• The Angkor ruins stretch over more than 248 square miles (400 square kilometers). Many visitors mistaken the size of Angkor and visit only a few of the most visited temples.
• Angkor Wat is unusually oriented to the west, a direction typically associated with death in Hindu culture. Archaeologists and scholars disagree as to why the ancient builders chose to deviate from the norm (pointing structures east) at the time.
• Bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat read counterclockwise, another indication that the temple is associated with funeral rituals.
• Also unusual for the time of construction, Angkor Wat was dedicated to Vishnu, a Hindu deity, rather than the current king.
• The original outer wall at Angkor Wat once enclosed the temple proper, city, and royal palace, occupying a space of 203 acres (820,000 square meters). Nothing remains of the wall today.
• Many visitors do not realize that many surfaces of the Angkor temples were once painted. Today, only small traces of the paint remain on just a few temples.

       

• Constructed in the early 12th century (between 1113 and 1150), Angkor Wat is considered to be the largest religious monument in the world.
• The sandstone used to construct Cambodia's national monument, at least 5 million tons worth, had to be carried from a quarry 40 Km away. Cambodians are pretty tiny people, so try to imagine them carrying bricks weighing up to 1,500 kilograms each from a quarry almost 40 kilometres from the site and it just doesn’t add up. The workers had to get creative, which is why it’s thought that canals were used to move the sandstone up the river. The entire city of Angkor used more stone than all the Egyptian pyramids combined, and took over an area larger than modern-day Paris. Angkor is thought to have taken 35 years, 3,00,000 workers and 6,000 elephants.
• Angkor Wat was shifted from Hindu to Buddhist use sometime around the late 13th century. The temple is still used by Buddhists as a place of worship today.
• One of the first Westerners to see Angkor Wat was Antonio da Madalena, a Portuguese monk, who visited in 1586. Long before Europeans arrived, a Chinese emissary named Zhou Daguan lived in Angkor for one year between 1296 and 1297; he created a written account of his experience there sometime before 1312. Zhou Daguan's book, the only account of 13th-century Angkor, was translated into English by Peter Harris in the book A Record of Cambodia.
• Henri Mouhot, a French explorer, helped bring Angkor Wat to fame in the West by publishing an account of his visit in the mid-19th century. His book is Travels in Siam, Cambodia, Laos, and Annam.
• Angkor Wat was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. The site suffered from decades of unregulated tourism and looting; many ancient statues have been decapitated and their heads sold to private collectors. An international collaborative effort has helped to slowly restore sites and prevent further collapse of unstable structures.
• Sokimex, a private company founded by an ethnic Vietnamese-Cambodian businessman, has rented Angkor Wat from Cambodia since 1990 and manages tourism there for profit. Sokimex also has a petroleum division, manages hotels, and runs Sarika Air Services.
• Most of the money to restore Angkor Wat comes from foreign aid. Only an estimated 28% of ticket sales goes back into the temples. In 2000 Hollywood rolled into town with Angelina Jolie to film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, putting the lost city of Angkor firmly on the map, injecting tens of thousands of much-needed dollars into the local economy. One lucky baby also won the lottery when Angelina Jolie adopted the seven-month-old after visiting an orphanage.
• The Angkor temple Ta Prohm—famous for the large vines that strangle the ruins—was used as the set for the hit movie Tomb Raider. Paramount was charged US $10,000 per day for seven days to film there. Unfortunately, some of the iconic trees growing through the ruins at Ta Prohm have had to be removed to preserve the temple from further collapse.