Heritage site
Baphuon
ប្រាសាទបាពួន
Baphuon (ប្រាសាទបាពួន) is an 11th-century temple mountain next to the royal palace inside Angkor Thom, in Angkor.[1][2] It is a three-tiered pyramid 34.8 meters high, and the largest monument in the Angkor park after Angkor Wat.[3][4] A reclining Buddha about 70 meters long, built from the temple's own stones in the 15th or 16th century, lies along its western side.[1] The temple was taken apart for restoration in the 1960s, abandoned during the war and put back together between 1995 and 2011.[4]
History
No inscription names the builder of the Baphuon, so its date was long worked out from other inscriptions and from its style.[1][3] Academic publications and guidebooks credited it to King Udayadityavarman II (reigned 1050 to 1065), and it was said to have been built around 1060.[1][5] In 2015 a team led by Mitch Hendrickson and Stephanie Leroy published radiocarbon dates for the iron crampons that hold its stones together. The dates place its construction in the reign of Udayadityavarman II's father, Suryavarman I (1010 to 1050), who until then had no temple mountain of his own in Angkor.[1][3]
The Baphuon was the largest temple of its time, surpassed only by Angkor Wat in the following century.[5] Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy at Angkor in the late 1200s, wrote of a "bronze tower", and researchers believe it stood on top of the Baphuon. That tower is gone.[5][3] The temple was built as a Hindu monument to Shiva.[5] Son Soubert, a professor of archaeology at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, has said it gave its name to a style, the Baphuon style, whose sculptures are very distinctive.[5]
The pyramid stands on a fill of sand, and at 130 by 104 meters at ground level it was the largest structure Angkor's builders had raised that way. Its weight and the rain seeping through its stones made parts of it collapse.[5] The architect Pascal Royère said the builders "reached the limits of what the technique could handle".[5]
Reclining Buddha
On the second tier of the western side is a reclining Buddha, made by taking down parts of the temple and reusing their stones.[5][6] The 2015 study gives its length as 70 meters, and a 2002 report as nearly 9 meters high and over 70 meters long; reports from 2008 and 2016 give 75 meters.[1][5][6][3] The Buddha marks the change from Mahayana to Theravada Buddhism in Angkor.[1]
Royère dated the Buddha to around the end of the 15th century.[5] The 2015 radiocarbon study calls the 16th century the conventional date.[1] That date is based on the last use of Angkor by Theravada Khmer kings, in the middle and later 1500s, as B.-P. Groslier described it in 1958.[1] Jacques Dumarçay and Royère later dated the Buddha from its architecture to between the late 1400s and the 1500s, and flat chisel marks of that period on buildings and statues have also been used to date it.[1] The study's own radiocarbon date for a crampon behind the Buddha's head falls between 1417 and 1452, the time of the takeover of Angkor by the kingdom of Ayutthaya, between 1431 and at least 1444.[1] Its authors say the Buddha may have been built before, during or after that time.[1][3]
Restoration
The École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), which had restored Angkor's monuments since 1908, chose in 1960 to rebuild the Baphuon by anastylosis: taking the temple apart stone by stone and putting it back on a strengthened core.[5] In 1970, as the war spread, the Angkor conservator Bernard-Philippe Groslier had a laterite shell built over the unfinished upper levels. The EFEO team left about two years later, and in 1975 its office in Phnom Penh was ransacked and the Baphuon records were lost.[5] The work stopped under the Khmer Rouge.[6]
When the EFEO architect Pascal Royère took over in 1995, about 300,000 stones lay over 10 hectares of overgrown ground.[5][6] He worked out where they belonged from 940 photographs of the temple, the oldest from 1910. About 30 Cambodian workers who had restored Angkor's temples in the 1960s and 1970s came back to help.[5] The team of the 1960s had planned to remove the Buddha; the EFEO decided to keep it.[6]
King Norodom Sihamoni attended the consecration of the restored Buddha in June 2008, watched by about 1,300 people.[6] Royère finished the temple in 2011.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 PLOS ONE, Leroy, Hendrickson, Delqué-Kolic, Vega and Dillmann, "First Direct Dating for the Construction and Modification of the Baphuon Temple Mountain in Angkor, Cambodia" (November 4, 2015)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily Khmer, report on the dress code for visitors to Angkor (August 5, 2016; in Khmer)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 The Cambodia Daily, Michelle Vachon, Metal Findings Give New Perspective on Angkorian History (June 20, 2016)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 The Cambodia Daily, Michelle Vachon, Royere, an "Impassioned Aficionado of Angkor" (February 8, 2014)
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 The Cambodia Daily, Michelle Vachon, Putting the World's Biggest Jigsaw Puzzle: Angkor's Baphuon Temple Back Together Again (July 13, 2002)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 The Cambodia Daily, Michelle Vachon, Baphuon Temple in Siem Reap Consecrated (June 5, 2008)