Angkor: an interactive map of Cambodia's must-see temples

An interactive guide to Angkor Wat and other temples at Angkor, Cambodia, including then-and-now recreations of individual temples and a map of the essential sights

The Telegraph | 29 November 2014

Angkor’s enigmatic temples, some still buckling under the weight of the jungle, have become a must-see on south-east Asia itineraries. But visitors who think of them only as crumbling ruins are seeing only half the picture, beautiful though it is. 
  

Far from being left to nature, most temples were painstakingly rebuilt over the past century. To what extent they have been reconstructed only becomes clear when looking at astonishing black-and-white photographs from the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), showing excavation work amid mounds of earth and rubble in the early 20th century. 
 

“What visitors see now are temples that have been worked on for many years,” said Andrew Booth, the author of The Angkor Guidebook, a new book that was three years in the making. 
 

“I never understood how much work had been done on them,” said Booth, who trawled for 10 days through 25,000 images kept by the EFEO. “Baphuon was not very well designed and started to fall down as soon as it was built. A picture from 1948 shows just a pile of rubble and early attempts to underpin it with concrete. What are now the temples were put together piece by piece by diligent academics so we can appreciate them. Hats off to them.” 

^{Credit: EFEO}

The EFEO, a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies, first began reconstructing Angkor’s temples back in the early 20th century. “Preah Khan was the first one to be seriously rebuilt,” said Booth. “It’s the only double-tiered structure in Angkor but a black-and-white photograph from 1909 shows only the bottom tier standing.” 

It was over many glasses of wine at Siem Reap’s Raffles hotel that a group of historians put their heads together to develop the guidebook’s most exciting feature: images that show what the temples would have looked like – brightly painted and standing tall – in their heyday. At one point, someone realised that the Khmers would not have been able to produce the colour blue, so they had to go back and revise everything. But after much discussion, a consensus of opinion between ceramic and architectural experts produced images of highly decorated temples, gilded and incorporating tiles glazed green and red.

These colourful overlays, when seen on top of photographs showing the temples as they appear today, provide the best guess that we have currently as to their original appearance. They bring to life temples that visitors to Angkor, limited for time and fatigued by the tropical heat, often struggle to comprehend. 

“When looking at the temple carvings today, there is not much evidence of colouration,” said Booth. “At Pre Rup there is some stucco but generally, very little stucco and paint remain. However, these buildings were built for the gods, they would have been gilded and brightly coloured. We know that a Chinese emissary, Zhou Daguan, wrote in the 13th century that the king worshipped at the royal enclosure of Phimeanakas, a 'magnificent, gold-topped temple’.”

 Lidar imaging technology used in Cambodia in 2012 conducted an archaeological survey of Angkor using lasers strapped to a helicopter. The resulting maps revealed post holes outside temples that formed the basis for the depictions of wooden galleries lining enclosures in some of the guidebook’s re-creations. 

Today’s visitors will also notice that, at East Mebon, a mid-10th-century temple with stone lion guardians, there are no stone steps down to the ground. This is because, though it’s now surrounded by palm forest and rice paddies, this temple once sat as an island in the centre of a large reservoir and would have been accessed by boat via a jetty. The temple continues to serve as a site for Hindus to persuade the god Indra to send rain at the end of the dry north-east monsoon, with villagers turning up to make offerings of incense and candles.

 “An awful lot is known about Angkor now,” said Booth, whose guidebook also has practical information on how best to see the temples today, including how to escape the crowds. This is a bit of an obsession for Booth, who, as founder of the tour company About Asia (aboutasiatravel.com), actually pays people to count the hourly footfall at temples in order to steer tour groups around the quietest parts of the complex. 

He thinks the hundreds of thousands who travel to Angkor during the high season are missing a trick. “June and August is low season. There are fewer people and it’s when rice is being planted, so the fields are green and active. The hotel prices are also low.” He advised touring in the morning, when it is only likely to rain one morning in seven. 

As well as reimagining the temples’ past glory, Booth’s guidebook intersperses old images with concise information about each temple and anecdotal local knowledge – such as the fact that the Khmer Rouge used Preah Ko as an ammunition dump and food storehouse between 1975 and 1979, and Preah Khan as an encampment a few years earlier, along with Vietnamese troops who left a message scrawled on one of the doors. 

^{Credit: Pierre Dieulefils}

The first curator of Angkor’s archaeological site is thought to have been Jean Commaille, who was given the post in 1908, a year after Angkor was ceded back to Cambodia, then part of French Indochina. Commaille, then secretary of the EFEO, set about clearing the jungle at the site, mainly so he could paint more watercolours of the fig-strangled temples. He was killed in 1916 while handing out wages to those he had charged with cutting back the trees. His tomb, outside Bayon temple, is marked out, but his story is just another behind this important site, waiting to be told.

• The Angkor Guidebook, by Andrew Booth, is available from Amazon (amazon.co.uk) for £19.95, or from angkorguidebook.com.