The Bayon at the centre of Angkor Thom carries more than fifty towers, and almost every one of them is cut into four enormous faces looking out to the four directions. They are calm, heavy lidded and nearly identical, and standing among them is the experience the building was designed to produce: whichever way a visitor turns, the same face is already looking back.
Scholars have argued for more than a century about whose face it is. The usual identifications are the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, who in Mahayana teaching attends to the suffering of the world in every direction at once, or Jayavarman the Seventh himself represented in that role, and the two readings are not exclusive in a tradition where a king could be presented as the earthly expression of a compassionate power.
Charles Higham sets the building inside Jayavarman the Seventh's programme of hospitals, rest houses and temples raised across the empire after a period of war and occupation, which gives the faces a political sense as well as a devotional one. The galleries below the towers are carved with a different register entirely: naval battles on the Tonle Sap, market scenes, cockfights, women cooking, men gambling. A monument built to be looked up at also recorded, at eye level, what ordinary life in the twelfth century capital looked like.