Jayavarman VII was a Khmer king (reigned c. 1181 – c. 1218) who ruled the Angkorian empire near its height, drove out a Cham army that had sacked the capital in 1177, and rebuilt the realm as a Buddhist state. He was the most prolific builder in Khmer history, founding the walled city of Angkor Thom with its face-covered Bayon temple, raising Ta Prohm and Preah Khan for his parents, and endowing a network of roads, rest-houses, and hospitals recorded in his inscriptions.
He came to the throne an old man, probably past sixty, in a kingdom that had just been overrun and its king killed. In the thirty-odd years that followed he raised more stone than any Khmer ruler before or since: a new walled capital, temples for his mother and his father, and a state temple whose towers stare out in every direction with the same faint, half-smiling face. No one is quite sure whose face it is.