The Temples of Siem Reap, Cambodia

After a fun evening in Phnom Penh, we’ve been in Siem Reap where we have been touring around looking at ancient temples. There are many ancient temples in this area of Cambodia, and they are all very big and complex. The temples were constructed about 1,000 years ago. The biggest temple is Angkor Wat, and it is said to be the largest religious building ever built. The temples are the remnants of a huge society of people that used to live in that area, a civilization called the Khmer. The capitol city of Angkor was estimated to have a population of one million people at its peak in the 12th century and was the largest city in the world at that time.  Many of the temples have large moats that were part of an elaborate aqueduct system that provided water to the cities. The temples are made of sandstone, which is very heavy and comes from mountains over 25 miles away, so somehow the Khmer people transported the stone that distance from the mountains (over 5 million tons just for the one temple Angkor Wat), but how they did it is still a mystery. The walls of the temples are meticulously placed together without the use of mortar, and if a worker messed up on the design or engraved something in the wrong place, the wall would have to be torn down and started over. The Khmer must have had very good mathematicians to have built such massive, beautiful structures.

It is a great mystery why after just three hundred years, Angkor was completely abandoned by its people, and its many temples were left to ruin. There were hundreds of thousands of people living in these cities and temples, yet they all left. The scientists who researched this question think that it was a combination of invaders and climate change that drove the population out – armies from Thailand attacked the city and may have done enough damage to the aqueducts to make the cities vulnerable to drought and flooding cycles which made them unlivable. I can’t imagine what change could have taken place to make so many people abandon their homes, and it’s equally hard to try and think about that happening to a modern city, like New York City, but Angkor must have been like the New York City of its time.

A few monks have been living in the temple of Angkor Wat during the past several centuries, but other than that the temples have remained completely abandoned. It was really interesting to see how much of the temples still remain standing after all of these years of exposure to the tropical environment of Cambodia. My favorite temple that we visited was one where the jungle has completely reclaimed the temple site – it actually has trees growing on top of its walls.