About 15 kilometres outside Battambang town on National Road 57 stands a metal gate without a fence that once supposedly provided access to a palace that has long since disappeared. Despite this, visitors often still come calling.
From the portal’s bars hang strings of colourful beads and ornaments, and nearby, several large pots prickle with used sticks of incense. Bunches of bananas are piled on altars next to two spirit houses. A few metres away under an umbrella, a small stall sells incense, candles and fruit.
According to Som Touch, who opened the shop in September, people seeking good luck or help winning money in illegal local lotteries come from far and wide to pray to the spirits at the gate.
Sometimes after making an offering, the supplicant will rub powder on the gate, and a number will appear to them.
“It is true that a lot of people have won the lottery,” she said. “I am one of them, too.”
The gate has been a sacred site drawing people to pray as long as locals could remember, said Toul Ta Ek commune chief Kea Thavy, though no one was sure exactly what building stood there before.
“It’s not only this gate that we believe is sacred; there are many other places in Cambodia as well. For example, there is an old gate at Bakan commune in Pursat province where people do the same thing,” she said.
Matthew Trew, an anthropologist who has been working in Battambang for the past seven years, confirmed that the metal and concrete portal had been revered for many years. It was known as the Damnak Loung gate or “royal gate”, because people believed it was once the location of a royal residence for kings when they visited Battambang.
“The most likely scenario is that King Norodom [who reigned from 1860 to 1904] lived in that residence during his exile from Phnom Penh, but as Sisowath was also born in Battambang, it is possible that [Sisowath’s father] Ang Duong also lived in the residence or nearby,” said Trew.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, cadres impaled the heads of traitors and enemies on the gate’s spikes, he said.
“Many parts of the gate that the Khmer Rouge utilised for that purpose have since been removed, but the main section is revered, because ghosts, particularly of dead ancestors closely related to people alive today, are greatly feared and respected,” he said.
“Many old sites of death, such as the killing caves of Phnom Sampeau, become important shrine sites because the ghosts of dead ancestors can still influence the lives of people today.
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