In Southeast Asia, I’m reminded all the time that dying for politics is dying for nothing. At Wat Keseram (some locals use the extra ‘ra’, others don’t; no one knows what’s right) I’m reminded again.

Built in the early 1970s as a well-equipped modern Buddhist temple and school, it has the largest collection of Buddhist folk paintings, finest woodwork, and loftiest hall among Siem Reap’s modern temples. Almost as soon as it opened, Pol Pot came to power and all religious worship was prohibited, all education banned.

Until 1979, old and senior monks were killed immediately, while young monks were forced into marriage or the military (any who resisted were also killed). Out of approximately 66,000 monks living at 4000 temples before the Khmer Rouge came to power, the regime claimed to have executed 26,000 by 1989, with a further 25,000 dying from starvation, exposure, overwork and illness during forced labor. The killing putatively stopped in 1979, but most monks were unable to return to their monasteries for another decade or more.

When monks returned to the Pagoda of Cornflower Petals, they found something disturbing: their school had been razed and replaced with a torture chamber. Even more disturbing, whenever they broke ground for a new stupa, they found bones of the tortured and executed were already there. For decades, they collected bones in a rough wooden spirit house, but by 2015 they had enough money to build a proud cement stupa.

Today, Wat Keseram is a busy meditation center and very active temple, and uses donations beyond what is necessary to maintain the monks to feed the pets abandoned here by those who can’t afford them.