I first saw a hol pidan in the back room of a shuttered pagoda in Takeo province, folded into a cedar chest that had not been opened in what the monks estimated was thirty years. The cloth was nearly four meters long, woven in darkened silk that had once been indigo and lac red, and across its surface ran an unbroken narrative: naga rising from lotus ponds, celestial musicians floating above tiled rooftops, devotees kneeling before a seated Buddha whose halo radiated in feathered threads. The edges of every figure were soft, blurred, as if the image had been dreamed rather than drawn.