Angkor Wat - Siem Reap

There are few places anywhere on earth to match the splendour of Angkor Wat. The temple is one of the most astronomically immense monuments to religion ever built and is authentically one the wonders of the world. Believed to have been constructed as a temple and mausoleum for King Suryavarman II at the apex of the Khmer imperium in the first a moiety of the 12th century, Angkor Wat is probably the best-preserved of the Angkorean temples. As with other Angkorean temples and walled cities such as Angkor Thom, the central theme of Khmer architecture revolved around the conception of the temple-mountain.

By the time building on Angkor Wat was commenced early in the 12th century, this had been elaborated to a central tower circumvented by four more minute towers. The central monument represents the mythical Mount Meru, the holy mountain at the centre of the macrocosm, which was home to the Hindu god Vishnu. The five towers symbolise Mount Meru's five peaks. It is arduous to express in words the gargantuan scale of Angkor Wat, but it can be explicated in part by an optical canvassing of the dimensions of the intricate. The temple is circumvented by a moat which makes the one around the Tower of London, built at roughly the same time, look homogeneous to nothing more than a garden trench.

At 190 metres wide and composing a rectangle quantifying 1.5 km by 1.3 km, it is hard to imagine any assailing force inundating the defences. But the moat was more than just a defensive bulwark, in line with the temple's Hindu inceptions it represented the oceans of the world. A rectangular wall quantifying 1025 metres by 800 metres borders the inner edge of the moat. There is a gate in each side of the wall, but unorthodoxly for the mainly Hindu-influenced Angkorian temples, the main ingress faces west. This ingression is a richly embellished portico, 235 m wide with three gates. However, the temple's greatest sculptural treasure is its 2 km-long bas-assuagements around the walls of the outer gallery and the hundred figures of devatas and apsaras. This intricately carved gallery tells stories of the god Vishnu and of Suryavarman II's successes on the battlefield. The whole intricate covers 81 hectares.