In Angkor Wat, the Sun Rises Behind the Temple

This episode is one morning at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, standing on the bank of the moat before the sun is up: the five towers still a black shape against the sky, and the reason the light comes up behind them instead of in front.

Angkor Wat was built between 1113 and 1150 under the Khmer king Suryavarman II, as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, on a site of 162.6 hectares — the largest religious complex in the world. Its plan is a model of Mount Meru, the home of the gods: the five towers in the middle stand for the mountain's five peaks, and the wall and the 190-metre-wide moat around them stand for the mountain ranges and the ocean that surround it. 1

The stone is not from here. The monument was made of five to ten million blocks of sandstone, each weighing up to 1.5 tonnes, quarried at Mount Kulen about 40 km to the northeast. One suggested route carried them roughly 35 km along a canal towards Tonlé Sap lake, another 35 km across the lake, and finally 15 km up the Siem Reap River against the current — a journey of about 90 km. In 2011 Etsuo Uchida and Ichita Shimoda of Waseda University found, from satellite imagery, a shorter 35 km canal between Mount Kulen and Angkor Wat, and argued the Khmer used that instead. 1

Unlike most Khmer temples, Angkor Wat is oriented to the west rather than the east. Maurice Glaize and George Coedès read that as evidence Suryavarman meant it as his funerary temple, and pointed out that its bas-reliefs run counter-clockwise, the reverse of the normal order, as Brahminic funeral rites do; Freeman and Jacques tie the alignment instead to Vishnu, who is associated with the west. Either way the facade faces the setting sun, so anyone at the moat at dawn is looking east with the light coming up behind the towers. The temple is also aligned so that its main tower meets the morning sun at the spring equinox. 1

UNESCO inscribed Angkor as a World Heritage Site in 1992, under criteria i to iv, as the centre of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th century, naming Angkor Wat among its artistic masterpieces; the site came off the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2004. 2

Visual credits: the footage and photographs in this episode come from the Pexels library and are free to use. The dawn timelapse of the towers and the reflecting basin is by KIMCHHEN LACH 3; the temple across its moat in the early light is a Pexels photograph 4; the carved gallery wall is a Pexels photograph 5; the devata is a Pexels photograph 6; the closing view of the causeway is a Pexels photograph 7; and the cover photograph is a Pexels photograph 8.