Angkor temples lure Chinese visitors

With its world-famous cultural relics, Cambodia draws a lot of Chinese traveling in Southeast Asia.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat, which was built in the early 12th century as a state temple dedicated to Vishnu, one of the Hindu trinity and the universe preserver, is among the must-visits.

The complex, considered one of the world's largest religious monuments, occupies a rectangular area of 1.5 kilometers by 1.3 kilometers, and the central massif of the grandiose structures of brick and stone is a miniature of the Hindu universe, with a massive three-tiered pyramid crowned by five lotus-like towers rising 65 meters from ground level.

Angkor Wat faces the west, and like other Khmer architecture, the temple has elegant bas-reliefs on the walls, both inside and outside.

There are nearly 2,000 distinctively rendered carvings of apsaras, female divinities in Hindu mythology, and some of the carvings feature the finest and best-preserved examples of such art in the Angkor period.

It is a wonderful experience to see the carvings while listening to a tour guide to understand the bas-reliefs, because they often depict legends and characters from Hindu mythology.