West Mebon Baray Temple

This guide to West Mebon Baray Temple, an island shrine sitting in Siem Reap's vast West Baray reservoir, begins in December 1936, when a villager digging for a dreamed-of Buddha statue struck bronze instead. It follows what turned up in that mud, the pieces still missing in the silt, and the unknown sculptor who was working, historians say, at the edge of what Khmer bronze casters could do. Stand on the platform and causeway where the god once lay, and picture the parts still unaccounted for.