Henry Mouhot suddenly came across the last thing he was expecting: a massive complex of stone temples.

Muhot had stumbled across one of the world's most astonishing and enduring architectural feats:

the nine hundred year old remains of

Angkor Wat.

But who built these vast sophisticated temples?

Why construct them deep in the jungle only to abandon them?

At first there were no answers,

then an amazing eyewitness account from the 13th century emerged in China.

The author describes the Great temple of Angkor.

A fantastic citadel and its resourceful inhabitants.

How could this be true?

The evidence was scant.

Now science is providing unexpected proof.

Archeologists are applying the latest techniques to reveal the mysteries of Angkor

and radar images from space revealed that Angkor was much bigger than originally imagined.

A vast city the size of London.

Scientists now know that Angkor wat was just a small part of one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in the world

Angkor wat one of the world's true enigmas; its size and purpose baffling.

Larger than any cathedral it is truly one of the greatest structures ever built.

Its towers shaped like lotus flowers were raised a hundred years before the cathedral of Chartres in France.

The buildings were laid out on a vast scale, stone shrines ascending one upon the other as if reaching for the heavens.

Endless corridors are carved with the longest reliefs in the world.

The precise construction would be hard to match even with lasers used by Modern surveyors

Archaeologist Charles Higham has studied all aspects of Angkor and its inhabitants the khmer.

Professor Higham has been crucial to understanding the extraordinary history of this ancient culture.

We are standing in the middle of the world's largest religious monument. It's absolutely gigantic it stretches on and on.

Angkor Wat was the temple mausoleum of one of Angkor's greatest Kings: King surya Varman the second, the sun King and

When he died his ashes would have been placed under the heart of the central register behind me

Angkor wat meaning holy Temple is symbolic in every way.

Its vast square moat represents the oceans around Mount meru legendary home of the hindu gods

when Henri Mouhat stumbled across encore in 1860 he wrote

one of these temples

Arrival to that of solomon and directed by some ancient, Michelangelo might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings

It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome

The Frenchman suspected that the temples belong to a huge and sophisticated civilization, but he had no evidence.

Angkor wat lies in the Northwest floodplains of Cambodia just above the great Lake.

When Mouhot discovered it in 1860 only a handful of buddhist monks and local Villagers lived around the ancient site

None of them knew how angkor wat had evolved or who had built it.

Legend had it that the great temple had built itself, some said that it had always been.

In Europe, the publication of Mouhot journal created a sensation

Soon a stream of explorers photographers and archaeologists traveled east

keen to uncover the mysteries of this vanished world

But our Amuro's part in this puzzle came to a sudden end

Bitten by a poisonous insect he died in the jungle the year after discovering the incredible site

As early explorers began to strip away the jungle they discovered even more temples

the Walls of the vast monuments were covered in intricate carvings

These reliefs Illustrate legends of an ancient culture and its religion

The Sandstone sections were carved in place. They would have taken the artists decades to complete

Inscriptions here are written not only in an ancient Cambodian language

But also mysteriously in Sanskrit the priestly language of the hindus

One of the great breakthroughs has been the translation of the entire corpus of angkorian inscriptions by a french scholar

George sur Des in seven thick volumes and

So bit by bit the actual internal history of angkor has been unraveled, and that's been absolutely critical

To the codebreakers they disclose that the sixth centuries ankle had been the capital of the khmer the indigenous people of cambodia

Between the 9th and 15th centuries ad a total of 38 Kings ruled their empire from angkor

Its Borders reached from Southern Vietnam to Laos and from the mekong river to Eastern Berlin

But whose grand Vision was this great city, and why was it built in the middle of the jungle?

the deciphering continued

then an astonishing discovery was made a

Junior Chinese official on a diplomatic mission visited angkor in the summer of 1296 Ad

During his year-long visit show doug juan kept a journal

his diary tells of a major Civilization a

Capital much bigger and more developed than the archaeologists dared imaginable

But was show Doug ones account fact or myth

archeologists searched for proof of the existence of the City Joe described

as

They pieced together this gigantic puzzle the full story began to Emerge

For thousands of years the indigenous people of cambodia the khmer had cut rice fields from the jungle

These farmers were a largely self-contained and peaceful race

But from the first century ad small feuding kingdoms developed around the country

In the eighth century a great leader emerged

to find a site for a brand new sacred capital the abandoned his home city in the Eastern part of Cambodia and

ordered all his subjects to cross the mekong river in a great March West

Having conquered his rivals. He chose the lush land between the sacred : hills and great lake for his new citadel

In 802 ad he had himself crowned Jaya Baumann the Supreme World Emperor King of Kings

Jiya Varma's Charisma one the people over

He came not only to rule by divine consent, but to be worshipped as a God himself

At a stroke this great and charismatic leader changed the course of Cambodian history

Over the next 500 years Jaya varmints descendants living God's succeeded him to reign in angkor

Each King had his own monument built to his glory destined to become his mausoleum

Since the second century ad the Kumar's had practiced hinduism

Each of the Royal Temples is modeled on the five peaks of Mount meru the home of the Indian gods

For their builders the shrines were a celebration of religion art science and power

throughout the first half of the 20th century

Cambodia was part of France's Colonial Empire

It was they who led the way in piecing angkor together

When they arrived and took colonial control of this part of the world the the place was an absolute shambles

I mean there were stones. Just like I found everywhere

There's nothing like what you see today, and so they dedicated vast amount of energy and effort into the reconstruction of the temples in

The 1960s the eminent archaeologist been Bernard Phil Croley made this comparison of angkor

Imagine that within the city limits of Paris you found thrown together Versailles the place de La Concorde and the Louvre.

