Preah Vihear is a Khmer temple laid out as a climb, along the crest of the Dângrêk range on Cambodia's northern border. The mountain gave it that plan. The range is a tilted slab of sandstone: it rises gently out of the Thai plateau, then breaks off in one south-facing wall above the Cambodian plain, 525 metres high. So the builders put the stairway and the five gateways on the gentle side and saved the sheer edge for the sanctuary at the end. The axis runs 800 metres north to south and gains 120 metres, each gateway framing the next one above you, and the crowds thin as you climb. At the far end the ground stops. A rock nose called Pey Tadi juts out past the last courtyard over the drop, and on cool-season mornings mist fills the plain below you until the rising sun burns it off. On a ledge path under the temple you come to seated figures cut into the natural rock, weathered soft by a thousand monsoons.
The ground under your feet is the thing being fought over. Cambodia won the temple at the World Court in 1962 with a French survey map of 1907 that drew the cliff onto the Cambodian side, against the watershed line the treaty specified. Siam had copies of that map and used them for decades without objecting, and the judges held that silence against Bangkok. Because Cambodia held the cliff and not the ramp, it had to cut its own road up the rock face, and did not finish it until 2003. The ridge carries other history too. This was the Khmer Rouge's last redoubt. Several hundred of them came down and surrendered at the temple in December 1998, so the place stayed unreachable until then, and mines still lie in the forest a few steps off the stones you are walking on. The temple has been closed since the border fighting of 2025. The court gave Cambodia the temple and left the ground around it undefined, and that undefined ground begins where the last courtyard ends.