Koh Ker: The Statues Came Home Before the Mines Left

Cambodia told the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention that 488,339,143 square metres of its territory were still recorded as contaminated on 31 December 2025, and that mines and explosive remnants of war caused thirty-nine casualties that year. Koh Ker was inscribed as World Heritage two years and three months before the end of that reporting period. The UNESCO-funded clearance inside the property covered 300,000 square metres.

Silence Index — D-142

Quiet, but findable

Ranks 73 of 99 scored dossiers — quieter than 27% of the others we have scored. A low score is not a warning; it describes who else will be standing next to you.

How the total is weighted. These are the fixed weights of the four inputs, the same on every dossier — not this place’s scores. We do not publish per-input bars, because the per-input values were never recorded article by article and inventing four plausible numbers that sum to the total would be a fabrication dressed as a chart.

Footfall pressure — visitors measured against the ground that absorbs them30%

Access friction — permits, caps, seasons, boats, weather windows30%

Acoustic floor — how close the nearest engine is20%

Night darkness — how much sky is left20%

The index is a desk instrument scored by this publication, not a field measurement. How it is calculated, and where it fails.

This is a desk-researched dossier. Nobody from this publication has walked at Koh Ker. It is built from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre's property file, the Article 7 transparency report Cambodia filed under the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention for 2025, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, Mine Action Review, the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority and CMAC, the National Authority for Preah Vihear, press releases from the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and from the museums themselves, peer-reviewed archaeology in PLOS ONE and Geoarchaeology, the US State Department's travel advisory, the GeoNames gazetteer, and Cambodian and international reporting used only where it carries an official figure. Operator pages are used only as evidence of what operators charge.

What was actually inscribed

The property is Koh Ker: Archaeological Site of Ancient Lingapura or Chok Gargyar. It was inscribed on 17 September 2023 at the extended 45th session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Riyadh, under criteria (ii) and (iv). It became Cambodia's fourth World Heritage property.

The numbers on the property page are worth writing down, because almost nothing else about this site is published with that precision. The core zone is 1,187.61 hectares and the buffer zone 3,523.77 — 4,711.38 hectares together, a little over 47 square kilometres. The reference coordinate is N13 46 59 E104 32 14, which puts the centre of the property on Prasat Thom, the seven-tier pyramid.

UNESCO's own description sets the chronology tightly: a building programme of twenty-three years beginning in 921 CE under Jayavarman IV, with Koh Ker acting as one of two rival Khmer capitals from 921 to 928 and as the sole capital until 944, after which political power returned to Angkor. Hold onto the distinction between capital and city; it is the whole of the argument later on.

The clearance, and the number nobody publishes

Koh Ker sits in Preah Vihear province, in country that was fought over into the late 1990s. In September 2021 CMAC and the National Authority for Preah Vihear inspected the complex together and identified priority ground for clearance, including 4.67 hectares north of Ta Men temple.

The documented clearance came through UNESCO's Heritage Emergency Fund. The project ran across 2022 and 2023, cost US$99,996, and used a technical team with mine detection dogs and APOPO's mine detection rats. UNESCO's account of it is specific in a way that is easy to read past: more than 300,000 square metres were secured, and the search turned up four landmines and three items of unexploded ordnance.

Three hundred thousand square metres is thirty hectares. The property and buffer together are 4,711.38 hectares. That is roughly six-tenths of one per cent.

We are going to be careful with that arithmetic, because it is the kind of number that gets weaponised. It does not follow that the remaining 99.4 per cent is mined. Mine action does not sweep landscapes; it clears areas that survey has confirmed or suspected as hazardous, and the great majority of any given property will never have been suspect. What the figure does establish is narrower and still important: the only clearance operation at Koh Ker with a published area attached to it covered thirty hectares, and no agency — not UNESCO, not CMAC, not the CMAA, not the National Authority for Preah Vihear — publishes a figure for how much of the Koh Ker property is confirmed clear. We looked. If that figure exists, it is not on the open web.

