Angkor Wat – A Transcultural History of Heritage: Volume 1: Angkor in France. From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions. Volume 2: Angkor in Cambodia. From Jungle Find to Global Icon 9783110335842, 9783110335729

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A N G KO R WAT

M I C H A E L FA L S E R

ANGKOR WAT A TR A NSCULTUR A L HIS TORY OF HE RITAGE VOLUME 1: A NGKOR IN FR A NCE . FROM PL A S TE R C A S T S TO E X H IBITION PAV ILIONS

DE GRUYTER

This publication was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) within the Cluster of Excellence 270/1 “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University/Germany. This publication was printed with support by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf/Germany.

ISBN 978-3-11-033572-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033584-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941361 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Angkor Wat replica in the 1931 International Exhibition in Paris, detail from postcard (private collection Michael Falser, compare Fig. VII.22c) Typesetting: hawemannundmosch, Berlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betirebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com



Table of Contents

Volume 1: Angkor in France. From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

Acknowledgements  XI Introduction  1

1. Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage  1 1.1. Angkor Wat in Paris: A French lieu de mémoire?   1 1.2. The Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context and the project Heritage as a Transcultural Concept  4 2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities  9 2.1. Angkor Wat, approaching its architectural ­configuration  9 2.2. Angkor Wat’s affordance qualities and actionable capacities: ­Architectural, performative, patrimonial  18 3. Preliminary reflections to Volume 1: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions  30 3.1. From exotic fantasies in garden landscapes to ‘spectacular’ p ­ avilions in universal and colonial ­exhibitions  30 3.2. The rediscovery and re-evaluation of plaster casts  35 3.3. Translational turns, colonial politics of translation, and the technique of plaster casts  38 3.4. From translation to architectural transfer and transcultural heritage  41 4. Preliminary reflections to Volume 2: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon  43 4.1. From back-translation to third space  43 4.2. A ‘heterotopia’ called Angkor Park: An ‘enacted utopia’ of cultural heritage?  46 4.3. From world heritage back to world’s fair: Angkor Park as a theme park?  53 V

Table of Contents

I. Lost in Translation? The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor at the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1867  57 1. Mouhot’s civilising vision from Angkor Wat’s central passageway  57 2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)  61 3. The polysemy of objects, white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor: The Universal Exhibition of 1867 and its classification system  71 4. The relevance of plaster casts around the 1867 Exhibition: The French ‘art industry’ and ‘industrial arts’ around 1860  78 5. The palais de l’Industrie after 1855: A laboratory for the Exposition permanente des colonies and the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie  81 6. Back to Egypt: The exotic architectures in the park of the 1867 Exhibition and the role of plaster casts  83 II. La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art: Delaporte’s Missions to Angkor, his Musée Khmer and the Universal Exhibition of 1878  89 1. Cracking the translation code of Khmer temple architecture: Delaporte’s mission to Angkor in 1873  89 2. The musée Khmer in Compiègne  96 3. From the palais d’Industrie to the Universal Exhibition of 1878: The Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques  100 4. The ‘political mandala’ of the palais du Champs-de-Mars’s floor plan and the double placement of the plaster casts from Angkor  114 5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace  116 III. Staging Angkor in the Museum  125 1. Archétypes, stage prop façades, and architectural fabriques in a Parisian convent: Alexandre Lenoir and his musée des Monuments français in the Petits-Augustins (1793—1816)  125 2. Dissection, comparison, and metonymic display of monumental architecture: Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée in the palais de Trocadéro  135 3. The French-British connection, or how the London’s ‘exhibitionary complex’ influenced Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois  144

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4. Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois — the first and last French museum of Angkor  158 5. Competing translations: “Not for show but for the sciences” — Angkor in the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin  176 6. Visual fragmentation and physical decontextualisation of Angkor: Towards the iconisation of cultural heritage — La Nave’s and Delaporte’s publications after 1900  181 IV. The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris: Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion  189 1. Changing scales: The world as exhibition  189 2. Visualising mastered space: the exposition coloniale of the Universal Exhibition of 1889  198 3. The pagode d’Angkor of 1889 — the first open-air pavilion of Angkor in Europe  205 4. From emprunt and spécimen to a prospective souvenir  210 V. The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906: From Lyon, Bordeaux, and Rouen to Marseille  217 1. Paris 1900: Angkor as a decorative accessory  217 2. Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, and Rouen 1896: Displaying colonies in the French periphery  226 3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906: Representing Angkor in the French periphery before the Siamese ‘retrocession’ of 1907  233 VI. Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922  247 1. Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922  247 2. The Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille en 1916: The role of Jean Commaille in a failed project  251 3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille  255 4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’: From the overall bird’s-eye view to the ‘altar of the ancestors’  269

VII

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VII. Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris  281 1. ‘Refusing the copy and the pastiche’? The 1925 Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris and the pavillon de l’Indochine  281 2. Angkor Wat as a permanent colonial museum in Paris? Discussions around 1927  284 3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism  287 4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931  323 VIII. The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris  341 1. The regionalist turn, or Le plus grand régionalisme:

From the ‘colonial picturesque’ to the ‘French indigenous’  341

2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies  347 3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France  356 4. The Colonial and Regional Centres — and Indochina: Architectural hybrids  368 5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina: From architectural pastiches to living heritage performance [artisanat]  376 Findings and Conclusions for Volume 1  391 From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions: Angkor in Museums, World and Colonial Exhibitions in France (1867—1937)  391 Epilogue to Volume 1 Back to Asia: From Bangkok 1860 to Bihar 2020  407 1. Visualising cultural inheritance and royal patronage versus mapping a colonial protectorate: Angkor Wat on Ang Duong’s coins and for Mongkut’s royal monastery in Bangkok  407 2. Between philanthropy and marketing, a ‘greater Hindu nation’ and the Internet: A ‘glocalised’ mega translation of Angkor Wat for Bihar 2020  416 Plates of Volume 1  425

VIII

Für Katharina

Acknowledgements

It was more or less exactly twenty years before this present publication, more precisely at around six o’clock in the morning on 13 July 1999, that I first saw Angkor Wat. I approached the site via the southern connection road from the nearby tourist hub of Siem Reap. Sitting on the open rear of a truck with the smiling Cambodian team members of the French Baphuon temple restoration project around me, I watched as the temple’s majestic towers emerged from the huge trees in the magic matutinal mist that lay over the deep green moat around the site. It is not exaggerated to call this precise moment one of the most impressive experiences in my life. At this point I was pursuing a double degree in architecture (with a focus on historic preservation) and art history (with a focus on South Asia) in Vienna, and I had already travelled with my backpack to India’s Taj Mahal, Myanmar’s Pagan site, Indonesia’s Borobudur temple, and China’s Great Wall. But my story with Angkor Wat was of a different nature from the beginning. More precisely, it was during my year as an Erasmus student at the École d’architecture Paris-La Villette in 1998/99 that I successfully applied for a three-month internship with the famous École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the institute that was founded in the colonial time period around 1900 to explore and preserve the cultural heritage of le Cambodge in French Indochine. When I arrived in Cambodia, it was the extremely charismatic director of the EFEO’s field office at Siem Reap/ Cambodia, Pascal Royère, who introduced me to the Khmer temples in and around Angkor Park, and the challenges of architectural preservation and cultural heritage management. It is to him – tragically posthumously († 2014) – that my first and most sincere thank-you is formulated. Shortly after this first visit to Angkor, a fellowship from Vienna University helped me to return for my master’s thesis in art history under the direction of Professor Deborah Klimburg-Salter, holder of the chair of Asian art history. I am grateful for her support then and ever since. During this 2001 visit I temporarily joined the German Apsara Conservation Project (GACP), whose work since the mid-1990s had been concerned not only with the famous decorative surfaces of the twelfth-century Angkor Wat temple in the heart of Angkor Park but also with the final consolidation of the Preah Ko temple some kilometres to the south-east of the archaeological reserve. My research project was to unfold and correlate both the original ninth-cen­tury architectural construction and the early twentieth-century French restoration history of this fascinating pre-Angkorian brick temple. It not only resulted in my thesis and some years later in my first monograph on Khmer architecture (Falser 2006) but also influenced my upcoming Angkor

Wat project. In this context, I would like to thank Hans Leisen, professor of stone conservation at Cologne University of Applied Sciences and GACP’s project director; Simon Warrack, stone conservator; and the project photographer, Jaroslav Poncar, for their shared on-site experience; ongoing support with background information, scientific data, and photographs; and their friendship, which without a doubt laid the solid foundation of this present work. Later internships at UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre in Paris and at its regional branch in Bangkok also provided me with important insights into global heritagisation processes at Asia’s archaeological sites. Here, my thanks go to Minja Yang and Richard Engelhardt. The most important institutional support for this project was provided by the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University, funded by the German Research Council (DFG). Here, I had the privilege of embedding the research that I conducted as a project leader since 2009 in the internal research area of “Heritage and Historicities” while I was affiliated to the chair of Global Art History (see introduction). In this context, I wish to thank primarily the DFG itself and, of course, my former Heidelberg colleagues – above many others, Professor Monica Juneja, Professor Rudolf Wagner, and Katharina Weiler and Brigitte Berger-Göken. As I worked towards finalising in 2013/14 what the German system calls a Habilitation (a professorial qualification manuscript), I was rewarded with fellowships from the German Centre of Art History in Paris (thanks go to then director Professor Andreas Beyer and to the Gerda Henkel Foundation) and from the Berlin-based Forum of Transregional Studies, funded by the Florence Max-Planck-Institute of Art History (thanks go to Professor Gerhard Wolf and Hannah Baader). From 2009 onwards my on-site and archival research into Angkor Wat’s career as a transcultural heritage icon was a particularly complex and multi-sited endeavour in Europe and Asia. In France, the most important sources came from the Paris headquarter of the EFEO itself, with its magnificent library and archive. In this context, my sincere thanks go to Professor Bruno Dagens and Professor Claude Jacques (†2018) for sharing their profound knowledge about the cultural and intellectual history of Angkor (Park); to Franciscus Verellen (EFEO director 2004–2014) for giving me free access to all necessary archival sources; to Pierre-Yves Manguin, Christophe Pottier, Olivier de Bernon, and Pierre Pichard for their scientific support; and to Isabelle Poujol (director of the photographic archive) and Rachel Guidoni and Cristina Cramerotti (library and archive) for their patient help in identifying and providing written and visual material for this publication. XI

Acknowledgements

Additional research took me to the French National Archives in Paris (many thanks go to Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère and Nadia Bouzid); the Archive of French Overseas History in Aix-en-Provence (I am particularly grateful to Anne-Isabelle Vidal and Isabelle Dion); and to Marseille (many thanks to Isabelle Aillaud from the Municipal Archives, to Ann Blanchet from the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille, to Véronique Raguseo from the Archives dé­ partementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, to the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, and to other libraries). Many other Paris-based institutions and affiliated specialists also deserve my thankful mention: the Musée Guimet (Pierre Baptiste, Thierry Zéphir, Jérôme Ghesquière, Dominique Fayolle-­ Reninger); the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Monique Antilogus, Emmanuel Schwartz); the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Emmanuelle Polack); the UNESCO archive and UNESCO-affiliated experts (Jens Boel, Adèle Torrance, Lyndel Prott); the Institut d’Histoire de l’Art – INHA (Jérôme Delatour); the French National Library and the Historical Library of Paris; ICOMOS International (with the affiliated expert Henry Cleere (†)); the Musée Branly, the Conservatoire numérique des Arts et Métiers, and the Sorbonne libraries; the château de Compiègne archive and the Hennebont archive (Jacques Guilchet); the owners of and the researchers studying the private archives of Louis Delaporte, Bernard Philippe Groslier, and Charles Meyer (Jérôme Hayaux du Tilly, Julie Philippe, Brigitte Groslier-Lequeux); and Monsieur Le­ boufnoir of Auberlet & Laurent in Montrouge near Paris. Other important sources were provided during my research in Europe and overseas by the Heidelberg University Library; ICCROM in Rome (many thanks to Stefano de Caro, Jukka Jokilehto, Joe King, Gamini Wijesuriya, Alison Heritage, Anna Stewart, and, for the research library and archival material, to Paul Arenson, Daniela Sauer, and Maria Mata Caravaca); the Asia and Ethnography Museums; the Plaster Cast Ateliers of the State Museums, all in Berlin (thanks to Martina Stoye, Beate Ebelt, Toralf Gabsch, Bertold Just (†), Thomas Schelper, and Wibke Lobo); by the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Geographic Society, both in London; the Leiden, Berkeley, and Cornell University collections; the archive of the École d’Athènes in Athens/Greece; by Professor Fani Mallouchou-Tufano from the Technical University of Greece; by the Québec-based architect Pierre Guertin; and by Professor David Chandler from Monash University/Australia. It’s not surprising that some of the most precious moments of personal encounter and of research into collections, archives, and libraries occurred in Southeast Asia. While international players overseeing developments at Michael Falser Vienna-Heidelberg, 20 September 2019

XII

Angkor included actors from the EFEO (thanks to Bertrand Porte from the Phnom Penh National Museum) and the GACP (see above), from the World Monuments Fund (thanks to John Sanday), and from the UNESCO branches in Bangkok and Phnom Penh (Philippe Delanghe), as well as various researchers (above many others Henri Locard from the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Anne Gouillou, Fabienne Luco, and Keiko Miura from Waseda University in Tokyo), many Asian and Cambodian institutions and individual protagonists contributed extremely important perspectives to counterbalance the global heritage narrative over Angkor. In the Phnom Penh context, great thanks go to architect and former head of APSARA, Vann Molyvann († 2017), and his wife, Trudy; the ex-conservator of Angkor Park, Pich Keo; Ang Choulean from the Royal University of Fine Arts; Ly Daravuth from the Reyum Gallery Centre; Youk Chhang and Kok Thei-Eng from the Documentation Centre of Cambodia; the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre (with Cheav Engseang, Than Tha­ naren, Chea Sopheap, and Gaetan Crespel); the Khmer translator Saur Sokhalay; and the staff of the Cambodian National Library and National Archives. In the wider Siem Reap-Angkor context, I would like to express my thanks to my dear friend Khun Phally; Khoun Khun-Neay († 2017), Ly Vanna, and Sim Bunthoeun from/for APSARA; Peter Willers from CMAC; Krisna Uk and Daraneth Um from the Centre of Khmer Studies; Dy Proeung with his plaster model atelier; and Long Nari, Nginn Pek (†2017), and his son Tek Touch from the GACP team. Further research brought me to Battambang to meet the son of the sculptor Tan Veut, Voeuth Savann; to Bangkok/Thailand (thanks to Professor Sunait Chutintaranond, then director of the Asian Studies Institute at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, and to his former student Anan Krudphet, who translated from Siamese for me); and to Java/Indonesia with its Borobudur and Prambanan sites. With more specific regard to this enormous publication project itself, I wish to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Gerda Henkel Foundation for their important financial support; the patient copy editors Angela Roberts and Kristie Kachler for making my non-native English writing a bit less German; and certainly Katja Rich­ ter, Anja Weisenseel, and Jan Hawemann for overseeing the logistics of publishing and designing this ever-growing book with DeGruyter in Berlin. Supporting an almost ten-year-long project is always a great challenge to the private environment of every researcher, and for this I have to thank my family and, most important, my partner. It is to her that this book is dedi­ cated.



Introduction 1. Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage 1.1. Angkor Wat in Paris: A French lieu de mémoire?

A black-and-white photograph features prominently in the 1984 volume La République, the first of the French historian Pierre Nora’s giant project called Les Lieux de mémoire (seven volumes from 1984 to 1992) (Fig. Intro.1a). In this photo three ‘European’ protagonists – a lady dressed in white, an elegant gentleman in a tailcoat and top hat, and a white-­ bearded gentleman in military uniform – are seen walking together along a paved pathway towards the foreground. A crowd of (mostly) men is gathered around them; almost all are dressed in black and some are wearing elegant tailcoats, the mark of an ‘Occidental’ gentleman. Others in the group are identified as ‘Oriental’ because of their Asian facial features, their uniforms and cone-shaped hats, and the fact that

they are holding flat round umbrellas over the couple dressed in white. To the left, in the middle ground, a similar group of ‘Asian’ guards carrying shields and swords delimit the distinguished group on the pathway from the background. There, an impressive architectural structure, seemingly constructed in stone and clearly identifiable as twelfth-century Angkorian style, frames the scene. There are a number of ways that one might interpret this image. For instance, were it not for the distinctly ‘un-tropical’ coniferous vegetation in the far background and the lack of Asian officials and spectators in the representative centre of the scene, it could easily pass as a typical press photograph to cover a politically motivated sight-

Figure Intro.1a  “Le maréchal Lyautey fait visiter l’Exposition coloniale au duc et à la duchesse d’York. Au fond, le temple d’Angkor”, as it was published in Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire in 1984 within Charles-Robert Ageron’s contribution “L’exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe ­républicain ou mythe impérial?” (Source: Nora 1984, 586—87; © Roger-Viollet, Paris)

1

Introduction

seeing visit to the temples of Angkor paid by a high-ranking state institutions in order to canonise the “moral richness European general and his wife. As indicated in Nora’s pub- of the [French] nation” (Chastel 1986, 411) and move it lication, the caption “Le maréchal Lyautey fait visiter l’Ex- towards a rather univocal and monolithic “patrimoine naposition coloniale au duc et à la duchesse d’York. Au fond, tional”. In what he considered an attempt to “déconcerter le temple d’Angkor” still leaves the reader in no little un- les Occidentaux”, the author deplored the “menace” and certainty about the actual site. Although the words “temple dissolution of a nation-based concept of cultural heritage d’Angkor” might be understood as a reference to the origi- caused by a “vague and invasive global notion […], a new nal site in Cambodia, the term “exposition coloniale”, in post-industrial phase [and by] the notion of a universal cultural heritage” (Chastel 1986, 405, 434). Furthermore, combination with the presence of the French host and his British guests (in fact the future British King George VI he lamented that this new notion included “Third World and his wife), clarifies that the photograph must have been countries” whose “tradition-bound manners [were] not comparable to the order of monumental symbols of the taken at an exhibition on French-metropolitan soil, more precisely in Paris of 1931. Is it a far-fetched interpretation Occidental sphere” (Chastel 1986, 445). That (also French) colonialism had brought (violently, in many cases) a Eurothat the representation of Angkorian temple architecture and Indochinese staffage figures served here as a backdrop centric notion of cultural heritage to many of Chastel’s sofor the larger political message that the French-colonial called “Third World countries” – with dramatic consemission civilisatrice had appropriated Cambodia’s Buddhist quences that have been felt from the decolonising period Angkor Wat temple into its own, secularised canon of a to this day, including in Cambodia – was not mentioned by patrimoine culturel? In fact, both topics – the “colonial ex- either Chastel or Ageron, nor was the fact that ‘Oriental pavilions’ (like the above-quoted Angkor Wat version of hibition” and the French “notion of heritage” – served as prominent markers within Nora’s Lieux de mémoire. The 1931) in European exhibitions were built primarily to first term appeared in the previously mentioned volume visualise Europe’s hegemonic claims on non-European culentitled La République and the latter in La Nation. And al- tural properties. though Charles-Robert Ageron, the author of the first artiBut why would the 1931 Exhibition to celebrate the cle in Nora’s book, mentioned that the goal of the Colonial French-colonial endeavour picture so prominently in a Exhibition of 1931 was to “materialise on [the] metropoli- postmodern publication project? The first volume in Nora’s tan soil of France her remote presence in all the parts of series was issued in 1984 and introduced by his preface the Empire” (Ageron 1984, 570), his proposed “lecture de “Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux”. l’Exposition” was more ambiguous. He summarised it as a Here, Nora’s appreciation of the so-called “memory-nation” “theatre of shadows, not a faithful reportage” that tried – of the French Third Republic – a period from 1870 to 1940 ultimately in vain – to “constitute a colonial mentality” but that forms the temporal framework of the first volume of that – supposedly more successfully – helped in “the birth this book – was expressed in a supposed harmonious unity of the republican myth” of France’s universal leadership with French colonialism, and Nora saw his project’s overall (Ageron 1984, 576, 585, 590). It is highly relevant for goal as being to artificially re-create this memory of the our following argumentation that Ageron had obviously nation.1 But Nora’s project began in 1984 at the end of the thought very little about the function of and concrete Cold War, during the last breath of decolonisation and agency behind this giant pavilion à la Angkorienne, the right before the Internet revolution. When Nora’s project construction of which he described without further explo- ended in 1992 the world had changed completely. With ration as somewhere between “free interpretation” and its first peak around 1900 and its second, more impactful “strict realism” (Ageron 1984, 574) – with no comment one in the post-1990 era, the process of globalisation (in about the ‘original’ temple site ten thousand kilometres to French: mondialisation) was characterised by an explosion the east of Paris (Figs. Intro.1b,c). of global mass migration, by the transfer and exchange In Nora’s book, the second term, “cultural heritage”, processes of people, knowledge, and information, and by was discussed in the contribution La notion de patrimoine, the accelerated movement of goods, objects, and images – written by the famous French art historian André Chastel. and all that over long distances and between whole contiHere Chastel conceptualised cultural heritage as an elitist nents, like Asia and Europe (in our case, between the countries of Cambodia and France). In light of these enterprise developed by leading intellectuals and emerging

1  “The nation’s memory was held to be powerfully unified; no more discontinuity existed between our Greco-

Roman cradle and the colonies of the Third Republic than between the high erudition that annexed new territories to the nation’s heritage and the schoolbooks that professed its dogma. […] The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history […] Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries […], because such activities no longer occur naturally.” [italics, MF] (Nora 1984, XXII–XXIV, this translated English version is from: Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 11, 12)

2

1. Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage

Figures Intro.1b,c  Angkor Wat as a full-scale replica during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (above), and Angkor Wat in Cambodia as photographed in 1936 by the French-colonial military aviation service for Indochina (below) (Source: 1b © Roger-Viollet, ­Paris; 1c © EFEO Archive, Paris)

changes, Nora’s approach from the late 1980s required a decisive correction. Coming back to the two above-quoted entries of Nora’s book, we must now completely re-conceptualise the reading of such temporal pavilion architectures ‘from the Orient’ through which ‘Occidental’ propaganda could underscore Europe’s hegemonic claim over Asia –

and with it, the nation-state-based concept of cultural heritage appears to be old-fashioned and too static. In the groundbreaking 1989 Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre the 1931 Exhibition was used in a critique of ethnographic practices within the contemporary art scene (Martin 1989). Building on the growing academic interest 3

Introduction

in transcultural entanglements within the discipline of art and architectural history, in the 2009 volume Memory, history, and colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in colonial and postcolonial contexts, the Indian art historian Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History at Heidelberg University (see below), formulated a robust critique of Nora’s concept. She criticised Nora’s aim of writing “a history of France through the medium of its memories”, as the French nation, constructed as a “fixed canon, a focal point of agreement” of a supposed homogeneous identity, was crystallised at different sites where a “consensual notion of patrimony enveloped the notion of heritage” (Juneja 2009, 12, 18). As a consequence, a multifaceted heritage construction with varying stakeholders in different times and places in relation to one concerned object was excluded. Drawing on the question of how colonial regimes canonised pre-colonial buildings as heritage and how this affected postcolonial-nationalist heritage configurations (which is

also an underlying question of this book), Juneja conceptualised a multi-layered, transcultural approach to cultural heritage. And she posed a number of questions that are also useful as regards Nora’s (Ageron’s) entry about ‘Angkor-in-Paris’: What forms of hegemonisation were involved as historical [also colonial, MF] monuments in nineteenth-century France were made to embody a narrative of national unity and identity? How did such projects work to evacuate monuments of their specific local or regional, historical, or religious associations, of residual meanings that lay beyond the bounds of scientific language? What forms of contestation, assimilation, appropriation, destruction, or coexistence of older and newer histories and memories ensue? How are these constantly negotiated by the different actors involved in the process of casting a [also colonial, MF] monument as patrimony? (Juneja 2009, 23)

1.2. The Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context and the project Heritage as a Transcultural Concept This book is the result of a research project Heritage as a Transcultural Concept: Angkor Wat from an Object of Colonial Archaeology to a Contemporary Global Icon,2 which I personally conceived with my dual background as an architectural historian and a preservation architect, and which I carried out as project leader within a collaborative research structure at Heidelberg University between 2009 and 2013, resulting in a Habilitation manuscript in 2014. The research topic was developed further until 2018 through various international workshops and conferences, publication projects (see below), grants and fellowships (such as from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris) and visiting professorships at the universities of Vienna, Bordeaux-Montaigne, Paris-Sorbonne and Kyoto. In order to situate this book’s central approach of transculturality, a short introduction to this initial research structure is useful. The Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context was established in 2007 as a new research platform at Heidelberg University to bring classical areas studies of South and East Asia on the one hand, and of modern European history on the other, into an interdisciplinary dialogue.3 It was part of the Excellence Initiative, which was initiated by the German Federal and State Governments and (still is) carried out by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Council of Science

and Humanities [Wissenschaftsrat]. It was the formulated aim of the Heidelberg Cluster to enhance the understanding of the multi-layered interactions between and within Asia and Europe – an area of great significance for academia as well as for contemporary society and politics – by examining the processes of exchange between cultures and establishing the concept of transculturality as a new methodological approach in the humanities and social sciences. With its thematic focus on Asia and Europe in a global context and having established as a first step a morphology of flows and circulations between Asia and Europe, the Heidelberg Cluster concentrated, in a next step, on exploring the specific dynamics of transcultural interactions. In this context, four different research groups (RA) worked towards a comprehensive understanding of highly complex processes and aspects such as: the generation and circulation of knowledge and the practices by which it is embodied between diverse epistemic communities (RA-C); its manifestations in the socio-political realm (RA-A); its propagation, contestation and defence through media and publics (RA-B), as well as its embeddedness in specific historical contexts; and, eventually, its narrative transformation into cultural memory (RA-D). Research Area D – entitled Historicities and Heritage and therefore the most important reference structure for the present research and book project – focused on how objects, texts, languages

2  Its original homepage is today still available under: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/

d-historicities-heritage/d12.html (retrieved 2 January 2019).

3  Its actual home is found under: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/home.html (retrieved 2 Janu­

ary 2019).

4

1. Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage

and spaces have been constituted and reconfigured through their mobile histories. By a close analysis of processes of transformation that unfold through extended contacts between cultures, various projects – including the present one – endeavoured to elaborate both the spatial and temporal dimension of transcultural phenomena. Research in this section contributed to substantiating the hypothesis that transcultural processes have been a formative characteristic of social formations over centuries, even pre-dating the advent of modern communication and global capital (commonly termed globalisation). The overall challenge here was to examine the nature of the shifts that circulatory practices of the past undergo in the present; to investigate how people in specific contexts experience, cope with and represent these changes; and to query the modes and arguments, concrete practices and techniques through which the experience of past societies is remembered, selected and cast into narratives, or into a body of objects, knowledge and practices canonised as heritage. Within the Heidelberg Cluster’s established professorships (including those in Intellectual History, Cultural Economic History, Visual and Media Anthropology and Buddhist Studies), the present research and book project was embedded within Global Art History.4 This unit’s underlying observation was and still is that art history has so far been one of the disciplines most firmly rooted in hermetic and regionally limited analytic frameworks but that such a paradigm has precluded insights into the cultural dynamics and entanglements that lay beyond that which is transmitted through discourses of cultural purity and originality, and the forms of cultural essentialisms they sustain. The overall agenda here included a deconstruction of disciplinary models within art history that have marginalised experiences and practices of entanglement. The search for new frameworks involved investigating the formation of art and visual practices as polycentric and multi-vocal processes. The term ‘global’ – used in this book project in the subtitle of the second volume – is understood not as an expansive frame to include ‘the world’; rather, it draws on a transcultural perspective to question the taxonomies and values that have been built into the discipline of art history since its inception and have been taken as universal. Beginning in the ancient past, objects of art, migrant artists – and modern-day architects in our case – and travelling visual regimes (museums, exhibitions, etc.) have invariably created an open public sphere of shared meanings and forms of articulation only contingently limited by territorial and cultural formations that crystallised with the formation of nation states. By reconstituting its units of analy­ sis, and by replacing fixed regions by mobile contact zones with shifting frontiers and viewing time as non-linear and

palimpsestic, the new approach of Global Art History enables a conceptualisation of visual practices as mutually constituted through processes of reconfiguration and through engagements between the local and the canonical, and through negotiations between multiple centres of production. In this book those centres to negotiate Angkor Wat between Asia and Europe will be primarily found in Cambodia and France, but also in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, and Great Britain and Germany. At the same time new fissures and boundaries that cut across existing national and geographical units call for being investigated. Fractured public spheres where a shared vocabulary about art and cultural heritage does not find resonance have been a site of conflict and controversy, which in turn become global issues – such as, in our case, during decolonisation and the Cold War and in global heritage politics. In this collaborative research environment at Heidelberg University, the present research and book project – with its focus on heritage as a transcultural concept and on architectural histories and conservation politics in their global entanglements – helped to locate the European and the non-European in a common field to help evolve a non-hier­ archical conceptual framework and language that historicises difference without essentialising it. From an abstract, methodological viewpoint, my research project investigated the formation of the modern concept of cultural heritage by charting its colonial, postcolonial-nationalist and global trajectories. This investigation – the results of which will be presented in the present two volumes consisting of twelve chapters and two epilogues – consisted of researching the case study of the Cambodian twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat (see its general description in the next section) as different phases of its history unfolded within the transcultural interstices of European and Asian projects and conceptual definitions. These started with the temple’s supposed discovery in the jungle by French colonial archaeology in the nineteenth century (chapter IX) and with its multi-form representation history in French museums and colonial and universal exhibitions (chapters I to VIII, compare Nora’s above-pictured Angkor Wat replica in the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris of 1931). And the investigation continued with Angkor Wat’s canonisation as a symbol of cultural inheritance by Cambodia’s neighbours of Siam and India (epilogue I) and its canonisation as a symbol of Khmer national identity during the struggle for decolonisation (chapter X), under the postcolonial regimes of the Khmer Rouge and during Vietnamese occupation (chapter XI). Finally, the investigation considers Angkor Wat as a global icon of contemporary heritage schemes under UNESCO’s World Heritage label (chapter XII) and as an archaeological reserve with an ambivalent process of local appropria-

4 The actual homepage is reached under: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/hcts-

professorships/global-art-history.html (retrieved 2 January 2018).

5

Introduction

tion (epilogue II). Compiled into the present publication of more than one thousand written pages in two volumes and with more than 1,200 illustrations, this book project investigates the temple’s material traces and architectural forms as well as the literary and visual representations (many of which were previously unpublished) of the structure, with a view to analysing global processes of transfer and translation as well as the recent proliferation of hybrid forms of art, architecture and cultural heritage. The concept of heritage, as I use it here as a starting point, relates to material structures, institutional complexes and practices and at the same time carries a powerful emotional charge emanating from the idea of belonging and shared cultural meanings, especially in the context of a young nation. Its origins go back to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, in the wake of which secularising and nation-building processes followed. The concept travelled as a form of colonial modernity (through France in our case) to the non-European world (to Cambodia and Indochina), where it worked to create new identities for alien cultural objects and situated them in a distinct discursive frame that was equally constitutive of the modern disciplines of architectural history and conservation. Yet today this concept is increasingly undermined through the workings of globality and digitality. So this book deals with the modern processes of cultural ­appropriation, exclusion and ascription that marked the transcultural relationships centred on the Angkor Wat complex. By questioning diffusionist master narratives that constituted their units of analysis in terms of a metropolitan Leitkultur and a recipient culture on the periphery, this study privileges a transcultural approach that investigates both the entanglements and the inner pluralities in each of the units. It draws attention to the ways in which local agencies (for example, during Cambodia’s short period of independence in the 1950s and 1960s) engage with ‘universalising’ concepts and debates on their own terms. Such processes are seen here to create a ‘third space’ (see a debate of this often-quoted term below) in which the monument comes to be refracted through the prism of the new

visualities being examined here with an extraordinary amount of illustrations. A rethinking of the concept of heritage is called for in this publication, one that will release it from the bonds of the European Enlightenment and overcome its old-fashioned parameters (Fig. Intro.2a).5 The workings of heritage between the global and the local, or better a synchronous, multi-sited investigation of both levels (some research calls this the ‘glocal’ level), also complicate its function as a cohesive expression of the national level in between – in the end we have to address the possibility of pluralising the meanings and workings of the concept. In order to a) analyse transfer, translation, exchange and – most important – hybrid innovation processes that are a product of cultural flows between Europe and Asia and b) to question their long-established asymmetries and map their creative potentials, the very nature of cultural heritage provides an ideal field for the intended methodological approach (Fig. Intro.2b). While culture in general can be differentiated into social, mental and material aspects, the concept of cultural heritage participates in all of these three levels. At the social level it encompasses all variations of identity constructions (regional, national, global), institution building, and social practices – and the vision of cultural heritage plays a strong role here: its identification, selection, protection, presentation and administration is always regulated by institutionalised authorities and scholarship (e.g., museums, research institutes, governmental conservation agencies). As a value-based, mental construct cultural heritage (national, colonial, universal) is a projection in the name of ‘authenticity’ that itself dominates preservation and conservation norms, standards and real actions on site. Material culture comprises artefacts including architecture – and historic monuments are a selection of the built environment to be ‘produced’, often ‘archaeologised’6 and preserved in the condition of a ruin, and protected by practices and techniques of preservation/ conservation (Pl. Intro.1). The intended methodology simultaneously analyses these three levels of culture through the lens of the (translingual) concepts of cultural heritage, (transnational) institutions and (transcultural) practices of

5  In the conference Kulturerbe: Denkmalpflege transkulturell, which I conceived and carried out in 2011 in

collaboration with the German Arbeitskreis Theorie und Lehre der Denkmalpflege, this Eurocentric notion of the concept of cultural heritage and its affiliated practice of architectural preservation was investigated. The original homepage of the event can be found here: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/ d-historicities-heritage/d12/konferenz-kulturerbe-denkmalpflege-transkulturell.html (retrieved 2 January 2019). The conference proceedings were published in 2013 at transcript/Bielefeld under the title Kulturerbe und Denkmalpflege transkulturell. Grenzgänge zwischen Theorie und Praxis (see Falser/Juneja 2013a). 6  In the international workshop ‘Archaeologising’ Angkor? Heritage between local social practice and global virtual reality, which I conceived and carried out in 2010 in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University, the production process of so-called ‘archaeological’ sites through different institutional and physical strategies was investigated. The original homepage of the event can be found here: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/d-historicities-heritage/d12/ angkor-workshops/2010.html (retrieved 2 January 2019). The conference proceedings were published in 2013 at Springer/Heidelberg-New York under the title ‘Archaeologising’ heritage? Transcultural entanglements be­ tween local social practices and global virtual realities (see Falser/Juneja 2013b).

6

1. Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage

Figure Intro.2a  Chart from the 2013 publication Kulturerbe: Denkmalpflege transkulturell to describe the ‘trans-cultural’ approach towards heritage beyond the Europe and non-Europe divide (Source: Falser/Juneja 2013a, 25; © Michael Falser 2019)

Figure Intro.2b  Chart from the 2013 publication Kulturerbe: Denkmalpflege transkulturell to conceptualise ‘artefacts/architectures’ as interconnected between social realms, mental spheres and material/physical strategies (Source: Falser/ Juneja 2013a, 27; © Michael Falser 2019)

historic preservation between France and Cambodia and beyond in (post)colonial and globalised times – with reference to ­Angkor Wat. Colonial, postcolonial and contemporary sources relating to Angkor Wat will comprise here of visual representations, written forms of discourse and material remains on site and abroad (in France and worldwide). These sources

overlap with and influence one another, and their evaluation calls for a dual and synchronous approach, deploying the methods of (art) history and architecture, conservation and building archaeology. Textual material on Angkor Wat comprises of (primarily French but also English and German) travel and expedition literature (often available in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris), ideological writ7

Introduction

Figure Intro.3  Chart from the 2015 publication Cultural heritage as civilizing mission: From decay to recovery to explain the relationship between civilising missions, the appropriation of artefacts and the affiliated strategies to map, restore and represent architecture as ‘built cultural heritage’ (Source: Falser 2015a, 15; © Michael Falser)

ings, political and administrative documents and scientific works, literary expressions and political media that articulated the French mission civilisatrice in Indochina (exploring the archives of France’s overseas history in Aix-en-Pro­ vence or of the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Paris), planning materials from the various museum projects and universal and colonial exhibitions in France (often found in the various city archives in Paris and Marseille), the first Cambodian nationalist journals and media, Marxist-communist pamphlets of the Khmer Rouge (sometimes surviving in national archives, libraries, museums and research centres in Cambodia) and the art historical analyses and conservation reports of Western academics and experts of

the French-colonial period through to the World Heritage commissions of UNESCO, ICOMOS and ICCROM with its archives in Paris and Rome (Pl. Intro.2, Fig. Intro.3).7 Visual representations range from sketches, architectural drawings, and photographs to virtual models from the same sources and additional databases. Material remains and objects will include archaeological findings, sculptures, architectural fragments and entire temple structures on site and their plaster cast models off site – e.g., in different states of increasing perfection from small exhibition models up to 1:1-scale accessible exhibits like the hybrid Angkor Wat structures produced for a dozen universal and colonial exhibitions in Paris and Marseilles between 1867 and 1937.

7  In the international workshop ‘Rebirthing’ Angkor? Heritage between decadence, decay, revival and the mis­

sion to civilise, which I conceived and carried out in 2011, the relation between cultural heritage as a concept and its appropriation through ideological systems and cultural-political agendas was investigated. The original homepage of the meeting can be found here: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/ d-historicities-heritage/d12/angkor-workshops/2011.html (retrieved 2 January 2019). The proceedings were published in 2015 at Springer/Heidelberg-New York under the title Cultural heritage as civilising mission. From decay to recovery (see Falser 2015a–c).

8

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities Built in the early twelfth century CE in the Khmer capital of Angkor, Angkor Wat as a religious building complex – the world’s largest, located in Cambodia, one of the world’s youngest and smallest nation states – is often subject to superlatives. A central and difficult question here remains: How one can describe in an unbiased manner a building complex for which the written and visual sources (and here we will focus primarily on written and visual material from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries) seem to rely heavily on comparisons with global ‘supericons’ such as the Egyptian pyramids or St. Peter’s basilica in Rome? The attribution of these superlatives continues, as Angkor Wat is today considered the star attraction in the world’s largest and most-visited ‘archaeological park’. Additionally, Angkor Park was placed on UNESCO’s exclusive World Heritage List in 1992. Instead of tackling the superlatives applied to Angkor Wat in the vast number of written and visual sources, this introduction will follow another line of enquiry. Because ‘describing’ a building is never a neutral act but is always ‘inscribed’ in the time- and culture-related mindset of the author, we must conceptualise the ‘coming to terms’ with Angkor Wat as a transcultural process per se. This consideration must start with the author of this book himself. The position of engagement with the Southeast Asian temple complex called Angkor Wat can only be assumed by the author in the full and explicit consciousness of his limited and biased preconfiguration: in this case, that is, by my own methodological key assumptions and thematic choices (both conscious and subconscious) and the fact that my reasoning and final conclusions are informed by the ‘Western’ disciplines of art and architectural history and cultural heritage studies, which are, from a conceptual point of view, themselves influenced by the above-mentioned global and transcultural turn. As an obvious consequence of these biases, the following study is neither formulated from the viewpoint of a Khmer-speaking Cambodian national citizen with his/her regionally embedded cultural and political mindset, nor is it motivated by the religious belief com-

mon to the pilgrims who visit the site or to the Buddhist monks from the local monasteries. Furthermore, operationalising the ‘describing’ of Angkor Wat as a transcultural process involves one other crucial observation: both the historic, nineteenth-century and the contemporary sources that frame the site using aesthetic, structural and cultural superlatives have one specific (Non-Cambodian) geographic and cultural-political origin that virtually all subsequent enquiries to this day refer to or build upon – (post)colonial France. In order to read my own bias and that of my sources through a transcultural lens, the following introduction will not pretend to be neutral: first (in 2.1.), I will approach, from my particular viewpoint as an art/architectural historian and trained preservation architect, the spatial-architectural configuration of Angkor Wat with a small selection of accompanying – primarily French – architectural plans and photographs. This section not only gives the reader an initial idea of the building complex in relation to subsequent architectural enquiries, but its concrete references to different book chapters will also introduce the reader to the quoted material’s historically embedded production process – to be more precise, to its use as a visual framing device for the various ‘Angkor Wat projects’ between Asia and Europe from the 1860s up to this day. In this sense, the unusual amount of visual material in this book – more than 1,200 illustrations are provided about Angkor Wat and its wider context – functions, in combination with the ever-changing cultural-political rhetoric and applied physical strategies at play, as a kind of visual anthology with which to map the transcultural trajectory of Angkor Wat as a global ‘icon’. The second part of this section (2.2.) will investigate why Angkor Wat has enjoyed such an astonishing career through a particularly French context into a global space. Under the rubric of architectural, performative and patrimonial affordance, a small selection of French(-colonial) building descriptions will be used to formulate my answer to this question.

2.1. Angkor Wat, approaching its architectural ­configuration With the twelfth-century Angkor Wat temple complex described as the “apogee of all Khmer art” (Jacques 1990, 107) and a manifestation of “the power and influence of Angkor” (Jacques/Freeman 2000, 11; compare MacDonald 1958, Stierlin 1971, to Legendre 2001), official historiography until today places the beginnings of the Ang­kor era in the ninth century CE. This dating is based on surviving stone inscriptions (often the only written sources available) proclaiming King Jayavarman II’s sovereignty as ‘king of the world’ in 802 CE and placing his capital in the present

day Roluos area located to the southeast of what shortly thereafter became the wider Angkor region. This overall area is in a fertile, irrigated range in the northwest of present-day Cambodia (Fig. Intro.4a) – between the Phnom Kulen (mountains) to the northeast and the Tonlé Sap (the Great Lake) to the southwest (Pl. Intro.3). Certainly, Cambodia’s history reaches back far earlier than this starting point of Angkor proper, and small independent states existed even before the Khmer. In fact, Chinese sources report commercial exchange activities from the first centu9

Introduction

Figure Intro.4a  A map of Cambodia after its national rebirth in the early 1990s, with Angkor Wat in the northwest (Source: Doyle 1995, 12)

Figure Intro.4b  A map of ancient Kambuja/Cambodia with the pre-Angkorian areas of Funan and Tchen-La, and other archaeological sites, such as Sambor Prei Kuk and Angkor (Source: Coedès 1963, 168)

10

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figure Intro.5  The inner section of the ninth-century brick-and-stone temple of Preah Ko in ancient Hariharalaya (today Roluos area), as photographed by Franziska Gatter/GACP during an archaeological investigation campaign of the author in 2001 (Source: Falser 2006, Fig. 21; © Michael Falser/GACP)

ries of the Christian era with a region called Funan, which was strategically placed between the Mekong river delta and the gulf of present-day Thailand (Fig. Intro.4b). This region also came in commercial contact with the wider Indian hemisphere by progressively importing the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, affiliated cultural elements such as Sanskrit script and, important for this study, artistic as well as spatial and architectural concepts for emerging temple sites. The inland kingdom of Chenla emerged on the site where King Isanavarman I established Sambor Prei Kuk in the sixth century CE with small individual brick temples in the first, so-called pre-Angkorian style (Pl. Intro.4a, compare Pl. IX.7a,b). With Jayavarman II and his successors, including Indravarman I, the city of Hariharalaya near Ang­ kor was enhanced after the ninth century with a giant water tank [baray] and temples that displayed characteristics – spatial, architectural and functional-symbolic – that were already relevant for Angkor Wat (Pl. Intro.4b, compare Pl. IX.4, 6). With the temple of Preah Ko (Fig. Intro.5) – and its (almost) symmetrical arrangement of six sandstone-embellished brick towers [prasat] on a raised platform at the end of an axial passageway, accessed through an entry gate [gopura] and flanked with lateral buildings – the character of a ‘private’ temple of royal worship was established (Falser 2006, 2007). Closed for public gatherings or processions, the gods – and kings after their apotheosis – resided here, represented as statues on pedestals in small cellas, to grant blessings to their people. With the nearby Bakong temple (see Fig. IX.61b), a type of ‘state temple’ was built

using a combination of the three main building materials of the Angkor era (laterite, brick and sandstone). The form of a stepped and terraced pyramid with lower and scale-reduced tower configurations around a central tower at the top was meant to symbolise – like at Angkor Wat’s massif central (see below) – Mount Meru, the residence of the gods. In subsequent years, King Yasovarman moved to the Angkor area just a few kilometres northwest to found his capital with the Bakheng hill temple, protective dikes and the East Baray 7.5 by 1.8 kilometres in dimension, (Pl. Intro.5). After a short interlude at nearby Ko Ker, the kings returned to Angkor and added their characteristic mountain temples (for instance, Pre Rup in brick). In a rare exception, the small-scale architectural jewel of Banteay Srei (already in full sandstone like almost all later temples) was built a few kilometres north of Angkor (see Fig. IX.47). Around 1000 CE Suryavarman I built the Western Baray (8 kilometres by 2.2 kilometres) and added his Royal Palace (compare Fig. X.8a, Pl. X.3b) inside the city of Angkor Thom. The giant mountain temple of the Baphuon (see Fig. IX.74) was added nearby by one of his successors. Suryavarman II reigned between 1113 and approximately 1150 CE. He was not only the initiator of Angkor Wat (see below) but also the patron of a whole series of other buildings in what art history today calls the ‘high-classical Angkor Wat style’, including the temples of Thommanon (compare Figs. IX.31, 67a–d), Preah Pithu, Chau Say Tevoda, Banteay Samré (Figs. IX.60a,b, 62) and Beng Malea. He also led a number of military expeditions, most 11

Introduction

importantly against the Cham to the east of present-day Vietnam, and he brought the power and influence of Angkor to an apogee. One of his successors, Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1218), is stylised today as the most important king of the Angkor era (see chapter X, compare Pl. IX.24a; Figs. X.4–5, Pl. X.2a,b). As the first great converted king to follow the Mahayana school of Buddhism (the important Bodhisattva figures were depicted extensively), he consolidated Angkor’s power outside his kingdom, and he also initiated a giant building programme inside his capital. He fortified Angkor Thom with a surrounding dike and a wall with impressive gates (see Figs. IX.72–73) and added the Bayon temple in the axial centre of the city (see Figs. X.55a,b, compare X.58), as well as smaller marvels such as the water temple of Neak Pean (see Figs. IX.32a–e, 58a,b), giant structures such as Preah Khan with its famous round-columned ‘library’ (see Figs. IX.44a–g) and other sites such as Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei, the so-called Elephant Terrace and diverse ‘hospitals’. After Jayavarman VII, other kings modified or embellished already existing sites (including Angkor Wat, see below), but no structures have survived from the fourteenth century onwards, since both residences and Buddhist pagodas were built in the perishable material of wood. At this point, conflicts with the emerging Thai kingdoms to the west intensified until the famous sacking of Angkor in 1431. As a reaction, more ­defendable cities like Lovek – where King Ang Chan also resided in the mid-sixteenth century CE (see his role in ‘restoring’ Angkor below) – and Oudong were founded, and better commercial networks moved southwards to the area where the modern-day capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, would be situated later. Angkor, however, was never entirely abandoned, and Angkor Wat always continued to be an active site of regional and ‘international’ Buddhist pilgrimage and of personal as well as cultural-political affirmation for all Cambodian kings and the country’s population up to the present day. A closer look at the archaeological map shows how Angkor Wat proper (for short summaries see, among many others, Jacques 1990, 107–128 or Jacques/Freeman 2000, 46–67) was integrated into the southeast of the earlier city plan around Phnom Bakheng (Pl. Intro.5, compare Pl. IX.13, 17b). Located roughly one kilometre to the north, Angkor Thom’s southern gate was constructed later. The question of whether the wider site of Angkor Wat was intended as a new capital as a whole, an additional city planning or just as a larger agglomeration around the central temple site is an ongoing debate that has recently gained new momentum through light detection and aerial ranging studies (Lidar, compare Fletcher et al. 2015). Although Suryavarman II can be identified as the initiator of the building project of Angkor Wat, it is also clear that he was already dead and had gone through his apotheosis when the temple was finalised around 1180 CE. Posthumously, he acquired the name Parama-Vishnuloka [literally: ‘the king who has gone 12

to the supreme world of Vishnu’, the god who acts as the preserver of the world order and fighter to restore harmony in the Hinduist trinity]. ‘His’ architectural project of Angkor Wat was intended to eternally venerate his glory and memory. Although Angkor Wat’s Vishnu-dedicated temple name Vrah Visnuloka or Brah Bisnulok was found on a seventeenth-century inscription, since the nineteenth century the appellation Angkor Wat (in French Angkor Vat, or more precisely in Khmer Nokor Vat from the Sanskrit-­ Pali composite nagara-vata) has become widely accepted. Often translated as ‘pagoda of the capital’, the ‘city which became a pagoda’ or ‘enclosure of the royal residence’, the more specific denomination “residence of a king, but of a dead and divinised king” has been long accepted (EFEO 1929, 10). Inscriptions inside the bas-relief galleries of Ang­ kor Wat name Brah Bisnukar as the architect, although he most probably only finalised the overall project after the death of Suryavarman II. Angkor Wat’s ‘practical’ positioning between the previous capital of (later fortified) Angkor Thom to the north and the north-south-oriented access road to the west has often been understood to be determined by the remaining space available and the site’s proximity to the Siem Reap River in the east, which was useful for the transport of the immense masses of building material (compare Pl. Intro.5). The overall ensemble of Angkor Wat covers about 200 hectares within an immense rectangle of roughly 1,300 metres in the north-south and 1,500 metres in the east-west expansion (Pl. Intro.6). The central site is framed by a peripheral and shallow moat (compare Pl. XI.33b), itself ­approximately 190 metres in width and being accessed by descending stone steps. The main entrance is oriented towards the west (contrary to other Angkorian sites with their usual orientation to the east), probably because of the temple’s dedication to Vishnu, who was associated with the western direction, or perhaps because of the site’s function as a funerary-temple (see the discussion about that interpretation below) and the fact that the west was seen as the direction of the sinking sun and therefore a symbol of death. The moat is crossed from the main western entrance by a paved bridge made of laterite and stone and is decorated by Naga snake balustrades and protecting lion sculptures (Fig. Intro.6, compare Figs. IX.75–77, 78a, 79). From the east, the moat is crossed via another access road. Having passed the moat over the western bridge, the visitor approaches the outermost, so-called ‘fourth’ enclosure of the inner site, itself made of a laterite wall of about 800 metres north-south and about 1,030 metres east-west, and four entry pavilions in the four cardinal directions in the corresponding axes of the central tower (compare Pl. Intro.6). The western entry – greatly admired since the first French-colonial reception onwards (compare Pl. IX.11d, Fig. IX.78c) and already replicated and ‘re-presented’ in the Paris-based Indochinese Museum in the mid-1880s (compare Pl.III.14a–d) – has an overall length of 230 metres and is structured by three gates with towers. In its

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figure Intro.6  The western entry of Angkor Wat as photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in 1995 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

Figure Intro.7  Angkor Wat’s central passageway, seen from the temple’s western entry gate towards the central mountain temple, as photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in 1995 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

southern aisle, important statues, such as the great Vishnu, are exposed for popular worship (compare Pl. EpII.15b). After passing through the narrow gate, the spectacle towards the temple’s central massif suddenly opens up to a vista (Fig. Intro.7) that was restored in one of the first French archaeological actions on the site (compare Figs. IX.11a–c, 12, 13) and that has since been iconised in scientific publications, popular guidebooks and various propaganda material (Fig. Intro.8, compare above many others Figs. VII.6; IX.17a,b, 33a, 68, 78b; Pl. XI.10a, 14, 19a, 20, 27a). The stone-paved central passageway of almost 400 metres in length and 1.5 metres in height is framed by a Naga snake balustrade and accentuated by six pairs of staircases reaching to the earth-surfaced areas in the north and south where two so-called ‘library’ buildings and two water basins are situated (compare Fig. IX.22a; Pl.XI.37a). The passageway (elevated by 1.5 metres) leads to a cruciform terrace that is elevated by a series of columns over twelve stairs on three sides and serves as an introduction to the main platform to the temple on three stepped levels or en-

Figure Intro.8  The world-famous Angkor Wat vista as advertised by Royal Air Cambodge on the cover page of Pacific Travel News of 1968 (Source: Pacific Travel News, August 1968, cover)

13

Introduction

Figures Intro.9a—c  Western elevation, cross-section from west to east and ground plan of the inner section of Angkor Wat, as published in the 1969 EFEO publication Angkor Vat: Description graphique (Source: Nafilyan/EFEO 1969, plans VI, X and III; © EFEO Paris)

14

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figure Intro.10  The inner section of Angkor Wat, as seen from the northwestern corner, ­photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in 2002 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

closures to form a classical mountain temple configuration over a solid core (Figs. Intro.9a–c, compare Pl. XI.26a). Simply put, this inner section of Angkor Wat is a giant pyramid of three levels, each with galleries, axial entry gates and corner towers (compare Figs. X.14; XI.24). Its outermost, ‘third’ enclosure constitutes the first elevated level of the overall massif central, with a socle of more than three metres in height. On a plan of 200 metres in the east-west and 180 metres in the north-south direction, this enclosure carries all-around galleries with solid stone walls towards the interior side. Those walls (with blind windows on the court side) are covered by the famous bas-reliefs with a height of 2 metres and an overall length of more than 600 metres (Fig. Intro.10, compare Fig. IX.55a, Pl. XI.27b). The galleries themselves are accentuated with four angle pavilions and accessed from the outside over three staircases on the northern and southern sides, and five on the eastern and western sides. Towards the exterior, the vault structure of the galleries rests on square pillars and an attached half-vault system on small pillars (Pl. Intro.7a, compare Figs. IX.64a, 65k, 66e, 89b). The western gate of the third enclosure opens to a cruciform gallery. Originally, this gallery comprised the famous ‘1,000 Buddha Hall’ (compare Fig. IX.8d), which was partly evacuated before 1970 and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. With four inner courts and lateral staircases leading to the adjacent elevated ‘library’ structures to the north and south (compare Fig. Intro.9c), the cruciform gallery rises in the east with a stepped staircase (Pl. Intro.7b, compare Pl. IX.11b and XI.28a,b) towards the ‘second’ enclosure. This enclosure is of an additional height of 6 metres, has an overall plan of 115 metres in east-west and 100 metres in north-south direction and can be reached via various access staircases (Pl. Intro.8a). It receives natural light through the characteristic wood-imitating window balusters (Pl. Intro.8b) and is itself accentuated by four corner pavilions with individual corner towers that add one more element to the impressive overall elevation of Angkor Wat

(compare Fig. Intro.9a). The western section of the inner court, with its two lateral small libraries, leads to the ‘first’ enclosure (or third level with a socle of 11 metres in height and a square plan of 60 by 60 metres) around the symmetrical central massif to form the inner pyramidal mountain temple section with eight steep staircases (Fig. Intro.11, compare IX.8c, 33b). Its upper level again comprises galleries, with the four corner towers and cardinal axes to the central tower reached through small three-nave galleries with lateral staircases leading to the central five-tower quincunx configuration (compare Fig. IX.88c). Finally, the central tower or sanctuary rises to an overall height of 65 metres over the spectacular surroundings (Fig. Intro.12, compare Fig. Intro.1c) and is reached through a complex cruciform and interconnecting space. It has a central cella under which a 25-metre deep pit is placed to contain a (today pillaged) treasure (compare Figs. VII.31b; IX.48a,b). Although this space is empty today, it may have been dominated originally by a giant statue of the Vishnu-divinised King Suryavarman II (compare Figs. IX.8c, XI.22b; Pl. XII.3a) and later, in the Buddhist period, by a standing Buddha inside the added walls. Since then, the peak of the central tower of Angkor Wat has become an icon of Cambodia’s ancient grandeur (Pl. Intro.9a,b). While the architectural setting is without a doubt ‘spectacular’, the decoration of the temple is no less famous: besides the elaborate pediment fields and inner walls decorated in the classical-Angkorian style of floral patterns and depictions of mythical and Hindu-religious scenes (Fig. Intro.13a, compare Figs. III.31b; Pl. III.14–15; Fig. IX.18b, 33d), several hundreds of the famous apsaras (dancing celestial maidens, compare Figs. X.44, 48c and our debate in chapter X) and devatas (divinities) cover the upper and lower architectural facades (Fig. Intro.13b, compare Figs. III.33, 34 and VI.12c). Even more famous are the several hundred, metre-long bas-reliefs on the outer walls of the ‘third’ enclosure. The overall pictorial programme of those giant picture books, stretching over almost 2,000 square 15

Introduction

Figure Intro.11  The steep staircases leading up to the third level of Angkor Wat, as photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in 2002 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

Figure Intro.12  Angkor Wat in an aerial photograph with a view towards the temple’s northeastern elevation, taken by Jaroslav Poncar in 2002 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

16

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figures Intro.13a,b  Decorative schemes of Angkor Wat, historic photograph of a pediment field with a mythical battle scene (left), and apsara figures on the adjacent walls (Source: EFEO 1930, 222; and Falser 2010)

metres, have attracted a great deal of discussion from the very earliest days of French colonialism onwards and have contributed greatly to the fame of this temple (see below). From the east to the north, and the west to the southern sides, scenes include a portrait-like image of King Surya­ varman with his entourage (Pl. Intro.10a, compare Pl. X.26a), but the long series of battle scenes, including the so-called ‘historic gallery’ that depicts a military parade with the king riding on his elephant (Pl. Intro.10b), are more dominant. These are accompanied by scenes from Hindu sources (notably the two great epopees of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata) depicting all the great gods of the Brahmanic pantheon and include the so-called Heaven and Hell gallery on the eastern south side (compare Fig. III.43) and the famous scene of the “Churning of the milk ocean” to the southern east side, with a total length of 45 metres and God Vishnu at its centre (Pl. Intro.10c, compare Fig. IX.87a). Angkor Wat – with its main entrance to the west – was never entirely completed, as some decorative schemes were left unfinished in the ‘less important’ (eastern and therefore less visible) sections of the temple (Fig. Intro.14). Missing elements such as the northeastern part of the famous bas-reliefs galleries were added later, as were the fallen or never executed columns inside Angkor Wat. Both interventions were almost certainly commissioned by King Ang Chan in the mid-sixteenth century CE (see below).

Figure Intro.14  Unfinished carvings on the upper eastern outside facades of Angkor Wat (Source: © Falser 2010)

17

Introduction

2.2. Angkor Wat’s affordance qualities and actionable capacities: ­Architectural, performative, patrimonial No other building of this size and cultural importance had a comparable ‘success and career’ in the global, Euro-Asian discoursive and investigative arena from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Not only did Angkor Wat in Cambodia – covered in the second volume of this book – become the unquestioned architectural masterpiece of the world’s most impressive, French-made archaeological park; it also became, as a site of religious veneration and royal affirmation since its construction, the cultural-political focal point for the whole nation of Cambodia. Unique in the history of modern nation states, the iconised silhouette of Angkor Wat has been included on the Cambodian flag and money since the nineteenth century (see Fig. Intro 9b; Pl. XI.1–j; Fig. EpI.1a, Pl. EpI.1a–l). However, as can be seen in the first illustration in this book, which shows Ang­ kor Wat outside of Cambodia – discussed in the first volume of this book – this monumental site was also a highly ‘mobile’ one that stretched beyond geographical borders and nation-bound orders. To this day, Angkor Wat is the largest non-European building ever to have been replicated on the European continent, and arguably on the planet. And this replication even happened several times, and in different scales and versions in Marseille and Paris. Culminating with the inscription of Angkor Park onto the prestig­ ious World Heritage List of (again, Paris-based) UNESCO, Angkor Wat as the Park’s largest stone building ‘still in religious use’ is certainly one of the world’s most ‘trans-cultural’ heritage products. Tracing its global trajectory forms the overall narrative of this book. Why was Angkor Wat’s global career from the very beginning so intimately bound to a French context? This question leads us to an additional hypothesis: In a process

of familiarisation, that is, of ‘coming to European (French) terms with a non-European building’ (see below our discussion of the linguistic process of ‘translation’), Angkor Wat provided very specific affordance qualities, which resonated strongly with the French-colonial mindset between the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. These affordance qualities not only helped to produce and reproduce the processes of aesthetic, cultural and architectural superlatives applied to the temple in various written, visual and physical sources. They also offered a set of actionable capacities that triggered specific on-site as well as off-site ‘re-actions’ and strategies – both rhetorical, such as in colonial heritage politics, and physical, including concrete interventions of conservation, restoration, reconstruction, replication – to appropriate Angkor Wat.8 This appropriation process involved transforming a site with religious origins (the original, twelfth-century intentions and forms of ritual ‘use’ of which were still ­obscure and could only to be speculated upon in the late nineteenth century) into a secularised artefact within a constructed canon of art and architectural history. Once it was acknowledged as a unique masterpiece using the normative value judgements of the Western disciplines of art and architectural history, Angkor Wat was transformed into an icon of cultural heritage – or better, a ‘to-be-inherited’ icon within the French-colonial cultural-political mindset, as the French term patrimoine culturel suggests (chapters I to IX). Those strategies of ‘cultural heritage-mak­ ing’ and the associated claims of cultural inheritance migrated, as explored in the second half of this book, from the French-colonial into the Cambodian postcolonial psyche between the 1950s and the 1980s (chapters X and XI).

8  In his groundbreaking “theory of affordances”, James Gibson described “how environmental features such

as substance, surface and layout” are perceived as “values and meanings” and afford a potential utility – in other words, “different kinds of behaviour”: for example, physical-geometrical, stand- or walk-on-able features of the ground afford visually-guided locomotion, enclosures afford concealment, and “graspable, detached objects afford manipulation” (Gibson 1977, 67). More recent studies refer affordance to “actionable properties [we call them ‘actionable capacities’, MF] between the world and an actor”, and set it in relation to the “cultural constraints and conventions” at play in-between (Norman 1999). An affordance-based approach in the field of architectural theory investigates the “relationships between built environments and humans over time, especially with respect to the form, function and meaning of architectural elements” and “explores the con­ nection between the initial intentions or objectives of the design [in the case of Angkor Wat, those original intentions are unknown today and needed to be reconstructed, MF] with how the artefact [was] actually used” later. What is called an “artefact-user affordance” therefore investigates how individual properties of the arte­ fact (size, space, distance, form, shape, weight, geometry, material etc.) and those of the user can determine whether a specific affordance exists, and of what quality (Maier/Fadel/Battisto 2009, 394–97). Or as Ian Hodder’s more recent analysis of entanglement of archaeological objects and humans had it: “Materials afford certain potentials” (Hodder 2012, 49). Also, the attribution of symbolic meaning, derived from the reading of architectural form, depended on the past experiences, present normative beliefs and aesthetic preferences from, and associated cultural images produced by the observer. Therefore, a specific relationship between the object and its observer – in our case during the French-colonial encounter before and after 1900 with the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat – determined what affordances existed and which specific behaviours and actionable capacities (reactions and applied strategies) were possible.

18

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

In a final step, this formation merged at a decisive threshold around 1990 with a globalised ‘heritage-scape’ (chapter XII and epilogues I/II). A quick periodisation of the scientific literature What was it that Angkor Wat afforded to the French before and after 1900? And which specific (cultural, aesthetic, political, normative) French preconfigurations enabled colonial and metropolitan France to enter into a specific relationship with the twelfth-century temple complex? In order to engage with this question, a small selection of French-colonial building descriptions about Angkor Wat will be quoted. This introduction is not the place to engage with the detailed critical enquiry of the enormous amount of French (cum international) literature about Angkor and Angkor Wat. This enormous task will be attempted within each of the twelve chapters and two epilogues in the context of their specific thematic take on Angkor Wat. How­ ever, in order to identify a useful choice of French sources for this short introduction, a quick periodisation of the written material available is necessary. After the formative years of French scientific literature about Angkor between the 1850s and 1900 (with Mouhot 1863, 1864, 1868 and Delaporte 1880 to Fournereau 1890), we can see an explosion of more systematic engagement in the wake of the so-called ‘retrocession’ of 1907 of Cambodia’s northwestern provinces – including Angkor – from Siam back to the French-colonial protectorate of le Cambodge (compare Fig. VI.1a; Pl. IX.2, 3, 6,7, 9). Here, the protagonists of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the scientific state agency tasked since 1898/1900 with identifying and classifying, protecting and presenting all the (in)tangible cultural heritage of French-colonial Indochina and beyond, took the leading role. In this context, Angkor Wat’s specific ritual, religious and cultural-political function in relation to its spatial organisation was hotly debated, and the epigraphist and later director of the EFEO (1929–47), George Coedès, was an important figure in this process until the 1960s. A first consolidation of the scientific knowledge about Angkor can be located around 1930: for our investigation, the three-volume project Le temple d’Angkor Vat between 1929 and 1932 about the temple’s architecture (EFEO 1929), ornamental sculpture (EFEO 1930) and bas-relief galleries (EFEO 1932), was a milestone (visual material from this project has already been quoted above). Within a typically Western periodisation model, Angkor Wat was, after long debates, ultimately attributed the highest position – as ‘classical’, the most mature – in the established canon of Angkor’s architectural and sculptural arts from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries CE (above all Stern 1927, CoralRému­sat 1940). Additionally, the institutional and spatial configuration of Angkor as a Parc archéologique had been planned since the 1910s and was finally decreed in 1925/30 by the French-colonial administration (see chapter IX).

Angkor Wat was thus turned into a picture-perfect highlight of the park’s prescribed itinerary for the burgeoning global tourist industry (Fig. Intro.15a), and scientific knowledge was turned into classic reading for the grand public (Figs. Intro.15b,c). In a long line of general conservators of Angkor Park – which began in 1907/8 with a former militiaman and archaeological amateur, Jean Commaille – the Beaux Arts–trained architect Henri Marchal stands out as one of the most influential and productive. From the 1920s up to the early 1950s, he sought not only to conserve and restore Angkor Wat but also to describe and propagate the temple’s architectural qualities (see below). From the 1940s onwards, a gradually reformulated paradigm in archaeological work from conservation to restoration and reconstruction (called ‘anastylosis’) gained momentum at Angkor Park. This mission continued far into Cambodia’s period of national independence (see also chapter IX) and under Bernard Philippe Groslier, who was the most ambitious and visionary – and the last – overseer of the Conservation d’Angkor, not least in his abandoned plan of a “reprise totale” of Angkor Wat (Groslier 1958b; see Fig. IX.91). The 1969 EFEO publication Angkor Vat: Description graphique du temple, under the direction of Guy Nafilyan (Nafilyan/EFEO 1969), provided a complete set of drawings of the temple which included overall site plans and floor, section, elevation plans as well as smaller decorative details (Fig. Intro.15d, visual material was quoted in Figs. Intro.9a–c, Pl. 5,6; compare Figs. IX. 88a–c). This project was the last scientific achievement in relation to Angkor Wat of the French before they were forced to leave at the beginning of Cambodia’s twenty-year period of brutal unrest between 1970 and 1989. The third – now international, but not exponentially more insightful – wave of publications about Angkor (Wat) fit with Cambodia’s UN-led national rebirth around 1990 and with the nomination of Angkor Park as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. At this important threshold, which would catapult Angkor into the global space of heritage culture, the 1990 publication Angkor was written by the French epigraphist, EFEO member and historian of ancient Cambodia, Claude Jacques (Jacques 1990, compare Dagens 1989), as a kind of summary of the theretofore ­accumulated (art) historical knowledge about Angkor (see Pl. XII.4). Jacques and his book form a useful starting point for the following discussion, as he implicitly referred to what we will identify as Angkor Wat’s three most important affordance qualities and actionable capacities, which emerged during the specific French-colonial encounter with the site. First, Jacques’ outspoken admiration of the architectural quality of Angkor Wat employed emotionally loaded but in fact never critically contextualised superlatives: The twelfth century counts as the apogee of Khmer art. […] the most balanced, the most harmonious, the most perfect of all Khmer temples [is] Angkor Wat. […]. It is

19

Introduction

Figures Intro.15a—d  Bontoux’s project to launch The opening of aerial tourism in Indochina: From Saigon River to Angkor-Vat on a straight wing between Saigon and the moat of Angkor Wat with a hydrofoil airplane (15a); Henri Marchal’s Guide archéologique aux temples d’Angkor of 1928, English version of 1933 (15b), George Coedès’ Pour mieux comprendre Angkor of 1943, second ­edition 1947 (15c), and Guy Nafilyan’s Angkor Vat: Description graphique du temple of 1969 (15d; compare Fig. EpII.14) (Source: Boutoux 1929, cover; Marchal 1933, ­cover; Coedès 1947, cover; Nafilyan/EFEO 1969, cover)

20

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

also the largest of all. […] How to describe Angkor Wat without running the risk of betraying its beauty?” [italics MF] (Jacques 1990, 107, 112, 116)

Second, Jacques, with all his individual affection for the site, praised Angkor Wat’s spatial and picturesque setting. More precisely, he perceived the temple’s instructive, visual narration patterns along its ‘spectacular’ bas-relief galleries as a kind of performative quality for processions and celebrations to valorise an element that is so dear to all French rhetoric on culture: grandeur. Angkor Wat, this is also the beauty of its finely chiselled bas-reliefs […] One must taste the quality of the soft light that illuminates these galleries across the window bars. Imagine the temple with all its enclosed idols in those sanctuaries […] served by hundreds of priests. And what a spectacle must have offered by all the famous festivities in such a setting that breathes la grandeur! (Jacques 1990, 120)

Third, Claude Jacques framed his whole book on ancient Angkor with an additional element: one of his concluding appendices, entitled “L’École française d’Extrême-Orient et Angkor” mapped out the supposedly altruistic action of his long-dead compatriots9 and emphasised a historically derived and still valid heritage/inheritance claim: It is impossible to separate the name of Angkor from the name of the French School of Asian Studies, as both have been tied together since the creation of this institution. However, it is a rather difficult task to estimate today the whole range of accomplished work. (Jacques 1990, 168)

While Jacques concluded his résumé of ancient Angkor with this particular ex-French-colonial claim over the ‘Ang­kor-as-cultural-heritage’ construction, his book was prefaced by the missionary words of the acting director general of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, who wanted to “save Angkor for humanity, at all costs” (Jacques 1990, 5). Reading between the lines, we see that this helped to transfer the previous French-made patrimonial quality of Angkor into a globalised, actionable presence, especially as he ap-

pointed Jacques to be his ‘Special Angkor Advisor’ and would indeed push the site ‘at all costs’ onto the World Heritage List shortly thereafter (see chapter XII). As we shall investigate in the following, Angkor Wat’s architectural, performative and patrimonial affordance qualities resonated in a particularly strong manner and therefore shone through in various building descriptions from the Frenchcolonial period. Angkor Wat’s architectural affordance Angkor Wat’s architectural affordance quality resulted from the prominence of French Beaux-Arts architectural composition aesthetics at the time, an aesthetic that resonated strongly with the supposedly ‘classical’ architectural layout and spatial composition scheme of the twelfth-century Cambodian temple. In a unique transcultural constellation, French Beaux Arts-trained architects, from both ends of the Euro-Asian arena in the French-colonial endeavour with Angkor Wat between the 1880s and the 1930s, helped to systematise and propagate the (to be restored) recreation and (to be replicated) representation of the architectural qualities of the temple. In Cambodia, Beaux Arts-trained architects, such as Lucien Fournereau, produced and published the first ­comprehensive set of drawings of Angkor Wat through the filter of Beaux-Arts aesthetics (see Fournereau 1890, Fournereau/Porcher 1890, compare Pl. III.9–13; Fig. VI.9). Fur­ thermore, many of the officially recruited conservateurs des monuments d’Angkor and their French team collaborators had gone through the same architectural (though not archaeological or conservation) formation in France.10 The most representative among the Angkor Conservators was certainly Henri Marchal (Paris 1876–Siem Reap 1970), who was in charge of Angkor Park over several intervals between 1919 and 1953 (compare chapter IX, see him depicted on Fig. IX.69). When Marchal studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris around 1900 and shortly after set off for Phnom Penh as “sous-inspecteur des Bâtiments civils en Indochine” before he joined the EFEO in the 1910s,11 Beaux-Arts architectural composition guidelines were already being taught and codified, for example in Julien Guadet’s famous four-volume Eléments et théorie de

9  In this context, he identified three decisive conservateurs des monuments d’Angkor and labelled each with

different altruistic attitudes: the first, Jean Commaille, was an almost natural “start with Angkor Wat: à tout seigneur tout honneur – Pay honour to whom honour is due”); Henri Marchal, full of “wholehearted devotion for the temples of Angkor”; and finally Bernard Philippe Groslier and his team, full of “admirable courage” during the last French actions before civil war broke out in 1970, which forced “the EFEO to leave those monuments of Angkor, over which it alone had kept watch for more than sixty years” (Jacques 1990, 168–70). 10  As indicated in the EFEO database, Beaux Arts-trained architects working for the Conservation d’Angkor were, among others, Jean de Mecquenem, Henri Mauger, Henri Marchal, Jacques Lagisquet, Paul Revèron, George Trouvé, and Maurice Glaize; see: https://www.efeo.fr/biographies/cadrecambod.htm (retrieved 19 July 2018). 11  Marchal’s Beaux-Arts dossier of his education and professional career can be found in digital version under http://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/ark:/54721/00282545 (retrieved 19 July 2018).

