Angkor Wat

Where it sits. Angkor Wat stands on the flat alluvial plain north of the Tonlé Sap lake, about six kilometres north of central Siem Reap and immediately south of the walled city of Angkor Thom. The site covers around 162 hectares inside a rectangular moat roughly 190 metres wide, crossed on the western side by a sandstone causeway some 200 metres long. Inside the moat, a laterite wall of about 1,025 by 800 metres encloses a park of grass and trees, and at its centre the temple rises in three concentric rectangular galleries to a quincunx of five towers, the central one reaching about 65 metres above the ground. It is the largest religious monument in the world by land area, and it has been in continuous religious use, in one form or another, since it was built.

The story behind it. Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century, from roughly 1113 onward, as a state temple and probably as his own funerary monument, and dedicated it to Vishnu rather than to Shiva as his predecessors had done. It faces west, unusually for a Khmer temple, an orientation associated with both Vishnu and the dead. The sandstone was quarried at Phnom Kulen some 40 kilometres to the northeast and moved by a canal system, with a laterite core behind the dressed facing. Blocks were fitted without mortar to tolerances that still surprise engineers. After the Khmer capital shifted in the 15th century the site was never truly abandoned: Theravada Buddhist monks maintained it, Japanese pilgrims left inscriptions in the 17th century, and Portuguese and Spanish visitors described it long before Henri Mouhot's widely read 1860s account introduced it to a European audience as a supposed discovery. It has appeared on every Cambodian national flag since the 1860s, including those of regimes that agreed on almost nothing else.

The carvings. The third enclosure carries about 600 metres of continuous bas-relief, roughly two metres high, and it is the single richest thing at Angkor. The southern half of the east gallery holds the Churning of the Sea of Milk, in which 92 asuras and 88 devas haul on the serpent Vasuki wound around Mount Mandara to produce the elixir of immortality, with Vishnu presiding at the centre. The west gallery shows the battle of Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata and the battle of Lanka from the Ramayana. The south gallery gives a historical procession of Suryavarman II with his generals and troops on one side, and on the other 32 hells and 37 heavens rendered with unsettling specificity. Around 1,800 devata figures are carved across the temple, individually detailed in hairstyle, jewellery and posture, and later Khmer-language and Buddhist additions overlay the original programme in places.

On screen. Angkor Wat's most beautiful film appearance is the end of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love in 2000, where Tony Leung's character travels to the ruins and whispers his secret into a hollow in a wall before sealing it with mud — a few minutes of screen time that made the temple a place of private grief rather than spectacle. The same year, the causeway, the western gate and the northern reflecting pool were used in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, though the bulk of that production's Angkor filming happened at Ta Prohm and the Bayon. Jean-Jacques Annaud shot Two Brothers around Angkor in 2003, and the temple is a fixture of Cambodian cinema, television and the label of the country's best-known beer.

What you actually see today. The standard route crosses the western causeway, passes the outer gopura with its huge standing Vishnu, walks the long avenue past two libraries and two ponds, and enters the galleries. The northern pond is where the sunrise crowd assembles for the reflection shot; it is genuinely fine and genuinely busy, with several hundred people in place before first light. The upper level, Bakan, is reached by a steep modern staircase, admits a limited number of visitors at a time, and closes on Buddhist holy days. Allow three hours to do the reliefs properly, walking them anticlockwise, and consider entering from the quieter eastern side and working backwards.

Getting there and timing. Passes are bought only at the Angkor Enterprise office on Road 60, in one-day, three-day and seven-day forms, and are photographed and checked at each temple. Tuk-tuks and bicycles are the usual transport from Siem Reap, 15 to 20 minutes away. November to February is dry and relatively cool; March to May is punishing heat; the June to October rains bring dramatic skies, full moats and green grass. Around the March equinox the sun rises directly over the central tower as seen from the western causeway, an alignment that draws a large crowd. Knees and shoulders must be covered to climb to the upper level. The causeway and ground-level galleries can be managed with assistance; the upper terraces cannot.