The vast medieval capital of the Khmer Empire in what is now Cambodia — a sprawling low-density city built around an engineered network of reservoirs and canals, home to Angkor Wat and the Bayon, abandoned as a royal seat in the 15th century, rediscovered by Europeans in the 19th, and now both Cambodia's national symbol and one of Asia's most visited ruins.
Angkor was once one of the largest cities on Earth by area, yet for centuries Europeans insisted it could not have been built by Cambodians at all. Spread across an area larger than modern Paris, it held temple-mountains of stacked stone, a moated walled city, and a web of reservoirs and canals that watered a population that may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Then the kings left, the forest moved in, and the temples kept standing while the wooden city around them rotted away. What survived was stone built to outlast people: Angkor Wat, the Bayon with its carved faces, and a landscape of water that scholars are still learning to read. The story of Angkor is partly about who built it, and just as much about who later refused to believe they had.