The national frame is published, and it is the right thing to reason from. Cambodia's Article 7 report for 2025 records 488,339,143 square metres of contamination remaining in the national database at 31 December 2025. During 2025 it released 104,095,101 square metres: 15,190,885 by non-technical survey, 24,642,400 by technical survey and 64,261,816 by full clearance. That breakdown deserves attention. Nearly two-fifths of the land Cambodia "released" in 2025 was released because survey established it had never been contaminated, not because anyone excavated it.

Casualties in 2025: thirty-nine. Nineteen from mines, twenty from other explosive remnants of war. Eleven people were killed, twenty-three injured and five lost limbs. For comparison, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor records 41 casualties in 2022, 44 in 2021 and 65 in 2020. The trend is down and the number is not zero.

The deadline has moved three times. Cambodia's original Article 5 obligation fell due on 1 January 2010, was extended ten years to 1 January 2020, extended again by six to 31 December 2025, and now runs to 31 December 2030 under the Mine-Free Cambodia 2030 target. The CMAA has a National Policy on Mine Action for 2026–2035 on its site, which tells you something about how the state itself reads the 2030 date.

Preah Vihear province specifically: Mine Action Review recorded 606 suspected hazardous areas covering 108.4 square kilometres at the end of 2023, which put it among the five worst-affected provinces. Cambodia's own 2025 report gives about 14.4 square kilometres for the province from baseline survey. Those two figures are not in conflict so much as they are different instruments — "suspected hazardous area" is a wider category than confirmed contamination — but we are printing both rather than picking one, because the gap between them is exactly the uncertainty a visitor is standing in.

The operational rule at Koh Ker is the same rule that applies across northern Cambodia and it is not decorative. Stay on the cleared paths and the swept ground between the temples. Do not step over rope or tape. Do not walk into standing vegetation to get a better angle on a lintel. Do not touch metal objects; report them to CMAC. This is the guidance the Cambodian authorities give and we are not going to dress it up or soften it.

The statues, and who is counting them

The other half of Koh Ker's story is the most successful cultural repatriation campaign in Asia, and unlike the demining it is documented down to the object.

The legal spine is the Southern District of New York. On 27 November 2019 the US Attorney charged Douglas Latchford, then 88 and living in Bangkok, with wire fraud conspiracy, smuggling, entry of goods by false statements and aggravated identity theft. The press release names Koh Ker directly: Latchford supplied looted Khmer antiquities from the site to a UK auction house from the early 1970s, and the Duryodhana — a guardian figure from Koh Ker exported around 1972 — sits at the centre of the alleged scheme. Latchford died in 2020 and the indictment was dismissed. The civil action did not stop. On 22 June 2023 his estate settled, forfeiting US$12 million in proceeds along with a seventh-century bronze Durga taken from Vietnam.

The returns themselves run back further than the prosecution. In May 2015 the Cleveland Museum of Art returned a tenth-century Hanuman that its own research placed at the east gate of Prasat Chen, inside Koh Ker, and signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambodia's National Museum — the first such agreement between the National Museum and an American institution. In August 2022 the SDNY announced the return of thirty antiquities, among them a tenth-century Skanda on a Peacock and a monumental tenth-century Ganesha, both identified as looted from Koh Ker. The Metropolitan Museum of Art deaccessioned sixteen sculptures in December 2023 in connection with the Latchford investigation and formally transferred them on 2 July 2024 — fourteen to Cambodia, two to Thailand. In December 2025 the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art returned a Head of Harihara, a Goddess Uma and a Prajnaparamita, and announced a multi-year initiative with the Cambodian government focused on repatriated objects, in its own words particularly those from Koh Ker.

