Banteay Thom Temple

This guide to Banteay Thom Temple near Siem Reap opens with a question about the carvings on its eastern gateway: who carved the Great Departure of a runaway prince, and who later came back to deface it. It traces the temple's rise under Jayavarman the Seventh, the Buddhist king who rebuilt Angkor with temples and hospitals after war, and the moated, dirt-track approach that keeps it off the main circuits today. It also follows the religious reversal under his successor, Jayavarman the Eighth, who turned his empire's chisels against the old Buddhist imagery. Look closely at the weathered pediments and you can still find faces sanded flat where that campaign passed through.