Divide the ground inside the walls by embankments into a regular grid of blocks, each with its ponds and its raised mounds for houses.
Laser scanning through the forest has revealed, inside the walls of Angkor Thom and round the great temples, a grid of low embankments dividing the city into blocks, with small ponds and house mounds in each: a planned city of wood that has otherwise vanished. Zhou says nothing of it; he speaks only of the thousands of families in the city.
Read the diagram from the centre outward: Brahmā at the heart, then a ring of the gods, a ring of human concerns, and on the outside the lesser spirits; the holiest function goes at the centre and the most worldly at the edge.
81 padas = 9 (Brahmā) + 16 + 24 + 32
Build the state temple as a stepped mountain with five towers in a quincunx (one at the centre and four at the corners), representing the five peaks of Mount Meru, surrounded by walls and a moat for the mountains and ocean that ring the world.
Enclose the central mountain in rectangular galleries, one within the other, each on a higher terrace, with gopuras at the cardinal points and pavilions at the corners.
Angkor Wat: galleries ≈ 187 × 215 m, 100 × 115 m, 60 × 60 m
Angkor Wat reverses the usual eastward orientation: its entrance, causeway and principal approach face west.
Enclose the capital in a square wall with a moat outside it; open five gates, crowned with the four faces of the Buddha, and bring the roads over the moat on causeways lined with giants holding the serpent.
Set the state temple at the exact centre of the city, where the avenues from the gates cross, and the king’s palace to its north.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A grid of blocks, each with its pond”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/angkor-thom-grid. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.