Vidallon, Gio V

The upper terrace: 200 faces of Lokesvara

The inner gallery is nearly filled by the upper terrace, raised one level higher again. The lack of space between the
inner gallery and the upper terrace has led scholars to conclude that the upper terrace did not figure in the original
plan for the temple, but that it was added shortly thereafter following a change in design. Originally, it is believed, the
Bayon had been designed as a single-level structure, similar in that respect to the roughly contemporaneous
foundations at Ta Prohm and Banteay Kdei.
The upper terrace is home to the famous "face towers" of the Bayon, each of which supports two, three or (most
commonly) four gigantic smiling faces. In addition to the mass of the central tower, smaller towers are located along
the inner gallery (at the corners and entrances), and on chapels on the upper terrace. "Wherever one wanders," writes
Maurice Glaize, the faces of Lokesvara follow and dominate with their multiple presence.
Efforts to read some significance into the numbers of towers and faces have run up against the circumstance that
these numbers have not remained constant over time, as towers have been added through construction and lost to
attrition. At one point, the temple was host to 49 such towers; now only 37 remain. The number of faces is
approximately 200, but since some are only partially preserved there can be no definitive count.
The central tower and sanctuary
Like the inner gallery, the central tower was originally cruciform but was later filled out and made circular. It rises 43
metres above the ground. At the time of the temple's foundation, the principal religious image was a statue of the
Buddha, 3.6 m tall, located in the sanctuary at the heart of the central tower. The statue depicted the Buddha seated in
meditation, shielded from the elements by the flared hood of the serpent king Mucalinda. During the reign of Hindu
restorationist monarch Jayavarman VIII, the figure was removed from the sanctuary and smashed to pieces. After
being recovered in 1933 from the bottom of a well, it was pieced back together, and is now on display in a small
pavilion at Angkor.
The outer gallery: historical events and everyday life
The outer wall of the outer gallery features a series of bas-reliefs depicting historical events and scenes from the
everyday life of the Angkorian Khmer. Though highly detailed and informative in themselves, the bas-reliefs are not
accompanied by any sort of epigraphic text, and for that reason considerable uncertainty remains as to which
historical events are portrayed and how, if at all, the different reliefs are related.[10] From the east gopura clockwise,
the subjects are:

A scene from the eastern gallery shows a Khmer army on the march.
A scene from the southern gallery depicts a naval battle; this section shows Cham warriors in a boat and dead
Khmer fighters in the water.
A market scene in the southern gallery shows the weighing of goods; the fish belong to a naval battle taking
place above.