Here is where two primary sources disagree, and we are printing both. On 10 June 2026 the Met returned two more works at a ceremony in Manhattan. The Met's press release describes them as an Angkor-period stone Guardian Deity (Rakshasa), circa 921–945, and a mid-seventh-century sandstone lintel with a dragon in foliage. It does not name Koh Ker in connection with either. Agence Kampuchea Presse, the Cambodian state news agency, reporting the same handover on the same day, describes the Angkorian piece as a tenth-century sandstone Hiranyakaśipu from Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker. The Met's own date bracket, 921 to 945, is precisely the Koh Ker building period. We cannot resolve the identification from the outside, and we are not going to average two institutions into a single sentence. The Cambodian agency names the temple; the American museum does not.

What all of this looks like on the ground is pedestals. At Prasat Chen the sculpture groups are gone and in several cases the carved feet remain on the plinths where the figures were cut off. The returns are real, but most of what has come back to Cambodia is in the National Museum in Phnom Penh or at the Preah Vihear provincial museum, not reinstalled at the temples.

What popular coverage gets wrong

Three claims, all checkable.

"Koh Ker was abandoned after twenty years and nobody knows why." The first half is wrong on the evidence. Tegan Hall, Dan Penny and Rebecca Hamilton published a palaeoecological study in PLOS ONE in 2018 using sediment cores from the moat of Prasat Thom, from Trapeang Khnar and from the Andong Preng reservoir. The basal date at Prasat Thom returns 692–890 CE — organic sedimentation was under way a generation or more before Jayavarman IV arrived. And the pollen record does not stop when the court leaves. Their conclusion is that occupation of Koh Ker persisted for at least seven centuries after royal power returned to Angkor, at reduced scale, with substantial population decline only by the mid-fifteenth century. In their words, this was not an ephemeral city established in virgin forest and utterly discarded two decades later. The capital moved. The city did not empty.

"The reason is a mystery." There is at least one testable explanation on the record, which is not the same as certainty but is a long way from mystery. Ian Moffat and colleagues, publishing in Geoarchaeology from a Flinders University-led project, ran ground-penetrating radar across the Rahal, Koh Ker's great reservoir, and traced a seven-kilometre embankment built to capture water from the Stung Rongea. Their modelling indicates the catchment could not handle the average flow, and that the structure failed during the first wet season after it was built. A state hydraulic project that collapses immediately is a political event as much as an engineering one. Treat it as the leading hypothesis, not as settled fact — but stop calling the question unexamined.

"It is World Heritage now, so it must be safe." Inscription is a judgement about outstanding universal value. It is not a clearance certificate, and it does not come with one. The demining project described above was funded and executed at Koh Ker in 2022 and 2023 — and UNESCO's own project page frames it against a site and buffer zone it rounds to four thousand hectares. The World Heritage plaque and the mine-risk education poster are on the same site for the same reason.

The border, and what it does and does not mean

Koh Ker is in Preah Vihear province, and Preah Vihear province has been in the news since 2025 for reasons that have nothing to do with Koh Ker. The Temple of Preah Vihear sits on the Dangrek escarpment at N14 23 27 E104 40 49. Koh Ker sits at N13 46 59 E104 32 14. On those two published UNESCO coordinates the straight-line separation is about 69 kilometres.

The US State Department has Cambodia at Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution, last updated 25 July 2025, and advises against travel within 50 kilometres of the Cambodia–Thailand border because of fighting between Cambodian and Thai forces. On our own arithmetic from the two coordinate sets, Koh Ker lies about 19 kilometres beyond that line. The advisory does not name it. That is a margin, not a guarantee, and the situation has moved repeatedly since mid-2025; check the current advisory and Cambodian government notices before you commit to a date rather than trusting this paragraph.

The same advisory lists the provinces where it says landmines and unexploded ordnance are especially found: Battambang, Banteay Meanchey, Pursat, Siem Reap, Pailin and Kampong Thom. Preah Vihear is not on that list. Cambodia's own Article 7 report shows contamination in Preah Vihear anyway. An absence from an American advisory list is not a statement about the ground.

