Actually, we can probably let Cambodia have Preah Vihear. Seemingly far more significant is Sdok Kok Thom, and it's definitely on Thai soil. A book coming out this week tells the tale
We all know about Angkor Wat and now, for better or worse, Preah Vihear. But Prasat Sdok Kok Thom has pretty much stayed off the culture radar - despite holding the key to all the rest. It was at this temple northeast of Aranyaprathet that a carved stele was found, crammed with information about the mediaeval Khmer Empire.
So revelatory was the inscription covering all four sides of the 1.5-metre-tall monolith that author John Burgess unabashedly compares it to the Rosetta Stone and the Code of Hammurabi.
Burgess - who is launching his book on Wednesday night at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok - is occasionally given to lofty superlatives, as well as fanciful cross-cultural allusions, but he's an engaging writer and there's nothing to suggest hyperbole in his ranking of the Sdok Kok Thom inscription.
Once translated, it unlocked virtually all of the mysteries of the "vanished" civilisation that built Angkor.
In fact, the man who did the translating in the early 20th century, Etienne Aymonier, called it "one of the most remarkable memorials that men in any country have ever left behind in stone".
The stele is today at the National Museum in Bangkok, and tourists clamber around Sdok Kok Thom, retrieved from the jungle by the government's Fine Arts Department. Their guides are often young students from nearby Tupprayapittaya School, whose library holds a full-scale copy of the inscribed stone.
And there's a half-scale replica of Sdok Kok Thom's inner courtyard at the Muang Boran tourist park south of Bangkok.
Yet the mystery of the temple, consecrated in 1052 AD, and its ornate stone, with its tales of 12 fabled emperors, is still being unravelled.
Sdok Kok Thom was completely overgrown in 1979 when Burgess, then a Washington Post correspondent, first stumbled across it while taking a break from the arduous task of recording refugee stories at nearby Camp 007, also known as Nong Samet Camp and Rithysen.
Burgess had seen Angkor's splendour 10 years earlier while visiting his father, who was running the Unicef office in Bangkok, and he recognised the site's significance, even in its neglected state. He's spent the subsequent decades piecing together its history.
In sharing the saga, Burgess lends it a human warmth that's absent from the usual accounts of such places, although he acknowledges using deductions, "the stock in trade of Angkor scholars".
He applies a novelist's licence to his depiction of the temple's founder, Sadashiva, as the Brahmin priest established "this ideal abode, foremost on earth".
Burgess also pays homage both the site's "resident spirit" who must be appeased, Chao Poh Sisuto, and the monk who lived there in the 1950s and '60s, Luang Poh Boon Tham from Surin, as well as its current overseer, Luang Poh Suwan Kanthathamo.
Called Bhadraniketana in Sanskrit, the temple predates the zenith of empire - Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom came much later, as of course did Henri Mohout, the Frenchman who rediscovered them for the West in 1860.
Burgess points out, though, that contrary to popular belief, the Angkor complex and its satellite temples around the old kingdom were never forgotten.
The locals know about them, obviously, even if they'd long since lost track of their purpose, but also in 1585 a Franciscan cleric recorded a visit by "the hunting king" who visited Angkor Wat and was so taken that he installed his Phnom Penh court there for another long spell.
Burgess sheds light on other misconceptions as well. The linga found in every temple isn't necessarily a phallus, for example. This remains a hot topic of debate for scholars nevertheless, as are two terms first found on the Sdok Kok Thom inscription.
This is the inscription that referred to "Java", sparking an endless argument as to whether the maharaja of that island-state dragged Angkor's founder, Jayavaram II, there to teach him some respect. It's a great story, Burgess decides, though implausible. More likely Jayavaram II "coming from Java" means something else entirely.
But did the Sdok Kok Thom stone's reference to a "devaraja" mean Jayavaram II was a "god-king"? It was the source of this term too but, as it turns out, there are more interpretations of "devaraja" than there are for "Holy Grail". The enigma persists.
