Ta Prohm

Ta Prohm was built by Jayavarman VII in 1186 as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and university, dedicated to the king's mother. At its height it housed over 12,000 officials and servants and was one of the richest temples in the Angkor complex. Unlike most of Angkor, it has been only partially restored, and the result is visually spectacular: massive silk-cotton and strangler fig trees have split walls apart, their roots draped over carved stone like slow-motion waves, while vines trace every lintel and collapsed galleries create shadowed labyrinths.

Go early in the morning or late in the afternoon — Ta Prohm is one of the most visited temples in Angkor and the central areas can become extremely crowded between 9am and 3pm. The carved devata figures on the walls are exceptionally fine, and there are several galleries where the root-and-stone interplay is dramatic enough to require time standing still. The temple was made famous beyond Cambodia when it was used as a filming location for the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, which brought a surge of visitors that has not really abated since.

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Ta Prohm was deliberately left in its half-ruined, jungle-consumed state when the French began clearing Angkor in the early 20th century — partly as a romantic experiment to show what the whole complex looked like on discovery, and partly because the enormous strangler figs and silk-cotton trees had become so entangled with the stonework that removal would have destroyed the walls. The result is one of the few temples that genuinely feels like a discovery.

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