The tourism consequence is measurable. Angkor Archaeological Park took 387,772 international visitors in the first half of 2026 and US$18.47 million in ticket revenue, down 31.7 per cent and 29.8 per cent respectively on the same period of 2025 — which had itself finished the year at 955,131 visitors and US$44.71 million, about 6.7 per cent below 2024. Cambodian and international reporting attributes the fall to the border conflict alongside regional economic conditions. Koh Ker is not Angkor, but it is reached from Siem Reap, and it draws from the same pool of arrivals.

Getting there, and what we could not confirm

Koh Ker lies about 87 kilometres north-east of Siem Reap in a straight line, on the coordinates above. The usual road runs via Beng Mealea and is sealed; operators quote roughly 120 kilometres and between two and two and a half hours each way. That is a long day trip and a much better overnight, though accommodation near the site is limited to a handful of guesthouses at Srayang and Koh Ker village.

On the ticket, we will be honest rather than confident. Koh Ker falls under the National Authority for Preah Vihear, whose own site lists the Koh Ker temple area within its remit alongside the Preah Vihear temple area — so it is administered separately from Angkor and the Angkor pass does not cover it. Every operator page we opened quotes US$15 for a foreign visitor. We could not open an official Cambodian government page publishing that fee, and we are not going to promote an operator figure to an official one. Take fifteen dollars in cash and expect it to be right.

Prasat Thom's seven-tier pyramid is the reason most people come. We could not verify the current condition or opening status of the wooden staircase on its northern face from any government or authority source, and several operator pages contradict each other on whether the summit is open. If that matters to your trip, ask the authority or a Siem Reap operator the week before, not us.

Why the Silence Index is 58

Mid-range, and it belongs there. Access friction is genuinely low: a sealed road, no permit, no cap, a two-hour drive from an international airport, and a ticket desk at the entrance. That is the profile of a 45. What pulls the score up is everything else. Footfall is a fraction of Angkor's and falling with it — the whole province recorded arrivals in the low hundreds of thousands in its better years against Angkor's millions. The acoustic floor across the dry dipterocarp forest is very low; there is no flight corridor, no industry and no through traffic. Night darkness is close to absolute, because the nearest settlement of any size is Srayang and it is small. And the ground itself carries a constraint that no amount of road surface removes: you can only walk where somebody has already walked with a detector. A place where the paths are the only permitted geometry is quieter than its road access suggests.

The Traveler's Panel · checked 14 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

Status	UNESCO World Heritage, inscribed 17 September 2023, criteria (ii) and (iv)
Administered by	National Authority for Preah Vihear — not APSARA, not the Angkor pass
Entrance	US$15 per foreign visitor on every operator page; no official page found
From Siem Reap	About 87 km straight line, roughly 120 km and 2–2.5 hours by sealed road
UXO rule	Stay on cleared paths. Do not step over tape. Do not touch metal. Report to CMAC
Advisory	US Level 2 (25 July 2025). Do not travel within 50 km of the Thai border
Border distance	Koh Ker is about 69 km from Preah Vihear temple on the escarpment

Getting there — Siem Reap → Dam Dek or Beng Mealea road → Srayang → Koh Ker ticket gate → Prasat Thom

1. From Siem Reap the sealed route runs east to Dam Dek and north past Beng Mealea, then north-east to Srayang and the Koh Ker gate. Operators quote roughly 120 km and two to two and a half hours each way. It is a long day trip by car and an unreasonable one by tuk-tuk.
2. Koh Ker is administered by the National Authority for Preah Vihear, which also runs the Preah Vihear temple area. The Angkor pass does not cover it and there is no combined ticket.
3. Prasat Thom, the seven-tier pyramid, is the centre of the property and the reference coordinate on the UNESCO file. Prasat Krahom stands immediately to its south-west and Prasat Khmau roughly three kilometres south. The satellite temples are spread across several kilometres of forest and are reached by a loop road.
4. Check the US and your own government's travel advisories before fixing dates. Preah Vihear province borders Thailand and there has been fighting on that border since 2025. Koh Ker sits well south of the 50 km line the US advisory draws, but the situation has changed repeatedly.
5. The best time is the dry season, roughly November to March. In the wet season the loop road and the forest tracks between the outlying temples are a different proposition, and wet vegetation is exactly the ground you should not be walking into.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

