Yasovarman I

Yasovarman I, son of Indravarman I and Queen Indradevi, founded the city of Angkor. Succeeding his father at Hariharalaya in 889 — possibly after a violent struggle with a brother, an episode hinted at in later sources but not securely documented — he completed his filial obligations there by dedicating Lolei, a temple on an island in his father's Indratataka reservoir, before transferring the capital some fifteen kilometers northwest to a site he named Yasodharapura.

The new city was planned on an enormous scale. Its ritual center was Phnom Bakheng, a natural hill that Yasovarman had carved and built into a five-tiered temple-mountain bearing more than a hundred subsidiary towers, arranged according to a symbolic scheme that scholars have connected to calendrical and cosmological numbers. East of the city he excavated the Yasodharatataka, now called the East Baray, a reservoir roughly seven kilometers long and nearly two wide, far surpassing his father's work at Hariharalaya. Yasodharapura remained the core of the Khmer capital region, under various configurations, for the next five hundred years.

Yasovarman was also a notable patron of religion and letters. He founded around one hundred ashramas, or hermitage-monasteries, across his territories, issuing for them a remarkable series of paired inscriptions in Sanskrit, some written in an Indian-derived script alongside Khmer lettering. The ashramas served Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Buddhist communities alike, an early instance of the religious pluralism that characterized much of Angkorian history. He additionally built temples on the hilltops of Phnom Krom and Phnom Bok near his capital.

The end of his reign is imprecisely dated; he disappears from the record around 910 and received the posthumous name Paramashivaloka. Two of his sons, Harshavarman I and Ishanavarman II, reigned after him in succession, before power passed to his brother-in-law Jayavarman IV, who removed the capital to Koh Ker for two decades. The city Yasovarman founded nonetheless proved durable: when Rajendravarman II restored the court to Angkor in 944, it was to Yasodharapura that he returned.