Suryavarman I

Suryavarman I won the Khmer throne in a civil war. After the death of Jayavarman V in 1001 and the brief reign of Udayadityavarman I, the kingdom divided between a king at Angkor, Jayaviravarman, and Suryavarman, who advanced from the eastern provinces over nearly a decade of fighting. He was issuing inscriptions as king by the middle of the first decade of the eleventh century and controlled Angkor itself by about 1010; his origins are obscure, and an older theory that he came from a Malay dynasty of the peninsula is no longer generally accepted.

Having taken power by force, Suryavarman governed with conspicuous attention to loyalty. In 1011 he had some four thousand officials swear a collective oath of allegiance, the text of which was engraved at the entrance to the royal palace at Angkor — one of the most direct surviving documents of Angkorian administration. His reign is associated with the walled royal palace compound and with work on the Phimeanakas temple within it, though the building history of that area spans several reigns.

Territorially, his reign marks a major expansion westward. Khmer authority was extended into the Chao Phraya basin, including the region of Lavo (modern Lopburi in Thailand), which remained within the Khmer orbit for two centuries. Inscriptions from his reign appear across a wide arc of the mainland, and he added to the dramatic clifftop sanctuary of Preah Vihear in the Dangrek range. The West Baray, the largest of all Angkorian reservoirs at roughly eight kilometers by two, was probably begun late in his reign and completed under his successor.

Suryavarman was a patron of Buddhism as well as the established Shaiva cults — his posthumous name, Nirvanapada, is explicitly Buddhist — and his reign illustrates how readily Khmer kingship accommodated multiple traditions. He died in 1050 and was succeeded by Udayadityavarman II, whose relationship to him is not clearly established in the sources. By the end of his forty-year reign the kingdom was larger, more bureaucratically articulated, and more thoroughly documented than ever before.