Cambodian silk weaving is not factory work and never has been. It happens in the gap between the ground and the raised floor of a wooden house, where the air moves and the light is soft enough to see thread by. A weaver ties off sections of yarn before dyeing so the dye cannot reach them, then unties, re-ties and dyes again until the pattern lives inside the thread itself rather than on the surface of the cloth. Only then does the weaving begin, and the pattern emerges a row at a time as the shuttle passes. It is slow, exacting, and mostly done by women. Takéo's countryside is flat, hot and given over almost entirely to rice, which means the loom is what happens between harvests. A single elaborate length can take weeks. The province supplies the majority of the country's output, though almost none of it carries Takéo's name once it leaves.

Doun Kaev sits on National Highway 2, a straight run down from Phnom Penh through paddy that stretches to the horizon in every direction. Takéo province, established in 1907, holds a little over a million people across 3,563 square kilometres — dense, agricultural, ranked among the more developed of Cambodia's provinces by human development measures, and still overwhelmingly rural. The town itself is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes: market, guesthouses, a waterfront where the wet season pushes the plain into something closer to a lake. Most travellers treat Doun Kaev as a staging post rather than a destination, which is fair and also a little unjust. The pleasure of the place is precisely that nothing is being performed for anyone. Eat noodles at a roadside stall, watch the motorbikes carry impossible loads of thatch and live ducks, and the town will not ask what you thought of it.

Twenty-odd kilometres east, at Angkor Borei, the ground holds something older than Angkor by six hundred years. This was a major settlement of Funan, the first kingdom known to have existed in Southeast Asia, and quite possibly its capital. Since 1996, archaeologists from the University of Hawaii and Cambodia's Royal University of Fine Arts have been coring, surveying and excavating here, tracing a thousand years of social complexity from roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE. Three kilometres further sits Phnom Da, a hill crowned by what is generally called the oldest standing Khmer stone temple, sixth century, and the small brick sanctuary of Ashram Maha Rosei. The statues that once stood inside — Vishnu with eight arms, Krishna lifting the mountain — are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh now. So, unfortunately, is a great deal else that never reached a museum: looting and the trafficking of Khmer antiquities have taken from this site continuously into the present century.

Pen Sovan was born in Tram Kak district in 1936 and joined the anti-colonial Khmer Issarak at thirteen. In June 1981 he became prime minister of the Vietnamese-backed government installed after the Khmer Rouge; in December, having irritated his sponsors, he was arrested, removed and taken to Vietnam, where he was held for more than ten years and released in January 1992. He came home, founded a party, won a parliamentary seat in 2014, and died in Doun Kaev in October 2016 at eighty. Chinary Ung left earlier and by a different road — born in Takéo in 1942, he arrived in the United States in 1965 to study clarinet and was still there when the country he had left came apart, taking with it most of its musicians. He turned to composition and in 1989 won the Grawemeyer Award, one of the largest prizes in music, for a work called *Inner Voices*. Two lives from the same rice-flat province, both shaped by a catastrophe neither chose.

Come in the dry season and the plain is dust and stubble, the temples on their hills visible from a long way off. Come after the rains and the same plain is a shallow inland sea with the roads standing above it like dykes and the far bank of everything gone soft. Neither version is the real one; the alternation is the real one, and every crop, canal and settlement pattern in Takéo is an answer to it. The Funan engineers who cut a canal sixty-eight kilometres from Angkor Borei to the seaport of Óc Eo were solving the same problem the farmer on the motorbike is solving today. Doun Kaev is a small town in the middle of a very old argument between people and water, and the argument is going about as well as it ever has.