Seeking Good Fortune in Siem Reap

Inside the Preah Ang Chek Preah Ang Chorm shrine, beautifully decorated, with two bronze sisters that were once displayed at Angkor Wat. Now located close to the Royal Residence in Siem Reap.

Two shrines, frequented by an array of locals every day seeking variations of good luck, health, success, fertility, and protection, are located close to the Royal Residence in Siem Reap, next to the Royal Independence Gardens. On my most recent visit to temple-town I visited both shrines and can vouch that they remain very popular spots for locals to visit, light incense sticks and seek some form of positive intervention. Of the two, the largest is the gated shrine for statues of two sisters and princesses, Preah Ang Chek, the taller, and Preah Ang Chorm, the shorter. Local legends aside, it seems the two post-Angkor style bronzes were found in the forest in 1950 having been removed from inside Angkor Wat, before the governor Dap Chhuon appropriated them, after which they ended up at Wat Damnak, after a stint in the Siem Reap riverbed, and finally found their current home in 1983. A well-traveled pair of statues, that are especially liked by newly-married couples seeking a blessing. The shrine looks like it receives a lot of money from the visiting believers. Nearby, is the more diminutive shrine for Ya, or Yeay Tep, effectively part of a traffic roundabout on National Road 6. This ancestral spirit shrine or Neak Ta, harks back to the practice of animism and the spirits which inhabit the trees, rivers, land and roundabouts of course. Yeay Tep, sitting under a banyan tree, is almost as popular as her neighbours, and is a modern copy of the more familiar Leper King (or Yama) statue that used to sit on the Angkor Thom terrace of the same name, but now resides in the National Museum in Phnom Penh.

Yeay Tep, a traditional animist Neak Ta spirit shrine, is located on a roundabout on National Road 6 in front of the Royal Residence in Siem Reap.