Around 900, King Yasovarman I ordered the construction of the East Baray at Angkor in present-day Cambodia. The huge artificial reservoir required immense labour and altered the hydrology of the Siem Reap plain. It functioned as both a practical water monument and a symbolic landscape within Khmer sacred kingship.

Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions praised kings through highly wrought verse that linked reservoirs, temples, and cosmic order. The baray helped make water control a poetic emblem of righteous rule, with earthly irrigation mirroring the mythic seas around Mount Meru.