21

Introduction

l’architecture of 1901 to 1904, or later in Edouard Arnaud’s Cours d’architecture et de constructions civiles of 1928. In his discussion of the “general guidelines”, Guadet, himself professor of architectural theory at the School, set out the “general principles for all [Beaux-Arts] studies”: all “composition needed an idea” from where “the proceeding from the whole to the parts, from the building masses to the details is advanced easily if the great point of departure was judicious” (Guadet 1901, 95–105, italics MF). Guadet’s following of the “great rules of composition” (Guadet 1901, 117–130) demanded that the overall great idea and programme of a building be transposed into a clearly comprehensible composition scheme under the law of “symmetry”, with the different volumes culminating in (or radiating from) an inner point of axially and/or concentrically composed gravity “as a pictorial manifestation of the originating idea”.12 This sounds like a veritable checklist for Marchal’s approach to describing the building of Angkor Wat. In 1925, when Marchal turned in his appraisal “L’architecture d’Ankor-Vat” for publication, he certainly drafted the temple’s spatial qualities against his own normative background of architectural Beaux-Arts aesthetics. To the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat, he ascribed the qualities of an harmonious ensemble of architectural originality, a maximum equilibrium in its masses, and a “judicious [compare Guadet, italics MF] balancing of all its elements”, all of which, he declared, merited even the “Grand Prix de Rome”.13 Marchal also referred to the fact that this prize came with a stay at the Académie de France in Rome and the obligation to finally send in an envoi. This was the exercise of a reconstruction drawing of sites and urban ensembles of classical antiquity, which the École and Academy professors saw as the authoritative design precedents for inspiration and emulation: It is evident that the plan of Angkor Wat, realised by a Khmer architect, bears witness to a perfect knowledge of

the laws of perspective and the presentation of the ensemble. Furthermore, the plan is very simple, a quality that necessitates long apprenticeship and conceptual confidence. The temple of Angkor Wat is the one that speaks most clearly with the visitor and is the one less distanced of all Khmer monuments from a European mentality. […] with its qualities of clarity, unity and simplicity, it cannot leave people of Greek-Latin civilisation untouched. With its balanced volumes, plan composition and moulded profiles, it takes its place side-by-side with monuments of our classic occidental art. […] At Angkor Wat, all parts are placed within a larger inner logic: the height of its foundations, the spaces of the inner courts and the length of its passageways allow a necessary graduation to produce the impression of majesté et grandeur. Not a minor element is left for hazard and the ensemble is realised intentionally to express an architectural ideal. […] Our admiration of Angkor Wat is based on the maximum effect of an equilibrium of its masses and a judicious balancing of all its elements. The plan of Angkor Wat is reminiscent of the great plans of the Grand Prix de Rome over the last fifty years: skilful symmetric layouts and perspectives produced through vast spaces of greenery, pools and a paved passageway that leads progressively to a central motif as the centre of the composition. [italics MF] (Marchal 1925 n.p.)

Simultaneously, and ten thousand kilometres west of the ‘original’ site of Angkor Wat, Beaux-Arts architects – most often with a solid professional experience in the state-controlled building industry in French Indochina and certainly a good knowledge of Angkor – were employed to physically ‘re-create’ the famous single temple of Angkor Wat for the Paris colonial and universal exhibitions in 1889, 1900, 1931 and 1937 and for those in Marseille in 1906 and 1922 (see chapters IV to VIII).14 One of the most interesting of these architects, Auguste Delaval, equally studied at the

12  In his summary essay “Just what was Beaux-Arts architectural composition?”, David van Zanten “define[d]

Beaux-Arts composition in the abstract as encompassing three things: (1) a technique of progressive design elaboration that started with an idea and ended with a spatial form, which (2) posed certain selections among choices of shape and relationship, obliging the designer to take a philosophical stand, which thus (3) generated something that, at the last step, was adjusted to flash into three-dimensions as a pictorial manifestation of the originating idea” (van Zanten 2011, 23–24; compare for a more detailed analysis van Zanten 1980). Guadet, who won the Rome Prize himself in 1864, defined ‘study’ as synonymous with ‘proportions’ and considered it the second, or decorative, part of architecture, the first being the ‘compositional’ and the third being the ‘constructional’ (compare Guadet 1901, 100). 13  In his analysis of the Beaux-Arts Rome Prize competition of the 1820s (see below), Neil Levine commented on the commission’s obvious focus on the plan drawings, and its vocabulary to praise projected facade elevations for their simplicity, nobility, unity or beauty of appearance combined with a judiciousness (see Marchal’s 1925 quote with the same term) and suitability of character in style and decoration; and to comment on the decoration with terms of correctness, good taste, fine proportions, purity of style, based on well-chosen models and attention to detail (Levine 1982, 109). I would like to thank David Sadighian from Harvard University for his precious information on Beaux-Arts internationalism. 14  Those Beaux-Arts architects were: Daniel Fabre for the 1889 Exhibition in Paris (see chapter IV), Alexandre Marcel for 1900 Paris (chapter V), Auguste-Henri Vildieu for 1906 Marseille (chapter V), Auguste Delaval

22

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figures Intro.16a,b  Auguste Delaval’s final plan of a recomposed Angkor Wat replica for the National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922 (left), and the ground plan of Abel Blouet’s 1821 Prix de Rome—winning project of a palace of justice (right). (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence; Middleton 1982, 114, © ENSBA Paris;)

École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1895 as student of Paul Blondel (himself a ‘Rome Prize winner’), Georges Scellier de Gisors and Alphonse Defrasse. He left (like Henri Marchal) France for Vietnam to take up the role of “inspecteur des Bâtiments civils en Indochine”15 in 1905. When plans for the Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille were declared in 1913 with the intention of taking place in 1916 (it finally opened in 1922), Delaval was chosen to build the first near full-scale replica of Angkor Wat. Our study will, for the first time, show that Angkor Park’s first conservator general, Jean Commaille, was also involved in 1915 with reconstruction sketches of the towers of Angkor Wat (Fig. VI.4a,b) and was exchanging letters with Delaval between Angkor and France to discuss the ‘correct’ execution of the

Angkor Wat replica. Additionally, Delaval’s creative visions to enact Angkor Wat in Marseille used the 1890 drawings of Lucien Fournereau (compare Figs. VI.5b, VI.9), who also followed the Beaux-Arts approach of symmetry in well-bal­ anced building masses. As a consequence, Delaval introduced a new gate-like entry to flank the central passageway (Fig. Intro.16a), leading towards a culminating central tower (compare Figs. VI.5a, 7a,b, 8,17). The importance of the Beaux-Arts composition scheme for Delaval’s interwar project indicates a comparative example that was carried out for the Prix de Rome competition almost one hundred years earlier (Fig. Intro.16b). Delivering a usual set of large-scale drawings in 1821, Abel Blouet (he finally won against Henri Labrouste to

for 1922 Marseille (chapter VI), Charles and Gabriel Blanche for 1931 Paris (chapter VII), and Paul Sabrié for 1937 Paris (chapter VIII). Some of the EFEO architects, including Henri Marchal visiting the 1889 Exhibition or Jean Boisselier visiting the 1922 Exhibition, were, as they mentioned themselves (see chapter VI), initiated into the wonders of Angkor through the Angkor Wat replicas they saw in France. 15  http://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/ark:/54721/00276230 (retrieved 5 August 2018).

23

Introduction

come in second) presented his version of a palace of derlying aesthetics from his post-war position implicitly j­ustice with a courthouse ensemble and a prison complex migrated, as we argue here, back onto the twelfth-century being attached to the north. Within the overall plan, Cambodian temple (Figs. Intro.17a,b). which, as in other comparable competitions of that period as well, “always presented the strongest visual image in Angkor Wat’s performative affordance terms of graphic design, […] the cross-axial scheme [so similar to Delaval’s composition for the Angkor Wat en- The French admiration for and engagement with Angkor semble for the 1916/1922 Marseille National Colonial Ex- Wat was not merely afforded by the temple’s architectural hibition!, MF] lent itself most readily to the expression of features. A second important element was its religious and variety within unity and the balance of major and minor ritual, or performative, quality, which triggered theoretical elements that the Académie usually sought. In its ideal debates and also concrete enactment strategies for both the form of a Greek cross, it was the plan-type preferred per- ‘original’ and the replicated versions of Angkor Wat. Just haps, above all others, for representational buildings of a shortly after the Siamese retrocession of Angkor to French lofty and didactic character” (Levine 1982, 95). However, Cambodge in 1907, George Coedès in 1911 published his short remark “The great temple of Angkor Wat” in the when Delaval obviously reworked classical Beaux-Arts composition schemes of large scale in the ground plan English Buddhist Review. From his ‘point of view’, “the drawing his Angkor Wat ensemble for 1922 National Co- great lines of the plan […] and the central tower immedilonial Exhibition, the School’s “fossilised theory” – with ately produced [an] idea”. It was as if he were responding to its excessive “cult of grand compositions” and of “gran- the above-quoted Beaux-Arts aesthetics of architectural deur” (Lucan 2012, 193, 198, 202)16 – had already been compositions. But now, Coedès also focused on the temheavily critiqued for years. Its “abuse of symmetry” (Gro- ple’s original religious and subsequent devotional function: mort 1924, 1) was considered an element of the nineteenth the plan produced the “idea of a sanctuary, of a ‘Holy of Holies’” (Coedès 1911a, 10). Although he reminded his century. Nevertheless, this architectural affordance quality – readers about Angkor Wat’s “Brahmanic origin” (see below), and indeed actionable capacity – of Angkor Wat in the Coedès instantly switched to the recently rediscovered French-colonial context would be ‘back-translated’ (see Buddhist inscriptions, which he declared to be “for the both terms below) to independent Cambodia when King most part votive” despite the fact that they had been enSihanouk’s state architect Vann Molyvann – himself the graved into the temple’s walls and pillars from the sixfirst Cambodian to pass an École-des-Beaux-Arts forma- teenth century onwards when post-Angkorian kings like tion in Paris – appropriated the temple’s layout and spatial Ang Chan were returning to the site to honour their ancescomposition scheme for his 1962 design of the Phnom tors (see below). By quoting one of the earliest Frenchmen Penh National Stadium (see Pl. X.14, Figs. X. 33–35). Like- ever to visit the site in the seventeenth century, and with a wise, in 1996, the study Angkor Vat par la règle et le com- view to the surviving Buddhist statues on site, Coedès pass mapped out the temple’s architectural symmetries speculated on the performative quality – or was fascinated (Dumont 1996, compare Manikka 1996). The author of by the imagined notion – of a site where people from all this study was René Dumont, previously not only Con- “Indochina” (a geographical or an anything but neutral servateur adjoint des Monuments d’Angkor but also profes- French-colonial term17) would flock together for political sor at Phnom Penh’s Université des Beaux Arts, whose un- consultation and cultural reassurance:

16  In his chapter “The end of the École des Beaux-Arts system” (Lucan 2012, 190–207) Jacques Lucan fo-

cused on the post-1900 architectural developments and the fact that the School’s once innovative composition schemes were considered outdated as they became – Delaval’s implicit compository reference to projects like the one of Blouet of 1821 are self-explanatory – more and more homogenised. Rome Prize winners after 1900 started to focus in their restorations drawing, “informed by serious archaeological scholarship”, on larger ensembles and urbanist questions, like Henri Prost on the Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople 1907/08, or Ernest Hébrard (the designer of EFEO’s Louis Finot museum in Hanoi, compare Fig. VIII.24a) on the Dio­ cletian Palace of Split (1909). Later, Hébrard became urbanist architect in French Indochina and Prost in French Morocco. 17  The term Indo-Chine (many English and German publications until after 1900 used the terms Further India or Hinterindien, compare James Fergusson’s 1876 book History of Indian and Eastern Architecture or Adolf Bastian’s 1866 Die Völker des östlichen Asien) was used probably for the first time by the geographer Conrad Malte-Brun and most prominently introduced in his 1810 œuvre Précis de la géographie universelle to describe an area of mainland Southeast Asia that was culturally informed by both Indian and Chinese influences. However, Indochine française was a political, colonial term to describe what in 1887 became the Indochinese Union of French Indochina (compare Hahn 2013 with Bertrand/Herbelin/Klein 2013).

24

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

Figures Intro.17a,b  René Dumont’s 1996 study Angkor Vat par la règle et le compass with a focus on concentric and symmetrical composition schemes (Source: Dumont 1996, cover, 88)

Angkor Wat had become for the Buddhists of Indo-China [sic] one of the most popular places of pilgrimage, and about 1664, Monseigneur Chevreüil, a missionary in Cochinchina could write that “the Temple of Onco was as famous amongst the Gentiles of five or six great ­kingdoms as St. Peter’s at Rome. Here they come to consult on their doubts and here they receive decisions about them with as much respect as Catholics receive oracles for the Holy See. Siam, Pégu, Laos, Ternacerim and some other kingdoms come here for pilgrimage” (Coedès 1911a, 11 and EFEO 1929, 18; quoting Chevreuil 1674, 145).

Building on his 1911 studies Les bas-relief d’Angkor Vat (Coedès 1911b) and Note sur l’apothéose au Cambodge (Coedès 1911c), the construction of Angkor Wat (Coedès 1920) and referring to his own introduction to the EFEO’s third volume on the temple (EFEO 1932), Coedès summarised his reflections on Angkor Wat in his famous essay “Angkor Vat, temple ou tombeau” of 1933. Creating a curious moment that crystallised French preoccupation with the performative quality of Angkor Wat, this essay was a

fervent response to Jean Przyluski’s essay “Pradaksina et prasavya en Indochine” in the same year. There, Coedès’ French colleague attributed to Angkor Wat the “funerary function of a tomb”, where ritual ceremonies to venerate the mortal remains of a king (Sanskrit: prasavya as opposed to pradaksina, to circumambulate the relics of a god in a clockwise direction) were – with the bas-reliefs in a supposed didactical arrangement to the left-hand side in order to “offer a well-prepared tableau of the late king to the spectateur” – also accessible to the “ordinary visitors walking around the monument” (Przyluski 1933, 328). Coedès, however, saw this attributed “utilitarian function [as] a complete misunderstanding”. In his opinion, the “plan and the decoration [was] to be read from the interior, from the viewpoint of the god living inside [as] a celestial palace with the central image of the god [Vishnu] with which the king after his death identified himself ” (Coedès 1933, 309). In the end, he agreed with the term “funerary temple” [temple funéraire] to describe Angkor Wat. Within the pancolonial network to exchange knowledge of archaeological and conservation practice in Southeast Asia (French Indochina on the one and the Dutch East Indies on the other side, see 25

Introduction

Figure Intro.18  Procession during the opening of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, as depicted in Figure Intro.1 (Source: Borgé-Visnoff 1995, 184)

chapter IX), this term had been introduced by Coedès’ col- ed god on display in the central tower) seemingly gave the French-made replica of Angkor Wat its symbolic sanction league F. D. K. Bosch in 1932 (Bosch 1932, 19). In the very same moment of transcultural simultaneity from the inside out (Pl. Intro.11, compare Pl. VII.8, 16). In (see this term introduced below) French intellectuals in the meantime, the temple’s giant bas-relief came back to the 1920s and 1930s were engaged in a scientific debate life in the form of disguised Khmer guards and Khmer Balabout how and whether exclusive ritual ceremonies by lo- let dancers who staged re-enactments of the historic procal monks or subsequent kings, religious processions with cessions for the president of the French Republic, the comBuddhist pilgrims from ‘all transregional quarters’, or pa- missaire général of the event and his guests, the press rades and gatherings of cultural-political self-assurance reporters and the greater public (Fig. Intro.18, compare took place at the original twelfth- to sixteenth-century site. Fig. Intro.1a; Fig. VII.44 and Pl. VII.15b). Once again, this At the same moment, Angkor Wat’s performative affor- performative scenario migrated back to the ‘real’ site when dance quality unfolded its actionable capacity back in the French-colonial personalities such as Maréchal Joffre were French-colonial motherland. There, as I shall suggest, liv- honoured with historic processions (see Fig. VI.13b). Later, ing notions of popular piety in laicist France and the scien- the postcolonial state leader King Sihanouk also pertific admiration and imagination of a cult-cum-culture for- formed stately grandeur (see Pl. X.16a, 20), staged himself mation of ancient Angkor Wat merged with political in reinvented state processions as an Angkorian king (Fig. strategies to publicly visualise the civilising mission of im- X.8a, compare Fig. X.51) and produced films such as perial France. In universal and colonial exhibitions (see Crépuscule or Le cortège royal (see Pl. X.26a). In later years the first volume of this book), Przyluski’s reading of Ang- Angkor Wat’s performance quality also afforded a propakor Wat’s performative function from the outside and gandistic stage set for the militarist regimes of the 1970s Coedès’ interpretation of the temple’s symbolic function and 1980s (compare Fig. XI.11, Pl. XI.14, 15, 20), and ultifrom the inside came to an overlap. Secular visitors to the mately its ceremonial character became instantly global giant Angkor Wat replicas made by Beaux-Arts architects, ­after 1990 (see Pl. XII.10). most prominently in Marseille 1922 and Paris 1931 (see chapters VI and VII), circulated along the spectacular cenAngkor Wat’s patrimonial affordance tral passageway (Figs. VI.16a, VII.22c) and through the didactical inner galleries and exhibition halls where they The central question and premise of this book revolves were educated on France’s enormous task of lifting an- around the question: What is it that has made and continnexed colonies such as le Cambodge into modernity. In the ues to make Angkor Wat a global and transcultural icon of uppermost levels of the didactic parcours (compare Figs. cultural heritage? Taking into consideration the temple’s VI. 21b, 22a/b; VII.28–32) the École française d’Extrême-­ above-mentioned architectural and performative afforOrient exhibited – in the salle des ancêtres (Fig. VI.23a) – dances, a third and crucial element may help us to explain its own ‘self-sacrificing’ work of restoring Indochina’s tem- its unparalleled and ambivalent success story: Angkor Wat’s ple heritage, after which the visitor entered the innermost patrimonial affordance. In their 2015 article “Mémoire et patrimoine: Des récits et des affordances du patrimoine”, ‘idea’ of the building, a sort of archaeological cella or salle du dieu (Fig. VII.34), where Vishnu (Angkor Wat’s dedicat- Joël Candau and Maria Ferreira convincingly developed a 26

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

checklist of those “patrimonial elements” for a cultural ob- was carried out by one architect, under one royal patron, for one commemorative purpose, and in relation to one ject that – in confrontation with a concrete patrimonial regime – increase the probability of the latter’s success in (Hinduist) religion. The site itself supposedly became – acthe “casting of the past” (after Appadurai 1996/2003, 30, cording to French researchers – a veritable piece of culturcompare Appadurai 2015): besides emotional ties, a senti- al heritage immediately after its own completion. As a rement of valence and emergency, intellectual, aesthetic, eco- sult, two panels that were added later in the northeastern nomic and political interests, the authors refer to the ob- corner of Angkor Wat’s spectacular bas-relief galleries, as ject’s quality to afford a “sort of narrative, a presentable and well as some strange, roundish columns still standing withadmissible self-story” [un récit de soi racontable et receva- in the inner sanctuary (where those were ‘originally’ never ble] as well as “discourse and the sentiment of sharing” [un used) were seen as a challenge to this conception. Early discours sur le partage – un sentiment du partage] (Candau/ remarks about the added columns (Fig. Intro.19) that were Ferreira 2015, 23, 24, 33, compare Fabre 2013) for the con- obviously taken from the temple’s western entry section, crete professional actors involved in the institutional pro- such as those made by the first conservator of Angkor, Jean cess of and the concrete actions taken towards the patri- Commaille, classified them as insensitive recent repair acmonialisation of the object concerned. tions taken by the ignorant monks living on site. As a conOne curious element of this is the fact that Angkor sequence, those monks were declared unworthy inheritors of the ancient masterpiece. Wat’s patrimonial affordance had already affected the Taking up earlier speculations about the “crude and inFrench historiographical imagination of the temple’s earliest construction history. As already mentioned above, a complete character” of the tardy bas-reliefs (as the eminent typically Western periodisation model was applied to for- scholar Étienne Aymonier called the execution of those mulate pre-, classical and post-Angkorian eras,18 with the two bas-relief panels, see Aymonier 1904, 235), correcting Siamese sack of Angkor in 1431 seen as a decisive thresh- his own first misleading dating efforts (Coedès 1911b) and old and rupture between the latter two stages. In this con- adding a supposed involvement of “Chinese craftsmen” text, French researchers from the late nineteenth-century (Goloubew 1924) into consideration, George Coedès came onwards have conceptualised Khmer history after the into the picture once more. His article “La date d’exécution mid-fifteenth century – including Khmer art and architec- des deux-bas-reliefs tardifs d’Angkor Vat,” published only tural history – in a clearly categorised and qualificatory in 1962 in the Journal asiatique, is a good example of the reference to a supposed ‘golden age’ of twelfth-century Ang­ continuing fascination of French scholarship with Angkor kor. From this conceptual framing, all of the ‘post-Ang­ko­ Wat’s patrimonial affordance quality (Pl. Intro.12). Evalurian’ kings’ artistic realisations must have necessarily had a ated with reference to the normative assumption of the lower quality, as much as all of those actors’ decisions and nineteenth-century art history tradition, the open decoraactions inevitably must have stood in a clear normative tive surfaces at twelfth-century Angkor Wat were seen as consciousness of the humble inheritance of past (and not “unfinished” and “not yet completed” elements “to be addpresent or even future) grandeur. And this historiographi- ed” to the Gesamtkunstwerk called Angkor Wat. Coedès’ cal strategy had and still has considerable consequences for translations of two inscriptions underneath the decorative panels identified the Buddhist king Ang Chan as the royal our site of enquiry: after the rather late correction of the chronology of the building constructions in the Angkorian patron behind those artworks, which had been “carried out period (Stern 1927), which finally placed Angkor Wat not by royal artisans” between 1546 and 1564 CE in a Vishnuit at the end but in very centre of the chronological timeline, style, “as in the past”.19 They were deemed to have “conthe temple was further monumentalised as the perfect, served the tradition in a natural subordination to the prehigh-classical architectural and artistic masterpiece, which decessors by using the old composition lines” of the neigh-

18  As we shall explore in chapter III, in the two neighbouring museums in the Trocadero Palace in Paris

(both established around 1878: Viollet le Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée and Louis Delaporte’s musée ­Indo-chinois, see Pl. III.6, Figs. III.11 and 28), the same periodisation model was applied to rediscover French-gothic architecture. In the following art historical comparison, Angkor Wat and Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, both constructed in the first half of the twelfth century CE, were depicted as two ‘classical’ buildings representing the most important and iconic ‘medieval’ buildings of two nation-states, Cambodia and France (compare Pl. X.14). 19  Summarising both inscriptions in the eastern section of the northern gallery and in the northern section of the eastern gallery, Coedès’ translation was: “S. M. Mahavisnuloka [Suryavarman II] had not yet completed two panels. When S. M. Brah Rajaonkara Paramarajadhiraja Ramadhipati Paramacakravartiraja [Ang Chan] ascended the throne, he charged Brah Mihidhara and the royal artisans to sculpt a story on the panels […] finalising the work was enforced [and] the galleries and balustrades were solidly finished, as in the past” [italics, MF] (Coedès 1962a, 237).

27

Introduction

Figure Intro.19  The original columns from Angkor Wat’s western central passageway that were moved to ‘repair’ the eastern portion of the entry to the temple’s central tower, an action supposedly executed by the sixteenth-century king Ang Chan (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

28

2. The temple of Angkor Wat and its affordance qualities and actionable capacities

bouring panels (Coedès 1962a, 240–42). Having reigned at Taking the mid-nineteenth-century context of European the new Khmer capital at Lovek, Ang Chan was likewise colonialism as the starting point for our story and followpoured into this patrimonial mould, and the French-colo- ing what James Clifford has called the “salvage paradigm, nial regime styled itself as the rediscoverer, preserver, con- reflecting the desire to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of tinuer and finally, ‘inheritor’ of Angkor (see below). Not destructive historical changes” (Clifford 1989, 73), we have only was Ang Chan already included in the performative seen that Angkor Wat provided French-colonialism with a tradition of “high dignitaries for the Buddhist clergy com- sense of self-justification and self-representation as the ing to Angkor Wat for pilgrimage” of the deified ancestors,20 torchbearer of a progressive modernity, as well as an active Ang Chan’s victorious “push-back of the [Siamese] enemy” mission civilisatrice to rediscover the lost, though salvaged from the Angkorian territory21 (as the French did in 1907 and then restored, cultural grandeur of the supposedly ‘dewith the region’s ‘retrocession’ to French-colonial Cam- generated Orient’ (Falser 2015a,c). As we shall explore in bodge) also allowed him to “discover […] the old capital the first chapter of this book, the famous and often-quoted [of Angkor Thom, MF] until then captured by the forest “profound admiration” of the “splendid ruins” of Angkor and effaced from human memory”. This “motivated – rather Wat expressed in 1860 by the French naturalist Henri Mounaturally – the king’s restoration work at this temple [of hot came alongside a (little quoted) remark on Cambodia’s Angkor Wat], which at this time was already seen as a na- civilisational status as one of “barbarism and profound tional sanctuary [sanctuaire national]” (Coedès 1962a, darkness” and a call for colonial France’s “conquest” for the 240–42; compare Boisselier 1962, 247). After Coedès’ short benefit of the country’s “instant regeneration” (Mouhot study, research about the ‘post-Angkorian’ layer over Ang- 1864, vol. I, 282, 275). De Lagrée’s, Francis Garnier’s, Lucien kor Wat continued (above others see Lewitz 1970–73, Gi- Fournereau’s and Louis Delaporte’s missions to Angkor beteau 1975, 93–111, Jacques 1999, Roveda 2001, 55–66). fore 1900 produced the same self-justifying rhetoric (comHowever, it was only in the groundbreaking photographic pare Fig. I.7, Pl. IX.5), while the first actions of the EFEO studies by Jaroslav Poncar, then a member of the German to ‘salvage’ Angkor Wat after 1900 resulted in the forced Apsara Conservation Project (GACP), that the overall pic- relocation of the active monastery in front of the temple in torial programme of the temple could be fully explored order to re-establish the temple’s ‘original idea’ and great (Pl. Intro.12). In his book Of gods, kings and men: The reliefs vista (see Figs. IX.11–13, 17a,b). In this earliest act of a sciof Angkor Wat (first published 1995) Poncar also covered entifically and institutionally embedded patrimonialisation, Angkor Wat as a living Buddhist site was ‘archaeolothe two late bas-reliefs in the northeastern corner, and the art historian Thomas Maxwell concluded that these six- gised’ back to its imagined architectural origins – in other teenth-century reliefs broadly “follow[ed] the same com- words, it was ‘re-Hinduicised’ into a dead, commodified positional principles and iconographic symbolism as the and ex lege protected ruin (compare Falser/Juneja 2013b). orginals” and that the “sculptures followed old original However the applied strategies of salvage had one additracings or sketches left on the blank panels by Suryavar- tional effect: they not only helped the active inscribing of man’s artists two centuries before”. Altogether, Maxwell the rescuer into the object’s aesthetic (and not religious) referred again to the “great prestige and awareness of tradi- and normative, institutional and legal configuration of cultion attached to this work” and judged it as a “respectful tural heritage and patrimony [patrimoine culturel]; they act of restoration, […] an initiative conforming to the tra- also, through a series of performative actions, appropriated ditional concept of merit accruing to a king who restores Ang­kor Wat through an act of cultural inheritance [héritthe temples of his predecessors, [and] one aspect of a con- age culturel] on site and overseas. When the temple as a scious desire to reclaim their heritage on the part of the replicated cultural icon was brought over ten thousand Khmer elite who evidently nurtured a sense of exile after kilometres – together with greater numbers of original the transfer of the capital from Angkor to the region south Khmer sculptures for French museums (see chapter III) – of the Tonle Sap” (Maxwell in Poncar 2006; compare Max- into the Paris International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, it well in Poncar 2013, 264–275). Until today, Angkor Wat’s became part and parcel of France’s own national mindset of cultural grandeur. As the organisers proclaimed in the patrimonial affordance can be seen in the word choice used to describe the supposed “restorative programs” car- famous journal L’Illustration in May 1931, the “Français ried out in the post-Angkorian context of “deeds of piety d’Asie” had taken their self-appointed “custodian role” over performed at Angkor Wat” (Polkinghorne/Pottier/Fischer the heritage reserve called Parc archéologique d’Angkor in colonial Cambodia. And they conceived of themselves as 2013, 603, 624).

20  After Khin Sok’s French study of the Cambodian chronicles (published in the EFEO series in 1988), Ang Chan’s return to Angkor was not identified (Khin Sok 1988, 149–60, 252–53), but his devotional practice as a fervent Buddhist stood in clear continuity with his Angkorian predecessors. 21  Hence the name of the nearby city of Siem Reap, probably meaning the ‘defeat of the Siamese’.

29

Introduction

“the legitimate inheritors of the ancient Khmer civilisation” (see full quotes in chapter VII). A few years earlier in 1929, the prestigious EFEO publication Le temple d’Angkor Vat proclaimed that the original site had now reached the status of a “universal celebrity”, just as it had supposedly gained the highest “prestige as a national sanctuary” (EFEO 1929, 5, 17) in the post-Angkorian era (see Coedès’ above-quoted 1962 remark about Ang Chan). In the short era of Cambodian post-independence, the colonial-made iconicity of Angkor Wat amalgamated with the site’s renewed status as a ‘national’ icon: in a unique moment of decolonised ‘sentiment of sharing heritage’, King Sihanouk and Charles de Gaulle met in 1966 to celebrate “both nations’ conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor”, as the general conservator of Angkor Park, Bernard Philippe Groslier, intoned it during the gigantic son-et-lumière show at Angkor Wat (see chapter X for the full text, compare Pl. X.23). Just twenty-five years later, the rhetoric of shared

heritage resurfaced again, this time under the notion of international solidarity at the end of the Cold War era. Once again, Angkor Wat’s patrimonial affordance took central stage: On 30 November 1991 UNESCO’s director general, Federico Mayor, in his Appeal for Angkor on the temple’s central passageway, asked “the international community as a whole to put the stamp of universal solidarity on the rebirth of Angkor” (Mayor 1991a, see full quote in chapter XII; compare Pl. XII.10), which was hastily nominated in 1992 to the World Heritage List of endangered properties. However, when the unprecedented, international set-up of an emergency help structure was in fact institutionally ­perpetuated far beyond any threat scenario, UNESCO’s globalised slogan of the ‘cultural heritage of humanity’ turned – as chapter XII and the epilogue II of this book will argue – into a neocolonial dispossession strategy, employed against a fully independent heritage regime in the newly established nation-state called Cambodia.

3. Preliminary reflections to Volume 1: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions 3.1. From exotic fantasies in garden landscapes to ‘spectacular’ ­pavilions in universal and colonial ­exhibitions The story of architectural representations of non-European cultures certainly did not begin with the era of universal and colonial exhibitions since 1851. With even earlier precursors we locate this phenomenon in the eighteenth century when – parallel to European expansionism – detailed travel reports, and historical, philosophical, and scientific treaties on the ‘Other’ (in our case, the so-called ‘Orient’) were increasingly available. This triggered the creation of exotic architectural fantasies for Western artificial garden landscapes where decorative clichés were assembled to form paradise-like illusory worlds. This Orientalist approach – even more acute in concrete situations of early colonial entanglements – was characterised by the “inclusion of realistic elements and stage props with a negation of concrete site-, time- and social-specific reference”. The subjects were staged in an ambiguous “some-where and some-time” and “the visual media in their massive reproducibility helped to create and consolidate the synthetic imaginary world of exoticism” (Polling 1987, 20, 23). This process also perpetuated stereotypes and essentialisms about the ‘Other’ while European domination was in the ideological foreground. In this phase of “poetic exoticism”

(Koppelkamm 1987), when written descriptions of the Orient were often translated into architectural representations and canonised in pattern books (Fig. Intro.20), ‘real’ architectural details from existing Asian building structures began to play a role.22 Napoleon’s colonial and scientific crusade to Egypt in 1798 and the subsequent publications on Egyptian antiquity (compare Fig. IX.4), along with the emerging disciplines of art history, archaeology, ethnography, and geography, triggered a new phase of “academic Orientalism” (Koppel­ kamm 1987). Increasingly in Europe, which had itself entered the age of architectural historicism, a detailed knowledge of the periods, styles, constructions, and materials of (Far) Eastern architecture was used to create exact physical quotations. Nevertheless, these interpretations remained subordinate to European functionality and to different aesthetic notions of symmetry and scale; their original context often remained absent from the picture (Fig. Intro.21). The height of European colonial expansionism during the second half of the nineteenth century was also the age of mass spectacles: the format of a “universal exhibition” 23 was born in London in 1851, and the first of these exhibi-

22  For example, the famous Brighton Pavilion, the summer residence of the Prince Regent (later King George IV) was designed by John Nash and completed around 1820, and elements of Indian and Chinese architecture were space- and time-compressed to form one single hybrid ensemble. 23  Instead of the common terms “World Exhibition” or “World’s Fair”, I will use the term “Universal Exhibition” throughout, which is closer to the French term “Exposition Universelle”.

30

3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

Figure Intro.20  ‘Oriental’ architecture in William Halfpenny’s 1752 Rural architecture in the Chinese taste being designs entirely new for the decoration of gardens, parks, forests, insides of houses etc. (Source: Halfpenny 1752, plates 9, 11, 54)

Figure Intro.21 The Elefantenhaus in the Zoological Garden in Berlin, in an 1873 drawing by the architects Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böckmann (Source: Koppelmann 1987b, 179)

31

Introduction

tions between London and Paris visualised the grand nar- that France’s typically Saint-Simonian grasp on those ratives of the leading (English or French) nations under events involved the merger of nationalistic optimism and the paradigms of culture, progress, humanity, and univer- industrialism with cultural “paternalism” (Ory 1982, 18). salism. This came with the strategy to classify the entire The primacy of progress in the Beaux-Arts rather than in world civilisation into hierarchising taxonomies along Eu- industry and science always came with a retrospective view rocentric standards. With their flexible location, limited on France’s own patrimoine to reconstitute itself as the time frame, and ephemeral materialisation, universal exhi- crowning endpoint of a universal civilising past. The typibitions were also perfect to stage the ‘Oriental and colonial cally French “notion of the Encyclopaedia (a notion of total periphery’ at the very centre of Occidental colonial power. knowledge)”, the “idea of France as civiliser” (Greenhalgh In a phase of “documentary realism”, the “mimetic act” 1988, 20, 115; compare Benedict 1983, Falser 2015a) and (Beautheac/Bouchart 1985, 7) to stage ‘authentic and exact’ the focus of the arts as the highest achievement of human representations of architectural highlights from the colo- civilisation also stood in relation to the French invention of the architectural – in our case Oriental – pavilions. As nised East became a crucial strategy. space-, time-, and scale-compressed physical models and The ‘national pavilion’ was the new medium that could best transport imperial ideologies and narratives of national “lifelike reproductions of an authenticated past” they were progress. It was born as an architectural concept during the placed in the “exhibitionary complex” of the exposition second Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1867 (see chapter I). universelle to visualise the colonially appropriated world The global touch was a crucial element from the beginning in a “totalising order” (Bennett 1988, 81, 88, 92; compare when so-called ‘Oriental nations’ (compare Fig. I.17) were Ben­nett 2004; Barth 2002, 10–11). Important for our above-introduced ‘trans-cultural’ aprepresented in hybrid ensembles with architectural references to their glorious archaeological pasts and almost proach to bridge clear-cut territorial nation-state borders never to their supposedly poor cultural presence.24 Three as much as disciplinary borders of the so-called ‘Area Studcharacteristics of the pavilion concept are particularly ies’ (Europe or Asia), these ephemeral pavilions also had ­important for the purposes of this study: first, despite be- very concrete consequences for the ‘real’ sites outside the ing labelled ‘national’, some pavilions (like ‘Mayan-Aztec exhibited European model world (Falser 2013h). Timothy Mexico’, see Fig. I.18 or IV.5b; ‘Pharaonic Egypt’, see Fig. Mitchell’s paper “The world as exhibition” described the I.19; or ‘Angkorian Cambodia’, see Fig. IV.9, as it was called function of the facade-like pavilions and stage settings, esin the 1889 Exhibition) were often condensed and fossil- pecially those from the Orient, as “the West’s great external ised versions of a re-imagined civilisation of antiquity. Sec- reality”: they not only sought to exhibit the world using a ond, these ‘Oriental’ pavilions, where the European con- “reality effect” but also “to order up the world [itself] as an cept of a modern nation functioning under the paradigm endless exhibition” – in an “act of political decidedness of progress merged with the concept of civilisation, were [of] colonial nature” (Mitchell 1989, 218, 226–27). Coming most often constructed with an articulated colonial inter- back to Nora’s 1931 Angkor Wat-in-Paris example (comest by the hosting European nation (Figs. Intro.22a,b; pare Figs. Intro.1a–c), the exhibition pavilions, now with compare again Fig. Intro.1). Third, how these pavilions of the claim to be ‘picture-perfect copies’ – would also re-proOriental antiquity were constructed reveal the politics of ject a “frame of visual order” (Mitchell 1989, 228) back to appropriation relative to forms of non-European architec- their ‘originals’ (and often less perfect, sometimes ‘ruined’) ture that were to be incorporated into the coloniser’s own Far Eastern counterparts. As a consequence, this visual frame would not only be searched for and even expected canon of cultural heritage. When the first analyses of universal and colonial exhi- by later visitors to the ‘real’ site but was also, as we shall see bitions emerged in the postmodern 1980s, it was noted in volume 2, reiterated, reproduced, and ultimately ‘real24  This was explained in the comment Architecture des nations étrangères, published in 1870 by the Oriento-

phile, Beaux-Arts architect-photographer Alfred Normand. With a typically French emphasis on industry and art in the universal exhibitions in order to “exchange concepts and methods between all people, and to appreciate the general status of artistic and industrial progress”, Normand described the “veritable specimen of temples, palaces, houses, schools and farm buildings of every country” as “types and reflections of civilisation […] the most lucky innovations” of the whole exhibition (Normand 1870, 1, 2). Alongside European pavilions, the Egyptian pavilion “ranked high among all nations and first among the Oriental nations”, because of its “tasteful configuration and its artistic and archaeological richness” (Normand 1870, 3). Reminding the reader of the French discovery of ancient Egypt and in a typically Beaux Arts­-influenced appreciation of architectural idea, proportion, scale, harmony and colouration (compare our remark on a Beaux Arts-like ‘architectural affordance’ of Angkor Wat!), Normand admitted that the Egyptian pavilion was (compare all our ‘Angkor Wat-in Paris’ constructions) built by a French architect in Paris, supposedly using “precise information and numerous photographs and plaster casts” (Normand 1870, 3, 4, 5); compare with a postcolonial critique like Colonizing Egypt (Mitchell 1988).

32

3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

Figures Intro.22a,b  Sketches for the French-colonial ‘Oriental pavilions’ of the Exposition ­coloniale in the Grand palais des Champs-Elysées in Paris 1906 (Source: Grand palais 1906, n.p.; private collection Michael Falser)

ised’ when surviving ancient structures were brought back to their supposed ‘original’ appearance through modern disciplines like archaeology, historic preservation and cultural heritage politics. In this sense, universal and colonial exhibitions were far more than just “laboratories for new architectural forms and compositions [italics MF]” back in the emerging non-European nations of the ‘Orient’ (Çelik 1992, 5) or in the European colonies (Leprun 2010, 51). They had important consequences in the far-reaching restoration measures used to preserve Asia’s architectural past: Back-translating the idealised and temporary model versions of universal and/or colonial exhibitions (see this term later in this introduction), vast temple sites like Angkor were subsequently turned themselves into “outdoor architectural museums” (Kaufman 1989, compare Schrenk 1999; see Pl. Intro.22) or themed parks (see this term explained later in this introduction), like in our case the Parc archéologique d’Angkor. At these sites, we argue in this publication, the temple structures were gradually restored and

preserved themselves as ahistoric pavilion-like exhibits similar to those seen in Occidental exhibitions, and they became “architecturally frozen in an ambiguous and distant past” (Çelik 1992, 56, 190) as cultural heritage icons. This relationship between the ephemeral exhibition pa­ vilions on the one hand (in volume 1) and the long-term archaeological sites of Oriental antiquity on the other (in the second volume) has motivated the structure of this publication. With the world’s largest religious stone monument – Angkor Wat – at the centre of our investigation, we claim that this above-formulated transcultural phenomenon has never before been discussed in such depth. However, a few earlier studies were useful for this argumentation. Michael Diers argued that these official ephemeral representations most often exhibited the best recorded, documented, and preserved monuments of their time. As a result, the “ephemeral monument stood as a short-term form of the [real] monument” and, through its mass media propagation and circulation, guaranteed the perpetual 33

Introduction

Figure Intro.23  Constructing Angkor Wat during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition: picture-perfect decorative surface behind a wooden scaffold with attached lightweight fibreboard casts called staff (Source: La Construction Moderne, 25 May 1930, cover)

iconisation of the latter. Thus, ephemeral Angkor pavilion architectures on display in French exhibitions helped to turn the real temple progressively into an icon of patrimoine culturel and pre-visualised its picture-perfect status that (French-colonial) physical – archaeological, architectural, restorative – interventions were seeking after. Diers highlighted the concrete materiality of the ephemeral: “From the monument, only the form, size and dignity, the decoration and the iconographic details are borrowed – as regards the raw material, the ephemeral is usually just a

coulisse construction out of glue and cardboard”(Diers 1993, 7, 8; compare Daufresnes 2001). The differentiation of the “exhibitionary styles [from] realism, hyperrealism [to] reconstruction” (MacDonald 1997, 5) – in other words, the degree to which the ephemeral pavilion representation borrowed from the source, and whether they were “original creations, stylised interpretations or exact restitutions” (Courthion 1931, 37, compare Zahar 1931 in chapter VII) – was often discussed in journals of contemporary art. They were also treated as contemporary building projects – for example, in technical journals like Construction moderne – and discussed next to issues like reinforced concrete or metal installations (Fig. Intro.23, compare Figs. VII.18, 19), but without any mention of the causality between the technical execution of the ephemeral pavilions and the ideological intentions behind them. Both the question of the technique, depth, and accuracy of the ‘translation’ (see below) of monuments from Oriental antiquity to ephemeral pavilion structures in Western exhibitions, and the colonial-political reverse effect that the latter had on the original site, is rarely investigated in architectural historiography. This is surprising when one considers the fact that general literature on the history of universal and colonial exhibitions has gained great popularity over the last thirty years.25 Two publications, how­ ever, have approached the above-mentioned desideratum of transcultural inquiry from different directions and at different moments. In her monograph Le Théâtre des colonies (1986), Sylvaine Leprun investigated the “scenographic construction modes” of the colonial exhibitions under the terms “ductile Orientalism” and “three-dimensional ethnology”, which have helped to “model this Oriental spectacle [of] ephemeral temples [and] animated panoramas” (Leprun 1986, 6, 17, 18, 20, 56). In her chapter “Facettes archéo­ logiques: Une identité en trompe-l’oeil”, Leprun added her stylistic investigations of these “playful animations” (Leprun 1986, 85, 94). She differentiated between the architectural strategies of “identical figurations/strict copies, composite assemblage of synthetic representative images [and] identifiable buildings made of interpreted signs on an archaeological basis” (Leprun 1986, 6, compare Courthion 1931). The topic was also addressed in Patricia Morton’s 2000 monograph Hybrid modernities, which focused on

25  This literature ranges from a focus on ethnographic representations and folkloristic shows (for example, Çelik 1990, Bancel 2002, Hale 2008, Blanchard 2011) to establishing comprehensive inventories (Mattie 1998, Kretschmer 1999, Wörner 2000, Geppert 2006/2010, Finding 2008, Greenhalgh 2012). In France, this trend comprises a repetitive, lionizing of the French exhibitions’ achievements and often contains little postcolonial critique or transcultural inquiry (Bouin/Chanut 1980, Bacha 2005, Mathieu 2007, Chalet-Bailhache 2008, Demeulenaere-Douyère 2010), but the latest research tends to be more interested the technical making-of of these mass spectacles (above others, Carré et al. 2012). Closer to our topic, a special image-based fascination with the representation of colonial Indochina can be observed (Beautheac/Bouchart 1985, 44–48, Archives municipales de Marseille 2006, Baudin 2006, Grandsart 2010) that even includes a veritable “Angkormania” (Demeulenaere-Douyère 2010, 202–205) and a nostalgic “rehabilitation of the last vestiges” from the last mass spectacles depicting imperial France (Aldrich 2005, Ageron 2006).

34

3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

the colonial politics and cultural taxonomies (or rather civilising hierarchies) of the pavilion representations, and on the architectural building techniques used for the exhibited colonies during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris. In her section on “Indochina” (Morton 2000, 234–51), the specific technique of plaster casts based “on a set of molds taken at Angkor and housed at Musée Indochinois” (Morton 2000, 239) was indicated (compare Dumont 1988 below); however, her story was just a rough outline and based on official and secondary sources only. As a result, Morton left unmentioned the incredible colonial efforts,

the logistical set-up and the concrete construction processes and construction materials (most importantly plaster casts, see below) through which those ephemeral architectural pavilions were produced. Neither was the ‘trans-cultural’ role of those replicas investigated to help their ‘originals’ to become iconic heritage sites, nor were the colonial practices considered which gradually incorporated sites like ‘the real Angkor’ into the canon of French patrimoine, a French lieu de mémoire (see above Nora/Ageron 1984), or in 1992 even into a UNESCO World Heritage Site in independent Cambodia (chapter XII).

3.2. The rediscovery and re-evaluation of plaster casts The rediscovery of the ontological value of architectural copies” defined the degrees of resemblance between the plaster casts can be dated to the mid-1980s when universal original and its substitute in the case that an original was and colonial exhibitions became a topic in art and archi- “not exactly reproduced”: combined quotations from differtectural history. ent originals as “pastiche”; an “artistic comment”; compleIn their 1985 Zagreb symposium proceedings, entitled tion or restoration to an original as “reconstruction”; scale-­ Originals and substitutes in museums, the value of plaster changing “models and maquettes”; and material-changed casts and their function in architectural models had be- “wax models, electrotypes, photocopies, holograms, anastycome a subject of discussion for the International Commit- losis and plaster casts” (van Mensch in Sofka 1985a, 123– tee for Museology (ICOFOM). Contributions appreciated 26). In the 1987 French conference on Le moulage, contrithe value of museum substitutes in their function as a butions addressed the plaster cast’s materiality, European democratised “réappropriation patrimoniale” of original history, legitimacy for conservation and restoration in exartworks (Deloche in Sofka 1985a, 35–40).26 As plaster hibition spaces, artistic and archaeological collections, and casts were similar to the technique of photography as a their status as art objects sui generis. Maybe for the first substituting device to bring together the whole world of art time and in direct relation to the ephemeral staging of to form a ‘history of world art’ (in contrast to the analytical Ang­kor Wat at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, René approach of ‘global art history’ discussed here), André Dumont, previously Conservateur adjoint des Monuments Malraux’s idea of a musée imaginaire was brought up, itself d’Angkor before the French left the site around 1970 (see not entirely free from colonial implications.27 Without his 1992 publication in this introduction, Figs. Intro.17.a,b), mentioning the implications of ownership rights, different gave a first rough chronology of the career of the plaster target audiences, and implicated power structures, a list of casts from Angkor in (post)colonial France (Dumont 1988). “justifications for substitutions” (Desvallées in Sofka 1985a, In a crucial shift in attitude after the dramatic de-evalua93–99) was proposed: above others, the impossibility of tion and disposal of the plaster casts from Angkor by the exhibiting the original (huge dimensions making it impos- same museum (see chapter III), Albert le Bonheur, the disible to move), the propagation of knowledge about a dis- rector of the musée Guimet (the institution that had inhertant original, or the interpretation of the original in order ited the original artefacts and casts from Delaporte’s musée to make it better understood by the intended audience Indochinois in the 1930s) praised the reluctantly salvaged, (e.g., through simplifying, scale-change). A “typology of but still poorly stored plaster casts of Angkor as “unique 26  The idea of exchanging artworks as plaster cast copies in European museums goes back to a convention

signed between European monarchs during the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867 (see chapters I and III).

27  How contested this concept of “réappropriation patrimoniale” was can be explained in our case. In his

text Malraux included Khmer art fragments from the Parisian musée Guimet, decontextualised from their original religious context, in his concept of a new “humanisme universel” (Malraux 1952, 66). Not only did he not mention that some of his original Khmer-as-‘universal art’ examples of the musée Guimet in Paris had been stolen at a time when Angkor was still in Siamese territory (see chapters II and III) and not, at the time of Malraux’s original 1947 publication, on French-Cambodian territory. He also omitted the fact that he himself had been imprisoned in French-colonial Phnom Penh for his attempts in the early 1920s to steal original bas-reliefs from the ninth-century Khmer temple of Banteay Srei. This incident caused a crisis in Indochinese French-colonial politics at the time (compare the reference to Malraux in the UNESCO-debate about Angkor after 1992 in epilogue II).

35

Introduction

Figure Intro.24  A postcard of the Louvre with the Le façade du Trésor des Cnidiens as plaster cast reconstitution (left) with the famous Victoire de Samothrace as original fragment (right) (Source: © musée des Arts décoratifs, collection Maciet)

and extremely important documents for the art of Angkor” (Association 1988, 124). Blurring the lines between colonial heritage and the new approach of universal heritage, the French ICOMOS president, Michel Parent, evoked the old notion of French responsibility for both the original site of Angkor and for the French Angkor plaster cast collection: “There are now two sites of Angkor in this world. It is [one] patrimoine universel” (Association 1988, 125). If the 1980s saw a rising, mostly British, interest in the nineteenth-century techniques of reproducing artworks and cultural heritage (Baker 1982/2007, Harrod 1985, Fawcett 1987), French publications in the 1990s addressed the history of plaster casts as once valid media in museum displays side by side with archaeological originals (Rionnet 1996, Actes de rencontres 1999) (Fig. Intro.24). The colonial implications in the use of plaster casts, however, were never debated. In a 1999 Paris conference on replicated antique statues and the history of archaeology (Lavagne/ Queyrel 2000), the constantly shifting status of the “originality” of plaster casts as either objects of art and/or science was addressed, as much as the fact that casts were in a “contested status at every stage of their history, because the processes of reproduction embodied in casting [were] inevitably disputed, their definition always provisional” (Beard 2000, 158, 162; compare Scherkl 2000, Klamm 36

2010). A special dossier entitled Les moulages en plâtre, published in the journal Les nouvelles du patrimoine, looked at architectural replicas from London, Brussels, and Paris (Van den Driessche 2000). And with the 2001 publications Le plâtre: L’art et la manière (Barthe 2001) and Le musée de sculpture comparée: Naissance de l’histoire de l’art moderne (Pieri 2001), the plaster cast in historic French collections had finally regained its place in the canon of French art historiography and as patrimoine culturel sui generis. However, the discussion never left the European continent or even introduced the topic of European colonialism. This changed with the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition and publication À fleur de peau: Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle about “moulage sur nature – moulage sur culture.” Three contributions to the special section entitled Au service de la science (Teneuille/Bajac 2001, 88–119) contextualised the use of plaster casts not only in light of their supposedly neutral function as aide-mémoire in artistic procedures but also relative to their ‘colonial’ function in establishing comparative racial and cultural, and altogether Euro- and anthropocentric taxonomies (Figs. Intro.25a,b). During the nineteenth-century expansionist waves of brutal European colonialism, plaster casts of ‘primitive species’ executed during the expeditions into unknown worlds played a crucial role in the “complete appropriation of the

3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

Figure Intro.25a  A plaster cast of Adolphe Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume (moulage sur nature) of parts of an original female body (about 1840—45) (Source: © musée de Sculpture comparée, Claire Lathuille/CAPa/Fonds ­Geoffroy-Dechaume, MMF)

reality of the world” (Papet 2001, 90). However, the link between the display modes of the “tableaux vivants” and “comparative galleries” of colonial ethnography and anthropology with those of colonially appropriated archaeological sites in French museum and exhibition spaces was not yet established. The same was true for the emerging interest of the conservation sciences when the conservator of the musée Guimet, Pierre Baptiste, spoke about the importance of the Parisian plaster cast collection from Angkor (Baptiste 2002, compare Baptiste 2013). In 2005 the conference volume Histoire de l’art et musées addressed the tragic fate of plaster casts museums, especially Viollet-leDuc’s initial concept for the musée de Sculpture comparée (Viéville 2005, 155–71), but Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois in the same Trocadero Palace (see chapter III) remained undiscussed (Pressouyre 2007, L’art 2007, Mersmann 2011). At this point in time, Anglo-Saxon research on the (post)colonial implications of architectural plaster cast mu­ seums (for example Fash 2004) had overtaken the French discussions.28 Likewise, the substantial 2010 edited volume Plaster casts: Making, collecting and displaying from classical antiquity to the present (Frederiksen/Marchand 2010)

Figure Intro.25b  A plaster cast by ­Alexandre Pierre Marie Dumoutier (moulage sur nature) of a head of Matua Tawai, a New Zealander of Ikanamawi (1838) (Source: © musée de l’Homme, laboratoire d’anthro­pologie, Paris)

included a section called Casting nations: The national museum, which focused on the plaster cast courts of the South Kensington Museum (Bilbey/Trusted 2010 referring to Bilbey/Cribb 2007) and its colonial mission as a “three-dimen­ sional imperial archive” (Baker 2010, quoting Barringer 1998, 11). At this point my own methodology on this topic came to the fore, as developed at Heidelberg since 2009 and primarily discussed in the first volume of this book and again in the first section of chapter XII. It conceptualises architectural plaster cast museums and the ephemeral reconstitutions of Far Eastern architecture during the universal and colonial exhibitions in the French métropole as two entangled parts of a transcultural process in which the colonialised ‘Orient’ was not only gradually appropriated in its physical nature, but also incorporated in the coloniser’s own expanding realm of a patrimoine culturel (as a first summary paper Falser 2011, compare Falser 2013a,c,e,h). As a matter of fact, the 2010s brought a lot of dynamics into this contested field of research. The conference Le Moulage: Pratiques historiques et regards contemporains was held in November 2012 as a joint venture between the

28  In the meantime in France, several masters and PhD theses on the Parisian musée Indo-chinois’ plaster

cast collection from Angkor have been completed or were in the process of completion (above others Houe 1992, Combe 2000, Legueul 2005, Philippe 2011/2013). Some results of this research using precious archival data formed the basis for new initiatives in the 2010s (see below).

37

Introduction

musée des Monuments français in the Trocadero Palace and the Quai Branly ethnographical museum in Paris. Although enquiries into neighbouring fields and regions (like Mesoamerica or Africa) were made, France’s greatest colonial prestige object, Angkor and its representation in France, was still not included (Lancestremère et al. 2016). Finally, the impressive musée Guimet exhibition Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe – Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, Baptiste 2013) in 2013 contributed largely to the public understanding of the value of plaster casts from Angkor (Pl. Intro.13, compare Pl. III.17–18). However, the underlying master narrative was rather ‘good old mother France and its colonial heroes in their role of salvaging and propagating Angkor’. The contested nature of Angkorian casts in the colonial processes of the appropriation of Asian temple architecture for European museums was only mentioned in my contribution (Falser 2013g, compare Falser 2015e). In a unique moment for French art history, the restored plaster casts of Angkor were exhibited ‘side by side’ (see below this expression used by Foucault in 1967) with their ‘originals’ (see Pl. III.17). However, a crucial change of the casts’ ontological status as previous secondary sources ‘of Khmer art’ into the present one as primary sources of a highly contested, colonial-time mu­ seum collection practice and history was unfortunately

not brought to the forefront. At this point in time, German-language scholarship got more involved in this topic of plaster casts and cultural imperialism because the Humboldt Forum in Berlin’s new-old city castle is actually planning to exhibit original ethnographica and plaster casts side by side in a (highly contested) world art parcours. At the 2015 conference Casting: A way to embrace the digital age in analogue fashion, convened by the Berlin State ­Museums and their plaster cast workshop [Gipsformerei], I could, for the first time, re-establish the competitive and contested history of the plaster cast collections of Angkor between Paris and Berlin (Falser 2016b, compare Falser 2012/14, 2015e, 2017b, 2019; see chapter III and Figs. III.41–44, Pl. III.15). How the German plaster casts of ­Angkor will be exhibited in Berlin is, by the time of writing, still an unsolved discussion (Pl. Intro.14a,b; compare Falser 2017c, 2018). At this point in time, the European history of “plaster monuments” was finally made an entangled transatlantic story (Lending 2017). The transcultural dynamics of how Western architectural replicas influenced the re-making of ‘real’ sites, such as those archaeological ones in Non-Europe during the time of European imperialist expansion (compare Falser 2013h), are, however, not yet sufficiently conceptualised or mapped out on a global scale (Falser forthcoming1).

3.3. Translational turns, colonial politics of translation, and the technique of plaster casts An analysis of the hidden power constellations existing within the translation processes between cultures – in this case between Asia and Europe – is an emerging feature in (trans)cultural studies since the last decade, such as in the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ (see above). But the prevalent focus has been on texts and images; the techniques of direct material translation – such as through plaster casts – were discussed only rather recently. Although the historico-cultural significance of this form of physical copying and exhibition in European museum collections has been rediscovered in the last decade (see above), the analysis of its relevance in the context of colonial translation politics remained a desideratum until very recently. The first volume of this book publication will focus entirely on the politico-cultural history of those French plaster casts that had been made from the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat during early French explorative missions and subsequently displayed in museums and at universal and colonial exhibitions. The overall hypothesis of this part of the book is that those plaster casts were a powerful tool used to ‘mobilise’ the ‘immobile’

temple site of Angkor Wat (as art history defines it, see chart Fig. Intro.2a) over intercontinental distances. Additionally, they served to represent the temple in the French métropole as a salvaged architectural masterpiece of French-colonial Cambodge, and therefore gradually to appropriate, or better to ‘translate’, this non-European site into France’s own canon of a patrimoine culturel. With regard to volume one, it is useful to conceptualise plaster casts within the larger cultural phenomenon and practice of ‘translation’. In the second volume we will see how this physical, aesthetic and normative canonisation strategy was ‘back-translated’ into Cambodia (see this term explained below) as the real temple of Angkor Wat was – with the picture-perfect vision and physical version already ‘at hand’ in exhibitions in France – gradually assimilated to its equivalent role model on temporary stage ten thousand kilometres away (chapter IX). Additionally, we will explore how Angkor Wat as a French-made icon of cultural heritage was further negotiated in the various postcolonial regimes (chapters X and XI), before it became a truly global icon29 after 1990 (chapter XII and epilogue II).

29  In using the term ‘global icon’, I’m borrowing from Bishnupriya Ghosh’s 2011 monograph Global icons: Apertures to the popular.

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3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

The ‘translational turn’ of the last decade30 has ad- “continuers of the [Eastern] originals” (Hermans/Koller dressed the shift from a linguistic perspective centred on 2004, 26). Thus, the ‘translated’ Angkor pavilions for the the analysis of the written text, to a broader concept. This French métropole between 1867 and 1937 were not only includes a) translations’ metaphorical character and scien- simple pastiche works or precise replicas but highly creatific perspective describing innumerable human interac- tive, architectural products sui generis. tions and connections inside and between cultures (culture But how can we conceptualise the “translatability” of as translation – culture as text); and b) the use of the term material culture (Budick/Iser 1996) – in this case, the spetranslation to describe power relations in any kind of cul- cific power and translation structure within the process of tural contact situation and process(es) of exchange and plaster casting [moulage en plâtre]? Technically speaking, transfer (translation as ‘trans-cultural’ practice). The sec- “the first stage in the production of a cast [moulage] is the ond approach is more useful when focusing on the French taking of plaster moulds from the original, using a separatcolonial strategies for appropriating Indochinese cultural ing agent to prevent the plaster sticking to the surface. heritage. It allows us to conceptualise colonial history in Since all sculpture, other than that executed in very low regeneral as a “politico-cultural translation history in an un- lief, has projections and undercutting, these moulds were even power relation” (Bhatti 1997, 5). Further, it helps us invariably made in many pieces. The piece moulds would to read the applied “orientalising translation styles [as] as- then be enclosed in an outer casing, the interior coated with sociated with hierarchical representations of other cultures a separating agent and the wet plaster poured in. The divias primitive or inferior to a normative ‘western’ civilisation, sions between the piece moulds produce a network of castand, on the other side, as an ‘appropriate’ style that down- ing lines on the completed plaster cast” (Baker 1982/2007). plays the distinctiveness of other world views and claims This would be cut away from the dried plaster afterward. universal validity for what may in fact be domestic catego- Using a special plaster or a lightweight fabric and plaster ries of thought” (Sturge 2009, 68). Viewed from this per- mix (in French called staff), the negative form of the mould spective and explained by Ovidia Carbonell in his article or cast could generate multiple castings. A later development introduced gelatine into the process, allowing for “The exotic space of cultural translation”, cultural theory up to sixty castings. And a special imprinting technique deals with the relationship between the conditions of [estampes] that was primarily applied to the casting of large architectural surfaces (in this case bas-reliefs, pediments, knowledge production in one given culture, and the way pilasters, etc.) was the result of moulding with potter’s clay knowledge from a different cultural setting is relocated for one or two castings only (Pl. Intro.15a–c). and reinterpreted according to the conditions in which In order to explore the hypothesis that plaster casts knowledge is produced. They are deeply inscribed within the politics, the strategies of power, and the mytholo- were a powerful tool in the French colonial appropriation of the built heritage of Angkor, Georges Didi-Huberman’s gy of stereotyping and representation of other cultures. reflections on imprints [empreintes] in relation to power – (Carbonell 1996, 79) namely, that the process of impression leaves the trace of Using power as the key term in the colonial context became an original object in a foreign medium – are especially usea rather classical approach in postcolonial studies. In our ful. Whereas the original object will naturally alter its case it implies considering an asymmetry in translational physical appearance over time (e.g., aging, patina and deflows of knowledge accumulation and a partial representa- cay), the trace of an object might technically be fixed as a tion of the colonised source text. The dominant authority, permanent, anachronic marker – an unchangeable imprint network, or regime controls the (often institutionalised) represented by a moulding as the basis of plaster casting. translation process, which is “not simply an act of faithful This moment of direct and intimate contact with the original reproduction, but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of (in the process of translation) imbues the imprint/mouldselection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication – and ing with authenticity and authority (Didi-Huberman 1999, even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, 14–69). Comparable to the process of coinage (see Figs. [and] counterfeiting” (Tymoczko/Gentzler 2002, xxi). Tak- EpI.1a,b), the possession of representative mouldings – in en together it is a manipulation of the parts being (or not this case, those taken from the large Khmer Temple of Ang­ being) translated as “orientalised” texts in order to con- kor Wat (Fig. Intro.26, compare Pl. Intro.10b) – acts as a form them to the expectations of the occidental target cul- kind of central key or generic code for authentic retranslature. In contrast to this postcolonial critique of cultural tions. Re-materialisation empowers the owner (the colonial appropriation through translation, an additional apprecia- agent) to translate and circulate exact, licensed, and valuation of the mere ontological status of translations let them ble copies of the object in any desired place, context, time also stand as new texts for a (Western) audience, and as frame, function, and for an audience and political intention

30  In a summary this turn was discussed in Bachmann-Medick 2009 (third edition), 238–83.

39

Introduction

Figure Intro.26 The atelier de moulage in the musée Sarraut (today the National Museum) in Phnom Penh/Cambodia in the 1920s, led by George Groslier, with a large panel from the galleries of Angkor Wat (compare Pl. Intro.15b) (Source: National Museum of Phnom Penh, Cambodia)

Figures Intro.27a,b  The home of George Groslier (the director of the musée Sarraut and ­ father of Bernard Philippe Groslier, Angkor Park’s last French Chief Conservator until the early 1970s), photographed in the late 1920s with the cast copy of Angkor Wat’s bas-relief (compare Fig. Intro.26 and Pl. Intro.10b, 15b, 16) (Source: Personal archive Kent Davis)

40

3. Preliminary reflections to volume one: Angkor Wat in France — From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions

determined by the representatives of power – in this case, for museums or universal/colonial exhibitions in France (compare Fig. III.31,32,36,40) as well as for various uses in the French protectorate of Cambodia (Fig. Intro.27a,b; compare Pl. Intro.15b). Elements of those ‘historic translations’ and those recently added in a postmodern reflex haunt Cambodia’s presence until today (Pl. Intro.16a–c). To place such translation practices in their proper historico-cultural context, it is necessary to situate them using the following general questions (Frank 2004), which will help to guide us through the study in volume one of the French plaster casts of Angkor and their intended European audience: 1. What was or was not translated (characteristics of the source, material context)? 2. When or how frequently and under what circumstances did the translation occur (temporal context)?

3. Where and over what distance did the translation occur (spatial context)? 4. Who was/were the translator/s (agency, mediation, institutional context)? 5. How was the translation carried out (resources, medium, techniques, processes)? 6. Why was an object translated (motives, expectations, context of operation)? 7. For whom was an object translated (target audience and culture, demand, circulation, reception)? 8. What was the result or the end product of translation (hybridity, mistranslation, intranslatability)? 9. To what extent did these translations to Europe/France create a reverse effect towards the original source in Asia/Cambodia (source-target relationship, semantic changes, expectations)?

3.4. From translation to architectural transfer and transcultural heritage In the article “The metonymics of translating marginalised texts”, Maria Tymoczko asked how a translator makes non-canonical or marginalised literature understood by his or her audience31 by providing either “popular or scholarly translations”: […] the former are usually severely limited in their transfer intent and minimally representative of the metonymic aspects of the original, while the latter allow a good deal of meta-translation to proceed, presenting quantities of information through vehicles such as introductions, footnotes, appendices, parallel texts, and so forth. In a scholarly translation the text is embedded in a shell of paratextual devices that serve to explain the metonymies of the source text, providing a set of contexts for the translation. In the case of a popular translation, by contrast, the translator typically focuses on a few aspects of the literary text, which are brought to a broad segment of the target audience. (Tymoczko 1995, 18)

Tymoczko’s “popular or scholarly translations” mirrored what Walter Benjamin defined in his 1923 analysis Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers [“The translator’s task”] as “free or literal” translations32 – they depended on the translator’s choice of the unit of translation. Translation, however, not

only leads to new translation products but also – as mentioned above with reference to the multiple Angkor Wat copies – has concrete consequences for the original text ­itself: the translation “canonises the foreign text, validates its fame by enabling its survival”, in fact “creates it [and] reconstitutes it” and “freezes it, shows its mobility and its instability” (Venuti 1992, 7, 9, 11). The source text and its translation form a dynamic and mutual “source-target” relationship (Chesterman 1997, 8), in which popular/scholarly or free/literal translations reconfigure the original differently: Both individual translators and whole institutional complexes can be seen as veritable “cross-cultured mediators” (Bassnett 2011). Thus, we argue that source texts and their translations function within a mutually dependent, trans-cultural framework that touches, from a generalising viewpoint, upon the three different major ‘levels’ of culture: social culture (institutions like museums), mental culture (cultural stereotypes, norms, values), and material culture (artefacts, architecture) (compare Fig. Intro.2b). In the colonial case examined in our context in which translation happened not only between two languages but between ­totally different cultures or encyclopaedias, a European ­hegemonic “translation privilege” (Lepenies 1993, 66) stereotyped and mythologised the Asian source as the primitive and exotic Other (altogether as ‘the Orient’). Addition-

31  She judged that “metonymic aspects” (the recognition of the whole by readings its associative parts) were

essential in assimilating new literal formats or variations. The translator had to “either make some decisive choices about which aspects to translate – that is, do a partial translation of the literary information in the text – or seek a format that allows dense information transfer through a variety of commentaries on the translation” (Tymoczko 1995, 18), often defined as ‘paratextual devices’ (see these strategy primarily discussed in chapter III about museum spaces). 32  For the differentiation between Treue (“fidelity”), Wörtlichkeit (“literalness”), or Freiheit (“freedom”) by choice, in an “ideal echo of the original”, a “virtual translation between the lines, [an] interlinear version”, see Benjamin 1923.

41

Introduction

ally, this influenced the self-representation of the Own and the Self as the Occident within a dynamic “process of strangeness and familiarisation” (Carbonell 1996, 79, 84). In a typically colonial process of “code-switching” (Kittel 2004, 24, 25), original objects from the so-called Orient passed – by often violent extraction from their socially, and in the case of the Buddhist monastery of Angkor Wat, religiously embedded use-value at their original site and their transfer (trans-latio) over long distances and through different cultural-political orders and borders – into their new “representation [as] classified artefacts” (Bachmann-Medick 1997, 7; compare Krapoth 1998) within a new target culture.33 Their new, institutionalised settings were, as in our case, often ethnographic or art/architectural museums or temporary exhibitions, artificially themed heritage reserves and archaeological parks back in their ‘original’ place.34 A crucial question for the ‘translatability’ of architecture relates to its size, accessibility, and ownership. The history of how singular original fragments from architecture were appropriated for European museums (for example, the ‘Elgin Marbles’ from the Athens Parthenon for the British Museum) is certainly well known. In classical art history, however, architecture is generally defined as ‘immobile’. But this study on Angkor Wat will prove the contrary: also large architectural objects can be highly ‘mobile’ and can even travel back and forth between continents, in various repetitions and over centuries. However, Angkor Wat’s ‘trans-cultural’ trajectory over 150 years between 1860 and 2010 can only be traced, if our explanatory terms to describe the involved transfer-translation operations35 are profoundly reconsidered. This includes our evaluation criteria (such as ‘original and copy’, permanence and the ephemeral, see chart Fig. Intro.2a), the operational parameters of process (such as agency, know-how, funding, infrastructure, and changing political contexts) as much as the techniques employed (such as plaster casting, photography, cartography, etc.). All this needs to be brought into a new disciplinary ‘frame-work’ between global art history and global heritage studies.

