West Baray
Vast hand-cut medieval reservoir once irrigating rice paddies, its flooded center island yielding the empire's largest bronze statue.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
West Mebon Baray Temple
Flooded island temple that yielded Khmer art's largest bronze, a reclining Vishnu found by chance in nineteen thirty-six.
Srah Srang
Ancient royal reservoir with a laterite landing stage guarded by stone lions and naga balustrades.
Bakong Temples
Ninth-century sandstone pyramid guarded by stone elephants and lion-flanked stairways.
Lolei Temple
Four ninth-century brick sanctuary towers built as an ancestral shrine on a now-vanished island reservoir.
Eastern Mebon Temple
Pyramid-shaped island sanctuary of brick and sandstone towers guarded by life-size stone elephants at each tier.
Prasat Bat Chum
Trio of tenth-century brick shrines whose doorjamb inscriptions name the minister who engineered them.