A Capital That Changed Religion Without Being Rebuilt

Angkor Thom is unusual among great religious complexes in having changed allegiance twice while the stones stayed where they were. The Khmer state had been Hindu, with Angkor Wat raised to Vishnu in the twelfth century. Jayavarman the Seventh made his new walled capital and its state temple Mahayana Buddhist. Within a few generations a Hindu reaction under later rulers went through the site systematically, cutting Buddha images out of niches and recarving some of them as linga or as ascetics, and the damage is still legible on the walls.

Theravada Buddhism then became the settled religion of Cambodia, and it is Theravada practice that continues at the site today. George Coedes described this kind of layering across mainland Southeast Asia, where Indian religious forms were adopted, localised and then displaced by later Indian forms without the political centre moving. The result at Angkor Thom is a single monument that carries the evidence of its own arguments. Four routes lead into the walled enclosure through gates flanked by long rows of stone figures hauling on the body of a serpent, a scene usually read as the churning of the ocean of milk, which is a Hindu myth used to frame the entrance to a Buddhist king's city. The complex is managed today as part of the Angkor archaeological park, and it is a working place of worship as well as a heritage site.