The Largest Temple on the Planet Is...

A Hindu Temple, but it's not in India...

The largest religious monument on Earth is a Hindu templet, yet it’s not in India.

It’s in Cambodia called Angkor Wat. But, how has the largest Hindu temple in the world found a home in the dense jungles of Cambodia?

My initial research told me that Hinduism spread to South East Asia through Indian merchants. This answer didn’t satisfy me in the slightest for one main reason.

Hinduism wasn’t just a long lost piece of Cambodian culture, it was and is still very much a part of their culture.

Despite Buddhism being the predominant religion, the celebration of Hindu deities and awareness of sacred Hindu texts like the Mahabharata and Ramayana are common knowledge. At some points my husband and I joked that Cambodia almost felt more Indian than India.

The story of Ramayana depicted in Cambodia where it’s called “Reamker”

So I went back to the drawing board and dug harder until I hit research gold.

The reason Hinduism spread to Cambodia is because the very first King of Cambodia was an Indian merchant. Yes, you read that right.

I will list the sources I used for further reading in case anyone is curious, but if you want a fantastic visual of this story please check out Odd Compass’s video. They did a phenomenal job.

Okay onto the story.

In the 1st century CE, a young man named Kaundinya was a wealthy merchant hailing from the Andhra region in Southern India.

Map of Bharat (India) 2nd Century CE showing Andhra where Kaundinya was from.

He owned merchant vessels called Boitas and filled them with prized Indian and western goods from trade with Ancient Rome, which he would sell to other parts of South East Asia.

Painting on bandana depicting an Ancient Indian “boita” vessel

The journey from India to the South East was a treacherous one. The typical route involved sailing south along India’s coast line, stopping at trading ports along the way to pick up more goods. The last port would be at Sri Lanka, after which the vessel would cut straight across the Bay of Bengal until it hit somewhere along the South East coastline. This voyage was usually done during monsoon season, so navigating the open ocean in the Bay of Bengal was often under vicious conditions. The heavens opened up and night turned to day with the constant crackling of lightning. Not to mention pirates.

A map showing a possible ancient route a merchant like Kaundinya would’ve taken along the coast to SE Asia. Map not to scale.

During one of Kaundinya's travels, his goods-filled boita was ambushed by pirates led by a female named Soma. Although Kaundinya bravely fought them off, the pirates still managed to get away with a good loot and Kaundinya’s ship was damaged as a result.

The damage to his vessel meant Kaundinya needed to make an unplanned pitstop somewhere along the banks of the Mekong to issue repairs. While on land, a local chieftain sought Kaundinya and his crew out.

To Kaundinya’s surprise, the local chieftan’s daughter was the female pirate that led his ambush attack. His daughter, Soma, was impressed with Kaundinya’s bravery against her pirates and became smitten with the Indian merchant.

The local chieftain offered Kaundinya his daughter’s hand in marriage. Whether out of fear of angering the local chieftain or wanting to facilitate good relations between the two regions, Kaundinya agreed to the marriage.

The marriage of Kaundinya to Soma is a beacon of Cambodian history, which marks the moment when “a new race emerged and a nation forged” to inaugurate the first true Kingdom in Cambodia, the Funan Kingdom with an Indian sitting on the throne.

Statue commemorating the union of Kaundinya and Soma in Cambodia.

But this international marriage was not as random as it may seem

India was the largest economy of the ancient and medieval world from the 1st to the 17th centuries CE, controlling ⅓-¼ of the world’s wealth.

That is a significant amount of wealth, power and control India possessed for nearly 17 centuries.

So tying the knot with an elite member of the wealthiest country in the world at the time was the quickest way to solidify your own region’s power and wealth. And Kaundinya and Soma’s union was far from the last.

From there the Funan Kingdom quickly grew into the mighty Khmer Empire, one of the largest South East Asian Empires to rule. It was under the power of the Khmer Empire that Angkor Wat was born.

But, how did Angkor Wat go from this…

A recreation of what Angkor Wat likely looked like based on anecdotal descriptions from foreign visitors and envoys at the time.

To this?

Angkor Wat in complete ruins when it was rediscovered by the French in the 1860s.

For decades we had zero answers because there were no surviving records or accounts from Angkor Wat. Most records and manuscripts were written on palm leaves, which don’t keep for that long especially in tropical conditions.

So, nearly seven centuries of history lost to war, looting and time.

But then, historians all the way in China discovered a dusty journal written in August 1296 CE that finally opened a door that everyone believed had been shut forever…

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