“It has been said, probably rightly so, that it is the largest-ever 3D puzzle,” Royere told AFP. Without the original plans, however, the undertaking was daunting to the point of impossibility. In 1995, after the civil war of the 1980s and the political turmoil of the early 1990s settled down, the EFEO restorers were allowed back into the country under the leadership of Pascal Royere. When the KR took Phnom Penh in 1975, the EFEO offices were ransacked and all the records lost. They were working on the second tier when the EFEO restorers were expelled from the country and many of the Cambodian restorers and builders were killed. Soon after the temple was dismantled, the Cambodian civil war broke out. This was a dry stone construction - no mortar was used to glue stones together - so every stone was individually shaped to fit together. Careful records were kept so that they could all be put back together again. Each of the 300,000 sandstone blocks were numbered and spread out over 10 hectares of the surrounding area. Based on successful use of anastylosis by Dutch restorers in Java, the restoration of the Baphuon temple called for the ruins to be completely dismantled, the structure shored up, then the temple rebuilt. The Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient (EFEO), the French organization that was in charge of Angkor conservation since 1908, started an ambitious program of restoration in 1960. It was built around a sand core, however, and its massive size, hasty construction and thin walls led to structural problems almost from the beginning.īy the 15th century, large portions of it had collapsed, so when it was converted from a Hindu temple to a Buddhist one, builders had no qualms about removing large chunks of rock from the tower to create an abstract outline of a massive reclining Buddha (30 feet high and 230 feet long) on the second tier, endangering the structure even further.Ĭome the 20th century, the temple was in ruins. With the tower, it was 164 feet (50 meters) high, and 426 by 340 feet (130 x 104 meters) wide. Dedicated to Siva, it was the largest temple in the country until Angkor Wat was built in the next century, and it was famed for its dramatic central tower. The three-tier pyramidical temple was built by King Udayadityavarman II in around 1060. It has taken a French and Cambodian restoration team 15 years to pick up where the 1960-1970 restoration was forced to leave off by the advancing Khmer Rouge forces and solve the greatest 3D puzzle in the world. On July 3rd, the thousand-year-old Baphuon temple in Cambodia’s Angkor Thom complex will be officially reopened to the public after it was dismantled into its 300,000 component stones in 1960.
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