Angkor Thum

This guide to Angkor Thum in Siem Reap opens on the causeway's fifty-four stone giants hauling a serpent toward the gate, then moves inside to the Bayon, the temple King Jayavarman the Seventh built at the city's center. It follows the long argument among scholars over how many carved stone faces the Bayon's towers actually hold, a count that has never settled. It also traces how builders worked laterite, a stone quarried soft enough to cut like clay before it hardens in open air. Look up at the gate tower's elephant heads as you pass beneath it.