Through successive waves of acquisition, loss, and recovery, the textile collection at the National Museum of Cambodiareflects Cambodia’s chaotic twentieth-century history. Foundedduring the French protectorate in 1919and opened in 1920, the museum, primarily called Musée Albert Sarraut after the then Governor-General of Indochina, became the largest repository of Cambodian archaeological antiquities(stone statues, bronze statuettes, ceramics, gold jewelleryand silverware)and ethnographic artefacts in the country, including contemporaneous textiles purchased fromlocal weavers and merchants. From the French colonial era to the civil war in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79)and its aftermath in the 1980s, this paper concentrates onthe formation of the textile collection, the lossof three-quarters of its artefactsbetween the 1970s and 1990s, and the surviving material and archival evidenceofthese textiles.In doing so,this paper considersthe ways in which the materials found post-conflict help link together thesecontrastedhistorical periods. Centring on absence and loss offers a dynamic framework to reevaluate how textile artefacts are embedded by colonial policies and war, to acknowledge further the destructiveness of the Khmer Rouge regime on Cambodian arts and crafts. How to reconstruct thetextilecollection when dealing missing artefacts?And how may suchfragmented sources be remobilised tounderstandthis material historyof conflict,thus revealingthe politics and dynamics behind the museum’s acquisitions?The transience of the National Museum of Cambodia’s textiles offers a case study through which absent objects in institutions can be identified, reintegrated and memorialised as another kind of presence, inflecting views on surviving material culture andheritage.