Photo 983(5)

Genre: Architectural Photography

View looking eastwards along the arcade, with a stairway beyond the doorway leading up into the central area of the temple.

'Ascending through the great western gateway towards the centre of the temple, we enter a cruciform gallery, conducting to four courts, or rather reservoirs, surrounded with open pillared galleries. This portion of the building is shewn at B in the ground plan, and is remarkable for its symmetry of construction....The pillars here, as in the inner range of the external corridors, have no base. Just below the capital, and extending about half-way down the shaft, we find a series of long inscriptions, which can be translated by the Cambodian priests, and are said to contain the records of offerings made by distinguished indviduals who at different periods visited the temple. The pillars, as will be seen from the photograph, carry an architrave and a deep frieze, ornamented with female figures in graceful dancing attitudes, called by the natives Tewadah or Chao Savan (dwellers in heaven). Above the frieze is an ezquisitely sculptured cornice, from which rises a pointed arch formed by corbeling. The general form of this portion of the building has a striking resemblance to the form of the Gothic structures of the twelfth century...In Nakhon Wat the rows of pillars take th eplace of the walls in the Gothic examples. Passing to the left, along an arm of the cross, we have before us one of the reservoirs, part of which is shewn in the next photograph.'

('Description of the Photographs', p. 37).

[Albumen print, signed 'J. Thomson' in the negative, 186x242mm].

Subjects = Khmer architecture; printed books; temples; Thomson, J., 'The antiquities of Cambodia' (1867)