Angkor Wat nears completion

1134

After a quarter century of labor by tens of thousands of workers quarrying and carving sandstone, Suryavarman II's temple-mountain approached its final majestic form - five lotus-bud towers rising above a rectangular moat nearly a mile wide. Its galleries bore the longest continuous bas-relief on earth, depicting the Churning of the Sea of Milk in nearly two thousand carved figures of astonishing grace.