Khleang Moeung occupies the ground between history and belief, a neak ta - a guardian spirit of place - who was also, in the telling, a real commander. In the Pursat version, around 1516 a general named Ta Moeun took his own life by jumping into a pit filled with poisoned swords. His spirit returned at the head of a ghostly host that spread disease through the enemy ranks, and in 1525 the rightful king, Ang Chan I, was restored. The rite at his sanctuary is not led by a spirit medium in the usual Cambodian pattern but by a ritual servant called the me smiṅ. What has happened since 1990 is more interesting than the legend itself: a regional neak ta with a local shrine has been taken up as a national figure, invoked far beyond Pursat and among Cambodians living overseas - a patron for a country that has had a great deal to mourn and needed somewhere to put it.

Pursat sits on the railway the French laid between Phnom Penh and Battambang, and for decades its station was the town's melancholy landmark - a handsome colonial building slowly decaying, its outbuildings occupied by families with nowhere else to live. Then in 2019 the line was restored and trains started calling again. Two run daily; the Phnom Penh service costs around eight US dollars and takes about four hours. National Highway 5 runs fully paved through the town on the same axis, and buses stop here every half hour through the morning and early afternoon - roughly $2.50 and ninety minutes to Battambang, $5 and four hours to Phnom Penh, with Sorya and Capitol Tour the established operators. Older guidebooks call Battambang Cambodia's second city; that has not been true for some time, since the growth of Siem Reap pushed it into third.

Central Pursat is small enough to walk in an afternoon, which is the right way to take it. Motorbike taxis wait at the market, the bus stops and the station, and a ride anywhere in town runs about 1,000 riel; a day out to the lake can be negotiated from around five dollars. Children will shout hello at anyone unfamiliar, and invitations to eat or to sing follow quickly. There is a bamboo train here, as in Battambang. Guidebooks are dismissive about the food, describing provincial Cambodian eating as sustenance rather than cuisine - a fair description of a country that endured mass starvation within living memory, and an unfair prediction, given that Battambang ninety minutes up the road was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2023. The climate is straightforward: daily temperatures between about 21 and 34 degrees Celsius, around 1,484 millimetres of rain a year, most of it falling in September and October.

The reason most travellers stop is 28 kilometres east. Kampong Luong is a floating village on the Tonlé Sap, north of Krakor - houses, shops, a school and a Catholic church all built on pontoons, its residents largely Vietnamese-speaking. Because the lake swells and contracts enormously with the monsoon, the village goes with it: the distance from Krakor and Highway 5 out to the settlement varies between roughly two and seven kilometres depending on the season. Nothing is anchored to a shoreline that itself refuses to stay put. In the other direction lies the Cardamom range, and Pursat is the practical jumping-off point for it - the reason the town keeps being described as somewhere to pass through. It is, but it is also the place where a general jumped into a pit, and where an entire village floats a few kilometres further out every dry season.