Angkor National Museum

This guide to the Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap centers on a single stone slab in the entrance hall, carved with a Sanskrit inscription found lying in the grass at Preah Khan temple by a French conservator in November 1939. You'll hear how its cramped verses amount to a twelfth-century supply list drawn up under King Jayavarman the Seventh, and what that list reveals about the theology behind feeding a kingdom's gods. The guide moves on into the museum's glowing Gallery of a Thousand Buddhas, each figure once fed with incense rather than rice.