The last and greatest capital of Angkor: a square of three kilometres inside a laterite wall and a moat a hundred metres wide, five gates crowned with faces and reached by causeways lined with giants, avenues running to the Bayon at the exact centre, the Baphuon and the palace to the north, and a grid of embankments and ponds among which the people lived in houses on stilts.
No Khmer treatise on planning has come down to us, but in 1296 a Chinese envoy, Zhou Daguan, spent the best part of a year at Angkor and wrote down what he saw. He begins with the walls: a square about twenty li round, a great moat outside, five gates, and bridges over the moat lined on each side by fifty-four stone figures holding a huge serpent. At the exact centre of the city stood a golden tower with some twenty lesser towers round it; a little north, a bronze tower taller still; north again, the king’s palace with its own golden tower. Houses were ranked: the palace roofed with lead and glazed tile, officials allowed tile only on their family temple and main hall, and commoners, who dared not use tile, roofing with thatch.
The plan Zhou describes is a map of the universe. The Bayon at the centre is Mount Meru; the wall is the ring of mountains at the edge of the world and the moat the ocean beyond; the causeways re-enact the churning of the ocean of milk by gods and demons pulling on the serpent. Airborne laser survey has recently shown what Zhou did not describe: inside the walls, the city was divided by low embankments into a regular grid, each block with its ponds and its mounds for wooden houses.
The monuments are placed at their real positions within the three-kilometre square. Outside the moat lie rice paddies and, to the north-east, the western end of the Jayatataka, one of the great reservoirs (barays) that watered them; the East and West Barays and Angkor Wat, 1.7 km to the south, lie beyond the plan. Click a building to read what Zhou says of it.