Jayavarman VIII

Jayavarman VIII reigned for half a century, from 1243 to 1295, and is remembered chiefly for a religious reaction. His relationship to his predecessor Indravarman II is not clearly recorded. A committed Shaivite, he presided over — or at least permitted — a systematic iconoclasm directed at the Buddhist establishment of Jayavarman VII: thousands of Buddha images carved into the walls and niches of the Bayon-period temples were chiseled away or crudely recut into lingas and Hindu ascetics, and the great Buddha from the central sanctuary of the Bayon was broken and cast into a shaft, where archaeologists recovered it in 1933. The scale of the defacement, visible at Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, and throughout Angkor Thom, makes it one of the most extensive episodes of iconoclasm in Southeast Asian history, though its exact dating within the reign and the degree of royal direction remain matters of inference.

His foreign policy was dominated by the Mongol expansion. When envoys of Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty demanded submission, Jayavarman had at least one mission detained — an act that risked invasion at a time when Yuan armies were operating in Champa and Dai Viet during the 1280s. Angkor escaped attack; the Yuan campaigns in Vietnam failed, and by 1285 the Khmer court had defused the threat by sending tribute. The kingdom thus avoided the destruction visited on some of its neighbors, while in the west Tai states continued to grow at Khmer expense.

Building under Jayavarman VIII was modest by the standards of his predecessors, consistent with a general slowing of monumental construction. The small temple of Mangalartha in Angkor Thom, dedicated in 1295 to a Brahmin scholar's family, is the last dated stone temple at Angkor.

In 1295 the elderly king was deposed or pressured into abdication by his son-in-law, who took the throne as Srindravarman; the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, arriving the following year, recorded that the new king had seized power and that his predecessor was kept confined. The date of Jayavarman VIII's death is not recorded. Under his successors Theravada Buddhism, spreading from below rather than imposed from the throne, became the lasting religion of Cambodia — an outcome his Shaivite restoration did nothing to prevent.