If we keep in mind that the process of ‘re-presenting’ Angkor Wat in France was primarily informed through a kind of mimetic operation within the medium of plaster casts, the above-introduced term of substitution explains another facet: following definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary the Latin word substitutio implies an “action of placing something or someone in place of another [and/ or] the appointment of a person as alternative heir”. So applying a legal perspective – in which substitution means the “nomination of a person as being entitled [to] an inheritance” – to colonial translation as a practice to appropriate elements of Oriental material culture, the “action or act of putting one thing in place of another” allows the translating (colonial) agency to ‘inherit’ the object through the “transfer of any associated rights and duties”. Let’s revisit the phenomenon of code-switching to transform individual objects and even whole sites like Angkor Wat from their original, religious use-value into displayed architectural masterpieces in temporary exhibitions overseas or into protected objects in archaeological reserves. In the first volume, where the seventy year-long translation of Angkor Wat into French-colonial museum and exhibition spaces (1867–1937) will be mapped, we will see how these physical processes, the concrete agency behind them, and the varying museographical end products helped to transcribe Asian architecture into a European normative system. Also, monumental architectures like Angkor Wat were used as a powerful means with which to make tangible the Western notion of the East as an ineffective and chaotic land made up of ancient and powerful but lost civilisations (compare again Fig. 1 in this introduction). While partial or full-scale reconstitutions of the once glorious architecture were represented in Occidental displays in ideal or restored condition, the ‘original site’ was canonised as an ‘eternal ruin’, not least to satisfy the Western voyeuristic curiosity about the Far East. This truly transcultural scenario introduced cultural heritage as a concept that simultaneously reconstituted the original and enabled its survival (compare again Clifford’s “salvage paradigm” (Clifford 1989, 73). This con-

33  This tension within the code-switching from a present-day ‘use-value’ [Gebrauchswert] of an object into

a historical ‘age value’ [Alterswert] of a historical monument [ein gewordenes Denkmal] was for the first time conceptualised in the groundbreaking analysis about Der moderne Denkmalkultus (1903) by the art historian and first general conservator of the Austrian Habsburg empire, Alois Riegl (compare Falser 2005). 34  These museum and exhibition spaces were themselves “cultural translations […] by the virtue of their job in representing [alien] cultures through the medium of objects[:] a translation from the originating world of the objects into a new network of meanings and interpretations” (Sturge 2007, 131). 35  Taken from the vocabulary of translation studies, these transfer operations may comprise and combine “repetition through identical text processing, recycling, borrowing, copying, the compilation of various text fragments, adoptions and, finally, large-scale collages and pastiches, ranging from a mishmash of fragments to the mimicking [of] a certain style in a virtuoso manner à la manière de with the risk of overinterpretation”. Altogether these procedures represent overlapping strategies of free or literal and popular or scholarly translations, switching and combining “principals of equivalence” (similarity) and “contiguity” (referential connection) (Van Gorp 2004).

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

cept mirrored the European nation’s self-representation as the guardian of a progressive modernity on the one hand and of a mission civilisatrice towards the ‘degenerated Orient’ and its threatened cultural heritage on the other (Falser 2015a, compare Pl. Intro.2). In this process, Oriental architecture was gradually included in the coloniser’s own canon and practice of cultural heritage (French: patrimoine cultural), which was also ‘constructed’ using similar strate-

gies of architectural museum display back home (Pl. Intro. 17a,b). As a hypothesis of the first volume of this book suggests, these monumental translations represent not just the most spectacular modern-day operations in the field of material culture between the Asia and Europe. They are also unique case studies with which to open up the classical field of architectural historiography with a truly transcultural and global perspective (Pl. Intro.18).

4. Preliminary reflections to Volume 2: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon 4.1. From back-translation to third space When Richard Brislin in 1970 introduced his concept of “back-translation for cross-cultural research”, Cambodia entered a crucial cultural-political threshold, from a rather soft decolonisation into a second phase of unforeseen violence, spanning from the coup d’état against king and state leader Norodom Sihanouk (1970) and republican civil war (1970–75) to Khmer Rouge auto-genocide (1975–79) and Vietnamese occupation (1979–89). In order to check the quality of translations from one, original language into another, Brislin proposed to “evaluate the equivalence between source and target versions” through a third text (we come back to this very term below) in form of a back-translated version from target to source in order to compare semantic shifts. “Good translations” would therefore be achieved, if a) both translators involved (the one sourceto-target and the other back-from-target-to-source) “may have shared a set of rules” for their actions; if b) the “back-­ translator [would be] able to make sense out of a poorly written target language version”, and if c) “many of the grammatical forms of the source [would have been] retained from source to target versions”. At best, “bilingual translators” with a high “familiarity [and] competence” in both linguistic realms would, according to Brislin, guarantee the highest “equivalence of meaning”, scale and performance of both translations (Brislin 1970, 185–86, 191, 213). Building on the first volume of this book publication, Angkor in France, in which we aim at mapping the physical ‘translations of Angkor Wat’ for French-colonial museum and exhibition spaces between 1867 and 1937, the second volume will ‘go back to the source’ of those translations: Angkor in Cambodia. Doing this within a core period between 1900 and 2000, however, means that any wish to return to a so-called ‘original’ site (as classical art and architectural historians, guide book writers, tour guides and heritage politicians love to term it) will fail. As we shall see in the first volume: ‘Angkor-Wat-in-France’ became a target of different politics of canonisation following the coloniser’s own cultural understanding (high against low culture, ancient grandeur against present decadence, the primitive against the civilised, colonial salvage and civilising mis-

sion, etc.). At this moment, “the invention of the idea of the original coincide[d] with the period of early colonial expansion, when Europe began to reach outside its own boundaries for territory to appropriate”. But if the “metaphor of the colony as a translation, a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map” is a valid figure of thought in our context (Bassnett/Trivedi 1999, 2, 5), what did it mean to apply the established taxonomies of ‘Angkor-Watin-France’ back to its ‘real’ twin site in Cambodia? By taking up Brislin’s initial approach, we argue here that the entangled nature of the French-colonial endeavour, both in the métropole and le Protectorat français du Cambodge since 1867, had turned Angkor (Wat) in Cambodia itself into a ‘site of back-translation’ – one that would “give some insight into aspects of the structure, if not the meaning of the original”: With the whole aesthetic background from various museum and exhibitions displays in France being projected on it as a basis for further archaeological, architectural and restoration measures, it would “never [ever] be the same as the original” (after Baker 2011, 7). What theorists had identified already in 1970 as the challenge of “decentring”, aiming at “eliminat[ing] the distinction between source and target language” by focussing on a “dynamic equivalence” of shared “cultural symbols” (Werner/Campbell 1970, 398–99), can be applied for our case study: the back-translation of secularised Angkor Wat in France (the Occidental target culture and audience) to where the 12th-century religious temple had originally been built (the ‘Oriental’ source) produced what we conceptualise in this book as a new semantic umbrella – a third text – over Angkor (Wat), and a new ‘frame-work’ – a third space – for the ongoing physical manipulations at and cultural-political uses of the site. And all this happenend in the name of cultural heritage. As already mentioned above, this study aims at overcoming the old-fashioned and rather static operational terms of art and architectural history and heritage studies, such as original vs. copy; ancient vs. modern and contemporary; centre vs. periphery; either European or Asian etc. Especially in the second volume, we will focus on the “in-between spaces” (as the often-cited 43

Introduction

Homi Bhabha termed it in his 1994 book The location of culture)36 where those dichotomies and binaries got constantly fabricated and questioned, re-negotiated, appropriated, recycled and hybridised within an ongoing process of cultural translation, back-translation and re-translation. This conceptualising of the ‘cultural heritage called Angkor Wat’ as a multi-sited and multi-layered complex foregrounds the concrete agency of the diverse ‘translators’ and ‘readers’, as well as their varying strategies. Taking Said’s groundbreaking 1978 study on Orientalism37 one step further, Niranjana’s 1992 publication Siting translation reminded us on the “coercive machinery” and “conceptual economy” of imperial knowledge production processes. And within this machinery, translation figured prominently within the applied technologies and power practices in the “fixing of colonised cultures, making them static and unchanging rather than historically constructed”. With the particular help of disciplines like art history, normative and aesthetic concepts like “the original” were established for selected and often stereotyped (and at the same time simplified) cultural elements38 of the ‘other’. More relevant for the second part of this book, Niranjana’s study also advocated for a more dynamic, multi-sited – we call it ‘trans-cultural’ – approach that would read the “historicity of translation” as a continued process from often originally colonial, subsequently postcolonial and lately even neocolonial activities in which the coloniser, the colonised, the decolonised and eventually the re-colonised were all together active agents in the ongoing circles of round-trip translations (Niranjana 1992, 1–4, 7).39 Just as the versions of Angkor Wat in French museums and exhibitions until the 1930s were ‘multiple’ (chapters I to VIII in volume 1), the uses of the temple as cultural heritage in Cambodia were and in fact remain ‘multi-sited’ and ‘multi-layered’, as volume 2 aims to show: it ‘travelled’ from be-

ing an architectural masterpiece inside a French-colonial archaeological park (chapter IX) and a national icon during Cambodia’s decolonisation (chapter X) to a cultural hostage during Cold War politics (chapter XI) and finally to a fetish object for UNESCO’s neocolonial heritage agenda (chapter XII). This progression has yielded strange local effects that persist into the present (see epilogue II). In covering the next hundred years after establishing the French protectorate of le Cambodge, until the above-­ mentioned threshold of 1970, one focus of this study will be placed on bringing the various involved figures out of their often invisible role as veritable ‘back-translators’ (compare Venturi 1995, Breger/Döring 1998, Bartsch 1998): acting as cultural brokers between the European and Asian projects à la Angkorienne, those architects and engineers, archaeologists, conservators and politicians can indeed be conceptualised as ‘bi-lingual’ actors. On the one side, those actors were ‘expatriate’ Khmer-speaking French colonialists, like Henri Marchal setting up Angkor Park with his Cambodian colleagues (see him in Fig. IX.69); or Bernard Philippe Groslier as a close friend of the Cambodian king and chef d’état (see both on Fig. X.2) securing the French monopole over Angkor during Cambodia’s independence. On the other side, those actors could also be ‘indigenous’ postcolonial and French-speaking Cambodians: like state architect Vann Molyvann turning Angkor into a national property with his Cambodian co-workers (see him in Fig. X.28); or Norodom Sihanouk himself assisting UNESCO director general Federico Mayor to make Angkor World Heritage (see both Fig. XII.10a). At the end of France’s monopolistic grasp over the site in about 1970, the back-translation called Angkor Wat seemed to have reached its highest architectural, performative and patrimonial equivalence (compare our discussion about the temple’s affordance qualities) to both its re-imagined twelfth-century original

36  “We should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-be-

tween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national and anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (Bhabha 1994, 38–39). 37  Said’s dichotomous concept of the discursive, scientific and imperialist construction of a “difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Said 1978, 43) was criticised as too static, even if his 1993 study Culture and imperialism gave the “Third World” a certain agency. 38  As Homi Bhabha puts it: “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations” (Bhabha 1983, 27). 39  Or as Niranjana explained it with her case study of the colonial translation studies of William Jones of the Asiatic Society in British India, being so similar to the French-speaking engagement and ongoing institutional validity of the École française d’Extrême-Orient at (post)colonial Angkor: “The most significant nodes of Jones’s work are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their ‘own’ laws; and (c) the desire to ‘purify’ Indian culture and speak on its behalf. […] Colonial relations of power have often been re­ produced in conditions that can only be called neo-colonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the ‘English book’ as avidly as their ancestors. […] The term historicity thus incorporates questions about how the translation/re-translation worked/works, why the text was/is translated, and who did/does the translating” (Naranjana 1992, 13, 37, 7).

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

‘source’ and to its picture-perfect nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century ‘target’ versions in France as a temporarily materialised spectacle in French universal and colonial exhibitions (compare Pl. Intro.11 with Figs. IX.78a–c). Through all chapters, the enduring presence and impact of the French pre-, high-, past- and even neocolonial readings and ongoing translations and back-translations of Angkor – always in astonishing complicity with Cambodia’s Francophile elites – will be an important feature. But the ongoing French influence over ‘Angkor-in-Cambodia’ is just one part of the story. The first part of this book investigates the process of “translating Europe’s Others” (after Asad/Dixon 1985; compare Asad 1973, 1986, 1988), the construction history of a colonised “Third World culture” for a Western target audience, or, more precisely in our case, the selective establishment and presentation of a “canon” of Cambodia’s ancient art and architecture in French-colonial museums, exhibitions and archaeological displays (Angkor Park itself included!). In response to volume 1, the second part of this book turns its focus in the other direction. It asks not only about the “ever-widening circles to affect what various ‘Third World’ readers themselves c[a]me to see as apt representations of their own culture” (Dingwaney 1995, 6)40 but also about the role of those ‘indigenous users’ in helping to establish or eventually transform colonial-made (back)translations of Angkor, sometimes by “couching their claims in European terms” (Ramirez 2006, 372). Elements in this process around the above-quoted 1970 threshold are for example: King Sihanouk reading from his “native point of view” (after Gottowik 1998)41 from Bernard Philippe Groslier’s French 1958 book Angkor: Hommes et pierres during Sihanouk’s own (French!) 1969 film Crépuscule (Pl. Intro.19a–c, see chapter X and the series of Pl. X.25). Another interesting case here is the French-trained Cambodian draughtsman Dy Proeung’s work for the EFEO’s 1969 publication Angkor Vat: Description graphique du temple and his exhibition the temple (like in a French-colonial exhibition, compare Fig. Intro.1)

as a small-scale model for, again, Norodom Sihanouk after 1990 (Pl. Intro.20a,b; compare Pl. EpII.29a–c). A similar process was at play when the Republican leader Lon Nol hastily formulated – again in French – his doctrine of Néo-­ Khmerisme in 1974 with borrowed terms from French studies on the Angkorian past (Lon 1974). It seems that until then Angkor (Wat) as cultural heritage and identity construction – and also as a concrete architectural site – survived better in its French translation than in ‘original’ Khmer. After 1970 the heritage regime over the site would switch into global English (and almost never Khmer!) translation, and this remains the case today. More recent examples of ‘indigenous users’ of French translations of Angkor are the protagonists of the national Cambodian Angkor protection agency APSARA (established only after 1995 with the help of French experts) as they play their role as indigenous watchdogs of so-called ‘traditional and vernacular’ heritage in and around Angkor Park; or local monks still following French-colonial pattern books of ‘traditional’ pagoda design and Angkor Wat-styled reliefs (Pl. Intro.21a,b; see both contexts explained in epilogue II).42 By “mapping the third space” (compare Bachmann-­ Medick 1998) or dynamic “contact zone” (after Pratt 1992) where cultural translations, back-translations and re-translations of Angkor (Wat) were and still are renegotiated and appropriated – and “age” differently since their first ‘editions’ (Eco 2001, 22) – , the second volume of this study will show how typically Orientalist stereotypes of Angkor Wat’s past grandeur and present salvage affected Cambodia’s past-colonial scene. With different sorts of an “Orientalism in reverse” (after Al-Azm 1980) at play, the ‘Angkor Wat as cultural heritage’ formation was far from being uniform or ‘shared’ in its meaning. To the contrary, it was even more disputed as before: it was either further ‘archaeologised’ (after Falser/Juneja 2013b) under an ongoing French regime after Cambodian independence in 1953 (chapter IX) and essentialised as Khmer neo-nationalist and even Buddhist-socialist (chapter X); or ideologically

40  “The stakes for critical (and appositional) readings of Western translations of non-Western cultures are,

therefore, very high, since these translations affect not simply the ways in which non-Western cultures are perceived and discussed in the ‘First World’, but also how they are subsequently recuperated in various parts of the ‘Third World’ as well” (Dingwaney 1995, 6). 41  In his contribution “about the indigenous reception of ethnographic texts” (compare Clifford/Marcus 1986, Clifford 1988, Fabian 1983/1995), Volker Gottowik’s introductory example about how indigenous children in the Brazilian jungle got confronted forty years later with ‘ethnographic pictures’ about their recent (still primitive?) ancestors as published by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques from 1955, is interesting in comparing with Sihanouk’s reading of Groslier’s ‘archaeological gaze on ancient (great, but vanished?)’ Angkor. In this sense relevant for our case study, Gottowik explores the involved reading processes of estrangement, familiarising, mimicking/adopting/essentialising and/or eventually creative appropriation of Western descriptions about the ethnographic other (Gottowik 1998, 65–68, 75–79). 42  During my visit at the Wat Bo temple and monastery site near Siem Reap in 2010, the depicted monk presented his traditional pagoda design works and his monastery’s moulding workshop, and referred to the 2005 publication Kbach, A study of Khmer ornament by Chan Vitharin (Chan 2005), which was itself, in fact, based on many French-colonial studies in ‘traditional’ Khmer ornamentation patterns, such as George Groslier’s Arts et archéologie series from the early 1920s.

45

Introduction

downgraded (like during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime), re-colonised through age-old enemies (by invading Vietnam) or hijacked in the 1980s by other intercultural reference claims of inheritance and emergency salvage (such as from ‘Buddhist’ Japan, ‘Hinduist’ India or ‘social-

ist’ Poland; see chapter XI); instantly globalised around 1990 as part of a new ‘humanity’ slogan of conjoint world cultures (chapter XII); and finally (see epilogue II) hybridised on the local level into a curious heritage conglomerate (see this term explained below).

4.2. A ‘heterotopia’ called Angkor Park: An ‘enacted utopia’ of cultural heritage? The present epoch [is] above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. […] There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilisation, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in every founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. [italics MF] (Foucault 1986, 22, 24) Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (originally Des Espaces Autres, 1967)

The above-formulated approach of ‘cultural (back)translation’ helps to conceptualise the entangled nature of the diverse representations of ‘Angkor Wat in France and in Cambodia’, with closer attention paid to the various involved ‘translators and readers’. In order to comprehend the multi-sitedness of Angkor Wat as a configuration of ‘interconnected sites and simultaneous time frames’ across whole continents into global space, an additional explanatory model is called for. In the late 1960s the past-colonial French influence over politically independent Cambodia and, more precisely in our case, the French monopolistic regime to turn the Parc d’Angkor into a picture-perfect archaeological reserve, reached its apogee. Ten thousand kilometres westwards in Paris, one of the greatest French philosophers, Michel Foucault, talked in 1967 on Des es-

paces autres [On other spaces] and thereby introduced his concept of heterotopia.43 As we shall see, his concept was also updated by (architectural) historians until today to reflect the ‘global’ challenge of their discipline, 44 a scale that Foucault already addressed in his reflections when he touched upon “la totalité du monde” (Foucault 1984, 47). But before exploring Foucault’s explanatory model in more detail, it is worth mentioning that his own biography was in a curious manner ‘connected’ with Angkor: mirroring the “side-by-side” scenarios of a decolonising process in the former French territories in Asia and Africa (compare the quote above), Foucault (he lived from 1926 to 1984) was an almost exact contemporary of the most ambitious and visionary, but also the last, French Conservateur des monuments d’Angkor, Bernard Philippe Groslier (he

43  In December 1966 Foucault had already talked about Les hétérotopies in the radio of France-Culture in a

slightly different and longer version (see Foucault 1994/2009b), and both versions were recently reconstructed from various archival sources (Defert 1997 and 2009). In a letter in early March 1967, Foucault confirmed, from his writing retreat in Tunisia, that he was rather surprised to be invited by French architects, as his very first thoughts about a new science called “heterotopology” did not cover architecture per se. However, this thematic connection continued, and the first official French version of his 14 March 1967 Paris talk was published, with his consent just before his death in 1984, in the context of the Internationale Bauausstellung in West Berlin (Foucault 1984), where new urban construction and architectural preservation areas were presented ‘side by side’. The first English translation of the shorter French version was published in the USAmerican journal Diacritics in 1986 (this version will be used here, see Foucault 1986), and translated into German for the catalogue of the documenta X exhibition in Kassel/Germany in 1997. 44  Samples of architectural reflections include Edward Soja’s 1996 book on Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real and imagined spaces, in which he, in a full chapter on “Heterotopologies: Foucault and the geohistory of otherness”, investigated Foucault’s “trialectic of space-knowledge-power [in relation] to two other spatial disciplines, architecture and urban planning” (Soja 1996, 145–63, here 148). In his 1998 article “Writing architectural heterotopia” Henry Urbach mentioned the “display of incoherencies, fissures and contradictions” in heterotopic configurations (Urbach 1998, 348); and Gordana Fontana-Giusti in the 2013 book Foucault for architects again summarised Foucault’s approach (Fontana-Giusti 2013, 135–37).

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

lived from 1926 to 1986). On the one, French, side the famous philosopher reflected upon the phenomenon of the simultaneity and spatial connectivity of sites across long distances. More precisely, Foucault would do this on 14 March 1967 for the inviting Cercle d’études architecturales in Paris after a comment that he had written, interesting in our comparison, from his retreat in the Tunisian village of Sidi Bou Said near Tunis, the actual capital the ex-French­colonial protectorat de Tunisie (1881–1956). Living in decolonising Tunisia between 1966 and 1968, Foucault found himself situated close to the large archaeological zone of the ancient Phoenician-Roman city of Carthage, which he had visited with great interest.45 Like Angkor, this site had been investigated, mapped and protected by French-colonial archaeologists and administrators; promoted in the country’s early national era (when Foucault was there); made UNESCO World Heritage shortly after (in this case in 1979) and finally renegotiated in UNESCO’s ‘WorldHeritage­-in-Danger’ politics around 1990.46 On the other, postcolonial Cambodian, side the French archaeologist Groslier at the same moment in time ‘enacted interconnectedness’ through the applied practice of archaeology and architectural conservation. More precisely and most prominently, with his vision of a “reprise totale” of Angkor Wat (compare chapter IX, Groslier 1958b), Groslier – consciously or not and until he abruptly left Cambodia in early 1973 – ‘back-translated’ the picture-perfect, 1:1-scaled, ephemeral test version of the same temple from the 1931 Exhibition at Paris to the ‘original’ twelfth-century site itself. From the trial-and-error beginnings of 1907/8 to the first heydays of temple reconstruction in the 1930s and 1940s up to Groslier’s elaborated heritage regime of the Conservation d’Angkor in the 1960s with more than 1,000 workers, the French at their artificial Parc archéologique d’Angkor did indeed realise – in the realm of cultural heritage – what Foucault called, in a more abstract sense, an ‘enacted utopia’. In his rather short 1967 paper, Foucault labelled his own present epoch – contrary to the nineteenth century with “history” and its “themes of accumulating past [as] its great obsession” – as “the epoch of space [being characterised by] simultaneity, juxtaposition, the near and far, the

side-by-side and the dispersed, [within] a network of points and intersections, [and] relations among sites (Foucault 1986, 22, 23). As examples of those interconnected sites, he first elaborated on “utopias as sites with no real place [where the concerned] society would be presented in its perfected or upside-down-turned form”. Being related to utopias, Foucault introduced “heterotopias” [hetero = other; topos = site] as “counter-sites” or “effectively enacted utopias” in which all “the real sites found within a culture were simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986, 24; see full quote above).47 With his elaborated ‘six principles of heterotopia’, Foucault provides us with a suitable category, even a checklist and, above all, telling examples to investigate the multi-sited – transcultural – nature of the heritage formation of Angkor… one being interconnected between multiple French and Cambodian, European and Asian, sites and projects. As regards his first principle, Foucault stated that principally all cultures constitute heterotopias: In “so-called primitive societies, […] crisis heterotopias [would come as] privileged, sacred or forbidden places reserved for individuals […] in a state of crisis”. In modern societies those sites would be replaced by “heterotopias of deviation”, as places where behaviour would be “deviant” in relation to the general norms of society. “Along the borderline” of both primitive and modern versions “rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and retirement homes” qualified for Foucault’s first principle (Foucault 1986, 24, 25). With “leisure as a rule” added to the modern-day characteristics, Foucault’s first principle suits our transcultural constellation: visitors of museum spaces and ephemeral exhibition sites in France, as much as local inhabitants or practicing Buddhists in, and/or transregional pilgrims and international tourists to an originally sacred but also secularised and institutionally protected ‘archaeological park’ of Angkor would necessarily adapt their behaviour patterns ‘beyond the norms’ of daily live. Additionally, coping with a status of ‘crisis’ – as the salvage paradigm to fight threat and decay has it – is in fact the sine qua non motivation of any museum or heritage reserve. Following Foucault’s second principle, each heterotopia can, “according to the synchrony of the culture[s] in which

45  In the chapter The heterotopia of Tunisia inside her book Foucault’s Orient: The conundrum of cultural dif-

ference. From Tunisia to Japan, Marnia Lazreg refers to Foucault’s much appreciated visits to the archaeological site of Carthage and followed herself: “In many ways, Foucault’s perception and experience of Tunisia was a form of heterotopia characterised by its own temporality, history, politics, and anthropology” (Lazreg 2017, 161, 160). 46  The connection between Angkor and Carthage came up again around the 1990s when both sites were included in UNESCO’s ‘Heritage-in-Danger Listing’ politics, with the French-trained Tunisian research director of the National Institute of Archaeology and Art in Tunis, Azedine Beschaouch, being involved in both projects (see chapter XII). 47  His original French text sounded like this: “[…] des sortes de contre-emplacements, sortes d’utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l’intérieur de la culture sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, bien que pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables” [italics MF] (Foucault 1984, 47).

47

Introduction

occurs” (Foucault 1986, 25), have one or multiple functions. This fits our case, as between museums, exhibitions and the heritage park, the ‘trans-cultural’ configuration of Angkor itself always had a self-stabilising, self-assuring and self-justifying function for each regime’s raison d’être, for political education agendas and cultural narratives. Those comprised colonial self-justifying civilising missions until the 1960s (chapter IX), national narratives of age-old cultural grandeur (chapter X), various Cold War ‘inheritance claims’ over Angkor in the 1980s (chapter XI), UNESCO’s ‘Heritage of Humanity’ and ‘World Heritage in Danger’ politics around 1990 (chapter XII) and the international set-up over Ang­kor Park until today. It is safe to say that Ang­kor Park counts today as the heritage utopia par excellence, where the topos of salvaging archaeological pasts for ever-new ideological presents and imagined futures has been functionalised for the last 150 years (compare Falser 2015a,c). As we shall see, all those previous functions are still present at Angkor Park today (see epilogue II). If heterotopias, as a third principle, are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1986, 25), then our transcultural enquiry into the entangled ‘exhibitionary complexes’ (after Bennett 1988) à la Angkorienne in the Euro-Asian contact zone mirrors this observation rather perfectly. As we shall see in the first volume of this book, museums and universal/colonial exhibition sites merged various places of the world into one juxtaposed, space-and-time compressed, “endless spectacle of the [whole] world-as-exhibition” (Mitchell 1989, 19). More precisely, sculptures/casts and architectural fragments from Angkor stood on display in museum spaces, such as the musée Indochinois in Paris, with other artefacts from, for example, the Borobudur/Prambanan sites from backthen Dutch-colonial Java (see Figs. III.28, 36, 48a,b). Even more ‘spectacular’, Angkor-styled pavilions found themselves, as in the famous 1931 International Colonial Exhibitions, standing ‘side-by-side’ with a mud mosque from Afrique Occidentale Française or the Roman ruins from back-then Italian-colonial Libya (Fig. Intro.28). On the other side of this entangled relationship, Foucault’s example of the “garden […] to represent the totality of the world” (compare our remarks on ‘Oriental pavilions’ in Western pleasure gardens or universal/colonial exhibitions, see above) is reflected in the very name and concept of Angkor “Park”. But Foucault’s reflections reach even further: today,

Angkor Park (nominated in 1992), the temples of Preah Vihear (in 2008) and the seventh-century temple zone of Sambor Prei Kuk (in 2017) – all of them built from different periods in time – are now standing side-by-side with other sites in a “universalising heterotopia” (Foucault 1986, 25), namely UNESCO’s World Heritage List (Fig. Intro.29): above so many others, the ninth-century Indonesian sites on Java (inscribed 1991), the sixteenth-century mud complexes from Mali’s old Djenné towns (nominated 1988), the Leptis Magna archaeological park in Libya (inscribed 1982), and the Mayan temples in Mexico, the Forum Romanum in Italy and the Great Wall of China. According to his fourth principle, Foucault compared heterotopias with nineteenth-century institutions of a typically Western modernity, like archives, museums and libraries as “places outside of time [in their function] to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes”. Foucault also called out transitory festivities and fairgrounds, and vacation villages to “rediscover timeless Polynesian life”48 as examples of sites with an endless “accumulation [of] various slices of time [qua] heterochronies” (Foucault 1986, 26). All those were once present in temporary colonial and universal exhibitions with their replicas of global antiquities next to ethnographic displays. However, his observation also fits here with the archaeological reserve of Angkor Park in the second volume: temples from the pre-­ Angkorian ninth to the Angkorian eleventh to thirteenth centuries CE, different religious (Hindu to Buddhist) contexts and different functions (from ancient out-of-use ruins to active monasteries like Angkor Wat) were and still are historically and aesthetically flattened and synchronised, and ex lege merged through various heritage schemes into one single protected and homogenised heritage reserve. Here, the accumulation and display of temporal and physical layers was achieved in the physical practice of unearthing the archaeological strata from different epochs of Khmer civilisation. And the presentation of these different layers in a park-like setting produces a simultaneous and all-comprising experience of visual consumption, made available for globalised heritage tourism along predefined itineraries for sunrise to sunset spots. “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable”, as Foucault’s fifth principle had it (Foucault 1986, 26). Limited access by permission and compulsory (paid) entries along legally determined and controlled border-

48  In his longer French text version, Foucault referred here to the village Sidi Bou Said near the archaeolog-

ical site of Carthage at the same Tunisian maritime coastline, where, further north, “the Club Méditerranée“ had already established its “vacation villages at Djerba” with similar neo-primitive “straw huts [paillotes]” (Foucault/Defert 2009b, 25, 31). Those versions had already been used in universal and colonial exhibitions (such as in Marseille 1922 or Paris 1931) to display ‘authentic indigenous people’ from the French colonies next to the Angkor Wat replica (compare Figs. VI.15a,b; VII.22c, 24b), and they came up again in the late 1990s when the global heritage schemes at Angkor Park aimed at staging again neo-vernacular good life in neo-traditional farms and eco-villages (see below and epilogue II).

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

Figure Intro.28  A postcard about the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris with its ­various colonial heritage icons, radiating from the Arc de Triomphe of the French capital (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Figure Intro.29  Screenshot from the online map of all inscribed sites of UNESCO’s World ­Heritage List in September 2018, section between Europe and Southeast Asia (including Angkor in the lower right section) (Source: © UNESCO Paris)

49

Introduction

lines make both museums and universal/colonial exhibitions, and archaeological parks, qualify for this criterion. In the case of Angkor Park, the discussion about ‘what is inside and outside of the protection perimeter’ or so-called ‘core and buffer zones’ of the world heritage site of Angkor is an ongoing feature from 1900 until today (see chapters IX and XII; compare Pl. IX.10a,b and 13 with Pl. XII.8 and 15–17). This includes ambivalent strategies of ‘how to treat the local population and religious stakeholders’ within the enacted – archaeologised and dead? – heritage reserve. How contested the ‘space in-between’ the conception of Angkor Park as secure, longue durée storage of preserved temples (compare Foucault’s fourth principle of heterotopia), and its colonial-exhibition-like ethnographic exploita­ tion approach is, may best be indicated by the recent denomination of Angkor as a “Living Museum” (see epilogue II) (Pl. Intro.22). According to Foucault’s sixth and last principle, heterotopias serve either as “spaces of illusion” or of “compensation”, as they are “regulated [on] a rigorous plan” and as “perfect, meticulous and well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled”. In this context, Foucault called “brothels and colonies […] two extreme types of [such] heterotopias” (Foucault 1986, 26). Interestingly, he addressed (only in the French unabridged version of his text) the “nineteenth and twentieth-century colonies” where the colonial agents “dreamt about a hierarchised and military society” (Foucault/Defert 2009b, 34).49 In this short remark, he explicitly mentioned the colonial protagonist who fostered France’s early twentieth-century colonial endeavour and, even more important in our context, who officially opened the perfect heterotopic mix between fairground, festivity and colony, the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition 1931 in Paris: Maréchal Lyautey (see him, in Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire of 1984, depicted ‘side by side’ with the British guests of honour, Cambodian guards and the Angkor Wat replica in the background, compare Fig. Intro.1a). In our case, cultural heritage as a) a modern-day Western concept and an ideologically exploited tool during Europe’s era of imperialist expansion, and b) a multi-sited conglomerate of well-arranged museums, temporary fairgrounds and delimitated heritage reserves like Angkor Park qualify for this principle: both versions provided and still provide an illusion of the mastery of, and/or a compensation for the destructive effects of the project of modernity as a whole. From a higher conceptual viewpoint on heterotopias, Angkor exhibition scenarios in the French métropole as much as Angkor Park as spatial

configuration have since their inception always served the various – colonial, postcolonial, international and global – regimes as Janus-faced sites for the illusion of – and at the same time the compensation for the (real or imagined) loss of – cultural grandeur. With the Parc archéologique d’Angkor, initiated after Siam’s 1907 retrocession of the area and decreed in 1925/30, the French regime in colonial Cambodge could finally present an iconic heritage site that surpassed Dutch-colonial Borobudur on Java or British-colonial archaeological sites in India.50 Until about 1970 Angkor Park would compensate France (as a kind of cultural capital) for what it had lost in political influence during the decolonising process of Indochina. At this moment the world’s largest archaeological reserve would equally help to foster the cultural self-understanding of independent Cambodia as the smallest newborn nation-state in Asia (chapter X). In the time that followed, Angkor Park was taken diplomatic hostage by the dystopian and later exiled Khmer Rouge regime between 1975/79 and 1989. And it was enmeshed in various inheritance claims from Asian countries like Japan and India (see chapter XI), as it became shortly after a self-assuring factor in the United Nations’ questioned role at the end of the Cold-War period when Angkor became the prestige project of UNESCO’s heritage programme (see chapter XII). As a consequence, World Heritage Angkor became a global test site, market place and vanity fair for so-called (ad hoc) heritage experts from Japan and China to France, Germany, Italy and the United States, etc., with their laptop-ready PowerPoint presentations about the latest heritage management schemes and ‘training the locals’ sessions (compare epilogue II). I would like to close the full circle of the transcultural history of Angkor-as-heritage with the observation that many of the French-made museum and universal/colonial exhibition scenarios of picture-perfect Angkor (Wat) were ‘back-translated to the real spot’ and crystallised within a colonial heritage utopia called Angkor Park. Conceptualising Foucault’s heterotopia as interconnected spaces and time frames that constantly add up and finally ‘juxtapose’ within a palimpsestic configuration in the present takes us to the provocative hypothesis of chapter XII and epilogue II: many the French-colonial strategies for Angkor Park itself re-emerged around and after 1990, were recycled and finally hybridised into a new, rather neocolonial heritage utopia called World Heritage of Angkor.51 It may be safe to say that – with the unique architectural, performative and patrimonial affordance quality of historic Angkor

49  “C’est ainsi qu’à la fin du XIXe et au début encore du XXe siècle, dans les colonies françaises, Lyautey et ses

successeurs ont rêvé de sociétés hiéarchisées et militaires” (Foucault/Defert 2009b, 34).

50  At the same time, it was often called France’s late Asian compensation for the loss of Pondicherry in India

or Alsace-Lorraine in the French-German border zone (in 1871).

51  From this viewpoint, ‘colonial’ and ‘neocolonial’ Angkor Park would both qualify as heterotopian sites

whose inter-related “spatialities of order” [are] legible” today (Topinka 2010, 54; compare Winter 2007a, 63–66).

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

Wat (see above) and now the one of the whole Frenchcolonial-­made archaeological reserve set-up itself – Angkor Park was more suited than any other heritage site for UNESCO’s ‘universal’ civilising mission in the medium of cultural heritage (Falser 2015a,c). Using Kevin Hetherington’s 1997 interpretation of Foucault’s concept in his book The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering, we see that an instantly globalised Angkor Park was arguably the perfect “site of alternate ordering” (Hetherington 1997, 9). In this sense, it was an ‘enacted utopia’ for a global ‘heritage-of-humanity’ community as envisioned in the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention – at precisely the moment around 1990 when the old Cold War blocks collapsed and a new global era commenced. From this viewpoint, both the colonial and the global Angkor Park were preferred targets of a kind of “utopic engineering” process, as Hetherington summarised it from an abstract point of view: Within the process of the utopic engineering of social space, certain sites will be more amenable to this utopic practice than others. They will become nodes in a network of social spaces that have a degree of centrality and influence within that set of relations. […] In other words, within a society and the social order through which it represents itself, certain new sites, or newly interpreted sites, will emerge that offer an alternative expression of social ordering to that which currently prevails. Within modern societies, that alternate ordering is often autopic one that looks to how society might be improved in the future (Hetherington 2001, 51).

However, as unique as the ‘success story’ of the internation­ al salvage campaign of Angkor Park may have been around 1990 (as UNESCO bureaucrats like to sell it until today), the ‘neocolonial’ aspect was evident in a) the site’s rushed nomination process being pushed through by individual actors against all odds; b) the perpetuation of an international control and coordination mechanism over Angkor Park beyond any time-limited emergency action; and c) the installation of the same months before any local protection system could be set up institutionally and be made operational. As a result, Angkor Park is not only the world’s largest archaeological heritage reserve but is arguably the only one on the planet in which a national agency is not a fully independent actor on its own site: until today, not a single major temple in Angkor Park – why not its unquestioned masterpiece, Angkor Wat, to start with in the first place? – is independently managed by a Cambodian team! As a result of this neocolonial nature after 1990, the world heritage site of Angkor today can be conceptualised as a new, multi-layered and multi-sited “hyper-heterotopia” (Marinelli 2009, 425):52 one that can be read from the outside as an updated version of a “hyper-colonial” concession-style’ (after Rogaski 2004, 11) where different international projects care for their different temple restoration projects individually (compare Pl. EpII.7–9), propagate ‘their typical way of practice’ (Figs. Intro.30a–c), but share information in order to have the whole international system functioning. A neocolonial reading from the inside indicates that Angkor Park comes, since 1995, with a new national protection agency and its local actors who partially mimic old colonial

52  With his study “Making concessions in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Italian colonialism in mainland China” Maurizio Marinelli investigated the historic colonial and presently commodified Italian concession in Tianjin (in place between 1860 and 1945). What he called the site’s present-day status of a “hyper-heterotopia” is also valid for the present status of Angkor Park: “a hyphenated space, something in between which lives and breathes both historically and emotionally between different worlds, [which] still maintains the symbolic sanitised order of colonial power but not its semantics: a localised globality and a globalised locale, a third, liminal, interstitial space that exists ‘in between’ competing cultural traditions, national boundaries, historical periods and also critical methodologies of seeing and understanding” (Marinelli 2009, 425; quoting Bhabha 1994, 218). In his analysis of historical Tianjin (Marinelli 2009, 402–412), Marinelli also describes the concession with attributes that also apply to both the French-colonial and neocolonial set-up of Angkor Park, now with different international conservation teams at play: the process of “multiple imperialisms with both foreign-foreign and foreign-indigenous practices and representations”; the different “emotional experiences” attached to the multi-layered, “internal and external spaces” (in our case, Angkor Park as an on-site archaeological and administrative practice or as a metaphor and “showcase” of colonial mastery and cultural prestige); the specific “habitus of colonial agency” (after Bourdieu 1984) and during international “co-presence”; the “annihilation of the previous spatial organisation of the site” and the “use of new building codes, architectural styles [and] of a new set of regulations” (like over-writing or “re-naming” the indigenous spatial use patterns at Angkor with a new circulation system over Angkor Park); and the issue of “extraterritoriality” (in our case, the ongoing special status of Angkor Park as a protected reserve after 1925/30, its special status during Japanese occupation around 1940 or as ‘national property’ during Cambodia’s independence, the debate of a ‘neutral zone’ for Angkor Park during the Cold War confrontation (see chapter XI), and its delimitation as UNESCO World Heritage in 1992). Elements of the present commodification of ‘ex-colonial Tianjin’ also apply to present-day Angkor Park: “Tianjin today tries to sell the ex-colonial built forms for progress, obscuring other narratives of forced relocation of the tenants and expropriation of their lodgings. […] Tianjin is re-packaging the colonial past and selling it as the beginning of its internationalization” (Marinelli 2009, 420).

51

Introduction

Figures Intro.30a—c  Temple restoration in the technique of anastylosis of the École française d’Extrême-­ Orient, as propagated in Maurice Glaize’s guidebook Les monuments du groupe d’Angkor of 1948 (above); and the propagation of the recent work of the Archaeological Survey of India at Ta Prohm (a site originally conceived by the EFEO as a heavily overgrown and ‘romantic’ ruin), as presented in the 2013 World Heritage Journal special issue on World Heritage in Cambodia (below, compare both illustrations with Pl. EpII.9a,b and 10c) (Source: Glaize 1948, 54, 55; World Heritage, special issue 68 (June 2013), 36)

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4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

strategies of establishing an archaeological landscape with a site corrosion process in the form of a social, religious and “spatialised alterity at various scales” (Samuels 2010, 71).53 In cultural alienation from an originally Buddhist site, however, our case, those scales include the neo-picturesque in low- has increased in recent years (above others, Miura 2015, tech horse-cart tourism, the neo-traditional in re-invented Brumann/Berliner 2016). To stay with Foucault’s wording: housing and farming styles, or the neo-vernacular in reset- Did the enacted utopia of Angkor Park finally turn into a tled eco-villages. Severe criticism from ethnographers, an- “degenerate utopia” of a cultural heritage Disney­land (after thropologists and cultural heritage theorists against this on- Silverman 1980,54 compare White/Faramelli/Hancock 2018)?

4.3. From world heritage back to world’s fair: Angkor Park as a theme park? The stated neocolonial character over present-day Angkor comes itself a universal and (neo)colonial exhibition. In Park has, effectively, a twofold reverse effect that reaches order to approach this hypothesis, a new research field even further back along our enquiry of the ‘Angkor-as-her- needs to be considered, which also helps to bridge the itage’ formation between European and Asian projects… old-fashioned conceptual divide between so-called ‘origiback into the findings in volume 1: not only were old ele- nal’ heritage sites with their supposedly stable and ‘authenments of French-colonial Angkor Park recooked on the tic’ (here archaeological) monuments on the one side, and spot, practices from French universal and, more important, artificial (often ephemeral) architectural re-creations on colonial exhibitions also resurfaced when Angkor was archi­ the other: Theme Park Studies.55 tecturally staged and performed in Paris between 1878/89 In his 2002 essay “The past as a theme park” the postand 1931/37 and in Marseille 1906/22 (see chapters II–VIII). modern father of critical heritage studies, David LowenTaking our methodological approach of ‘cultural (back) thal, reminded us (by referring to his ground-breaking translation processes within our Euro-Asian contact zone’ 1985 book The past is a foreign country) that all cultural one step further into the formation of a kind of back-back-­ heritage constructions per se, be they produced in “theme translation, and applying Foucault’s heterotopian, multi­- parks in the present [or in] landscapes of the past as we see sited concept of the simultaneous and palimpsestic ‘near them, are an artifice, an invention, a construct, an illusion”; and far or side by side’ to the current situation, will finally the applied “Arcadian tricks” to simulate order and control, lead us, in epilogue II, to the last hypothesis of this publi- as much as to “conflate” various time layers into one cohercation: the ‘enacted utopia’ of present-day Angkor Park ent and flattened display, are in fact, to take some of with its neocolonial characteristics finally closes the full Lowenthal’s examples, similar in “themed gardens of the global circle within its transcultural trajectory and be- Middle Ages”, eighteenth-century European landscape gar-

53  In his 2010 article “Of other scapes: Archaeology, landscape, and heterotopia in Fascist Sicily”, Joshua

Samuels suggested to define heterotopia, “for archaeological purposes, as real spaces that, by juxtaposing incommensurate spatial, temporal, or social systems, generate a jarring, disorienting, or disturbing alternate ordering. These spaces are most usefully understood as generating new kinds of meaning, rather than foreclosing them” (Samuels 2010, 68). Applying this definition to heterotopic – archaeological – landscapes that emerged through land reforms, building projects and resettlement programmes by the Italian Fascist regime to present-day Angkor Park means the following: a supposedly “voluntary resettlement of farmers to new rural farmhouses for hygienic improvement [and] as vehicles of moral hygiene” (Samuels 2010, 72–73) were applied justifications for neo-traditional housing and farming showcases inside, and the so-called Run Ta-Ek eco-village planning outside Angkor Park (see epilogue II). 54  In his “interpretive topology – from utopia/dystopia to heterotopia” Hugh Silverman quoted a 1977 paper by the French philosopher Louis Marin on “Disneyland: A degenerate utopia” (see the comparison between the American theme park and the Angkor archaeological park below: “A degenerate utopia, writes Marin, is a fragment of the ideological discourse realised in the form of a myth or a collective fantasy”) (Silverman 1980, 173). 55  Interestingly, the architectural fabrication processes of themed environments were particularly rich in research material, for example from studies on “fairground architecture” (Braithwaite 1968) and “merchandised architecture” (Wassermann 1978), all the way to Walt Disney’s Imagineering (Imagineers 1996/2005), the “special effects in scripted places” like Las Vegas (Klein 2004), and from Dreamworld architecture (Herwig/ Holzherr 2006) and the 2010 Dreamlands exhibition in Paris Centre Pompidou (Dreamlands 2010) to “theme park designing” (Younger 2016).

53

Introduction

dens,56 the “ruins [like] Masada as a produced icon of na- 13,000 kilometres apart from each other. Interestingly, the tional identity” for Israel (compare the role of Angkor Park Disney-Angkor connection continues until today, as visitors as much as cinemagoers are immersed in the same for the Cambodian nation-state) and in actual theme parks being “reshaped by global demands thousands of miles ‘lost-in-the-jungle’ scenarios where Indiana Jones’ ‘Temple away” (Lowenthal 2002, 14, 11, 16, 18). In the same edited of the Forbidden Eye’ became part of a discovery walk at volume, Terence Young localised “theme park landscapes Disney World (Pl. Intro.23a) or where Lara Croft in the in the era of commerce and nationalism”, defining them as film Tomb Raider (compare Winter 2000/2002) would walk secularised “pilgrimage sites within today’s mass culture” in 2001 through real but enhanced Angkor (Fig. Intro.31, (compare the performative affordance of Angkor Wat for Pl. Intro.23b). the French-colonial regime, as introduced above). In his It was in this sense that the 2010 volume Staging the study – and this is also an issue in our second epilogue past: Themed environments in a transcultural perspective reabout contemporary Angkor Park – “native people” are of- directed a Western-centric take on theme parks towards ten an “impediment” for a conflict-free and harmonious “global cultural entanglements” within the Euro-Asian condisplay, and “local and regional identities are steadily erod- tact zone57 and added the issue of “cross-cultural theming” ed and lost to park operators pursuing profit and national of the “past of one’s own and of the exotic Other” into the allegiance” (Young 2002, 3, 10). In the same year Margaret research agenda. Hence, the definition of “themed environKing defined theme parks as “hybrid descendants of world’s ments” was conceptually enlarged to “blur the boundaries” fairs, museums, and the architectural follies and pleasure between all forms of “spatialising history” to include opengardens”, as “a total-sensory-engaging environmental art air museums, sites of historical re-enactments, live perforform” and as a “social artwork designed as a four-dimen- mances on picturesque stages, shows of ‘traditional’ cultures, cultural theme parks (Pl. Intro.24a,b) and colonial sional symbolic landscape”. According to her, theme parks would “distil cultural values and ideas (and not artefacts)” exhibitions (Schlehe/Hochbruck 2010, 7–16).58 In his conand evoke “impressions of places and times (real and im- tribution “The presence of pastness” Cornelius Holtorf – aginary)”. Additionally, theme parks would tell cultural important for our argumentation – added “ruins, other arnarratives that the visitors could totally immerse them- chaeological sites and artefacts that evoke the past” to the selves in by walking through a camera-ready “series of vi- list of themed environments (in fact, Alois Riegl’s ‘age-value’ gnettes and sequences of themed stage-sets” with “material from 1903, compare Falser 2005/2008b). He argued that artefacts foreshortened as icons and images, free of contra- “seeing a historical narrative, […] seeing the ruin’s pastness” dictions [and] without claims of authenticity” (King 2002, will be the decisive moment to indicate the “similarities be2–3, 5, 9). King made theme parks an American invention, tween themed environments and cultural heritage: both a with Disneyland/Anaheim, California, from 1955 as the successfully themed environment evoking the past and [my first and until today most important example. However, emphasis] a famous archaeological site or artefact will need how far removed was the making of Walt Disney’s imagi- to be staged appropriately in order to possess the property neered theme park called Magic Kingdom (compare Imagi- of being past”. As a consequence, “the boundary between neers 1996, 2005), one may ask with an ironic twist, from what is genuinely old and what is artificially new [will] lose the late-colonial reinvention of the glorious kingdom of its meaning” (Holtorf 2010, 36, 37). Through this meth­ odological lens it becomes evident that archaeology/conAngkor in form of an ‘archaeological park’? This happened roughly at the same moment in time, with comparable in- servation as a practice and ‘authentic’ monuments in arfrastructural, visual and physical devices (bonded areas; chaeologically themed spaces (like the French-colonial Parc entry booths; prepared picturesque vistas; park-like itiner- archéologique d’Angkor from 1925/30 and the world heritaries, etc.), and partly for the same clientele of the emerg- age site of Angkor since 1992) run through similar processing global culture-cum-leisure-tourism, but the two were es to get “branded” as aesthetic products (Holtorf 2007).59 56  In the same volume, additional papers reflected on those entanglements between landscape/pleasure gar-

dens, theme parks and the picturesque (Schenker 2002, Harwood 2002), which also played an important role when archaeological parks, such as Angkor Park, were established and designed (see Falser 2013d, compare Weiler 2013). 57  In this sense Joy Hendry, in her 2000 publication The Orient strikes back: A global view of cultural display, studied Japanese and Chinese theme parks (in a side remark, she mentions the Angkor Wat model in Bangkok’s Grand Palace) (Hendry 2000, 119, see our discussion in epilogue I; compare Schlehe/Uike-Bormann 2010, Weiler 2016). For the interconnectedness of Asia in Europe and Europe in Asia, see Ravi/Rutten/Goh 2004. 58  One definition of themed environment is “[…] all themed material forms that are products of a cultural process aimed at investing constructed spaces with symbolic meaning and at conveying that meaning to inhabitants and users through symbolic motifs” [italics MF] (Schlehe 2010, 9; after Gottdiener 2001, 5). 59  Both count as equal features in our globalised “experience society and popular culture” (Holtorf 2005,

54

4. Preliminary reflections to volume two: Angkor Wat in Cambodia — From Jungle Find to Global Icon

Figure Intro.31  Film set of Tomb Raider with an artificial fishing village in front of Angkor Wat in 2000 (Source: Winter 2002, 335)

In his 2007 book The themed space: Locating culture, nation, and self, Scott Lukas underlined the “unifying nature that characterises a theme”. He expanded the scientific enquiry on “theming” to the combined “use of immersive landscapes, the [applied] technologies, holistic/connected architectures [and] human performances” and to the underlying and often-used “cultural stereotypes made possible by co­ lonialism”. In this sense, Lukas investigated the same “behind-the-scenes” techniques to “stage authenticity” (after MacCannell 1973/89), and the same involved actors and political-ideological-economic motivations for his theme park studies (Lukas 2007, 2, 7, 14, compare Lukas 2008/2014), which are also central in our inquiry about the making and

constant re-making of Angkor Park. In his 2016 edited volume Lukas defined themed space as constituted by “an overarching narrative, symbolic complex, or story”, and immersive space as motivated by “the idea that a space and its multiple architectural, material, performative, and technological approaches may wrap up or envelop a guest within it” (Lukas 2018, 3–15). Like this, the topic of theme parks, universal/colonial exhibitions and “themed spaces as ruins” (like Angkor Park) came to an overlap. In this sense, Colonial Williamsburg (a decisive place for the history of US-American independence in the seventeenth century) was termed “a living museum”, like Angkor Park (see Pl. Intro.22), and both may count as “imagineered historical places”.60

2009a; compare Planel/Stone 1999). To the contrary, Paulette McManus’ short paper “Archaeological parks: What are they?” still focussed on the “authenticity” of monuments, a non-profit and educational approach, and “conservation rather than public service at the core of purpose” as the major criteria (McManus 1999, 57, 59). 60  Colonial Williamsburg was transformed with a certain Beaux-Arts signature in the 1920s and 1930s (the same moment when the French-colonial Angkor Park was decreed and produced through Beaux-Arts architects) into “Colonial Williamsburg” or “the Revolutionary City”. It counts today as the “world’s largest living history museum” (Kerz 2016, 195, compare Lounsbury 1990). Kerz herself brought her case study into our above-quoted methodological approach: “Colonial Williamsburg is also a Foucauldian heterotopia that nar-

55

Introduction

Even more challenging is a case study on The Lost City as an artificial entertainment landscape as part of the Sun City resort in South Africa in comparison to the ways that (inter)national conservation teams today keep on selling the old colonial myth of ‘Angkor lost and found in the jungle’ (Pl. Intro. 25a,b; compare Figs. I.7, II.1a–c; III.16a,b; VI.2a–d; IX.7a; Pl. IX.24b; Pl. XI.33a).61 With a view on their worldwide extension, political exploitation, “hyper-commercial interpenetration” and the “imperial eye” of their planners, Susan Davis introduced the term of global “media conglomerates” (Davis 1996, 408, 405, 417) for artificial theme parks. Many of her observations correspond with our observation of a neocolonial and super-commercialised set-up of Angkor Park and its ‘branded’ cultural icon, Angkor Wat (Pl. Intro.26a,b). As an archaeologically themed total environment with often over-restored temple architecture Angkor Park today comes with pavilion-like fetishes of international compe­ tition, facade-oriented spatial landscape markers inside a carefully packaged pilgrimage site of global and regional

mass tourism, or picturesque stages for folkloristic performances full of cultural stereotypes and narratives. Aesthetically, Angkor Park and Angkor Wat reconnect to where they started in our transcultural history: archaeologically themed universal and colonial exhibitions. Yet, with an ­ever-more and faster import and test-like application of global heritage schemes, and the site’s amalgamation into a whole tourist district beyond classical park boundaries – including restructured Siem Reap city with its Cambodian Cultural Village (see Pl. Intro.24b,c, compare Pl. EpII.24), and a whole network of other archaeological sites in the wider vicinities – Angkor has mutated into a totally new, both fascinating and shocking, transcultural heritage conglomerate. The overall aim of this book is to map and contextualise its more than 150 year-long multi-sited (heterotopian) formation process between European and Asian projects – in two volumes of text and, for the first time ever in such detail, with more than 1,200 plans and illustrations as a kind of visual anthology besides the written analysis.

rates and hence (re)produces the ideas of the American nation 365 days a year by including stories of achievement and bravery while excluding those of failure and misery” [italics MF] (Kerz 2016, 198). And indeed, with its restored, reconstructed and partially re-invented structures inside an open heritage reserve, and with ‘local’ populations being a living part of the picturesque scenario (others were relocated), the “imagineered historical place” of Colonial Williamsburg (Francaviglia 1995) can serve as a comparable example to historic and contemporary Angkor Park. 61  The same “three-component-mythic narrative discourse” (van Eaden 2016, 212, compare Hall 1995) is at work in Lost City: the legend of a pre-modern idyllic tribe with its magnificent palace brought to an end by a disaster, leaving only an enchanted ruin as archaeological evidence of former greatness. Leaving the secure hotel zone to walk a ‘bridge of time’ as a threshold to the archaeologically themed and timeless space (compare the same set-up between the tourist hub of Siem Reap along a highway into Angkor Park), visitors ‘re-discover’ and immerse themselves in a para-colonial romance with the Lost City, made with ruined facades and columns from glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, before they get rewarded with a fresh beer (compare with Fig. IX.25, Pl. Intro.26b).

56

I

Lost in Translation? The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor at the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1867

1. Mouhot’s civilising vision from Angkor Wat’s central passageway The pagoda of Angkor Wat and the ruins of Angkor Thom were not rediscovered by Mouhot, as one says. And there is a simple reason for this: they had never been forgotten nor lost. (Bouille­vaux 1874, 131)

There were, of course, many accounts of the glorious temples of Angkor before direct French-colonial impact on Indochina. These included the famous report of the Chinese delegate Zhou Daguan from around 1300 (rediscovered in Abel-Rémusat 1819; compare Philpotts 1996, Smithies 2001), accounts from the post-Angkorian period (see especially Vickery 1977), Portuguese reports from 1600 onwards (Groslier 1958), a first plan of Angkor Wat made by a Japanese visitor in the 1630s (Peri 1923; compare Pl. IX.1), a­ ccounts from Cambodia as a tributary kingdom under Siamese domination until the mid-1860s (see especially Chandler 1973, 1976a, 1983; compare the epilogue to this volume), and reports from random, short European visits up to 1850, such as that of the French missionary CharlesÉmile Bouillevaux (Bouillevaux 1858, 1874, 1879; see the introductory quote above). However, it was the report based on the 1860 visit of the French amateur naturalist and anthropologically inclined explorer Henri Mouhot that was propagated by French historiography as proof that a French citizen was the first to ‘discover Angkor’. Mouhot’s report became a farreaching, strategically exploited document telling Europe about Angkor and “using Angkor to popularise the French presence within Indochina in the Metropolitan opinion” (Dagens 2005a, 279). Ironically, especially as regards the extreme pride France later took in Angkor, Mouhot had spent many years of his early life in Russia, and his travels to the Upper Cambodian temples of Angkor (which from 1794 to 1907 was part of British-influenced Siam) and to the Laotian border zone were, after many fruitless petitions to uninterested French ministries, originally commis­ sioned (but not financed) by London’s Royal Geographic Society.1 The colonial-expansionist movement towards Southern China via the Mekong River first gained momentum with the British in India and Burma to the southwest

and with the French in Cochinchina, a region including Saigon in the southeast of the Indochinese Peninsula. Mouhot’s report on his three-week stay at Angkor in January 1860 was first published in French in the popular Tour du Monde in 1863, in revised form in English in 1864 under the monograph title Travels in the central parts of Indo­ china, and re-edited in French in 1868.2 Finally, it was republished in both languages in 1989 as Cambodia was on its way to being ‘reborn’ as the youngest Asian nation-state under UN supervision and French leadership, and as the myth of Angkor entered a new stage of a global commodification through cultural heritage politics (see chapters XI and XII in the second volume of this book). Overlooking for the moment the interesting variations in the different publications, the significance for this study lies in the fact that French-colonial propaganda and the mass media did not simply posthumously make Mouhot (who died in Laos near Luang Prabang on 10 November 1861) into the ‘discoverer of Angkor’ and a compatriot and hero; it is even more important and often overlooked that Mouhot himself formulated his architectural hymn to Ang­ kor using a unique blend of a French colonialist and missionary rhetoric: Ongcor […] one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race so civilised, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works? One of these temples [Ongcor Wat] — a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient [Oriental, in Mouhot 1863, 299] Michel Angelo — might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which this [Cambodian] nation is now plunged. […] European conquest, abolition of slavery, wise and protecting

1  On the detailed context of Mouhot’s involvement in the British interest in Cambodia and his private initia-

tive, see Pym 1966, xi–xxii. His maps of Cambodia and the greater Angkor regions were never published and are until today stored at the archive of the Geographic Society in London (see chapter IX). 2  A new comment was published by Chovelon 2001.

57

I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.1a  Angkor Wat’s central passageway in Mouhot’s 1864 publication Travels in the ­central parts of Indochina (Source: Mouhot 1864, between 278 and 279)

laws, and experience, fidelity, and scrupulous rectitude to those who administer them, alone would bring the regeneration of this state. It lies near to Cochin China, the subjection of which France is now aiming, and in which she will doubtless succeed: under her sway it will become a land of plenty. I wish her to possess this land [of Angkor], which would add a magnificent jewel to her crown. […] The temple of Ongcor [Wat] is the most beautiful and best preserved of all the remains, and is also the first which presents itself to the eye of the traveller […] Suddenly [while standing in the passageway of Angkor Wat, MF], and as if by enchantment, he seems to be transported from barbarism to civilisation, from profound darkness to light. [italics MF] (Mouhot 1864, 275, 277—79, 282)

In this description of the view from Angkor Wat’s central passageway towards its central and elevated towers (Fig. I.1a), Mouhot’s aesthetic and moral notion of transfor­ mation from “barbarism to civilisation, from profound darkness to light” – or as he described it in the earlier 1863 French version “On se croit transporté de la barbarie à la 58

civilisation, des profondes ténèbres à la lumière” (Mouhot 1863, 298) – results in his call for French-colonial action in favour of the “regeneration” of Cambodia as a “nation”, the present degenerate status of which had become visible in the supposedly decayed condition of what had been its previous architectural grandeur (Fig. I.1b,c). Mouhot’s 1863 French version was appropriated only a few months later to serve Francis Garnier’s more political colonial-expansionist imperative to penetrate onto “barbar­ ian soil”: Above others, considering the question [of colonial conquest] from a higher viewpoint, should a country like France, when she puts her feet on an alien and barbarian soil, limit and content herself with the mere goal and motivation of the extension of her commerce? This generous nation, whose opinion reigns [over] the whole of civilised Europe and whose ideas have conquered the world, has received by Providence a much higher mission: a mission for the emancipation and the call to light and liberty of these races and people which are still enslaved by

1. Mouhot’s civilising vision from Angkor Wat’s central passageway

Figures I.1b,c  The north side of Angkor Wat’s central massif, in Mouhot’s original sketch (above) and in his 1864 publication (below) (Source: Pym 1996, Pl. VIII and Mouhot 1864, 288)

ignorance and despotism. Should France turn out the flame of civilisation in her hands as regards the profound darkness of Annam? […] Should it turn away from the most beautiful part of her œuvre? […] Cochinchine […] a new empire of the East Indies [Indes-Orientales] emerges in the shadow of our national pavilion. [italics MF] (Garnier 1864, 44, 45)

Educated in the naval college at Brest and in 1863 made inspecteur des Affaires indigènes in Saigon’s twin city, Cholon, in the French colony of Cochinchina, Garnier was one of the first leading political figures to formulate a version of the French mission civilisatrice in Indochina. He saw this mission as establishing a French “East Indies” that would compensate for the loss of French possessions of Canada 59

I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

and India to Great Britain (Osborne 1995, compare LacouThe inclusion of a ‘scientific task force’ clearly distinguish­ ture 2005); he died on a military mission to Hanoi in 1873 ed the Egyptian expedition from the plans for civilising defending this vision. Although this first French expansavages that colonial administrators had begun to elabsionist movement into Indochina was propagated to a cerorate before the Revolution. Napoleon transformed what tain extent by the hesitant central French government of was latent in Enlightenment discourse into a blueprint the Second Empire (1852–70), the leading advocates for for cultural change […] On the banks of the Nile, then, expansion were single admirals and officers in the French the idea, if not the term, of a special French mission to navy who were developing a militant doctrine of coloni­ civilise had been born with the Republic. The word ‘civilisation, and members of the geographical movement sation’ also appears to have acquired many of the overaround the Société de la géographie, which had been based tones that would be associated with the term mission in Paris since 1821. Its supporters ranged from the Marquis civilisatrice — that is, the inculcation of new needs and de Chasseloup-Laubat, ministre de la Marine, to Vice-Adwants, and the spread of French institutions and values miral Bonard, gouverneur commandant in Cochinchina, deemed to be universally valid […] To an important dewho had negotiated a treaty for a French protectorate over gree, Napoleon’s decision to bring all of French civilisalower Cambodia with the newly ruling King Norodom. In tion to Egypt was determined by the view that he and his 1862 Bonard had already undertaken a journey to Angkor contemporaries held of the country as the original craon Siamese territory. In his 1863 report in the Revue mari­ dle of les lumières […] Napoleon’s characterisation of his time et coloniale, he used his observations to argue for the campaign was one designed to bring civilisation back to restoration of decayed Cambodian architecture as a monuits origins. [italics MF] (Conklin 1997, 18—19) ment to the grand empire in the service of French expansionist intentions (Bonard 1863; compare Dagens 2008, In a differently embedded transfer situation, bringing civiKlein 2013). lisation back from civilised Europe at least to where it once However, the specific dual character of the French co- equally blossomed seemed to have been realised in Camlonial mission a) to propagate and (re)introduce civilisa- bodia one hundred years after Napoleon’s project in Egypt: tion to Indochina on a universal scale, and b) to position now, the archaeological resurrection, architectural preserthe French modern nation as the re-discoverer, protector, vation, technological and aesthetic mastery, and touristic and ultimately, the inheritor and continuer of the far-dis- propagation of Angkor through the efforts of a mise en va­ tant and extinct high civilisation of Angkor, has its roots leur became the central cultural-political task of the French in a specifically French context (Falser 2015a3). Very gener- in ‘their’ Indochina after the temples had been ‘retroceedally speaking, civilisation (singular!) emerged, most prob- ed’ from Siam in 1907.4 In a Far East version of Napoleon’s crusade to co-opt Egypt’s antiquity, Garnier convinced the ably during the eighteenth century, as a distinctive term to “connote the [constitutional, political, administrative, mor- governor of the colony, admiral de la Grandière, the co-neal, religious, and intellectual] triumph and development of gotiator of the French-Cambodian Treaty, of the expansionist and commercial importance of the Mekong River reason” and to “capture the essence of French achievements compared to the uncivilised world of savages, slaves, and to the Southern Chinese province of Yunnan. At this time, barbarians” (Conklin 1997, 14, compare Costantini 2008). de Lagrée had (as we shall see in the following analysis) already undertaken preliminary archaeological investigaThe French Revolution and the Declaration of the Human Rights triggered an intended institutionalisation of appar- tions at the Angkorian temple sites located just a few kiloently universal principles and contributed to the self-con- metres north on Siamese territory in order to anticipate ception of France as a grande nation and a superior civili- France’s political claim on the region. In the meantime sation made up of the “foremost people of the universe” G. le Mesle had already formulated his wish, in the August both at home and as an empire abroad. This made the term 1866-issue of the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, civilisation appear to signify a universal vision and fostered to “explore the immense temple of Ang-Kor [sic]” and to concrete desire for an active mission. France’s first post- “send to France some important fragments of this architecrevolutionary colonial enterprise was Napoleon’s political ture […] worth to be on display next to the souvenirs from Ninive and Thebes” (Le Mesle 1866, 139). and cultural crusade to Egypt in 1799.

3  A more detailed discussion about the French notion of a mission civilisatrice in particular, and the nexus to

cultural heritage (from colonial and globalised times), was discussed in the book Cultural heritage as civilizing mission. From decay to recovery (Falser 2015a–c). 4  This dramatic episode will be discussed in detail in the first section of chapter VI.

60

2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)

2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)5 Des moulages en soufre de ces bas-reliefs ont été envoyés par le commandant de Lagrée à l’exposition universelle de 1967, et figurent aujourd‘hui à l’exposition permanente des colonies (Palais de l’Industrie, pavillon XIV). Ils permettent de juger des dimensions et du relief de ce genre de sculpture. (Garnier 1873, Vol. I, 48)

The quite unspectacular footnote cited above gives us an important indication of how the first casts of the temple of Angkor Wat appeared on the European (French) stage.6 These casts mark the beginning of the astonishing ‘career’ of the physical representations of Angkorian temple architecture in France, which began quietly during the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris and reached, as we shall see in the following chapters, its peak with the musée Indo-chi­ nois in the Parisian Trocadero Palace (1880s to 1925/37) and with the colonial exhibitions in Marseille (1906, 1922) and Paris (1931). It ended exactly seventy years later during the Parisian International Exhibition in 1937 with the small and, again, ‘silent’ reconstitution of an Angkorian-style pavilion in the middle of the Seine River at a moment when the French-colonial project found itself in deep crisis. This annotation was a three-line footnote (#2) that ­appeared in the six-hundred-page first volume (Partie de­ scriptive, historique et politique) of the publication entitled Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine on page 48, paragraph 3 of Angcor Wat within Section IV (Description du groupe de ruines d’Angcor). After being circulated between 1871 and 1873 in different chapters inside the famous Le Tour du Monde: Nouveau journal des voyages (Garnier 1871–73), the book was only published in 1873 (due to the Franco– German War of 1871, as reported by different sources) under the aegis of the admiralty of the ministers Admiral Rigault de Genouilly and later Vice-Admiral Pothuau. The Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, minister of the French navy under Napoleon III and president of the Paris­ian Société de géographie, announced this mission to Indochina in 1865, and it was led by the commander (capi­ taine de frégate) Ernest Doudart de Lagrée (1823–68). On 11 August 1863 de Lagrée acted as the crucial mediator between the Cambodian king, Norodom I, and the French in the neighbouring French colony of Cochinchine concerning the installation of the French protectorate of Cambodia. However, no word about the northern Siamese provinces of Angkor and Battambang was made in the treaty.

Participants in de Lagrée’s mission included Francis Gar­ nier, lieutenant, inspector of indigenous affairs, member of the agricultural and industrial committee of Cochinchina, and the author responsible for the book’s 1873 publication after de Lagrée’s sudden death during the mission in 1868; Louis (Marie Joseph) Delaporte, enseigne de vaisseau and draughtsman for the publication; the two medical doctors Eugène Joubert (also geologist for the mission) and Clovis Thorel (also botanist for the mission); Louis-Marie de Carné, attaché of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the two interpreters Séguin and Alexis Om; and finally thirteen other participants who were responsible for the functioning and security of the mission (Garnier 1873/I, 11; Revue maritime et coloniale 17/1866, 252; Julien 1886, 219–21; compare Gomane 1994). The mission’s aims, according to Pierre de la Grandière, the governor of Cochinchina, in his instructions on 25 May 1865 in Saigon, were (a) to explore the Mekong River, particularly the fairly unknown borderland between Cochin­ china and Laos, the navigability of which was intended to guarantee the political and commercial penetration of the French from their Indochinese colony into the Southern Chinese province of Yunnan, and (b) to collect political and commercial, geological and botanical, astronomical and meteorological, anthropological and ethnological, and, finally, historical and cultural information on the region (Garnier 1873/I, 14–20) (Pl. I.1).7 As a consequence, the ­visit to the temples of Angkor – at this time on foreign land located just a few kilometres north, across the French-Siamese borderline over the Tonlé Sap Lake – was a short side trip of a few days, albeit one that would be extremely relevant in the years and decades to come. Besides a larger map of the official itinerary within the closer Indochinese area into China, a close-up map charted the mission’s visit to Ang­kor (Pl. I.2). As Villemereuil quoted in his 1883 collection of de Lagrée’s reports, the latter had established a quite overburdensome work schedule for the mission’s stay at Angkor:

5  Elements of the following paragraphs were published by the author in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Ex­ trême-Orient (Falser 2014). 6  Parts of these findings, along with results from the research about the 1867 Universal Exhibition and the first musée Khmer have been published in Falser 2014c. 7 Also, the first commandant en chef and premier gouverneur-amiral de la Cochinchine, Louis Adolphe Bonard, had discussed the position of Angkor on a first sketch map in relation to the commercial and strategic importance of the Mekong River (Bonard 1863).

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1. Make a plan of the town and determine the buildings to be studied in detail; 2. Copy, without exception [sic], all ancient inscriptions by noting their finding places; 3. Represent in plans, sections and elevations the principle buildings, by retracing, as detailed as possible [sic], the smallest details; 3. Mould the bas-reliefs which make not to great difficulties […]; 5. Observe with attention all signs which could indicate either the absolute or the relative age of each monument; 6. Study the general mode of the construction and, in particular, these of bridges, arches and roads; study the mechanical means being employed, how had the foundations been made, the ­coloration of the buildings, gildings, platings; 8. [sic] [Study] the distribution of the buildings, the orientation of their different parts, research the traces of habitations [habitations particulières], and, if needed, opening some forest aisles; 9. Researching the provenance of diverse building materials; if possible, finding the ancient quarries. (Villemereuil 1883, 464; compare Dagens 1989, 143—44)

Inside the 1873 publication with its three volumes containing more than 1,000 written text pages, 250 illustrations, 70 plates, and various maps and architectural plans (it was Napoleon III’s small-scale Indochinese version of the giant publication made of Napoleon Bonaparte’s crusade to Egypt), the account of the Angkorian temples was quite prominently placed in the arc of suspense created through the scientific description. This placement in the narrative was meant to establish the great myth of Angkor within the French project of Indochina. However, as we shall see later, many details were omitted. Volume 1 of this 1873 publication presented descriptive, historical, and political information regarding the mission itself, including a list of the different sites visited during the mission (with a fifty-page description of the temples of Angkor) and a general description of different regions, inhabitants, and customs. It closed with a short essay on French-colonial politics in Indochina. Containing more than five hundred pages, volume 2 referred to the scientific observations and special investigations of the different members of the commission: geology and mineralogy by Joubert; anthropology, agriculture, and horticulture by Thorel; and a study of the Indochinese vocabulary by de Lagrée and Garnier. The third part of the whole publication comprised of two sections, the first of which contained maps and architectural plans by Lagrée, Delaporte, and Garnier. The second was a kind of illustrated travel descrip­ tion called Album pittoresque du voyage d’exploration en Indochine, which was entirely written by Delaporte and included geographical indications, illustrations, and sketches – among them one of the earliest plans of Angkor Wat after the Mouhot publication of 1864 (see below).

