At Global Heritage Fund, we believe that the heart of heritage lies with the people who cherish it. Periodically, we will be posting intimate stories highlighting the many local voices that make our global heritage a story truly beyond monuments.

Eyeless sockets gaze listlessly from behind plastic screens, unfeeling, unknowing, unaware they are surrounded by a cavalcade of similarly mute brethren, stacked one atop the other like the building blocks of a child’s playset. In their macabre silence, they throng an ocean so vast, they could slake the thirst of a thousand angry sea gods – and still hold enough to unleash a deluge.

There are no gods here, though. Only the bleached remains of two million shattered souls, every one liquidated in the shadow realms and charnel houses of the Killing Fields. Their bones are a testament to the four-year, orgiastic murder spree euphemistically known as the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

That’s Cambodia, for those not up on their history.

In a reign lasting four years, the DRK – known by its American corruption “Khmer Rouge” – was so murderous it became synonymous with what is now called the “Cambodian Holocaust.” It was so murderous that, to this day, peasants can just as easily call themselves gravediggers as they can farmers, they’ve dug up so many bones.

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Bones in the Killing Fields. ©Wikimedia Foundation

Mok Ngam could have been one such victim. Perhaps his location, far outside the capital city of Phnom Penh, and his occupation, a stonemason, spared him this fate. Neither an intellectual, nor a French speaker, nor a wearer of glasses, Ngam is something that was considered a far more insidious blight: a lover of culture.

He still remembers the day, in 1975, when his work with the Ecole Francais d’Extreme Orient (EFEO) in the ruins of Angkor Wat was halted. He doesn’t speak much about the years after his expulsion from the precincts of this holy site. “They sent me away, into the countryside. There were thousands of others. I had to hide all of the skills I learned. I couldn’t speak French. I couldn’t show that I knew how work with the stone. That’s why I was one of the few who survived.”

Though his callused hands saved him from a summary execution, in the watery fastnesses of his eyes there can be discerned the gulf of memory and the wages of unadorned trauma. But – and it is an important but – Ngam’s eyes brighten when he speaks of the ruins.

“It was my life’s work. Of course, I returned as soon as I could. There is always more work to be done at Angkor,” he says. “I met John Sanday [GHF’s Cambodia Project Director] there, and he employed me on the project. He brought me with him again to Banteay Chhmar.”

John Sanday speaks approvingly of his relationship with the prodigal stone mason. “The Khmer stone masons have an affinity for the stone” he says. “They’re always touching it feeling for the accuracy of the join.”

Indeed. Though he is not from the wild north of Cambodia, Ngam feels an equal affinity for the people that cut open the heart of this jungle and installed their epic structures in its emptiness. Their temple, a testament to a golden age of imperial ambition, retains an element of mystery and power in its intricately carved stones. “I feel like I understand the minds of the people who built this temple, because I have spent my life among their ruins,” he relates.

Ngam, now 68 and an elder statesman of the conservation scene, is as enthusiastic as ever, though he feels his time as a workman is waning. “I need to share this knowledge with the younger workers, because while I hope to see Banteay Chhmar conserved, I realize I will probably not live to see the last of the work completed!” he says. “And like Angkor, there is always more to be done.”

Learn more about Ngam’s work with GHF at Banteay Chhmar by visiting the official project page.