Wat Bo

This guide to Wat Bo in Siem Reap follows a dispute among historians over who painted the vivid murals inside its eighteenth-century ordination hall, from the abbot's account of a pipe-smoking wandering artist to a French scholar and a later pair of researchers, each naming different painters from decades apart. It walks the western wall's stacked panels of the Reamker, Cambodia's version of the Ramayana, where Rama, Sita and the monkey general Hanuman share space with French colonial soldiers and nineteenth-century market scenes. The carved doors and pediments, by contrast, carry no such argument.