We know Angkor as the ruins of a city with grand temples of exemplary architecture in Cambodia. But for conservationist Jiang Huaiying, it is a big jigsaw puzzle.

A holy place first for Hindus and then Buddhists, Angkor is one of the Seven Forgotten Wonders of the Medieval Mind. But when the Chinese conservation team, led by Jiang, was invited by the Cambodian government and UNESCO in 1997 to repair the 900-year-old ChouSay Temple, the place had nothing to show its glorious past, except about 5,000 pieces of stone lying around.

But in 10 years, the team has given back ChouSay some of its glory, even though it didn't have any drawing or description to fall back upon.

The Chinese government has approved the $1.86-million conservation work, which now awaits the ratification of the Cambodian government and UNESCO, a top official at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage said yesterday.

After ChouSay, the team will move to the much larger and historically more significant Ta Keo Temple, deputy minister of the administration Dong Baohua said. The project will begin later this year and end in 2014.

The Ta Keo Temple was built between the 10th and 11th centuries to "replicate" Khursag Kurkura, or "mountain of all lands", in the Hindu scriptures. The five pagodas on a three-layer terrace represented that mountain.

Suryavarman II built most of the structures in Angkor, including the grand Angkor Wat Temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, between 1113 and 1150. The huge pyramid temple is regarded as the supreme masterpiece of Khmer architecture.

The Ta Keo Temple, however, is older, built by Jayavarman V about 150 years before Angkor Wat. It's a sandstone structure, with a central tower surrounded by four turrets. The fact that the temple was built with giant pieces of stone, many of them weighing over 5 tons, makes the project all the more challenging.

"It's hard to imagine how the medieval Cambodians carried the stones into the jungle and laid them one upon another," Jiang said.

The Ta Keo project budget has not been finalized but it could be more than 40 million yuan ($5.13 million), a huge amount for a conservation project in China, said Shen Yang, director at the conservation center for monuments and sites, China National Institute of Cultural Property. A majority of the team members, including Jiang, are from the institute.

Apart from the Angkor temples, Chinese conservationists are working on an ancient palace in Ulan Bator in Mongolia.

Source: China Daily