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Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the complex surrounding it, and the only major Angkor temple whose religious dedication changed during its own working life -- built as a Hindu temple to Vishnu, later rededicated to Buddhist worship. Facing west rather than the east-facing orientation of most Khmer state temples, it stands in the southernmost part of the wider Angkor Archaeological Park, a hallmark example of the high classical style of Khmer architecture.
Angkor Wat's silhouette is defined by five sandstone towers -- four smaller ones at the corners of the temple's uppermost level surrounding a taller central tower -- built to represent the five peaks of Mount Meru, the mountain at the center of the universe in Hindu cosmology. Each tower is carved with lotus-bud-shaped detailing, and the arrangement is echoed in miniature throughout the temple's design.
The temple's sandstone walls carry nearly 20,000 square feet of bas-relief carvings, among the most extensive in the world. Long galleries depict scenes from Hindu epics -- the Ramayana and the Mahabharata -- alongside historical battles and processions from the Khmer empire. Elsewhere, thousands of carved apsaras, celestial dancers, decorate the walls and columns, each one individually detailed.
A wide, rectangular moat surrounds the entire complex, representing the cosmic ocean that encircles Mount Meru in Hindu belief. Inside it, the temple is laid out in concentric rectangular galleries, each level slightly smaller and higher than the last, so that a visitor walking toward the central towers is, symbolically, climbing toward the center of the universe.
Angkor Wat sits within the Angkor Archaeological Park, a vast expanse of forest and former rice-farming land north of Siem Reap that holds hundreds of temple ruins besides Angkor Wat itself. A wide moat, among the largest of any temple in the park, rings the entire complex -- originally dug both for cosmological symbolism and practical water management in a landscape shaped by the region's monsoon rains and its proximity to the Tonlé Sap, Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake.
The moat's steady water level is also what has kept the temple's foundations stable for nearly a millennium, while protecting it from the jungle regrowth that has partially reclaimed many less-protected temples nearby.