Koh Ker entrance	US$15 per foreign visitor per operator pages — no official page found
Angkor pass	Does not cover Koh Ker. Separate authority, separate ticket
Car and driver from Siem Reap	Typically US$70–110 for the day, quoted by Siem Reap operators
Guide	Not compulsory. Licensed Khmer guides are the practical way to get the epigraphy
Angkor comparison	H1 2026: 387,772 visitors, US$18.47m revenue, down about 30% year on year

What to pack

• Cash in small US dollars and riel. There is no card infrastructure at the gate.
• Closed shoes. Not because of the walking — because you should not be putting bare skin into leaf litter in a province with recorded UXO contamination.
• Two litres of water per person minimum. There is very little sold on site and nothing between temples.
• A torch for the interior chambers at Prasat Krahom, which are dark even at midday.
• Nothing to dig with, and no metal detector. Both are self-evidently a bad idea here and the second is illegal.

Where to stay

There is no hotel infrastructure at Koh Ker. A small number of guesthouses and homestays operate at Srayang and in Koh Ker village, and they are basic — fan rooms, cold water, generator or intermittent grid power. Most visitors base in Siem Reap and do the site as a long day, which is the reason so few people see the outlying temples. Tbeng Meanchey, the provincial capital, is the alternative if you are combining Koh Ker with Preah Vihear temple, but check advisories carefully before planning anything that goes further north toward the border.

Safety & responsible travel

• Stay on cleared and marked ground. This is not a scenic-path convention: CMAC and APOPO cleared 300,000 m² here in 2022–2023 and found four landmines and three items of UXO, and no agency publishes a confirmed-clear figure for the rest of the property.
• If you see an unknown metal object, do not touch it, do not photograph it up close, and report it to CMAC or to the site staff.
• Do not buy antiquities, fragments or 'old' carvings anywhere in Cambodia. The reason Koh Ker's pedestals are empty is a market, and it was supplied by people who told themselves the pieces were already out.
• Pay the entrance fee at the gate rather than through informal arrangements. The revenue goes to the authority that maintains the site and employs local staff.
• Srayang and Koh Ker village are working communities, not part of the exhibit. Ask before photographing people, and buy your water and food locally rather than carrying everything in from Siem Reap.

Nearby, and quieter

Beng Mealea, a large twelfth-century temple left largely uncleared of forest, sits on the road from Siem Reap and is the natural stop on the way. Prasat Krahom and Prasat Khmau are within the Koh Ker property itself. Sambor Prei Kuk, a pre-Angkorian capital inscribed by UNESCO in 2017, is south in Kampong Thom province. The Temple of Preah Vihear stands on the Dangrek escarpment about 69 km north — inscribed in 2008, and directly affected by the border situation since 2025, so it should be treated as a separate decision requiring current advice rather than an add-on.

Getting there, in order

• 1Siem Reap
• ↓
• 2Dam Dek or Beng Mealea road
• ↓
• 3Srayang
• ↓
• 4Koh Ker ticket gate
• ↓
• 5Prasat Thom

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

Koh Ker, Preah Vihear Province, Cambodia · 13.7831°N 104.5372°E · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

• Prasat Thom — the seven-tier pyramid and the reference coordinate on the UNESCO property file
  13.7832°N 104.5379°E
• Prasat Krahom — the red temple immediately south-east of the pyramid, with dark interior chambers
  13.7810°N 104.5428°E
• Prasat Khmau — the black temple, about three kilometres south of the main group
  13.7544°N 104.5480°E
• Kaoh Ker village — the settlement immediately north of the temple group
  13.7891°N 104.5378°E
• Srayang — commune seat on the approach road; basic guesthouses and the nearest fuel
  13.7628°N 104.5094°E
• Beng Mealea — twelfth-century temple on the sealed road in from Siem Reap
  13.4705°N 104.2290°E
• Siem Reap — the gateway city and international airport, about 87 km south-west
  13.3618°N 103.8606°E

