Banteay Chhmar

The village takes its name from the temple beside it: Banteay Chhmar, usually translated as the narrow or the cat fortress. The complex was built in the late 12th or early 13th century under Jayavarman VII, the king who raised Angkor Thom, the Bayon and a network of temples and hospitals across his empire. Archaeologists read the site as a planned Angkorian centre, probably a fortress, and unlike the open cities of the period. An inscription names the prince Srindrakumara, one of his sons, and the galleries were carved with scenes of the war against the Cham, including a naval battle, and with images of a many-armed Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

Set far from Angkor on the route towards the Dângrêk range and the western frontier, the temple was abandoned with the rest of the empire's western holdings, and the forest and the rains brought its towers and galleries down. The village that grew around it farmed among the ruins for centuries. In the 20th century the area lay in the disputed north-west: it was fought over during the war, held by the Khmer Rouge and later by border factions, mined heavily, and emptied and resettled more than once, and its people were among those who crossed into Thai refugee camps in the 1980s.

The temple has been heavily looted in recent decades, robbed of reliefs and statues that were traded into art markets across South-East Asia, and many of those pieces remain lost. Conservation teams have since worked on the galleries, Cambodia has put the complex forward for World Heritage listing without it being inscribed, and the village has built its community tourism scheme around the ruins with the Global Heritage Fund and Heritage Watch.

Life in Banteay Chhmar is organised around the pagoda, the farming calendar and the extended family, as in most Cambodian villages. The commune's ceremonies — Khmer New Year in April, Pchum Ben in the autumn, ordinations, weddings and funerals — are held at the wat beside the ruins, and monks walk the lanes at first light for alms. The old temple is treated as a living sacred place as well as an archaeological site, with offerings left at shrines among the fallen stone.

What sets the village apart is its collective approach to visitors. The community-based tourism scheme, developed with conservation and development organisations, trains local guides, rotates guests between homestay families and puts part of the income into a village fund, so that a stay is a transaction with the commune rather than with a hotel. Weaving groups make silk and cotton scarves, and other households supply food, transport and guiding.

Border life shapes the culture too. Many families have relatives working in Thailand, Thai goods and television are common, and a good number of people speak some Thai. Memories of displacement and of the mine-clearing that followed are recent enough to be part of ordinary conversation. Visitors are expected to dress modestly, greet elders and monks with the sampeah, and ask before photographing people, houses or ceremonies.

Several thousand people live in the commune, one of six in Thma Puok district, in hamlets of stilt houses spread between the temple, the reservoir and the fields. The day starts before dawn with cooking, the market run and the walk or ride out to the rice, and slows to almost nothing in the middle hours of heat; work resumes in the late afternoon, and by mid-evening the lanes are dark and quiet. Electricity, mobile signal and piped water have arrived within living memory, and the road from Sisophon has been improved, which has shortened the trip that once took most of a day.

Rain-fed rice is the main crop, with cassava, maize, vegetables and fruit trees, cattle for ploughing and cash, and fishing in the baray and the seasonal ponds. Incomes are low and irregular, and many young adults spend part of the year working in Thailand or in Cambodian towns, sending money home; migration and the debts that fund it are a constant subject. Tourism adds a small, seasonal income to a limited number of households.

The temple is a working part of the village's economy and landscape rather than a fenced-off monument. Conservation work, guiding, cooking and weaving provide jobs, while the surrounding countryside still carries the legacy of the war years in mine-cleared land and in the pattern of settlement.

Meals here are village food, eaten with the rice harvested nearby. A household meal is a bowl of rice with two or three shared dishes: a soup, a stir-fry of vegetables from the garden, grilled or fried freshwater fish from the reservoir and ponds, and a small dish of prahok, the fermented fish paste that seasons much of Khmer cooking, or of tuk trey, the fish sauce used at the table. Beef and chicken appear at festivals and for guests.

Breakfast is usually noodles — nom banh chok, rice noodles in a green fish gravy of lemongrass and turmeric, or kuy teav, a clear soup with rice noodles — bought from a stall or made at home. Samlor korko, the thick mixed soup of fish or pork with green papaya, jackfruit and roasted ground rice, is the everyday country dish, and samlor machu, a sour soup with tamarind, is common in the hot months.

Field and forest foods matter on this plain: bamboo shoots, wild greens, water lily stems, small crabs and snails from the flooded rice, frogs in the wet season, and ants, which are eaten fried and used to season meat. Sugar palms supply palm sugar and fresh palm juice, and kralan, sticky rice with coconut roasted in a bamboo tube, is sold by the roadside. Drinks are green tea, sugarcane juice and iced coffee with condensed milk.