The largest religious monument on earth — a single sandstone temple in Cambodia, raised in the early twelfth century under King Suryavarman II as a scale model of the Hindu cosmos and dedicated to the god Vishnu. Built for a god and most likely for a king's own afterlife, it outlived the empire that made it, was converted from Hindu to Theravada Buddhist worship, was never fully abandoned, and became the soul and the flag of the Cambodian nation.
It is the largest religious monument ever built, and it was raised as a working model of the universe. Angkor Wat's five stone towers stand for the peaks of Mount Meru, the mountain at the center of the Hindu cosmos; its walls are the mountains at the world's edge, and its vast moat is the ocean that surrounds everything. The empire that built it fell, the city around it was left to the forest, and the temple itself quietly changed religions, from Hindu to Buddhist, without ever closing its doors. Today the temple sits at the heart of Cambodia’s national flag — a rare case of a nation building a single monument into its emblem — and it has flown over Cambodian governments of every kind, even the cruelest. A god's house became a nation's heart.