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 14 August 2026

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Koh Ker: Archaeological Site of Ancient Lingapura or Chok Gargyar. Inscription in 2023 under criteria (ii) and (iv); core property 1,187.61 ha and buffer zone 3,523.77 ha; reference coordinates N13 46 59 E104 32 14; the twenty-three-year building programme from 921 CE; and the capital dates 921–928 as rival capital and to 944 as sole capital
2. UNESCO — UNESCO commends Cambodia for the inscription of Koh Ker on the World Heritage List. The inscription date of 17 September 2023 at the extended 45th session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh, and the statement that most of the statuary on the site was looted
3. UNESCO — Dogs and rats team up to clear Koh Ker temple of landmines. More than 300,000 m² secured at Koh Ker by CMAC and APOPO teams, and the four landmines and three items of unexploded ordnance found in the course of that clearance
4. UNESCO Heritage Emergency Fund — Demining and preventing illicit trafficking of cultural property in Koh Ker. The project running 2022–2023 at a cost of US$99,996, clearing some 300,000 m² within a site and buffer zone the page rounds to 4,000 hectares, using mine detection dogs and rats
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Koh Ker documents and decisions. That the governing inscription instrument is Decision 45COM 8B.8 (2023) and that an ICOMOS advisory body evaluation exists for the property
6. Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention — Cambodia Article 7 transparency report for 2025. 488,339,143 m² of contamination recorded at 31 December 2025; 104,095,101 m² released during 2025 split 15,190,885 by non-technical survey, 24,642,400 by technical survey and 64,261,816 by full clearance; 39 casualties in 2025 with 11 killed, 23 injured and 5 amputations; the third extension under Mine-Free Cambodia 2030; and about 14.4 km² of surveyed contamination in Preah Vihear province
7. Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor — Cambodia, Impact. 681.28 km² of antipersonnel mine contamination at end-2022 alongside cluster munition and other ERW figures; the Article 5 deadline history of 1 January 2010, a ten-year extension to 1 January 2020 and a six-year extension to 31 December 2025; and casualties of 41 in 2022, 44 in 2021 and 65 in 2020
8. Mine Action Review — Clearing the Mines 2024: Cambodia. 435 km² of antipersonnel mined area remaining at end-2023; 606 suspected hazardous areas over 108.4 km² in Preah Vihear province; the seven operators working in Cambodia; and the discrepancy between CMAA's reported 193.4 km² cleared in 2023 and Mine Action Review's own estimate of 129.7 km²
9. Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority (CMAA). That the CMAA is the national regulator, publishes monthly explosive-ordnance hazard reports from the Cambodian Mine/ERW Victim Information System, and has issued a National Policy on Mine Action for 2026–2035
10. Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC). CMAC's own description of its mandate across survey and land release, mine and UXO clearance, risk education and training — the body to which unknown metal objects are reported
11. National Authority for Preah Vihear. That the National Authority for Preah Vihear's remit explicitly covers the Koh Ker temple area as well as the Preah Vihear temple area — that is, Koh Ker is administered separately from the APSARA authority at Angkor
12. Southeast Asian Archaeology — CMAC clearing Koh Ker temple complex. The joint NAPV and CMAC inspection of 2 September 2021 and the identification of 4.67 ha north of Ta Men temple as priority ground for clearance
13. US Attorney's Office, SDNY — Antiquities dealer charged with trafficking looted Cambodian artifacts. The 27 November 2019 indictment of Douglas Latchford, 88, of Bangkok; the charges; the explicit naming of Koh Ker as a source site; and the Duryodhana guardian figure exported around 1972 with provenance later falsified
14. US Attorney's Office, SDNY — Return of 30 looted antiquities to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The 8 August 2022 return of thirty antiquities including a tenth-century Skanda on a Peacock and a monumental tenth-century Ganesha identified as looted from Koh Ker, and the dismissal of the Latchford indictment on his death
