National Museum of Cambodia

The National Museum of Cambodia holds the largest collection of Khmer cultural material in the world: roughly 14,200 stone, bronze, ceramic and wood objects spanning the prehistoric, pre-Angkorian, Angkorian and post-Angkorian periods, housed in the same purpose-built 1920 building the collection has occupied for over a century. Its strength is depth within a single national tradition rather than breadth across cultures: sandstone and bronze devotional sculpture excavated from named Angkorian sites, including material recovered directly from temple excavations such as the West Mebon reclining Visnu, sits alongside a growing body of objects repatriated from Western museums and from the market built around the dealer Douglas Latchford, making the museum, in effect, both an art-historical archive and an active party to Cambodia's ongoing restitution effort.

The red-roofed, ochre-walled building on Street 13 in central Phnom Penh, immediately north of the Royal Palace, was designed by George Groslier (1887-1945), a French-born historian, painter and curator who spent much of his career trying to revive Cambodian arts and crafts he believed were dying out under colonial rule. Groslier's design is not a copy of any single Khmer temple but an enlargement of temple forms taken from bas-reliefs, reinterpreted at museum scale. The foundation stone was laid on 15 August 1917, and the building rose alongside the newly founded Ecole des Arts Cambodgiens (1917), the craft school that trained Cambodian artisans in stone carving, wood carving, metalwork and lacquer. The completed museum was inaugurated during Khmer New Year on 13 April 1920, in the presence of King Sisowath, the French Resident-Superieur Francois-Marius Baudoin, and Groslier himself, who served as both director of the Ecole des Arts Cambodgiens and curator of the new museum. At its opening it was named the Musee Albert Sarraut, after the then Governor-General of French Indochina; the building was extended in 1924 with wings added at either end of its eastern facade, and the central section of that facade was renovated in 1968 under the Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann. The east facade measures just over 97 metres, the north-south faces just under 73 metres, and the complex totals around 5,190 square metres of galleries, stores, studios and offices.

Authority over the museum and Cambodia's arts administration passed from the French to the Cambodians on 9 August 1951, two years before independence, and the post-independence museum, then called the Musee National de Phnom-Penh, was the subject of a bilateral accord between France and Cambodia signed on 7 November 1956. Madeleine Giteau, as Conservatrice du Musee National, directed the museum through this transition from 1956 to 1966. In 1966 Chea Thay Seng became the first Cambodian director of the National Museum and, at the same time, dean of the newly created Department of Archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts, the successor institution to the Ecole des Arts Cambodgiens, which still stands behind the museum.

The museum closed in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh, and it stayed closed through the end of that regime, reopening on 13 April 1979, three months after the city's liberation. The building was found with a rotten roof, its collection in disarray and its garden overgrown; many of the museum's own staff had been killed under Khmer Rouge rule, and the loss of that expertise, layered onto the physical damage, made recovery slow. A colony of bats living in the roof was a later, more prosaic threat, its droppings damaging displayed objects and posing a health risk to staff and visitors before the colony was cleared. The museum's basement, which holds roughly 90 percent of the collection in storage, floods in the wet season; a UNESCO-backed renovation beginning in 1993 raised the storage shelving above ground level, and in 1997 added a pump and an internal catchment pond to manage floodwater, work supplemented since by private donors. Conservation capacity was rebuilt with help from the National Gallery of Australia in the 1990s and, afterward, the French government, which continues to fund a conservation workshop employing a stone and wood conservator who has trained a team of Khmer staff, with the funding also covering salary supplements for the Cambodian conservators involved.

