This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Before Cambodia's twentieth century wars, roughly eight professional Lakhon Khol troupes performed the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Ramayana, across the country. Today only one remains, attached to Wat Svay Andet, a Buddhist monastery on the Mekong east of Phnom Penh, and its survival at all is closer to an accident of continuity than a guarantee. Transmission at Wat Svay Andet itself was broken outright for fourteen years, from 1970 to 1984, through the Cambodian civil war and the Khmer Rouge period, a rupture that silenced performing arts across the country and killed a generation of the artists who might otherwise have carried them forward; that the tradition resumed there at all owed to surviving community members who remembered the choreography, the masks and the pinpeat orchestra's music well enough to teach it again once conditions allowed.
UNESCO inscribed Lkhon Khol Wat Svay Andet on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2018, a designation reserved for traditions assessed as genuinely at risk of disappearing rather than merely notable, and its own safeguarding file names the same two pressures that threaten most single-community heritage practices worldwide: economic migration pulling younger performers toward paid work elsewhere, and the sheer difficulty of resourcing an all-male masked dance tradition that depends on one village keeping faith with a story it has told, with one interruption, for roughly a thousand years.