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Even if the visit to Angkor was at this point meant only as a side programme for this primarily commercial, political, and geographical mission, its placement at the start of the two-year expedition made its documentation a spectacu­ lar and even natural opening for the publication in 1873. As Garnier put it in the preface: “Our first visit after we left Saigon was at the magnificent ruins of Angcor [sic] which has in the last few years attracted the attention of the Orientalists, and quite naturally I placed de Lagrée’s studies on the Cambodian monuments at the beginning of the book” (Garnier 1873/I, i–ii). After a brief look back at previous geographical discoveries in Indochina in chapter 1, the reader of chapter 2 (Composition, organisation et ressources de la mission – son départ pour le Cambodge et les ruines d’Angkor) of the first volume of the publication was introduced to the reasons for this prominent first stop of the mission: Leaving Saigon on 5 June 1866 on gunboats number 32 and 27, the mission spent a two-week preparatory stay in Campong-Luong at the Great Lake Tonlé Sap waiting for a letter of agreement for the supposedly “scientific and peaceful mission” to come from Chao Phya Bhudhara Bhay, Siam’s minister of the north provinces of Siem Reap and Battambang (dating Bangkok 13 June 1866 [see Villemereuil 1883, 120]). On 21 June, the mission boarded a gunboat for the ruins of Angkor across the CambodianSia­mese border near the northeastern section of the lake. This trip was to provide a “definitive consecration” of de Lagrée’s private studies of the temples (Garnier 1873/I, 22), which had been undertaken only a few months before the mission itself (see below). This was the reason, confirmed by Garnier in a footnote at the beginning of chapter 3 (De Compong-Luong à Angcor Wat – Notions générales sur les monuments cambodgiens ou khmers), why the fifty-page description of the Angkorian temples in chapter 4 referred entirely to de Lagrée’s private notes, which “were rediscovered” after his sudden death during the expedition and only slightly altered and retrospectively augmented with some descriptions and later insights by Garnier (Garnier 1873/I, 23). As a consequence, large parts of the information on Angkor in the first volume of the 1873 publication were not the result of the explorative mission itself. This may apply to the descriptions and impressive drawings by Louis Delaporte in the attached atlas section and may also explain the hybrid mix of detailed maps and architectural drawings of the temples on the one hand, and the interpretative, exoticised, and even invented illustrations of a ‘forgotten temple ruins forlorn in the jungle’-aesthetic on the other. The illustrative collage was even more complicated: in volume 1 a third type of perspective illustration of Angkor Wat and other temples was ‘transcribed’ (and again occasionally slightly altered) for the publication as wood engravings made from original photographs taken during the mission by the Saigon photographer Émile Gsell (com-

2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)

Figure I.2a  The main protagonists of the 1866–68 Mekong mission as photographed on the staircase of Angkor Wat by Émile Gsell; from left to right: De Lagrée, de Carné, Thorel, Joubert, Delaporte, Garnier (Source: Gsell 1866, © INHA, Paris)

pare Bautze 2013). These photos survive to this day in an undated photo album called Vues des ruines d’Angkor Wat et d’Angkor Thom (Gsell 1866).8 After the book had outlined the travel procedures of the mission to the citadel Siemréap, as well as its continuation on the horse carts and elephants provided by the Siamese governor, the first map of the publication provided the reader with a Carte des environs d’Angcor by de Lagrée and Garnier.9 Inside this chapter of Garnier’s book, there was a section on the main building materials of the temples (including sandstone, brick, and laterite), the main architectural features (walls, vaults, towers, columns, causeways, and terraces), the principal motifs of decoration, and the general disposition of the buildings (gates and cruciform

galleries); in addition, the six main protagonists of the mission were shown on a staircase at Angkor Wat after the photography by Gsell (Fig. I.2a). An official photograph of Louis Delaporte, our later main protagonist to propagate Angkor in France, was published in her wife’s posthumous, nom de plume publication (Beauvais 1929) after his death in 1925 (Fig. I.2b). Finally, fourteen pages of description (Garnier 1873/I, 44–57) in chapter 4 (Description du groupe de ruines d’Angcor) brought the reader, after a short visit to the temples of Mont Crôm and Athvéa (§1,2), right into the temple of Angcor Wat (§3). The schematic overall plan of the temple was provided in a drawing by Laederich, the premier maître mécanicien de la Marine (Fig. I.3). Few years after Mouhot’s first version published in 1863 (Fig.

8  This album has no date and place of publication but has survived in the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris. It contains sixty-two photographs on 42 × 31 cm formatted “albuminated paper” most of which have never been published publicly. Most probably it was intended as a private album for Gsell as indicated by his handwritten note inside the manuscript: “Le souvenir de tant de milliers d’années mortes. Un souvenir de quelques semaines d’amitié bien vivante – qui survivra – 19–20 avril 18xx (Commission d’exploration du Mékong dirigée par Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, Angkor Wat, 1866).” 9  How this map was used for what would decades later be called a Parc d’Angkor is discussed in chapter IX.

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Figure I.2b  Louis Delaporte in official uniform (Source: Beauvais 1929, between 162 and 163)

Figure I.3  Site plan of the overall Angkor Wat temple from the 1873 Garnier publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate II; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure I.4a  The map of the inner floor plan of Angkor Wat from Mouhot’s French 1863 publication (Source: Mouhot 1863, 302)

Figure I.4b  The map of the inner floor plan of Ang­kor Wat from Garnier’s 1873 publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate XVI; © Heidelberg University Library)

2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)

Figures I.5a,b  Angkor Wat’s central passageway with wooden houses of the active monastery on the compound of Angkor Wat: a) in an 1866 photograph of Gsell; b) transferred into the Garnier publication of 1873 (Source: Gsell 1866, © INHA, Paris; Garnier 1873, vol.1, 45; © Heidelberg University Library)

I.4a), a detailed inner floor plan of Angkor Wat set the standard of precision for the years to come (Fig. I.4b, compare Fig. VI.9). In fact, this latter version was probably more building on a slightly older British version of John Thomson of 1867 (see later in this chapter). In the French 1873 publication the reader was then guided through the western entry gate of the third enclosure towards the façade principale of the second enclosure. It is important to note that all the architectural photographs of Angkor Wat in the above-mentioned Gsell album of 1866 (Gsell’s photographs are today stored at the musée Guimet in Paris) were transformed into wood engravings for the 1873 publication (Figs. I.5a,b) – all except the one showing the perfectly proper site of a Buddhist monastery with the stilted wooden houses of caretaking monks north of the central passageway in front of the second enclosure (Fig. I.6a). Ironically, an undated French postcard (Fig. I.6b) hinted at the endangered status of those wooden houses (to be ­removed by French archaeologists after 1907, compare chapter IX, Figs. IX.8, 11, 12). The reason for the Garnier’s omission of this important illustration by Gsell is easily explained, and it initiated a topos that has remained a persistent feature in the Western narrative about the Angkorian temple site,10 from Mouhot’s first commentary (compare Pym 1966, ­Dagens 2005a/2008, Edwards 2007, 20–22) to the onsite ­restoration work of the École française d’Extrême-­ Orient (EFEO) between 1908 and the late 1960s (see chapter IX), up to this very day (see chapter XII). Garnier’s description of Angkor Wat perpetuated the image of a temple that “fell into ruins even before its completion” and that – despite being in reality an “object of general veneration” as

a transregional pilgrimage site and the site of the Siamese government’s restorative measures during its political mandate ending in 1907 – became overgrown with dense tropical vegetation and remained unprotected by the local population and the supposedly powerless monks on the site (Garnier 1873/I, 54, 57). In sharp contrast to picturesque drawings of a local crowd on Angkor Wat’s causeway (Fig. I.7) or of the site from a kind of aerial perspective with the author (Garnier or Delaporte?) himself drawing the scene and being watched by a local ‘primitive’ (Fig. I.8), Garnier’s publication offered another, purely scientific take in order to inaugurate the temple’s reinvented status as an undeniable architectural masterpiece. For the first time, European readers encountered precise views of Angkor Wat’s main elevation (Fig. I.9a) and details from its decorative elements (Fig. I.9b), vaulting systems, and balustrades (compare III. Fig.38) in scaled architectural drawings. After a description and illustration of the ruined entry gates, the text led the reader up the staircase to the first level and to the central entry towards the cruciform gallery and the lateral rectangular galleries of the bas-reliefs with an almost uninterrupted overall length of over 800 metres (twice 178 metres north-south, respectively 223 metres west-east, according to the author’s calculations). It was exactly at that point – in combination with an illustrated close-up of a bas-relief (from a Gsell photograph) on the following page (Fig. I.10) and the well-placed indication of the supposedly badly preserved, partly unrecognisable, and therefore inaccessible condition of some bas-reliefs – that an unspectacular footnote #2 on page 48 gave the first indication that samples of these decorative panels were

10  Many examples of these observations had been collected in a rather early stage in Naudin 1928 and

­Malleret 1934, compare Rooney 2001.

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.6a  The view from the central passageway towards the inner temple of Angkor Wat with its active monastery in an 1866 Gsell photograph (Source: Gsell 1866; © INHA)

Figure I.6b  An postcard depicting the houses in front of Angkor Wat with the remark: “Cambodia-Angkor Wat: The villages of the monks which will soon disappear” (Source: Despierre 2008, 136)

Figure I.7  Locals on the passageway of Angkor Wat as they were depicted in the 1873 Garnier ­publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate VI; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure I.8  A local inhabitant watching Delaporte drawing Angkor Wat (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate V; © Heidelberg University Library)

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2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)

Figures I.9a,b  Angkor Wat’s inner main elevation (above), and decorative elements in plan and elevation of door frames, columns and blind doors (below), as depicted in Garnier’s 1873 publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plates XVII and XIX; © Heidelberg University Library)

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.10  Depiction of a detail on a bas-relief of Angkor Wat (as plaster-cast replica, compare Pl. Intro.10a,b, 12) in Garnier’s 1873 publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, page 49; © Heidelberg University Library)

copied in “sulphur casts”11 and sent by de Lagrée to the 1867 Parisian World Exhibition.12 Later, they went to the Exposi­ tion permanente des colonies in the palais de l’Industrie (compare introductory quotation). On 1 July 1866, after no more than one week on the site, the mission left Angkor Wat and travelled by elephant to Siem Reap and finally by boat over the Great Lake back to Compong Luong (Garnier 1873/I, 154). On 6 July the commission was presented to King Norodom I in Phnom Penh and attended a Khmer ballet, which provided yet another picturesque motif for the publication. After this stay in the Cambodian capital, the mission left for the Cambodian-Laotian frontier near Stung Treng where the Mekong River proved to be unnavigable. The mission continued to Bassac and the Khmer temple of Wat Phou and finally reached Luang Prabang, where it visited the site of Henri Mouhot’s death in 1861 and where his tombstone was erected in May 1867. By this time French historiography had already hailed Mouhot as the French discoverer of Ang­kor Wat, despite the facts that his journey to the temple had been hosted by the British and the Catholic chap-

lain Bouillevaux had already visited the site in 1850 (Bouillevaux 1858, 1879). However, in 1867 the casts taken of the bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat were already on their way to the most important public spectacle of the 1860s in Paris: the Exposition universelle de 1867. The public historiography addressing France’s supposedly peaceful interest in Angkor during the 1860s was, and still is, defined by this master narrative of an official mission. It was the commandant Arthur Bonamy de Villemereuil who published a short version of de Lagrée’s manuscripts in the 1879 Mémoires of the Société académique indo-chi­ noise de France and who re-edited all the surviving documents with his own annotations, interpretations, and crossreferences in a giant, almost nine-hundred-page book, Ex­ plorations et missions de Doudart de Lagrée, in 1883. With this document, it is only possible to find out more about these first plaster casts taken of Angkor and, indeed, of their deeply political context. After de Lagrée’s reports on the history of Cambodia, Villemereuil compiled a detailed list of “political and diplomatic documents concerning the contemporary situation in Cambodia” that shed light on France’s and especially de Lagrée’s ambitious colonial visions. He continued with de Lagrée’s writings about the “archaeology of Cambodia”, his collection from Cambodia (with a full list of his harvest from his stay including plaster casts), his private letters about his travels, and finally with documents detailing the Mekong mission. In the selection of historical documents on Cambodia, Villemereuil quoted the Treaty of 11 August 1863 with the French-Cambodian protectorate (no word about Angkor was mentioned), signed by Chief Commander of Cochinchina, de la Grandière, in the Palace of Oudong, then still the capital of Cambodia (Villemereuil 1883, 89–93). The next document cited was the Cambodian-Siamese Treaty of 1 Decem­ ber 1863 in which Cambodia had silently reconfirmed its status as “a tributary state of Siam” (§1) and its cession of the provinces of “Pratabong and Nakon Siamrap” (Battambang and Siem Reap including Angkor) since 1795 (§8.1) (Villemereuil 1883, 95–101). In the following twenty-five pages, Villemereuil provided a unique insight into de Lagrée’s fierce protest against Cambodia’s politics towards Siam in the case of Angkor.13

11 The moulage du soufre was one of many different options for moulds and was included in the most popu-

lar manuals in the nineteenth century. As indicated in the 1829 Manuel du mouleur by Lebrun, which was constantly republished until and after the date of the Mekong expedition, this procedure of sulphur casts was mainly used for the copying process of small-scale medals (Lebrun 1829, 187–88). 12  After the description of the architecture and decor of Angkor Wat, Garnier gave the reader similar, but much briefer information on five other temple sites: Mont Bakheng, Angcor Thom (with a clear focus on the five entry gates to the city and the Baion temple), the Loley-Preacan-Bakong site (near Roluos village to the southeast of Siem Reap), Méléa and Preacan (outside the Angkor area), and Pnom Bachey (near Kampong Cham, northeast of Phnom Penh). The latter site is important for this chapter because it is here that we find the second indication in the book suggesting that casts from a temple’s sculptures were sent to France – this time, as was explained, only to the Permanent Colonial Exhibition in Paris (Garnier 1873/I, 93). 13  Compare with our analysis in chapter VI and in the epilogue I of the first volume.

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2. Footnote 2 on page 48, or: The explorative mission to the Mekong River (1866—68)

In two letters, one to de la Grandière on 12 December 1863 from Kompong Luong and one shortly after to the Cambodian king ad personam, de Lagrée accused Siam of attempting to gain and keep control over Angkor, a territory which, according to him, should have been inside the French protectorate, not least to “guarantee Cambodia’s freedom under France’s protection” (Villemereuil 1883, 102–6). In a letter dated 20 May 1865, sent from the same spot close to the border, de Lagrée openly gave his opinion on the situations: “The Cambodians do not attach great importance to the treaty with Siam […] I confess that I, per­sonally, do not feel enthusiasm either. It seems to me that our treaty is, forthrightly affirmed, entirely insufficient. Did we really come to Cambodia not to touch upon it? That we should really pawn our future [in Cambodia] with a [single] formal paragraph seems pointless to me!” (Villemereuil 1883, 123). Villemereuil also mentioned one of the most important documents in this context, dating from 8 January 1866. In The memoir of M. de Lagrée on the illegitimacy of the ­Siamese claims to the possession of Battambang, Angkor, and the Cambodian parts of Laos, de Lagrée declared that Siam’s eighteenth-century intentions were “insidious” and furthermore that the “secret treaty of 1863” between Cambodia and Siam was a “violent and shameful extortion” and “spoliation”; he requested the “immediate determination of Cambodia’s territorial limits which had been so urgently demanded by the Bangkok court” (Villemereuil 1883, 115– 19). This (and not an amateurish interest in archaeology, as the official story has it) was the real reason that de Lagrée undertook two journeys to the Cambodian-Siamese border zone in early 1866, months before the Mekong mission. His “second voyage in March 1866” (Villemereuil 1883, 225) resulted in the compilation of a larger dossier on the Cambodian archaeological sites, including “Angkor et les monuments de la région Nord du Cambodge” (Villemereuil 1883, 220–61). The tragic incident that occurred on 4 March 1866 during de Lagrée’s eight-day visit to Angkor was never circulated in the French official historiography (the British reported about it, compare Kennedy 1867, 307–8) but was well described in Lagrée’s lengthy internal report to de la Grandière dating Phnom Penh 5 April 1866. Initially, he had just planned to go to Angkor for two days to prepare the itinerary for the forthcoming mission, but he was confronted with a great disappointment on arrival:

Upon my arrival in Angkor, I learnt that we had been anticipated. An agent from the English consulate in Bangkok, and a skillful photographer were already at work. They had arrived with ministerial orders from the authorities of this country […] and the English consul even had a letter from the Siamese king himself. Some days after their arrival, a Siamese mandarin came with an express order to come to help them and to draw the grande pagode [of Angkor Wat, MF]. In fact, the agent was called Mr. Kennedy and the photographer Mr. Thompson [sic] from Singapore; the mandarin was the superintendent of the pagodas of Angkor. These gentlemen did not tell me that they were on an official mission, but that might have been well the case. They asked me for some information (of course, I said nothing) about the French explorative project, which had already been well known for several months in Bangkok. I do not have to say how embarrassed I was to see that we had been outstripped at Angkor. How much reason there is to fear now that, as a result of our much-delayed expedition, the English will foreclose us at the heights of the River [Mekong]! From Bangkok the distance to Yunnan is shorter […] we may encounter some bad consequences: the English are not the ones to prepare an easy route for those arriving after them. [italics MF] (Villemereuil 1883, 446—50, here 446—47)

The French failed to publish an accurate illustration of Ang­kor Wat before Great Britain14: the Scot photographer John Thomson (after having visited and portrayed King Mongkut in Bangkok) and his travel companon Henry George Kennedy had reached Angkor Wat already on 26 February 1866 (Kennedy 1867, 306). One year later in 1867, Thomson published his photographic album The antiquities of Cambodia: A series of photographs taken on the spot, with letterpress descriptions in Edinburgh. It pictured a plan of Angkor Wat, “from a survey by the author” (Thomson 1867, 12), as Thomson proudly indicated with a more detailed depiction than by Mouhot and therefore a good source for the 1873 Garnier publication (Fig. I.11). Additionally, the publication featured sixteen photographs, including Angkor Wat’s main inner entry (Pl. I.3), architectural elements, and selected bas-reliefs.15 It is interesting to note that in this highly competitive race for scientific primacy over Angkor, which in 1866 was on Siamese territory,

14  The photographic race between the French (with Gsell) and the British (with Thomson) to depict Angkor

is told in a detailed way in Jim Mizerski’s 2015 monograph Cambodia captured. Angkor’s first photographers in 1860’s colonial intrigues (Mizerski 2015, especially 47–107; compare Franchini/Ghesquière 2001, Piemmattawat 2015). 15  According to Thomson, he and Consul Kennedy, themselves informed about Angkor by Mouhot’s English account, had left Bangkok in January 1866 with photographic apparatus, sketch material, and astronomical instruments (Thomson 1867, compare Thomson 1875, 1877). Already in the year of 1866 had Thomson left his unpublished Notes of a journey through Siam to the ruins of Cambodia for the Royal Geographic Society in London (compare Mizerski 2015), the same institution which supported Henri Mouhot.

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.11  Plan of Angkor Wat, taken by John Thomson in 1866, published in his 1867 publication The antiquities of ­Cambodia – A series of photographs taken on the spot, with letterpress descriptions and reprinted in The straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China of 1875 (Source: Thomson 1867, 12)

suitable ad-hoc recording techniques and translation meth­ ods were considered decisive. As a result, de Lagrée decided to change his plans and to extend his stay in Angkor to check out the situation, undertake studies, and acquire as much information as possible in order to be at least the first to send home physical proofs from the temple. De Lagrée was, as he himself admitted in his report, “neither well prepared for really serious work [in situ] nor well equipped with suitable instruments. […] Saigon had not been able to deliver either plaster for the moulds or paper for imprints, [his] draughtsmen from Saigon, Lefèvre, was missing, and taking any photographs was impossible”. In addition, in light of the authoritative presence of the English, the locals seemed reluctant to help a Frenchman. “Leaving Angkor at the same moment as the English”, de Lagrée had at least taken “the exact measures of Angkor Wat for a floor plan, […] moulds from a certain number of sculptures with cement and with all the sulphur which [he] was able to find in the region”. From ten kilometres away he had used little suitable earth for imprints [estampes], only to find that “on his return many of the pieces had been broken in the carriages”. He copied some minor inscriptions and also took away some original pieces, such as sculptures and architectural elements. In a letter to his sister-in-law, dated Kompong Luong 16 April 1866, de Lagrée again reported on his excursion to Angkor (Villemereuil 1883, 450–51), but he was already at work on the French monopolistic myth 70

about the discovery of Angkor: “[He] had seen beautiful things, […] had gone where no European had been before, […] had seen totally unknown ruins and met the savages.” Back home, he had “evidence for [his] observations with his drawings, mouldings, sculptures, objects, and old potteries – [but he judged them] altogether too fragile to be transported to France”, because he had already exhibited his harvest from Angkor at Saigon where he “had won a medal for [his] plaster casts and sculptures”. In an account spanning several pages (Villemereuil 1883, 305–11), Villemereuil described “The art objects which had been collected by Captain de Lagrée in Cambodia” in April 1866 and which were then sent to Paris – two full months before the famous Mekong mission itself ! Villemereuil commented on its afterlife: In the report and the letter of 5 and 16 April 1866 […] M. de Lagrée tells us about the difficulties he encountered to mould [mouler] the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat and to transport these fragile œuvres in oxcarts where many of them were destroyed. To these casts [moulages], he added these from Phnom Bachey and [original] objects of stone, bronze, terre cuites, and wood which he had collected all around. These specimens de l’art des Khmer constituted a collection which was unique in its genre [Footnote 1] and was in one of the first exhibitions in Saigon that the objects merited highest distinction. ­

3. The polysemy of objects, the white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor

[Footnote 1: It is in fact the first time in Europe that such a thing was exhibited. Today, this collection is distanced, without any possible comparison, through this of the musée Khmer being organised in the Trocadero by M. Delaporte and composed of remarkable pieces brought by him from Cambodia in 1873.] From here, this collection was sent to France where it was shown in the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, and later disposed in the Exposition permanente des colonies. The brothers of M. de Lagrée made him an homage in this institution which still possesses this collection in a sensibly reduced version. In all these transports, many of the moulages had been broken and it is due to the infinitively patient work of the conservator M. Aubry-Lecomte that some of these casts could be reconstituted. Thanks to the courtesy of the actual conservator, M. de Nozeilles, by the help of the specialist M. Feer, Indianist at the Bibliothèque nationale, and of M. Delaporte and Harmand as the brave explorers of Cambodia and Indochina, we could study this collection and add some details to the original list which was a copy sent from Saigon at the same moment as the collection itself by M. Vial, capitaine de frégate and directeur de l’intérieur in Cochinchina. (Villemereuil 1883, 305)

The original collection of de Lagrée had, according to the author, mostly come from Phnom Bachey (near Kampong

Cham on the French side of Cambodia from de Lagrée’s first excursion) and Angkor Wat (second excursion, see above). It had most probably comprised of nineteen entries of original sculptures, fifteen ‘sulphur’ casts (six from Angkor Wat including parts from the bas-reliefs of the internal galleries; however, two had disappeared), and twelve cement casts (eleven from Angkor Wat, four already lost) of bas-reliefs and inscriptions, and four religious and civil manuscripts. By the time of the 1883 publication, however, half of de Lagrée’s collection “did not exist anymore”.16 De Lagrée’s harvest from Cambodia was shipped from Saigon on the La Creuse in September 1866. Its arrival in Paris was reconfirmed by Aubry-Lecomte who fixed the heavily deteriorated collection, the bad condition of which was primarily the result of its hasty execution due to colonial rivalry in Angkor between France and Great Britain during these few days in 1866. On 15 July 1867 – at the height of the Universal Exhibition in Paris, which was also attended by Siam as a sovereign monarchy – the French– Siamese Treaty reconfirmed in §4 that “the provinces of Battambang and Angkor (Nakhon Siem Reap) [would] stay on the side of the Siamese kingdom” and that the frontiers between both nations on Cambodian territory would be “delineated as soon as possible by a joint commission of ­Siamese and French officers” (Villemereuil 1883, 121–23, here 122).17 However, this arrangement would not last long.

3. The polysemy of objects, white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor: The Universal Exhibition of 1867 and its classification system After the first exhibitions claiming universality were held in London in 1851/1862 and Paris in 1855, the Parisian Uni­ versal Exhibition of 1867 formed France’s second exhibition. Under the title Exposition universelle d’art et d’indus­ trie (1 April to 3 November 1867), it attempted to display, and at the same time to prove, the direct relation, entanglement, and intertwined character of art works and i­ ndustrial products as the central human creative spheres within the great project of universal progress. This approach tried to merge the traditions of art and industrial trade exhibitions from the eighteenth century onwards. As in the showcase

of the Second Empire under Napoleon III, the main protagonists mirrored the background of the exhibition, which was under the strong influence of Saint-Simonian universalism. Frédéric Le Play, engineer and state counselor, was elected commissaire général after his experience as the organiser of the 1855 Exhibition. Michel Chevalier, who had also been involved in both the 1855 Paris Exhibition and the French participation at the 1862 London Exhibition, was the crucial mediator in French–English free trade politics and was a well-known theoretician in political economy, co-editor of the Journal des débats, and a senator under

16  In his 1879 publication Villemereuil listed in the 1866 transportation to Paris sixteen imprints of inscrip-

tions (ten already lost), twenty-six mouldings of inscriptions (twenty-two already lost), and three notebooks (Villemereuil 1879, 53). In this publication, Appendix I gave a slightly different list of de Lagrée’s harvest from Cambodia that was reconfirmed by Aubry-Lecomte: “eight cement and five sulphur mouldings of bas-reliefs, four sulphur mouldings of inscriptions, eight sculpture debris, one fragment of a Buddha statue, six diverse heads in granite, one pendant of baked clay, five pottery debris, and two bronze statue debris” (Villemereuil 1879, 62–65). 17  Villemereuil even mentioned in a footnote that a special “Carte de délimination du Cambodge et de Siam, 31 mars 1868” (the same month of the death of de Lagrée) was stored at the French Ministry of the Navy and reconfirmed the “French loss of Angkor as a material fact” (Villemereuil 1883, 123).

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.12  Aerial drawing of the Champs-de-Mars of the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris (© Archives nationales, France)

Napoleon III. For the 1867 Exhibition, he was elected a member of the Commission impériale and director of the international jury for the selection, coordination, and commendation of the displayed products of the exhibition. Besides an annex for the agricultural and horticultural exhibition on the Île de Billancourt, the central site of the exhibition comprised the fifty-hectare Champs-de-Mars built by engineer Jean-Baptiste Krantz with architect Lépold Hardy. It was transformed (for the first time in the history of universal exhibitions) into a park for pavilion-like displays around a giant palais de l’exposition with a floor plan comprising two circular edges, a rectangular intermediate section including a central garden, and with overall dimensions of 490 by 380 metres (Fig. I.12). The general goal of all universal exhibitions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was to stage, certainly against the politically motivated backdrop of the hosting nation, what was supposed to represent a globally valid ideal of the concept of civilisation, with all regions, nations, and their products present on site. As a consequence, the layout and internal systems of classification of the 1867 palais de l’expo­ sition are one of the key points of this section’s main question: How can one classify and embed a cultural product – in this case the first casts or original specimens of Angkorian art in Europe – into a valid exhibitionary model of world civilisation if its cultural, geographical, and artistic origin 72

and status were still represented by floating white spots on the mental and physical map of the exhibition’s host ­nation? A guide for exhibitors and visitors written by Henri de Parville brought the problem and challenge for the layout of the exhibition into stark relief. In order (a) to overcome the earlier tradition of separate expositions (or separate sec­ tions) of industrial products and Beaux-Arts displays, and (b) to counterbalance the increasing homogenisation of the exhibited product range of the different nations (a side effect of the earlier events), Parville called for the “substitution” of universal with international, partialised exhibitions [expo­ sitions internationales partielles, Parville 1866, 12]. This new display system was to take into consideration both national particularities and entities, and the useful comparability of the products. However, in order to be both an “instruction for the labourer, a study of the industrialist and the scholar”, the event had to first be a “spectacle for the majority” [C’est la masse qui fait loi] (Parville 1866,13). Astonishingly similar to a strategy to ‘juxtapose the near and far’ through a network of interconnected points to be experienced simultaneously by the visitor (compare Foucault’s heterotopian concept in the introduction to this book), Parville explained the final arrangement of the 1867 Exhibition. It followed the “principle of a Pythagorean table with a double entry where a series of fields could at the same time be crossed

3. The polysemy of objects, the white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor

Figure I.13a  Schematic floor plan of the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Source: L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, vol. 2, 205; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure I.13b  French section of the 1867 Universal Exhibition; left edge: The thin French colonial section (Source: © Bibliothèque historique de Paris; detail from a larger map)

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

longi­tudinally and transversally” (Parville 1866, 18) – that jects themselves (Group I in gallery I: œuvres d’art), which is, a radiating arrangement of nations and, across nations, was intended to illustrate the most refined degree of civilia longitudinal, gallery-like display of objects of the same sation. When it came to the section on the French colonies, nature. A schematic floor plan of the 1867 Exhibition re- the double system of classification for each object (accordvealed twenty-four different radiating compartments or- ing to its national affiliation and product classification) ganising nations and groups of nations according to their brought additional unintended facets to the intentional attributed importance (Fig. I.13a). From a total of about “polysemy of the objects” (Barth 2007, 21). At the same time 150,000 square metres, France alone took up more than it caused a contradiction in the object’s proper assignment 60,000 square metres (including the sections Algérie and within the classifying narrative of civilisation. The question Colonies françaises at the western edge), followed by Great remained: Where were cultural and even artistic objects Britain with a bit more than 20,000 square metres. ‘Less from the colonies to be put if the dichotomy of the civilised important’ nations from Asia like China, Japan, and Siam, métropole (the European motherland) and the colony that for example, shared only one miniscule spoke in this mate- was still to be civilised – as the central goal of the colonial rialised wheel of civilisation. mission civilisatrice – had to stay intact? Could Angkorian For practical reasons, the building had to be built on sculptures from the extinct Khmer empire of the ninth to one single ground level. As one open space it was flooded thirteenth century CE be displayed in the same section as with natural light, organised with several entries on the a contemporary French Beaux-Arts painting? And an even sides with radiating corridors from the edge to the central more difficult question was where to put plaster casts from garden, and built using an interior modular assembly sys- sculptures of forgotten ruins that could not be dated and tem of lightweight partitions that could easily react to the located exactly and that did not even belong to the young individual arrangement of the national and thematic sec- French colony in Indochina. In any case, by definition of tions. Following the modified grid as “a veritable chessboard” the Règlement général (Disposition des œuvres d’art) in §1.1, (Parville 1866, 40) made possible a parallel and even over- copies of pieces of art were excluded from the Beaux-Arts lapping arrangement of artistic and industrial products. Group I. Seen from the geographical-political assignment of Following the above-mentioned double-entry system of the exhibition’s display, however, Angkorian objects should objects, the classification scheme was naturally the central have appeared in the small Siamese sections, exactly oppokey to the complete depiction of the world. It introduced a site of the large French section (Figs. I.14a,b). But that was, new thought pattern that arranged the objects and products of course, unthinkable for the French host whose imperial in developmental narratives that traced developments ambitions for the much-desired Cambodian temples on from physical to intellectual needs (from food, clothing, and Siamese territory were made manifest in this display. The French-colonial section of the exhibition was reprefurniture to art) and from raw materials to industrially pro­ cessed products. However, the innermost core of the exhi- sented by the French War and Navy Ministry and figured bition before the central garden was occupied by the exhibi- as an extremely thin spoke-like attachment to the southtion Histoire de travail, which displayed a compressed global east ‘wheel’ of the vast display of the French métropole. The history of the production of art. Here France display­ed her commission for its organisation was established by Prosper history of art from the Gauls to the French Revolution. de Chasseloup-Laubat, ministre de la Marine et des colonies, The official Système de classification was attached to in accordance with Le Play and Rouher and included its the Règlement général, which was decreed by Napoleon III president Zaepffel, directeur des Colonies au ministère de and signed by Eugène Rouher, the minister of state and la Marine, and its vice-president Aubry-Lecomte, commis­ vice-president of the Commission impériale, in July 1865. saire-adjoint de la Marine as well as Conservateur de l’Ex­ It contained ten groups with a total of ninety-five classes position permanente des colonies in the palais de l’Industrie. (Exposition universelle de Paris 1867c, 581–602). Special It was also Chasseloup-Laubat who oversaw the conditions attention was paid to the artistic product line from its prac­ and financial handling of the products from the colonies tical perspective at the outer and larger edge of the exhibi- that found their way to the Parisian exhibition.18 In the case tion plan, to its applied and ‘civilised’ character in the in- of the French possessions in Asia and in correspondence ner core of the exhibition (Fig. I.13b). Here we will focus with de la Grandière, gouverneur de la Cochinchine, the on (a) the inner part of the central ring with its section of shipping on the transport route from Saigon to Suez by sea “Material and applications of the liberal arts” (Group II in was managed by the Ministry of the Navy, whereas the overgallery II: matériel et application des arts libéraux), which land route from Suez to Alexandria (the Suez Canal only materialised intellectual achievements, and (b) the neigh- opened in 1869!) and again by sea from Alexandria to Paris bouring inner ring that was occupied by the pure art ob- (most probably via Marseille as the colonial port and fur-

18  Excerpt of the correspondence between Chasseloup-Laubat, Le Play, and Rouher concerning the role of

the ministère de la Marine et les colonies for the 1867 Exhibition; see CARAN F12/2981.

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3. The polysemy of objects, the white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor

Figures I.14a,b  The indoor presentations of Siam during the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Source: Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, vol. 1, 333; Grand Album 1868, 35; © Heidelberg University Library)

ther on by train) was paid for by the Imperial Commission of the 1867 Exhibition. Along with a special section on Algeria, all the other French colonies from all four regions of the world were packed into a coherent space that was too small to properly distinguish the colonies’ different cultural characteristics.19 For the installation of the Asian colony of Cochinchine, Chasseloup-Laubat sent Fauque de Janquières, capitaine de vaisseau, to Paris. Studying the official Catalogue des produits des colonies françaises with a focus on the Indochinese colony of Cochinchine and the new protectorat de Cambodge and looking for products that were sent by the ongoing de Lagrée/Garnier mission, we can see that the listed entries to some extent appear quite logical and are, for our purposes, quite interesting. Following the narrative of ‘high’ European and ‘low’ Asian civilisation, the large majority of products from Cochinchina and Cambodia appeared in the highernumbered groups of raw material and products – for example, rice, pepper, tea, and sugar in Group VII (food products) or different types of wood in Group V (products of extractive industries). Group IV (clothes) mentioned costumes annamites (product number 291 in Class 35) with the name of the sender “Comité agricole, de Lagrée, Bordot” (Exposition 1867a, 19) and Group III (furniture and other housing objects) indicates porcelain and annamite pottery (product number 151 in Class 17 from “De la Grée” [sic] (Exposition 1867a, 11) or a candleholder with mother-ofpearl incrustations (product number 204, in Class 26) from “Francis Garnier” (Exposition 1867a, 14). However, in the

most ‘civilised’ section containing art objects (Group I), Cochinchina together with all other French colonies was represented by only six entries compared with almost 1,400 entries in the entire colonial catalogue: there were no oil paintings in Class 1, and only one “decorative painting” was entered in Class 2 (paintings and drawings), sent by “Garnier, Comité agricole” (Exposition 1867a, 2). Finally, between and bridging the sections of the arts and the applied arts was Group II (materials and applications of the liberal arts [matériel et application des arts libéraux]), which brings us to our central findings. This group comprised of eight classes (6 to 13) almost all of which included entries from Cochinchina (Exposition 1867a, 2–9): Class 6 (products of the printing industry and book trade) with “one Cambodian manuscript on paper” and “four manuscripts on palm leaves” sent by “De la Grée”; Class 9 (prints and photographic camera) with “photographic albums from Cochinchina and Cambodia” sent from the “Scientific commission of Cambodia” (most probably with the album by Émile Gsell on Angkor, see above); Class 10 (musical instruments), Class 12 (instruments of precision and material of scientific instruction) with money and calculation instruments; and Class 13 (maps and instruments of geography and cosmography) with an “atlas of the French colonies and map of Cochinchina” provided by the ministère de la Marine. It is Class 8 (application of drawings and modelling in the common arts [application du dessin et de la plastique aux arts usuels])20 that brings us to the casts of Angkor. Entry number 89 from Cochinchina reads:

19  They covered America with Martinique, Guyane, Guadeloupe, St. Pierre et Miquelon; Africa with Sénégal,

Côte d’or and Gabon, Réunion, Mayotte and Madagascar; Oceania with Tahiti and Nouvelle-Calédonie, and, finally, Asia with the Établissements français dans l’Inde and Cochinchine (Aymar-Bression 1868, 591, Notices 1866). 20  The official text of Class 8 included the following objects and products: “Dessins industriels. Dessins ob-

75

I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Moulages en soufre pris dans les ruines d’Angkor [sulphur casts for the ruins of Angkor] — fragments en grès et en poterie de statues décoratives d’Angkor [italics MF] — Tête en bronze d’une statuette du Bouddah, provenant de la colonie de Phoum-Morcai, province de Kouposédi — un fragment de tête et une statuette en bronze, provenant de Phoum-Bachq — trois fragments de statues en grès (De Lagrée). (Exposition 1867a, 5)

Rounding out the entries in the catalogue of the French colonial section, de Lagrée (as well as the later mission of de Lagrée/Garnier) had sent – sometimes in combination with the local ‘agricultural committee’ or the ‘scientific commission’, the body responsible for assembling a col­ lection representative of Cochinchina for the 1867 Exhi­ bition – quite a large variety of objects and products to France.21 These varied from daily decorative household objects, descriptive material like maps, photo albums, and books to original minor decorative artwork. The final and most interesting aspect of what was sent included original Angkorian sculptures and fragments along with cast copies (of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat as it was specified in the given footnote in the Garnier publication, see above). These arrived directly from the site and had to be incorporated into a colonial display, which opened only a short time later in April 1867. Taking into consideration the difficulty of packing and transporting these objects by elephants and small barges from the site to the Cambodian Great Lake and their shipping to Saigon (and from there by a French steamboat from Saigon to Marseille over a land bridge ­between the Red Sea and Alexandria), one can imagine their arrival à la dernière minute on the Champs-de-Mars. The lack of time for a conceptual partition of the different ­objects may be one explanation for why all objects from Angkor, both original and copies, landed in the colonial section of Group II/Class 8. Thus, due to their nature as copies, the bas-reliefs from Angkor Wat were classified in the more technical section featuring techniques for the reproduction of art instead of in the art section. As a consequence, these objects were totally ‘lost in the translation’ within the rigid classifying system as far as – compared to the exhibitions to come – their purely artistic, picturesque, and exotic character was concerned. Thus far, no concrete illustrations and photographs of the Angkorian display in 1867 have been found

for this research, and only a very few are available that give one a general impression of the French-colonial section (Pl. I.4a–c). A strange and striking contrast was created by juxtaposing Angkorian casts, as evidence of European high-tech reproduction techniques, with low-tech ethnographic displays that served a Eurocentric narrative about simple-minded natives of Cochinchina. This impression was nicely circumscribed by Jules Delaval’s 11 November 1867 report on “The French colonies” in the journal L’Expo­ sition universelle de 1867 illustrée. Published engravings were also circulated in different media to show the picturesque presentations of the French posessions (Figs. I.15a,b): In the growing colony of Cochinchina, the Annamite race follows the Chinese positivism. The chatter of the mind [folle du logis] dreams less about divinities; the hand prefers to be used for a more useful work; it guides the buffalo into the rice fields; it weaves silk and cotton; the china-grass for the clothing of the family. It leads the boat through the meandering canals and rivers which flood the area; it prepares the fish to dry; it chisels gold and sil­ vers for jewelry, incrusts mother-of-pearl furniture for sell or the own house. From these works of the indigenous, the European spirit brings back their procedures and advices for use; it collects with curiosity the debris of old civilisations which, in unknown ages, have reigned over the country. In the glass boxes of the liberal arts section one can see paintings, sculptures and vestiges of architecture which make an interesting contrast to the contemporary art without character [italics MF]. (Duval 1867b, 387)

Some months earlier on 28 May 1867 in the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, the same author had already published one of the very few detailed critiques of the ­display in the French-colonial section. As Duval wrote, the colonial section was quite similar to the “small nations” in the rest of the exhibition and was very difficult to find in the ordering system. Occupying only a very thin spoke in the exhibition’s floor plan (a radiating form of a wheel on which the most central compartments represented the most civilised status), the colonies “arrived empty-handed when it came to contributing to the sections of artworks, the liberal arts, and applied common arts”. Their natural as well as their historical and political units were “cut into pieces”, and even “their names were lost in the crowd” (Du-

tenus, reproduits ou réduits par procédés mécaniques. Peintures de décors. Lithographies ou gravures industrielles. Modèles et maquettes pour figures, ornements, etc. Objets sculptés. Camées, cachets et objets divers décorés par la gravure. Objets de plastique industrielle obtenus par des procédés mécaniques: réductions, photosculptures, etc. Objets moulés” (Exposition universelle de Paris 1867c, 582). 21  The internal correspondence of the jury for Group II/Class 8 also mentioned “De la Gré” [sic] in the section “Colonies françaises”. In the same class, Viollet-le-Duc (see chapter III about his concept of a musée de Sculpture comparée) reconfirmed that he sent some “spécimens” of his works – indeed, as much as Henry Cole, first director of the South Kensington Museum from 1857 to 1873 and British commissioner for the Paris Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867. (CARAN F12/3095, also F12/3037)

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3. The polysemy of objects, the white spots on the map, and the casts from Angkor

Figures I.15a,b  Exposition des Colonies Françaises and Exposition des Indes Françaises in the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Source: Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, vol. 2, 385 and 172; © Heidelberg University Library)

val 1867a, 1). Finally, standing before the objects from Indochina, Duval dated the “detached fragments of Angkor” to “1500 BCE”. In this context, it is not totally clear whether

he paralleled the moulages from Angkor with neighbouring displays of Native American Indians (which could not be reconfirmed as belonging within Class 8)22 or referred

22  However, in the same section of Group II/Class 8 within the display of French India (Inde française), Ranayanartagou, Chef de service de Chandernagor, was responsible for a “collection of moulded statuettes representing all Indian types of people” (Exposition 1867a, 5) that was most probably very small as depicted in the journal L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée in volume 2 on page 172.

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

to “redskin” figures on the bas-reliefs from Angkor Wat themselves, but his original French comment does serve to illustrate our argument about the vague and embedded ­status of the Angkorian products in the 1867 Exhibition: […] des fragmens [sic], détachés par les soins de M. de Lagrenée [sic] des ruines du temple d’Angkor, dans le Cambodge, nous reportent en des siècles et des pays que la science historique n’a pas encore éclairés [italics MF]. Les calculs les plus timides font remonter à quinze cents ans avant l’ère chrétienne ces bustes de granit, modelés avec un art que les Grecs de la meilleure époque ne désavoueraient pas. Tout auprès des moulages pris sur des sculptures du même temple, figurent des guerriers, coiffés de panaches de plumes retombant sur la tête à la manière des Peaux-Rouges. Serait-ce un nouvel anneau de cette chaîne de traditions que les érudits s’appliquent à établir entre les peuples de l’Asie et ceux

de l’Amérique, avec l’espoir de démontrer la communauté d’origine? (Duval 1867a, 2)

Moulages appeared not only in Class 8 as a supposedly ‘neutral’ method with which to copy and circulate original artworks (or indeed to appropriate them in the colonial context), but also ‘at the other end’ of Group II in Class 13 (Cartes et appareils de gégraphie et de cosmographie) where their highly contested purpose in the colonial game of appropriating, classifying, and displaying the ‘civilisation’ of the whole planet became much more evident. Next to galvanoplastic reproductions from the war ministry, the So­ ciété d’ethnographie installed an “ethnographic collection of nude images of different human races” along with “sculptures and plaster casts of the principle characters of ethnographic groups” (Exposition universelle de 1867b, 45,46; compare Cordier’s ethnographic installation in the Musée permanent later in this analysis with Fig. Intro.25b).

4. The relevance of plaster casts around the 1867 Exhibition: The French ‘art industry’ and ‘industrial arts’ around 1860 It would be too simple to conclude with the statement that and contextualised. As it was listed in the Catalogue officiel the first material translation of the Angkorian temples for from the Imperial Commission on Group II (Material and the European continent in 1867 was a pure mistranslation application of the liberal arts), Class 8 (Application of as far as the mode of a ‘correct’ embeddedness was con- drawings and modelling to the common arts) comprised of cerned. The fact that the moulages of the bas-reliefs of “artistic works that served the industry as model and orna­Angkor Wat were not directly integrated into the European mentation” in six different forms: (1–4) designs and patterns for print, weaving, embroidery, and furnishing, (5) display mode of the exotic Other within the picturesque staging of extinct civilisations (we will return to this point) patterns and models for the ornamentation and decoration, might only mean that they were temporarily ‘lost in trans- and, most important, (6) “designs and objects of industrialised sculpture obtained by mechanical procedures”.23 lation’. In fact, they were not simply ‘parked’ in a useless compartment of the 1867 Exhibition; on the contrary, they As Edmond Taigny, member of the admissions comwere displayed in a very prominent section that perfectly mittee of Class 8, stated, the displayed physical products mirrored the then hotly debated question of how industri- had no significant role in this group, and the patterns and al technology could contribute to the popularisation of art, models, no intrinsic value; their importance and merit deand thereby educating the public in it. And further, their pended only on their artistic inspiration (Exposition unidisplay raised the question of how art could continue to verselle de 1867b, 27). Studying the following list of 251 play an important role in the beginning of the age of me- entries for Class 8, one can see that de Lagrée’s sulphur chanical reproduction without supporting a devalorisation casts of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat in the neighbouring of its own notion of authenticity, originality, and artistry. It French-colonial section found their unexpected European was in this section that the question was de­bated – of equivalents with the following highly ‘exotic’ French which role copies of artworks (from a technological point names (Exposition universelle de 1867b, 28–36): chromo­ of view seen as artworks themselves) played in this cele- lithographies, photographies estampées en relief, imitations de brated “new temple of industry” in the 1867 Exhibition to peinture par la gravure typograpique, procédés de sculpture display an “abridged version of the human genius” (Dubois sur plâtre, groupe en relief de carton-plâtre peint, gravu­res paniconographiques, photosculptures, and finally, galvano­ 1867, 3,4, 60). In order to approach this topic, the profile of the rele- plastie. In summary, these different mechanical techniques vant section inside the 1867 Exhibition has to be sharpened could reproduce or even multiply two- or three-dimensional

23  Original: “Les dessins et objets de plastique industrielle obtenus par des procédés méchaniques (réduc-

tions, agrandissement, photosculptures)” (Exposition universelle de 1867b, 27).

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4. The relevance of plaster casts around the 1867 Exhibition

original objects (from images to sculptures, pieces of ar­ vided a never-ending “empire of trends [empire des modes] chitecture to whole models) in different materials, and on and the gilded vulgarity of products” (Dognée 1869, 8–9). one-to-one or eventually reduced or enlarged scales. Many However, these accusations simply ignored the “great social guidebooks to the 1867 Exhibition found especially admi- conflicts” that had led to the “social progress” in which the rable descriptions of the displayed products that under- exhibitions developed and boosted the revolution of “egalscored the “superior reputation of the French industry” itarian ideas and practices” (Dognée 1869, 10–13). Dognée (Guide officiel 1867, 35). The Angkorian exhibit was placed posited that “art was not banned in these industrial adin this prominent group, but it was certainly not ‘discov- vancements, rather it declared the indispensable condition for the success of industrial progress” (Dognée 1869, 18–19). ered’ in this 1867 Parisian event. None other than Victor Baltard, the great French A great exhibition like that held in Paris in 1867 was nothBeaux-Arts architect, contributed a fourteen-page essay on ing less than a “comparative study” that brought together a the Procédures et enseignement de l’art industriel in the “temporary concentration of works of/for the people of all summarising Class 8 comment of the Rapports du jury in­ countries, […] bringing justice to the disturbed distance” ternational under director Michel Chevalier. More than between them (Dognée 1869, 20). In a short excursus on half a century before Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay the 1867 Exhibition, Dognée formulated his regret that the on the The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduc- “courte durée” of the event could only produce “some artion, Baltard acknowledged the tremendous development chaeological pastiches of ancient monuments”, whereas the in the “art of reproduction of graphical or sculptural art- whole of “civilisation” had brought together their “spéciworks” and its great advantages for the industry. But he men” of all human creativity (Dognée 1869, 23–24). Finally, also argued critically from the artists’ point of view, de- he came to his central thoughts on the industrial arts in scribing its process as a translation in which the salient which the techniques of mechanical reproduction, such as merits of the original should not be distorted. Out of all plaster casts, played a central role. The products of the indisplayed procedures in Class 8, he nevertheless preferred dustrial arts would find their ideal in the balanced associthe most direct “mechanical reproduction processes, such ation of the “useful and the beautiful”. Despite not being as plaster casts”, because their (im)print/proof [épreuve] unique creations but reproductions, the multiplication of from the original was direct, “precise and absolute” (Bal- which had been obtained mechanically, the industrial arts tard 1868, 143, 148).24 Still, Baltard defended the concept of stuck to its “special mission” of fabricating objects that the artistic original and suggested that the new techniques served a useful purpose in everyday life but that were, nevcould help to “transport from one language to the other”, ertheless, “artfully adorned”. The expression “se revêtant to “propagate good artworks”, and to make them “tangible d’une parure artistique” in relation to the above-mentioned and understandable for everybody”, whereas mechanical mechanical qualities brings Dognée’s analysis quite close reproductions would only “bring an effect, may interest the to direct research about the European history of the plaster spectators, but never really touch their inner feelings” (Bal- casts from Angkor. Once (and in 1867 for the first time in tard 1868, 144, 145). Baltard’s juxtaposition of effect, inter- Europe) they were introduced not as objects of art per se, est, and reproduction versus feeling and the original in but as spécimens of a reproducible procedure that could be used to embellish useful products. Their (almost postmodrelation to plaster casts and original artwork would prove correct at the end of the European career of plaster casts ern) function as decorative elements would be predefined from Angkor. About seventy years after the date of this as “useful” for the hybrid architectural reconstitutions of publication, the pavilion-like plaster cast display of Angkor Angkor as objects of public instruction and political propin the 1937 Paris Exhibition was rendered almost pointless aganda in the exhibitions that were to come. This is even (see chapter VIII). more significant when we take into account Dognée’s final Eugène Dognée’s publication Les arts industriels à l’Ex­ comment that the old-day “splendours of Beaux-Arts galposition universelle de 1867 advanced an impressive analy- leries” at the 1867 Exhibition had almost entirely lost their sis of the relevance of industrial arts. After a compressed “novelty appeal” (Dognée 1869, 38). In his eight-hundredtheoretical discussion on art and industry, he provided an page product catalogue divided into sections on animal, eight-hundred-page annotated catalogue that grouped all vegetable, and mineral raw materials (from wool, leather, related (im)print media products in the 1867 Exhibition. silk, and ivory to wood, cotton, and fibre and finally stone, According to Dognée, “severe accusations” had been made earth, and metals), plaster casts were categorised in the that works of art were currently suffering from an “increas- mineral section under the subdivision “earth”. As an intering monotonous similarity”, which was accelerated by the mediate product in an artistic process, Dognée referred to effect- and commerce-oriented great exhibitions that pro- plaster casts as “economical reproductions of expensive

24  See Didi-Huberman’s theoretical thoughts on the nature of imprints as mentioned in the introduction of

this monograph.

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

sculptures” (Dognée 1869, 520) that could a) find their way, “hidden under a golden sheet”, into luxurious apartments, b) be a “more useful application [for the] popularisation of good models for art schools”, or c) be most useful for the “cheap and faithful popularisation [and] diffusion of the best works of art of antiquity and the younger era […] without the necessity of difficult travels” – that is, the reproductions could be featured in the displays of museums containing masterpieces from “all regions and all times”. Dognée concluded, “Plaster casts have to fulfil an exemplary role. In the 1867 Exhibition they proved worthy of their glorious participation in the artistic education of the people” (Dognée 1869, 523–24). As an important example of this, he quoted the galvanoplastic reproductions in the South Kensington Museum in London that were part of a “radical reform of the public taste”. It was precisely this approach in the relation to the London museum that Louis Delaporte would share in his similar vision to create an Indochinese Museum in Paris with plaster casts from Ang­ kor on display (see chapters II and III). Dognée shared his opinion about the South Kensington Museum with his British colleague Richard Redgrave who, as art director of the museum, praised its “splendid and unequalled contribution of reproductions of objects of art” to the 1867 Exhibition. These reproductions included a g­ iant plaster cast of the door of the Spanish cathedral of Santiago de Compostella and “electrotypes from the coronation plate in the Tower” (Redgrave 1868, 151). Referring to the plaster casts that France had produced of the Trajan column from earlier copies in London (compare chapter III on the South Kensington Museum) and to British moulds coming from objects in the Parisian musée de l’Artillerie in the context of the 1855 Exhibition, Redgrave finally concluded his own report on Class 8 of the 1867 Exhibition: “Thus there are indications to show that the movement is progressing, and we may hope that shortly a system of interchanges will be set on foot by which our own and all other collections for increasing the taste in and feeling for good art will be rendered more complete, and spread into manufacturing localities where, from the necessary rarity of fine objects, such art could not otherwise be seen and studied” (Redgrave 1868, 168). And, indeed, in this he proved correct; through the strong efforts of Henry Cole, whose energetic negotiations during the 1867 Exhibition helped to acquire a large collection of plaster casts for the South Kensington Museum, the Convention for promoting universally reproductions of works of art for the benefit of museums of all countries was signed the same year in Paris by the aristocratic leaders of European nations, including Great Britain’s Albert Edward, Prince of Wales; the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm; Prince Napoleon of

France; Csar Alexander of Russia; the archdukes of Austria, Karl Ludwig and Rainer Joseph; representatives of Hesse, Saxony, Belgium, Sweden and Norway, and Italy; and Prince Frederik of Denmark. The convention was a ground­ breaking development for the intended low-cost circulation of art objects and entire “historical monuments” through the medium of plaster casts for display in museum collections, and it occurred at a singular moment when a panEuropean exchange network seemed possible above the emerging egocentric representation of each Kulturnation (culture nation). The convention read like this:











Throughout the world every country possesses fine historical monuments of art of its own, which can easily be reproduced by casts, electrotypes, photographs, and other processes, without […] damage to the originals. (a)  The knowledge of such monuments is necessary to the progress of art, and the reproductions of them would be of a high value to all museums for public instruction. (b)  The commencement of a system of reproducing works of art has been made by the South Kensington Museum and illustrations of it are now exhibited in the British section of the Paris Exhibition, where may be seen specimens of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swiss, Russian, Hindoo (italics MF), Celtic, and English art. (c)  The following outline of operations is suggested: I.  Each country to form its own commission according to its own views for obtaining such reproductions as it may desire for its own museums. II.  The commissions of each country to correspond with one another and send information of what reproductions each causes to be made, so that every country, if disposed, may take advantage of the labours of other countries at a moderate cost. III.  Each country to arrange for making exchanges of objects which it desires. IV. In order to promote the information of the proposed commissions in each country and facilitate the making of reproductions, the undersigned members of the reigning families throughout Europe, meeting at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, have signed their approval of the plan, and their desire to promote the realisation of it. The following Princes have already signed this Convention…25

To conclude, within the international flows of copies, these ‘immobile’ and internationally renowned icons of cultural heritage (from single precious objects to architectural elements and whole “historical monuments” from all over Europe and the world) became highly mobile and – to fol-

25  This text is today displayed in a facsimile reproduction in the Architectural Courts in the Victoria & ­Albert Museum (formerly South Kensington Museum, compare Figs. III.23 and Pl. III.4–5).

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5. The palais de l’Industrie after 1855

low our transcultural methodology (compare chart Fig. Intro.2a) – increasingly lost their fixed local identity, exploitable national affiliation, and the relevance of legal ownership. At this moment, the modern colonial enter-

prise was just developing, and the appropriation of art and architectural manifestations in colonised territories (like India and Indochina) for the European heritage market was about to begin.

5. The palais de l’Industrie after 1855: A laboratory for the Exposition permanente des colonies and the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie What is particularly interesting in Redgrave’s report is his detailed, up-to-date knowledge about the French roots of the practice of taking plaster casts of art objects. This knowledge was made clear when he brought one important institution into the debate – the Union centrale des arts appliqués à l’industrie, which had organised their first exhibition in 1865 in the palais de l’Industrie, the site of the Universal Exhibition of 1855. The 1855 Universal Exhibition will not be discussed in detail here for the simple reason that at that time the contact zone with Cambodia or Angkor was not yet fully established: the colony of Cochinchina was only founded after the Treaty of Saigon in 1862 and the establishment of the protectorate of Cam­ bodge in 1863; this did not include Angkor, which lay to the north on Siamese territory. However, the central building of the 1855 Exhibition played a crucial role insofar as two institutions residing in this building after 1855 helped to predefine certain display characteristics of cultural heritage in general and of the plaster casts from Angkor in particular. On 23 October 1855 (some two weeks before the official closing of the 1855 Exhibition), a handwritten four-page report from the ministère de la Marine et les colonies (direc­ tion des Colonies, Bureau du régime politique et du com­ merce) discussed the “necessity to create a space for the conservation of the colonial products after the universal exhibition and to launch the project for a permanent location for an exhibition of these products”. Its author was the conseiller d’état and directeur des colonies, Mestro. He was worried about these products from the colonies that had been displayed in an annex of the palace and were cared for by the Department of the Navy but afterwards taken

away and publicly sold or bought by the state. Mestro mused on a possible site for a “permanent exhibition”, which had to comprise not only the already institutionalised popularisation of the commercial opportunities in Algeria26 but also that of the colonies further away, the “richness of soil” of which should be put “constantly in front of the eyes of the public” (Mestro 1855). He was successful in this project; the Exposition permanente des produits de l’Algérie et des colonies was founded by decree of Chasseloup-Laubat, the minister of the colonies, in 1858 (Palais de l’Industrie 1875, xii). In 1859 the collection found a home in the palais de l’Industrie – with Aubry-Lecomte, sous-commissaire de Marine, as its conservator and with a small local committee overseeing the different sections of Algeria, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and Guyane. A Guide du visiteur from 1860 reconfirmed the installation of the exhibition within seven bays inside the southern gallery of the palais de l’Industrie’s first floor, accessible by gate XII of the building. The display focused on four major thematic groups: vegetable products, minerals, animal products, and “indigenous industries and ethnography” (Cardon 1860, 8). The latter – we might call it ‘performative’ – approach to the representation of the French colonies’ products and patri­ moine, even if Cochinchina was not yet displayed, was especially crucial for the representation modes of Angkor in future universal exhibitions. As the guidebook described, the visitor to the Exposition permanente was confronted with a strange display of different colonies at the entry to the exhibition’s gallery, which combined an ethnographic staging with original archaeological findings to form a hybrid ensemble. The scene comprised of two faked warriors framing the entry, one from Gabon holding three spears, a

26 The Exposition permanente des produits de l’Algérie had been a small collection of samples that were as-

sembled in a small subsidiary building of the war ministry in order to provide minor information to the employees and a small, curious public. After its display at the London Exhibition of 1851, it was, after a time in the rue de Bourgogne, finally installed in 1854 for the public as the Exposition algérienne in the city palace Hôtel Sesmaisons in rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain. The collection was organised into several rooms displaying a “véritable encyclopédie algérienne” (Ministère de la guerre 1855, 8) with a strong focus on agricultural and industrial products and a very small section of ‘(applied) arts’ with daily utensils, carpets, small furniture, and some paintings. A short-lived single Exposition permanente des Colonies without Algeria was installed in rue de Rivoli. At the moment when the two different administrations of Algeria and the colonies were merged into one ministry, these two exhibitions were also united inside the palais de l’Industrie (Cardon 1860, 5; Blum 1894, 7).

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.16  Official guide of 1869 to the Musée oriental at the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie in Paris (Source: Union centrale 1869b, cover)

sword, and a buckler, and one from Guyane with a costume of liana and algae. The idols of Shiva [le Cupidon in­ dien] and Buddha, which according to the guidebook had been found during archaeological excavations of the mosque of Rangoon in the Indes Occidentales, were placed at their feet, and the whole display was framed by sugar cane from the colonies of Mayotte and Réunion (Cardon 1860, 8). This combination of colonial products, patrimoine, and ethnography inside the exhibition found its apex in the display of sixteen lifelike busts and bodies of indigenous “Algerian types” by Charles Cordier, the French ethnographic sculptor who was also to garnish the ethnographic gallery of the National History Museum in Paris (later musée de l’Homme) with a similar display (Margerie 2004). Calling these busts “spécimens des beaux-arts”, the guidebook quoted a catalogue that summarised the approach of the artist: also interesting for “the anthropologist, the ethnographer, anatomist, philosopher, and historian”, his art was “not a simple individual episode, a pure fantasy” but was part of the description of the “great movements of humanity”; his 82

“faithful reproductions of the types of different races [were] necessary to throw light on the study of the biological and moral sciences, and to give them a solid basis through the sculpting which [serving this approach, MF] had never a more profound signification, a more general interest” (Cardon 1860, 97–98, quoting Trapadoux 1860). Together with its colonial-political mission and economic propaganda, two highly important facets of the Exposition permanente migrated into the displays of Angkor in future universal exhibitions: a) the combination of lifelike ethnographic staging together with artistic sculptural interpretations as “reproductions fidèles” of the colonised Other, and, b) their function of describing the advancement of humanity. According to the important footnote in Garnier’s 1873 publication, it was also the context and display mode of the Ex­ position permanente into which the sulphur casts from Angkor by de Lagrée were transplanted after their sevenmonth display in Group II/Class 8 of the 1867 Exhibition at the Champs-de-Mars. In the same year (1858) that the larger Exposition per­ manente des colonies was created, the French Société du progrès de l’art industriel was founded to assist the fusion of the applied arts with industrial developments. Its first Ex­ position de l’art industriel was opened in the palais de l’In­ dustrie in 1861 with a focus on drawings and models for the application of art in relation to mechanical reproductions (compare Group II/Class 8 in the 1867 Exhibition). The So­ ciété l’Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie was founded in 1864, and its bylaws defined its final goal as being “to foster these cultures of art which served the realisation of the beautiful and the useful” and to support those works of art that helped “augment the public taste for the beautiful”. As it was defined in §5 of the foundation text, the institution was convinced of the advantages of the “universalisation of the applied arts into industry” (Union centrale 1865, 35). Once again, the Department of Science and Art of the South Kensington Museum in London was the major reference. The first exhibition of the Union cen­ trale took place in 1865 in the palais de l’Industrie, two years before the Universal Exhibition of 1867. In the galleries, the great nave, and its lateral pavilions, original works of art were displayed next to industrial reproductions, and their different conceptual distinctions and artistic values were blurred and merged. The nine groups of applied arts, which covered themes from the decoration of housing and furniture to issues of education, highly influenced the classification system of the universal exhibition two years later. The first group contained “all works of art composed in the area of industrial reproduction” and also included many examples of the plaster cast technique. Additionally, the 1865 exhibition catalogue covered the special section of a musée rétrospectif with the exhibited periods stretching from antiquity to the Renaissance. As the Union’s president Ernest Guichard pointed out in the preface, the 1865 Exhibition had been organised for the French industry as a preparative undertaking towards the “European competition”

6. Back to Egypt: The exotic architectures in the park of the 1867 Exhibition and the role of plaster casts

of the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Union centrale 1869a, v– vi). Despite this focus on French products, a specific section on the Middle Ages to the Renaissance also covered Roman and Assyrian antiques as well as “Oriental Art”, including bronzes, lacquerware, faience, and porcelain from India, Persia, China, and Japan. With its ‘original’ works of art, this section on Oriental art mutated into a special Musée oriental that was displayed at the Union’s headquarters at the place Royale (Fig. I.16). As the Guide du visiteur from 1869 speculated, the museum’s eight rooms (including a grand salon) finally received, once the 1867 Exhibition had closed its doors, the original ethnographical art objects from French India and Cochinchina that had belonged to the ministère de la Marine et des colonies and had most probably originated partly from de Lagrée’s missions to Angkor (Union centrale 1869b, 41). Despite the institution’s early approach of evaluating plaster casts as original products of the applied fine arts, the Union centrale also hosted exhibitions of plaster casts that were conceived as copies of French architectural patri­ moine. Its fifth exhibition in 1876 in the palais de l’Industrie displayed objects from the archives of the commission des Monuments historiques with Viollet-le-Duc (see his role as

the founder of the musée de Sculpture comparée in chapter III). Besides drawings and photographs of French monuments (including Roman and Arabic architecture in Algeria), the visitor could explore almost one hundred full-scale plaster casts from French historic monuments, including twelfth-century architectural sculpture from the collection of Geoffroy-Dechaume (Union centrale 1876, 91–98). Only a few months later this collection would find its home inside the palais de Trocadéro of the Universal Exhibition of 1878. Together with the ethnographic character of the Musée permanente des colonies, with its colonial-political and economic approach, and the exhibitions of the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie, with their focus on industrially applied arts,27 the palais de l’Industrie was a test laboratory for the staging of French and colonial cultural heritage in the medium of plaster casts. When de Lagrée’s plaster casts and originals were finally displayed in the Musée permanente des colonies, it was reported that the brothers of Doudart de Lagrée (who by that point was already dead) allowed the following lines to be installed above his Angkor collection: “Mort victime de son zèle pour la science” [Died a victim of his zeal for the sciences] (Villemereuil 1879, 62).

6. Back to Egypt: The exotic architectures in the park of the 1867 Exhibition and the role of plaster casts Although the 1867 Exhibition was already the second universal exhibition in Paris after 1855, it was the first ever in France to introduce freestanding pavilions outside the central exhibition building. Small ‘national’ pavilions and shop-like installations inside the palais de l’exposition had already been a feature of earlier universal exhibitions. As an illustration of the interior of the 1867 Exhibition par­ cours illustrates, the spatial arrangement also confronted the visitor with a densely packed series of representations of the Far East including Siam, the de facto legal owner of Angkor at that moment (compare Figs. I.14a,b). The settings in the newly introduced park, constructed by the engineer Jean-Charles Alphand with the landscape architect Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, enabled the architects of the more than thirty freestanding pavilions and almost twenty installations of ‘nations’ to create larger individual structures. They were sometimes even embedded into veritable architectural ensembles including a surrounding garden (compare Fig. I.12). As regards the predefined parameters for the different Angkorian pavilions in the later universal and colonial exhibitions, it was this outdoor 1867 Exhibition that triggered several cultural dynamics and processes that can be summarised in five aspects: the pro-

cesses of (a) the iconisation of cultural heritage, (b) the stereotyping of one’s own culture and of the ‘alien-exotic Other’, (c) the fossilisation of an imagined civilising strata, (d) patrimonialisation, and e) architectural hybridisation (compare Normand 1870). Representing a nation (or, to a lesser degree, a culturalpolitical entity like the Vatican) or an institution (like the Suez Canal Company) within one single pavilion brought with it the problem of choosing those cultural elements that were considered representative of the nations’ dominant features. This choice required a selection process initiated by the decision makers, which in many European cases included either national commissions composed of leading cultural-political and scientific representatives or just one national commissioner alone. The major reference for the cultural self-definition of emerging nation-states after 1800 was cultural heritage and, not surprisingly, most pavilions used the vocabulary of the already established canon of ‘national heritage’, which consistently excluded and eliminated all cultural elements outside the chosen representative framework. Taking into consideration that universal exhibitions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the largest public media events of the time –

27  In 1877, the musée des Arts décoratifs was founded and in 1880 both institutions were merged into the Union centrale des Arts décoratifs.

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

attracting millions of international and increasingly mobile visitors – these pavilions were also part of an emerging trend that can be called ‘cultural heritage tourism’. As a result, national pavilions were conceived as universally recognisable eye-catchers that depicted each nation’s iconised ‘national cultural heritage’ characteristics in highly exclusive, temporarily built, and scale-compressed architectural models. Each individual European nation – or emerging Asian nation-state like China, Japan, and Siam – chose (or was helped by architects of the hosting nations to choose) representative characteristics for its pavilion in a process of cultural self-stereotyping. However, non-invited, non-participating, or even de facto non-existent nations or cultural entities were not necessarily absent. Keen to represent as many nations or cultures as possible in order to render a universal exhibition truly ‘universal’, the hosting nation quite often financed and built foreign pavilions using an architect of its own choice who imagined and invented the building style of the ‘cultural other’ in a process of stereotyping the foreign, alien, and exotic. In relation to both the pavilions of independent nation-states and the structures developed by the hosting nation itself, the processes of nationalising and (self-)stereotyping cultural heritage fostered a fossilisation of the displayed cultural strata within the stylistic appearance of each pavilion. Very often the emergence of cultural nationalism, with its investigations into the ‘own’ and/or ‘alien’ cultural strata of ancient and extinct civilisations, was aligned with the disciplines of art history and archaeology. As a result, the pavilions were styled, preferably using the architectural language of ‘antiquity’, according to different motivations: European modern nation-states tended to link their newborn cultural consciousness to the roots of the cultural strata of their ‘own’, occasionally reinvented, distant past. On the other hand, to label and ‘fossilise’ a European colony from Africa, the Americas, and Asia with an archaeologically reconstructed stylisation of an extinct civilisation helped the colonising métropole to detach the colonial entity from its own contemporary, but supposedly primitive, decadent, and uncivilised present. In the case of colonialism, the process of ‘patrimonialisation’ came with the material translation and transfer of the colonialised country’s cultural heritage into the centre of a universal or colonial exhibition. It helped the colonising motherland within its mission civili­ satrice – this was also true for modern nation-states within their ‘own’ antiquity – to reinvent itself as a highly civilised inheritor of the past and to connect itself with the past as a righteous ‘continuer’ of a distant ‘high’ civilisation. Finally, most of the pavilions from the 1867 Exhibition onwards were built as architectural hybrids. The following case study will demonstrate in particular (as the long career of reconstitutions of Angkor in the next chapters demonstrates generally) that archaeologically appropriated originals – ranging from sculptures to whole architectural parts together with copied originals from the original site and occasionally multiplied by mechanical reproduction with the use of 84

drawings, plaster casts, and photographs – were integrated into hybrid-picturesque pavilions. These were in their very core always constructed with contemporary building techniques and modern materials. As a picturesque stylistic hybrid from the outside, it exhibited in its richly decorated inner showroom a mix of original archaeological findings, new architectural models, and life-size ethnographic installations along with geographical maps, photographs, and scientific publications. With the plans of the southwestern outdoor section of the 1867 Exhibition as a reference – its geographical direction was turned upside down on this map for a better readability (Pl. I.5a–c) – we will focus primarily on the Parc Égyptien inside the Oriental section. Approaching this ensemble from the south, the visitor passed the Italian section created by the Italian architect Cipolla to the northeast along with several smaller buildings, including the archaeological reconstitutions of the Maison toscan and the Palais pompéien with an inner display of bronze reproductions of archaeological findings from Herculaneum. Directly opposite, in the southwest, the Vatican staged a ruined entryway to the subterranean ‘Roman catacombs’. Having reached the crossing of the Avenue d’Orient and the Grand Boulevard and looking to the northeast down the Grand Boulevard, the visitor had before him a hybrid collage of ‘oriental constructions’ (Fig. I. 17): to the right the mosque of the Turkish ensemble, in the centre and to the left the Arab-style palais, the écuries, and the temple de Phile of the Parc Égyptien. Continuing along the avenue and turning left (northwest) on the Avenue des Etats-Unis, the visitor would bypass the pavilions of the Compagnie du canal de Suez and of Romania to reach the strange pre-Columbian temple de Xochicalco – the highly disputed Mexican pavilion. In actual fact Mexico had not been invited to contribute as a nation because of the anti-monarchist tensions that had recently erupted in the country. The Austro-Mexican emperor Maximilian, installed as monarch by Napoleon III (the host of the 1867 Exhibition) had just been executed by Mexican nationalists under Benito Juarez on 19 June in the same year. Thus, the arrangement of peaceful nations inside the 1867 Exhibition did not necessarily mirror the political realities but focused instead on reconstructing an apolitical pavilion-like model of the civilisation of humankind (Fig. I.18). This archaeological hybrid from Mexico was built as a private project by Léon-Eugène Méhédin, who had taken plaster casts and pictures of the same building as a photographer for the French Commission scientifique du Mexique pour l’archéologie. Turning south in front of the Missions évangel­ iques and passing the large Moroccan, Chinese, and Japanese sections to the right along the Avenue d’Orient, the visitor came across the écuries pour éléphants (the Siamese installation of the stalls containing real elephants!) and moved left to return to where he had started at the Egyptian Park, which comprised of four buildings and the temple de Phile (temple de pharaon or temple d’Edfou in other sources), its most interesting element (Fig. I.19).

