Ta Prohm

Where it sits. Ta Prohm stands in the forest about a kilometre east of Angkor Thom and roughly two kilometres northeast of Angkor Wat, within the Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap Province. Unlike the temple-mountains around it, it is flat: a single-level complex of concentric galleries and courtyards spread across an outer enclosure of about one kilometre by 600 metres, most of which is now forest. Only the dense inner core is visited, and the modern route enters from the west, threads a sequence of collapsed halls and tight courtyards, and exits east, so the crowd flows one way.

The story behind it. The temple was founded in 1186 by Jayavarman VII, the Buddhist king who rebuilt the empire after the Cham sack of Angkor, and was originally called Rajavihara, the royal monastery. Its central image was a personification of the perfection of wisdom given the features of the king's mother, and it functioned as a monastery and a place of learning rather than a state temple. A foundation stele records its economy in remarkable detail: more than 12,600 people lived and served within the temple itself, with nearly 80,000 more in over 3,000 villages assigned to support it, and the treasury held gold and silver dishes, tens of thousands of pearls, precious stones and hundreds of silk beds. Whether those numbers are literal or aspirational, they describe an institution the size of a small city. Later kings extended it, Ta Prohm's Buddhist imagery was systematically chiselled out during a Hindu reaction in the 13th century — you can still see empty niches where seated Buddhas were cut away — and the whole complex was abandoned some time after the fall of Angkor in the 15th century.

The trees. When the École française d'Extrême-Orient began clearing Angkor in the early 20th century, it deliberately left Ta Prohm largely as found, as a demonstration of how the monuments had appeared to their rediscoverers. That decision defines the site. Two species dominate: the pale, smooth-barked Tetrameles nudiflora, called spung in Khmer, which grows enormous and sends buttress roots over the galleries like poured wax, and strangler figs, whose roots run down walls in tight braids. The trees are simultaneously the attraction and the principal threat, since their roots both bind loose masonry together and prise it apart, and a fall takes a gallery with it. Since 2004 the Archaeological Survey of India has worked here with the APSARA authority on a conservation programme that stabilises structures, props galleries with steel and timber, and makes hard case-by-case decisions about which trees stay.

On screen. Ta Prohm is the temple most people have seen before arriving, because of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, filmed at Angkor in 2000 and released in 2001 with Angelina Jolie. The production shot at several monuments — the Bayon, Phnom Bakheng and Angkor Wat's causeway among them — but the images that lodged were of Ta Prohm: the doorway framed by fig roots and the great spung on the eastern side, now known to every guide and driver as the Tomb Raider tree. It is worth being precise about what was real. The temple exteriors and courtyards are the actual site; the interior sequences with the falling jasmine petals and the two-faced statue were built on sound stages at Pinewood, and elements were rearranged in the edit so that the geography on screen does not match the geography on the ground.

What you actually see today. The visit is short in distance and slow in practice: perhaps 500 metres of route through cramped galleries, over fallen lintels, past false doors and around courtyards heaped with numbered blocks awaiting reassembly. Look for the carved devata on the interior walls, many of them exceptionally fine and often overlooked next to the trees; the Hall of Dancers on the east side with its friezes of apsaras; and, on a small corbelled arch on the south side of the inner enclosure, a much-discussed carving that resembles a stegosaurus and is almost certainly a chameleon or a boar against a leafy background rather than evidence of anything else.

Getting there and timing. Angkor passes are sold at the Angkor Enterprise ticket office on Road 60 outside Siem Reap in one-, three- and seven-day forms, and are checked at every temple. Ta Prohm is 20 to 30 minutes from town by tuk-tuk and sits on the standard small-circuit route, usually visited after Angkor Thom. It fills between about 9am and 3pm; opening time and the last hour are far better. Shoulders and knees must be covered. Uneven rubble, high thresholds and narrow passages make the interior route unsuitable for wheelchairs, and a boardwalk covers only part of it.