Angkor was not built in a day — or by one king. This route traces Khmer history from the 9th-century brick towers of Roluos through Jayavarman VII's monastery-cities, into the French colonial grid, the killing fields, and villages living the same way for centuries.
Consecrated 967 AD to Shiva by Yajnavaraha, a Brahmin royal tutor — the only major Angkorian temple not built by a king. Pink sandstone carvings cut 3cm deep survive almost intact. Open 07:30-17:00, 37km northeast of town.
Jayavarman VII's 1191 monastery-city, whose foundation stele records 97,840 attendants and 1,000 dancers. The Hall of Dancers, a two-storey round-columned building unlike anything else at Angkor, and collapsing galleries held by strangler figs.
Hariharalaya, the Khmer capital before Angkor. Bakong, dedicated 881 AD by Indravarman I, is the first sandstone temple-mountain and the structural prototype for Angkor Wat two centuries later. Preah Ko (879) keeps six brick towers with original stucco.
Rajendravarman's 961 state temple in laterite and brick, built when the court returned to Angkor from Koh Ker. The name means 'turning the body', a cremation rite. Steep east stairs open onto rice fields and the East Baray's dry bed.
Eight galleries running from the Funan kingdom to the empire's collapse; Gallery A alone holds 1,000 Buddha images. Original inscribed steles here decode the doorframe carvings you saw in the temples. Open 08:30-18:00.
A glass-walled stupa on this pagoda's grounds holds skulls and bones recovered from a Khmer Rouge execution site used between 1975 and 1979. Bilingual panels explain the Democratic Kampuchea years; young monks study a few metres away.
Rusting T-54 tanks, a MiG-19 fighter, artillery and defused mines from the 1970-1998 conflicts. The guides are former soldiers and landmine survivors telling their own biographies — the actual reason to come. Open 08:00-17:30.
One of Siem Reap's oldest pagodas, founded in the 18th century. The vihara holds rare 19th-century Reamker murals in which Khmer painters slipped in French colonials in pith helmets and Chinese merchants smoking pipes.
Founded in 1992 to rebuild carving and weaving skills that nearly died with the artisans killed under the Khmer Rouge. Watch apprentices cut sandstone, lacquer wood and paint silk in open workshops on Stung Thmey Street.
A former royal pagoda used by King Sisowath, later a Khmer Rouge-era ruin, now home to the Center for Khmer Studies and a 20,000-volume library — the most open research collection on Cambodian history in the country.
Houses on eight-metre stilts above the Tonlé Sap floodplain, a settlement pattern unchanged for centuries because the lake swells fivefold each monsoon. Boats run through the flooded mangrove forest at high water.
The 1920s shophouse grid laid out when Siem Reap was a colonial outpost administering newly 'rediscovered' Angkor. Ochre Old Market halls, the 1932 Grand Hotel, and shuttered villas along the river between the two bridges.