Wat Po Veal – Battambang (Wat Bovil)

Also recorded as Wat Bovil. Contemporary monastery and pagoda in the heart of Battambang city, east of the river, and south of Wat Po Knong. There are two pagodas here, that replaced an earlier pagoda reportedly founded in the early 19th century.

In the 1930s the pagoda also featured a Pali school, Pali being the ancient language used by Theravada Buddhism. Numerous Pali manuscripts were copied from here and stored by Louis Finot in the 1900s with Jacqueline Filliozat noting (translated from French)

These are engraved manuscripts on sheets, supposed to strictly conform to the originals and which are undoubtedly the last witnesses of one of the most beautiful monastic libraries of Cambodia which has now disappeared, victim of intentional destruction in 1975.

Filliozat Jacqueline. Pour mémoire d’un patrimoine sacré. In: Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient. Tome 87 N°2, 2000. pp. 445-471.

That original pagoda also served as a museum of Angkorian-era temple relics, collected by the monks and documented during the time of the French administration in the early to mid-1900s.

during the Khmer Rouge years….[Wat Po Veal’s] collections were specially targeted for destruction..

Cambodian History Through Cambodian Museums, Heather A. Peters, 1995

Apparently, it still houses some relics while it is yet to reopen to the public the Battambang Provincial Museum serves as the main museum for the province.

At the rear, or east of the two pagodas are a series of shrines amongst a garden that also features a glass-encased petrified tree trunk.

Historical Images

Via Fonds Cambodge

Rodney Charles LHuillier

Living in Asia for over a decade and now residing in beautiful Siem Reap. Rodney Charles L'Huillier has spent over seven years in Cambodia and is the author of Ancient Cambodia (2024) and Essential Siem Reap (2017, 2019). Contact via [email protected] - more..