Srah Damrei (Elephant Pond)

This guide to Srah Damrei, the boulder-carved elephant shrine atop Phnom Kulen near Siem Reap, opens with ninth-century sculptors who found the animal sleeping inside a single sandstone rock and carved away everything else. It traces the mountain's role as the birthplace of the Khmer empire, where Jayavarman II declared himself a god around 802, and how surveyors did not pin down this clearing's location until the 1920s. Stand at the elephant's shoulder and look for the lions and unnamed creature carved beside it.