The collection is figures and fragments, worked in stone and in wood. Buddhas, of course. Vishnu, from the long stretch of centuries when Khmer kings built for Hindu gods before Theravada Buddhism became the settled faith of the country. Lokesvara — Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world — whose serene, downcast face is one of the most recognisable things Khmer sculptors ever made. And lions: the paired guardians that sat at temple stairways, front paws planted, chests forward, staring down whoever climbed toward the sanctuary. In a museum they look like sculpture. At the foot of a stair, which is where they were carved to be, they were doing a job. Wood survives badly in this climate, so the wooden pieces are the ones to look at hardest; they are the least likely to have a duplicate anywhere.

The museum also holds a collection of lintels from the pre-Angkorian period, and a lintel repays the small effort of understanding what it is. It is the carved stone beam spanning the doorway of a sanctuary — the surface a worshipper passed directly beneath, and therefore the surface the builders lavished attention on. Pre-Angkorian lintels are their own idiom: arcs and medallions, foliate scrollwork, makaras spitting garlands from either end, an ornamental vocabulary that predates and then feeds into everything Angkor would later do at scale. They are also, awkwardly, the most portable substantial piece of a temple. A tower cannot be carried off. A lintel, in bad decades, can be. Every one of these sitting on a stand in Kampong Thom is a beam that stayed.

Construction of the museum began in 2008. That same year, the last of the mines were finally cleared from the ground at Sambor Prei Kuk, the seventh-century capital thirty kilometres to the northeast that supplies much of what stands in these cases. The site had a hard twentieth century. American aircraft bombed positions inside the archaeological complex in the early 1970s, leaving craters among prasats that had stood since King Isanavarman I made the place his capital in the years around 616 to 637. Fighters afterwards left mines in the same ground. It took until 2008 to make the forest floor safe to walk on — and in that year, in the provincial capital, someone began pouring the footings of a building to hold what had come out of it. Bomb, mine, clearance, museum. The sequence is not a metaphor. It is just the order things happened in.

The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts inaugurated the museum on 31 March 2011, in a building put up in traditional Cambodian style rather than the concrete-box idiom that provincial institutions across the region so often get. For several years it was exactly what its size suggested: a local museum, visited mostly by locals. Then, in July 2017, UNESCO inscribed Sambor Prei Kuk on the World Heritage List, and the temples up the road stopped being a specialist's detour. In September 2020 the Japanese ambassador, Mikami, came to see both the temple site and the museum, with a view to a new heritage-conservation collaboration between Japan and Cambodia through the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. Japanese archaeologists and conservators had already spent years working the stratigraphy at Sambor Prei Kuk; the interest in the small building holding its statuary followed naturally enough.

The argument for a museum this modest is not about the number of objects. It is about distance. A lintel in a European gallery is an artefact; the same lintel twenty minutes' drive from the doorway it spanned is a piece of a place, and the people who live in that place can walk in and see it without a passport or a plane ticket. Cambodia lost a great deal of its portable heritage across decades of war and its aftermath, and the slow work of getting objects home has been going on ever since. Kampong Thom's museum is the far end of that effort — not the headline repatriations, just a room, a gallery, and 150 things that never left. Go in the same trip as Sambor Prei Kuk, and go to the museum first. The temples make far more sense once you have seen what used to stand in them.