This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Vietnamese settlers carried Cao Dai into Phnom Penh during the religion's own formative years, building the Kim Bien House of Gratitude as a first foothold, and by 1927 missionary efforts had already begun drawing Khmer converts to the new faith.
Caodaists then built Cambodia's first Cao Dai God Temple on land adjoining the Kim Bien House of Gratitude, the same site where those earlier settlers had planted the movement's first foothold a decade before. The new temple was completed in 1937, and Pham Cong Tac, the religion's co founder, officially inaugurated it on May 22 that year. Tac would himself be exiled by France to Madagascar only four years later, a separate chapter in Cao Dai's early history already recorded on this atlas.
The temple did not stand as an isolated outpost. It became the centre of Cao Dai missionary activity across Cambodia, the base from which the young religion's earliest documented spread beyond Vietnam's own borders was organized and carried forward.
What the 1937 completion changed for Cao Dai's spread was the difference between scattered converts and an organized foreign mission. A decade of settlers and missionaries working without a temple of their own gained, in Pham Cong Tac's dedication, a fixed centre adjoining their own first foothold from which the faith could keep expanding across Cambodia.