The museum divides its holdings by material rather than by period: stone, bronze and other metal, ceramic, and wood. On the museum's own current figures there are 1,877 works on display in the galleries and a further 12,320 in the basement store, a total of 14,197 pieces, of which only about 15 percent is ever on view at once. The stone collection is the core of what most visitors come to see: sandstone and schist sculpture spanning the pre-Angkorian period (6th-8th centuries), when statues needed carved struts or a horseshoe-shaped support arc to stand upright, through the Angkorian period (9th-13th centuries), when sculptors abandoned those supports altogether, plus temple lintels and bas-reliefs that double as dating evidence for the buildings they came from. Bronze casting, by the lost-wax process used in Cambodia since the Neolithic period and still practised today, reached its technical peak under the Angkorian Baphuon style and produced free-standing, multi-armed divinities that would have been difficult to carve safely in stone. The ceramics collection runs from Neolithic hand-built pottery excavated at Samrong Sen to Angkor-period wares thrown on a wheel and fired at high temperature, made for architectural decoration, ritual use and daily life alike, some shaped as animals. The wood and ethnographic collection is the thinnest of the four by chronology: no pre-Angkorian wood object survives in the collection at all, because wood decays and burns far more readily than stone, so what remains dates to the Angkor and post-Angkor periods, after Cambodia's turn to Theravada Buddhism at the end of the 12th century replaced Brahmanic stone temples with wooden monastic buildings that needed carved wooden images to fill them.

The museum describes safeguarding Cambodian heritage and working toward the repatriation of stolen pieces as core parts of its own mission, and states on its own history page that, supported by UNESCO's International Council of Museums and its 'One Hundred Missing Objects' campaign, eight objects were returned to Cambodia between 1996 and the drafting of that page, from private individuals and from institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. That process has accelerated sharply since. The British collector and dealer Douglas Latchford, indicted in New York in 2019 for trafficking looted Khmer antiquities and dead within a year of the charge, had supplied Khmer material to at least ten American museums; when the 2021 Pandora Papers leak exposed the offshore trusts he used to manage that collection, several of those museums moved to return what they held. The Denver Art Museum announced in October 2021 that it would restitute four Cambodian antiquities connected to Latchford, after Cambodian officials said the museum had for years been slow to respond to requests for provenance records. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had already returned two looted Koh Ker temple statues in 2013, agreed in December 2023 to return a further sixteen Khmer works tied to Latchford and his network, completing the removal of every Latchford-linked Khmer object the Met had identified in its own collection. Seventy repatriated pieces, drawn from the Met and other collections, were formally welcomed home at a ceremony at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh on 27 August 2024, after which, according to reporting on the ceremony, the statues were transferred to their permanent home at the National Museum. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art added three more sculptures in December 2025: a 10th-century sandstone head of Harihara, a 10th-century sandstone Uma, and a bronze Prajnaparamita of around 1200, with the Smithsonian's director stating there was strong evidence all three had left Cambodia amid war and the breakdown of order. None of the sources consulted for this page itemizes which of these recently returned objects are currently on public display in Phnom Penh rather than in storage or under study.

Beyond exhibiting its own collection, the National Museum operates under Cambodia's Department of Museums with a stated responsibility to support and oversee every other museum in the country. It has an active international loan programme that predates Cambodia's decades of civil conflict and was revived in the 1990s, starting with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1992 and followed by loans to museums in France, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Germany, loans which the museum says have in turn brought professional and structural assistance back to Phnom Penh from the French and Australian governments. Its first temporary exhibition since the 1920 opening, 'The Ganesha of the National Museum,' was held in 2000, and a permanent installation on Post-Angkorian Buddhist sculpture opened the same year, reflecting the fact that the museum's collection of Buddhist and Hindu sculpture is not treated purely as art history: it also serves an active religious function for Cambodian visitors. A comprehensive guidebook to the collection was published in Khmer, English and French in 2002.

Visitors consistently single out the building and its courtyard garden as one of the most attractive museum settings in Phnom Penh, and rate the depth of the Angkor-period stone sculpture collection highly; the recurring complaint is that the galleries carry little on-object labelling, so a visitor who skips the guide or audio tour is left looking at a long run of similar-looking statues with no context.