Trapeang Totoeng Thngai Temple

Often touted as a mysterious site, it certainly lives up to the hype. Totung Thngai Temple (ប្រាសាទ​ទទឹងថ្ងៃ), as it is also known, is located east of Siem Reap, and south of Bakong Temple.

What remains at the mysteriously ruinous site are several sandstone doorway frames of what was a group of eight temples, an annex building with a surrounding wall and moat.

It is quite curious to see so many of the sandstone doorframes still standing while all else lay in rubble. From a quick look, it can be perplexing to work out the site’s layout. Looking at ground level, there are remains of the base platform, which supported three towers, followed by a group of five towers, with outer entrance gopura doorframes adding to the collection of Stonehenge-like plinths.

It was believed to be built in the tenth century.

Not too far away is the Trapeang Phong site.

Layout

Via EFEO Banyan

Historical Notes

Prasat Trapeang Totung Thngay (The Shrine of the Pool Across the Sun). It is situated about 800 metres west from Kuk Prasat (No. 583), on a mound probably formed from the soil of the surrounding ditch-basin. There is nothing left here but a confused heap of broken bricks above, which emerge door lintels. It may be deduced, however, from the situation of the latter that they are the remains of a group of five brick shrines, open to the east, arranged thus: one at the point of intersection of the diagonals of a square, the others at the corners.

A brick outbuilding, now as ruined as the sanctuaries, was almost juxtaposed with the south face of the southeast sanctuary. Other piles of debris still allow us to recognise that there was a three-passage brick gopura on the east face and perhaps a false gopura on the south face.

A basin-ditch surrounds the mound, interrupted on its east face by a causeway which ends, about sixty meters further, towards the east, at a rectangular pond still filled with water, whose major axis is oriented north-south., hence the current name of this temple.

Lajonquiere, 1902

Rodney Charles LHuillier

Living in Asia for over a decade and now residing in beautiful Siem Reap. Rodney Charles L'Huillier has spent over seven years in Cambodia and is the author of Ancient Cambodia (2024) and Essential Siem Reap (2017, 2019). Contact via [email protected] - more..