15. US Attorney's Office, SDNY — $12 million settlement of civil forfeiture action against the Latchford estate. The 22 June 2023 settlement in which Latchford's daughter consented to forfeit US$12 million in proceeds and a seventh-century bronze Durga
16. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Met to transfer 14 sculptures to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The 2 July 2024 transfer of fourteen sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand, deaccessioned in December 2023 in connection with the SDNY investigation of Douglas Latchford
17. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Met returns two sculptures to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The 10 June 2026 return of an Angkor-period stone Guardian Deity (Rakshasa) dated ca. 921–945 and a mid-seventh-century sandstone lintel — described without any reference to Koh Ker or Prasat Chen, which is the point of disagreement with the Cambodian account
18. Agence Kampuchea Presse — Cambodia welcomes return of two more Khmer antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Cambodian state news agency's account of the same 10 June 2026 handover, identifying the Angkorian piece as a tenth-century sandstone Hiranyakaśipu from Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker
19. Cleveland Museum of Art — Cleveland Museum of Art returns Khmer sculpture and enters cultural cooperation agreement with Cambodia. The 11 May 2015 return of a tenth-century Hanuman which the museum's own research placed at the east gate of Prasat Chen at Koh Ker, and the first MoU between Cambodia's National Museum and an American museum
20. Smithsonian Institution — National Museum of Asian Art returns three sculptures to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The 11 December 2025 return of a Head of Harihara, a Goddess Uma and a Prajnaparamita, the 1967–1975 looting window, and the announcement of a multi-year initiative with the Cambodian government focused on repatriated objects particularly those from Koh Ker
21. Hall, Penny & Hamilton — Re-evaluating the occupation history of Koh Ker, Cambodia, during the Angkor period (PLOS ONE, 2018). Cores from the Prasat Thom moat, Trapeang Khnar and Andong Preng; a basal date of 692–890 CE at Prasat Thom; and the conclusion that occupation persisted at least seven centuries after the court returned to Angkor, with substantial decline only by the mid-fifteenth century — explicitly not an ephemeral city discarded two decades later
22. Phys.org — Ground-penetrating radar reveals why the ancient Cambodian capital was moved to Angkor (Moffat et al., Geoarchaeology, doi:10.1002/gea.21757). The seven-kilometre embankment built to capture the Stung Rongea, the modelling showing the catchment could not contain average flow, and the conclusion that the system failed in its first year of operation
23. Archaeology Magazine — Infrastructure design flaw led to Khmer city's decline. The independent account of the same Flinders University-led radar survey, including the buried spillway and the failure of the reservoir dike in the first rainy season after construction
24. US Department of State — Cambodia Travel Advisory. Level 2 as of 25 July 2025; the instruction not to travel within 50 km of the Cambodia–Thailand border; the list of provinces named for landmines and UXO, which does not include Preah Vihear; and the instruction to report unknown metal objects to CMAC
25. Xinhua — Cambodia's Angkor records 387,772 international tourists in H1 2026. 387,772 international visitors and US$18.47 million in ticket revenue at Angkor in the first half of 2026, down 31.7 and 29.8 per cent year on year, with the border conflict named among the causes
26. Phnom Penh Post — Jan–June Angkor ticket sales plummet by almost a third in first half of year. The same H1 2026 figures with the 2025 full-year comparison of 955,131 international visitors and US$44.71 million, itself 6.7 per cent below 2024
27. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Temple of Preah Vihear. The published coordinates N14 23 27.028 E104 40 49.17 and 2008 inscription, used here to compute the straight-line separation between Preah Vihear temple and Koh Ker
28. GeoNames gazetteer — Preah Vihear province place records. Decimal coordinates for Prasat Kaoh Ker, Prasat Krahom, Prasat Khmau, Kaoh Ker village and Srayang, used for the key-location points on the map panel

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.