6. Back to Egypt: The exotic architectures in the park of the 1867 Exhibition and the role of plaster casts

Figure I.17  General view of the ‘oriental constructions’ in the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Source: Grand album 1868, 85; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure I.18  Pavilion of Mexico, temple of Xochicalco (Source: Chalet-Bailhache 2008, 23)

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I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.19  Temple du Pharaon of the Egyptian ensemble of the 1867 Universal Exhibition (Source: Exposition universelle de 1867 illustré, vol. 1, 57; © Heidelberg University Library)

It is this temple structure that not only contributed to all five of the processes enumerated above; its conceptualisation, style- and space/scale-compressed composition, and architectural construction methods would, from an abstract point of view, be surprisingly influential for, if not similar to, the Angkorian reconstitutions in future universal and colonial exhibitions.28 Additionally, this pavilion’s construction mode was one of the best documented in the earliest history of ‘French’ Orientalist pavilion constructions for universal exhibitions (compare Normand 1870, as discussed in the introduction). This is due to the detailed one-hundred-page report Exposition universelle de 1867: Description du Parc égyptien by Auguste MarietteBey, an eminent French archaeologist in Egypt, member of the international jury of the 1867 Exhibition and of the Commission vice-royale égyptienne. The ‘Egyptian Park’ in Paris was under the organisation of Charles Edmond, Com­missaire général de l’Exposition Vice-Royale égyp­

tienne, who was working in the name of the Egyptian viceroy Ismael Pacha. The ensemble comprised four structures: the temple, “both museum and specimen of the Pharaonic art”; the palais “in Arabic style” built by the architect from the Egyptian government, E. Schmitz, with an apartment for the Egyptian viceroy and a hall with an exposed relief plan of Egypt; the two-story Okel in the style of an Upper-Egyptian caravansary with a public café, some rooms for “indigenous Egyptians”, their boutiques and ateliers, and a study room upstairs for the Egyptian commission and the secretariat of the Société anthro­ pologique de Paris; and, finally, the écuries, which provided the stables for two donkeys and two dromedaries (Mariette 1867a, vi). Officially working for the Egyptian com­ mission vice-royale, Jacques Drevet, the architect of the temple, was one of the typical French “Orientalist architects” (Declety 2003, 62, 65), along with his French colleague Alfred Chapon, who built the palais du Bey de Tu­

28  Compare with the 1:10-scale plaster cast model of a gate in Angkor Thom for the 1878 Exhibition (see Fig. II.12, compare Falser 2013b); or the pagode d’Angkor of 1889 with its Allée de Sphinx (see Pl. IV.5).

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6. Back to Egypt: The exotic architectures in the park of the 1867 Exhibition and the role of plaster casts

nis, the jardin chinois, the Suez pavilion, and the Siamese and Japanese buildings. According to Mariette’s report, the overall site of the temple measured eighteen metres wide by forty-eight metres long from the entry gate to the back of the temple structure. Mariette himself preferred to call the structure a “chapel” or a “museum” to display the collection of Egyptian antiquities from the Museum of Boulaq/Cairo, which he had developed in 1858 to replace the older national museum. Generally speaking, the site was a spatially compressed version of similar ‘real’ Egyptian sites like Karnak or Edfu; the temple was temporally and stylistically compressed because, as Mariette elucidated in a separate publication called Aperçu de l’histoire d’Égypte from the same year (Mariette-Bey 1867b), it aimed to combine three major time periods from old Egyptian civilisation in one building. The visitor entered the site through a “Ptolemaic” pylon and advanced along a small allée des Sphinx (with five copies on each side) towards the two sitting sculptures of Ramses II (all copies from the “XIIIth dynasty”, about sixteenth century BCE) placed at the entry to the inner temple. Measuring nine metres high, eighteen metres wide, and fifteen metres long, the temple building was encircled by a series of columns on each side (dating in style from the “introduction of the Christian era”), which created a circular corridor (dated “XVIIIth or XIXth dynasty”, about thirteenth century BCE). Finally, the inner hall was arranged in the style of an ancient tomb (from the “Vth dynasty”, about 2500 BCE) to represent the oldest style of Egyptian art. Functioning as a museum, it displayed a large collection of original sculptures, the accurate and natural lighting of which was, in contrast to the collage of authentic building parts that composed the structure, only made possible by non-authentic openings in the ceiling and the facades. As he explained, Mariette presented the visitor with an “idea of Egyptian art with its three most characteristic epochs”. To achieve this he “substituted a pure reproduction and simple building” with what he called an “étude d’archéologie égyptienne”, “restitution”, and “imitation” (Mariette 1867a, 10, 11) that was based on the temple of Philae in Upper Egypt near Aswan. However, Mariette abandoned the attempt to obtain all architectural and decorative elements from the real site in plaster casts as exact copies for Paris because of a lack of time, missing infrastructure (transport facilities), and destructive humidity at the site that was detrimental to a longer casting campaign. As a side effect of creating an imitation and interpretation rather than a mere copy of a real temple, Mariette bypassed the archaeologically obvious necessity of rebuilding the de facto ruins onsite (just behind the temple, the Vatican was represented by a ruined entry to the catacombs), and called his project a “savant effort” to reconstitute “an Egyptian temple at the time of its most perfect state of conservation”. After this explanation of his “archaeological study”, Mariette obviously felt obliged to prove the degree of authenticity of its single elements and made the following aston-

ishing list of the state-of-the-art techniques used for an exact material translation of architecture, a list that we will also encounter in the reconstitutions of Angkor: all parts were photographed and meticulously measured; almost all architectural elements, such as the bas-reliefs and columns were copied (sometimes “restored or made anew”) by plaster casts and applied to the structural core as a masonry construction by the Parisian contractor M. Celeri; important details were taken in “almost 400 paper mouldings” [éstampages en papier] by the Parisian Godin; the ten sphinxes and the Ramses II statues on either side of the entry were moulded from originals at the Louvre Museum in stucco and multiplied by a newly applied technology using a mix of “Portland cement and integrated broken fragments of marble” by the Parisian entrepreneur cimentier Chevalier; the decorative work on almost all the exterior facades including the twenty-two columns was modeled after plaster casts by the Parisian maison Bernard et Mallet; and the existing colours were “sampled” in situ and executed as “archaeological paintings” by the Parisian painter Bin (Mariette 1867a, vi–vii, 11–28). “The architecture of the ancient kingdoms became an accepted symbol” (Çelik 1992, 116) as an iconised pars pro toto of Egyptian heritage, and the Pharaonic antique style became the obligatory stereotype in depictions of Egypt for the following universal ­exhibitions (as was likewise the case with Angkor as a representation of Cambodia). This was certainly the case in 1878 when Mariette, now promoted to commissioner general, built another Pharaonic version. In a kind of “denial of coevalness” (after Fabian 1983), the fossilisation of Egypt’s stratum of antiquity served to disconnect the represented country from its contemporary culture. This “archaeologizing” strategy (Falser/Juneja 2013b) would in fact perfect­ly match those Eurocentric politics at play in French-colonial Cambodge and later in the new-born nation state of Cambodia to turn a religious and active temple site of Ang­kor Wat into an architectural masterpiece within an archaeological and dead heritage reserve (see chapters IX, XII). Charles Edmond, the ‘French’ commissioner of the Egyptian section, had disqualified the Arabic architectural style as “arbitrary and capricious […] without any system worth being displayed” in order to praise the effort to “reconstitute by ­[scientific] thinking the oldest ideas of human civilisation” (Edmond 1867, 177, 18). The terms “reproduction fidèle” (Marini 1867, 58) or “idée plus complète [de l’art égyptien]” (Launey 1867, 423) used in relation to the Egyptian pavilion were the recurring Occidental descriptive features for Orientalised pavilion projects in universal and colonial exhi­ bitions. In reality (and also in the case of ­Ang­kor), these ephemeral and strictly surface-oriented structures were strange architectural hybrids where all kinds of ‘exact and authentic copies’ from the original site – translated by the techniques of drawings, photographs, paper mouldings, and plaster casts – had been attached to a hidden core of contemporary building construction (brick, concrete, reinforced concrete, wooden scaffoldings). Through the exhibi87

I  Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor…

Figure I.20  Deménagement of the ephemeral event called the Universal Exhibition (Source: Exposition 1867 illustrée, II, 28.11.1867, 469; © Heidelberg University Library)

tion of original specimens in their interior showrooms, the borderlines between the concepts of original, reproduced, reconstituted, copied, interpreted, and reinvented works of art became fluid, permeable and undistinguishable, and resulted overall, as a final product, in a new creative exhibit of contemporary architectural and political-cultural practice. When the 1867 Universal Exhibition was finally closed, the “spectacle” of the ephemeral pavilions was, as in all other following exhibitions in the future with Angkor on display, completely dismantled (Fig. I.20). However, it left a “durable memory” which would last within the French imaginaire:

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Que reste-t-il aujourd’hui de l’Exposition universelle de 1867? Autant vaudrait demander ce que sont devenues les neiges d’antan. […] C’est aujourd’hui surtout qu’on peut comprendre l’œuvre de reconstruction que nous avons menée à terme. Nous avons réédifié ce qu’on a détruit: et, à cause de cela même, notre œuvre restera: car elle gardera le souvenir durable de ce qu’on ne verra plus, c’est-à-dire du spectacle qui laissera dans l’esprit des hommes l’impression la plus profonde de tout ce siècle, rempli pourtant de prodiges. [italics MF] (L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, vol. 2, 470)

II



La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art: Delaporte’s Missions to Angkor, his Musée Khmer and the Universal Exhibition of 18781

1. Cracking the translation code of Khmer temple architecture: Delaporte’s mission to Angkor in 1873 Additional funds are necessary from the Beaux-Arts section […]. They will certainly be useful for the Colony itself, which also provides support with great goodwill: all this will indeed help to make better known and bring back from oblivion all those marvels once produced, its old civilisation. These funds will help to collect precious material for the reconstitution of its history, and in short, to attract attention of scholars, artists and of all France to shed light on a French country with an undoubtedly great future […] The goal of the excursion to the Khmer ruins is, above all, to collect, for being sent later on to the museums in France, the greatest possible amount of sculptures, art objects, casts from bas-reliefs, reproductions of inscriptions, and other artistic and archaeological specimens from the explored monuments. [italics MF] —Louis Delaporte to the Cochinchinese governor Dupré (Saigon, 14 July 1873)

In the year 1873, when the impressive publication Voyage carbon”, to the importance of the “Yang-se-king route for d’exploration en Indo-Chine 1866–68 was finally published, the European trading interests” (indeed, he mentioned the the first really comprehensive French mission to Angkor earlier Mekong mission as a reference), and to the goal of took place. The planning, execution, and outcome of this “making our merchants aware of these regions’ products and industries”. And he deemed the future results highly mission scientifique aux ruines des monuments khmers de l’ancien Cambodge to collect Angkorian objects for “our na- relevant to parallel inquiries of the “geographical societies tional museums” (Delaporte 1874, 2516) was published in in London and Berlin” and the “commercial networks [alApril 1874 by Louis Delaporte, its restless spiritus rector, in ready] established by German and American agents”. As a a detailed six-page report for the Journal officiel de la Ré- concluding remark, he calculated that the mission would publique Française. This report was addressed to the main take one year, with costs totalling 30,000 francs.2 In an earsponsors of the mission, the ministre de la Marine et des lier letter from 1873 to Admiral Dupré – who was at that colonies and the ministre de l’Instruction publique, des cultes time gouverneur général du Cochinchine and had the lofty et des beaux-arts. Most important, the 1874 report provides ambition of incorporating the province of Tonkin into the French colonies in Indochina where Garnier had just us with a detailed list of what can be contextualised as the first massive material translation of Angkor for the French died on the battlefield after capturing Hanoi (Dupuis 1885, public. Its objects were, in a first step made since August Dutreb 1924) – Delaporte listed his efforts to finance his 1874, displayed in the small musée Khmer in the palais de mission. He mentioned his unsuccessful approaches to the Compiègne, seventy-five kilometres northwest of Paris. ministers of commerce, the navy, and the colonies, and Even though Delaporte’s project focused entirely on even of foreign affairs, and formulated his idea “to make Angkor, the preparatory correspondence shows that the plaster casts and to obtain original specimens [échantillons] arguments he advanced in seeking funding for this under- of the Khmer ruins by permission of the Cambodian king taking were quite similar to the political and commercial […] to be sent back to France where they would easily find goals of the de Lagrée–Garnier mission in 1866–68. In an the best places within the collections of the Louvre”.3 As undated seven-page draft letter (most probably from 1872), a major political player in the French-colonial project Delaporte scrutinised the “usefulness of an explorative and also co-sponsor of the 1873 publication, the Société de mission to the basin of Tonkin and its neighbouring re- géo­graphie de Paris was considered one suitable financial gions”. He referred to the Tonkin-Yunnan area as “rich in partner. Delaporte had already contacted the society in 1  Parts of this section were published in Falser 2013b and 2014. 2  Louis Delaporte, Utilité d’un voyage d’exploration du bassin de Tongkin et des régions. 7 p., undated letter

(ANOM INDO GGI 11795). 3  Delaporte to Dupré, Paris 3 January 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795).

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1872.4 Along with the support of the ministre de la Marine Admiral Pothuau and its directeur des Colonies Baron Benoist d’Azy, Delaporte’s major political-cultural liaison was the direction des Beaux-arts under the ministre de l’Instruction publique, des cultes et des beaux-arts Jules Simon. This direction was the Third Republic’s newly installed institution to oversee art production for the state (Genet-Delacroix 1996) under its first director Charles Blanc. Delaporte was granted 10,000 francs to “gather, during [his] stay in Cambodia, statues, bas-reliefs, columns, and other architectural elements and sculptures of archaeological and art historical interest and to deliver them to a French outpost from where these fragments would be transported to France by boats of the state”.5 On 20 May 1873, well equipped with art works as French gifts for the Cambodian king and his mandarins, Delaporte left France on his mission d’exploration du Tonkin to Cochin­ china, where he arrived five weeks later. Several letters to Dupré dating up to mid-July 1873 confirm Delaporte’s efforts to establish, upon his arrival in Saigon and with the help of Chomereau Lamothe, the general secretary of the Cochinchinese government, a suitable personnel for his project. Including a diplomatic side visit to the Cambodian king in Phnom Penh with help by Jean Moura (lieutenant de vaisseau and French représantant du Protectorat du Cambodge in Phnom Penh), it now entirely focused on Ang­ kor. With a patriotic undercurrent in his 1873 letter, which was dated conspicuously to Bastille Day (14 July), Delaporte placed his archaeological mission right in the ideological centre of the French-colonial mission civilisatrice. The funds provided by the Beaux-Arts directorate would (see the full introductory quote above) help (a) to salvage the marvels of the ancient Khmer civilisation, which had entirely sunk into oblivion; (b) to reconstitute its history by the collection of precious materials; and (c) to “attract the attention of the savants, artists, and all France to shed light on this French country [italics MF] with a grand future”. As regards the process of material translation, Delaporte’s aim “to collect the largest possible number of sculptures, art objects, casts of bas-reliefs, reproductions of inscriptions, and other artistic and archaeological specimens”6 never distinguished between original objects or their substitutions in plaster; the choice between original or copied échantillons for France depended apparently on their

‘translatablility’ as regards size, weight, transport, and infrastructure. Inside French Cambodge, “removal of specimens” from ruins like those close to Compong-Soai caused “no difficulties” for Delaporte as long as he counted them as “abandoned ruins from the cult”. Nor did Dela­ porte care about the legal ownership of these Angkorian properties, which were until 1907 not placed ‘within a French country’ (as Delaporte had it in the above quoted letter) but were on Siamese territory, as he mentioned himself in his report of 2 April 1874 in the Journal officiel de la République Française: On 13 September we arrived at Angkor Thom. I found the mission being installed in a grand bamboo hut right in the centre of the ruins […] The province of Angkor is today part of the kingdom of Siam. Therefore, our relationship to this new area was certainly different than to the mandarins inside [French] Cambodia. During his passage to Siem Reap, the centre of this province, Bouillet already had a meeting with the governor. This mandarin was totally shocked by our arrival and decidedly declared that the installed orders of the king of Siam forbade all removal of statues or sculptures from the monuments of Angkor. These orders had been known to us in advance. As a consequence, Bouillet reassured the mandarin that we only wished to visit and study the ruins, to collect inscriptions, and to take casts of the sculptures and bas-­reliefs. In order to level these difficulties, I had brought on board of our gunboat some gifts for the governor, and as a reaction he consented to provide us guides and assistants for our task. [italics MF] (Delaporte 1874, 2546—47)

Delaporte’s report in the Journal officiel listed all the major participants in the sixty-man expedition who were collected on one gun- and one steamboat. These included Félix Gas­ pard Faraut, conducteur des ponts et chaussées in Cochin­ china and special assistant for the excursion to the ruins, together with three mechanists from the navy charged with drawing architectural plans; the engineer-hydrograph Bouillet; the civil engineer and geologist Ratte; and the naturalist Jullien from the Natural History Museum in Paris (all three came from France with Delaporte himself); the naturalist and navy medical doctor Jules Harmand; a dozen sea- and militiamen; three interpreters; and, last but not

4  In her detailed analysis, Julie Philippe quotes a source from the archive of the Société de géographie indicat-

ing that the vice-amiral Fleuriot de Langle presented Delaporte’s idea on 19 July 1872 to the Society, which granted Delaporte 56,000 francs in the same year (Philippe 2013, 47; compare Philippe 2011). 5  Chef du bureau des beaux-arts Aléxandre to Delaporte, Paris 12 May 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795). A similar Arrêté du ministère de l’Instruction publique, des cultes et des beaux-arts was issued on 7 May 1873 (CARAN F17/2359); see Zéphir 2013, 42 and 43. 6  Delaporte to Dupré, Saigon 14 July 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795). The detailed list of sites (from “Compong Svai to Lovec, Préacan, Mélea, from Pnom Culen to Angcor-Wat, Angcor-Thom and the surrounding temples like Pnom Crom to Ko Ker”) and questions of the personnel were mentioned in the letters dated to 5, 14, and 17 July.

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least, the capitaine d’infanterie de Marine Auguste Filoz, contracted as a specialist to execute moulds of the Khmer sculptures and bas-reliefs of the Bayon and Angkor Wat temples (Fig. II.1a). For the latter undertaking, the mission brought with them lifting jacks, saws, levers for the “manoeuvring of the stones”, and “plaster and cement” for the mouldings (Delaporte 1874, 2516). As a starting point for his report, Delaporte repeated the typical colonial narrative about the Khmer temples sites: they were located “between the 10th and the 17th degree on northern latitude and the 100th and 105th eastern longitude” and were perfect in their execution as markers of a once powerful civilisation of “longue durée”; they contained remarkable artworks; they had been partly destroyed by war, abandoned for centuries, left in a state of complete disintegration, and were deserted, ignored, and even feared by the indigenous population who viewed the sites with “superstitious terror”; and, finally, they were covered by a devastating vegetation … and it was only with an “axe in the hand” that one could reach the temples. The collection of “twenty carriages” full of original pieces from the temples of Beng Mealea and Preah Khan on the Cambodian side was under the care of Faraut, and the “detachment of the sculptured surfaces from big stone blocks required”, in the middle of trees and liana and under conditions of constant bad weather, “a slow and exhausting use of the saw [sic!]” (Delaporte 1874, 2546).7 This account is evidence of Delaporte’s forceful detachment of original temple material. However, the transportation of the largest objects caused considerable problems. In a letter from Mealea to Dupré dated to 2 September and later depicted in his 1880 publication Voyage en Cambodge, he described how seventy to eighty Cambodians helped with the excavations. Some objects were cut into pieces with stone saws, fourteen ox carts were needed to bring the original giant statue of the Preah Khan to the neighbouring village of Stung, and rafts of bamboo sticks were used to transport smaller objects on the small river (Fig. II.1b).8 After Dela­ porte’s and Ratte’s return from Phnom Bok temple with three sculptures, including one four-faced Brahma statue (Croizier 1875, 98, 113), the mission arrived in Angkor Thom on 13 September 1873. Since they were on controlled Siamese territory, the major obstacle was yet to be solved (or silently bypassed): as Delaporte indicated (see quotation above), the Siamese Mandarin in the nearby village of Siem Reap was “shocked” by the arrival of such a large French mission and strictly “prohibited any removal of statues and sculptures from the Angkor site” (Delaporte 1874, 2546–47). In order to improve the situation, Étienne

Aymonier (himself working at the same time on another – linguistic – ‘translation’ project in form of the first Cambodian dictionary) was called from Phnom Penh to come with royal recommendation letter. Jean Moura was asked to organise suitable junks and diesel oil. To appease the Mandarin, Delaporte had also loads of wood delivered for the Siamese king’s intended palace nearby.9 Although his staff silently continued to remove originals from the site (Fig. II.1c), he assured the mandarin that they were appropriating sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural pieces from the temples without directly violating property rights, as they were only making reproductions (substitutes) of and conserving the originals – namely, by using the technique of making moulds and plaster casts. As reconfirmed in a dépêche télégraphique sent at the beginning of October 1873, Delaporte was indeed preparing to remove one large sculptural ensemble of thirty big stones with two giants and a balustrade from a “locally abandoned monument” (as he referred to the Preah Khan near Angkor Thom) for a future “great effect in Paris”. Today the ensemble is housed in the musée Guimet.10 If the official story as published on 2 April 1874 in the Journal Officiel (see quote above) sounded like a full success, then Delaporte’s internal Note complémentaire du Compte rendu de la mission aux ruines des monuments Khmers de l’ancien Cambodge (today preserved in the French National Archives) reveals a different, less glorious version of this giant transfer/translation operation. Not by accident did Dela­ porte introduce the document by saying that he had “reserved for this additional note some details particularly interesting for the Direction des Beaux-Arts”, but did “not consider it useful to be made public”: Arriving at the eastern causeway of Preah Khan, I was struck by the imposing effect of the two giants, one of which with five heads was holding in his ten hands the nine-headed dragon. Only a single element was missing. Certainly being a bit rough and deteriorated over time and through the contact by the trees, it appeared to me so remarkable that I decided to spare no efforts to bring it back to France. With unprecedented efforts, we finally succeeded to transport the thirty heavy stones of the group to the banks of the river five kilometres away. The Governor who had previously consented to send barges was shocked by such a considerable mass and refused to have it removed. I immediately sent out our steamboat to organise other barges at Phnom Penh. The day they arrived the mandarin had finally given his consent to give us ten pirogues to transport our stone blocks to the lake.

7  Delaporte’s need of “some stone saws, which could not be found or fabricated on site” was even telegraphed

to Phnom Penh and Saigon (Dépêche télégraphique, 30 August 1873; ANOM INDO GGI 11795). 8  Delaporte to Dupré, Méalea 2 September 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795). 9  Delaporte to Dupré, Méalea 2 September 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795). 10  Moura to Dupré, Dépêche télégraphique, Phnom Penh 2 October 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795).

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II  La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art

Figure II.1a

Figure II.1b

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1. Cracking the translation code of Khmer temple architecture

Figures II.1a—c  Delaporte’s mission at the ruins of Angkor and the transport of original sculptures to the French métropole (Source: Delaporte 1880, 367, 87, 13)

One half of them were loaded on the gunboat, the other half on the barges from Phnom Penh. I myself was in such a bad state of health that I could not observe them during the voyage. The barge with the nine dragon heads was partially filling up with water and sank in the lake. A raft transporting a great lion from Preah Khan, a very nice and rare object, was also abandoned by the locals at the mouth of the Stung River.11

Besides visits to almost all the known sites in the Angkor area and the execution of measured drawings, detailed indications, and photographs from the Bayon temple for a “reconstitution complète” back in the French motherland (see the discussion of Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois later in chapter III), Jullien also made a test series of moulds from the bas-reliefs of the Bayon, and the head of the famous statue of the Leper King. Filoz was installed at Angkor Wat. However, due to limited resources (the mission’s stock of plaster and cement had been completely decimated by the constant rain), the options for a massive material ‘translation’ were limited. Additionally, almost all of the mission’s participants fell severely ill, and Delaporte decid-

ed to return to Phnom Penh and Saigon. Filoz was left behind on the site with one interpreter and some workers for his month-long undertaking of the moulding of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat. With the help of Aymonier the original objects and moulds were transported on several smaller skiffs to the larger boats of the mission, which reached Saigon on 13 October. Moura in Phnom Penh was charged with retrieving the original sculptures that had already been removed but were left behind in Angkor, and Dela­ porte decided to cancel the second part of the mission to Tonking due to his very bad health and “the latest political status in this country”. Taking the next available pâquebot for France, he left Ratte and Jullien in Saigon to wrap up “our sculptures” (Delaporte 1874, 2547) and to load them on the state carrier Aveyron for France. Never before in the modern history of the Khmer temples and Angkor Wat had such a ‘massive material translation’ of the Cambodian temple site for the European continent been attempted. Delaporte closed his 1874 report listing the “results of the mission” with the following six paragraphs: (a) the “acquisition” of about seventy original sculptures and architectural fragments, the most important

11  Louis Delaporte, Note complémentaire du Compte rendu de la mission aux ruines des monuments Khmers

de l’ancien Cambodge (CARAN F21/4489/3a). For the valuable insight into this truly delicate issue, I am grateful for the information provided by Julie Philippe who has studied Delaporte’s correspondence, today preserved in the private archive of the Delaporte family in Loches (Delaporte’s birthplace in 1842) in detail (see Philippe 2011 and 2013; compare Tournemire 2013, Baptiste 2013a–c).

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of which were a group of two crouching giants, several Buddha statues, and architectural fragments of pilasters, columns, capitals, doors, windows, cornices, sculptures bases etc.; (b) a moulding of the head of the famous Leper King and of a large fragment of the bas-reliefs of the Bayon temple (by Jullien); (c) thirty-four moulded panels of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, forty-five mouldings from other temples by Filoz; (d) the recent discovery of more than ten ruins; (e) executed plans, drawings, and photographs of twenty remarkable ruins; and (f) a collection of copied inscriptions from around Angkor Wat (taken care of by Moura). The final paragraph of the report recalls Delaporte’s vision for an “installation [in France] of the artistic collection of [this] mission” to the once powerful Angkorian region – at this moment still on Siamese territory, but in Delaporte’s view a “region whose destiny was to be bound to France” (Delaporte 1874, 2548). Back in France and in front of the Société de géographie, which had financed his trip to Angkor, Delaporte expressed his patriotic civilising vision of surveying the “unexplored regions of central Indochina”, including the “ancient Cambodian provinces”. Those had been just recently abandoned to Siam but today energetically reclaimed by King Norodom and which were, by the Cambodian heart of their inhabitants, their race, and language determined to come back to France [redevenir françaises]” (Delaporte 1875, 200). In 1877 Delaporte published a thirty-four-page description in the Revue des deux mondes on his mission to Angkor. In the passage on the work at Angkor Wat, he mentioned “one vil­ lage and several monasteries, pilgrims, and monks” and the “dull superstition of the modern populations” on the site (Delaporte 1877, 451–52), but he focused primarily on the heroic French mission against the resistant Siamese, on the dense vegetation, the heat, the pouring rain, and the health problems that accompanied gathering original and copied specimens from the forgotten ruins of Angkor in Cambodia. He went on to claim that Cambodia itself had, with this initiative, finally “entered the domain of science for archaeologists, language scholars, Indianists, and Sinologists”. In short, they had created “a scientific edifice on Indochina to rival what English Indianists had patiently created on their grand Asian colony” (Delaporte 1877, 455). This

missionary undertone was again heard in his 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge, and it once again proved the high political importance of the plaster casts from Angkor to the foundation of the French mission civilisatrice in Indochina. Soon to provide a precious first-hand source of one of the major agents of this translation project of Angkor, the travel and working notes of Auguste Filoz were published in his 1889 account Cambodge et Siam, voyage et séjour aux ruines des monuments kmers [sic]. They counterbalanced the master narrative of the 1873 mission to Angkor that Delaporte had eternalised in the enthusiastic descriptions and imaginative engravings of his 1880 publication Voyage en Cambodge (see above).12 More important, this publication certainly provides a) one of the most detailed accounts of the exhausting process of physical translation (i.e., moulding) work at Angkor Wat, and b) a rare account of the ‘real other voices’ – the monks – at the lively and far from abandoned temple site of Angkor Wat (see Fig. IX.7c):13 I hope that the hatred provoked through the Delaporte mission will not fall back on us. I put on my uniform and, with two other Annamites, I visited the chief of the monks. Informed of our arrival, he (so to say a kinsman of the king of Siam) received us at the entrance of his hut and invited me to sit down with him. Our approach seemed to flatter him. During our conversation he vivaciously complained (as the interpreter told us) about the Delaporte mission, which had stolen many idols and pillaged the whole country. And he said that it would be the best solution for us to leave instantly. I answered without trouble that the mission had always acted in conformation with the authorities and had paid for all provided help. Our host replied, not without indignation, that Delaporte had never come to see him. […] I tried to convince the chief of the monks that our works are more helpful than menacing as we intend rather to clean and repair the sculptures rather than to deface them. His tone got milder as we went on. [Later] a group of monks with ceremonial scarfs came to visit us […] They wanted to know the goal of our work. Of course, the moulding process was unknown to them. I put a layer of cement on the ground; then, I put some oil on the imprints [empreintes], which I applied to the cement. This demon-

12  Delaporte complimented Filoz twice in his 1880 publication. In the paragraph “moulage de bas-reliefs” in

chapter 6, he referred to Filoz’s work at Angkor Wat. Left behind by Delaporte’s mission, Filoz stayed on site for six weeks only to see his moulds destroyed in an accident on his return to Saigon. Delaporte also comments that “several very interesting plaster casts” of Filoz’s work were finally shown at the Universal Exhibition in 1878 at the Trocadéro. However, in a footnote Delaporte detailed the failed translation efforts: Filoz had, above other objects, made fifty-four panels of thirty-two uninterrupted metres from the “galerie des combats” at Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, these had been executed in papier mâché [carton pâte] and suffered heavily from the humid climate at the site, but they were still of “great archaeological interest” and were stored in the “atelier de l’École des Beaux-Arts” in Paris for future use in Delaporte’s musée Khmer (Delaporte 1880, 203, 251). 13  Compare the report of Carpeaux of his 1901 and 1904 missions to the Bayon temple (Carpeaux 1908) as discussed in chapter IX).

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1. Cracking the translation code of Khmer temple architecture

stration had a good effect. I finally explained to these men that, thanks to a mission like that of Delaporte, France possesses — for the instruction of her children and of the history of the genius of man — the specimen of the works of all people, which it conserves in splendid palaces. ‘Does this mean that there exist even more beautiful monuments than ours?’, asked one of the monks. I responded to him with all sincerity that there were only few. ‘These monuments’, added the monk, ‘are not the works of human beings, but of angels’. [italics MF] (Filoz 1889, 71—72, 73, 75)

Auguste Filoz, capitaine, chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, officier d’Académie, membre de la société des Orientalistes, (as he was announced in the book title) travelled from Toulon, France, to Saigon and Phnom Penh via the newly opened Suez Chanel and reached Angkor after Delaporte’s mission (according to Filoz comprising 150 participants in total!) had already installed their tents inside Angkor Thom near the Bayon temple. In his travel notes, Filoz dedicated an entire eighty-page section entitled Séjour aux ruines to his work on the mouldings. Delaporte and his colleagues – at this point all severely ill – left the site in twenty-seven ox carts, and Filoz was left behind with three Annamites and one soldier. They installed themselves right next to the monastery with its “one hundred pretty constructions by the monks and their servants” inside the compound of Ang­kor Wat. What one comes to understand (see quote above) in reading this account is that Delaporte was, according to Filoz’s astonishingly unbiased report, quite detested by the monks for having “looted” [sic!] Angkorian temple sites and “the whole country” without “even contacting the chief monk” at the largest monastery of the region – an oversight that was disrespectful and unthinkable in the local culture. At this point, in an attempt to explain the copying nature of the moulding technique, Filoz defended Delaporte and his own mission to bring some specimens of this (even for France) incomparable cultural site before the French public as one representative element of the global “history of human genius”. A unique feature of Filoz’s report is that the voices of the local monks are heard through their questions about ‘the other’ (France and its monuments) and through their own explanations of the divine status of their temple “built not by human beings but by angels” (Filoz 1889, 75). Filoz judged that large parts of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat were too fragile for him to use cement for his mould-

ings, and he proposed (in theory) the use of moistened tissue paper. However, as he mentioned himself, his more than forty “carton-pâte” moulds (Chinese paper and glue) of “the beautiful bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat” were only a second choice to “spare his limited stock of cement” (Filoz 1889, 86). In reality, these paper moulds never really dried properly and were destroyed by humidity and insects. Filoz’s report is also a document of his personal struggle during this ‘translation project’. He was ill, was attacked by mosquitos and the penetrating smell of bat guano and his hands were burning from working with cement (a procedure that also caused considerable damage to the original surfaces of the temple!).14 He was constantly observed by helpful but vigilant monks, and he even fell from a scaffold in the north­ern gallery. Relief came with a three-day cremation ceremony on-site and, best of all, with the unexpected visit of his “good old friend Étienne Aymonier from Phnom Penh”, with whom he “shared a bottle of Bordeaux” (Filoz 1889, 76–78). After these first trials, Filoz’s successful moulds (which also finally reached France) were executed using several layers of cement under a thin coating of coconut oil, and they were cast from various parts of the galleries of Angkor Wat and from the temples of Bayon and Phnom Krom, and Preah Khan in the Compong-Soai province. On 30 October 1873 and after thirty-six days, Filoz and his three colleagues left Angkor Wat for Siem Reap with eight ox carts. This removal was not without incident, for the monks were very angry that they could not check Filoz’s “considerable harvest”, and the group also had a serious accident on the way due to a tiger attack (as they called it) during which damage was inflicted on “a considerable part of the moulds” (Filoz 1889, 109). Back in Phnom Penh, Filoz showed his mouldings to Moura and Aymonier and was even presented to the Cambodian king, Norodom I, on 17 November – just before his planned return to Angkor: “this time with appropriate material, indispensible provisions, and tools” (Filoz 1889, 162). In December 1873, with Delaporte’s report in his hands, Charles Blanc, the Directeur des beaux-arts, pledged his support with another 1,000 francs for Félix Faraut’s return to the Angkorian region to finalise his work. This was “evidently of an interest of the first order, as much for the general history of the Asian civilisations as for the special history of fine arts”.15 As conducteur des ponts et chaussées en mission scientifique dans le royaume de Siam, Faraut was responsible for visiting Khmer temples in the Battambang–

14  I am grateful for the information provided by the stone conservator Simon Warrack who worked for

many years for the German Apsara Conservation Project at Angkor Wat (see epilogue II). According to his observations it seems quite obvious that large parts of the famous bas-reliefs and tympana of Angkor Wat were damaged during the recurring executions of plaster casts and the even more destructive cement mouldings. However, this problem was not mentioned in the recent catalogue of the musée Guimet (see Pl. Intro.13), which celebrated Delaporte as the great discoverer of Angkorian temple art (compare Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, there within Baptiste 2013c, Leisen 2013, Falser 2013g). 15  Blanc to Dupré, Palais Royale 6 December 1873 (ANOM INDO GGI 11795).

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Siem Reap region and for drawing detailed plans and elevations from the Delaporte mission, but he had to return in June 1874 for health reasons.16 Around the turn of the year 1873/74, 102 boxes containing moulds and original objects from the Delaporte-Filoz mission (like elements of the Naga balustrade as seen in

the first original exhibit in the 1878 Exhibition, see Fig. II.21) arrived in Paris via the colonial port of Marseille.17 To Delaporte’s surprise, the Louvre Museum refused to display the cultural harvest from Angkor, and it remained unpacked in the courtyard of the museum for several weeks where it suffered under the harsh winter climate.18

2. The musée Khmer in Compiègne Correspondence between the Directeur des beaux-arts under the ministère de l’Instruction publique and the ministère des Travaux publics indicates that the idea of installing the objects from Delaporte’s mission in the palais national de Compiègne some eighty kilometres northeast of Paris was already percolating in February 1874. This was close to the castle of Pierrefonds, which was at that time under idealistic reconstruction by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (Delaporte’s later competitor in obtaining exhibition space in the Trocadero palace; compare chapter III); both sites, Compiègne and Pierre­fonds, were conceived “to attract visitors”. Indeed, it may have been the close proximity of the collection to his own restoration project that had occasioned Viollet-le-Duc’s visit to Delaporte’s museum and formed his pejorative view of Khmer art.19

However, a note dated to the same month suggested that Delaporte’s findings might be displayed in the Exposition permanente des colonies in the palais de l’Industrie before their travel to Compiègne.20 Delaporte was in direct contact with the Beaux-Arts and state architect Lafollye,21 who was charged with adapting the palais for the Musée oriental. Different spatial configurations were proposed by the architect. Finally, the palais de Compiègne was turned into a veritable transcultural parcours des visiteurs (Pl. II.1a,b)22. Upon entering the cour d’honneur in the southwest, the visitor was supposed to turn immediately into the left wing of the castle, passing the corridor de la régie and the magasin des tapis, which were – according to a plan of the Directeur général des beaux-arts Marquis de Chennevières-Pointel – reserved for plaster casts from Mexico from the mission of Léon Méhé-

16  In a letter dated to Saigon 9 June 1874 written to the directeur de l’Interieur under the new governeur de la

Cochinchine Le Myre de Vilers, Faraut summed up his mission: in late January he had left Saigon with three Annamites and had gone to Phnom Penh, taking “the European M. Thomas” with him along with letters of recommendation from the Cambodian king for the Siamese provinces. He reached Battambang province and finally Siem Reap on 18 April for “his most important work”. Under continual rain and with a high fever, he returned exactly one month later and reached Saigon, with his drawings and paper imprints of decorative ornamentation of the temples, on 3 June 1874 (ANOM INDO GGI 11796 – Mission Faraut: Exploration d’Angkor, 1874–1882). 17  A six-page inventory État du contenu des caisses renfermant les objets rapportés par la mission du Cambodge dirigée par Mr le lieutenant de vaisseau Delaporte pendant les mois de Juillet, Août, Septembre, Octobre 1873 containing a detailed list of all items ranging from Buddha heads, several entries of original fragments of the Naga balustrade (as the first original exhibit in the 1878 exhibition, see Fig. II.21), and moulds such as those from the famous sculpture of the Leper King have survived in the Archive of the French National Museums in the ­Louvre, along with different bills of transports and plaster casts between Chennevières, the acting Directeur des beaux-arts, to Villoz, secrétaire général des musées nationaux (AMN Z4 – Arrivée des objets apportés par Louis Delaporte du Cambodge). 18  In a letter dated to 27 January 1874, from the secretary general of the musées nationaux to the director of fine arts, the objects were judged as valuable exhibits, but the inavailability of space in the Louvre for new collections was also mentioned (CARAN F21/4489, quoted in Baptiste/Zéphir 2008, 14). 19  Although no direct correspondence between these two protagonists has been located for this research, Viollet-le-Duc left the following important remark in his written œuvre: in the conclusion of his 1875 publication Histoire de l’habitation humaine (also covering central Asia, Buddhist India, and the Far East), the staged voice of the “Architect” judged Khmer art, after his attested visit to the “palais de Compiègne”, an “art of decadence” rather than “primitive art”, the Angkorian ruins being, after all, just “insignificant” leftovers in the middle of the vast Asian continent (Viollet-le-Duc 1875, 356, 357). 20  These early letters date from 25 February 1874 (CARAN F21/4490 – Palais de Compiègne, 1874–1879). 21  Joseph-Auguste Lafollye (1828–91) also adapted the château de Pau near the French-Spanish border and the château de Saint-Germain for national collections. Additionally, he was involved in the architectural planning for universal exhibitions in Vienna 1873 and Paris 1878 (Delaire 1907, 309). 22  The plans were, for the first time, published in Falser 2014.

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2. The musée Khmer in Compiègne

din (see his role during the 1878 Exhibition). At the end of should, together with drawings of both scientifically grounded temple reconstitutions and romantic ‘ruins-inthe narrow corridor, the visitor was to turn right, into the large, rectangular and columned vestibule [salle dite des co­ the-jungle’ illustrations, frame the three-dimensionally relonnes], the central space of what the plan called the “musée constituted temple architectures. An article by J. Assézat in d’antiquités orientales” (Pl. II.1a). Crossing this central space, the Paris-based journal Les débats politiques et littéraires of the visitor might turn right into the south-eastern gallery to 26 November 1874 reported on Delaporte’s (too peripheral) leave the exhibition via the escalier d’Apollon towards the “musée Khmer à Compiègne” (Assézat 1875) and predefined cour d’honneur, or, alternatively, take the north-eastern sec- the position of Khmer art within a comparative museum tion of the escalier d’honneur adjacent to the central space to parcours through the artefacts of all world civilisations (see reach the first floor with the second exhibition space in the chapter III): salle des gardes (Pl. II.1b). On this level Lafollye also indicated the exhibition space of the salle de fêtes, which would Compiègne is far away. A museum in Compiègne is there­ hold a few canvases removed from the Louvre and from the fore almost a lost museum. […] The castle of Compiègne musée Gallo-Romain.23 In April 1874, seventeen other boxes is not made for such a use. […] It is difficult to read the of moulds from Angkor arrived. These were ‘back-translated’ Cambodian antiquities next to some glass boxes with in Paris into six-hundred-kilogram plaster casts and shipped Gallo-Roman stone axes from the previous Saint Germain by waterway to Compiègne where they were unwrapped in museum. […] What belongs to Paris should go to Paris: the presence of Delaporte in mid-May 1874. the documents that are needed by the researchers to unFinally, on 18 August 1874 the first musée Khmer on the derstand and to bring together the successive ages of European continent was inaugurated by Chennevièresthese intermittent civilisations which […] will finally lead Pointel.24 However, for Delaporte this event was just one to a global understanding of civilisation. (Assézat 1874) transitional point in his larger vision, a vision that shined through in two of his letters to Chennevières sent just a day An interesting little element was mentioned in a short rebefore the opening. Delaporte thanked Chennevières for port by Ludovic Drapeyron in the journal Le XIXe siècle on his upcoming visit, but at the same time he asked for six 19 August 1975 about the “musée Khmer”: as much Dela­ more months to finalise his architectural drawings. Inter- porte was celebrated as the great amateur of Khmer art (he estingly enough, he did not find the original objects but even received a “lettre de distinction” by the eminent ethrather the displayed plaster casts to be “the most interest- nographer Jean de Quatrefages), he was not tired, during a ing parts” of his collection, as they would, together with guided to through his museum, to emphasise the divide between Angkor’s glorious past and Cambodia’s present detailed drawings, “permit an entire reconstitution of the agony with “natives full of superstition and evil spirit [esmost remarkable monuments of Khmer architecture”.25 As prits malfaisants]” (Drapeyron 1875, compare the abovewe shall see, Delaporte’s final goal was not to follow the current fragmentary aesthetics of placing singular, relative- quoted sections by Filoz about Delaporte’s disrespectful ly small-scale originals on pedestals in a quite neutral exhi- comportment during his visit in Angkor). As far as the drawings were concerned, Delaporte spent another half bition space. Nevertheless he tested this approach in the central space of his newly installed museum in Compiègne. year in the dépôt des cartes et plans of the navy with the It was depicted in this manner in the eleven-page entry on help of Félix Faraut, who, after his convalescence, was alKhmer (Art) in Ernst Bosc’s important Dictionnaire raison- lowed by the ministère de la Marine to assist Delaporte for né of 1879 and two years later in 1881 in Émile Soldi’s Arts several months at Compiègne in early 1874. In a letter datméconnus (Figs. II.2a,b).26 ed to 1 February 1875, Delaporte reconfirmed this underWhat Delaporte aimed for – this was already visible in taking; he listed architectural drawings of fifty-two Khmer his drawings for the 1873 Garnier publication, and it be- temples that would help him to reconstitute the primary came more and more important after the Louvre refused to Khmer temples – making them as significant as comparaaccept his original sculptures from Angkor – was a pictur- ble sites in Egypt and “as delicately ornamented as our esque overall ensemble of originals indistinguishable from buildings from the Renaissance” – and to “revive them as the plaster casts being displayed next to each other. These they were in their epoch of splendour. A thousand details 23  Lafollye to Chennevières, Compiègne 10 March 1874 (Installation d’un musée d’antiquités orientales au

palais de Compiègne), and the director of public buildings to the minister of public instruction, Versailles 26 March 1874 (CARAN F21/4490). 24  Pierre Baptiste mentions 15 August 1874 as the “official inauguration”. See Baptiste 2013a, 117. 25  Delaporte to Chennevières, Paris 17 August 1874 (CARAN F21/4490). 26  In Bosc’s exploration of the value of Khmer art and Delaporte’s mission and museum project, the author already spoke of Delaporte’s material from which “a restitution of the largest part of the monuments of ancient Cambodia [would] be possible” and which was “installed in the Campiègne but would hopefully soon installed permanently in the Louvre” (Bosc 1879, 24–35, here 30).

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Figures II.2a,b  Salle des colonnes of the palais de Compiègne with the Musée khmer (Source: Soldi 1881, 308, 274)

of their charming sculptures could be used by our arts and our modern industry, as much as the reconstitutions of their ensembles would be a veritable revelation”. In this aspect Delaporte came quite close to using the approach of the applied art industry that was discussed in the context of the 1867 Exhibition. Concluding his letter and in reference to the museum in Compiègne and the atelier de moulage of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he estimated that the inventory comprised 80 original pieces, 120 plaster casts, and 50 photographs.27 The few surviving photographs of the early display in Compiègne, however, still show the classic museum situation of originals and plaster casts on heavy pedestals (Fig. II.3). In order to produce a more spectacular ensemble with the spectacular end piece of the sculptural group of the “grand géant” from Preah Khan temple, Lafollye had, in December 1874, already requested additional funding from the direction des Bâtiments civils. This occurred just a few years before the reassembled piece provided the focal point for the development of a veritable “Angkormania” in France (compare Demeulenaere–Douyère 2010, 202).

Figure II.3  A photograph of the inner space of the Musée khmer, around 1875 (Source: © Musée Guimet Paris, Photographic Archive)

27  Delaporte to the Directeur géneral des beaux-arts, Paris 1 February 1874 (CARAN F21/4490).

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2. The musée Khmer in Compiègne

Figure II.4  Frontispiece of the guide to the Musée khmer (Musée cambodgien) in Compiègne (Source: © Archive of the Compiègne Museum)

In 1875 the Comte de Croizier, president of the Société académique indo-chinoise de France, of which Delaporte was also a member, published his book L’art khmer. It comprised an architectural study of the old monuments of Cambodia, a list of all explored sites, and, most important, the first Catalogue raisonné du Musée khmer de Compiègne. This catalogue proved that Delaporte’s understanding of a proper representation of Khmer art was not strictly bound to the notion of the authenticity of original art objects that started to dominate the European museum landscape after 1900 (compare Fig. II.4). The catalogue contained a total of 204 entries, with twenty-two statues (two plaster casts like that of the Leper King), ten animal-like architectural decorations including the previously mentioned giant Naga sculpture with a dimension of 3.5 by 4 metres, fifteen steles, thirty-nine architectural objects and objects in reliefs, seventy-eight plaster casts with mostly larger decorative panels and bas-reliefs (like the death of the monkey king from Angkor Wat), and four inscriptions (to be augmented with fifty rubbings [estampes] by Filoz and Faraut).

A few photographs and one larger map of the Cambodian temple sites completed the inventory (Croizier 1875, 91– 139). The few depictions of exhibits inside the catalogue did not properly distinguish between original and plaster cast copies (Figs. II.5a,b). What is even more important for the following inquiry into Delaporte’s translation project of the Angko­rian temples for the French métropole, and what was already identifiable in this first catalogue, was his focus on a comprehensive set of almost all the represen­tative architectural elements of the classical period of ­Angkor. In the years to come, and over the course of subsequent missions, Delaporte’s selected collection of what he considered the most representative pilasters, columns, balusters, friezes, cornices, and lintels from Angkor can be conceptualised as cracked translation or better generic code28 of Khmer temple architecture which would serve – in his own museum and, more essentially, in universal and colonial exhibitions until 1937 – as a basis for all kinds of in-style assemblages and hybrid pavilions à la Angko­rienne.

28  With the term generic (and not genetic) we mean the reference to an overall, comprehensive or represen-

tative class or family such as ‘Angkorian buildings’ in general, in a time when a concrete art historical periodisation of formative, classical, late style denominations were not yet established for Khmer buildings arts.

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Figures II.5a,b  Plaster cast of a decorative ­element from Angkor Wat, published in ­ Croizier’s 1875 catalogue of the Musée khmer in Compiègne (Source: Croizier 1875, 97, 72)

3. From the palais d’Industrie to the Universal Exhibition of 1878: The Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques In 1876 the artist Émile Soldi published his essay “Quelques points d’éthnographie et d’archéologie préhistorique” on the ethnographic museum of Copenhagen (created in 1841). Referring to its founder, C.J. Thomsen, and the man responsible for the museum’s mode of display, J.J.A. Worsaae, Soldi was deeply impressed by the methodological approach used by the museum to explain “the relations between the nations with progress and civilisation” (Soldi 1876, 189). With a display of “reduced models of [whole] towns, tents with furniture, costumes on mannequins” similar to those exhibited at the Universal Exhibition in 1867, the collection of “40 rooms and more than 100,000 objects” was divided into two main parts: the first was dedicated to antiquity, from the European Stone Age to the first stages of civilisation in Asia, Africa, and America; the second displayed aspects of the “contemporary epoch” from non-European ‘primitive’ and ‘stationary’ civilisations and also included “Tibetans and the Indo-Chinese”. As far as differentiation 100

between the groups was concerned, Soldi listed the museum’s five thematic divisions: (a) religion, accompanied by scripture, literature, etc.; (b) the human being as represented in images, costumes, etc.; (c) war with weapons, and instruments for hunting, fishing, and navigation; (d) the house with its household, agriculture, manual work, and objects of pleasure; and finally, (e) industry and art. In this way the museum’s purely scientific aim was to show an “uninterrupted series” progressing from one tribe to the next and to facilitate an understanding of minor modifications and important “deviations of civilisation” (Soldi 1876, 190). Soldi concluded that the ethnographic museum in Copenhagen should serve as an example for a similar Parisian project that had already been discussed for thirty years with the French navy (which was responsible for colonial affairs) and that was supposed to replace the “insignificant hall”, the magasin de Curiosités, in the attic of the Louvre. As a model for a special building comprising primary materials as well as

3. From the palais d’Industrie to the Universal Exhibition of 1878

literary and artistic works within the disciplines of geograethnographical museum is a museum of history; the anphy, archaeology, ethnography, anthropology, art, and the thropological museum is a museum of natural history. […] sciences with a suitable and logical disposition, Soldi prothis ethnographical museum cannot and should not composed the main building of the 1867 Exhibition with its segprise of the most elevated and most special manifestation mentary sections for each country and circulating galleries of the human spirit: Art; all artistic objects are reserved for for each series of similar objects (Soldi 1876, 194; compare the collections of the Louvre, such as from Italy or Greece, chapter I and Figs. I.12 and I.13 a,b). However, his proposal the Orient or Egypt. The interest of the ethnographical mudid not come out of nowhere. In fact, he was referring to the seum is to present uninterrupted series; one will walk from ethnographic theory that had already emerged in the 1820s, one people to another and will finally pursue the developand which we will discuss later in the context of the Trocament of civilisations. [italics MF] (Watteville 1877b, 4) dero exhibition. For Soldi’s future involvement in the 1878 Exhibition, however, the decree made by the minister of In 1876 Watteville had been nominated as coordinator of public instruction on 6 January 1874 was essential. It prede- this undertaking by order of the former minister Waddingfined the creation of a Commission des voyages et missions ton. In his report concerning the future museum, Wattescientifiques et littéraires to guarantee the efficient planning ville partly referred to Soldi’s analysis from 1876 (without and execution of the growing expeditions and missions in giving his name; see quotation above). This ethnographic the name of the colonially and scientifically expanding and historical museum would place the human being as French nation. It was presided over by the sous-secrétaire “créateur” (not as “créature” in an anthropological sense) at d‘État au ministère de l’Instruction publique. Oscar Baron de its centre and would show in “uninterrupted and unlimited Watteville, chef de la division des Sciences et letters, was the comparative series” the gradual modifications and cultural member29 who established annual reports on the ever-grow- stages from “progress to decadence” of what was back then ing number of French missions around the world, from New considered the ‘primitive’ and the ‘advanced’ in both extinct Guinea to Central America, and in various disciplines, from and extant civilisations. And even if the archaeological obbotany to archaeology, covering an astonishing range of in- jects themselves were included in these ethnographic disvestigated subjects from ancient ruins to measured human plays, artworks per se (like those from missions to Italy, Greece, and Egypt) were not included and were reserved skulls, insects, and inscriptions.30 As Watteville quoted it in his 1877 Rapport sur le Musé­ for the art collections of the Louvre – which had refused to um ethnographique des missions scientifiques Joseph Brunet, incorporate Louis Delaporte’s plaster casts of Angkor from minister of public instruction, had signed the arrête ministé- his 1873 mission into its collection (Watteville 1877b, 2–5). riel on 3 November 1877 to establish a Muséum ethnograOn 23 January 1878, in the north-eastern pavilion of phique et des missions scientifiques to house these new find- the palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Élysées, the tempoings. As a matter of fact, Delaporte’s Angkor collection in rary version of this ethnographic museum of scientific misCompiègne was already included on the list. sions opened as a one-month, small-scale test run to gauge the public taste for a comparable display during and (in In the anthropological museum, man is studied on its own its institutionalised version) after the Universal Exhibition of 1878. At that time did Agénor Bardoux, ministre de l’Inand as a créature. In the ethnographical museum, on the struction publique, des cultes et des beaux-arts, in his opencontrary, it is the créateur which is investigated. […] The

29  Other members included some deputies of the national assembly, the conservators of the Louvre Muse-

um or of the département des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, the directors of the École des chartes, the musée d’Histoire naturelle, the École des langues orientales vivantes, the musée de Saint-Germain or of the Enseignement supérieur. 30  In his report on the year 1875 he mentioned twenty-eight missions (eleven on history and archaeology and nine on natural history missions; eleven missions within Europe and only four to Asia) including the following: Jules Harmand’s zoological-medical mission (Harmand was also on Delaporte’s 1873 mission) to the northwest of Cambodia including Angkor, other missions to the ruins of Carthage, crane measurements by the Société d’anthropologie to Peru, others to Alaska and South America, and Charles Wiener’s mission to Bolivia (Watteville 1876). For the year 1876, Watteville reported forty-five missions (eleven on archaeology, sixteen on natural history and eight on geography, with twenty-four to Europe and seven to Asia) including the continuing research of Dr. Harmand in Cochinchina and the Siamese provinces of Cambodia, another mission to the Roman ruins of Timgad, Charles Wiener’s mission to the Inca Trail (returning with seventeen boxes of collected artefacts), a mission for inscriptions in the maritime Alps, a mission for insects to the Dutch East Indies, others to New Guinea, the missions of Émile Guimet to China, Japan, and India, Félix Ratte’s mission (a member of Delaporte’s 1873 mission, here as ingénieur des arts et manufactures) to New Caledonia for geological research, Émile Soldi’s research mission to London to examine existing collections and their classification systems, and Charles de Ujfalvy to Russia (Watteville 1877a).

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ing speech, place the major vision for the museum into its political and ideological (i.e., its colonial) context by declaring that through comparisons between primitive, extinct, and still existing civilisations, this ethnographic and historical museum on “our origins” opened “a new gate for the study of the progress and decadence of the human race”. Furthermore, this declared a great and noble idea that was etched onto the patriotic “devotion of the missionaries of public instruction” and that helped to shed light on the development of the French nation within the course of Enlightenment: “It was the love for science and for France as a nation that had inspired [our] travellers [such as Dela­ porte, MF] as they were confronted with exhaustion, solitude, and grand perils. It was this double frame that centupled their moral forces” (Notice 1878, 5–8). After its insertion into the discussion of applied industrial arts in the context of the emerging techniques of mechanical reproduction and within the role of the education of public taste during the 1867 Exhibition (see chapter I), Delaporte’s ‘transfer and translation project’ of Angkor – with its original sculptures and its plaster casts of entire architectural surfaces – was now, just ten years later, embedded in quite a different context. On only a few occasions after the opening speech made by Bardoux in January 1878 was the coherence between the narrative of cultural decadence and a civilising, uninterrupted progress and enlightenment (the beloved topos with which the nation justified its moral mission for public instruction) so closely linked to the emerging scientific disciplines of ethnography and archaeology. As Watteville later explained, this first and provisional installation was a test phase to “introduce a classi­fication of the thousands of different objects” that the distinguished researcher “had brought back from different points of the world” and to “classify disparate samples [échantillons] of natural history next to the debris of extinct civilisations, clothing or arms next to inscriptions and skulls – to present all these objects in a picturesque and breathtaking order”. This would form, according to Watteville, a base for the display in the 1878 Exhibition and in a permanent ethnographic museum that was planned for the near future with: […] improvisational charts, vitrines, and steps to classify the objects, mannequins for the display of costumes, large-scale maps of each mission for a more detailed idea of the explored regions, wall paintings of landscapes or views on monuments, and finally, with the display both the plans and imprints [estampes, but this also comprised moulds from plaster casts, MF] of the missions like the reproduction of the prehistoric inscriptions […] or the ­execution whole monuments. (Watteville 1886, 25, 26)

Interestingly, the “new gate” [la nouvelle porte], which in Bardoux’s speech stood in for the threshold between decline and progress of the human race, was represented both as a building part and as a metaphorical symbol of the pas102

sage from one civilising step to the next. The visitor to the exhibit, which was originally conceived for Charles Wiener’s mission, could walk through four halls on a journey towards the origins of civilisation. It started in the first hall with the missions of Charles de Ujfalvy to central Asia and of Carlo Lansberg to Syria, and it concluded with a third section containing different collections from expeditions to America like that of Alphonse Pinart to the equator, Venezuela, and Peru; Jules Crevaux to Guyana; and Léon de Cessac to Peru. In between, the second hall contained the three-thousand-object collection of Charles Wiener from Peru and Bolivia, which was divided into different classes, including, among others, architecture, sepulchres, sculpture, and ceramics, with supplementary information provided by maps, photographs, canvases, and costumed mannequins. As the most important of the architectural and picturesque reconstitutions from plaster casts of original ‘heritage sites’, the spectacular gate of Tihuanaco from Western Bolivia was curiously placed on top of an Indian hut of stones and straw, whereas on the other side of the Peruvian section, the Inca fountain, Concacha, was placed in front of the so-called Huanuco viejo gate containing lions and colossi from Tihuanaco (Figs. II.6a,b). Together with de Cetner’s oil canvas of Peru and two landscape drawings of Colombia by Paul Roux, these architectural reconstitutions were made (along with statues and Indian busts) into plaster casts by Émile Soldi after Wiener’s drawings, sections, and pattern sketches (Notice 1878, 7, 18–33). In a report published in the famous print journal L’Illustration, the provisional exhibition was honoured. However, the inscriptions, drawings, and plaster casts in one single “vitrine of Delaporte”, merited just three lines (Du­ rousset 1878, 39). Placed in the entresol [palier] of the visitor’s parcours next to the West African mission of Alfred Marche and Soldi’s mission to England for comparative studies on the origins of glyptic, Cambodia was represented with two missions. The first of these was the 1875 mission of the naturalist and navy medical doctor (later an important diplomat) Jules Harmand, whose collection of Indochina’s natural history (including 3,000 species of plants, portrait photographs, measured skulles and skeletons of the ‘sauvages’ of Cambodia and Laos) was on display along with some complementary studies of the ancient monuments of Cambodia. The second contribution to the section on Cambodia referred to Delaporte’s “mission to the Khmer ruins” and comprised pieces from the newly installed musée de Compiègne. Following the trend for a thematic fusion of ethnography and archaeology, the contribution categorised his “recent discovery of Khmer monuments” as belonging to “studies of general history of art and the human civilisations”. In this context, buildings were built by a “special race […] that was reproduced in Khmer sculpture and could sometimes even be retrieved among the degenerated indigenes of today who were progressively leaving their primitive state of barbarism behind” (Durousset 1878, 11). When speaking of the results of the 1873 mis-

3. From the palais d’Industrie to the Universal Exhibition of 1878

Figures II.6a,b  The temporary display of the Musée ethnographique in 1877 in the palais de l’Industrie with a combination of ethnographic specimens, didactical displays and picturesque collages (Source: Soldi 1881, 389, 365)

sion, comprising three hundred spécimens of sculptures, plaster casts, and inscriptions and more than eighty drawings, plans, and photographs with all the “elements for an exact reconstitution of the architectural masterpieces of

ancient Cambodia”, the author apologised that “the few plaster casts in this exhibition could only give a weak idea of the beauty of the Khmer sculpture”. Nevertheless, he listed three trial “restorations of monuments” [restauration des 103

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monuments] that were, most probably, displayed as drawings: the primary facade of the Beng Malea temple, the ornamentation of the top part of a Bayon face tower, and a small Buddhist temple (Durousset 1878, 11).31 A poster promoting the presentations of each section in public lectures has survived. As an end point to a long list of contributions about all the exhibiting missions, Dela­ porte presented his paper on “Khmer monuments”32 on 28 February 1878, just one day before the temporary exhibition was to close (Fig. II.7). With this short exhibition in the palais de l’Industrie and the accompanying lecture series, the Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifique was in line with what Ernest Théodore Hamy, the later founder of the permanent ethnographic museum, summarised in 1890 as “the proper respect these missions had paid to the sciences and the country”, and their efforts to “disperse the love for France and the sciences” (Hamy 1890, 81). Altogether, these missions were meant “to pay tribute to the French [colonial] expansion abroad”.33 Shortly after the closure of the temporary exhibition on 1 March 1878, its display was transferred to the new rectangular palais de l’Industrie, which was the central building of the Universal Exhibition’s Champ-de-Mars in 1878 (Fig. II.8, compare Pl. II.2a,b). Within the general classification ­system of nine groups and ninety classes (a tenth class was added on social affairs), this unit of the Ministry of Public Instruction with its ethnographic-scientific character, now entitled Exposition spéciale du ministère de l’Instruction publique, was not embedded in Group I [æuvres d’art] – even though one class on “drawings and models of architecture” (Class 4) comprised hypothetical reconstitutions of ancient ruins [Restaurations d’après des ruines ou des documents] – but rather in Group II, which was called “edu­cation and instruction – material and approaches of liberal arts”. Within Group II, with its Classes 6 to 16, it was placed after primary and secondary education and before the classes on print materials, the “common applications of the arts of drawings and statuary” [Classe 11: Application usuelle des arts au dessin et de la plastique], photography, musical instruments, and public medicine/hygiene, instruments of precision and, finally, maps and instruments of geography. Within Class 8, “organisation, methods, and material for higher education”, it was integrated – next to

sections on curricula of academies, universities, scientific societies, and their collections and exhibitions – into the subdivision entitled “scientific missions” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 1, 224, vol. 2, 41). Moving from Group II [Matériel et application des arts libéraux] with Class 8 [Application du dessin et de la plastique aux arts usuels] in the Universal Exhibition of 1867 to Group II [Education et enseignement – matériel et procédés des arts libéraux] with Class 8 [Organisation, méthodes et matériel de l’enseignement supérieur] in the Universal Exhibition of 1878, Delaporte’s plaster casts from Angkor underwent a supposedly minor but in fact quite significant change: from their classification as industrial arts at the first height of the age of mechanical reproduction to the classification as public instruction in the field of colonial-scientific propaganda with a clear mission to ascribe to world civilisation and nations different degrees of decline and progress. As its organiser, Oscar de Watteville, explained in his special report, the architect Charles Rossigneux, already a member of the French jury during the 1873 Exhibition in Vienna, had designed the overall exhibition of the Ministry of Public Instruction inside the galerie des Arts libéraux with overall costs of 350,000 francs on a 1,714 square-metre floor plan and almost 3,000 square-metre wall surface (Watteville 1886, 27, 97). The special exhibition of the scientific missions was strategically placed just after the entrée principale of the palace, left (northeast) of the grand vestibule d’honneur du coté de la Seine (the so-called galerie d’Iéna) and the central reception pavilion of France, which divided the overall French section to the northeast from the section of Great Britain to the southwest (see Fig. II.9). A catalogue of thirty-five French missions around the world and a published plan of the floor and wall arrangement of the salle des mission scientifiques (Fig. II.10) indicate the transfer of the participants and main elements from the exhibition in the palais d’Industrie some months earlier. Along with the largest section on Charles Wiener’s mission to Peru and Bolivia, which was again represented with the portique Péruvien and the fontaine Péruvienne (recast in concrete for the 1878 Exhibition) executed by Émile Soldi, and the representation of the Carthage mission of Jean-Baptiste de Sainte-Marie with a porte Carthaginoise by architect Rossigneux, Delaporte’s participation had been

31  Unfortunately, illustrations of Delaporte’s display during this short exhibition in the palais de l’Industrie

could not be located for this research.

32  CARAN F17/3846 (Musée ethnographique). In this dossier, correspondence between the Ministry of Pub-

lic Instruction and the Ministry of Publics Works in January 1878 confirms that the plaster casts from the musée de Compiègne were transported back and forth. On 31 December 1877, Delaporte was already in contact with Émile Soldi to help him in reserving “four or five metres” in the palais de l’Industrie to “fill up with plaster casts, photographs, and drawings” and to bring him in contact with Watteville. 33  See Dias 1991, 166; compare Dias 2014 and 2015. For the transition period from the earlier ethnographical displays to the musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, compare Dupaigne 2017, 25–39. For the formative years of ethnographical and anthropological research towards the musée de l’Homme with its late-colonial context, compare, above others, the studies of Conklin 2013 and Delpuech et al. 2017.

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Figure II.7  Poster for the presentations held for the Muséum provisoire d’éthnographique des missions scientifiques with the presentation of Louis Delaporte on Khmer monuments on 28 February 1878 (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

significantly enlarged to include eight panels featuring maps, drawings, photographs, and, most prominently placed at the left part of the entry to this exhibition, a 1:10scale model of an entry gate to Angkor Thom – the first three-dimensional architectural reconstitution of Khmer architecture ever built on the European continent. Strangely enough, the Angkor model was, as far as this research was able to determine, not depicted in circulating guidebooks and popular print journals about the 1878 Exhibition; but the picturesque collage of various collected ‘eth-

nographic’ objects from the scientific missions to the Far East, Africa, and the Americas was honoured in the popular Journal hebdomadaire, with a short reference to Dela­ porte’s and Soldi’s project (Ginisty 1878, 58–9). It republish­ ed an image from the 19 January 1878 issue of L’Illustration (see above) on the temporary exhibition inside the palais de l’Industrie before the gate was finished. In order to underline the significant shift of the embeddedness of Dela­ porte’s project (to ‘re-present’, i.e., ‘trans-late’ the architecture of Angkorian antiquity for the French métropole) in 105

II  La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art

Figure II.8  Bird’s-eye view on the 1878 Universal Exhibition of Paris with the Trocadero Palace (left) and the Champs-de-Mars (Source: Bitard, Journal Hebdomadaire 1878, no. 1, 5; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure II.9  Schematic organization of the main exhibition building of the 1878 ­Universal ­Exhibition (Source: Gautier 1878, 21)

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3. From the palais d’Industrie to the Universal Exhibition of 1878

Figure II.10  Schematic floor and wall plan of the salle des missions scientifiques during the Universal Exhibition of 1878 (Source: Ministère des l’Instruction publique 1878, plan)

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French colonial propaganda during this 1878 Universal Exhibition, a footnote in the 1881 publication Les arts méconnus by Émile Soldi, the executing artist of this model, is of particular interest: At the occasion of the Universal Exhibition, the Ministry of Public Instruction has asked us to execute in full size, and under the direction of and following the restoration drawings by M. Delaporte, a reproduction of one of the five gates of Angkor with its alley of giants. This monument should be placed in front of the section of Great Britain in the great vestibule; French Indo-China will therefore be the monumental counterpart of the pavilion of British India and show the parallels of those neighbouring arts. The belated participation of Germany […] forced us to abandon our already ongoing execution work and to only work out a small 1:10-scaled model (exhibited in the Trocadero), which served us for our studies. However reduced this project may be, it was due to the care of M. Delaporte to investigate this restoration that this model provided an exact idea of the monument from its epoch of ancient splendour. [italics MF]. (Soldi 1881, 283)

According to Soldi, a 1:1-scale model of this gate was originally conceived as a representation of French Indochina by the Ministry of Public Instruction and was to be placed as the French counterpart to the giant Indian pavilion that dominated the British-Indian section on the other side of the entrée principale of the Universal Exhibition (Fig. II.11). Presided over by the Prince of Wales, son and heir of Queen Victoria, Empress of British India, this giant pavilion was celebrated in tourist guidebooks on the curiosities of the Universal Exhibition as “a magic palace of 1001 nights” (Gautier/Desprez 1878, 92; compare with Bitard 1878, 35 and Birdwood 1878). As Soldi tells us (a confirmation in official documents could not be located), the French counter-project of the Angkor gate in its original size had already been initiated but was cancelled because of a new spatial arrangement made to accommodate the belated participation of the German Empire. In the end, only a 1:10-scale version was executed (Soldi 1881, 283). Interestingly, recently discovered private correspondence in the Delaporte’s family archive in Loches indicates that Dela­ porte himself went to London with his wife to study the English scene, that he was well aware of the British plans to “exhibit a Hindu gate in order to push a proper national affection”, and that he initially indeed planned “to built a

much higher monument with a total height of 15 meters.”34 In the above-mentioned catalogue issued by the Ministry of Public Instruction on the thirty-five French missions represented in the exhibit, Delaporte’s participation in Ang­kor was mentioned in two main sections. A list mentions of twelve “plans of some monuments being measured during the mission” including floor and elevation plans and drawings of architectural details from the temples and buildings of “Méléa, Baïon, Séliam, Préakan, Ta-Kéo, MiBaume, citadelle de Prey, Basset, Athvéa, citadelle de Préasat-Couk” (these plans were most probably finalised in France by Ratte and Faraut after the 1873 mission). The main attraction of Delaporte’s contribution was the “Modèle au 1/10e d’une des portes de la citadelle d’Ang-cor Tôm” (Fig. II.12). After a general description of the urban setting of Angkor Thom with its five entry gates, the catalogue identifies some strangely hybrid aspects of this model, which was fabricated using elements taken from different sites. Representing the “southeastern gate of Angkor Thom” with quadrilaterally decorated “Brahma heads”, the original length of its causeway with flanking giants and supporting Garuda-birds with multiheaded Naga-snakes in their claws – “a motif that was reproduced from the citadel of the Préakan temple”– was “cut to a quarter of its length” due to the spatial constraints of the exhibition space in Paris. As the catalogue mentioned, the model of the Angkorian gate was not a “pure and authentic reconstruction”. Indeed, “some parts of the ornamentation, some figures and the giants of the parapet of the bridge were reproductions of original pieces that were brought back from the mission and were actually displayed in the [ethnographic] galleries of the Trocadero (Cambodian section).” In a kind of art historical conclusion, the gates of Angkor Thom were judged part of “the first period of high Khmer art”, altogether a “period of imagination” in which “large ornamentation of multiple figurations in unequal forms and proportions was produced” and the stylistic “symmetry was visually sufficient, but not followed by the artist with mathematical regularity” (Ministère de l’Instruction publique 1878, 18).35 Watteville reported on the creation of the 1:10-scale model and mentioned the 38,000 francs that were paid to the researchers and artists involved in this display, which remained “property of the state” after the 1878 Exhibition. He also mentioned, above others, Wiener and Delaporte, the plasterer Ghilardi (who also made plaster casts for R ­ ivière and Wiener), and the cost of 12,000 francs for the execution of the porte Khmère by Émile Soldi (Watteville 1886, 29, 38,

34  This note was written by Delaporte’s wife in 23 February 1878 in a letter to her grandmother, regretting

that Delaporte was totally busy with the giant 1:1-scaled project. A transcription of this letter was provided by Julie Philippe in 2014 (compare Philippe 2011, 2013). 35  This catalogue entry on Angkor was entitled “XI. Delaporte (Louis), lieutenant de vaisseau, chef de mission, Faraut (Félix), continuateur de la mission. – Mission au Cambodge, pour étudier les anciens monuments khmers, réunir les éléments d’un musée d’antiquités cambodgiennes (1873–74 ) – Carte de l’Indo-Chine méridionale, donnant la place des monuments explorés par la mission.”

