IKTT (Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles)

IKTT was founded in 1996 by the Japanese textile conservator Kikuo Morimoto, after a 1995 UNESCO-commissioned survey found that Cambodia's civil-war decades had all but erased traditional silk weaving — skilled weavers had died, the few who remained were aging, and raw silk and natural dye materials were no longer readily available. The organization began in Phnom Penh, relocated to Siem Reap in 2000, and in 2002 Morimoto purchased forest land outside the city for what became a working village built around the whole textile chain rather than a single workshop.

That village — the site of IKTT's sister initiative Wisdom from the Forest — grows mulberry trees to feed its own silkworm farm and cultivates and harvests dye plants across roughly 23 hectares of forest and garden. Per IKTT's own account, colors come exclusively from natural sources: lac insects for deep reds, prohut bark for yellows, indigo plants for blue, and ebony fruit for black, applied to hand-reeled Khmer silk before it goes to the loom for ikat (hôl) weaving. IKTT now operates two Siem Reap sites — a shop and museum in Viheachen Village and the working atelier/village in Chob Saom, Peak Snaeng — and runs visitor programs including workshop tours, natural-dyeing demonstrations, forest walks and silkworm-farm visits, with a dedicated museum of antique textiles and tools that opened in March 2026.

The organization now employs roughly 800 people and functions as a living archive as much as a producer, having documented more than 300 traditional Khmer textile patterns that were at risk of disappearing along with the weavers who once made them. Morimoto died in 2017, but IKTT continues under his successors as an active silk-weaving and natural-dye operation rather than a static heritage display.