Jayavarman IV ruled from Koh Ker between 928 and 941 CE, and his successor Harshavarman II held the court here until 944. Why a Khmer king would leave the fat, well-watered plains north of the Tonle Sap for this dry scrubland is still argued over. He may have been a usurper who needed his own ground; he may simply have been going home, since the evidence suggests he was a local lord here before he was king of anything. Ancient inscriptions call the place Lingapura, the city of lingas. Those same inscriptions record how the building program was paid for: a taxation regime so aggressive that the scribes thought it worth writing down. Within the 81 square kilometres now protected, archaeologists count 184 monuments. After 944 the court went back to the plains, and no Khmer king ever ruled from here again.

Almost every Khmer state temple is concentric - you spiral inward through nested enclosures toward a centre. Prasat Thom does not. Its plan runs in a straight line east to west, a procession rather than a spiral, and at the end of it stands the Prang: a seven-tiered sandstone and laterite pyramid, 62 metres to a side at the base and 36 metres tall. A single colossal linga once crowned the summit, reportedly more than four metres high, and it is gone like nearly everything else portable at this site. East of the temple lies the Rahal, a reservoir roughly 1,200 metres long and 560 metres wide, its banks stepped with laterite. The builders used brick, laterite and sandstone more or less interchangeably. A thousand years on, the small hard bricks have outlasted the stone.

What the Koh Ker workshops did with sandstone has no real precedent. UNESCO's citation reaches for the word motion, and that is the right word: figures caught mid-lunge, weight already shifted, muscle bunched for a blow that never lands. The masterpiece was a group from Prasat Chen showing Bhima and Duryodhana from the Mahabharata at the instant before the killing stroke, two heavy bodies leaning into each other across an open floor. Another pair showed the monkey kings Sugriva and Valin wrestling. The style was so distinct that art historians simply named it after the place. None of the great pieces are at Koh Ker now. Some are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh and the Musee Guimet in Paris. The rest were taken.

The statues left Koh Ker in a country that had no functioning economy, no police worth the name, and a great many people with nothing. The men who did the physical work of cutting a two-tonne sculpture off its base were mostly Cambodians who saw a tiny fraction of what the piece would eventually sell for; the money accumulated much further down the chain, among dealers and collectors who paid seven figures and asked remarkably few questions about provenance. Reversing that took decades and lawyers. When Sotheby's offered the Duryodhana at auction in late 2011, the Cambodian and United States governments filed in March 2012 to seize it, and the warrior went home in December 2013. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had already returned its pair of Kneeling Attendants in May of that year. The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena sent back Bhima in 2014, and the two fighters finally faced each other again in Phnom Penh.

On 17 September 2023, at the extended 45th session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh, Koh Ker was inscribed on the World Heritage List as "Koh Ker: Archaeological Site of Ancient Lingapura or Chok Gargyar" - Cambodia's fourth World Heritage property. It has not become Angkor. There are no crowds, no hotel strip, a village of stilted houses and a primary school about a kilometre from the main sanctuary, and two open-air restaurants by the parking area where you can get noodle soup and cold coconut. Roughly two dozen of the 184 monuments are open. The rest are in forest that has been swept for mines only along the roads and the ring road, which is why the danger signs stand where they do. Stay on the cleared ground and the loudest thing at Koh Ker is the wind in the trees.