Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom (អង្គរធំ) is the walled royal city that King Jayavarman VII built at Angkor in the late 12th century. It lies about 10 kilometers north of the center of Siem Reap. A square laterite wall about 3 kilometers long on each side and a moat enclose some 900 hectares. The Bayon stands at its center, and the Baphuon (ប្រាសាទបាពួន), the site of the royal palace and several smaller temples lie within its walls.

The south gate of Angkor Thom, 2016. Photo: Marcin Konsek, CC BY-SA 4.0

Heritage site details
Khmer name	អង្គរធំ
Site type	Walled city
Location	Angkor, Siem Reap province
Country	Cambodia
Period	Late 12th century
Subjects	History & Remembrance; Religion & Spiritual Life

History

Jayavarman VII came to the throne in the early 1180s, after fighting Cham forces; some Cham factions had attacked Angkor in the 1170s. He rebuilt the capital and raised the present wall around it, with the Bayon in the middle. Angkor Thom was the last of the enclosure walls he built; Preah Khan, Banteay Kdei and Ta Prohm, temples of his reign, have walls of their own. The walled area held older monuments too: the Baphuon, an 11th-century temple mountain, stands next to the royal palace inside the enclosure.

Im Sokrithy, an archaeologist with the APSARA National Authority, the government body that manages the Angkor park, describes Angkor Thom as the center of a larger city of about a million people spread over some 3,000 square kilometers. Inside the walls, he says, the city was laid out in districts for priests, the royal household, officials, diplomats, merchants and ordinary people. Its streets formed a grid, with two ring roads, one along the wall and one outside the moat.

The wall and moat were built for defense and also as a picture of the universe: the Bayon stands for Mount Meru at the center, and the wall and moat for the mountains and ocean around it. The ethnologist Ang Choulean has linked the plan to the legend of Nokor Kok Thlok, the story of Cambodia's birth on an island that the naga made by drinking the sea.

Wall and gates

The wall is built of laterite and stands 7.5 meters high, or about 8 meters by a 2026 report. Earth banked against its inner face supports it, and a road 10 meters wide ran along the top of that bank around the city. A small temple, called a Chrung temple, stands at each corner. Channels cut through the bank let floodwater out into the moat. The laterite for today's repairs is quarried in Chi Kraeng district, east of Siem Reap, where the original builders also cut theirs. Researchers think the earth for the bank was dug from the moat.

The city has five gates: Tonle Om on the south, Ta Kav on the west, Dei Chhnang on the north, and two on the east, the Victory gate (Chey) and the Kmaoch gate. The Victory gate, off the four main axes, runs straight from the royal palace out of the city, and is believed to be the last one built. Above each gate is a tower with four faces, which published research identifies as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. On the causeway to each gate, 54 gods line one side and 54 demons the other, pulling on a naga as in the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, with the moat as the ocean. The southern gate, the most fully restored, is the one most visitors use.

Inside the walls

The Bayon, Jayavarman VII's central temple, was built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The architect Olivier Cunin has estimated that it had 59 towers carved with faces on all four sides, 236 faces in all. Northwest of the Bayon is the Baphuon, and north of it the laterite enclosure of the former royal palace, with the Phimeanakas temple and the Srah Srei pond inside. The Terrace of the Elephants lies outside the palace's eastern gate. Other temples inside the walls include Preah Palilay, Preah Pithu, the Khleangs and West Prasat Top. Several Buddhist pagodas also stand there.

Restoration

French archaeologists restored the Victory gate's causeway in the 1920s. An APSARA team excavated it again in 2024, after finding that the earlier work had left weak points, and found the head of one of its gods during the dig. The Authority's records show where about 50 to 60 percent of the causeway statues' heads are; some are in the Angkor Conservation store, the Angkor National Museum and collections abroad.

Twenty-two sections of the wall have collapsed, four of them in a storm in 2011. The APSARA National Authority has been rebuilding them with laterite and a supporting inner wall; by 2020, seven sites were finished. In April 2026 it began a six-month repair of a 15-meter section southwest of the Tonle Om gate.

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