Khmers: Creating Heaven On Earth

The Khmer Empire, now modern Cambodia, was largely unknown until the nineteenth-century discovery of the ruins of Angkor Wat, an astonishing temple complex. Long abandoned, its huge size and beautiful symmetry reveal it be an attempt to create, on earth, the Hindu concept of heaven. Yet it also reveals a society where peasants and artisans supported an absolute ruler. One twelfth-century king made his people build this largest of all the world’s religious temples to ensure immortality for himself as a living god, much like the Egyptian pharaohs did.