An interactive guide to Angkor Wat and other temples at Angkor, Cambodia, including then-and-now recreations of individual temples and a map of the essential sights
By Natalie Paris and Rory Norton
28 Nov 2014
Angkor’s enigmatic temples, some still buckling under the weight of the jungle, have become a must-see on south-east Asia itineraries. But visitors who think of them only as crumbling ruins are seeing only half the picture, beautiful though it is.
Far from being left to nature, most temples were painstakingly rebuilt over the past century. To what extent they have been reconstructed only becomes clear when looking at astonishing black-and-white photographs from the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), showing excavation work amid mounds of earth and rubble in the early 20th century.
“What visitors see now are temples that have been worked on for many years,” said Andrew Booth, the author of The Angkor Guidebook, a new book that was three years in the making.
“I never understood how much work had been done on them,” said Booth, who trawled for 10 days through 25,000 images kept by the EFEO. “Baphuon was not very well designed and started to fall down as soon as it was built. A picture from 1948 shows just a pile of rubble and early attempts to underpin it with concrete. What are now the temples were put together piece by piece by diligent academics so we can appreciate them. Hats off to them.”
Credit: EFEO
The EFEO, a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies, first began reconstructing Angkor’s temples back in the early 20th century. “Preah Khan was the first one to be seriously rebuilt,” said Booth. “It’s the only double-tiered structure in Angkor but a black-and-white photograph from 1909 shows only the bottom tier standing.” Read more at The UK Telegraph.
