Banteay Srei: The Best Carving in Cambodia, and Why It Is Pink

Banteay Srei is small enough to walk in twenty minutes and it is the temple people come back talking about.

The reason is the stone. It is built from a fine-grained pink sandstone that takes an edge the coarser grey sandstone of the big Angkor temples cannot hold. The lintels and pediments are cut deep enough to throw real shadow at midday, and the detail survives a thousand years of monsoon in a way that flat relief does not. Stand close to the pediment of Shiva dancing and you can read individual fingers.

It was consecrated in AD 967, which makes it older than Angkor Wat by roughly 150 years, and it was not built by a king. Its patron was Yajnavaraha, a brahmin and a royal tutor - one of the very few major Khmer temples founded by someone outside the royal line. The scale follows from that: doorways you have to stoop through, towers you could touch the top of.

The name means citadel of women, and the usual explanation - that the carving is too fine for men's hands - is a later folk gloss rather than anything the inscriptions say. What the inscriptions call it is Tribhuvanamahesvara, the great lord of the threefold world, and it was dedicated to Shiva.

Banteay Srei closes earlier than the central Angkor temples. That single fact should shape your day: it goes first, not last. A plan that puts it in the late afternoon runs out of temple.

Early morning is also the light. Pink sandstone at eight in the morning is genuinely pink; at noon it flattens out to grey-beige and the deep carving loses the shadow that makes it read. Photographers go at opening.

It is 37 kilometres north-east, about fifty minutes each way by car or a long hot tuk-tuk ride. On the way you pass out of the temple park into rice country, which is half the pleasure of the trip.

Crowds. It is small, so it fills fast - a single coach makes it feel busy in a way the same coach would not at Angkor Wat. The first hour after opening and the last hour before closing are the quiet ones.

It is on the Angkor Pass, so no separate ticket. The things often sold with it are not: Phnom Kulen charges USD 20 of its own, and Koh Ker and Preah Vihear have their own admission too.

You have driven fifty minutes; do not drive straight back.

Beng Mealea is the classic pairing and the best one. Another forty minutes east, a 12th-century temple on Angkor Wat's footprint that was never cleared, crossed on wooden walkways over collapsed galleries with trees standing in the courtyards. Banteay Srei is what Khmer masons could do at their most precise; Beng Mealea is what the forest does when nobody stops it. Seeing both in a day is the best single day in the park.

Kbal Spean, the river of a thousand lingas, is close by and quieter still. Shiva carvings lie in and under a streambed, and the walk up is about 1.5 kilometres of forest path. Worth it when there is water in the river, which means in or just after the rains.

The Cambodia Landmine Museum sits on the same road and is run by a former child soldier who has cleared tens of thousands of mines. It is small, honest and not a tourist attraction in the usual sense.

Phnom Kulen is the other common pairing and the one to be clear-eyed about: separate USD 20 entry, a steep road, and a waterfall that only really runs in and after the rains.

Almost nothing at Banteay Srei is labelled, and the pediments are the whole point, so it is worth knowing four of them before you arrive.

Shiva dancing the tandava - the cosmic dance of creation and destruction, on the east pediment of the south library. The most reproduced carving in Cambodia.

Kama shooting Shiva - the god of desire fires an arrow at a meditating Shiva to make him fall in love with Parvati, and is burned to ash for it. North library, east side.

The burning of Khandava forest - Agni the fire god and Indra fighting over a forest, on the north library's west pediment. Look for the animals fleeing.

Ravana shaking Mount Kailash - the demon king of the Ramayana trying to uproot Shiva's mountain, with Shiva calmly pressing it down with one toe. South library, west side.

The guardian figures at the tower doorways are copies; several originals were stolen in the twentieth century and some are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, which is one good argument for seeing that museum after Siem Reap rather than before.

A licensed guide is worth taking here even though the temple is small, precisely because it is all iconography and none of it is signposted.