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🏛️ Angkor Wat
The largest religious building on Earth — a temple in the Cambodian jungle so famous it is on the country's flag.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
📍 Where is it?
📍 Siem Reap, Cambodia — see it on the big map →
Deep in the jungles of Cambodia stands Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world. It was built in the early 1100s by a Khmer king named Suryavarman II, as a temple for the Hindu god Vishnu. Later it became a Buddhist temple, and it is still used for worship today.
Angkor Wat is enormous — it covers an area bigger than 200 football fields. Its five towers are shaped like lotus flowers, and they are meant to look like Mount Meru, the home of the gods in Hindu stories. The walls are covered in thousands of carvings telling stories of gods, kings and battles.
For hundreds of years, the temple was hidden by jungle and forgotten by the outside world. Today it is the pride of Cambodia — it even appears on the Cambodian flag, the only national flag in the world with a building on it.
🤩 Wow fact!
Angkor Wat is on the flag of Cambodia — the only national flag in the world that shows a building.
🧠 Quiz time!
What is Angkor Wat?