Surrounding these the cathedrals of Notre-Dame, Chartres, and Rennes

flanked by all the churches built in Paris before the 19th century

Since Henri Mouhot had first discovered Angkor in 1860 much had been learned about its history

But almost nothing was known about the culture

responsible for these incredible monuments.

The largest religious monument in the world the city of the gods Angkor Wat in the heart of Cambodia

But is this astonishing temple only the visible tip of a greater unseen mystery?

700 Years ago a junior Chinese official visited angkor on a diplomatic mission

During his 11 months stay with a cambodian family. He recorded many aspects of life in angkor

the Jo Dagwons account contains several flights of Fancy

For instance he describes the great temple of angkor wat as having been built in a single day by a legendary Chinese architect

He was also Openly judgemental referring to his hosts as barbarians

Archeologists have taken his writings with a pinch of salt

You've always got to think of it as being seen to the eyes of an educated Chinese for whom anyone Beyond the empire

was by definition of Barbarians and

in reading what he has to say one has to be certainly on occasion judicious in

Realizing the prejudices were there

For a hundred years french archeologists were too busy restoring the temples to pay the journal much attention. So it was largely ignored

Then in the 1970s the murderous regime of POl pot's stopped all work at angkor

His Army of Communist revolutionaries the khmer rouge laid thousands of landmines around the site rendering it off-limits for years

Now at last ability has returned to Cambodia and work on the temples has resumed

Today angkor has world heritage site protection with a dozen countries funding archaeological research

with much of the major restoration work complete the focus has shifted away from the temples at the center and

on to the outlying pieces of the puzzle

Just north of angkor wat an eight-mile wall encloses the remains of several magnificent stone temples

Explorer Henri Mouhot suspected in 1860 that this was once the khmers great capital of angkor thom

the Holy City

the Perfectly square wall like angkor wat is surrounded by a moat and

covers an area the size of Manhattan Island

At its center is the Bayon temple

In his journal from 1296 show Doug wan describes a busy city teeming with life

Archeologists are now looking for evidence the district the great Metropolis. He was describing

But any evidence has all but vanished and the Dense forests

In the last two years archaeologist Jacques Gouchier has started to excavate the interior of the walled City

Farrakhan elicited to the shore applauded when I started this study

We knew almost nothing because everything was covered in Forest energy stocks

except

The only surviving features were the stone temples and the foundation of the Royal palace

But we knew nothing of the rest of the 900 hectares within the city wall and clearly others hid firm

For a while it seemed that gaucher was fighting a losing battle

But his persistence is at last producing results

There's our care unit through the stay mad geeks

after two years of very difficult research Conrad formats

We that last began to build an impression of this city throughout the city leaders?

Gaucher is plotting thousands of coordinates onto an ever more detailed map of angkor thom

He is now able to trace an intricate grid system of canals and roads together with the sites of thousands of wooden houses

Back in 1860 when Henri Mouhot discovered angkor wat he had suspected that it was just part of a complex City

road ugh Juan's Thirteenth Century Journal alludes to a political and religious citadel

Now at last archaeologists have enough evidence to bring to life this extraordinary city as it looked 700 years ago

Anchor was a capital far bigger and far in advance of any European city of the time

Jacque go shares findings confirm the accuracy of Ja Dagwons account

What he describes is fact not fantasy

These are the monuments which have cost merchants from overseas to speak so often of Cambodia the rich and noble

If you are looking for gold lions gold Buddha's bronze elephants and Bronze horses. This is where you'll find them

from the inscriptions

Archeologists know that angkor thom the holy City was built nearly a century before Joe arrived by the khmers greatest monarch

Giovanna in the Seventh Ruled over Cambodia between 1181 and 1219

Known as the great builder king he expanded the empire further than any other khmer ruler

Within the City Walls the King Built a palace befitting his mighty empire

the Royal Palace stands to the North of the Golden Tower

Lintels and Columns all decorated with carved and painted Buddhas are immense

The roofs - I impressive long colonnades and open corridors stretch away

interlaced in harmonious relation

Jaco Shares excavations at the Royal Palace confirm shows account

That within City the sukyohama

did they

We found evidence out of this palace was a large area talking

With interconnecting quarters and building a separate band that we found holes 80 centimeters in diameter

Four huge supporting Columns, it would have been a very impressive sight like my snout

As evidence materializes about the royal palace the role of the Kumar's rulers these earthly gods becomes clearer

During his day Joe Dagwon had several audiences with the Ruling King

Every time I was admitted to the palace for an audience with the king

He came forward with his chief wife and took his place in the embrasure of the Golden window in the main audience hall

Joe himself came from a culture with the Ruler elevated to godhood

the Chinese approved of the Kumar's devotion

These people know, what is Stewar King?

The king talked to social pyramid that stretched down to the lowest peasant

The Monarch Spoken see showed itself in a legend showed up one length out

Of the palace rises a golden tower to the top of which the ruler are sent nightly to sleep

It is common believed that in the tower dwells a genie

Formed like a serpent with nine heads. Which is lord of the entire kingdom

Every night the genie appears in the shape of a woman with whom the sovereign couples

Should the genie fail to appear for a single night it is a sign that the kings death is at hand

If the king should fail to keep his tryst

Disaster is sure to follow

Well, I'm not sure about that

He would have been fine king had he been able to do that at for any length of time

but I but what we do know is that it was a

practice of the aristocrats to send and the regional

Landed Gentry as it were to send up a woman from their family to be a member of the Kings entourage

to become a concubine

Which would in a sense, bind?

The provinces to the center in a very physical manner and they wouldn't be surprising if indeed the king did have a very substantial

harem from which to choose

Show doug juan notes that the King had five wives and a harem of 3,000 women

The King was rarely seen outside the palace, but Joe describes one such occasion the New Year festival