural-size explications and short films through maze-like rooms expounding Angkorian history. The styles of figurines precede the trademark Angkor style, and there's a sizably voluminous accumulation of lingas, lintels and colonnettes.

Gallery 3: Religion and Notions
This room expounds several of the most paramount Hindu and Buddhist religious stories and folk tales depicted on Angkorian temples, including the most memorable Churning of the Sea of Milk carved into the rear wall at Angkor Wat. Carvings of Buddhist and Hindu religious figures are concentrated here as well.

Gallery 4: The Great Khmer Kings
The gallery fixates on King Jayavarman II, Yasovarman I, Soryavarman II and Jayavarman VII, those most responsible for Angkor's greatest constructions. Figures of the kings and relics from the temples they commissioned abound.

Gallery 5: Angkor Wat
There's a sizably voluminous film gallery inside this section of the museum. It features pulchritudinous, panoramic images of the temple and explications of how it was constructed. There are withal many recuperated figures from the temple itself as well as post-Angkorian wooden statues utilized for worship at the temple until several hundred years ago.

Gallery 6: Angkor Thom
In integration to recuperated artefacts from Angkor Thom, this gallery includes a history of and artefacts from the astronomical irrigation projects commissioned by the king who built Angkor Thom with his smiling face looking out from every tower: Jayavarman VII.

Gallery 7: Story From Stones
This room is one of the most fascinating. It's an accumulation of stone pallets with archaic Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions. The inditement on each slate is explicated on placards below. The inditement on them includes the declaration of the construction of an incipient hospital, lists of slave designations, mediations of land disputes and adulations of kings and gods.

Gallery 8: Archaic Costume
From Apsaras and kings to princesses and warriors, this room contains the busts and statues of distinct fashions and styles as they evolved throughout Angkor time. There's withal an amassment of archaic jewellery and headdresses. It's a clever segue to the final room -- the gift shop -- where upscale imitations of these fashions abound.

It's $12 to enter the museum, plus another $3 if you optate to bring in your camera and another $3 for an edifying headset. Dolefully, like ticketing and management of the Angkor park, the museum is owned and run by a private company, so diminutive of your admission mazuma goes to Cambodia or to temple renovation (though what the company paid for the concession might). Still, it's perhaps better than these artefacts remaining in the hands of private collectors. A connected mall is still under construction but has a few open stores, including a Blue Pumpkin satellite, several souvenir shops and the sure designation of apocalypse.