Baron Empain Palace

This guide to Baron Empain Palace in Heliopolis follows the Belgian industrialist Edouard Empain, who built the Paris Metro before carving this district out of open desert and raising a mansion modeled on Angkor Wat and the temples of Orissa between 1907 and 1911. It traces the private grief that turned the palace into a ghost story for local villagers, a daughter kept hidden inside its walls, and the decades it stood stripped and empty after Empain's family lost it. Look up at the stone monkeys, elephants and Hindu deities still climbing its facade.