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Figure II.11  The British-India section in the palais de l’Industrie of the 1878 Exhibition (Source: Bitard, Journal Hebdomadaire 1878, Supplément 5; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure II.12  The 1:10 scale porte d’Angkor, originally displayed in the French salle des missions scientifiques in the palais de l’Industrie of 1878, here re-exhibited in the musée Guimet in 1908 (Source: © INHA Archive, Bridgeman Paris/Fonds Giraudon)

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66–68). Consulting a dossier on this project as it is preserved to this day in the National Archives in Paris, Soldi sent his work report and bill of 11,970 francs for the plaster cast model (commenced on 5 April, as he stated later) entitled “Mémoire des travaux exécutés par Monsieur Emile Soldi pour la porte d’Angkor-Tom, destinée à l’Exposition universelle”36 to Watteville on 28 August 1878. The involvement of Delaporte can be traced from this and other reports about the model.37 In light of the history and the cultural-political context for the two 1878 exhibitions of the missions scientifiques and the details of their execution, the aesthetic justification for the display of the porte d’Angkor as the first three-dimen­ sional model of Angkor in Europe is very interesting. It leads us back to the artist contracted for this 1:10-scale model, the ‘all-rounder’ of art history and archaeology, Émile Soldi-Colbert de Beaulieu, and his publication Les arts méconnus, les nouveaux musées du Trocadéro. It was published in 1881, three years after the Universal Exhibition of 1878 but only one year after the major publication entitled Voyage au Cambodge: L’architecture Khmer written by the author and driving force behind the real transfer of Angkorian sculptures and the translation of Angkorian architecture into the French métropole – Louis Delaporte. Together with the 1873 publication Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine by de Lagrée/Garnier, the art historical and aesthetic but, particularly, pictorial, emergence of this model can be traced to a certain extent. It was Delaporte who embellished the descriptions of Angkor’s architecture in de Lagrée and Garnier’s account of the French Mekong expedition of 1866/88, and with a blend of three different types of illustrations: imaginative-picturesque drawings following the classical-colonial ‘ruins-lostin-the-jungle’ narrative, interpretative drawings of hypothetical reconstitutions of Khmer temple architecture, and finally, measured in-scale drawings of the temple’s floor plans, elevations, and construction details. As far as the inspiration for the 1:10-scale porte d’Angkor of 1878 is concerned, Delaporte executed four illustrations of the first two (the imaginative-picturesque and the interpretative) types to accompany the text. The authors of the 1873 pub-

lications were impressed by the “five monumental gates” of Angkor Thom with “their [sheer] dimensions and the powerful originality of their ornamentation and design” and therefore “placed them unobjectionably under the most beautiful works of Khmer architecture”. The southern gate (compare the analysis of its restoration in chapter IX), considered too dilapidated to be “reconstituted”, and was substituted with reference to the southeastern gate with its ­fifteen-metre causeway and two lateral snake-shaped balustrades made up of fifty-four seated giants and a seven- or nine-headed end figure on each side (Garnier 1873, 60–61). Finally, the “five gates with their 540 giants” were judged to be “the [materialised] fruit of a unique mindset [pensée unique]”, which allowed the spectators to get an “idea of this Cambodian power the existence of which had not been known until recent years” (Garnier 1873, 62). Two of Dela­ porte’s four drawings of the gates mentioned in the text depicted the balustrade’s decayed sculptures of the partly headless giants and the nine-headed end figure. However, plate VIII in the volume’s appendix gave an impressive overall view of a heavily overgrown but, in Delaporte’s version, nevertheless complete gate (the only exception being the missing pediment) containing two miniscule Cambodian ‘natives’ on the causeway flanked by the overgrown giants (Fig. II.13a). Besides the pictorial translation of the real sites into ‘ideal ruins in the jungle’, the imagined re-translation of the same sites into a well-preserved masterpiece of ancient Khmer city planning should leave no doubt about the scientific authority and acquired architectural knowledge of the participants in the 1866 expedition. In the text of the 1873 publication, and therefore right next to the two images of the decayed sculptures in the same ensemble, Dela­ porte placed his impressive perspectival drawing of an ideal but ‘generic’ reconstitution of this kind of architectural feature; however, the title “Angcor [sic] Thom: restauration de l’une des entrées de la ville” did not refer to a specific gate (Fig. II.13b). Using an exaggerated perspective, the causeway towards the gate in the background was blown up into a seemingly endless construction that was ‘revived’ with staffage figures including an elephant above and a fully

36  CARAN F17/2757-8 (Exposition 1878, Divers: travaux de construction et d’installation, transports, 1877– 1878). Here he stated that in this bill he included neither his “work of the last six months” nor the expenses of his “atelier” and the work of “his collaborator M. Delaporte” of 8,000 francs. 37  In the more detailed report entitled “État des dépenses faites par Émile Soldi, statuaire, pour la reconstitution et l’exécution en plâtre du petit modèle de la porte de la citadelle d’Angkhor-Tom, destiné à l’Exposition Universelle”, Soldi listed the work and the collaborators for this model: thirty-nine workdays paid for the “sculpture” to thirty-nine stucco workers [ouvriers ornemanistes] for 7,340 francs; 72 francs for the architecte-dessinateur M. Deverud; 281 francs for the carpentry [menuiserie] of M. Rabotte; 3,539 francs for the plaster cast work [moulage] of “M. Ghilardi and his six workers” and 738 francs for general expenses. In an earlier list dated to 24 August, he made a slightly different report: together with Soldi, Delaporte had worked twenty-nine hours for the “sculptural work of the little model” (billing 39 francs on 4 August) and altogether Ghilardi and his six helpers spent the astonishing amount of 285 days (billing 3,539 francs) for the execution of the model.

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Figure II.13a  Porte d’Angcor, as depicted in Garnier’s 1873 publication Voyage d’exploration (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate VIII; © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure II.13b  Idealistic “restauration” of an entry to Angkor Thom as depicted in Garnier’s 1873 publication (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, page 61; © Heidelberg University Library)

occupied rowing boat under the bridge. Since Soldi never actually visited the original site in order to execute the plaster cast model, he depended heavily on architectural sketches and personal interpretations from his colleague Delaporte. And even though Delaporte published further drawings of this gate only two years after the 1878 Exhibition in his 1880 publication, we can assume that Soldi may have already used some of these architectural renderings in their preparatory state. In his 1880 publication, Delaporte referred only briefly to the southeastern gate “Angkor-la-

Grande” as the “gate of the dead” that led the visitor directly to the Bayon temple in the centre of the city of Angkor Thom (Delaporte 1880, 155–56). However, on the following page he illustrated his brief remark on this specific gate with an extraordinary engraving of a fully reconstituted version that was subtitled “Porte d’Angkor-Thôm (Vue restituée)”. This formed the missing detail of the gate that had been left out in the Garnier publication of 1873 (Fig. II.14a). Comparing the ruined 1873 version of the gate with the reconstituted 1880 version exemplifies how Delaporte’s 111

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Figure II.14a  Porte d’Angkor-Thôm (Vue restituée) as depicted in Delaporte’s 1880 publication (Source: Delaporte 1880, 157)

Figure II.14b  Entrée orientale de Pontéay Préa-Khan (Vue restituée) as depicted in Delaporte’s 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1880, 20/21)

visual translation from the real site into the print medium38 got closer and closer to the original appearance of the gates. In a short remark from his 1880 publication, Delaporte mentioned his collaborator Félix Ratte who had studied the five gates closely during the 1873 mission for a “reconstitution bien exacte” that served the 1:10-scale model only five years later in Paris.39 As was already mentioned in the exhibition catalogue of 1878 by the Ministry of Public Instruction, the temple of Preah Khan to the northeast of Angkor Thom served as the model for the 1878 reconstruction of the Angkorian gate. In his 1880 publication Delaporte reported extensively on this temple, where the bridge-gate ensemble was indeed very similar to the gates to Angkor Thom. It was here that he had installed his colleague Bouillet and his draughtsmen during the 1873 mission “for the reconstitution of the original figuration” of the temple, which he judged, along with the gates of Angkor Thom, to be “certainly one of the most fascinating ensembles of Khmer art ever realised” (Delaporte 1880, 187, 188). It was from this very location that Delaporte had removed the enormous figurative head element that would be exhibited at the 1878 Exhibition in the Trocadero palace (see below). And it was this architectural feature that was depicted in

the two impressively reconstituted perspectives that might have (in their preliminary sketches for the later publication) served Soldi as a model in 1878. Whereas the first double-page illustration “Entrée orientale de Ponteay Préa-Khan. Vue restituée” (Delaporte 1880, 20/21) was a dramatised perspective onto the giant’s causeway, the second depiction “La citadelle de Preá-Kan (Angkor). (Vue restituée)” (Delaporte 1880, 268–69) gave the missing architectural indication for Soldi’s model – that is, the flat side elevation of the bridge and the gate. Together with the quotation of the lateral Garuda-bird decoration from a comparable, slightly lateral depiction of the central entry to a Preah Khan temple near the town of CompongSoai (Fig. II.14b) (which Soldi even cited with an illustration in his own 1881 publication), the 1:10-scale plaster cast model for the 1878 Exhibition was a hybrid pictorial translation that brought together various architectural elements from similar Khmer bridge-gate ensembles to form one presentation in Paris. Soldi reconfirmed this assumption in his own book with the following subtitle for an engraving of his 1878 model which he re-translated ‘en bloc’ (compare the trimmed edges of the depicted gate) into a re-imagined tropical scenery of Angkor: “La porte d’Angkor –

38  This happened about thirty years before Angkor was finally incorporated into the French protectorate of Cambodia in 1907 and detailed archaeological research began, and eighty years before the real ‘restoration’ work of the gates in the late 1950s was initiated by the EFEO (see chapter IX and Figs. IX.72–3). 39  “On a pu voir a l’Exposition universelle de 1878 (salle des missions scientifiques) la reproduction au 1/10 de la porte Sud-Ouest d‘Angkor, précédée d’une chaussée de géants avec frises de garoudas copiées sur celles de Préa-Khan. Ce modèle, où étaient réunis des spécimens variés de l’art khmer, a été exécuté par M. Soldi, sculpteur, ancien prix de Rome, d’après les relevés de la Mission et la restitution que j’en avais faite. Voy. p. 157.” (Delaporte 1880, 194)

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Figure II.15  La porte d’Angkor as a 1:10-scale model, re-translated into an exotic ­vegetation in Soldi’s 1881 publication Les arts méconnus (Source: Soldi 1881, 288–89)

Figure II.16  Angkor Thom, Plan et élévation d’une porte de l’enceinte, ­restitution d’après les mesures de Ratte en 1873 et de Laederich en 1882 as depicted in Delaporte’s 1914–24 publication Les monuments du Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1914–24, plate X; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Modèle au dixième. Restitution par M. Delaporte d’après ses relevés des ruines (italics MF) encore existantes (Voir la gravure p. 284). Sculpture par Émile Soldi – Musée ethnographique du Trocadero” (Fig. II.15). The reference in the subtitle leads the reader to a “porte d’Angkor”, the depic-

tion of which in Soldi’s book was a simplified, close-up, and even dramatised copy of Delaporte’s plate VIII in the Garnier publication of 1873. Only in his last great publication in 1924 did Delaporte present a precise elevation of the southern gate to Angkor Thom (Fig. II.16). 113

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Although Garnier’s 1873 publication (as well as Dela­ art itself ”. Therefore “this [Khmer] architecture” was includporte’s book of 1880) mentioned this Angkorian gate as one ed in Hegel’s classical period where “youth, imagination, and of the most important elements of Khmer architecture, it fantasy had conserved all its upturn” (Soldi 1881, 276). was Soldi who, without ever visiting the original site, tried to Identifying this gate of Angkor as a “veritable arc de integrate the gate – along with the artefacts and architectures triomphe” (Soldi 1881, 283) with “the most beautiful [French] of other cultures and civilisations – into a global art history monuments of the thirteenth century” (Soldi 1881, 288), of progress. In his impressive publication Les arts méconnus, Soldi pleaded for the (French colonial) “archaeological salles nouveaux musées du Trocadéro from 1881, containing 530 vage of the Khmer monuments” and judged “the effect and pages and 400 engravings (dedicated to Victor Hugo on his the taste of Angkor” suitable to influence “our [French] eightieth birthday), Soldi wrote six chapters on what he con- artists” and to improve the “unbeautiful proportions of the sidered the “misjudged arts”. These arts, although compris- constructions of modern Paris” (Soldi 1881, 330). Soldi’s ing “the artistic genius of the largest part of the world” had comparison of Khmer with French Gothic architecture was been unjustifiably excluded by “arbitrarily assigned limits” not accidental; it referred to the unique constellations of but were in reality just “different degrees, aptitudes, and ap- the years to come when Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture proaches” (Soldi 1881, 14). Next to European medieval, Per- comparée on the one side of the palais de Trocadéro would sian, American, and Egyptian art, “L’art khmer” as chapter be complemented with Delaporte’s musée des Antiquités four comprised sixty pages alone. Soldi referred to Hegel’s cambodgiennes on the other side (see chapter III). During theory of art forms (without referring to Hegel’s later lec- the Universal Exhibition of 1878, however, the visitor, who tures on aesthetics) and his progressive periodisation of art was, as one who wrote about the event put it, “struck with into symbolic, classical, and romantic art. According to He- stupefaction” in front of the 1:10-scale plaster cast model of gel, at the lowest symbolic level, the idea was dominated by the porte d’Angkor in the palais du Champs-de-Mars just the material, like, for example, in ‘primitive’ and the early, had to cross the Seine River and enter the galérie des arts elaborate architecture of Oriental civilisations; whereas, clas- rétrospectifs in the Trocadero palace (Pl. II.3). Here he sical art with its equilibrium of the idea and the material was could get a close look at one of the gate’s original elements best seen in Greek sculpture. However, Soldi tried to rede- “en grandeur naturelle” (Simonin 1878, 605). But it was supfine Hegel’s schema by identifying “la porte d’Angkor” as a posedly the original masterpiece of the balustrade of Preah perfectly balanced piece of architecture, placing it in the Khan from the display of the antiquity of Angkor that real“second period of the art of India which was the Cambodian ly caught the attention of the visiting masses.

4. The ‘political mandala’ of the palais du Champs-de-Mars’s floor plan and the double placement of the plaster casts from Angkor The populace in each country is constituted as a nation; and all the diverse nations on the globe constitute humanity itself. And all exhibited objects with respect to improving the moral and material condition of humanity, or, in other words, to satisfying its physical and moral needs, constitute the Exhibition in its entirety. Not a single object should be exhibited without this goal. (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 1, 40) — Administrative report on the 1878 Paris Exhibition

The above-quoted introduction of this massive adminis­ trative report initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce under the engineer and commissaire général Jean-Baptiste Krantz, set down the general conceptual (ideological and aesthetic) guidelines to the 1878 Exhibition. Following the double-entry system used for the 1867 Exhibition, which sought to “classify the diverse products of human activity”, Krantz defined the regulating social scale of the “population” to the “nations” which constituted “humanity” (see original quote above). As a consequence, to support the overall project of representing the nations as constantly moving towards a universally valid concept of humanity, “not a single object could be exhibited” if it did not “improve moral and material condition to satisfy its physical and moral needs” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, 114

vol. 1, 38–40). As at the 1867 Exhibition, the aspect of public instruction – one might even call it propaganda – was the most important operation for the hosting French republic. It formed, to a lesser degree, the architectural language of the superstructure of the central exhibition hall; the 420,000 square-metre layout and the spatial and thematic arrangement of the French and foreign sections of the hall made it readable as an attempt to underscore the (supposedly) valid status of the civilising world. The shape of the 1867 Exhibition as a laterally stretched circle with spokes and radiating concentric spheres was changed in the 1878 Exhibition to a compartmental arrangement in the form of a rectangular floor plan, and in this configuration the representation of the plaster casts from Angkor had doubled (Pl. II.2a,b; compare Fig. II.9). The visitor ap-

4. The ‘political mandala’ of the palais du Champs-de-Mars’s floor plan…

proaching from the Seine and passing the giant head of the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (later a gift from France to the United States) to his left reached the main entrance via a fleet of steps and a terrace containing the Statue of the Republic. Passing the vestibule d’honneur with the previously mentioned freestanding palace of British India on the right and the centrally placed arrangement of the French fine arts, the visitor entered the left part of the palais, which was entirely occupied by the French section. Here the 1:10-scale model of the porte d’Angkor was prominently placed inside the exhibition of scientific missions under the Ministry of Public Instruction. But this was not the only positioning of plaster casts from Angkor. A similar spatial and symbolic arrangement had been carried out on the other side of the palais and was inscribed in a more colonial gesture. In front of the École militaire to the southeast of the palais, the visitor entered the galerie de travail through the porte d’entrée with a 1:80,000-scale map of France. Passing on the southern edge pavilion the trophée des Indes Hollandaises, represented by a pyramidal collage of colonial products from the Dutch East Indies (Livret-Chaix 1878, 63) (Fig. II.17), the visitor entered the section of the Colonies françaises under the supervision of the ministère de la Marine et des colonies (Fig. II.18). With its perpendicular arrangement it preluded the entire French section from the southeast. With senator Victor Schoelcher installed as president of the colonial commission for the 1878 Exhibition, Hubert Michaux as Directeur des colonies, and Aubry-Lecomte as conservateur de l’Exposition permanente des colonies, the section contained the French colonies from Cambodia and Cochin­ china to Senegal, Gabon, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. It presented as a series of large glass vitrine boxes containing more than 1,400 exhibits (including silk cloth from the Cambodian king).40 However, this display mode was seen as old-fashioned and reminiscent of the 1867 Exhibition (compare Fig. I.15a). In order to keep the costs down for the ministry, the general administrative report mentions that the furniture was temporarily borrowed from the permanent colonial exhibition in the palais de l’Industrie (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 1, 114). The Catalogue des produits des colonies françaises lists several items from Cochinchine including “plaster casts of bas-reliefs and inscriptions, debris of statues and ornaments form the temples of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat”, Cambodian sculptures and, as in 1867, a photo album from Émile Gsell (Exposition 1878, 157–96; here 164–65). A short notice in the Journal hebdomadaire about the 1878 Exhibition mentioned mannequins with indigenous costumes, maps, and the only freestanding piece of architecture, a “model of an Annamite habitation” (Bitard 1878, 266–67). A guide

Figure II.17  The Dutch East Indies trophy in the 1878 ­Universal Exhibition (Source: Bitard 1878, Journal hebdomadaire, no. 30, 40)

to the curiosities of the 1878 Exhibition, however, judged the “fetishes and idols a banality” that was already well known from other museums (Gautier/Desprez 1878, 188). By this time colonial representation was seen as outdated, and most probably it was only barely orchestrated by the responsible administration. The ‘real’ Ministry of the Colonies was only established later in 1894, and the Direction des colonies was attached to the ministère de la Marine until 1870 and only later incorporated in the ministère du Commerce et des colonies. However, as we shall see, the repre­s entation of colonial power through freestanding ­architectural structures reached its first peak only at the 1889 Exhibition. To sum up the situation in 1878, the plaster casts of Ang­kor were embedded in two different French-imperial messages on the palais de Champs-de-Mars: on the one

40  However, the cited number of 1,450 exhibitors and 765 récompenses might have comprised all the colonial

objects inside the 1878 Exhibition (Commission coloniale 1879, 3). See also: Dentu 1878, 219 or CARAN F12/3227, Exposition 1878.

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Figure II.18  Colonies françaises in the 1878 Universal Exhibition (Source: Journal Hebdomadaire 1878, supplément no. 38; © Heidelberg University Library)

hand, they served to display the French efforts and results within scientific – that is, archaeological and ethnographic – missions around the planet; on the other hand (and this partly overlapped with the first), they were embedded in the French-colonial representation of goods and products. Both exhibitions were situated strategically at each end of the vast French section, which had received the most prominent position in the floor plan of the palais de Champs-de-Mars – a floor plan that served as a kind of ­laterally stretched ‘political mandala’ of the French Third

Republic. However, the first and most important impression of Angkor in France did not come with the exhibition of some debris in the colonial section or from the reduced plaster cast model in the display of scientific missions – it happened finally in the form of an ‘original’ sculptural masterpiece put on display in the dominant new palais de Trocadéro. And it was in the discipline of ethnography – not, as one might assume, classical archaeology or art history – that this material transfer and translation from Angkor to Europe was embedded.

5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace In 1828, three years after he had been nominated conservateur du Dépôt de géographie in the Bibliothèque Royale by the French king Charles, Edmé François Jomard, ingénieur-géographe, participant in the famous French expe­ dition to Egypt and member of the Académie royale des Inscriptions et belles-lettres, presented a plan to create an ethnographic museum in Paris. This happened at a moment “when the [scientific] borders between naturalist, linguistic, and geographical studies were extremely unclear” 116

(Dias 1991, 125), and the taxonomies on the development of animals and plants, the human races, archaeologically unearthed extinct or ‘discovered’ primitive civilisations, and artistic productions around the known planet were being poured into a narrative of progressive humanity, civilisation, and the nation-state (compare citations above). Taking as models similar collections, like that in the German town of Göttingen, or the Parisian Muséum d’histoire with its systematic research on natural specimens under the fa-

5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace

mous Georges Cuvier (compare with chapter III), Jomard, representation of the body, food, clothing, dwelling and in his Remarques sur le but et l’utilité d’une collection ethno- constructions, domestic economies, defence, arts and graphique of 1831, considered ethnography a suitable new sciences, music, customs and traditions, and finally, objects field of enquiry through which to measure “in an exact and of cult (compare with the classification system of the 1867 positive manner the degree of civilisation of people which Exhibition). As regards the focus on architecture and herwere only little advanced on the social scale” and to “appre- itage, Class 4 (Arts qui servent au logement) gave room for ciate their works and throw light on the state of their arts, Order 1 with “modèles de constructions” including the domestic economies, and the nature of their moral and re- “genres: maisons, pagodas, temples, chapelles, palais, châligious ideas” (Jomard 1831, 422). Jomard excluded antiq- teaux, tours, ponts, forts, fortifications, tombes, etc.” uities and Beaux-Arts collections in his first proposal since (Jomard 1845, 551). This genre of ordre 1 of classe IV made it was not the aspect of beauty but the “degree of utility and the 1878 execution of the 1:10-scale model of the Angkor usage” in the same “genre” that was to be blended with geo­ gate by Delaporte/Soldi a perfect example that was valid for graphical and material information in order to establish a ethnographic display. Just a few months before his death, Jomard’s essay Classification méthodique des produits de classification system. However, an 1843 letter from the Bavarian physician l’industrie extra-européenne ou objets provenant des voyages and botanist Philipp-Franz von Siebold, written in the con- lointains (Jomard 1862) linked his general classification text of his research on Japan for the Dutch and the instal- system with the objects that came to France from colonial lation of an ethnographic museum in Leiden, changed explorative missions. Those were, based on these and simJomard’s approach. Within a coherent order of ideas that ilar approaches, finally introduced to the public in the perincluded extinct (whether deemed ‘civilised or barbarian’) manent colonial exhibition in the palais de l’Industrie and and extant people alike, and with the appreciation of ar- later during the 1878 Exhibition in the Ministry of Public chaeology as a “historical study”, a unity of humanity was, Instruction’s displays of the missions scientifiques. From according to Siebold, best explained by exhibiting “striking this point of view it seems important to state that Soldi’s analogies” that came out of a combined display of “compar- 1876 article Quelques points d’éthnographie et d’archéologie ative research on archaeology and [italics MF] ethnology” préhistorique (see above), along with Watteville’s ideas, was (Siebold 1843, 11). Interestingly enough, being originally strongly influenced by Jomard’s concept, which, in its latest from Bavaria, which had no colonies, and working in the iteration in 1862, merged ethnographic and a­ rchaeological service of the Dutch on their colonies in the Dutch East objects on display into a French-colonial vision. However, if the two above-mentioned 1878 exhibitions Indies, Siebold pointed to the importance of ethnographic-archaeological collections, especially those in “the capi- were entirely inscribed into the political mission of the tals of the civilised empires of Europe” that possessed French republic within the palais de Champs-de-Mars, non-European colonies. There, “missionaries, researchers, where the diverse branches of actual human activities and naturalist travellers, the armed forces and civil servants, products were displayed in a supposedly peaceful compemerchants and seamen” alike could be perfectly instructed tition among all ‘civilised’ nations, then a ‘purely scientific’, in their “special mission” to the colonies and foreign coun- supposedly apolitical perspective on the ethnographic retries (Siebold 1843, 17, 18). search of non-European cultures was still missing. A third Just few years after the letter, Jomard responded to Sie- location in the 1878 Exhibition where Khmer art popped bold with his Caractère et essai de classification d’une collec- up in front of the gaze of the public was the vast retrospection ethnographique (published in 1845) where he aimed to tive exhibition in a neo-Moorish or neo-Byzantine style incorporate “art products and industries of people far from developed by the architects Gabriel Davioud and Jules European civilisation” (Jomard 1845, 540) in a double-clas- Bourdais and located on the other side of the Seine in the sification system based on geographical and material infor- palais de Trocadéro (Fig. II.19). In the thematic tradition of mation. It placed non-European cultures under the Euro- the galerie de l’histoire de travail at the 1867 Exhibition the centric paradigm of a “universal march towards progress in collections of ancient objects were systematically displayed human civilisation”. He recalled his 1831 comment that the at the very core of the elliptic palais de l’exposition. This was growing influence of Christian Europe on the whole globe a giant central structure containing a conference hall and made the collection of original spécimens of “extra-Europe- two lateral gallery wings with curved colonnades that an industries” from quickly disappearing cultures an ur- opened the view towards the Champs-de-Mars and the gent task and likewise that “where these originals were ­exhibition space right below the palace. To take up once missing or too large in dimension”, the execution of “draw- again our symbolic interpretation of the rectangular floor ings and models” was urgent and necessary (Jomard 1845, plan of the palais de Champs-de-Mars as a ‘political mandala’, we can say that these colonnades formed the enor547). In his classification ethnographique of 1845, Jomard proposed ten classes with subdivided ordres in several gen- mous ‘arms’ of the Trocadero palace high above the whole res – “the material, the form, the dimension, and the prov- exhibition space that embraced (swallowed?) a range of enance of the objects constituted the species [espèce]” freestanding pavilions to the right and left of the Seine (Pl. (Jomard 1845, 549) – in an ascending hierarchy from the II.3). On the north-western banks of the Seine in front of 117

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the Trocadero hill, the French-colonial Arabesque-style three, including the colonial exhibition) in the Universal pavilion of Algeria (including a small pavilion of the terri- Exhibition.42 tory of Alsace-Lorraine, which had just been lost to GerWith a room-by-room description in a guidebook by many in the 1871 war) was by far the largest structure. To A. R. de Liesville entitled Coup d’œil sur l’exposition historithe south, a picturesque ensemble of smaller European que de l’art ancien, the potential visitor was guided through pavilions were installed with Sweden and Norway and an the approximately forty thousand objects. They ranged from ‘Oriental group’ comprising Japan, China, and Siam,41 “some engraved zigzags on the battle axe of the savage or our Egypt, Tunisia, and Persia. To a certain extent, these build- primitive ancestors to the most refined and most complete ings complemented the interior exhibition programme of artworks of modern Europe” to the “much less explored field of the Orient and the Americas”, which the author the Trocadero palace. With ministerial decrees from January 1877 for the judged to be “much less interesting than the exhibition on Universal Exhibition of the following year, it was decided Europe and its classical antiquity” (Liesville 1879a, X–XI, that an Exposition historique de l’art ancien de tous les pays XII). Approaching from the left wing and crossing the “Oriet de l’ethnographie des peuples étrangers à l’Europe (Minis- ental hall” right behind the great central rotunda with its tère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 1, 551–62) would be installed carpets, lamps, a vase from the Alhambra and ceramics under the direction of Adrien de Longpérier, numismatist from Turkestan, Liesville passed a Buddha statue and a fountain (both from Japan) in the vestibule to enter the and ar­chaeologist. Gustave Schlumberger was acting as secretary general. Following the règlement spécial (Minis- ground floor on the right wing of the Trocadero. The first tère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 2, 179–82), the ten sections three halls focused on Egypt in different historical periods. also comprised the Exposition de l’art ancien in the left Ancient Egypt was represented by a small temple (judged wing of the building, which featured objects from the by Liesville to be the most important object in the entire Stone Age to 1800, from the so-called ‘primitive arts’ of right wing) under the curatorship of Mariette-Bey from the the Gauls to ancient musical instruments, and which fo- Bulaq Museum in Cairo (compare his role to establish the cused on art from France and Europe “in chronological “Egyptian Park” in the 1867 Exhibition). Displays representorder” (Fig. II.20). One section was called ethnographie ing Egypt under the Kalifs and modern Egypt, labelled “dedes peuples étrangers, managed by a French ethnologist plorable and in profound decadence” in the 1878 Exhibiworking in the Americas, Alphonse Pinart, and was dis- tion’s official report (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. 1, played in the entire right wing of the building in “geo- 560), were present as well. Liesville guided the visitor to the graphical order”. As a result, this arrangement did not fol- next hall where “immense stone sculptures from the mislow the comparative object-related approach developed by sion to Cambodia by M. Delaporte from the château de Jomard and his later colleagues and presented on mostly Compiègne added to the verve of the museum” (Liesville private and area-focused collections. Neither detailed floor 1879a, 66). The above-cited official report honoured their plans of the two different wings nor an extensive collection “unique origin and the curiosity they elicited from an ethof photographs of the interior showrooms could be locat- nographic, European point view”. However, it concluded a ed for this research. short description of the Khmer section with the observaLouis Delaporte, already represented both through tion that “it had much more interest for the specialists than parts of his collection and as collaborator in Soldi’s 1:10- for the homme de l’art” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1881, vol. scale version of the porte d’Angkor, had already been invit- 1, 561). Liesville’s book, on the other hand, dedicated five ed by Longpérier in January 1878 (when the temporary whole pages to the display on Angkor. Obviously ignoring exhibition in the palais de l’Industrie was just about to open Delaporte’s indirect participation in the scientific mission’s its gates) to present parts of his Khmer collection in the exhibition on the Champs-de-Mars with a reconstituting and picture-perfect 1:10-scale model of a gate of Angkor, historical section of the Trocadero as “a grand attraction of curiosity” during the 1878 Universal Exhibition. In mid- Liesville praised Delaporte’s approach, which he described March 1878 an agreement between the Ministry of Public as being able to “get over a tradition that the scrupulousness Instruction and the commissaire général was made to split of the sciences should forever ban from our museums: the Delaporte’s collection for exhibition at two sites (or even restoration [restauration] of the monuments”. Liesville con-

41  Reporting on the “foreign installations” below the Trocadero hill, Dentu stated that the Siamese king had

agreed to renounce his rights of total sovereignty over Cambodia and to split it with France by 1862, which might to some extent explain why in its pavilion Siam did not display the antiquities of Angkor that remained on Siamese territory until 1907 (Dentu 1878, 297). In reality, the Franco–Siamese Treaty of 1867 reconfirmed the placement of Angkor on the Siamese territory, see chapters I, VI and epilogue to volume 1. 42  A letter by Longpérier, directeur des sections historiques, to the commissaire général on 7 January 1878, and by the ministère de l’Instruction publique, des cultes et des beaux-arts to the commissaire général of the universal exhibition on 12 March 1878 (CARAN F12/3490 – 1878 Trocadéro, sections art ancien, Cambodge).

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5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace

Figure II.19  Photograph towards the Trocadero Palace with diverse pavilion installations ­during the 1878 Universal Exhibition (Source: Petit Moniteur Universel 1878, Album, vue no. 5; © Bibliothèque historique de Paris)

Figure II.20  Photograph of the Exposition de l‘art ancien in the Trocadero Palace during the 1878 Universal Exhibition (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

tinued, “One takes the risk of creating a hybrid mergence, confusing, erroneous, and sometimes [even] ridiculous, the examples of which we could just see in the exhibition about the missions of the Ministry of Public Instruction” (Liesville 1879a, 67). Enraptured by his own interpretations of comparative world art studies, Liesville let his gaze wander from Khmer

fragments of Buddha and Brahma statues (supposedly “variations of the Greek Hermes or the Roman Janus”) and bas-reliefs to pilasters, fragments of friezes, and decorated columns (“emerged from the contemplation of Assyrian bas-reliefs”) to stop finally in front of the most imposing object – the central giant-serpent group, “the largest specimens of sculptures in the whole Trocadero” (Liesville 1879a, 119

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69). Liesville closed his appreciation of Delaporte’s Angkor collection with the wish that it be “kept in Paris to be compared to Egyptian, Cypriot, and primitive Greek works of art, and not in the castle of Compiègne where it did not complement the style of Louis XVI and the paintings of the eighteenth century” (Liesville 1879a, 69–70). He continued his tour through the showrooms of Émile Guimet’s Lyon-­ based Chinese and Japanese collection, Pinart’s collection of ‘savage’ masks from Mexico and Peru, Wiener’s Colombia mission, ivory sculptures from Congo in the African room, and artefacts from Oceania. He concluded with objects from Belgium, Spain, and Scandinavia and a remark on the “chaotic parcours” and the “voyage en zig-zags” as far as the chronological and geographical order of Trocadero’s right wing was concerned (Liesville 1879a, 118). In his pursuit of the goal of collecting, displaying, and popularising Khmer art in France and of placing it in direct stylistic competition with the Egyptian collection of Ma­ riette-Bey or the Chinese-Japanese collection of Émile Guimet, the installation was certainly Delaporte’s biggest success thus far – as he stated not much later in his publication Voyage au Cambodge: As soon as a first ensemble was organised, the new museum would be declared accessible by the public. Accessible au public! And this will only happen when it will finally be transported to Paris, the centre of studies and of all great Asian collections. [Footnote 1] This wish was partially realised when the Cambodian antiquities, brought to Paris on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition of 1878, were exhibited in the galleries of the Trocadero between the collections of Egyptian art and those of Chinese and Japanese art. And there is good reason to be optimistic today that they will not leave Paris anymore and that the musée Khmer will definitely be installed there. [italics MF] (Delaporte 1880, 248—50)

Other reports (e.g., Bréban 1878, 109–110; Liesville 1879b, 12) linked the displayed Khmer art back to Indian roots and even made stylistic comparisons to Egypt, Assyria, and the European Renaissance (Duranty 1879, 535) but rarely offered any illustrations. Only the journal Le monde illustré featured the “Cambodian giants and multiheaded snakes” in an imposing engraving by M. Woodward (Fig.II.21). It

accompanied an article by Léo de Bernard on 2 November 1878 that praised this artefact as the only one of novelty and interest for the visiting crowds (Bernard 1878). Having transferred parts of his newly installed collection from the peripheral château de Compiègne to the “galleries of the Tro­ cadero” in central Paris (Delaporte 1880, 203), Delaporte celebrated this very moment by re-using this engraving in his 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Delaporte 1880, 245). What was in fact depicted was a fascinating collage in many ways, and it reveals the intertwined modes of representation of the exotic and the picturesque, the as yet undefined modes of scientific (ethnographic and/or archaeological) display, the colonial appropriation of Khmer art in original and/or copied forms – in short, the hybrid exhibition practices and strategies in which the polymorphic translation of Angkorian ‘heritage’ was embedded in the French hemisphere. The well-composed but grossly exaggerated perspective in the engraving depicts several visitors staring up at the highly elevated giant sculptural ensemble, which had been cut off from the Naga balustrade of the Preah Khan temple and transported to France by Delaporte’s mission in 1873 (Fig. II.22). This was, as already discussed above, executed against the will of the ruling Siamese governor of the Siem Reap province, who had only agreed to the making of plaster casts (Delaporte 1874, 2546–47; compare the analysis on his 1873 mission above). At first glance, we might assume that Delaporte’s exhibit inside the Trocadero’s ethnographic parcours through the extinct civilisations of the world was – in contrast to the reduced plaster cast model of the Angkor gate several hundred metres down the hill in the Champs-de-Mars exhibition of the scientific missions – a ‘pure original’. The available parts of this ensemble had already been painstakingly listed and documented in Croizier’s 1875 catalogue for the musée Khmer in Compiègne and comprised three entries: the giant end piece sculpture, a part of the balustrade itself, and (only!) one head.43 As an analysis conducted by Pierre Baptiste, curator of the musée Guimet, has proven, the display was a hybrid ensemble of originals and replicas (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 134–35, Baptiste 2013b, compare with Baptiste 2008): Delaporte had simply taken away the large front figure and the first god [deva] tearing the Naga-snake. For the 1878 Exhibition he not only changed the originally homogeneous line of deva heads into an alternating head

43  Croizier listed these ensembles in his catalogue in section II (“Statues et animaux fantastiques employés

dans la décoration architecturale”) with the following three entries: “XXIV: Yacksa (géants), soutenant le corps d’un nagas (en grès), hauteur 3,50m, longueur 4,00m. […] ce groupe faisait partie d’un ensemble double, placé de chaque côté des ponts jetés sur les fossés de Ponteay-Prakan, où il formait une balustrade monumentale. Les personnages qui le soutenaient, reconnaissables à leur figure grimaçante, étaient des yacksas. Seul, le géant polycéphale, placé en tête du groupe qui étreignat le naga heptacéphalique, avait une expression hiératique qui rappelle les faces brahmaniques des portes d’entrée d’Angkor”, “XXV: Kabal (tête) de Yacksa, en grès (cette tête faisait partie de la suite du groupe précédent (no. 24)”, and “XXVI: balustrade (fragment de l’extrémité), longeur 1.55m, hauteur 0.40m. C’est un double éventail, formé de sept têtes de dragon, qui terminait la balustrade, provenant de Ponteay Prakan, qu’on voit au musée (no. 24)” (Croizier 1875, 106, 108).

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5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace

Figure II.21  The Naga balustrade from Preah Khan, exhibited in the Trocadero Palace and published in Le Monde illustré on 2 November 1878 (Source: Le Monde illustré, no. 1127 (2 November 1878), 277; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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Figure II.22  Une entrée de Ponteay Préa-Khan (Vue restituée) as published in Delaporte’s 1880 publication (Source: Delaporte 1880, 190)

Figure II.23  Prahkhan, près d’Angkor Thôm as exhibited in Delaporte’s musée Khmer (Source: © INHA Archive; Bridgeman Paris/Fonds Giraudon)

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5. The Naga balustrade of Preah Khan and the Ethnographie des peuples étrangers in the Trocadero palace

Figure II.24  Dégagement du Práh Khan d’Ankor, as published in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient in 1928 (Source: BEFEO 1928, plate XIV)

series with a demon [asura]-head from the other side of the balustrade (as Delaporte depicted it in his engraving), he also copied the first sitting figure by making a plaster cast copy that was to be placed behind the original in order to enlarge his ensemble for the exhibition. After the 1878 Universal Exhibition when Delaporte finally moved his Khmer collection into the newly installed musée Indo-chinois in the right (Passy) wing of the Trocadero (see below), he also changed the head arrangement (Fig. II.23). The plaster cast element that he added already had some (fake) patina, and this hybrid ensemble was to greet the visitor in the basement of the lateral end pavilion, which served for the next forty years as the entry staircase to Delaporte’s museum. By this time the 1:10-scale plaster cast model of the gate to Angkor Thom by Soldi/Delaporte from the 1878 Exhibition on the French scientific missions had disappeared into storage at the ministère de l’Instruction public. However, the picturesque ensemble from the colonial section, with some exhibits from Angkor and Cambodia, had returned to the Exposition permanente des colonies in the palais de l’Industrie or the storage of the ministère de la Marine. Almost five decades later, the ‘real’ balustrade of the Preah Khan temple was – without the missing front element – restored on site by the EFEO in 1928 (Fig. II.24); at that time Dela­por­ te’s masterpiece was on its way to the musée Guimet, where it stands today in the entry hall as a scientific ‘original’ and therefore as a ‘shortened’ version – without Dela­porte’s additions (Pl. II.4). The ‘real’ southern gate of Angkor Thom was finally brought back (‘back-translated’) to its picture-­

perfect version around 1960 when the Angkor Park had become the largest archaeological (re)construction site on the planet (see chapter IX, Figs. 72–73). Delaporte’s Khmer collection, comprising scale-reduced models and drawings, as well as original objects, plaster cast copies, and, as we now know, hybrid collages of both, was embedded in three different scenarios in the 1878 Exhibition. Whereas the political and propagandistic intentions in the colonial section under the ministère de la Marine as well as the exhibition of scientific missions under the ministère de l’Instruction publique were outspoken and obvious, the messages of the ethnographic displays inside the Trocadero palace had to be read ‘between the lines’. Since the 1820s the ideological background of the discipline of ethnography had already been defined by Jomard and continued by Ernest Théodore Hamy, the first director of the ethnographic museum, which opened in the Trocadero after the 1878 Exhibition. If it is true that this emerging discipline was, as we mentioned above, marked by a threefold narrative of humanity progressing from primi­ tivism to higher civilisation and the nation-state (with the French cultural status quo representing the highest achievement), then Delaporte’s exhibits played a significant role in this construction. He most probably participated in the Congrès international des sciences ethnographiques, which took place in July 1878 inside the Trocadero just a few metres away from his Angkor display, and was, as “Lieutenant Delaporte, member of the Mekong expedition”, like his colleagues Étienne Aymonier, Émile Guimet, Long123

II  La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art

périer, and Pinart, a member of the hosting Société d’éthnographie (Ministère de l’agriculture 1891, 17). In his opening speech, the society’s president Léon de Rosny evoked the French civilising mission which was a) based on the “voices of Voltaire and Rousseau” who had brought critical philosophy, social reforms, and the concept of human rights to Europe; and b) grounded in the new discipline of ethnography as the study of the “humanité consciente”, as the “science of the destiny of the whole human mankind” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1891, 32, 33, 35). The séances of this congress continued until October of the same year, and Rosny participated in the general discussion “On the methodology of ethnography” with which “the achievements of architecture and literature” [monuments d’architecure et des lettres] of the past could retrace “historic nationalities” [nationalités historiques] (Ministère de l’agriculture 1891, 751). From this point of view, the reported visit of the conference to the exhibition, which ended in front of Delaporte’s Ang­

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kor display, embedded ‘innocent’ archaeological objects and supposedly academic studies like the “reproduction du palais d’Angkor” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1891, 720) into contested colonial taxonomies of progress, civilisation, and nationhood. As the Commandant de Villemereuil had concluded in his paper on La polygamie en Cambodge (see above) “with applause” from the audience, archaeological studies on and executed casts from the Cambodian ruins by scholars like Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, the German ­Adolf Bastian from the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin (compare chapter III), Delaporte and Harmand were not enough to retrace the civilisation and progress of an ancient nation: the territory of ancient Angkor, “diplomatically abandoned to Siam with an unforgivable blindness” and “today in the hands of a dying race” (Ministère de l’agriculture 1891, 379, 385) had to be reincorporated into contemporary nationhood. This meant forcing Siam to retrocede it back to Cambodia – which was a protectorate of civilising France.

III



Staging Angkor in the Museum

Reconstituting architecture in the museum: A general approach The previous sub-chapters on the development of Angkor in France have thus far focused on its representation through (a) singular original objects like sculptures or architectural fragments, (b) plaster casts of the same, and (c) a smallscale plaster model of an idealised entry gate to Angkor Thom. These installations were greatly limited by time constraints as universal exhibitions did not last longer than half a year and were generally dismantled afterwards. Another factor was unsatisfactory limitations of space and public access. In our context of temporary exhibition spaces, the castle of Compiègne was quickly adopted for museum displays, and Delaporte never approved it as a longterm home for his Angkor collection. After Angkor’s success at the 1878 Universal Exhibition, however, a new situation emerged that would prove essential for subsequent stagings of Angkor in open-air pavilions at similar events in the future. After 1880 the display of Angkor was institutionalised within a permanent museum located in the city centre of Paris – the musée Indo-chinois in the Trocadero palace, which was under the direction of Louis Delaporte. For the display of treasures from Angkor the interior exhibition space provided special new conditions that would enable a crucial next step in the development of museum displays of Angkor in France. Beyond simply displaying singular art objects (original or copied) on oldfashioned pedestals, curators could now construct either 1:1-scale two-dimensional facade elements, or, more im-

portant, could ‘re-present’ whole temple structures through three-dimensional and freestanding reconstitutions. One major focus of this chapter will be the museological scenography – that is the background, the hanging and positioning, the lighting, the visitor’s parcours, and the intended message within a chronological display mode of stylistic developments. Another issue will be the detailed analysis of the agency behind and the fabrication modes of these multi-form structures. These display aesthetics of architectural antiquity did not come out of nowhere, but had, especially in France and neighbouring Great Britain, a longer history. In order to place Delaporte’s indoor architectural reconstitutions of Angkor within a larger architectural history, the following two developmental strands will be examined: first, they will be placed in line with previous and parallel undertakings inside France as they developed from Alexandre Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français in the Parisian convent of the Petits-Augustins (1793–1816) and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée in the palais de Trocadéro (from 1882 onwards). Second, they will be compared with non-French museum displays like the highly influential Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum in London (from 1873 onwards) and, this time in direct concurrence with Delaporte’s project, the Angkor display in the Völkerkundemuseum (ethnography museum) in Berlin from around 1900 onwards.1

1. Archétypes, stage prop façades, and architectural fabriques in a Parisian convent: Alexandre Lenoir and his musée des Monuments français in the Petits-Augustins (1793—1816) A museum has, as a consequence, to follow two directions from an institutional point of view: to be political and to be educational for the public. From the political viewpoint, it has to be established with a good portion of splendour and magnificence for everyone’s eye so that it attracts a curious crowd from all four corners of the world and opens its treasures for all people with an interest in art; as far as instruction is concerned, a museum has to unite all that art and science can offer for public information. (Lenoir 1800, 51) —Alexandre Lenoir’s vision of the function of a museum

When the trained painter Alexandre Lenoir (1762–1839) wrote the above lines in his museum guide from 1800 entitled Musée des monuments français ou description histori-

que et chronologique des statues en marbre et en bronze, bas-reliefs et tombeaux des hommes et des femmes célèbres, pour servir à l’histoire de France et à celle de l’art, he had

1  Parts of the following analyses were published in Falser 2013e and Falser 2012/14.

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already been responsible for the dépôt des Petits-Augustins in Paris for ten years. During the turmoil of the French Revolution all the clergy’s goods were put at the disposal of the nation and its citizens. One year later the commission des monuments decided to repurpose religious convents for use as storage rooms for historic books and manuscripts. Similarly, the Hôtel de Nesle and the couvent des Petits-Augustins were converted into depots for statues and other art objects and architectural elements from religious institutions, aristocratic buildings, and collections. In 1791 Lenoir was made Conservateur des monuments of the dépôt des Petits-Augustins. In his 1800 text on the musée des Monuments français, he formulated a clear vision in mind: The mass of important monuments from all centuries helped me to develop the idea of creating a special museum with a historical and chronological concept through which one will rediscover the [different] periods of French sculpture in particular halls by giving each of them a specific character to represent the exact physiognomy of each century [la physionomie exacte du siècle]. As a consequence, all paintings and statues with no relation to French history or French art should be brought to other establishments. I presented this idea to the committee of public instruction and the reaction was very positive. ­(Lenoir 1800, 7)

Originally, Lenoir was given the difficult and ‘re-active’ task of safeguarding artworks from ‘vandalist destruction’ – or was it more accurately iconoclasm with a clear political message?2 His self-image was perpetuated both by Lenoir himself in his various publications and reports as well as in conservative French historiography to this day. Even the groundbreaking Louvre exhibition and catalogue publication Un musée révolutionnaire. Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir of 2016 still intitulated Lenoir as a “fervent defender of art against revolutionairy vandalism” (Bresc-Bautier, Chancel-Bardelot 2016, backcover). In reality, he developed an ambitious “pedagogical” programme for his museum (Foucart 1969, 227), and after the destructive pre-1800 movement had slowed down, he – quite ‘pro-actively’ as we shall see – initiated the partial dismantling of supposedly abandoned sculptural ensembles and ‘monuments’ and oversaw their transfer to his museum.

Although the museum opened to the public in 1793, the comité d’instruction publique and Bénézech, the Minister of the Interior, accepted Lenoir’s concept of a ‘museum of French monuments’ only in 1795. This resulted in a unique exhibition space in the emerging field of art history. Considering that his museum was also useful for “theoretical courses and drawing classes of practical art schools” (Lenoir 1800, 46 – a topos which would recur in Delaporte’s museum eight decades later), it is no surprise that the politically and culturally instructed visitor (see first quotation above) followed a chronologically ordered parcours (see second quotation above) through the following: a) various ‘themed period rooms’ stretching from primarily French medieval to then contemporary art and architecture, before entering b) three open courtyards with architectural reconstitutions and, finally, c) a garden ensemble containing picturesque collages of busts, tombs, and cenotaphs. As Lenoir’s museum was an important precursor to Delaporte’s architectural museum eight decades later, we will focus here on his strategies used to ‘fabricate’ and stage façadelike and/or freestanding architectural reconstitutions in his museum. Therefore, it is useful to look at Lenoir’s various illustrated descriptions (eight editions, including a version in English), catalogues (twelve editions), reports on specific objects and projects,3 and, last but not least, his journaux on more than one thousand object manipulations. This will bring to light another important aspect in reference to the first Angkor museum in France: Lenoir not only safeguarded original art objects, but also integrated plaster cast copies of inaccessible, lost, or returned art objects into his hybrid collages. Exhibiting the progress of art and the early experimenting with metonymic displays As can be seen in the supposed final version of the museum’s floor plan of 1809, which we will use as a reference point for this analysis (Fig. III.1), Lenoir created a series of interior spaces in chronological order to “give each hall the character and the exact physiognomy of the represented century” (Lenoir 1800, 7; compare Chancel-Bardelot 2016). With various specimens of sculpture and architectural fragments collected from all over Paris and France, Lenoir arranged spatial collages, time and style capsules or “chrono-

2  This can be seen in André Chastel’s essay “La notion du patrimoine” in Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, where he mentions – in a constructed contrast to Viollet-le-Duc’s plaster cast display of French patrimoine in the musée de Sculpture comparée – that Lenoir supposedly “regrouped the artworks, of course original, being saved from vandalism” (Chastel 1986, 422). Both observations are incorrect, since, as we shall see, Lenoir was engaged in proactively relocating entire buildings and not only displayed originals but also plaster casts or placing them in combination with reorganised sculptural or architectural ensembles. It is interesting to note that Chastel, then vice-président de la Commission de l’inventaire, was partially responsible for the return of the (again, heavily mutilated) facade of Gaillon castle (after it had been moved from Lenoir’s site to the Ecôle des Beaux-Arts) to its original site around 1975. See Foucart 1997. 3  For a detailed list of Lenoir’s publications, see Courajod 1886, 205–70.

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1. Archétypes, stage prop façades, and architectural fabriques in a Parisian convent

Figure III.1  The plan of the musée des Monuments français, published in 1806 (Source: Bresc-Bautier, Chancel-Bardelot 2016, 195; © Archives du musée des Monuments français, Paris)

topes” (Poulot 2001, 40; compare Poulot 1986, 1997, 2016), with various decorative elements that were supposedly from the same stylistic family. In order that the visitor might understand his vision of constant progress in the arts, he started his parcours with a salle d’introduction (Fig. III.2), where “the artist and the amateur” alike would see “at a glance” the whole panopticon from the “infantile stage of art with the Goths” to the “progress under Louis XII”, its “perfection under François I”, and, finally, the arts’ “decadence under Louis XIV” (Lenoir 1800, 8). Lenoir’s vision of a three-dimensional “encyclopaedia” of art, “where the youth would find word by word all the degrees of imperfection, perfection, and decadence” (Lenoir 1800, 52) was informed, as he himself stated, with great respect, by the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums of the archaeologist and first modern art historian, the German Johann Joachim Winckelmann whose groundbreaking periodisation of art was published in Dresden in 1764 – just a few decades before Lenoir’s project (Winckelmann 1764). As Lenoir declared, “With all the power of his genius, Winckelmann has traced for us the way that we have to follow. One can read fruitfully in his History of Art the

chronology of the ancient people beginning with the Egyptians, passing over to the Greeks, following the progression of art to arrive at the Romans within the same system” (Lenoir 1800, 95). The application of Winckelmann’s history of artistic progress was certainly the reason why Lenoir mentioned Assyrian art and incorporated (as Viollet-le-Duc would also do later) very few Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures into his introductory hall. This was because Lenoir wanted to bridge the gap between Winckelmann’s developmental sequence from Egypt to Rome with his own narrative of French art, one that included the artistic specimens produced by the Gauls in their contact with the Romans. After the first hall, the visitor passed the reconstituted tomb of François I (1550) from the abbaye de Saint-Denis and continued around an inner courtyard and its connecting inner galleries to reach the display halls of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, moving then to the seventeenth and the (unfinished) eighteenth centuries (Lenoir 1815a, 56). Interestingly, Lenoir’s spatial programme also involved a sophisticated lighting control through historic glass windows, which moved from a dark to progressively brighter illumination, symbolically leading his parcours 127

III  Staging Angkor in the Museum

Figure III.2  Salle d’introduction to the musée des Monuments français, as depicted in the 1816 publication Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du musée des Monuments français by Réville/Lavallé (Source: Réville 1816)

from the early beginnings to the supposedly more sophisticated periods of art.4 It remains a matter of speculation whether Lenoir knew the collection of Roman plaster casts of ancient Greek sculptures belonging to the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Mengs’s collection was based on his friend Winckel­ mann’s periodisation of art and was created in Rome before being transferred to Dresden where it was displayed in 1786 and 1794 (Kiderlen 2006, 15–32) – at the very moment when Lenoir was also developing his programme of a musée des Monuments français. In any case, comparisons between the display mode of the Dresden exhibition (Pl. III.1, Fig. III.3a) and, later, Lenoir’s museum (Fig. III.3b) reveals many interesting museological and scenographic parallels: not only were freestanding sculptures inside the

museum space loosely grouped to form thematic ensembles but also the architectural and decorative fragments were combined with sculptures and busts (following Winckelmann’s stylistic explanations, compare with Font-Réaulx 2005, 161) as “specimens” of a stylistic family and were framed by a neutral background created by the enclosing walls to create ‘picture-perfect’ ensembles. This was interpreted as an early “rhetorical strategy” of a metonymic display where the different single parts from various sites represented the whole stylistic message without any reference to the organic totality of the original context (Bann 1984, 77–92; Poulot 1986, 522). Keeping in common with Dresden, the use of plaster casts as a secondary medium worthy of artistic display also played an important role in Lenoir’s exhibition. Of course,

4  This effect was explained by Lenoir who reported on the mystical and strange effect of his thirteenth-cen-

tury hall, the “truly Asian character” of which surprised his distinguished visitor, the “first consul Bonaparte” who declared, “Lenoir, you had me transported to Syria. I am satisfied with your work. Continue with your promising research, and I will perceive the results always with great pleasure” (Lenoir 1802, 8).

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Figure III.3a  A display at the Stallhofgebäude in Dresden of Mengs’ plaster cast collection (1786–94), here depicted in Matthäi’s Catalogue des jets de stuc des plus excellentes antiques en figure, bas-reliefs, têtes, mains, pieds etc. (Source: © Skulpturensammlung, Bibliothek, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, photo: Hans-Peter Klut)

in Mengs’s case the historic Roman copies were considered ‘secondary originals’ of the lost Greek sculptures, whereas Lenoir used plaster casts with constant reference to Winckel­ mann. He called them “archétypes” and “moulded proofs on an original or a model” (Lenoir 1800a, 14) that acted as substitutes for the original Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures belonging to museums like the Louvre. How­ever, the use of plaster casts was not just a simple matter of copying originals before their return to the original museum site. The longer Lenoir worked on his museum display, the more the use of plaster casts became a strategy of its own for his sculptural collages.5 Lenoir considered his plaster casts of ancient non-French monuments so “essential for

Figure III.3b  The display of the remains of the musée des Monuments français in the Écôle des Beaux-Arts in Paris after the closure of Lenoir’s ­museum in 1816 (Source: Courajod 1886, II, 111)

history of the arts, even in relation to France” that he had them made “at his own expense” to be displayed in his introductory hall (Lenoir 1800a, 95). The first on the list was an “imitated model” of an Egyptian tomb (compare Viollet-­ le-Duc’s entry hall to his musée de Sculpture comparée with Egyptian sculptures eighty years later). More important, plaster casts were also used for the mise en scène (in the best sense of the word) of the collages in the French ‘period rooms’ and were combined with Lenoir’s direct manipu­ lation of the fragmented objects through “modern resto­ ration” – which meant, most often, not only repair but new additions sometimes remade from ancient stone blocks – for a totally new interpretation. Here, Lenoir’s

5  The first catalogue of 1793 counted 256 objects on display, which came from Parisian churches and convents. Lenoir proudly listed only salvaged originals that ranged from an ancient Greek Bacchus statue to two columns from the Egyptian site of Memphis (Lenoir 1793, in Courajod 1886, 234–70). The 1806 catalogue already listed 37 “archétypes” in relation to 563 “French monuments” (almost 7 per cent of all installations were casts, see Lenoir 1806, 1–2). The last calculation called out 572 inventory numbers (Lenoir 1815, 59–160).

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Journaux6 until 1798 are useful since they retrospectively summed up all the interventions and the incoming and outgoing objects as they were published and commented on in 1878 by Louis Courajod, conservator at the Louvre (Courajod 1878). In the first Journal (1791–92), containing 140 entries on different actions, Lenoir perpetuated his own self-image by underscoring that endangered objects from all over Paris were protected in his museum from the ­anti-cleric and anti-royalist iconoclastic movement.7 However, the course changed with Lenoir’s nomination as Conservateur des monumens [sic] in 1794 (the third year of the republic). From this moment onwards, Lenoir pursued his vision ‘proactively’. He initiated a correspondence with ­citoyen Henri Grégoire, who was member of the Comité d’instruction publique à la Convention nationale and had just published his Second rapport sur le vandalisme; in addition, Lenoir’s proposal for a musée de Monumens français [sic] was unanimously accepted and confirmed by the committee in 1795. The three major and often combined strategies employed by Lenoir can be filtered from 1,140 entries in the journals. They comprise the following: a) the sale and exchange of original art objects from Lenoir’s depot;8 b) the reuse (reworking) of incoming original marble objects, which were judged to be too mutilated and therefore “useless” for new art objects and repair work (an attempt to transfer authenticity?); and finally, c) the use of plaster casts to complete and/or repair already installed or intended sculptural collages.9 Interestingly, his use of plaster casts coincided with the moment in 1793 that the plaster cast guild in Paris launched a petition to have their metier registered as “artistic property”.10 Accepting these three strategies as part of Lenoir’s museological approach at the Petits-Augustins not only calls into question his reputation as the reactive saviour of only original art objects under direct

threat of revolutionary vandalism. It also introduces important strategies that Delaporte would also employ in his manipulations of objects for his Angkor displays during the 1878 Exhibition and in his Trocadero museum some years later. But the most important factor in understanding Delaporte’s ideas was Lenoir’s (and later Viollet-le-Duc’s) metonymic display strategy of exhibiting architectural fragments against a neutral background to create new stylistic collages. Whether this strategy, along with the use of plaster casts and modern collage-like interpretations, might have worked with Lenoir’s unrealised plans to install a salle des faits héroïques de Napoléon le Grand, Empereur des Français containing early nineteenth-century art or even a Salle égyptienne under the title Dix-neuvième Siècle, Voyage en Égypte de l’Empereur et Roi Napoléon Ier (Poulot 2001, 39) remains a matter of speculation. Architectural stage props in the courtyards of the Petits-Augustins — “didactic monsters”? If the sculptural and architectural collages in the interior halls and on the walls of the visitor’s parcours were primarily small-scale installations of original but newly arranged objects, plaster casts, and modern repair work, the giant and partly freestanding architectural façades in the courtyards of the Petits-Augustins introduced a new museological and scenographical dimension. As a matter of fact, the main entrance to the interior of the musée des Monuments français itself was already a relocated facade from the midsixteenth century castle of Anet (Fig. III.4a). In his 1806 description historique11 (Lenoir 1806, 143–47), Lenoir gave a short historical background of the facade and celebrated the “architectural ensemble, its precious details and picturesqueness” created by the architect Philibert de Lorme and the sculptor Jean Goujon. The sixty-six-foot high “magnif-

6 These Journaux comprise the periods of “État no.1: 1791–1792” and “État no.2: 1793–1799”, as well as “État

no.3: Returned objects”, and “Recapitulations of the monuments returned to churches” (revised later called “Répartitions”), altogether 1,140 entries on 196 printed pages (Courajod 1878). 7  Interestingly, it was not just French objects that flowed in but also a considerable number of (non)-European ones including Etruscan vases, Egyptian and Greek figures, or misdirected curiosities. 8  In a short note from 1795, Lenoir reconfirmed that he had already organised the fourth public sale of the dépôt’s artworks. He was proactive in his commitment to appropriating the surviving débris of public artworks and trading in original but supposedly mutilated marbles from his dépôt for original art and architectural objects. 9  In 1794–95, Lenoir returned a plaster cast model of the gate of Saint-Sulpice church to the Louvre (no. 538); on the other hand, he also successfully contacted the minister to get permission to order plaster casts of antique statues from the Louvre (no. 733, in 1795). Sculptors and plasterers [mouleurs] were repeatedly employed to execute whole sculptural and architectural models for the various themed halls in the museum. 10  Yet in parts of Europe the plasterers’ artistic copying skills as well as their ‘original’ casts received as little official acknowledgment as the originals themselves, which were deserving of individual ‘copy-rights.’ In 1793 Parisian plasterers collectively petitioned the National Convention to have their metier incorporated into artistic copyright law (Pétition des citoyens mouleurs à la Convention Nationale 1794. See Rionnet 1996, 326–27). 11  In the Year 8 (1799), Lenoir reported on his project to minister Lucien Bonaparte. In five architectural drawings he planned a larger ensemble that included the facade and a whole entry scenario in front (Lenoir 1799).

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Figure III.4a,b  Architectural open-air displays inside the musée des Monuments français with the remains of the Anet castle (left) and the facade of Gaillon castle (right) (Source: Courajod 1886, II, 21 and 23)

icent portal”, bought by order of the minister of the interior, tain.13 However, the architectural facade that Lenoir used transferred and painstakingly ‘restored’ (reassembled) next as an entry to the second court towards the jardin Élysée to the facade of the neighbouring house, had been com- in order “to develop an effective perspective” was judged bined with lateral wall structures that included pilasters “less pure in style” than the other parts of the ensemble and niches containing sculptures.12 (Fig. III.4b). Later research has filled in more of the details: Gaillon Even more impressive was Lenoir’s transfer of parts of the Gaillon castle, built around 1500 for cardinal Georges was sold in 1797 as bien national and was left to decompose d’Amboise, minister to Louis XII. As Lenoir mentioned, he by its owner Darcy. Lenoir visited the site in 1799 and 1801 and bought a selection of fragments from it. The southern had rescued these parts from pending demolitions. In his description historique (Lenoir 1806, 147–49), Lenoir – obvi- and southeastern gallery were transferred to Paris in 1802, ously seeking to justify this enormous translocation by em- and the entry portal of the cour d’honneur was reassembled phasising his efforts to salvage the last ‘ruined parts’ (com- and renamed arc de Gaillon. The final product was “a fruit pare with Delaporte’s typically colonial, civilising mission of the fantastic imagination of Alexandre Lenoir who addrhetoric about safeguarding the Khmer sculptures of the ed quite arbitrarily lateral travées from other buildings supposedly threatened Angkor temple ruins for French parts to the gate of the Gaillon court” (Chirol 1952, 131). It museums) – laid out the plan and the elevations of the en- was later judged by the postmodern world to be “not much visaged second court of his museum containing four “ara- more than a montage like the other didactic monsters besque” facade elements from Gaillon and a central foun- ­imagined by the Conservateur du musée des Monuments 12  In 1806 Lenoir planned that this portal should be adorned with structures from the same castle, giving

access to the second court, the garden, and the planned musée historique de la France containing busts of national celebrities. 13  Lenoir himself provided further information of this architectural translocation (Lenoir 1802, 18 and 1806, 148).

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Figure III.5  The Gaillon facade in the Paris Écôle des Beaux-Arts after 1850 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris)

français” and “one of the darkest chapters of the history of vandalism” (Foucart 1997, 252, 260) instigated in the name of salvaging antiquity from the revolution. Of the highest relevance for the facade-like reconstitutions of Viollet-leDuc and for Delaporte’s architectural museums, Lenoir’s Gaillon project might have served as the best prototype that was still accessible to both protagonists around 1880. When his museum closed in 1815, Lenoir’s fabrique of Gaillon was mutilated and transferred to the Écôle des Beauxarts and was restaged in a reduced version by Félix Duban (Fig. III.5) before being, once again, heavily altered and returned in 1975 to its ‘original site’.14 Picturesque fabriques inside an Elysian garden setting — a conceptual forerunner of exhibition pavilions? According to his Journal, in 1796 (the fifth year of the republic) Lenoir launched his plans for a museum garden “for a public promenade” and presented his own painting of the imagined project to the minister responsible (Courajod 1878, Journal 2, entry no. 757, 107). Named the jardin Élysée

and planned as a site to commemorate – in repeated reference to Westminster in London and Santa Croce in Florence – the glory of illustrious people, the project might have been realised in 1799 and was explained by Lenoir in the description historique of 1800: in this peaceful Elysian garden full of well-selected and symbolic trees, he created a sublime cemetery-like landscape with more than forty urns and the self-designed tombs, cenotaphs, and sarcophagi of virtuous personalities (from Descartes and Molière to La Fontaine), which evoked a “sweet melancholy speaking to the sensible soul” (Lenoir 1800a, 19). Even though Lenoir explicated most of the architectural features in the park according to the same strictly ordered description historique framework of different ‘style rooms’ inside the museum, their chronological order was lost in the garden context (Recht 1997, compare Barragué-Zouita 2016), which posited an eternal nature outside time and history (Fig. III.6). This vision should, as we will discuss it in chapter IX on archaeology in Indochina, serve as an important – transculturally migrating – aesthetic source for what after 1907 would materialise as a Parc archéologique d’Angkor in French-colonial Cambodge (compare Fig. IX.22a). Along

14  To present a coherent idea of the architectural development from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries with Anet from 1540 and Gaillon from 1500, Lenoir intended but never finished a “restoration of a twelfth-century Gothic building” for the third court from the “débris” of a cloister and chapel of King Louis IX’s architect Pierre de Montreau (Lenoir 1815, 6).

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Figure III.6 The jardin Élysée in Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français as depicted in Lenoir’s 1806 publication (Source: Lenoir 1806, plate 204, © Heidelberg University Library)

with a dominant column and freedom statue, a Roman-style fountain and a Renaissance-style ‘ruin ensemble’, two Goth­ ic-style installations in the park became famous: the tomb of Gallic king Dagobert I (reigned 632–45) (Fig. III.7a) and the tomb-memorial of Héloïse and Abélard (Fig. III.7b). These two memorials perfectly illustrate the hybrid character of Lenoir’s architectural collages, whose single – original and newly interpreted – elements were “with his plans and designs […] recomposed and readjusted according to their age” (Lenoir 1800b, 17) to form an “aimable panthéon de fabriques” (Poulot 1986, 504). Lenoir’s journal reconfirmed the arrival of Dagobert’s “heavily mutilated shell lime sarcophagus” from Saint Denis in 1794 (Courajod 1878, Journal 2, 80). In 1800 Lenoir reported on Dagobert’s chapelle sépulcrale, which had been destroyed during Norman occupation and rebuilt by Louis IX for the Saint Denis abbey. For the museum garden the remains of the tomb that had been “salvaged from destruction” – its historic elements were described in detail but were not distinguishable in the final reinterpretation – were now enshrined in a newly arranged “Gothic-style chapel”. Originally erected in a supposedly post-crusader style, it was later rebuilt using descriptive bas-reliefs, reinterpreted

inscriptions, and a pointed gable field, and it was framed with statues of Dagobert’s wife Nantilde and son Clovis (Lenoir 1800, 153, 155) – statues that had both been “destroyed in 1793 and remade after old models” (Lenoir 1806, 75, compare Lenoir 1809). The tomb-memorial [chapelle sépulcrale] of Héloïse and Abélard was – together with the facade of the Gaillon castle – the best-known architectural display in Lenoir’s museum (Lenoir 1815b). A mémoire to Général Bonaparte (Lenoir 1800b) and a notice from Lenoir’s Journal mentioned that in 1800 “the minister had authorised the sale of a large quantity of marble rubble from the site of the future tomb and the use of this money for the positioning of the [new] monument” (Courajod 1878, Journal no. 3, 167). As Lenoir mentioned in his 1806 report (Lenoir 1806, 86–88), he intended that this chapel be “built with the débris of a chapel of Paraclet and from the abbey of Saint Denis in the architectural style being practiced in the twelfth century” (Lenoir 1806, 86). As a final result, the collage in his Elysian garden was a veritable fabrique of different ‘original’ objects and plaster cast details from different places, as well as his own ‘in-original-style’ additions and new interpretive restoration work.15

15  The columns and glass windows inside the newly added pediments came most probably from Saint-Den-

is, other débris from the eighteenth-century trinité monument for Héloïse at the Abbaye du Paraclet près Nogent sur Seine (sketched by Lenoir “before its destruction” and depicted in his 1800 report; see Lenoir 1800a,

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Figure III.7a  The monument of the Gallic king Dagobert as depicted in the 1816 publication Vues pittoresques by Réville/Lavallé (Source: Réville 1816, detail)

Figure III.7b  The tomb-memorial of Héloïse and Abélard in the jardin Élysée in Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français (Source: Courajod 1886, II, 25, detail)

It may be safe to say that no other architectural feature in Lenoir’s whole museum comprised such an historically multilayered version of originals, transferred relics, reused elements, copies, restorations, and new additions than the memorial chapel of Héloïse and Abélard. The 1816 publication Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du musée des Monuments français, which contains superb engravings by Réville and Lavallée (Roquefort 1816), has kept the memory of Lenoir’s “eclectic montages” (Foucart 1969, 232) alive

to this day. Without a doubt they served as a picture-perfect inspiration for the architectural museums that came into being a few decades later in the Trocadero palace. None other than Viollet-le-Duc labelled this hybrid undertaking of Lenoir as a “product of fantasy” [compositions fantastiques] in his Dictionnaire raisonné (on restoration from 1866), but he also added that at least Lenoir had used “imagination to really produce the ancient forms”.16 Within the supposedly neutralising, ahistorical background of nature

plate 41). The medallions in the upper part of Lenoir’s architectural collage came from the cloisters of Notre Dame in Paris. The Gothic tomb of Abélard was transferred from the church of St. Marcel les Challon sur Saône where it had been originally placed in a Gothic side chapel (depicted in Lenoir 1800a, plate 42), but was “after discussions in several journals brought back to its first condition and function” (Lenoir 1806, 233), with “the other elements of the cenotaph being decomposed by [Lenoir’s] campaign in the commune of St. Marcel” (Lenoir 1800a, 223–34, here 233) and a new inscription of the names on the plinths. Next to the original statue of Abélard, Lenoir placed Héloïse “in a [comparable] female figure sculptured in this time, to which [he] added the masque of Héloïse”. As Lenoir added (compare with Delaporte’s Naga balustrade of 1878, see chapter II), he was not sure of the exact physiognomy of both protagonists and let “their têtê de mort be moulded by the sculptor Deseine who had already formed theirs busts for the museum” (Lenoir 1806, 86, 87). 16  “Leaving aside entirely the restorations carried out in earlier centuries – which were nothing but substitutions – our era from about the beginning of this century witnessed a number of attempts to present a true idea

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in Lenoir’s Élysée garden, this architectural fabrique – along with the didactic stage props of whole facades in the open courts and the metonymic collages of sculptures and decorative fragments in the ‘style rooms’ of the inner parcours – added another aspect to Lenoir’s architectural display modes. This combination would be highly influential for future architectural museum and public exhibitions; Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée (see below) was no exception. The political Bourbon Restoration closed the museum in December 1816, “for the monarchy the museum epitomised the despoliations of the revolution – the ravaging of churches and castles, the confiscations of property, sacrilege, and lèze majesté” (Greene 1981, 217). Héloïse and Abé­ lard and others were moved to the Père Lachaise cemetery,

and the other tombs were returned to Saint Denis. The exhibits at the Petits-Augustins were partly incorporated into the Écôle royale des Beaux-Arts, moved there by architect Félix Duban in the 1840s (compare Schwartz 2016). Lenoir was made administrateur des monuments français at the royal church of Saint Denis, and he continued to write until his death in 1839. The ancient site of the Gallo-Roman baths and the old Hôtel des abbés de Cluny, which revealed a certain reliance on Lenoir’s museum concept, were conceived by Alexandre du Sommerard in the 1830s and were finally realised on the basis of the work of the architect Albert Lenoir, Alexandre Lenoir’s son (Erlande-Brandenburg 1977, Bann 1984, 77–92). Here, the display of period and style rooms was continued.

