Thailand Guide
The northeast: Isaan
Prasat Hin Khao Phanom Rung
Opening time: Ruins daily 6am–6pm; Phanom Rung Tourist Information Centre daily 9am–4.30pm
Price: Ruins, B100 or B150 including entrance to Prasat Muang Tam
Address: 12km south of Ban Tako
Prasat Hin Khao Phanom Rung stands as the finest example of Khmer architecture in Thailand, graced with innumerable exquisite carvings and with its sandstone and laterite buildings so perfectly aligned that on the morning of the fifteenth day of the waxing moon in the fifth month of the lunar calendar (usually in April) you can stand at the westernmost entrance pavilion and see the rising sun through all fifteen doors. This day is celebrated with parades all the way up the hill to the prasat – a tradition believed to go back eight hundred years. The excellent, museum-like Phanom Rung Tourist Information Centre inside the Gate 1 car park provides an outstanding introduction to the temple's construction, iconography and restoration.
As at most Khmer prasats, building at Phanom Rung spanned several reigns, most likely from the tenth century to the thirteenth. The approach to the complex is one of the most dramatic of its kind, its 200-metre-long avenue symbolic of the journey from earth to heaven. Ahead, the main tower, representing Mount Meru, home of the gods, looms large above the gallery walls, and is accessible only via the first of three serpentine bridges, each crowned by five heads.
A dancing Shiva, nine of his ten arms intact, and a lintel carved with a relief of a reclining Vishnu preside over the eastern entrance to the inner sanctuary's main tower. Inside kneels an almost life-size statue of Shiva's vehicle, the bull Nandi, behind which stands the all-powerful Shiva lingam, for which the tower was originally built; the stone channel that runs off the lingam and out of the north side of the tower was designed to catch the lustral water with which the sacred stone was bathed.