Cambodia P-17 1000 riels 1972-1973 UNC｜Angkor Wat｜UNESCO｜60% bigger than US dollar

Front: Students (girl and three boys) writing at desks in a school.

Back: Head of Lokecvara at Ta Som, Angkor Wat

Size: 186 × 88.5 mm, 7.32" × 3.48", 60% larger than a US dollar bill.

Watermark: Retrograde image of Schoolgirl, facing right.

Printer: Bradbury Wilkinson and Company, UK

Angkor is the vast medieval capital of the Khmer Empire, flourishing from the 9th to the 15th century and encompassing hundreds of temples, reservoirs, and urban structures across northwestern Cambodia. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized for its extraordinary architectural, artistic, and hydraulic achievements, and for monuments such as Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and the Bayon, which together form one of the world’s greatest sacred and urban landscapes.

Ta Som is a small late-12th-century temple within the Angkor complex, built during the reign of Jayavarman VII. It is especially famous for the monumental strangler fig whose roots envelop its eastern gopura, creating one of Angkor’s most iconic images of stone and jungle in symbiosis. As part of the Angkor site, Ta Som is also included in the UNESCO World Heritage designation.

Lokecvara (Avalokiteśvara), the “Lord Who Looks Down,” is the bodhisattva of compassion and one of the central figures of Mahayana Buddhism. Under Jayavarman VII, he became a spiritual patron of the Khmer state, and his serene, all-seeing presence is reflected in the face towers of temples like the Bayon and in sanctuaries such as Ta Som. While Lokecvara himself is a religious figure rather than a monument, his cult and iconography are inseparable from Angkor’s UNESCO-listed sacred landscape.