2. Dissection, comparison, and metonymic display of monumental ­architecture: Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture ­comparée in the palais de Trocadéro In the British Museum one can see many examples of Greek statues on display next to those from Asia Minor, which, both being of an excellent style, differ from each other as much as medieval statuary differs from that from Attica. If the museums in France had just been serious establishments for study outside of exclusive systems, had they not already reunited side by side, in special museum halls, the comparative casts of classical and medieval statuary? Nothing had been more useful for the artistic intelligentsia to show that art, throughout all epochs, has always developed along certain identical principles […] Footnote: […] If we just placed in these halls a parallel display of Greek figures of the Eginetic period and French statues of the twelfth century, one could be struck by the analogies of these to art forms, both in form and in execution […]. But all this would make it necessary to emancipate the spirit of the artists and to make known that there was also French art before the sixteenth century, two things that are hindered at all costs as this would mean the death of the existing academic protectorate in the field of art. [italics MF] (Violletle-Duc 1866, 151—53) —Viollet-le-Duc in the 1866 chapter on sculpture in his Dictionnaire raisonné

Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné and the ­influence of Georges Cuvier’s Anatomie comparée The architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) finished his ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle in 1868 (the same year that the great Mekong expedition returned to France!) after fourteen years of work on over five thousand written pages and more than three thousand text-bound illustrations. He presented his version of a “universal explanation, a closed

and complete system” in which its reason- and rationalitybased arguments aimed at a double goal – namely, the “interpretation of Gothic as a scientific, highly ordered architectural system with both the logical structure and the historical complexity of other great systems of form, be they linguistic, anatomical, or geological” (Bergdoll 1990, 2). Viollet-le-Duc also attempted to promote the general appreciation of the Middle Ages with both its imagined laical society and emancipated artists and its French Gothic architecture and architecture-bound sculpture. This opus

of an earlier art by means of the production of certain compositions. These compositions were really the products of fantasy. But at least their authors imagined they were really producing the ancient forms [italics, MF]. Monsieur Lenoir in the Museum of French Monuments, which he himself had organised, attempted to classify in chronological order all the historical remnants that had been saved from destruction. It has to be conceded that the imagination of this celebrated conservator played a more active role in his efforts than did any real knowledge or any real critical spirit on his part.” Quoted in: Bergdoll 1990, 207. Original in: Viollet-leDuc 1866 (volume 8, on restauration), 21.

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magnum was – along with his publication Entretiens sur mankind. […] Then philologists discovered the origins of l’architecture – meant as a counter-project to the aesthetic European languages, all of them coming ultimately from and ideological monopoly (or the “protectorat académique” the same source. Ethnographers, for their part, oriented as he called it, see the quotation above) of the classical Greek their work in the direction of the study of races and of and Roman canon of the Écôle des Beaux-Arts. their various aptitudes. Finally, the archaeologists came After receiving a position at the administration of the on the scene, and, studying artistic productions from India bâtiments civils, Viollet-le-Duc was hired by Prosper Méri­ through Egypt and on through Europe itself, they commée at the government agency for the preservation and pared, discussed, and distinguished among these various restoration of France’s architectural heritage, the commisproductions, uncovered their origins and charted their sion des Monuments historiques, for which François Guizot interrelationships, and, following the same analytic methhad inaugurated the position of an inspecteur général des od, eventually succeeded in classifying them according to Monuments historiques in 1830. Following the historian Lucertain general laws. [italics MF] (quoted in Bergdoll 1990, dovic Vitet in this position and completing a successful res­ 197; original Viollet-le-Duc 1866, 15) toration study of the Madeleine church at Vézelay in 1840, in 1844, together with his colleague Jean-Baptiste Lassus, As Viollet-le-Duc indicated several times, biological analoViollet-le-Duc won the competition for the restoration of gies in a comparative series of organic transformations the most prestigious cathedral – the Notre Dame of Paris. formed the basis of his historical investigation into the deThis was also the moment when the Gothic style in contem- velopment of the composition, function, and (only as the porary architecture was being heavily criticised by the ‘clas- final materialised consequence) style of medieval architecsical’ faction around Quatremère de Quincy as useless and ture. However, the central approach to “better understandreminiscent of an ancient and barbarous decorative system. ing the diverse and complicated parts, all rigorously deA parallel movement, with Viollet-le-Duc as one of its main rived from needs, that compose our medieval monuments”, protagonists, posited the historic significance of the Middle as he mentioned in his 1854 introduction, quoting a central Ages – supposedly at the same level as the period of Peri- method in the natural sciences for his own supposedly sciclean Athens – as the birthplace of a true and still valid entific observation, was “to dissect them separately, in deFrench national style, character, and value system. scribing the functions performed, the use of each of the In considering Viollet-le-Duc’s role in initiating the first diverse parts and of the modifications it has experienced” French indoor museum of truly monumental architecture (Viollet-le-Duc 1854, x). Dissection was one the central and, most important, its comparative display mode of frag- terms used by Georges Cuvier, the famous anatomist from mented facade elements (like plaster cast installations the Parisian Muséum national de l’histoire naturelle, to clasalong a chronological visitor’s parcours), an analysis of his sify biological extant and extinct species by the function of Dictionnaire raisonné is most useful for the debate of the their individual characteristics in relation to one another Angkorian paster casts. With its style of textual argumen- rather than by their formal characteristics. What Cuvier tation and the direct placement of illustrations (80 per cent explained in his analysis of the animal organs within their of which were ‘transcribed’ from plaster casts), the Diction- transformations, analogies, and resemblances from a quotnaire was a conceptual forerunner of the musée de Sculp- ed 1799 letter in his Leçons d’anatomie comparée (Paris ture comparée, which was founded in 1882. In his chapter 1798–1805), provided almost all the key words for Violleton sculpture in 1866, Viollet-le-Duc explored his method- le-Duc’s discussion of his museum collection of architecological approach of placing artworks within a “compara- tural plaster casts more than half a century later. In his tive sculpture museum” containing “special halls where the “collection”, Cuvier explained, he had “in the best order and plaster casts of the antique statues could be compared with the largest development all the parts of the animal bodies these of the Middle Ages” – or, more precisely, “the Greek from even the most distant species” with which “the simple sculptures of the Enigetic epoch with the twelfth-century comparing anatomy had almost became a game: a short French sculptures” (see the quote above). In restauration, glance [would be] enough to make out the variations and Viollet-le-Duc quoted the disciplines of comparative anat- successive degradations of each organ. […] How many combinations, decompositions had taken place in [each] omy, philology, ethnography, and archaeology, which were interval? How many affinities?” The physiologist had, acuseful for his transcultural approach: cording to Cuvier, only to engage with this “impenetrable Our age has wished to analyse the past, classify it, com- laboratory”, not the “individual parts” per se but the “generpare it, and write its complete history, following step-by- al condition between each of them”; their “modifications, step the procession, the progress, and the various trans- combinations with other phenomena” was the core interest. He “had to isolate them to take away all the accompanying formations of humanity […] a new analytic attitude of our era […] Cuvier, by means of his studies of comparative and overshadowing accessories” to “compare them […] in a anatomy, as well as of his geologic research, unveiled to series of facts of which until this point science only consists. the public almost literally from one day to the next a very He had to follow each organ in all the [different] classes” (Cuvier 1833, xiv, xvi–xviii). Cuvier quoted his contempolong history of the world that had preceded the reign of 136

2. Dissection, comparison, and metonymic display of monumental ­architecture

Figures III.8a,b  Anatomical analyses in the 1831 publication Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme by Jean-Marc Bourgery (Source: Bourgery 1831, Atlas, plates 9, 19; © Heidelberg ­University Library)

rary citoyens’ fields of anatomic enquiry: North America, the Levant, Egypt, and Persia. The Far East was added into the field of comparative anatomy only a few decades after Cuvier, as the studies of Delaporte’s colleague Jules Harmand in Cambodia, presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1878, would prove. This led to Cuvier’s controversial claims that it would be possible to reconstruct or ‘to restore’, — to anticipate the architectural analogy — an animal skeleton, even of a lost species, from a single part of a fragment of a fossil. He demonstrated this experiment, with much-proclaimed results, on a prehistoric pterodactyl. It is precisely this sequence of dissective analysis and synthesis, this relationship between the part and the organic system, that is at the base of the [Viollet-le-Duc’s] Dictionnaire […]. Now, not only could a new theoretical proposition be presented in the fragmented form of the dictionary, but the fragmented form was itself part of the demonstration [to which the consequent] act of synthesis was the reading of the dictionary. [italics MF] (Bergdoll 1990, 19, 20)

For this mode of fragmented depictions, Viollet-le-Duc was heavily influenced by anatomical atlases that standard-

ised the observation of objects, such as the Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme, which Jean-Marc Bourgery published containing a unique set of lithographs (Bourgery 1831–54) after gaining the approval of his teacher Cuvier (Figs. III.8a,b). Here, the exploded views and decomposed sections of a human skull came close to the Dictionnaire’s illustrative mode that would finally lead to Delaporte’s Ang­kor display (compare Fig. III.36 for his pavilion installation of Angkor Wat in the aesthetics of architectural section). Unusual views of architectural elements dissected from below with sectional cutaway perspectives, exploded perspectives, and combinations of traditional architectural depictions, such as plans, sections, and elevations, provided those elements of the whole architectural system (Figs. III.9a,b) that were to be synthesised within the mind of the Dictionnaire’s reader. If this mode of dissection, decomposed display, and hypothetical reassembling of real, reinvented, and/or idealised composites in Viollet-le-Duc’s texts and the illustrations of his Dictionnaire “operated as an imagination technology, [as a kind of] instrument for the extension of imagining or visualising activities through the selective amplification and suppression of [architectural] material, form, and content” (Vinegar 1998, 47; compare Thaon 1982, Steadman 137

III  Staging Angkor in the Museum

Figures III.9a,b  Analytical drawings by Viollet-le-Duc in his Dictionnaire raisonné of 1866 (Source: republished in Bergdoll 1990, 21, 126)

2008, 31–53), then this operational modus for directing and even manipulating the viewer’s imaginative gaze would materialise in the musée de Sculpture comparée after 1882. Just as, in the gallery of comparative anatomy at the musée d’Histoire naturelle, Cuvier used paleontological data to ‘re­ construct’ extinct animals through and from their skeleton, guiding the visitor’s gaze into their inner system, Viollet-leDuc’s museum also ‘restored’ – with fragmented three-dimensional displays – monumental architectures within their own stylistic families. Something he attempted only once in his Dictionnaire with the representation the of “cathédrale idéale” (II, 324). From this point of view, his famous quote from the chapter on restauration not only explained his own idealistic restorations of architectural ensembles like Besançon or Pierrefonds, but also his modus operandi for an architectural plaster cast museum and an “archaeological reconstitution of an ideal type” (Baridon 1996, 41) in relation to the accidental and variable: “To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish it in a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time” (after Viollet-le-Duc 1866, 14). As we shall see later, Louis Delaporte’s display of the statuary and the architecture of the extinct Khmer (including Cham and later Javanese) culture would follow a similar but extended mode. 138

The metonymic display of monumental ­architecture within a “reproductive continuum”: The musée de Sculpture comparée In 1879 Viollet-Le-Duc pitched his proposal for a “museum of comparative sculpture of different art centres and epochs” to Jules Ferry, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, and to Antonin Proust, Director of Fine Arts. At this point in time, he had already been executing plaster casts for many decades in his practice of monument restoration in France as a kind of ‘backup procedure’. In his letter’s preamble, he mentioned his 1855 proposal in the name of the commission des Monuments historiques as having offered a “free contribution of the plaster casts of statues and ornamental sculpture of the most beautiful French monuments of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries”, which had been ignored by the ministry and opposed by the Louvre and the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Viollet-le-Duc 1879a, 1). As he had already explored in his 1866 chapter on sculpture (see the corresponding quotation above), the British commission in the context of the 1851 London and 1855 Paris exhibitions and the plaster cast museum at the 1857 Crystal Palace (see discussion below) had been allowed – free of charge but upon agreeing to leave one copy in France – to carry out moulds of different French sculptures for the comparative, encyclopaedic plaster cast galleries in England.

2. Dissection, comparison, and metonymic display of monumental ­architecture

Now, as Viollet-le-Duc complained, “French artists had to cross the Channel to study their own French sculptures”. In this mid-nineteenth-century “querelle des moulages”17 between the academic taste for classical (Greek and Roman) antiquity and an appreciation of a wider canon of art including Renaissance and French Gothic art, the contribution of plaster cast museums to the creation, demonstration, propagation, and justification of a proper concept of art and to the classification, chronologisation, hierarchisation, and normatisation of its proper history were heavily disputed.18 Viollet-le-Duc’s proposal of a musée de Sculpture d’ornement comparée (in another report he added copied wall paintings into the concept) for the larger public to “give a complete idea of our French sculpture” (Viollet-le-Duc 1879a, 5) was no exception. Based on the ideas immortalised in his Dictionnaire, he foresaw three divisions that would allow his chronological parcours to “easily follow the progress of the art in each developmental centre”: first, the “relation between the sculptures of different epochs and civilisations”; second, “for France, the divisions by schools of the different epochs”; and third, “the application of the sculpture following the employed architectural system” (Viollet-le-Duc 1879a, 3). Based on Winckelmann’s periodi­ sation of art and clearly building on Lenoir’s ideas, Violletle-Duc differentiated between three periods into which the displayed sculptures had to be divided. It should represent a) “those people who had reached a high degree of civilisation”, which was defined as the “imitation of nature”; followed by b) “a more or less intelligent interpretation” called an “archaic epoch”; and, c) finally, an “epoch of emancipation” comprising a “perfection of the details” (Viollet-le-Duc 1879a, 3). Especially relevant for Delaporte’s display of the Khmer (‘Oriental’) culture at the other end of the Trocadero palace, was Viollet-le-Duc’s explanation that “not all people had gone through all these three developmental phases of art” and some had not even gone further than the first “période hiératique”, which applied “to most of the Oriental people” including the “Egyptians of antiquity and the Byzan-

tines”. In his 1866 chapter on sculpture he also added “India and Minor Asia” to this list. However, the “archaic period” was exemplified with the “most intimate relation” between the “Enigetic epoch of the Greek with the archaic epoch of twelfth-century France” (Viollet-le-Duc 1879a, 4). In his second report from the same year, Viollet-le-Duc presented some concrete sketches of the parcours in the northern ‘Paris wing’ of the Trocadero palace and of the intended installation of each of the six halls focusing on France in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries as an extension with a parallel display along the open portico towards the Seine (Fig. III.10a, compare Pl. III.6). Only the first hall, the “salle des époques hiératiques”, offered a truly intercultural display (Fig. III.10b). In order to work out the relationships between the different archaic epochs, Violletle-Duc proposed plaster cast samples (“types”, compared to Lenoir’s “archétypes”) from the first dynasties of Egypt, from Assyria, and from the Greek “Eginetic epoch” for display in comparison with French statuary from the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Viollet-le-Duc 1879b, 2). In a more detailed discussion (Viollet-le-Duc 1879b, 4, 16–20), he gave the following examples from relevant collections that were to be included: samples from the musée Égyptien du Louvre and the musée Boulaq in C ­ airo; some “surmoulages” from the musée Assyriens du Louvre and from the British Museum; examples from Cyprus from the Louvre Museum; the head of a statue from the Greek Aegina temple from the museum in Munich; and, finally, a couple of French standing figures from the main portal of the eleventh-century Vézelay church and from Moissac. The second hall, called Étude de la nature – Abandon de l’hiératisme, illustrated Viollet-le-Duc’s central message: the comparable quality between early classical Greek statues from the time of Phidias and those from thirteenth-century France. After these two halls, the visitor continued towards the fifth hall of Michelangelo’s Renaissance and the stylistic decline in seventeenth-century France and entered the sixth hall to find a comparative display of “fragments of sculptured ar-

17  Sauerländer 2001, 72–79. 18  In the context of the 1794 petition of the Coopération des mouleurs a plaster cast atelier was founded in the

Louvre Museum (Rionnet 1996), and plaster casts were developed for display next to original art objects until the end of the nineteenth century. However, an exclusive museum of plaster casts only emerged later. In 1834 Adolphe Thiers (historian and minister of the interior) had conceived of a museum of plaster casts of ancient and Italian post-antique sculpture in the Écôle des Beaux-Arts for the instruction of young artists. In 1836 he nominated Louis Peisse Conservateur du musée des études de l’Écôle des Beaux-Arts to install just such a project on the art of Pisano and Michelangelo, but it failed due to a lack of funds and coherence of the collection (Font-Réaulx 2005). In 1848 a petition to the government was signed by the plasterers of Paris (with Violletle-Duc as one of the most prominent promoters) to install a national plaster cast atelier and a museum of reproductions (full text in Rionnet 1996, 345). In 1849 and again in 1871, Charles Blanc, director of the BeauxArts School, proposed the creation of a Musée universel des copies (mostly painting) that would be realised in 1873 in the palais de l’Industrie; it closed soon after (Boime 1964). In 1855 the commission des Monuments français presented the above-mentioned proposal. In 1867, a convention for the exchange of plaster casts between European monarchies was signed during the Universal Exhibition in Paris (see chapter I on the 1867 Exhibition). In 1874, Félix Ravaisson launched one of the last offensives for just such a museum (before ­Viollet-le-Duc pitched his above-mentioned report in 1879) in the aftermath of the 1878 Universal Exhibition (Recht 2001).

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Figures III.10a,b  Viollet-le-Duc’s plans for the musée de Sculpture comparée from his second report in 1879 (Source: © Archive des musées nationaux, Paris)

chitectural ornamentations, divided by schools” and “photographs of the buildings where the fragments came from”. Viollet-le-Duc died on 17 September 1879, just two months before the foundation of the museum was reconfirmed on 4 November 1879.19 The museum was tested in a modified version during the 1878 Universal Exhibition and inaugurated shortly thereafter on 28 May 1882. Under the head conservator and sculptor, Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume, and the premier concessionnaire of the atelier de moulage, Jean Pouzadoux, it contained the first four of Viollet-le-Duc’s original six halls, which passed through the cultural stages of formation, maturity, and decadence and contained almost four hundred

plaster casts. What the visitor to the first hall of the 1882 version encountered was, in the best realisation of Viollet-leDuc’s Dictionnaire and of his two reports, a collage of 1:1-scale and painstakingly dissected architectural and sculptural fragments that ranged from (French) single capitals to pediments and standing portal figures with their carrying columns from the churches of Chartres and Corbeil, and finally, an entire 1:1 entry gate with all elements combined in the famous portal of the Vézelay church (Fig. III.11, compare Pl. Intro.17a). On the pedestals located to either side in front of the lateral walls, the French display of the ‘hieratic epoch’ was complemented with Greek and Egyptian sculptures, like the statue of Chephren (Fig. III.12).

19  Compare CARAN F21/4490, Chambres des députés 1880.

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2. Dissection, comparison, and metonymic display of monumental ­architecture

Figure III.11 The musée de Sculpture comparée around 1885 with the gate of Vézeley church, left with Egyptian, right with Greek sculptures (Source: © Paul Robert/Cité de l’Architecture et du ­Patrimoine Paris)

Figure III.12  Catalogue of the musée de Sculpture comparée by Guérinet 1894 with plaster casts from French church sculptures and the Egyptian statue of Chephren (compare Fig. III.11 on the left edge of the photograph) (Source: Guérinet 1894, vol. 2, plate 145)

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Recalling Lenoir’s earlier display in the Petits-Augustins and the one in the Écôle des Beaux-Arts as a test run, the photographic aesthetics of a black-and-white display eliminated context, signs of age, colour, and patina through the use of grey-white plaster casts (their moulding traces were most often visible in order to distinguish them from ‘originals’). Those were framed by a totally monochrome background to which they were always tightly fixed. Their inner hollow ‘life’ of wooden scaffoldings, nails, and ropes was never visible (compare Pl. Intro.17b). In such a presentation, these different architectural fragments functioned as perfectly dissected specimens of stylistic entities for the spectator (Figs. III.13a,b, compare Fig. III.3b). As neutral plaster cast fragments those combined presentations spoke – from a metonymic point of view – for the whole building or building/style family that they represented, and they could be appreciated and compared to each other by their mere formal qualities and art historical relevance. 20 Malcolm Baker’s dictum of a “reproductive continuum” – he spoke of the complementary and interconnected modes of reproduction of ‘real architecture’ from plaster casts to paper mosaics and photographs in the South Kensington Museum (Baker 2010, see next paragraph) – can be extended in two directions. The first direction is Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire with its fragmented representation of architecture achieved through his literary style of argumentation, and, as he mentioned himself, through the inclusion of “as many drawings as possible [that] were made from plaster casts [about 80 per cent], the others from photographs” (Viollet-le-Duc 1866, 117). The second direction is (a) an ever-growing photograph collection which stood in a certain “battle of comparativism” (Bercé 2007, 81) to the medium of plaster casts (in 1927 up to 125,000 photographs against 1,500 plaster casts), (b) the circulating postcards of the interior exhibits which made the metonymic game of fragment collages even more accessible and variable to visitors (Gamp 2010, compare Jarrassé/Polack 2014), and finally (c) the circulating exhi­bition and sale of catalogues (Ministère de l’Instruction Publique 1883, 67–70), some-

times with superb illustrations for the consumption of the public. The most impressive catalogues were from the éditeur des musées nationaux, Armand Guérinet, from about 1894 (Guérinet 1894, see figures above), or the five largescale photographic series Album du musée de Sculpture comparée (Palais du Trocadéro) published in 1892 by Frantz Marcou, inspécteur général des Monuments historiques (Marcou/Frantz 1892). In the latter publication, the dissected three-dimensional architectures and fragments from the museum became decontextualised picture-like (iconised) objects and sequences of comparative study (Fig. III.14). However, at the end of each stylistic series, they were recontextualised in their original site with a photographic piece of evidence (compare with La Nave for Delaporte’s museum in the later discussion). Viollet-le-Duc’s concept in his Dictionnaire of the 1860s and its realisation in a concrete museum after 1882 must have been an astonishing development for Delaporte’s Khmer museum located at the other end of the Trocadero palace; however, this transcultural approach – as far as the Mediterranean Orient was concerned – was short-lived: Viollet-le-Duc’s museum changed its format several times between 1882 and 1937, and this continues up to the present (Cogeval 1997). In 1886 the halls of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries were open but soon after all French art was slowly ‘liberated’ from its confrontation with antique and non-European art. In 1888 a library housing the relevant publications and several thousand photographs opened, and courses on French architectural history were organised. In 1887, before the 1889 Universal Exhibition (see chapter IV), the southern arm of the Trocadero (aile Passy) was added to the museum – which only left space at the very end of the wing for Delaporte’s museum. After Geoffroy-­ Dechaume (1882–92), Delair (1892–94), and Haraucourt (1894–1903), Camille Enlart became the new director of the museum in 1903 and remained in that post until 1927. Viollet-le-Duc’s project with its metonymic logic was modified into a mere illustrative and educational-patriotic parcours of French art.21

20  Right after its opening, Viollet-le-Duc’s comparative concept was criticised as “purely accidental” as far as

an Assyrian bas-relief next to a portal figure of the French Moissac church was concerned, or as too dominant and even “crushing” [écrasement] in its placement of large-scale architectural features like the gate of Vézelay church (Gonse 1882, 66, 68). 21  Even though he defended the colour-neutral plaster casts in their comparative value as “even more exact than the original” (Enlart 1911, 3), Enlart transferred their former signifying and symbolic value into something of mere documentary value inside an archive of national heritage. The non-French sculptures were finally banished to the outer galleries, which were glazed for display (Enlart 1925). In 1929 the museum displayed more than 1,500 plaster casts on 7,000 square metres, but the attraction of these objects for the public diminished. With the enlargement and redesign of the Trocadero palace into the new palais de Chaillot for the (last French) International Exhibition of 1937, Paul Deschamps, the new director of the musée de Sculpture comparée, added a department for the copies of mural painting, glass windows, and a documentation centre. ­Viollet-le-Duc’s comparative parcours was further mutilated in favour of a pure French national exhibition and even the former neutral white-greyish plaster casts were patinated. The museum was named, according to its (strongly modified) origins, the musée des Monuments français. After a new renovation campaign and a fire in 1997, the museum was completely reorganised, and it reopened in 2007 (Pressouye 2007, L’Art 2007, Flour 2008b).

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Figure III.13a  Illustrations of the 1894 catalogue by Guérinet about the musée de Sculpture comparée with a montage of different capitals and architectural fragments (Source: Guérinet 1894, vol. 1, plate 21)

Figure III.13b  A series of bas-reliefs of the ­cathedral of Reims as depicted in Marcou/ Frantz’ Album du musée de Sculpture comparée of 1898 (Source: Marcou/Frantz 1898, series 2, 13th century, plate 48)

Figure III.14  An elevation/section of the church St.Pierre of Moissac as depicted in the Album du musée de Sculpture comparée of 1898 by Marcou/Frantz (Source: Marcou/Frantz 1898, series 1, 12th century, plate 17)

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3. The French-British connection, or how the London’s ‘exhibitionary complex’ influenced Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois Louis Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois was established in the purposes of this section, but important keys to Delaporte’s period between the Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889 ideas can be found in the last three chapters and the second and was located at the end section of the Passy wing of the of three appendices in which he elaborated a comparative Trocadero palace; it closed soon after Delaporte’s death in study on the architectural history of Angkor, quoted British 1925. The museum had never been officially conceived as a forerunners for his own museum, and combined both with Far-East Asian counterpart to Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de colonial-political messages. Sculpture comparée, and although it was extremely relevant In his introductory section of the first chapter, Delapor­te for the architectural staging of Cambodia in colonial France has already set the scene for his missions to Cambodia, and as a repository for the numerous Khmer pavilions in which were (and would be, especially in the future) all about future French exhibitions (1889–1937), it has largely been making “these monuments of great art known to Europe and ignored. The few published remarks on the museum men- enriching [the French] museums with a collection of Khmer tion its general history but do not conceptualise it within antiquities that deserved to be placed next to these of Egypt the larger and internationally embedded museological (art and Assyria” (Delaporte 1880, 12). Using these two great civhistorical and political) context of its time (Zéphir 1996, ilisations as an example, Delaporte embedded Angkor withBaptiste 2008, 2013). in the same non-European reference points that Viollet-leOne crucial way to fill this gap is to parallel Delaporte’s Duc had already used to frame the French Gothic period in concept with the obvious inspiration he drew from London. his Dictionnaire and in the introductory hall of his museum. Here – and not in Viollet-le-Duc’s 1875 study of the Histoire Both Viollet-le-Duc’s French Gothic and Delaporte’s Khmer de l’Habitation humaine, where the author judged Khmer periods dated from about the same time between the ninth art “decadent” and “insignificant” (see Viollet-le-Duc 1875, and the thirteenth centuries CE. More important, both pro356–57) – Delaporte found not only an intellectually and tagonists believed that the yet unnoticed monuments from scientifically fertile ground for his art historical and cultur- the artistic periods that they promoted (each with a sense of al-political ideas, but also concrete museographical models. ownership) contributed to a reconvalescence of contempoBoth aspects need further specific enquiry: first, a look into rary art and architectural practice. Louis Delaporte’s major publication Voyage au Cambodge In his chapter nine, Delaporte began to elaborate on the (1880) in relation to his British colleague James Fergusson “importance of the Khmer architecture” and to conceptualwill serve to explain his approach towards a comparative ise a “classification according to their usage”. It was here architectural history of the Far East with the Khmer temple where Delaporte, a naval captain and veritable amateur of site of Angkor at its centre. Second, the selected remarks Khmer art and archaeology, quoted his great scientific refin his 1880 publication will lead us to the pioneering archi- erence for the insertion of Khmer art and architecture into tectural museums of Asian architecture in London, which a canon of world art: clearly inspired Delaporte’s conception of his own Angkor museum. The museum itself will be analysed on the basis […] the distinguished English archaeologist [James] Ferof archival data and a detailed examination of the existing gusson who had in 1867, shortly after Mouhot’s publicaphotographic material. And finally, the picturesque, hybrid, tion, dedicated a whole remarkable chapter to the old and rather performative display of architecture in Dela­ Khmer building in his book History of architecture in all porte’s museum will be compared with the museum that countries. This study begins with these terms: ‘Since the had the largest coherent, but nonetheless rather clinical, revelation of the buried cities of Assyria, the discovery of display of architectural surfaces of Angkor around the year the ruined cities of Cambodia is the most important fact 1900 – namely, the Völkerkundemuseum (ethnography muthat took place for the art history of the Orient.’ Subseseum) in Berlin. Comparing these two display modes for quently calculating the surface area of the temple of Ang­ monumental architecture brings us back to our investigakor-Vaht [sic], the author judged it more considerable tion of the ‘colonial’ appropriation of ‘exotic’ architecture than the temple of Karnac [sic], the main sanctuary of Old through the medium of translation: plaster casts. Egypt. (Delaporte 1880, 261)22 Delaporte quoting Fergusson quoting Delaporte: Towards a universally comparative ­history of Angkor Delaporte published his five-hundred-page Voyage au Cam­ bodge: L’architecture Khmer in 1880. The first eight chapters concerning his travel to Angkor are not of interest for the 144

In his first attempt to systematise world architecture in the 1855 publication The illustrated handbook of architecture, James Fergusson’s analysis ranged from Buddhist to Hindu architecture (no comment yet on Cambodia). It covered the areas of China, America, Western Asia, and included Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, and Saracenic architecture in a first and Christian architecture in a second part (here with a

3. The French-British connection

strong focus on Gothic architecture all over Europe, compare with Viollet-le-Duc).22 In his 1880 publication Delaporte had quoted Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern architecture, which came out in 1876 as the third volume of the History of architecture in all countries. It now covered – besides the main section on “India Proper” and a concluding chapter on China – “Further India” with Burma, Siam, Java, and finally, Cambodia (alone twenty pages). With Fergusson’s 1876 and Delaporte’s 1880 publications and their photographical references of Thomson and Gsell (Figs. III.15a,b, III.16a,b), a strange constellation for the architectural history of Angkor was formed. Delaporte quoted Fergusson in order to justify the relevance of classifying ‘his’ Angkor as being at the same cultural height with Egypt, Assyria, and European antiquity, and he largely based his appraisal of Angkor on Fergusson’s classificatory system of world architecture. Fergusson, an India specialist who never visited Cambodia himself and who relied heavily on published research for his comparative studies and on the very first photographic material from Angkor of 1866 taken by the Scotsman John Thomson for his depictions (Thomson 1867, compare our discussion in chapter I), quoted the “intelligent interest and liberality of the French display in these re­ searches”23 in reference to Mouhot and Garnier’s 1873 publication. He also praised “Captain Delaporte [for] bringing back not only detailed plans of most of the temples, but

copies of inscriptions and a large collections of antiquities and casts”. He did not just reference Delaporte’s museum in Compiègne but even announced the imminent revelations of French research on Angkor: “It is understood, however, that M. Delaporte has cleared out the place, and made careful plans and drawings of the whole, so that in a short time we may expect to know all about it” (Fergusson 1876, 664, 689). In his twenty-page study on Cambodia and the Angkor Wat and Bayon temples Fergusson finally placed Angkorian culture with its use of the wheel and of monolithic stone roofs at the top of his “index of high civilisation”; in turn, Delaporte borrowed Fergusson’s embedding of Angkor between the ancient antiquity of Egypt and India on the Asian side and “classical” Rome24 on the European side (Fergusson 1876, 684, quoted in Delaporte 1880, 262). In chapter ten on “Special characters of Khmer art: Different phases of its development”, Delaporte continued his universally valid, comparative enquiry into the architec­ tural compositions and different stylistic and constructive elements of Angkor. What linked his undertaking with Lenoir and Viollet-le-Duc’s treaties was the periodisation of artistic development ‘à la Winckelmann’ into an early stage, a zenith [apogée], and final “phases of decadence”. In our specific case this was a hidden cultural-political message on the status of Cambodia in relation to a French-colonial civilising mission.25 Worldwide comparison became the all-determining approach for Delaporte’s second appendix to his

22  Fergusson mentioned Cambodia in the preface: “We know a great deal about one of two buildings in Cambodia and Java, but our information regarding all the rest is so fragmentary and incomplete that it is hardly available for the purposes of a general history, and the same may be said of Burmah and Siam” (Fer­ gusson 1876, vi). However, relating to Delaporte’s citation Fergusson only rated Angkor second on his hit list of rediscovered cities after Assyrian sites, but a relevant one for the architectural history of India: “Since the exhumation of the buried cities of Assyria by Mons. Botta and Mr. Layard nothing has occurred so startling, or which has thrown so much light on Eastern art, as the discovery of the ruined cities of Cambodia. Historically, they are infinitely less important to us than the ruins of Nimrod and Nineveh; but, in an architectural point of view, they are more astonishing; and, for the elucidation of certain Indian problems, it seems impossible to overrate their importance” (663). 23  Referring to the Mekong expedition and the 1873 mission he quoted: “As they, however, could not complete the investigation, a second expedition was fitted out, under Captain Delaporte, who had taken part in the previous expedition. They returned to France in 1874, bringing with them not only detailed plans of most of the temples, but copies of nearly all the inscriptions they could find, and a large collection of antiquities and casts. The latter are now arranged in the Château of Compiègne, and accessible to the public. The drawings and inscriptions are in course of publication, and, when available, they will supply materials from which we may reason with confidence, not only as to the arts but as to the history of this wonderful people. – Footnote: Few things are more humiliating to an Englishman than to compare the intelligent interest and liberality of the French display in these researches, contrasted with the solid indifference and parsimony of the English in like matters” (Fergusson 1876, 664). 24  This refers to Fergusson’s classification of Angkor Wat (he referred to it in the Siamese way as “Nakhon Wat”) as somewhere between Egypt, Rome, and Greece. He paralleled the gallery-protected bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat with the Greek and labelled the “square piers”, including their capitals and the architrave composition, as so “essentially of the Roman order” (whereas from Kashmir-India were of the “Grecian Doric”) that he even suspected a direct influence: “It is difficult to conceive the likeness being accidental” (Fergusson 1876, 676). 25  With the evident inspiration stemming from Fergusson’s pioneering work, the “pyramids of the Khmer” (a feature “originating in Egypt, also appearing in Ceylon, Java, and Indochina”) had “analogies” with the “téocali” of the Mayas in Central America or those of Pagan, or even, from a stylistic point of view, the “four-faced Brahma face”, which was deemed similar to “Greek representations” and could therefore prove the “superiority of taste of the Khmer in relation to the other nations [italics MF] of the Far East” (Delaporte 1880, 324, 340).

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Figure III.15a  Photograph of John Thomson of 1866 at Angkor (Source: © University Library of St. Andrews)

Figure III.15b  Thomson’s photograph being translated into an engraving in Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern architecture of 1876, here reprinted in the edition of 1899 (Source: Fergusson 1899, 680)

Figure III.16a  Émile Gsell’s photograph of the Bayon towers at Angkor a few months later than Thomson in 1866 (Source: Gsell 1866, © INHA Paris)

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Figure III.16b  The use of Gsell’s – or Thomson’s? – photograph for Delaporte’s 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1880, 101)

3. The French-British connection

book, entitled “Analogies of Khmer architecture with the architectures of other countries” (Delaporte 1880, 421–38), where he not only copied Fergusson’s cultural divisions, but partly claimed Fergusson’s comparisons of architectural styles in India, Cambodia and Greece as his own.26 In chapter eleven, including “What do we know of old Cambodia” and “A glimpse of the civilisation and the customs of the Khmer”, Delaporte continued his analysis and quoted Fergusson’s discourse about the delicate cart-making of the Khmer (Delaporte 1880, 353). With a well-placed mention of Dutch-colonial research on the ruined temple of “Boro-Boudour” in Java, Delaporte switched his discourse from comparative architectural history to a normative perspective on modern and colonial history: he used the term “civilisation” as a reference point, linked it with “epoch” and “nation”, and asked “how long did this power [puissance] of the Khmer people last?” before concluding that “Cambodia’s decadence” had started “with an indeterminable series of wars and incursions that only came to an end with the arrival of the French in Indochina”. If Lenoir’s periodisation of art and architecture had a purely French focus in the time of revolutionary vandalism, and if Viollet-le-Duc’s comparative display intended to revive con­ temporary French art and architecture in a reference to a rediscovered French Gothic period, then Delaporte brought the civilising aspect within a history of world architecture (with Angkor at its centre) right into the core issue of French colonialism: in this momentarily “decivilised but still incomparably fertile land”, the French had – and this was the final statement in the main part of his 1880 publication – the “duty [to] revive the marvellous past of this people, to reconstitute these admirable artworks [italics MF] and to enrich [this past] with a new page in art history and in the annals of humanity” (Delaporte 1880, 377–78).27

From the Oriental Repository and the Architectural Museum to the Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum: British counterparts of an architectural museum of Angkor Delaporte’s determination to “reconstitute the much admired masterpieces” of ancient Angkor was crucial at a time when the temples themselves were still under Siamese control. For the time being, the only way to appropriate Angkor for a French colonial patrimoine was its ‘re-presentation’ in France. In the eighth chapter of his 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge, which began with the story of his return from the first two missions to Angkor and the transport of original and copied objects back to France, Delaporte added an important section called “A summarised history of the foundation of a new museum”. Here, he told the story of his refused Angkor plaster cast collection at the Louvre, its transfer to Compiègne and partial repair at the Écôle des Beaux-Arts, and his great wish to bring it “to the public” in Paris as it had been during the 1878 Universal Exhibition (Delaporte 1880, 247–49, compare chapter II). Delaporte engaged with a ‘reproductive continuum’ (a term after Baker 2010) – from words, illustrations, photographs, plaster casts, and whole architectural reconstitutions as different modes of appropriation through to verbal, pictorial, and physical translation. The temples of Angkor were described in words, but to “form an idea of the sculptures, one had to attentively study with a magnifying glass the photographic views in the museum, mostly coming from the rich collection of M. Gsell in Saigon [from his Angkor visit in 1866], which had also been used on several occasions to illustrate this book” (Delaporte 1880, 249). This procedure was comparable with Fergusson’s use of John Thomson’s photographs from the same year (1866 for his above-mentioned publication. But, as was also the case in Viollet-le-Duc’s publication, Delaporte used – without in­

26  One example of Delaporte’s plagiarism is his observation that the Cambodian piers [piliers] were, along with other architectural details, close to the Roman Doric order, whereas sculptures from the Javanese temple of “Boro-Boudour” were influenced by the “Greco-Hindu” art (Delaporte 1880, 437, compare with Fergusson 1876, 676). 27  Of course, the contested implication of colonial engagement in classifying the universal range of architecture was not Delaporte’s invention, and indicates Fergusson’s influence. On the first pages of his 1876 publication, Fergusson rated India below the “intellectual supremacy of Greece, or the moral greatness of Rome; but, though on a lower step of the ladder, her arts [like Delaporte with Angkor] were more original and more varied, and her forms of civilisation [presented] an ever-changing variety, such as nowhere else to be found” (Fergusson 1876, 3). However, he valued India, in comparison to Greece and Rome, which were “dead and passed away” [like the Angkorian epoch], “as a living entity [and] a complete cosmos in itself ”, where “architecture” (and here we might even hear echoes of Viollet-le-Duc’s Gothic epoch) was “still a living art, practised on the principles which caused its wonderful development in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries” (Fergusson 1876, 4–5). In contrast to Delaporte’s colonial engagement, Fergusson saw India’s “story of backward decline” or “downward progress” as being accelerated by colonial impact: “Architecture continues to be practised with considerable success in parts of India remote from European influence; so much so, that it requires a practised eye to discriminate between what is new and what is old […] Architecture may, consequently, linger on amidst much political decay” (Fergusson 1876, 34–35).

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dicating a difference between the original and the copied – plaster casts from his musée Khmer in Compiègne as the source for his illustrations of sculptures and architectural surfaces (compare Figs. II.5a,b). Delaporte predefined these buildings from Angkor, which would effectively represent the first monumental reconstitutions in the métropole in the years to come, as the “Baïon [and] Angkor-Vaht [whose] reconstruction, essentially representative of the Khmer architecture, would neither be difficult nor expensive” (Dela­ porte 1880, 249). It was at this point that Dela­porte cited – comparing the “[French] masters of Indochina” with the “British in India and the Dutch in Java” and anticipating his Angkor museum – the most important British references: “the Hindu, Burmese, and Malayan sculptures in the British Museum displayed next to Assyrian antiquities, the elevation of entire monuments of the architecture of India rebuilt in the South Kensington Museum and, finally, the India Museum with its vast rooms on archaeology with not only original and cast sculptures, but also a considerable collection of photographs, drawings, and relief plans in an admirable arrangement for study” (Delaporte 1880, 251). What could Delaporte have known, before his 1880 publication, about the British situation of architectural plaster cast museums in general and the display of ‘Oriental’ monuments in particular? Which aspects of the London museums in combination with Fergusson’s work could have influenced him? Where are the parallels to Viollet-leDuc’s musée de Sculpture comparée installed in the same building as his own museum project and to Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français, which had reconstituted the architectural past eighty years earlier? The famous Sanchi gate, certainly the most relevant reconstitution of Oriental architecture at that time in Great Britain (compare Pl. III.5b), had just opened for the public in 1873 inside the Architectural Courts or Cast Courts of London’s South Ken­sington Museum. Delaporte spoke of these Oriental casts (he translated them as “reproduction moulée”) several times in his second appendix “Analogies de l’architecture Khmer avec les architectures des autres pays” (Delaporte 1880, 421– 438). However, within the London display of Sanchi two important strands merged that had developed in the British capital over the last decades and had highly influenced the French scene: (a) the use of plaster casts to mount architectural fragments in hybrid stylistic groups for a museum context (compare with Lenoir) and to display life-size ensembles from one original monument (compare with Viollet-le-Duc); and (b) the use of these display techniques for the colonial-political making and appropriation of ‘Oriental heritage’ to create a “three-dimensional imperial archive” (Barringer 1998, 11). Both strands played an important role in Delaporte’s museum concept and therefore need some further exploration. The Great Exhibition of Industry of All Nations held in London in 1851 was the first to be called ‘universal’, and its spectacular display of monumental sculpture and architecture in the Crystal Palace under the organising genius of 148

Henry Cole had a great impact on similar popular projects in subsequent decades. After the event, the whole exhibition building and its Oriental installations were moved and reopened in 1854 as a private enterprise. To a certain extent these architectural displays were comparable to Lenoir’s (public) musée des Monuments français, which created stylistic and temporal ensembles using various architectural and sculptural elements from different places. In the Foucauldian sense of a heterotopian constallation (see the introduction of this book), different spaces from all over the world were temporarily interconnected and the visitor, once getting his special entry ticket, entered a controlled space of time-limited deviation and illusion. However, different in their reliance on painted plaster cast copies and/or n ­ ewly invented interpretations to depict mostly foreign countries, the ten architectural courts of the Crystal Palace at Syden­ ham offered a parcours through – not far from an aesthetic point of view from the Archaeological Park of Angkor after 1900, compare chapter IX – “a curious and fascinating three-dimensional musée imaginaire” of archaeologically unearthed and ideally reconstructed and staged antiquity from the Nubian and Egyptian Courts (Pl. III.2a,b), to those of the Alhambra, of Greece and Rome by Owen Jones; the Pompeian, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Italian Courts by Matthew Digby Wyatt; and the Nineveh or Assyrian Court by James Fergusson under Henry Layard’s direction (Piggott 2004, 67–121, Kenworthy-Browne 2006). Besides the plaster casts from the churches of Notre Dame in Paris, Vézelay, and Chartres, which were brought in by Viollet-le-Duc to reinvent a Gothic ensemble from original and faked elements, Cuvier’s scientific attempts to reconstitute the full-scale shape of various “extinct animals” was realised with an outdoor antediluvian fun park. Although Fergusson, the appointed manager of the whole complex, was to become an expert on Indian architecture, on the architectural side of things the whole of Asia was underrepresented. Despite this popular display of monumental architecture, which resulted in full-colour catalogues – under the influence of Owen Jones, whose 1856 publication The gram­ mar of the ornament included detailed pattern books of decorations from various regions and epochs around the planet (Jones 1856) but pointed in another aesthetical, more pictorial direction –, it was left to Fergusson to formulate another approach. In his 1857 address to the Science and Art Department at the South Kensington Museum entitled On a national collection of architectural art, he advocated a public, but more serious “institution of [an] architectural museum, established on cosmopolitan and scientific principles” (Fergusson 1857, 12). In a move that has particular significance for this chapter, he also questioned the assumed ‘immobility’ of monumental architecture by evoking the translation technique of making plaster casts, and he argued that their full-size and uncoloured quality was necessary to properly display chronologically classified monuments. Although he defined “architecture as ornamental and orna-

3. The French-British connection

mented construction” and was engaged in the English ­ ebate over a new national style that would replace the d Classicistic “attempt to restore, with more or less minute exactness, the style of the Roman Empire” with a revived “pure Gothic” (compare with Viollet-le-Duc’s similar approach in the French context), Fergusson did not want to leave the matter of style as “a plaything for the antiquary and the archaeologist”. He lobbied for a “more general diffusion of knowledge with reference to the forms of art that have gone before and a more correct appreciation of its aim and object” (Fergusson 1857, 4, 6, 12). Interestingly, Fergusson underlined this anti-elitist programme for the “great regeneration of art” through an archi­ tectural museum that made reference to the ‘post-Lenoir’ museum in the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris, which he described as being neither a “strictly architectural collection” nor a fully developed “speciality” (Fergusson 1857, 14). Turning to the private museums in London, he judged Sir John Soane’s “extensive collection of architectural casts and illustrations” to be useless because of its stylistic “incongruities”, and the “Architectural Museum in Cannon Row to be too exclusively medieval to perform the functions of an institution to improve the taste of the nation”. In addition, he downgraded the Sydenham installations because they ­rarely displayed real “reproductions” but only “pleasing reminiscences of the various styles” under the ­suffocatingly heavy layer of an overinterpreted colour scheme. In his conclusion Fergusson proposed – together with models, drawings, and especially the unmatched “accuracy and truthfulness” of photographs (compare again with Violletle-Duc’s Dictionnaire) – a comparative parcours through colour-neutral plaster cast installations using a selection of the “best and most typical styles” of chronologically ordered and “full-size” architectural monuments (Fergusson 1857, 15–17). What Fergusson referred to as the Architectural Museum was founded in 1851 by the famous Neo-Gothic architect and restorer George Gilbert Scott and his colleague Charles Bruce Allen (along with later adherents like William Burges, John Ruskin, and Charles R. Cockerell) and opened in 1852 in Cannon Row, Westminster. With Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français acting as a test forerunner, this London museum might have been the “very first cast collection explicitly called an ‘architectural museum’” with a national claim (Flour 2008a, 214) (Fig. III.17). With its scholarly aim of offering a mainly medieval catalogue of architecture and ornament for the improvement of contemporary build­ ing practice in a Gothic Revival language (compare with Viollet-le-Duc’s national focus on the ‘French’ Gothic style), in 1857 it was (mainly for financial reasons) incorporated into the newly founded South Kensington Museum at the

so-called Brompton site (Bottoms 2007). When the South Kensington Museum opened in the same year under its new name (formerly known as the Museum of Manufactures since 1852), it also included its own collection of plaster casts, which had been initiated for the instruction of public taste and fine arts education. Now the casts from the Gothic-oriented Architectural Museum were collected in one gallery and were in direct concurrence with the Museum of Ornamental Art in the lower gallery, which had come to the collection from its former site at Marlborough House (Fig. III.18). The two gallery displays revealed the different ideologies of the Gothic Revivalist style in architecture on the one hand and, on the other, a more encyclopaedic focus on the reform of design in the applied arts and of public taste under the coordination of Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, from the Government School of Design and from the Science and Art Department (compare the latter’s quoted role during the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris, chapter I). Both followed a more serial display mode in the development of stylistic entities (compare with Robinson 1856). The Architectural Museum grouped its elements in a more metonymic display order where fragmented but coherently arranged architectural elements such as arches, columns, etc. helped the viewer to imagine a larger and more complete architectural building context. In both cases large and even freestanding architectural reconstitutions and the focus on Oriental architectural sculpture were not yet a real issue. This changed in 1859 when a group of distinguished experts published a two-page article in The Builder in support of the foundation of a “National Museum of Architecture and Architectural Decoration” containing both existing collections. The aims would be to (a) arrange a representative selection of specimen into a comprehensible series according to the progress of artistic style and typology, and chronological and geographical criteria; (b) confront the spectrum of Classical and Gothic with Oriental architecture; (c) combine the architectural fragments into coherent building parts and “complete orders”; (d) contextualise the objects with accompanying cast models, engravings, drawings, and photographs “showing the present and original condition”; and (e) “to put together, in each sub-division, two or three monuments of the best character in each style, made as complete as possible, and of dimension as large as the gallery will admit” (Donaldson 1859). This contribution initiated a series of articles about an ideal, even universal, architectural museum with life-size representations of exquisite monuments. Sculptors and architects like John Bell and C. B. Allen advocated the insertion of Far East monumental architecture into the universal museum parcours.28 These discussions and the subsequent realisations merged

28  Isabelle Flour (Flour 2008a) has explored the circumstances around the sculptor John Bell’s launch of the “Universal Museum of Architecture” (in “The union of sculpture and architecture”, Building News, 30 March 1860) and his plea for the study of Indian monuments of architecture (in his multi-part article “Indian monuments of architecture”, in the Building News in 1860) along with Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, Assyrian to

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III  Staging Angkor in the Museum

Figure III.17  Interior view of the Royal Architectural Museum, Tufton Street (Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum)

Figure III.18  Interior view of the Museum of Ornamental Art, Classical Galleries, at the South Kensington Museum, ca. 1857 (Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum)

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at the South Kensington Museum and certainly influenced veyors undertook Oriental studies as an intentional side both Viollet-le-Duc’s and Delaporte’s later museum dis- ­project through which to approach the newly acquired terplays, although these two French plaster cast museums in ritories on the Sub-Indian continent. In 1798, along with a the Trocadero palace were never, as in London, conceived similar initiative in Calcutta, the Oriental Repository was of as one coherent didactic entity to explain and hierar- created inside the East India House in London to house the chise world architecture between the Occident and the Ori- incoming industrial-commercial products and natural hisent. Henry Cole, the driving force behind the South Kens- tory collections that were displayed for interested merchants, ington Museum, preferred original works in architecture traders, civil servants, and members of the public (Skelton and accepted “casts, photographs, or drawings, only as 1978, Desmond 1982).29 Following the success of the Comsubstitutes for original works” (Flour 2008, 223). However pany’s Indian display during the London Exhibition of 1851 he pushed, especially after 1864, for the reproduction of and the inclusion of many objects from the reconstructed various art works (Perry 1887) and architectural decora- ‘bazaar’ in the British-Indian section of the 1855 Universal tions for his museum as well as for the application of his Exhibition in Paris, this vast collection of individual obreconstructed colour schemes on the exposed plaster casts jects was used as interior architectural decoration when the in order to achieve a higher reality effect for the popular Company surveyor Matthew Digby Wyatt (who was also gaze. In 1869 the Architectural Museum, in constant ideo- involved in the design of the architectural courts at the Sy­ logical battle with the South Kensington Museum, moved denham exhibition), converted the former Tea Sale Room to its new location in Westminster. into an Oriental stage set complete with Islamic columns When European plaster cast samples arrived at the mu- and arches, ancient sculptures, fragments, and exquisitely seum as a result of Cole’s successful initiative for the 1867 carved stonework (Fig. III.19). This development of an International Convention for the Exchange of Reproduc- Oriental Museum containing architectural fragments and tions of Works of Art (see its full text quoted in chapter I), exotic decor came to a sudden and unexpected end after the Architectural Courts for the South Kensington Muse- the Indian Mutiny in 1857–58 when the East India Compaum were being planned and a special section was foreseen ny lost its hegemonial power in India to the British Crown. for Near, Middle, and Far Eastern architectural exhibits. Its London museum was thus marginalised by its 1869 These installations mirrored the “truly imperial modes of transfer to the new India Office in Whitehall (opened in appropriation of architectural heritage” (Barringer 1998, 1861). The long struggle against the ultimate dispersal of 229) – in other words, they were the materialisation of the the India Museum had begun. In the late 1860s and 1870s its process of incorporating Oriental architecture into the Oc- rich natural history collection finally went to Kew Garden cidental (colonial) canon of architectural heritage through and the new Natural History Museum, and the original plaster cast translations. “Amaravati marbles” (not marble after all) finally ended up As the British-colonial counterpart to the French pro- in the British Museum next to the famous Elgin marbles jects of representing Indochina that would develop in the from the Athens Parthenon (compare with the issue about years to come, the displays of Indian artefacts and architec- the Parthenon and its influence on the Angkor debate in tural elements already had a seventy-year history in Lon- chapter IX). don. These collections – from their beginnings as a kind of However, the India Museum and its new ‘reporter on the cabinet of curiosities – stretch back to the Honourable East products of India’ (and later John Forbes Watson) played an important role in the standardisation of museum disIndia Company, which ruled Bengal and the major trade ports of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta until the mid-nine- plays of Indian antiquity using archaeological drawings, teenth century. Its civil servants, geographers, and sur­ photography, and the medium of plaster casts (Desmond

Greek, Roman, Saracenic, Arabian, Mexican until Gothic, Renaissance, and modern examples (in “Mr Bell’s Lecture at the Architectural Museum”, Building News, 8 February 1861, and “The four sisters, or some notes on the relationship of the fine arts”, Building News, 15 February 1861). The Neo-Gothic section focused on a European medieval-style display (compare Scott’s article “On the formation of a National Museum of Architecture, viewed in connexion with its bearings upon mediaeval art”, The Builder, 21 June 1862 and 28 June 1862), but Allen developed a universal taxonomy that divided world architecture into the “the arch order” (including Roman, Moorish, to Renaissance) and “the lintel order” (with Egyptian, Assyrian, Hindu, Chinese, to Mexican styles) in his multi-part article “Thoughts on a National Gallery of Architecture” (in the Building News in 1863). 29  Better equipped than the comparable French Exposition permanente des colonies in the palais de l’Industrie in Paris after 1855, the scientific, ethnological, and artistic exhibits of the mid-nineteenth-century East India House ranged from a few archaeological objects, such as the famous Babylonian Stone, the Amaravati reliefs, and two Assyrian reliefs, a model of the town of Lahore, Tibetan household instruments, Ladakhi clothing, mummies, a giant Chinese lantern, and Hindu deities, to maps, charts, and drawings, an ever-growing collection of books, and various other curiosities.

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Figure III.19  Transformation of the former Tea Sale Room in the East India House by M. Digby Wyatt as an extension to the India Museum (Source: Illustrated London News, 6 March 1858; republished in Desmond 1982, 43)

1982, 111–28). The East India Company’s civil administra- tion’ project of Indian monuments of antiquity towards the tors, surveyors, and army officers – and this was similarly European Continent, he reviewed all available methods for the case for the French in Indochina – played a significant the illustration of architectural remains. role in the British-colonial myth of discovering ‘abandoned In addition to his discussion of the execution of and ruined sites’ of ancient antiquity in India and in the “coloured drawings, plans, sections and other architectural propagation of this myth in England. After earlier initia- drawings and models” and his proposal to obligatorily intives to safeguard, repair, and document Indian ancient clude one photographer in each archaeological survey or sites (for example, the repair work of Fatehpur-Sikri initiat­ restoration campaign in colonial India, he placed great emed in 1815 by Lord Hastings and the commissioned facsim- phasis on “moulds and casts”, which were already planned ile copies of the Ajanta frescoes), the famous army engineer, for the “gateway of the Sanchi Tope” (Watson 1869, 1–6). archaeological surveyor, and founder of the Archaeological More important than Forbes’s introduction were the seven Survey of India, Alexander Cunningham, made photogra- appendices. In “Appendix A: Memorandum regarding the phy an essential supplement to measured architectural architectural objects in India, of which it is desirable phodrawings. The India Museum stored an enormous photo tographs should be taken”, Fergusson provided a fifcollection, which was used by Fergusson and others for teen-page list of Indian monuments to be photographed in their publications and was even displayed in the 1867 Ex- addition to the five hundred representations that he had already presented in the 1867 Exhibition in Paris. In “Aphibition in Paris. In 1869, the same year the SKM published its four volumes of various art reproductions (Science and pendix B: Memorandum regarding objects in India of Art Department 1869), Forbes Watson also published his which it is desirable casts should be obtained”, Fer­gusson Report on the illustrations of the archaic architecture of In- declared casts to be an adequate substitute if the originals dia. In this fifty-page report, which easily counts as one of could not be taken from museum collections in India or the most important sources on the British colonial ‘transla- from the original spot, using as examples sites like “Bodh 152

3. The French-British connection

Gaya, Kootub at Delhi, the gateways of Sanchi [or] the Elephanta Cave at Bombay” (Watson 1869, 20–22). In “Appendix C: Extract from a letter referring to a scheme for the conservation and representation of ancient monuments in India”, Fergusson declared that the Governor General in Council focused on “castings too exclusively” and reminded the reader that “casts can only represent an infinitesimal portion of the objects of antiquarian interest in India”, whereas “photographs and drawings conveyed far more information” and “originals of small objects of art […] with intrinsically more value […] could be obtained from ruined and desecrated temples at less expense than to cast them” (Watson 1869, 23). After General Cunningham’s appendices D and E on the archaeological remains of India and Colonel Meadows Taylor’s memorandum on prehistoric archaeology in India, Forbes added the eight-page “Appendix F: Description of two processes for the taking of moulds from sculpture in bas-reliefs, & c., in India” where he listed utensils and materials ranging from brushes and sponges to wheat flour and papers for paper piece moulds (like for Sanchi) (Fig. III.20) and for “making composition moulds” using the carton-pierre technique. Forbes’s guidebook for the British-colonial appropriation of Indian architecture concluded, however, with an English translation of a technical manual written by a Frenchman who claimed to have invented this material translation method – namely, Victor Lottin de Laval’s Manuel complet de lottinoplastique, l’art du moulage de la sculpture en bas-relief et en creux mis à la portée de tout le monde… précédé d’une histoire de cette découverte of 1857 (Lottin 1857). This publication had a direct impact on the British scene, at home and in the colonies overseas (Fig. III.21). Henry Hardy Cole – the oldest son of Henry Cole, the director of the South Kensington Museum – served as Royal Engineer and archaeological surveyor in the upper provinces of India. He published the results of his explorations for the Archaeological Survey of India along with the preparation of “a number of plaster casts of Indian monuments at the request of the Science and Art Department to the Government of India, no doubt at his father‘s instigation” (Skelton 1978, 301). His most important project was to translate Indian architectural antiquity into the British canon of colonial heritage. H. H. Cole executed a copy – he called it a “plaster cast facsimile” (Cole 1874, 13) – of the almost ten-metre-high eastern gateway of the Buddhist stupa of Sanchi located close to Bhopal in upper central India and dated to the second century BCE (compare Falser 2013e, Guha-Takurta 2013, Stoye 2016, Falser 2016b). H. H. Cole depicted the six-week execution of the plaster

Figure III.20  Tools used in paper-moulding, as depicted in an attachment in Forbes Watson’s Report on the illustrations of the archaic architecture of India (Source: Watson 1869, between pages 44 and 45, © British Library Archives)

casts during January/February 1870 (Pl. III.3) in language comparable to Delaporte’s descriptions about Angkor since the 1866 Mekong mission (see chapter I, compare Fig. III.29). With three colleagues, nine “native modellers”, and twenty-eight tons of material transported on bullock carts for their execution through “elastic moulds with gelatine”, the plaster casts reached Liverpool and London in June 1870 via Bombay through the newly opened Suez Canal (the 1866 casts from Angkor still had to cross this point by land!) (Cole 1874, footnote 13–14). They arrived just in time for the first Annual International Exhibition that opened on 1 May 1871 near the South Kensington Museum.30 The reconstitut-

30  In order to feature “a collection of objects illustrative of the ethnology and geography of the various parts

and races of the British Empire, including especially races of India”, the India Office was directly involved in acquiring casts of Indian faces, photographs of Indian ethnic groups, artefacts of Indian aboriginal tribes, and figures dressed in traditional costumes for the Annual Exhibition in 1874 (Desmond 1982, 107).

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III  Staging Angkor in the Museum

Figure III.21  Group of plaster cast moulders at work at the Qutb Minar and Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque complex, 1872. Photograph taken by Charles Shepherd of Bourne & Shepherd (Source: © RIBA Library Photograph Collection)

ed Sanchi gate, along with a small model and photographs of the whole Sanchi site as well as a staged “Indian court”,31 had its test run for the public gaze in the 1871 Exhibition (Fig. III.22). Its depiction in the Graphic on 6 May with an exaggerated perspective from the visitor’s point of view was (on another scale) quite comparable to the illustration of Delaporte’s Naga balustrade in the Paris exhibition only seven years later in 1878 (compare Fig. II.21). At this moment, the Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum (also called the Cast Courts, though they contained original objects as well) were in the plan-

ning stage, and the two strands of display for monumental architecture and Oriental culture were merged into this single project, which inspired Delaporte for his own museum (compare Falser 2013e). As early as 1867 the South Kensington Museum director, Cole, initiated the new court comprising two large halls separated by a narrow and open three-storey gallery, to contain the museum’s collection of plaster casts of large-scale architectural sculpture (Physick 1982, 156–60; Harrod 1985, Mitter 1997, Leslie 2004, Baker 2007, Bryant 2011, 197–207, Bilbey/Trusted 2010, Patterson/ Trusted 2018). General Henry Scott constructed the courts,

31  In 1871 the tenth volume of Art Journal reported on the “International Exhibition of 1871” (compare Falke 1871). It described the “Indian Court” with “shops like an oriental bazaar”, labelled “the attempt to convert the art of India into the likeness of what may be called art in England” as “hybrid abominations” (1 August 1871, 208–9), criticised the liaison between the exhibition and the South Kensington Museum, and formed its ­criticism, that “the character of an educational, artistic, national display [was] abandoned – and the ground purchased by the money of the public covered by a monster bazaar”, under the title “Exhibition, or bazaar?” (1 October 1871, 245). However, the “Cast Courts” of the South Kensington Museum – at this time under construction – were judged positively (1 September 1871, 231) and the Sanchi gate was likewise honoured (1 March 1871, 65–69; see Wallis 1871).

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each with a length of 135 feet, a width of 60 feet, and a maximum height of 83 feet (Fig. III.23). The opening in 1874 was a public success and the “press coverage favourable”,32 but critical voices also spoke of an “architectural mania for exaggeration in size and an ambition to ‘do the biggest thing out’” (The Art Journal 1873). Most probably, Dela­ porte – sources prove that he had been to London several times33 – had used the 1874 Guide to the art collections of the South Kensington Museum for his walk through the museum, which created a hybrid scenario between original and reproduced artefacts and architectures of the Orient (Pl. III.4). A visitor to the South Kensington Museum passed the North Court with the “Italian works of art” containing casts of Michelangelo’s David and Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit from the cathedral of Pisa; he reached the South Court from “Abyssinian trophies” and “Electrotype reproductions” like the “Regalia from the Tower” and objects from the Louvre, and he moved towards the adjacent “Oriental Courts”, which were decorated by Owen Jones with “Art workmanship of the East Indies, China, Japan and Persia for the convenience of comparison”. Finally, the visitor entered “The New Court” with its “full-size reproductions in plaster of architectural works of large dimensions” (South Kensington Museum 1874, 23–29, here 23). John Hungerford Pollen’s 1874 Description of the architecture and monumental sculpture in the South-Eastern Court of the South Kensington Museum gave more detailed insight into the new olive-green and purplish-red coloured Architectural Courts. It listed European objects from England, Flanders, Germany, Spain, and Italy in order to show “the principal changes of style in monumental and decorated architecture illustrated in historical order” in the western architectural court and “the architecture of the Oriental nations, Arab, Moorish, and the numerous styles that have prevailed in India […] cast by the officers employed for the Architectural Survey of India” in the eastern architectural court (Pollen 1874, 1,2). The highlight of the European side was the freestanding life-size cast of Trajan’s Column in Rome (second century CE), which was originally built to commemorate the Roman Emperor Trajan’s war of conquest against the East European Dacians. Here the cast of Trajan’s column was centrally placed in two gigantic fragments in the western court and was to be viewed either from the visitor’s intimidatingly low perspective within the court (Pl. III.5a) or from the elevated passageway between

Figure III.22  The Sanchi gate in the 1871 Annual International Exhibition, London (Source: Graphic, 6 May 1871, 425; reproduced in Desmond 1982, 106)

the courts, which furnished a commanding view over the entire architectural universe. This plaster cast replica symbolically represented Great Britain’s nineteenth-century inheritance of the colonial and civilising mission of ancient Rome in Europe.34 After its successful display in the 1871 International Exhibition and its subsequent dominance in the east court section of “Indian and Arab Architecture”, the “Eastern Gateway of the Sanchi Tope” (Pl. III.5b) was made the symbolic and colonial-political counterpart to Trajan’s Column of European antiquity in the neighbouring court. As a freestanding plaster cast of one of the richly decorated entry gates to the central Buddhist stupa, it represented the real site that, after its European discovery by

32  Physick mentions an overview of press releases: Art Journal, 1873 (276); Builder, 4 October 1873 (789); Building News, 25 April 1873 (469), 31 October 1873 (473–75); The Architect, 19 April 1873 (208), 26 April 1873 (220), 10 May 1873 (249), 24 May 1873 (273). 33  I thank Julie Philippe for this information from Delaporte’s family archive in Loches (compare Philippe 2011). 34  This giant cast provoked critics in the press to call it a “mammoth model” with little value for art students. In: Building News 14 (25 April 1873), 469 (no author). The twelfth-century portico de la gloria of St. James Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella represented the largest example of the second type of restitution: attached to the wall, it can be seen as a forerunner of Viollet-le-Duc’s museum highlight of the gate of the Vézelay church (compare Fig. III.11).

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Figure III.23  The Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum in a section plan (Source: V&A Print Room, no. E.1048-1927, republished in Physick 1982, 158, fig. 182)

the British officer General Taylor in 1818 and its depiction as ruined and supposedly abandoned, had been made one of the earliest and most prominent icons for the British cultural – in this particular case, archaeological – mission on the Indian subcontinent. At the South Kensington Museum, the plaster cast of the giant gate stood – surrounded by ten plaster cast panels from the site and a small accompanying architectural model of the ‘real’ site – for the “oldest monument of Oriental art […], a singular example of the embodiment of the principles of timber structure in architecture of stone” (Pollen 1874, 3). It was judged, as far as the sculptural quality was concerned, “typical, if not representative, of the life and doctrines of Buddha, and of the worship of certain typical objects” (Pollen 1874, 71).35 However, Pollen found only very little room for EastWest exchange in his publication and reduced Indian art to its decorative qualities (Pollen 1874, 5) – a common feature of the British treatment of India36 as well as of the French treatment of Indochina with Cambodia. However, in his 1874 Catalogue of the objects of Indian art exhibited in the South Kensington Museum, Lt. Henry Hardy Cole had another opinion. His goal was (a) to “familiarise the people of England with the productions of India”, which was to them still “an unknown land […] with the vague idea of a distant

and barbaric splendour”; (b) to “create a true knowledge of these millions of people” through the existing collection; and (c) “to correct the vulgarities in European art manufactures by the suggestiveness of Indian art objects” (Cole 1874, 1–2). Delaporte formed exactly the same goals with his Angkor museum to promote Khmer architecture and design for the French public and artistic scene! From a museographical point of view, the Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum in their 1874 iteration developed three new modes of cultural taxonomy, an architectural display, and a didactic strategy that would prove essential for the Trocadero palace containing Violletle-Duc’s concept of the musée de Sculpture comparée and Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois a few years later. First, the Architectural Courts created a spectacular show of a series of monumental architectures, which were, by virtue of their translation into facsimile copies and their transfer into the museum, regrouped as fetishised architectural icons and isolated and decontextualised from their original historical context, site, and past or present use value. As part of a “three-dimensional imperial archive” (Barringer 1998, 11), the Architectural Courts sought “to create the illusion of an adequate representation of the world” (Arieff 1995, 404; compare Mitchell 1989). The Architectural Courts

35  On the exotic parcours the Sanchi gate was placed between other exhibits from the Orient like the famous

fourth-century Iron Pillar from the Kutb mosque in ancient Delhi, a sixteenth-century gate and audience chamber of Akbar Khan from Fathepur Sikri near Agra, and a fifteenth-century pulpit from a Cairo mosque. 36  A totally different story was fabricated by the French and British (and later Indian and Italian) archaeologists, philologists and art historians when North-Indian Buddhist art after its European ‘contact’ with European Hellenistic art was named the “Greco-Buddhist style of Gandhara” (Falser 2015d, 2018; compare above many others Mitter 1977).

