Post-Pol Pot Cambodiaand the Building of a New Stupa

Abstract

On the occasion of the 1957 Buddha-Jayanti, relics were brought from Sri Lanka and installed in a stupa in front of the railway station in Phnom Penh, an event of great symbolic importance for the newly independent country. When, after a period of profound political disruption, the former king, Sihanouk, returned to Cambodia in the early 1990s, these relics once again became a focus of attention. A medium from the royal family suggested to theking that the country’s misfortunes were due to the relics being in an inauspicious place, and that they should be moved. After other locations proved unfeasible, it was decided to build a mammoth stupa on Oudong mountain, the location of pre-colonial burial stupas for the royal family. The relics were moved to the new stupa with great ceremony in 2002. This paper describes the building of the stupa and the ceremonies surrounding the transfer of the relics and discusses the emerging symbolic importance of the stupa