Angkor Thom and the Bayon: Read the Walls, Not Just the Faces

Most visitors treat Angkor Thom as a temple with a long entrance. It is not. It is the last capital of the Khmer empire, laid out by Jayavarman VII around 1200, and it is a square roughly three kilometres on each side behind eight-metre walls and a moat. At its height it may have held a hundred thousand people. Everything wooden has gone; only the stone remains, which is why it reads as scattered monuments in forest.

The gates are the introduction. Five of them, each with a tower of four faces, and each approached by a causeway lined with 54 gods on one side and 54 demons on the other, hauling on the body of a serpent. That is the Churning of the Ocean of Milk again - the same myth carved flat on Angkor Wat's east gallery, here built at the scale of a bridge. The south gate is the best preserved and the one most tours use.

Inside, the buildings you can still see are the Bayon at the centre, the Baphuon, the Phimeanakas and the royal enclosure, and the Terrace of the Elephants and Terrace of the Leper King along the eastern side. Between them is grass and forest where the city was.

Walk the terraces rather than driving between stops. The Terrace of the Elephants is 350 metres of parading elephants and garudas and it was the royal reviewing stand - you are standing where the court watched the army come home.

The faces are why people come and they deserve it - over 200 of them on the towers, serene, eyes lowered, four to a tower, looking out in every direction. Who they are is still argued: the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the king himself, or deliberately both at once.

But the thing most visitors walk straight past is at eye level on the outer gallery, and it is arguably more remarkable.

The outer gallery does not carve gods. It carves ordinary Khmer life in the twelfth century: a market with a woman haggling, men at a cockfight, a game of chess, a woman giving birth, a cook at a pot, fishermen, a man pulling a splinter from his foot. There is nothing else like it in the region and it is the closest thing we have to a photograph of how these people actually lived.

It also carves the naval battle against the Chams - the war Jayavarman VII won to found this city - in panels along the eastern side, with rows of oarsmen, crocodiles taking the dead in the water, and the fighting on deck.

The inner gallery, added later, returns to gods and kings. It is the outer one to slow down for.

This is the single strongest argument for a licensed guide at Angkor. Nothing is labelled, the panels run for a hundred metres, and without someone pointing you will photograph the faces and miss the rest.

Behind the Bayon stands the Baphuon, and it has the best story at Angkor.

It is older than Angkor Thom - mid-eleventh century - a temple-mountain that was already ancient when Jayavarman VII built his city around it. By the twentieth century it was collapsing, and in the 1960s French conservators began anastylosis: taking the whole thing apart, stone by stone, numbering some 300,000 blocks and laying them out in the forest to rebuild on a sound core.

Then the war came. The records of which block went where were destroyed in the Khmer Rouge years, and the archaeologist who had led the work died. What was left was a hillside of 300,000 numbered stones and no key.

Rebuilding it took decades of what has been called the largest three-dimensional jigsaw in the world, and it reopened in 2011. When you walk up it you are walking on a puzzle that was solved without its picture.

On the west side, a 70-metre reclining Buddha was assembled out of the temple's own stones in the sixteenth century. It is hard to see as a figure until someone points out the head, and then you cannot unsee it.

Go at 08:30. The sunrise crowd is still at Angkor Wat or at breakfast, and Angkor Thom is at its emptiest. By ten the coaches arrive and the Bayon's narrow upper terrace becomes a slow shuffle.

Allow two hours minimum - one for the Bayon, one for the Baphuon and the terraces. Most itineraries give it forty minutes, which is why so many people remember Angkor Thom as the one with the faces and nothing else.

The Bayon is a maze. Low doorways, steep narrow stairs, and no obvious route. That is part of the pleasure but it is hard going for anyone unsteady, and there is no shade on the upper terrace.

The south gate gets the traffic; the north and west gates are almost empty and just as good, and a driver will happily take a different one if you ask.

Victory Gate, on the east, is the one the army came back through and lines up with the Terrace of the Elephants.

It is all on the Angkor Pass. Angkor Thom sits on the small circuit with Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm, and is the middle stop of a standard day.