1110
Suryavarman II begins construction of Angkor Wat
On the Cambodian plain, quarrymen started floating sandstone blocks from Mount Kulen down specially-dug canals to a site bigger than any medieval city in Europe. The temple's five towers would eventually mimic the peaks of Mount Meru, home of the gods. An estimated three hundred thousand laborers and six thousand elephants worked on the project, carving nearly two thousand apsara dancers into the gallery walls.
Huizong paints auspicious cranes
The Song emperor recorded a flight of white cranes over his palace gate by painting them in exquisite detail on a silk scroll, inscribing the occasion in his own slender gold-wire calligraphy. The painting survives as one of the finest imperial artworks in Chinese history. The emperor saw the cranes as an omen of heavenly favor, though his reign would end in captivity and disgrace at the hands of the Jurchen.
Sidon falls to the Crusaders
With a Norwegian fleet under King Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer blockading the harbor, Baldwin I took the ancient Phoenician port. Sigurd would sail home a celebrity, the first European monarch to visit the Holy Sepulchre, trailing legends about jousting through Byzantine streets. Sidon's capture completed the Latin kingdom's control of the central Levantine coast, linking Acre to Beirut along a continuous strip of fortified ports.
Abbey of Ani rebuilt in Armenia
The medieval Armenian capital, damaged by earthquakes and Seljuk raids, saw its great cathedral restored by wealthy Armenian merchants under loose Georgian overlordship. Ani was known as the city of a thousand and one churches, and for a generation it was again one of the most beautiful cities in the Christian East.