Angkor is a city, and Angkor Wat is one building in it

Angkor Wat is a temple. Angkor is the city it stood in — an enormous complex of temples, reservoirs, canals and road causeways spread across a landscape, which at its height supported a population large enough to rank it among the biggest pre-industrial urban settlements anywhere.

Almost everyone books a trip to see the temple and then discovers the city. It's worth arriving with that the right way round.

The temple

Angkor Wat was built in the twelfth century, originally as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, and later came into Buddhist use — a transition that left traces you can read on the building itself.

Its plan is a model of the cosmos: a central quincunx of towers representing the peaks of Mount Meru, enclosed by concentric galleries, surrounded by a vast rectangular moat standing in for the ocean. The famous silhouette — the row of lotus-bud towers — is the mountain seen from outside.

Two things repay slow attention. The bas-reliefs running around the outer gallery are extraordinary: hundreds of metres of continuous carved narrative, depicting mythological episodes and historical processions in fine detail. And the temple is oriented west, unusually, which is why the classic photograph is taken at sunrise with the towers backlit above the reflecting pool.

The other temples are not a consolation prize

Two in particular are as memorable as the main event.

The Bayon, at the centre of the walled city of Angkor Thom, is a dense cluster of stone towers carved with large serene faces looking out in each direction. Walking through it, you're never not being looked at. It's a completely different sensation from the ordered geometry of Angkor Wat.

Ta Prohm is the temple left partly in the grip of the forest, where enormous silk-cotton and strangler fig roots pour over and through the stonework. It has been stabilised rather than cleared, which was a deliberate choice — a demonstration of what the whole site looked like before conservation work began.

Water was the real infrastructure

The most impressive thing at Angkor is not carved. The Khmer built a massive hydraulic system: huge rectangular reservoirs called baray, fed and drained by canals, managing water across a strongly seasonal climate of heavy monsoon and long dry months.

That system is what let the population grow to the scale it did, and its eventual difficulties are part of the long, still-debated story of the city's decline. Aerial and lidar survey has revealed how extensive the network of channels, roads and settlement was — far beyond the temple enclosures visitors walk.

When you look at a straight-edged lake at Angkor, you are usually looking at engineering.

It was never lost either

As with Petra, the "lost city reclaimed by jungle" framing is a European one. Angkor Wat in particular remained a functioning religious site and was never abandoned to the forest; Khmer people knew exactly where it was, and it appears on maps well before the nineteenth-century French accounts that made it famous abroad.

Planning the visit

The site is large, spread out, and hot, and temple fatigue is real. Three patterns work:

• One day gets you Angkor Wat, the Bayon and Ta Prohm, and not much else. It's a long day.
• Three days lets you take it at a reasonable pace and reach the outlying temples, which are quieter and in some cases finer than the famous ones.
• More than three is for people who find they've become interested in Khmer architecture, which happens more often than you'd expect.

Sunrise at Angkor Wat is the iconic experience and correspondingly crowded. The reflecting pools are small, the good positions are few, and people arrive very early. Going instead in the late afternoon, or heading to a lesser-visited temple at dawn, trades the postcard for the silence.