It is instructive to contrast Ban Chiang’s ‘eccentricity’ in Thailand’s historical narrative to the assimilation into the national heritage of the North-east’s Khmer stone sanctuaries of Prasat Phimai and Prasat Phanom Ruang. Built in the tenth to twelfth centuries along the imperial route that led to Angkor, capital of the Khmer empire, the two sanctuaries were re-erected and improved in the late 1980s by the Fine Arts Department under the ‘historical parks’ scheme. Their restoration, together with that of several other smaller Khmer shrines, was primarily intended to boost Isan’s appeal as a tourist destination at a time when Angkor was still offlimits because of the activity of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas; implicit in the restoration, however, was a claim to Khmer architecture as being part of