West Baray

This guide to the West Baray outside Siem Reap starts in nineteen thirty-six, when a villager digging for a buried Buddha instead struck bronze fragments of a giant reclining Vishnu. You'll hear how King Suryavarman the First had this eight-kilometer reservoir hand-dug around the year ten fifty, using labor itself as tax, and how its stored water helped Angkor's rice fields feed a swelling capital. Stand at its edge and picture the basin that made all of it possible.