The temples of Angkor, built between A.D. 879 and 1191, when the Khmer civilization was at the height of its development. Angkor represents one of humankind's most astonishing and enduring architectural achievements. From the great citadel of Angkor, the kings of the Khmer empire ruled over a vast domain that reached from what is now southern Vietnam to Yunan, China and from Vietnam westward to the Bay of Bengal. The structures one sees at Angkor today, more than 100 temples in all, are the surviving religious remains of a grand social and administrative metropolis whose other buildings - palaces, public buildings, and houses - were all built of wood and are long since decayed and gone. Angkor represents the largest religious center ever constructed by man. It dwarfs the Vatican of today - another religious center.
The lands where the city of Angkor stands were not chosen as a settlement site because of any pre-existing sacred importance, but rather for their strategic military position and agricultural potential. In time however, over the half-millennia of Khmer occupation, the city of Angkor became a great pilgrimage destination because of the cult of Devaraja, the 'god-king'. From the era of Jayavaram II (802-850 A.D.) onwards, Khmer kings not only ruled by divine consent, but actually came to be worshiped as gods themselves. The increasingly larger temples built by the Khmer kings functioned as the locus of the cult of the Devaraja, and were at the same time earthly and symbolic representations of mythical Mt. Meru, the cosmogical home of the Hindu gods. The symbol of the king's divine authority was the Shiva Lingam within the temple's inner sanctuary, and worship of the Lingam was the official state religion. While the religious ideologies of Funan and Chenla, the precursor empires to the Khmer, had also proclaimed the worship of the Shiva Lingam, Jayavaram's chief innovation was to identify the king with Shiva, involving a sort of apotheosis of the earthly ruler during his life time. Upon his death, the temple became the Devaraja's mausoleum and thus a pilgrimage shrine for ages to come. While the cult of the Devaraja continued unabated throughout the Khmer empire, other kings identified themselves with the Hindu god Vishnu (such as Suryavarman II, the builder of Angkor Wat) or the Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (such as Jayavaram VII, the builder of the Bayon).
The Thais sacked Angkor in 1431 and the Khmers abandoned the city in 1432, after this the city was more or less 'lost' for a few centuries. Wandering Buddhist monks, passing through the dense jungles, occasionally came upon the awesome ruins. Recognizing the sacred nature of the temples but ignorant of their origins, they invented fables about the mysterious sanctuaries, saying they had been built by the gods in a far ancient time. Centuries passed, these fables became legends, and pilgrims from the distant reaches of Asia sought out the mystic city of the gods. A few Portuguese and other adventurous European travelers knew of the ruins, and stories circulated in antiquarian circles of the strange city lost in the jungles. Few people believed the stories to be anything more than legend however, until Henri Mouhot, a French explorer brought Angkor to the world's attention in 1860. The French people were enchanted with the ancient city and beginning in 1908 funded and superbly managed an immense restoration project. The restoration has continued to the present day, excepting periods in the 70's and 80's when military fighting prevented archaeologists from living near the ruins.