The very dimensions of Angkor Wat are allegories. Art historian Eleanor Mannikka calculated that the 617-foot length of the bridge over the moat, when measured in the ancient Khmer measurements instead of feer, corresponds to the 432,000 years of an age of decadence in Hindu religious time; that the 2,469 feet between the first step of the bridge and the threshold of the temple's center represent the 1,728,000 years of a golden age. A Khmer Brahman of the early 12th century, passing those bas-reliefs and successive terraces, she writes, would have stepped off many more such meaningful measures before entering at last the central tower's dim sanctuary, as Suryavarman II may have done for the first time in 1131, to face the great image of Vishnu. There, "Time stops, divinity and space merge and a long numerical journey ends in infinity. "
Khmer prosperity depended on water–on its favorable distribution throughout the growing seasons, with the rice fields softened for tilling and then flooded at the right times. But the monsoon rains might come too early or too late. And so, when building a major monument, the Khmer would construct what has been termed a hydraulic city. With canals, wide moats, and bara~huge rectangular reservoirs.
These baray were not dug into the earth. They were formed by the raising of dikes. When such a reservoir is filled by rain and a diked river, the water level will be above the level of the plain; when water is needed, open the sluices and gravity will distribute it via irrigation canals and ditches. Thus dryseason farming is possible too.
By these means the Khmer obtained two and even three harvests a year, sustaining an enormous population on which rested the kingdom's economic, demographic, and consequently political strength. At the beginning of the dry season the king would lead the army to make war in the north or east or west, for glory, for slaves. Especially powerful kings ordered new hydraulic cities, new monuments, new baray. Yet the baray are an inigma at Angkor. They were not built for growing rice because there are no outlets to feed into canals. They served for some other purpose. At Angkor, a temple is not a temple - it is Mount Meru - the home of the gods. The baray are extensive bodies of water, but their function was perhaps for religious symbolism just as were the temples. Yet there are canals running throughout the Angkor complex.
Branching from the brownish Siem Reap River, a 15-foot-wide canal slowly flows westward, lined with shrubbery so tall that the branches over it form an intermittent tunnel. The canal skirts the square of Angkor Thom, turning south and then west again–and there's the Western Baray, built 900 years ago, the biggest of all.
Its dimensions amaze anyone– one and a quarter by five miles. A little more than half of itis silted up: Oxen graze in it; in the distance two boys fly a kite. But the farwestern portion, fed by that slow-moving canal, is an inland sea. There's a sluice gate there, built in the 1950s, partly with foreign-aid funds from the United States. I remember being told that it dispensed irrigation water to 32,500 acres, through 140 miles of arterial canals. The farmers had radios, motor scooters, and houses with tile roofs. It was a landscape of prosperity.