Phnom Penh’s Wat Piphoat Rainsey. (Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily)

French Researchers Challenge Preconceptions About Pagodas

 Cambodia Daily | 19 January 2016

Among the 3,635 pagodas they looked into, only 563 built prior to 1975 still exist, they said.

Researching 1,755 destroyed pagodas through archives and interviews with local people, the Guerets found out that only 312 of them had been demolished by the Khmer Rouge. Another 847 were destroyed between 1970 and 1980, but not by the Khmer Rouge; 199 were destroyed during an armed confrontation; and 200 had been razed since 1990 for unspecified reasons.