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1 The Temple Complex Angkor and the Archaeology of Colonial Fantasy, 1860–1906 In 1860, a team of Chinese coolies and Siamese guides escorted a young French naturalist named Henri Mouhot through the dense jungle undergrowth surrounding the former seat of the Khmer Empire at Siem Reap, named after the decisive battle that had seen its annexation by Siam in the fifteenth century. Before the year was out, he was dead, but what he saw on this Siamese side trip as a naturalist turned accidental tourist filled him with wonder and catapulted him to posthumous fame. Mouhot’s guides may well have marvelled at his wonder, for there was no novelty for them and many others in the vicinity in the site to which they led him. But to Mouhot this was the paradigmatic moment of discovery, a moment whose mixture of joy, shock, and gravitas must have turned him giddy with prospects of academic fame. Before him were ancient trees and vines and dense brush, whispering with wildlife and teeming with a wealth of natural specimens. Ordinarily, he might have stopped to sketch this or that life-form in his sketchbook, trapping a bug, or snaring an exotic butterfly. But what he saw blinded him to such minutiae. Here were the sandstone corpses of a civilization, the huge and sprawling ruins of an abandoned city. Mouhot was barely known at the time and had failed in his first grant application to the French government. Aided by his marriage to an Englishwoman, he had secured funding from the Royal Geographical Society of Britain, which had every interest in seeing such “blank patches” on Britain’s map of Southeast Asia filled. Eight years after the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852), the vast tract of land stretching southeast of Rangoon through Siam and across to Saigon was as yet unspoken for, at least by European powers. The year of Mouhot’s discovery coincided with the launch of France’s first travel journal, Tour du Monde (World tour), designed to inform the public and politicians of the value and potential of overseas countries and peoples, so that France might better decide “what we should take, and what we should leave.”1 As he regained focus and continued his tour of this place known in Khmer as Nokor Vat (temple city), Mouhot would have seen Buddhist monks traversing part of the complex, tending to shrines, and their dwellings. His hurried, fluid sketches of the ruins contrast with the exactitude of his depictions of natural specimens, betraying both the excitement of his discovery and his awe at the impossibility of ever adequately representing its enormity. Perhaps to indicate scale, Mouhot included peo- 20 : Chapter 1 ple in his sketches: solitary figures leaning against a lintel or groups of two clad in monkish robes. Sketched at a distance, their ethnicity is indiscernible, but their contemporaneity is immediately apparent. To Mouhot, these people, however few and far between, were part of the picture. As a naturalist, he recorded what he saw. But Angkor would no doubt remain in his imagination as it became in European conceptions and as it first appeared to him in that moment of awed discovery: as the fantastic , picturesque burial ground of a “dead” civilization. Several months later, a severe bout of malaria dispatched the exhausted Mouhot to an early jungle grave in Laos, but his memoir was compressed into a travelogue and published posthumously by a family friend.2 In January 1863, the Revue Maritime et Coloniale (Naval and colonial review) published an account by Vice Admiral Bonard , governor of Cochinchina, describing his voyage from Saigon to Angkor aboard “the first European steamboat to have flown a [French] flag” on the Tonle Sap lake.3 Bonard stressed the potential of Cambodge’s people and the untapped archive of its Angkorean past.4 Rehashed by a ghostwriter and embellished with elaborate engravings , Mouhot’s diary was serialized later that year in the Tour du Monde, firing the imaginations of France’s growing colonial lobby and inviting comparison with the monuments of British India.5 Extolling Cambodge’s rich natural resources, Mouhot urged France to add this “jewel” to its “colonial crown” before Britain snatched it.6 Many of Mouhot’s sketches were excluded from the text, thus banishing those human figures—the presence of the present—which had been recorded in the young naturalist’s first impressions, from public view. In their place were lavish interpretations of his original line drawings by the...

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