When the French cleared Angkor from the 1900s they cut back the forest from most temples. Ta Prohm was left partly as found, on the reasoning that one site should show what the explorers had seen, and it has become the most photographed temple after Angkor Wat.
Ta Prohm
Built in 1186 by Jayavarman VII as a Buddhist monastery and university, it once housed 12,500 people with 80,000 more in surrounding villages supporting it, according to its own foundation stele. Today it is a maze of collapsed galleries with silk-cotton and strangler fig roots pouring over the stonework. The trees are both the attraction and the threat: they hold the walls together and will eventually bring them down, so a long-term conservation programme is stabilising selected structures. Wooden walkways now guide visitors and the famous root doorways have queues; come at opening time.
Preah Khan
Larger, quieter and in many ways more rewarding: a temple, monastery and city built by the same king in 1191 on the site of a battlefield. A single long axis runs through collapsing halls, a two-storey building with round columns that appears nowhere else in Khmer architecture, and its own share of trees on walls. Far fewer people come here.
Banteay Srei
Twenty-five kilometres north-east, a small tenth-century temple of pink sandstone with carving so fine and so deep that it was long assumed to be the work of women, which is where the name, citadel of women, comes from. It is the finest decorative carving in Cambodia and is worth the drive. Go early; the stone glows in low sun.
Beng Mealea
Forty kilometres east, a temple of similar plan to Angkor Wat, unrestored and largely collapsed into the jungle, with clambering over blocks required. It was mined during the war and cleared only in 2003. The scale and the silence are the point.
Roluos and Kbal Spean
The Roluos group south-east of Siem Reap holds the ninth-century temples that preceded Angkor itself. Kbal Spean, up in the hills, is a riverbed carved with a thousand lingas and reliefs of Vishnu, reached by a 1.5 km walk through forest, best in the wet season when the water runs.
Practicalities
Ta Prohm and Preah Khan are on the standard circuits. Banteay Srei and Beng Mealea require a longer tuk-tuk day or a car, and Beng Mealea has a separate ticket. All are covered by the Angkor Pass except Beng Mealea.