Why the dates need care
Angkor Wat has no single founding inscription that gives a start date, so its chronology is pieced together from the reign of Suryavarman II, from the style of the carving, from later inscriptions, and from visitors’ accounts. The framework below is widely accepted, but many specific years are approximate. Where the evidence is thin, the dates are given as ranges.
Before the temple: the early twelfth century
Suryavarman II came to the throne around 1113, apparently after a struggle for power. A later inscription praises him as a ruler who restored order. He is remembered as a warrior king, with campaigns recorded against the kingdom of Champa to the east and Dai Viet to the north, with mixed results.
His reign came after about three centuries of royal building at Angkor, including the temple-mountains of earlier kings. The ground around the future Angkor Wat was already part of this landscape of reservoirs and temples, so the site was not empty when work began.
Construction: roughly 1113 to 1150
Construction is traditionally placed in Suryavarman II’s reign, which ended around 1150. The temple was dedicated to Vishnu. It is not known how long the work took, and some parts of the decoration were left unfinished at the end of the reign. The unfinished state of certain reliefs is part of the evidence that the king died before the work was complete.
The king’s posthumous name, Paramavishnuloka, reflects his association with Vishnu. Later records suggest this name was also applied to the temple, although the name used by the Khmer builders for the temple itself is not fully settled in modern discussions.
The shock of 1177 and the rise of Jayavarman VII
In 1177, a Cham force attacked the Khmer capital, sailing up the Tonle Sap lake, and the king of the time was killed. Cham occupation lasted a few years, until Jayavarman VII drove them out and was crowned around 1181. Angkor Wat was a state temple of the old regime, and it seems to have been preserved rather than destroyed. The new king was a Mahayana Buddhist and built his own great monuments, including the Bayon, in Angkor Thom. Some Hindu images in older temples were modified. The details for Angkor Wat itself are debated, and there is no clear evidence that Jayavarman VII damaged it.
The thirteenth century: reaction and change
After Jayavarman VII, a period of Hindu revival under his successors is reflected in the defacing of Buddhist images at several Angkor sites. It is not always easy to say which changes are the work of which king. In the thirteenth century, Theravada Buddhism, a form practised in Sri Lanka and parts of mainland Southeast Asia, began to spread into the Khmer lands, gradually replacing Hindu devotion and Mahayana Buddhism as the main religion.
The shift to Buddhist use
Over the following centuries, probably by the fourteenth century and certainly by the sixteenth, Angkor Wat was a Theravada Buddhist site. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who stayed in Angkor in 1296 and 1297, described the city and its temples but left no clear account that is generally agreed to describe Angkor Wat, so the temple’s role at that moment is uncertain.
Buddha statues were placed in the galleries and the central sanctuary, and the cruciform terrace was used as a Buddhist shrine. Later inscriptions record pilgrims and donors. Visitors from Japan left inscriptions in the seventeenth century, one dated to 1632, indicating that the temple was an active destination for pilgrims even after the royal court had moved south.
The sixteenth century: completion of the reliefs
During the 1500s the Khmer court was based in places such as Longvek and later Oudong, but some kings still showed interest in Angkor. Scholars have connected the completion of some of the unfinished bas-reliefs, in the northeastern part of the gallery, to this period. The painting and carving of these panels is in a later style, which shows the temple was still being worked on over four centuries after its first building phase. A Portuguese visitor, Antonio da Madalena, is reported to have seen the site in the 1580s, and his account was later written up by the chronicler Diogo do Couto.
Modern history
In the nineteenth century, Western accounts began to circulate widely, notably that of the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited in 1860. For much of this period the region around Siem Reap was under Siamese control, and it returned to Cambodia, then a French protectorate, in 1907. The École française d’Extrême-Orient began clearing vegetation, repairing structures and recording inscriptions, work that continued through the first half of the twentieth century.
Angkor Wat came through the civil war of the 1970s with less damage than many feared, although the surrounding region suffered greatly and conservation work was interrupted. In 1992, the Angkor site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Since then, teams from Cambodia and many other countries have worked on restoration, drainage and conservation, and Angkor Wat has become the centrepiece of the country’s tourism.
A summary of the main stages
- About 1113: Suryavarman II becomes king.
- About 1113 to 1150: building of Angkor Wat as a temple of Vishnu.
- 1177: Cham attack on the Khmer capital.
- About 1181: Jayavarman VII is crowned and begins a new building programme.
- Thirteenth to fourteenth centuries: Theravada Buddhism spreads, and the temple gradually becomes a Buddhist site.
- Sixteenth century: reliefs are completed, and European and Asian visitors record the site.
- 1860: Henri Mouhot visits, bringing Angkor to wider notice in Europe.
- 1907: Siem Reap region returns to Cambodian administration, and French conservation begins.
- 1992: Angkor is inscribed as a World Heritage Site.