Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom was the capital city of Khmer kingdom from mid 10^th century to the 15^th century. This ancient city covers an area of 3km by 3km (1, 9 mile) =145.8(360acres).

ProtectionAngkor Thom is protected by a fortified stone wall which is 8m (26f) tall and the moat surrounding which is 100m (328f) wide. To make a stronger protection, this moat used to be filled up with many crocodiles.

Five gates

Angkor Thom has five gates. All five gates look the same because they have the same decoration. There is one gate on each side except the eastern wall which has two gates.

Buddisadva Avalokitesvara’s four faces

Each gate was designed as a tower which is 23m (75f)tall. Its upper structure was designed with four giant smilling faces of Buddisadva Avalokitesvara crowned with the sculpture of a blooming lotus flower. In Mahayana Buddhism, Buddisadva Avalokitesvara is one of ten reincarnations of Buddha who nearly attains enlightenment and whose function is to save people’s lives.

Demon and God

In the front of each gate, there is a row of 54 demon statues  on the right and a line of 54 god statues on the left holding or pulling Naga body in an action of tug of war. This sculptures show a scene of a famous Hindu myth where gods and demons used a Naga to churn the sea of milk to take elixir of immortality.

Demon and God’s face

Each demon statue has scary face with big eyes, big nose, and their crowns also look completely different style from gods'. God statues wear high conical crowns with smiling faces.

RestorationBefore the restoration in the 1920s, All of these statues used to be destroyed and crumbled into the bottom of the moat. Angkor Thom that we see today is the result of at least five centuries of occupation and urban development, including frequent remodeling. It is a succession of cities, which took more or less final form around the end of the 12th century under the reign of Jayavarman VII.

RemodelingThe remodeling of urban forms which had themselvesdeveloped over the preceding 400 years was not a minor undertaking, particularly as Jayavarman sought to render the spatial composition of his city highly symbolic. In addition, the exact definition of the square resulted from a number of unavoidable constraints, such as the existence of the Phnom Bakheng.

The wall, called Jayagiri in period inscriptions, is itself surrounded by a wide moat called Jayasindhu. One inscription explicitly compares this ensemble to the mountain range and sea of milk which encircle the universe in Indian cosmological conceptions adopted in ancient Cambodia.

Thus Angkor Thom was in its entirety the world created - or recreated after the city sacking by the Chams emerging as ambrosia after the Churning of the Sea of Milk. This explains why the churning episode was represented at each of the five gates giving entry to the city.

We are far from fully understanding the purely functional aspects of the city. An ancient water outlet, known as Run Tadiv, is still in use today at the southwestern corner of the enclosure wall. We do not know if the nearby rectangular reservoir, Beng Thom, or the pond known as Trapeang Daun Meas in the northwestern quadrant of the Royal Palace, existed in ancient times.

A similar structure at the wall's northeastern corner is overgrown with vegetation today. Future research promises to tell us if this was another outlet or, rather, as logic suggests, a mechanism serving to introduce water into the city. Atop the wall at each of its corners, Jayavarman also erected a temple- the Prasat Chrung - along with a stela inscribed in Sanskrit. The only complete inscription, covering all four sides of the stela, is that of the southwestern Prasat Chrung.