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of the South Kensington Museum can be conceptualised as represent the Occident and the Orient in the same exhibitionary complex would become a reality in the Trocadero a kind of “exhibitionary complex”, in which collections “sought to make the whole world, past and present, meto- palace from the late 1880s onwards: certainly on another nymically available in [plaster cast] assemblages of objects scale, both the Gothic-style icon of the Vézelay gate in the […] they brought together and, from their towers [in our musée de Sculpture comparée and the Angkorian pavilions case the elevated gallery between the courts, MF], to lay it in the musée Indo-chinois represented two opposite sides before a controlling vision” (Bennett 1988, 79). Here, the within one French metropolitan and colonial empire. metonymic system followed an overall taxonomy that was Second, the Architectural Courts combined a serial-eninscribed into a unique spatial arrangement: in each court, cyclopaedic display of architectural details along their upper each object represented the larger building context and sin- galleries, a metonymic display of architectural fragments and whole facade elements attached to the surrounding gular region from where it was taken. The combined group of buildings in each court represented a cultural sphere walls, and – a new highlight – the presentation of monuacross a longer, homogenised, and abstract time span: Eu- mental, freestanding, and life-size architectural replicas. rope in the western court from the Romans to the Renais- This blending of different museographical strategies emsance, and ‘the Oriental nations’ in the eastern court from ployed by various architectural museums in London cerearly Buddhism to the sixteenth-century Mogul era. And tainly inspired its French equivalent in the Trocadero palfinally, one central and dominating icon represented the ace with Louis Delaporte as the driving force. very cultural foundation of each of the two spheres of Third, the architectural reconstitutions inside the Archiwhich the British Empire felt itself to be the righteous in- tectural Courts represented a crucial transition from the heritor: on one side Trajan’s Column represented the Ro- “didactic moment” of the earliest architectural museums man Empire with its supremacy over civilised Europe, and and the “academic imperialism” in the public exhibitions on the other side the Sanchi gate acted as the archaeologi- and museum displays like those of the South Kensington cal reminder of a past high civilisation, a present degener- Museum to “a period of popular imperialist triumphalism” ated situation on the Indian subcontinent, and a “symbol (Barringer 1998) in London’s Colonial and Indian Exhibiof responsible British custodianship of, and authority over, tion in 1886. It contained the hybrid ‘Indian Palace’ of Indian history and culture” (Barringer 1998, 19). However, Caspar Purdon Clarke, the architect of the Indian pavilion the established cultural taxonomy of Occidental and Orien- for the 1878 Exhibition in Paris (see Fig. II.11). With these tal spheres remained isolated and could only be seen syn- overlapping phases developing towards the end of the ninechronically from the elevated (and indeed Janus-headed) teenth century, Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois also repreview point on the bridging gallery. Although this scenario sented an imperial enterprise – even though (or because of did not last long, it was conceived as the first permanent the fact that) Angkor did not yet belong to French Indo­ museum configuration of that kind in contrast to the china. The cast models of Sanchi in London, like those of ephemeral displays of past and future universal and coloni- Angkor in Paris, did not survive the decline and final failal exhibitions. This division of plaster cast reconstitutions to ure of the British and French colonial projects in Asia.37

37  As fragile in its cultural-imperial gesture as the political situation in India itself, the Sanchi gate did not

survive long in the South Kensington Museum. The museum guide of 1881 already indicated that the eastern architectural court was now displaying European objects, mostly from Italy. The Sanchi gate was transferred to “The Indian Section, Exhibition Road” where it dominated a new “Architectural Court” for the newly installed “India Museum” in the former Annual Exhibitions (Birdwood 1880). The “Lower and Upper Galleries” included architectural features, such as casts and original sculptures from Takht-i-Bahi and Bodhgaya (South Kensington Museum 1881, 71–76; compare with South Kensington Museum 1894), and Caspar Purdon Clarke – the later director of the Indian section – was sent (along with George Birdwood of the India Office) to India to complete the collections. Interestingly, other commissioned copies of the Sanchi gate were exported for display in temporary displays at other museums including the musée Guimet in Paris and the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin. Its first version for London disappeared when the Imperial College was erected in the 1950s (Skelton 1978, 301). The South Kensington Museum changed its name to the Victoria & Albert Museum. In Berlin, the Sanchi gate may be on display again in front of the upcoming Humboldt Forum (Falser 2017c, compare Falser 2012/14, Stoye 2016).

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4. Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois — the first and last French museum of Angkor Having analysed the musée Khmer in Compiègne after Delaporte’s 1874 mission to Angkor as well as his success at the Universal Exhibition of 1878, and deducing from the descriptions in his 1880 publication what Delaporte had learnt from the plaster cast museums in London, we can conclude that at this moment he had quite a precise vision for his museum project in Paris. It was meant as an instructive and picturesque parcours through fragmental metonymic ensembles, and the freestanding pavilion-like plaster cast reproductions were intended to convince the visitor of the unequalled quality of Angkorian temple architecture and the legitimacy of the French colonial (archaeological) mission in Indochina. Contrary to the newly built Architectural Courts in London, Delaporte was confronted with the spatial constraints of the internal exhibition space at the Trocadero palace. Retired in 1880 from the French navy and still disenchanted by the Louvre’s snobbish refusal of his Angkor collection, Delaporte convinced the Ministry of Fine Arts and Public Instruction to support his second and last personal mission to Angkor with a decree in 8 September 188138 and a letter to the governor of Cochinchina, Charles Le Myre de Vilers.39 In the biography Louis Delaporte, explorateur (1842–1925): Ses missions aux ruines khmères by René de Beauvais (reportedly the pseudonym of Delaporte’s wife, Hélène Savard), the Société académique indo-chinoise of which Delaporte had been a member since its foundation in 1877, is mentioned as having subsidised the mission, which continued from “3 October 1881 to 15 February 1882”.40 In these few months, Delaporte had, for the second time after his 1874 mission, “tried, sometimes in vain, to decipher the ensembles and details [of the Angkorian temples] with a pencil, a camera, and the medium of plaster casts” (Beauvais 1929, 195, 197).

A four-page letter to Louis de Ronchaud, the Sécretaire général de la direction des Beaux-Arts, which Delaporte wrote from “Angkor” on 29 November 1881, gives us some insight into how he paralleled his mission to translate Khmer architecture on the ‘real site’ with his ambitious museum project in Paris. Delaporte describes how, with the governor of Cochinchina’s additional support of 8,000 francs, personnel, and material, he was already “installed at Angkor for ten days” to study “the pagoda of Angkor Wat, to execute plans, photographs, plaster casts […] of remarkable fragments and masterpieces […], and to acquire some original objects”. He went on to deem that these undertakings would be altogether successful results for France “once the installation of the Khmer museum would finally be settled”.41 An undated report by the captain of Delaporte’s boat Mousqueton gives us important insight into the enormous struggles faced by this mission with its seventy helpers and fifteen tons of material including “apparatus, bags of plaster and gelatine, 250 drafting plates”, etc. The central group of this mission formed by Delaporte included Félix Faraut as draftsman, photographer, and explorer, the medical doctor Ernault J. Laederich as photographer,42 Joseph Ghilardi as plasterer and special appointee of the Ministry of Fine Arts (he was already involved in the restoration of various collections on display during the 1878 Exhibition), Thil as draftsman and “employé des Ponts et chaussées”, two interpreters, one corporal with ten guardians, three servants, and a carpenter to build the wooden boxes for transport of the fragile plaster casts.43 Three other letters by Delaporte dated 11 to 13 January 1882 survive; these were written to Vilers from the Saigon Hospital. He returned to France shortly thereafter, severely ill and having left his personnel behind to finalise the mission’s task. In these letters he stated – significantly for this chapter’s focus on transla-

38  Arrêté du ministère de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts (CARAN F21/4489), quoted in Zéphir 1996, 67. 39  On 16 September 1881, minister Ferry reported to Vilers that he had entrusted Delaporte with an “artistic and archaeological mission […] to the neighbouring regions of the French colony” and ordered him to “execute a copy of each plaster cast from his journey for the planned archaeological [Indochinese] museum in Saigon” (compare with Maisonneufve-Lacoste 1881). In December, Ferry mentioned that thirty elephants transported the personnel, material, and collections of the mission with a weight of eight thousand kilograms (ANOM INDO GGI 11795). 40  Philippe mentions a budget of 42,000 francs and a departure from Saigon to Angkor on 10 November 1881. See Philippe 2013, 51. 41  Delaporte to Ronchaud (Angkor, 29 November 1881), in: CARAN F17/2953, quoted in Combe 2000, annex 1. 42  In her studies about Delaporte’s missions and his private archive, Philippe mentions Laederich’s personal letter of 20 August 1880 to Delaporte as “dessinateur au dépôt des Cartes et plan de la Marine” (Philippe 2013, 51). An undated Album de voyage by Laederich is preserved in the archive of the musée Guimet in Paris (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 70, 100). 43  Two reports by the Capitaine du Mousqueton (no name and no date, ANOM INDO GGI 11795).

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tion as a phenomenon of colonial appropriation – that the moulds executed during the mission were “of the same finesse as the originals” and that their retouched plaster cast versions were “to be considered as originals themselves […] of an overall value of 60,000 francs”.44 Back in Paris, in 1889 Delaporte was nominated honorary “conservateur du musée Indo-chinois du Trocadéro”45 (Beauvais 1929, 199). The museum was also called the musée des antiquités Cambodgiennes and would finally find its place in the Trocadero palace. In the early 1880s, however, his museum was far from ready.46 A spatial and chronological reconstitution of the musée Indo-chinois is difficult to attain (no officially published version of the floor plan could be located for this research), and Delaporte constantly modified the arrangement up to his death in 1925. A 1903 floor plan of the overall situation in the Trocadero palace (with annotations from the director of the musée de Sculpture comparée, Enlart) (Pl. III.6) and a detailed map indicate the general placement of Dela­ porte’s museum in the left (south-western) Passy wing (Fig. III.24). As regards the arrangement of the exhibits inside the museum, Delaporte himself sketched two alternative floor plans in a letter dated to 26 July 1886 (Figs. III.25a,b) and reconfirmed the “colouring of the monuments” to Albert Kaempfen, directeur des beaux-arts.47 The intended colouring of Delaporte’s plaster cast exhibits was – contrary to Viollet-le-Duc’s neutral display – a constant topic of discussion. However, the intended colour scheme “in gold and silver [as] an indispensable operation to give the museum its veritable character” (Delaporte in 1887)48 could not be reconfirmed through the present research.49 According to Delaporte’s 1886 version of the floor plans, the visitor would enter the end pavilion of the Trocadero on the ground level and encounter the first monumental and original exhibit as the “group of the giants” for which Delaporte had lately received more original pieces to replace older plaster cast additions (compare Figs. II. 21 and 23).50 On the second floor of the parcours – and here the transcultur-

Figure III.24  The placement of the musée Indo-chinois in a sketch plan, maybe by Louis Delaporte ca. 1880 in the Archive of the National Museums in the Louvre (Source: © Archives de musées nationaux, Paris)

al contact zone between the European display from the musée de Sculpture comparée and the Asian (‘Indochinese’) one was just divided by a single door (Fig. III.26a) – the visitor was confronted with a blend of different types of architectural display: ascending the staircase, to his left and right he passed ensembles of singular casts (against the neutral background of a mysterious black velum), which were, in

44  See: ANOM INDO GGI 11795. 45  Decree from the Fine Arts Ministry, 31 January 1889 (CARAN F21/4489, quoted in Zéphir 1996, 67). 46  In a letter written in April 1883 Delaporte reported to Albert Kaempfen, directeur des beaux-arts between

1882 and 1887, that “his plasterer” would be ready to deliver “the complete collection of the Khmer plaster casts, including these pieces for the two planned architectural monuments, for the final museum location” for a sum of 25,000 francs, which included Delaporte’s future acquisitions. Delaporte to Kaempfen, Paris 30 April 1883 (AMN 5HH1-11). 47  Delaporte to Kaempfen, Plombières 26 July 1886, five p. (AMN 5HH1-11). 48  Delaporte on 11 December 1887 to Antonin Proust, president of the Commission des monuments historiques and later commissioner of the 1889 Exhibition in Note relative à l’installation complête du Musée khmer en vue de l’Exposition Universelle de 1889 (Musée Guimet – Dossier Musée Indo-chinois, Correspondence Delaporte 1886–1911). 49  One rare case of a coloured plaster cast as result of Delaporte’s Angkor mission in 1896–97 (with Urbain Basset, see later in this chapter) was just restored for the 2013 exhibition in the musée Guimet. See Baptiste/ Zéphir 2013, 158, cat. 129. 50  This ensemble had to be moved from the first to the ground floor due to the weight of its original sandstone.

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Figures III.25a,b  Floor plan variations in a letter of Delaporte in 1886 (Source: © Archives de musées nationaux, Paris)

Figure III.26a  On the threshold between Europe and Asia, with a plaster cast display of the head of the Marseillaise (Le départ des volontaires 1792) by François Rude (1833–36) inside the musée de Sculpture comparée in the foreground, and the display of Angkor in the neighbouring room (Source: © Médiathèque du patrimoine Paris, Fonds Olivier)

Figure III.26b  Inside the musée Indo-chinois with plaster casts, bas reliefs and a face tower element from the thirteenth-century Bayon temple (Source: © Médiathèque du patrimoine Paris, Fonds Durand)

the visitor’s imagination, formed into coherent stylistic entities. This was true with the Ta Prohm or a Bayon-style group containing a few originals on pedestals, 1:1-scale copies of long bas-reliefs, and single decorative elements that framed a central giant plaster cast from a face tower (from Fournereau’s mission, see below) (Fig. III.26b). To a certain extent, these wall-bound fragment montages (in-scale cop-

ies and separated from each other) served Delaporte’s metonymic strategy, introduced in Lenoir’s musée des Monuments français nine decades earlier (compare Fig. III.3b). A second type of exhibit was seen in the display of largescale 1:1 casts of entire original architectural elements. In London Delaporte had certainly seen this solution at work in the architectural museums and in South Kensington’s

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Figure III.27a  The inner facade element of the Western main entry gate of Angkor Wat in the musée Indo-chinois (Source: © Musée Guimet, Photographic Archive)

Figure III.27b  The plaster cast facade of the fontaine de Grosse Horloge in Rouen, displayed in the musée de Sculpture comparée (Source: Marcou/Frantz 1898, series 5, 18th century, plate 34)

Architectural Courts. However, the freestanding plaster cast of an entire rectangular facade element from the inner-western entry gate of Angkor Wat (Fig. III.27a) was, with its monochrome background, strikingly similar in proportion and iconic effect to exhibits like that of the plaster cast of the eighteenth-century ‘Fontaine de Grosse Horloge’ from Rouen (Fig. III.27b) in the neighbouring musée de Sculpture comparée. There was a third type of display that was still wall-bound but was augmented in its three-dimensional quality and composed as a total architectural hybrid (Fig. III.28). Placed prominently in front of the ascending staircase and under the open and iron gabled roof structure of the Trocadero, Delaporte’s creative prototype was, according to an 1886 letter, a “complete and characteristic monument d’architecture”. It was made out of two bent balustrades with balusters and Naga-headed end pieces

from ‘Pémanacas’; a sculptured staircase, two lions, the base, a pediment frame, and door decorations from ‘Préakan’; door frames from ‘Ta Prohm’; and columns and pilasters from the ‘Tamononi’ temples.51 This first hybrid form of architectural reconstitution, along with the idea of exhibiting larger-than-life parts of Angkor Wat, certainly inspired Delaporte to instigate a third plaster cast campaign in Angkor. Its main protagonist in the absence of Delaporte was the Saigon-based BeauxArts-trained architect Lucien Fournereau. Formerly the chef du Service des tra­vaux in French Guiana, and later inspecteur des Bâtiments civils in Saigon and member of the Société des architectes français (Amougou 2008, 173–75), Fournereau was charged, during a visit to Delaporte’s museum in 1877, with this archaeological mission by Minister of Fine Arts and Public Instruction Eugène Spuller and

51  In a section entitled “Organisation du Musée en vue d’une prochaine ouverture au public”, Delaporte

listed the next steps: 1) the installation of the plaster casts and diverse pieces from the last (1881–82) mission, which had been purchased by the state and completed with some decoration and colouring; 2) the transport of the plaster casts and originals from Compiègne and their installation with the help of the Directeur des bâtimens civils. Additional space for the moulds was needed, as well as a securing of the gates and a separation from the musée des moulages du Louvre. Delaporte to Kaempfen, Plombières 26 July 1886 (AMN 5HH1–11).

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Figure III.28  Hybrid installation inside of the musée Indo-chinois with plaster casts from various temples (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris)

Director Kaempfen. Together with Sylvain Raffegaud, the sculptor of the Saigon public works department,52 and Kerautret, the inspecteur des travaux public, a mission of eighteen people left Saigon on 12 December 1887 and journeyed by boat to Siem Reap via Phnom Penh, reaching their base camp at Angkor Wat right after Christmas of 1887. According to Fournereau’s lengthy report in the journal L’Architecture (1889) and a summary in La construction moderne (E. R. 1888), his mission ended in late March 1888. He brought home “520 plaster casts of fourteen temple structures, thirteen original sculptures in sandstone and wood, numerous drawings of floor plans, profiles, sections, colour studies, and 350 photographs” (Fournereau 1889, reprint in Amougou 2008, 143). Fournereau’s internal report made up six densely written pages dated to 11 August 1888 and was addressed to the minister of public instruction and fine arts at the time, Édouard Lockroy. Published on 4 October in the Journal officiel de la République Fran­ çaise, it can be read as one of the most significant manuscripts on the giant ‘colonial translation project’ of Angkor and as one of the most detailed descriptions about the te-

dious on-site operations.53 According to these lines, he left Saigon on 17 December 1887 with Raffegeaud, Kerautret, one indigenous draftsman, five Chinese plasterers, one carpenter, two helpers for scaffoldings, six Annamite coolis, and a small military escort to protect the mission against stray gangs from a recent revolt. The material for this massive translation operation comprised of twenty-six barrels of plaster (more than four thousand litres!), six barrels of potter’s clay [terre à modeler] and two barrels of gelatin, three hundred planks for the wooden transport boxes, extra tools, and the provisions for the group (Fournereau 1888, 4064). After a stopover in Phnom Penh on 19 December to pick up two sea-adapted trailers from architect Fabre (director of the public work service and architect of the Cambodian pavilion of the 1889 Exhibition, see next chapter), they reached the Siem Reap River on 24 December. They unloaded the material onto seventy barges and sixty-nine ox carts, which were provided “by the Siamese governor of Siem Reap province at an exorbitant rate” and installed themselves “for the next forty-three days” in the provided “tourist huts” right at the Angkor Wat temple

52  Interestingly, Raffegeaud’s own report did not speak of any plaster cast operations (Raffegaud 1888). 53  A draft version of this report survived in which Fournereau complained that many of the plaster casts

from the last Delaporte mission “were disseminated all around, landed on the verandas and offices [of French and foreign officials], and were mostly damaged or destroyed” (cited in Combe 2000, annexe 5).

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Figure III.29  The mission at Angkor, the right person probably Lucien ­Fournereau (Source: © Musée Guimet, Photographic Archive)

within an active crowds of “monks, devotees, and pilgrims”. Here Fournereau began his operation “to bring together the missing fragments to complete and to replace some already lost objects in the musée Khmer”. In this internal report Fournereau referred to the political, propagandistic, and instructive dimension of his translation project. He mentioned the concurrent London project of displaying reproduced colonial antiquity, and he anticipated outmatching – “for the honour of our [French] country” – the “generic plaster cast reconstitution [moulages des types] of India in the India and South Kensington Museums”. Additionally, he emphasised that his “eighty-two boxes” of translation products, as “a patient work of reconstitution that revives the isolated fragments”, would be of great value for the administration, the architects, the art lovers, and the industrial and artistic productions of diverse genres” alike (Fournereau 1888, 4065). Interestingly, Delaporte planned these plaster cast campaigns (without him) painstakingly in France and gave very detailed “Instructions” to

his collaborators. These detailed descriptions (Pl. III.7)54, which included a wide range of texts, sketches, drawings, and indications on all the specific surfaces to be moulded, have survived in the private archive of the Delaporte family in Loches and give us a fascinating insight into Delaporte’s vision of an all-encompassing translation project of Angkor for the French métropole that can now be compared with rare photographs from the missions themselves (Figs. III.29, 30).55 Fournereau’s first cast operation covered the western main entry of Angkor Wat (Pl. III.8), which reached a total height of twelve metres, with the help of “eight workers for eleven days” (the attached list documenting the operation mentioned a copied “surface of 4 metres width and 11.45 metres height in 45 elements”). The second operation comprised casts of the central eastern bas-relief gallery with the ‘Churning of the Milk Ocean’ scene (see Pl. Intro.10c). Fournereau put a special emphasis on his colour studies of various decorations in the temples (compare Pl. III.13). Re-

54  Thanks go to Pierre Baptiste, Thierry Zéphir, Jérôme Ghesquière et Dominique Fayolle-Reninger from

the Musée Guimet for their help and to Jérôme Hayaux de Tilly for his permission to publish this important material of his family’s (Delaporte’s) home archive in Loches. 55  For this information I am very thankful to Julie Philippe (see Philippe 2011, 2013). Details and pages of Delaporte’s Carnet de recommendations de Louis Delaporte were given in the musée Guimet catalogue Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe of 2013 (see Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 61, 138, 140–41).

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Figure III.30  The plaster cast mission to Angkor, most probably during the Fournereau mission in 1888 (Source: © Musée Guimet, Photographic Archive)

fraining from making moulds of the central Buddha statue musée Guimet (Fig. III.31b) may depict the central pediment out of religious respect, the next operation covered the right at the moment when the moulding procedure began. “grand ensemble of the [lower eastern section of the] central These can now, more than one hundred years later, be comtower” using a “vertiginous scaffolding of eleven metres out pared with the rediscovered plaster cast ‘re-translation’ for of bamboo and planks” to mould “a complete pediment and the pavilion-like reconstitution in Delaporte’s museum (Fig. two half pediments, the tympanum, lintels, piers and pilas- III.32). This time Fournereau did not compare the forthters of a development of 8 metres width by 11.25 metres coming reproduction of Angkor Wat’s central tower with the height in 214 elements” (Fournereau 1888, 4065, 4068). An British museum projects, but instead with the exhibited illustration in Fournereau’s own 1890 publication Ruines “[Gothic] cathedral gates in the neighbouring musée de d’Angkor (Fig. III.31a) and a historic photo found in the Sculpture comparée” (Fournereau 1888, 4065). After a com164

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Figure III.31a  Bamboo scaffolding to Angkor Wat’s pediment field on the lower central tower, south-east side, on a photograph taken most probably right before the moulding process, illustrated in the 1890 publication Les ruines d’Angkor by Lucien Fournereau and Jacques Porcher (Source: Fournereau/Porcher 1890, 6)

Figure III.31b  The same pediment field of ­Angkor Wat’s lower central tower, west side, on a photograph taken most probably right before the moulding process (Source: © Musée Guimet Archive, Photographic Archive)

Figure III.32  The same decorative surface as above, translated in a plaster cast, rediscovered in the storage at St. Riquier/France in 2002 (Source: photo by Pierre Baptiste, musée Guimet 2002)

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plete site plan of the temple made with the help of a theodo- sought to show that the French tricolore flag was already lite, colour and construction studies, sketches, eighty-six unremovably placed on Indochinese territory.56 photographs of Angkor Wat, and the first part of the plaster Most of the plaster casts reached the Trocadero musecasts being sent to Saigon on 9 January 1888 by the gunboat um to complete Delaporte’s collections, and some of them Bouclier, the mission moved on to Angkor Thom on 9 Feb- were reused in the first Cambodian outdoor pavilion (by ruary 1888. It camped, as Delaporte had done fourteen years the architect Fabre) for the 1889 Universal Exhibition in earlier, near the “Piméan-acas” temple site. Here, the focus Paris (see below). As a parallel method to the physical reconstitution of Angkor on French soil within Delaporte’s was the Bayon temple; one whole face of its sculpted towers [tourelle à masque], of 3 metres width and 4.5 metres height, museum and the exhibition pavilion and following what was moulded. The rest of Fournereau’s report covered site we termed the ‘architectural affordance’ quality of Angkor visits and recorded works from other temple sites including Wat in the context French Beaux-Arts aesthetics (see introthe Baphuon and the Roluos site southeast of Angkor. duction), Fournereau executed an impressive series of waOn 25 March 1888 the plaster provisions were exhaust- tercolours and drawings of his 1887/88 studies in Angkor. ed and the mission was in the process of storing eighty-two Signed by the architect with the date “March 1889”, they boxes of mouldings safely in Siem Reap against theft, hu- were presented in the section of scientific missions in the midity, and insects before it left for Saigon. With no further palais des Arts libéraux at the Champ-de-Mars during the access to sites on the Siamese side, the group visited other 1889 Exhibition. Thirteen of these – immense in size, each temples inside the French territory of Cambodia. The mou- measuring from one to four metres length – are located in lages from Angkor (next to the incoming samples from the current archives of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.57 Champa, Siam, Burma, and Java) would allow his team, as Six sheets covered “Anghor-Vat (Pagode Royale)” in a Fournereau put it, to “reconstitute 4 monuments d’architec- unique blend of ground floors (Pl. III.9), sections and eleture in large scale, 14 of smaller dimensions, and 122 diverse vations in different scales, ranging from 1:200- to 1:10-scale objects”. This would help viewers “to appreciate the charac- building parts (Pl. III.10a,b and Pl. III.11) and in an alterteristic traits of the three epochs of Khmer art” (Fournereau nating mode of actual half-­ruined and ideally restored con1888, 4067) from a “fantastic epoch” represented by Preah ditions embedded in a lush exotic vegetation and rendered Khan, a classical period represented by Angkor Wat, and a in bright watercolours. Two sheets were totally new in their third period of brick temples. This periodisation (as a con- message and therefore crucial for the new type of hybrid cept comparable to Viollet-le-Duc on the basis of Winckel- reconstitutions of the Angkor pavilions: one comprised of mann) was proven incorrect following the art historical ten affixed smaller papers of detailed relief and profile studdebates launched by Philippe Stern in the subsequent dec- ies (Pl. III.12), elevations of decorative elements (Fig. ades. A list that Fournereau included gave a detailed “reca- III.33) – compare their present condition inside the upper pitulation of the 520 acquired moulages” containing 241 storeys of the central tower of Angkor Wat (Fig. III.34) –, a from Angkor Wat and 61 from the Bayon alone. Of the perspectival view, and a colour study “Vestige de peinture” thirteen original objects, six came from Angkor Wat in- from Angkor Wat’s inner ‘cruciform gallery’ (Pl. III.13). cluding the last wooden ceiling element inside the first- Another sheet featured an impressive watercolour called floor gallery, stone balusters, and the ‘Reclining Buddha on “Ruines khmères du Cambodge” that merged different arthe Cruciform Gallery’. Besides four hundred photographs, chitectural fragments and motifs, Buddhist monks as the drawings focused on Angkor Wat’s overall site plan, staffage figures, and picturesque landscape elements into a and on profile and colour analyses, but they also covered hybrid Piranesian collage of the eternal ruin of Angkor temples like “Ba-puon, Préa-pithu, Pimêanacas, Leley, Préa- (depicted in chapter IX as Pl. IX.5). In fact this was not far cû, and Bacong” (Fournereau 1888, 4068). At the end of his removed from Lenoir’s 1806 depiction of a jardin Élysée, written report, Fournereau’s emphatically patriotic under- see Fig. III.6). In 1890, Fournereau published a representatone linked his translation of Angkor less with Dela­porte’s tive collection of his plaster casts, drawings, and photographs from Angkor in Les ruines khmères, Cambodge et museum and more with the French gesture of colonial power during the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris, which Siam: Documents complémentaires d’architecture, de sculp56  Fournereau 1888, 4068, compare the whole dossier “Mission Fournereau” in ANOM INDO GGI 23792. 57  Besides a magnificent elevation and plan from Bangkok’s “Vat-Cheng” temple, the set comprises six

sheets from “Anghor-Vat” (the overall site in plan and longitudinal section in 1:200 scale, one north-south section of the inner enclosure as ideal “restauration”, two ideal 1:10-scale section/elevation drawings, and one sheet with ten detailed studies comprising three reliefs/profiles, five elevations of decorative elements, one perspective and one colour study), four sheets of the Baphuon temple with an elevation, plan, section, and a sheet with nine profile studies and three photos of the ruin, and, finally, the above-mentioned watercolour composition called “Ruines khmères du Cambodge” (compare the online catalogue Cat’zArts of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris). The author would like to thank Emmanuel Schwartz and Monique Antilogus of ENSBA Paris for their help.

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Figure III.33  Decoration study of an Apsara figure at Angkor Wat in pencil and watercolour technique by Fournereau in 1889 (Source: © ENSBA Paris)

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Figure III.34  The decoration inside the central tower of Angkor as photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in his 2005 publication Angkor – A photographic portrait (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

ture et de céramique (Fournereau 1890) when most of them were already exhibited in Delaporte’s museum (Figs. III.35a,b). In the same year and with the help of Jacques Porcher, professor at the Parisian École municipale J.-B. Say, Fournereau’s book Les ruines d’Angkor: Étude artistique et historique sur les monuments khmers du Cambodge siamois made the above-mentioned coloured drawings accessible (Fournereau/Porcher 1890). In an extended joint mission to Angkor and other parts of Indochina with architect Henri Vildieu (adjoint au chef du service des Bâtiments civils in Saigon and responsible for the Annam and Tonkin pavilions in the 1889 Exhibition; see chapter IV), the Saigon-based sculptor Sylvain Raffe­ geaud undertook a second mission archéologique from ­October 1890 to March 1891 in Delaporte’s name. Similar

to Delaporte’s 1873/74 mission – where the local Siamese authorities strictly forbade the removal of original objects (Delaporte totally ignored this edict) and the execution of mouldings and drawings was the only authorised ‘translation mode’ for Angkor’s antiquity – Raffegeaud was even confronted with the direct intervention of Norodom, the Cambodian king, who warned him against further theft and the overexploitation of the human labour force.58 As various further correspondence proves, Delaporte’s Khmer museum became a veritable ‘transfer’, or, better yet, a ‘translation site or trading port’ of plaster casts and original artefacts from Angkor, Indochina, and even the whole of Southeast Asia. It not only actively commissioned and acquired moulds from Angkor under Delaporte’s initiative and provided the ‘generic code’ for the multiform Angkor

58  The king wrote an anxious letter to Phnom Penh’s Résident supérieur in February 1891 not only to prevent

the exploitation of Cambodian peasants for the transportation of original objects due to the season’s heavy workload in their rice fields, but also to intervene against the direct theft of original temple sculptures as an “act of destruction of Khmer religion” and a direct affront against “Cambodian customs since antiquity and during all kingships” (King Norodom to the Résident supérieur in Phnom Penh from his Palais royal on 2 February 1891). Reflecting the typical colonial attitude, the Résident superieur wrote to the acting gouverneur général de l’Indo-chine in Saigon, Jules George Piquet, that the king would “close his eyes to the removal of artistic sculptures on the condition that no reclamations by the Cambodians would be raised” (Résident Supérieur to the Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine, Phnom Penh 6 February 1891). A letter dated to 23 March 1891 by Raffegeaud reconfirmed the sending of twenty-five boxes to France, a letter from 30 November 1891 indicated the dispatch of thirty-two boxes with about 190 objects, to the French port of Toulon (ANOM INDO GGI 23794 – Mission Sylvain Raffegeaud 1890–92). Their reception was reconfirmed by Delaporte (Musée Guimet – Dossier Musée Indo-chinois, Correspondence Delaporte 1886–1911).

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4. Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois — the first and last French museum of Angkor

Figures III.35a,b  Plaster casts from Angkor Wat as produced and published by Lucien Fournereau and Jacques Porcher in 1890 (Source: Fournereau/Porcher 1890, plates 66 and 17)

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pavilions in the following exhibitions in France, but also received original objects and plaster casts from private ­donors, traders, and expired exhibitions like the Lyon Exhibition of 1894, Rouen of 1896, or the Javanese plaster cast collection of the Dutch-colonial mission at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris.59 The last plaster cast mission to Angkor under Dela­ porte’s indirect supervision was carried out by the sculptor Urbain Basset in the winter of 1896/97.60 A short inventory by Delaporte (most probably on 13 June 1897) mentioned Basset’s remit to make plaster casts from Angkor Wat for “the completion of the ensembles of the grand entry gate of the central tower, of the grand rectangular pilaster of the western entry, and the Naga sculpture from the decorative ensemble of the principle [western] entry gate”.61 Several boxes of casts “for the restitution of the Bayon temple” were mentioned in relation to Basset’s mission and the musée Guimet. Interestingly, Delaporte’s request for another acquisition of the “Restitution en relief du temple de Baïon” as a work by “Capitaine Filoz” (Delaporte’s colleague in his 1874 mission) was turned down by the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1897, but it was finally accepted in 1901. 62 The musée Indo-chinois was opened for a short time in 1884, was partly accessible through 1888,63 reopened definitely during the 1889 Universal Exhibition, and remained a permanently open institution during the 1900 Exhibition (Phi­ lippe 2011, compare Houe 1992, 30–36, 51–52). Indeed, the above-mentioned architectural reconstitutions were executed in Delaporte’s museum and offered different types of ‘literal or free translations’ (after Benjamin 1923, see introduction) from the original source. The western entry gate of Angkor Wat was built as a veritable 1:1 translation with only few alterations (compare Dela­ porte’s preparatory sketch, Pl. III.7, 8).64 Comparing the illustration inside Guérinet’s undated photographic publication documenting the musée Indo-chinois (Pl. III.14a) with the actual situation at Angkor Wat in 201065 (Pl. III.14b–d)

demonstrates the high accuracy of this architectural translation, despite the fact that parts of the lintel may have already been missing back then.66 A similar approach was used for the giant 1:1 reproduction of the eastern entry to the central tower of Angkor Wat (Fig. III.36, see next page). The presentation of this architectural translation was, to a certain extent, a hybrid reminiscent of Cuvier’s, Jean-Marc Bourgery’s and Viollet-le-Duc’s analyses of comparative anatomy and sculpture (compare Figs. III.8a,b and 9a,b) in which the spectator could, in the best sense of the word, even enter the dissected body or architecture on display. However, this was a presentation mode that Delaporte had certainly experienced in realiter and ‘copied’ from V ­ iolletle-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée on the other side of the Trocadero palace (compare Fig. III.14). The central pediment of ‘Krishna killing Kamsa with his sword’ had been (as we have depicted it in the Figs. III.31a,b), photographed right during the execution of the mould during Fournereau’s mission. In its ‘original’ location at Angkor Wat (Fig. III.37, see next page), both lower half pediments show scenes from the epic poem the Ramayana. Interestingly, Delaporte copied only the lower left half pediment for his reconstitution in Paris, which depicted the alliance of Rama and Lakshmana in the presence of the monkey-king Sugriva. The original lower right half pediment was replaced with a scene from another half pediment located on the northern part of the central tower, probably due to the already decayed state of the original or to Delaporte’s desire to create a more balanced composition for the Parisian museum. Delaporte himself had already tested this analytical approach in his own drawings for Garnier’s 1873 publication (Fig. III.38), and summed his knowledge about Angkor Wat’s central tower up in drawing within his 1924 publication Les monuments du Cambodge (Fig. III.39). However, Delaporte’s representation of the Bayon temple in his museum as a freestanding and hybrid structure

59  Compare: Musée Guimet Archive (Dossier Musée Indo-chinois, Correspondence Delaporte 1886–1911). 60  The “Mission Basset 1896” was mentioned briefly in the file ANOM INDO GGI 23791. 61  Quoted in: Combe 2000, annexe 6, further data on Basset on pages 14, 37–38. 62  Compare the letters from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts of 8 December 1897 and 26

March 1901 to Delaporte (Musée Guimet Archive). 63 The Société centrale des architectes français visited the museum in 1888, compare with Roux 1888, 544. 64  In the section on Angkor Vat: Les ‘entrées occidentales’, the musée Guimet catalogue of 2013 gives some important details about this project, the installation of which is dedicated to the 1881–82 plaster cast mission to Angkor and the plasterer Joseph Ghilardi (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 146–47, cat. 107). 65  The author would like to thank the photographer Jaroslav Poncar for the tour given in 2011 to these sites of historic moulding procedures at Angkor Wat. 66  However, it is not unlikely that the currently missing part of the original lintel was destroyed during the historic moulding process. Simon Warrack, stone conservator for many years of the German Apsara Conservation Project (GACP) at Angkor Wat, reconfirmed that many facade elements were probably damaged by these moulding processes with aggressive cement. The author would like to thank Simon Warrack for this information during many conversations in 2010 and 2011 on site, and the director of GACP, Prof. Hans Leisen for his valuable help over so many years (compare epilogue II).

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Figure III.38  Delaporte’s drawings of Angkorian temples as published in Garnier’s 1873 publication Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, part 1, plate XVIII; © Heidelberg University Library)

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Figure III.36  The eastern entry to Angkor Wat’s central tower as staged in Delaporte’s ­museum in Paris around 1900 (Source: Guérinet n.d., plate 2)

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4. Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois — the first and last French museum of Angkor

Figure III.37  Roof and pediment above the eastern entry to Angkor Wat’s central tower as ­photographed by Jaroslav Poncar in 1994 (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

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Figure III.39  Delaporte’s drawing of the western elevation of Angkor Wat’s central tower as published in his 1914–24 publication Les monuments du Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1914–24, pl. 36; © Bibliothèque ­nationale de France)

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4. Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois — the first and last French museum of Angkor

Figure III.40  The hybrid reconstitution of the Bayon-styled tower in the musée Indo-chinois around 1900 (Source: © INHA Archive, Bridgeman Paris/Fonds Giraudon)

was totally new.67 This pioneering effort would influence the aesthetics of Angkor pavilions in the universal and colonial exhibitions until 1937 (Fig. III.40). The giant masque had been taken (or simply duplicated) from the formerly metonymic display (compare with Fig. III.26b) and integrat-

ed into the upper structure of the new model (it was recently rediscovered, see at the end of this chapter). All single decorative elements were considered authentic (literally translated) per se but were in fact reassembled into a hybrid and picturesque structure as a ‘free’ or creative interpretation

67  The catalogue entry “La tour à visages du Bayon” in the Guimet catalogue of 2013 gives us some more

details on how Delaporte instructed Fournereau and Raffegeaud in his Carnet des recommandations for their 1889 mission. Here it becomes clear that various different parts all over the Bayon temples were copied and, back in Paris, hybridised into one single structure. The catalogue also gives a series of preparatory sketches, and, as a highlight of the exhibition of the musée Guimet in 2013, the restored upper part of the Bayon-like reconstitution (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 159–61).

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of the original ‘Khmer text’ that Delaporte wanted to make ‘readable’ for the general French public. This large-scale reconstitution as the indisputable highlight of the museum was certainly an object of great satisfaction for the patriot Delaporte; here, finally, was an impressive French-colonial answer to the British 1:1 reconstitutions of Indian antiquities like the Sanchi gate in the South Kensington Museum. If we accept Delaporte’s rarely published words as a guide through his own museum of French-colonial art of the Orient, which he considered the logical “prolongation” of the parcours through the Occidental musée de Sculpture comparée at the other side of the Trocadero, it is probable that the whole parcours through his museum was more or less completed around 1900. In this published text and in line what we termed in this introduction as Angkor Wat’s ‘performative affordance quality’, did Delaporte ask his visitors to forget all

about the Orient, to “transport themselves into Indochina”. They should “reconstruct in their imaginations” the ancient temple site by wandering through the “specimens and partial restitutions that provided some idea” of the real site – an ancient splendid temple city which lay supposedly abandoned and uncared for in the jungle waiting to be rescued by the French (Delaporte 1901, 35–46).Through Delaporte’s temple translation for the French métropole and the ideal or idealised architectural reconstitution and its inclusion in a performative museum parcours, the visitor was both familiarised with and initiated into the French-colonial vision. Existing in parallel, the ‘real’ site of Angkor was mentally converted from a living, religious site to a dead archaeological ruin and canonised as French cultural patrimoine – even before this actually happened after Siam’s retrocession of Angkor to (French) Cambodia in 1907.

5. Competing translations: “Not for show but for the sciences” — ­Angkor in the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin68 […] and it will be a pleasure to prove to our dear friends of the Seine that a German museum can possess and exhibit what a French museum is hiding in childish and stingy pettiness. —Thomann to Grünwedel, 8 December 1897

With the political vacuum hanging over Angkor around 1900 – the Siamese government in Bangkok seemed not to be particularly interested in the cultural and political asset of Angkor, and the local administration was pliable to the interests of incoming foreigners in their race to amass the best collections of artefacts – other European nations began to be curious about Angkor. Around 1900 it was surprisingly not Delaporte’s museum that owned the largest coherent ‘facsimile’ of the decorative surfaces of Angkor Wat but the Ethnographical Museum (Völkerkundemuseum) in Berlin. It possessed altogether three hundred mouldings totalling two hundred metres in length and up to three metres height of the famous bas-reliefs (six hundred square metres!).69 However, the German Empire did not attempt to augment its famous Indian collections in Berlin with specimens of Hinterindien in the context of a direct colonial interest like the French but rather to contribute to the cultural and scientific prestige befitting a rising European power. As

a result of this different motive behind the physical translation of Angkor, Berlin’s display was completely dissimilar to the French one. Commissioned by Adolf Bastian, the director of the museum and great Indianist who had visited Angkor right after Henri Mouhot (Bastian 1868), together with Albert Grünwedel, the head of the Indian section, these mouldings were executed in Angkor in 1898 by the rather dubious adventurer Harry Thomann (alias Gillis), and were purchased by the museum in 1903. They were displayed from 1904 until the destruction of the museum during World War II, and have by now been slowly rediscovered. From the very beginning the German argument for the Angkor mouldings was formulated in terms that were directly competitive with the French project. In March 1898 Grünwedel reported that “Bastian had tried several times in vain to purchase copies from the musée Khmer,70 which was even kept hidden in an artillery school at Compiègne [sic], but a unique opportunity to acquire maybe some origi­

68  Results of this research have been published in: Falser 2012/14. Thanks go to Martina Stoye, Beate Ebelt, Toralf Gabsch at the Berlin Museums, Bertold Just (†), and Thomas Schelper of the Gipsformerei, and Wibke Lobo. New results were discussed during a conference in 2015 in Berlin and published 2016 online publication Casting. A way to embrace the digital age in analogue fashion? (compare Falser 2016b). Thanks for new photographic material go to Tamara von Rechenberg/Heidelberg. 69  A 400-page file “Museum für Völkerkunde – Acta betreffend die Erwerbung ethnologischer Gegenstände durch H. Thomann (Pars I.B.31, 1897–1909)” from the archive of the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin/ Dahlem will be cited in English translation in the following discussion. 70  Indeed, Delaporte had exchanged a lion head for a lion sculpture with the Dresden Ethnographical ­Museum in 1885 (Archive Guimet, correspondence Delaporte 1886–1911). Thanks go to Petra Martin at the Dres­den Museum (compare Falser 2012/14 about the Paris-Berlin connection).

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Figure III.41  Harry Thomann (alias A. Gillis) in Angkor, photograph of 1898 (Source: Private ­collection Tamara von Rechenberg/Heidelberg)

nals, certainly paper mouldings [Abklatsche, Papiermulden] and photos from Angkor on the Siamese territory had come up” (Grünwedel to Weißbach of the Committee for Augmenting the Ethnological Collections of the Royal Museums, 17 March 1898). The agent for this job knew how to bypass the French port authorities in Saigon by using a

faked name and nationality. Thomann left Genoa in April 1898 under his new name “A. Gillis” and three months later reported on the progress of his campaign in Angkor (Fig. III.41), where he attempted to take casts with two assistants and 120 “lazy natives”. Announcing the arrival of his cultural harvest on his return trip via Southampton at the end 177

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Figure III.42  Lists of the incoming mouldings from Angkor by Thomann-Gillis for the Völker­ kundemuseum in Berlin, 1898 (Source: © Ethnographic Museum, Berlin)

of the same year, he declared that he had taken “more than 300 mouldings from the most famous bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Pl. III.15, Fig. III.43), 120 additional paper mouldings, and 130 photos, for a total purchasing prize of 110,000 mark” (Thomann-Grünwedel, 24 November 1898). Different inventory and reception lists (Fig. III.42) prove the arrival of the boxes in the museum, which were unpacked in the presence of Grünwedel. The paper mouldings (compare with Forbes Watson’s manual of 1869) comprised all galleries of Angkor Wat including seven 2.25 by 1.8 metre papers of the famous scenes of the Quirlung des Weltenmeeres in the southeastern gallery (compare Pl. Intro.10c), 123 pieces of “hell-and-heaven” scenes, and seventy rubbings of inscriptions. Grünwedel exercised a curious strategy, one that included a critique of the French translation technique and purpose, in order to finance this purchase. Arguing that “the French had moulded just a few parts directly from unclean stone and only from selected scenes, without any scientific basis and just for an instant show effect [Momenteffekt]”, he recommended the “Maudsley procedure to get more details and larger areas” and suggested the “controlled multiplication” of the collection, which could be “offered to other museums in England or the United States”. The purchase of Thomann’s Angkor collection would, 178

according to Grünwedel, “help to close this intolerable gap inside the Berlin Museum […] and to dwarf the French Angkor project […], an absolutely necessary measure of German patriotism that would secure the leading role of the [German] museum with its collection and research of the Far East”. Justifying the German translation of Angkor from a scientific point of view, Grünwedel concluded in a letter from 1 December 1899 with his hypothesis concerning the French “secrecy regarding Angkor”: The French expeditions have taken away a series of architectural elements and reliefs from the temples in a vandalising manner and executed some mouldings. All this was possible since these structures were forgotten in this country. When Mouhot discovered these temples in 1861, nobody wanted to believe it, not even the Siamese. Then Bastian heard about the ruins and got permission from King Mong Kut to visit them. Others followed, but then it was silent […] The few mouldings by the French made in plaster cast right at the spot produced clumsy results. From a scientific point of view, the French archaeologists did not take coherent surfaces anywhere, but instead here and there just few details according to their bizarreness and effect […] since 1889 it has fallen silent and even

5. Competing translations: “Not for show but for the sciences”

Figure III.43  Photograph of the in-situ bas-relief of Angkor Wat to be moulded during the campaign of Harry Thomann (alias A. Gillis), compare the corresponding list of ­delivered mouldings Fig. III.42 (Source: Private collection Tamara von Rechenberg/­Heidelberg)

the parts brought back to Europe are not accessible. All efforts by our museum to acquire reproductions were in vain. The numerous letters were not even answered and the poor mouldings [of the bas-reliefs] are hidden in Compiègne. It is our [German] duty to give Angkor back to the scientific world and to enable the Germans sciences to fulfill what the French have omitted. […] it seems to be the plan of the French to let Angkor fall into oblivion since they could not gain political control over them and returned only to plunder them. [italics MF]

Grünwedel praised the quality of Thomann’s mouldings of “308 metres of Angkor Wat – against only thirty-three in Compiègne”. However, these numbers only reflect what he

had read in the published 1875 inventory of the musée Khmer (Croizier 1875), which had not been updated to include the current situation in the Trocadero palace. In 1903 the Thomann inventory of 442 entries was bought in its entirety and the mouldings were made into plaster casts and displayed as flat,71 coherent, and 1:1-scale copies of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat along the inner gallery walls of the second, and later of the first floor (Figs. III.44a–d) (Museum 1914, floor plan; Staatliche Museen 1929, 47–48, 52–54). Together with the Schliemann and Turfan collection, the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat contributed to Bastian’s comparative vision of a “universal archive of humanity” (Fischer 2007). This completely two-dimensional and clinical display

71  At different sections of the correspondence it seems that the German side had also tried in vain to assem-

ble the different plaster casts into a freestanding structure.

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Figures III.44a—d  The installation of the plaster casts of Angkor Wat’s bas-reliefs in the Völker­ kundemuseum in Berlin-Stresemannstraße, around 1926 (Source: © Ethnographic Museum, Berlin)

of the bas-reliefs from Angkor Wat in Berlin in the form of a scholarly or literal 1:1 translation with a supposedly pure scientific approach couldn’t have been more different from Delaporte’s free and popular translation of Angkor within

a picturesque and performative French-colonial heritage parcours. However, both versions offered valid strategies with which to provide substitutes for the monumental architecture of Angkor within a Western museum space.72

72  Thomann tried to show parts of his collection to Delaporte in 1904/5 (Archive Guimet – correspondence

Delaporte 1886–1911), but because of the dubious sources of Thomann’s collection Delaporte showed no interest. The Berlin plaster cast collection of Angkor in the Völkerkundemuseum was considered lost after the heavy destruction of the museum during World War II, but parts of their ‘negatives’ (mouldings) survived, were recast and exhibited in the Härtel-Galerie in the Berlin/Dahlem museum complex of West Berlin in the 1980s (Lobo 1986) and in a great Angkor exhibition held in Bonn in 2007 (Kunsthalle 2007, compare Falser 2012/14). At present, they are planned to be incorporated into the Humboldt-Forum in the reconstructed city castle in Berlin (compare Pl. Intro.14b; Falser 2016b, 2017c, 2019a).

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6. Visual fragmentation and physical decontextualisation of Angkor: Towards the iconisation of cultural heritage — La Nave’s and Delaporte’s publications after 1900 Apart from some mission reports and his general publication in 1880, Delaporte was, to a certain degree, a gifted writer and academic-scientific propagator of his museum (Baptiste/ Zéphir 2013). Additionally, he was an enthusiastic amateur and colonial propagator of Khmer architecture as part of France’s territorial claims on Angkor. Thus, after 1900 it was his colleague and attaché au muséum des Antiquités cambodgiennes, Henri La Nave, who publicised Delaporte’s museum in the Revue universelle and the famous Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He repeated the well-known discourse of Ang­ kor’s architectural and decorative equivalence (or even supremacy), in its “grandeur et simplicité”, to Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek antiquity (La Nave 1903, compare Cordier 1901) and accentuated the museum’s “exact restitutions” in relation to the “hastily executed […] fugitive decor” of the short-lived structures in universal exhibitions (La Nave 1904a, 326). At this point the undated but wonderfully illustrated book Le musée Indo-chinois: Antiquités Cambodgien­ nes exposée du palais du Trocadéro was published by the Parisian editor Armand Guérinet with sixty-two phototypes (most probably taken by the famous Studio Giraudon), original objects, single plaster casts, and full-scale reconstitutions and drawings from Angkor, Java, and the Cham sites in South Vietnam (Guérinet n.d.). Thus far the most relevant publication in large format had been issued by La Nave in 1904 under the title L’art khmer, with “collected and classified documents after original sculptures, reproductions [restitutions], and plaster casts from the Trocadero […], photographs and drawings by the author” as well as fifteen pages of text called “Reflections and study about Khmer art”. An album of 135 incredible illustrations of the exhibits at the musée Khmer, including photographs and drawings with a handwritten list of legends and explanations (La Nave 1904b), was the single most important aspect of this publication. The text itself was an extended mix of the two publications mentioned above and a description of the magical scenes of the never-ending bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, scenes that remained ‘untranslatable’ through the compact architectural restitutions in the medium of collaged plaster casts installed in the French museum space. However, the political, typically colonial, message was as clear for La Nave as it had been for Dela­porte in his 1880 publication: even if the monks on-site more or less cared for the temple (he called it “conservation de l’édifice”), the “grand kingdom of Angkor was totally lost” (in another passage “completely extinct”) and the actual “indigenes of Siamese Cambodia watched the immense ruins of their ancestors with amazement but were incapable to understand a single word of these grandiose conceptions” (La Nave 1904b, 14). For La Nave the overall “goal of this study [was] to bring out the value of Khmer art” [mettre à jour la

valeur de l’art Khmer] and “to rebuild […] this picturesque debris” for the sake of the “artistic and scientific inspiration within the creations of [French] contemporary art” (La Nave 1904b, 15). La Nave’s visual contribution to the text was a perfect ‘reproductive continuum’ (compare with Baker 2010) in a dramatic advancement of Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural analysis between written, graphic, photographed, and materially substituted formats. Original objects and architectural fragments from Angkor and their substitutions in reproductive media merged into a new heterotopian non-local, (non-)temporal, and transcultural reality. The reader of these illustrations lost the spatial orientation necessary to distinguish the real site of Angkor Wat from its substitute inside a museum, and the aesthetic and physical orientation necessary to distinguish the real artefact from the copied, fragmented, decontextualised, and newly represented and arranged material. In La Nave’s catalogue of 135 entries on the exhibits of the musée Khmer only thirty-six were original sculptures, whereas the rest were the result of the great translation project of Angkor’s antiquity for the French métropole. These included the following: seventy-one plaster casts in a context-less, artificial, and analytical presentation against a neutralising background (Fig. III.45a); fifteen drawings reimagining the ancient living site (Fig. III.45b) or reconstituting the decorative patterns of its architectural surfaces (Fig. III.45c); ten architectural full-scale reproductions [restitutions] including those of the Bayon and Angkor Wat temples in photographs from Delaporte’s museum (Fig. III.45d); two photographs from the real site of Angkor Wat; and a miniature model of the whole Bayon temple site. However, Delaporte had the final word. His publication Les monuments du Cambodge: Étude d’architecture Khmère appeared in three parts in 1914, 1920, and 1923 (these merged into a comprehensive volume in 1924) and was financed by the ministère de l’Instruction publique and the commission archéologique de l’Indo-chine of which Delaporte was a founding member. In the written sections of this book, Delaporte discussed the architecture of Angkor with reference to Fergusson’s world art analysis, developed analogies with other Southeast Asian sites through a series of ornamental drawings, and summarised a success story that stretched from the initial vision of his missions to Angkor to his vision of the instructive function of his museum which would act as a “logical complement to the musée de Sculpture comparée. […] Archaeologists and draftsmen” alike had helped to “revive the compositions [and] reconstitute the ensembles” of the Angkorian temples with drawings, photographs, and plaster casts”. In Delaporte’s idealistic, but totally unrealistic perspective, the “musée Indo-chinois was [and would be in the future] frequented by architec181

III  Staging Angkor in the Museum

Figures III.45a—d  Presentation of the life-size plaster casts, an imaginative reconstitution of the palais des Rois at Angkor Thom, detailed drawings of the decorative surface of Angkorian temples, and a photographic insight into the Angkor Wat reconstitution of the musée Indo-­ chinois. All depicted in La Nave’s 1904 publication L’Art Khmer (Source: La Nave 1904, folios 78, 11, 99, 98; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

ture schools and écoles professionelles (e.g., the School of Lace Fabric and Embroidery), by decorators and stucco workers looking for inspiration, and by artists to study Khmer art”. Not only did “Rodin [have] a lintel of Angkor 182

Wat in his atelier”, but – in Delaporte’s indirect parallel to the same discussion of Indian art within the British Arts and Crafts Movement – Angkor’s temple design had also found its way into contemporary pattern books of decora-

6. Visual fragmentation and physical decontextualisation of Angkor

Figure III.46  An Angkorian design being used for modern applied arts, as depicted in Quénioux’ 1912 publication Éléments de composition décorative (Source: Quénioux 1912, 133)

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Figure III.47  The page about Le musée Indo-chinois du Trocadéro in Delaporte’s 1914—24 publication Les monuments du Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1914—24, plate 37; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

tive art (Fig. III.46).73 In the third part of the publication called Le musée Indo-chinois du Trocadéro, Delaporte explained the museum collection and especially the reconstituted “monuments d’architecture” of the Bayon and Angkor

Wat temples (Delaporte 1924, 114–28). The thirty-seven large-format plates in Delaporte’s œuvre summarised La Nave’s 1904 illustrations and merged a collection of sketches, site photographs, plaster cast illustrations, idealised recrea-

73  Here Delaporte quoted Gaston Quénioux, the Inspecteur général de renseignement du dessin, and his 1912

book Éléments de composition décorative: cent thèmes de décoration plane, where under “Theme 42 – Quatrefoil adorning a border” a sandstone bas-relief of eleventh-century art was gradually abstracted for a wall painting of French modern art and a sketch of an iron-forged grill (Quénioux 1912, 132–33; see figure quoted in Delaporte 1924).

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6. Visual fragmentation and physical decontextualisation of Angkor

Figures III.48a,b  Plaster cast reconstitutions of temples from Java (Plaosan, Sewon) inside the musée Indo-chinois, after 1900 (Source: Guérinet n.d., plates 34, 46)

tions in drawings, and realised museum models into a hybrid representation of the real and the recreated site of Angkor (Fig. III.47) – a colonial strategy for the successive iconisation of Angkor’s architectural features that would turn out to be the foundation of its commercialisation for the tourist and heritage industry in the decades to come. At this point, sites from the colonial Dutch Indies were also on display (Figs. III.48a,b, compare Figs. VII.38d,e; Fig. IX.57b). When Delaporte’s last publication came out only a few months before his death in 1925 at the age of eighty-three, his project of reconstituting Angkor in a Parisian museum space was overtaken by the reality, though he himself was not at the helm: since 1907 the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap had been finally incorporated into the Frenchcolonial enterprise of Indochina. The ‘real’ temple site of Angkor, which had been translated for the French métropole by a whole generation of French explorers between 1850

and the 1900s through written texts, graphic analyses, photographic documentations, plaster casts, models, and whole freestanding pavilions, would finally be restored into a picture-perfect site itself (see chapter IX). Nevertheless, Dela­ porte’s plaster cast collection served as a unique depot or general decorative code of Angkor for the Khmer pavilion in the following colonial and universal exhibitions: 1906 and 1922 in Marseille and 1900, 1931, and 1937 in Paris (see following chapters IV to VIII). The fate of the museum after Delaporte’s death in 1925 was lamentable as far as his plaster cast collection was concerned.74 On 2 December of the same year, the Comité conseil of the musée Guimet (presided over by Émile Senart, together with director Joseph Hackin with his adjoint René Grousset and other researchers like Sylvain Lévi and Raymond Koechlin) decided to take over the ‘original’ artworks from Delaporte’s museum to their museum “for a scientific regrouping and a better

74  General summaries in Combe 2000, 64 and Legueul 2005, 112–15, 128–31, Baptiste 2013b,c). The archive

des musées nationaux in the Louvre keeps files about Delaporte’s plaster cast collection during his time: AMN 5HH 1 an 2, about the later fate: AMN-MA 19, -U1, -U2, -U25, -Z2-4.

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Figures III.49a—c  Excerpts from Philippe Stern’s inventory of the musée Indo-chinois, most probably dating from 1925 after Delaporte’s death (Source: © Musée Guimet archive)

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didactical presentation of the Khmer, Cham, and Siamese collections”.75 The art historian Philippe Stern, Delaporte’s collaborator since 1912 (Coedès 1910), was responsible for the transfer of the original material, and a salle Louis Delaporte was opened a few years later. In a detailed but unpublished inventory including two sketch plans (Figs. III.49a,b), Stern catalogued around six hundred plaster casts by provenance, object description, dimensions, style, reproduction reference (dates of the relevant missions), ownership, state of conservation, and placement (Stern 1925, compare with Dupont 1936). Under “Indochine/Art Khmer 230-3C/69” Delaporte’s masterly and labourious plaster cast reconstitution of the lower eastern part of Angkor Wat’s central tower from Basset’s 1896/97 mission was, at the moment of its pending physical demolition in his own museum after his death, downgraded to a simple inventory card (Fig. III.49c).76 Large parts of the 1878 palais du Trocadéro were demolished to make way for its added-on and newer version by the architects Jacques Carlu, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, and Léon Azéma for the last French Universal Exhibition in 1937 (see chapter VIII). At this time, the French colonial project as a whole had lost much of its popularity and political attraction, but Philippe Stern defended the ‘original’ value of the plaster casts in 1932: The plaster casts of the musée Indo-chinois were executed during official French missions on monuments that were hardly accessible back then and are partly overgrown today. Their aesthetic value and their importance today are enormous: they represent a considerable material effort and expenditure. Therefore, they have almost the value of originals [Ils ont ainsi presque valeur d’originaux].77

As a result of the new decisions, the still planned display of a general Indochinese collection at the new palais du Chaillot (Figs. III.50a,b) was finally eliminated from the floor plans78. Delaporte’s plaster casts were stored in a disused factory in Clichy. Plans for a plaster cast museum did not materialise. After World War II the remaining parts were transported to the storage of the musée de l’Art moderne. In 1973

the casts were brought to a badly equipped storage place in Saint-Riquier Abbey (Somme province) northwest of Paris. They were ‘re-discovered’ in the late 1980s with help of the director of the musée Guimet, Albert Le Bonheur (Dumont 1988, Bonheur 1988/1989) and made public in the journal Connaissance des Arts in 1992 (Seuillet 1992) (Pl. III.16a,b) at the same moment when – the transcultural relationship of both recovered heritages in France and Cambodia was obvious – the ‘real site’ of Angkor was made, again with strong French support, UNESCO World Heritage (compare this context in chapter XII). Research about Delaporte’s museum and its plaster casts continued (Baptiste 2001, 2002, 2008, Combe 2000, Legueul 2005, Philippe 2011/2013, Falser 2011, Baptiste 2013b). In 2012 the casts were brought to the new storage at the musée Guimet in Normandy. Only one year later in October 2013, the same museum staged – during an exhibition called Angkor, Naissance d’un mythe: Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013) – the restored casts from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois side by side with its original artefacts of Cambodian art (Pl. III.17). On display in a totally new arrangement next to the socalled ‘original’ sculptures from Angkor that had come to Paris via the same colonial channels as their ‘substitutes’, the casts were now completely transcribed (‘translated’) into the new value structure provided by applied museology: They changed their former (colonial) status of mere secondary sources of far-away, mostly untransportable (immobile) stone objects and surfaces of glorious medieval temples. Now they were staged as primary sources of a former French-colonial (in this case specifically Dela­porte’s) civilising task and attendant attempts to inform an Occidental (French) public about Khmer antiquity, and to integrate the same into the canon of both a French patrimoine culturel and a global art historiography. While the majority of the French contributions in the catalogue (Pl. Intro.13) still advanced this old-fashioned French narrative of cultural enhancement (in this case in the person of Dela­porte), only a few papers engaged either with the contested French-colonial history of the plaster casts (Falser 2013g) (Pl. III.18a,b), their physical quality as a matter of contemporary con­ servation (Baptiste 2013c) or with the evidence of that the historic casts in French depots could – as a matter of a ver-

75 The Compte rendu of the session is preserved in the archive of the musée Guimet. See Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 192. 76  A small collection of plaster casts from ‘Far-East’ Angkor were, along with a longer list of “antiquités orientales”, still available in the ‘provisional catalogue’ of the plaster cast ateliers of the French national museums in 1928 (Ateliers de moulage 1928, 32). In 1934 Delaporte’s initial dream for a “salle d’art Khmer” within the Louvre was discussed, but finally dismissed (AMN-MA19). 77  The French report is found in Archives des Musées nationaux/U1 Guimet 1932, as quoted in Baptiste/ Zéphir 2013, 260. The idea to read artefacts from the ‘original’ site, and substitutes and copies from Angkor in French museum collections and storages as “one patrimoine universel” was brought up again in 1987 by the French ICOMOS member Michel Parent (see chapter XII). 78  On the floor plan one can see the Indochinese display conceived for the upper central risalith of the new palais du Chaillot. A special Cambodian section was not planned. I am grateful to Mrs. Polack at the musée des Monuments français, Paris for her help in 2011 and 2013 (compare Jarrassé/Polack 2014).

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Figure III.50a  The last plan of the new Trocadero Palace (palais du ­Chaillot) including a central space for the musée de l’Indo-chine (Source: © Musée des Monuments français, Paris)

Figure III.50b  A decorative plate above the left-hand entry to the new palais du Chaillot of the 1937 Universal Exhibition with reminiscences of Angkor (Source: Michael Falser 2013)

itable ‘back-translation’ (as we conceptualised it in the introduction to this book) – have to offer for contemporary restoration practices back in Angkor Wat in Cambodia (Leisen et al. 2013, see in epilogue II). Unfortunately, the transcultural entanglement of a) both sites – Angkor Park (see chapter IX–XI) and the Parisian musée Guimet as inheritor of the relics from the old musée Indo-chinois and from long-gone universal and colonial 188

exhibitions (see chapters I, II, IV–VIII) –, and of b) both local practices of a mise en valeur and global commodification (now the restoration and touristic/voyeuristic exploitation of both the original temples and the surviving replicas of the site) within one and the same concept of heritage called Angkor was not discussed (see our discussion in the introduction, compare chapter XII and epilogue II in volume 2).

IV

The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

1. Changing scales: The world as exhibition The trains, the steamboats, and the telegraph have diminished the distances and multiplied the relations between the different countries. Additionally, the knowledge about geography [goût de la géographie] has changed rapidly. […] However, it has to be admitted that neither maps nor the existing model globes can give a good idea of the entity that is the round earth and the proportions between its different parts. The project of a giant model globe on a 1:1-million scale [Le projet d’une globe terrestre au millième] will give us an impression of the earth’s grandeur and, at the same time, a sensation of its smallness […] For the first time, we shall see how the globe is in reality occupied by certain spaces of known dimensions, like those of the largest cities: Paris will occupy one centimetre. From here, right away, the relation will be established between this very centimetre, which is Paris, and the surface of the globe, which is our earth; and by this relation, one will have a very clear perception of the comparable dimensions between diverse countries, continents, and the different oceans. This kind of modelled globe will be of great interest for the discipline of geography […] The general conspectus [vue d’ensemble] will reveal the scale of the immense work accomplished during this last century; it will illustrate the most astonishing conquests of the sciences, and will show, at the same time, the extent of those areas that still await the benefits of civilisation. It will provoke a verve for new discoveries and new adventurous enterprises. [Our project is] a veritable instruction and a salutary œuvre […] for all the progressing conquests of science and civilisation [italics MF] (Villard/Cotard 1888) —Théodore Villard and Charles Cotard, Projet de globe terrestre (1888)

In his seminal paper “The world as exhibition”, Timothy Mitchell described the 1889 Universal Exhibition as a process in which the world was set before its audience “as an enframed totality”. An “entire machinery of representation” under a strictly organised view, created an “endless spectacle [in] reality effect” (Mitchell 1989, 227, 218, 221, 222) through which all visitors encountered the narrative of the French Republic and its “progress as a collective national achievement” (see Bennett 1988, 80, compare Silverman 1977). This narrative was portrayed and visualised through different physical scales, thematic sections, and aesthetic viewpoints, which oscillated between what Susan Stewart has termed the “miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir and the collection” (Stewart 1993) and which we will explore in the following. When Théodore Villard, engineer of the Direction de grands travaux en France et à l’étranger, and Charles Cotard, engineer for the compagnie du Canal de Suez and the railway line projects between Europe and Asia, proposed their project for a globe terrestre in 1888, France’s fourth Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1889 was in the process of full realisation (compare Alavoine-Muller 2003). Both men argued that the geographical and spatial perception of the world had changed with the introduction of fast transportation means like the railway and the steamboat and with the installation of worldwide communication systems like

telegraph lines. Overcoming the old-fashioned visuali­ sation modes of two-dimensional cropped maps and small globes, their project of a terrestrial globe on a 1:1-million scale and almost thirteen metres in diameter would guarantee public comprehension of the new global reality (compare Rocher 2017). Using lines and colours, the spatial and logistic interconnectedness of Paris (now one square centimetre) as the metropolitan (political, commercial, and cultural) centre of its non-European peripheries would be made legible (see original quote above). Without explicitly identifying the imperial ambitions in this “salutary work”, the Eurocentric, even colonial, undertone of the French exhibitors could hardly be missed since this “vue d’ensemble” was also intended to illustrate the “most amazing conquest of the sciences and, at the same time, to indicate the extent of these regions that still awaited the benefits of civilisation” (Villard/Cotard 1888, 3). From this point of view, Foucault’s heterotopian facets of modernity (simultaneity, juxtaposition of places, network of connected points, techniques for appropriating space, accumulated time, see Foucault 1967 and compare with our introduction) could also be decribed as a new strategy of a “spacetime compression”(Harvey 1990). This strategy can be seen as an integral part of the French-colonial project to bring its centre and its multiple peripheries to an imagined and real political, commercial, and ‘trans-cultural’ overlap. 189

IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figures IV.1a,b  A planned version of a sphère terrestre by Filon/Cordeau (left) and the realized globe terrestre by Vaillard/Cotard (right) for the 1889 Universal Exhibition as published in La nature (Source: Filon/Cordeaux 1888, plate 2; La nature, 2e semestre 1889, 113)

When the Vaillard and Cotard realised the project (Figs. of the world and could look down from on high at the IV.1a,b), their building was placed on the central western globe’s totality, the surface of which was made of painted edge of the Champs-de-Mars between the palais des Arts sheets and the painstakingly applied plaster bas-reliefs of libéraux and the palais des Enfants. Its imperial character its topographical features. As Stewart explained it in a genwas underscored by the forty-five-page official publication eral sense, this “reduction of the physical world” into the listing the project’s Comité scientifique de patronage. The “cultural product of a miniature, a toy world”, meant, as it list included the Emperor of Brazil and the Count of Flan- was described in an abstract context, a “multiplication of ders as honorary presidents; le Duc de Sermoneta, the ideological properties”; the “reduction in scale” brought an president of the Société de géographie (the society to subsi- “increase of the detail and significance” (Stewart 1993, 45– dise Delaporte’s plaster cast campaigns to Angkor in the 55). This miniature model did not represent a neutral globe same years!), as an honorary member; the committee itself terrestre, but it was an ideologically loaded vision of the with Colonel Derrécagaix as director of the geographic ser- world mastered by Occidental technology and science and vice of the French Ministry of War; and most important, conceptualised in a hierarchical relation between the metFerdinand de Lesseps, diplomat and entrepreneur of the ropolitan centre of the French Republic and its colonial Suez and Panama Canal projects. Although Lesseps men- periphery. Leaving the globe terrestre and crossing the tioned in his short introductory statement that technical Champs-de-Mars towards the Seine River, the visitor enadvances contributed to a “general human fraternalism”, his tered into another, even larger visual model of metropolifinal words linked the project of “human progress” with the tan-global interconnectedness in the form of the giant panclaims of “conquest” and “property ” (Villard/Cotard 1889, orama de la Compagnie transatlantique.1 8). When the terrestrial globe opened to the public (Monod The strongest Republican voices had only just gained 1890, II, 555–62), the visitor was invited to participate in control over French politics in the late 1870s, and the most this conquest with a close look at the globe from below. prestigious project during the first decades of the French From the surrounding galleries, he could inspect France’s Third Republic, the Universal Exhibition of 1889, was – commercial, industrial, and scientific conquest of the rest quite logically from this ‘point of view’ – placed under a de1  About the employed techniques of the great ‘spectacle’ of the 1889 Universal Exhibition with, above others,

a series of panoramas and dioramas, see Michaux 2005.

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cidedly retrospective motto commemorating the one hun- Betts 1982), in which the causal interconnectedness bedredth anniversary of the French Revolution, which had tween the French métropole and France’s colonies overseas been constitutive to the French Republic itself. Merging the opened up a new spatial configuration of the république revolution’s ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité with coloniale. Rousseau’s missionary concept of a people’s sovereignty France’s traumatic defeat of 1870/71 against Germany (valid and defendable on a global scale) and with the Third had resulted in a destabilised national integrity inside EuRepublic’s educational and instructive mission (which in- rope. However, the expanding sciences (mostly anthropocreasingly infiltrated its growing imperial ambitions) al- logical and ethnographical, as discussed in the section on lowed the utopian vision of a “République coloniale” to the 1878 Universal Exhibition), the evolution of cartograemerge (Bancel 2003; compare Daughton 2008). Propagat- phy, and the propagating effect of geographic societies, ed through a modern-laical reference to ancient republican helped the rising of a passion for exoticism, a popular désir Rome and a reuse of its missionary Christian vocabulary, d’ailleurs. And an emerging popular press interest in geothe Republican citoyen in the French métropole had be- graphical discoveries (Le Tour du Monde, Le Journal des come almost “naturally” colonial and therefore an integral voyages, l’Illustration, etc.) had fostered France’s early imagpart of France’s universal mission civilisatrice in outre-mer inaire of colonial expansion. Eleven years after the 1878 Exhibition, the situation had changed considerably. The (Bancel 2003, 34–45; compare Falser 2015a). With Jules Ferry acting as the leading force pushing for “crystallisation of a [concrete] ideology of universal concolonial expansion from North Africa (e.g., Tunisia) to Indo- quest” had now formed “a new [however Eurocentric] apchina (Tonkin, Annam) in the early 1880s (he as well was prehension of the planetary space” (Bancel 2003, 61) that a supporter of Delaporte, see previous chapter), France’s needed to be communicated and explained. More than in possessions would grow from 1880 to 1895 from 1 to al- any of the exhibitions that had come before, this needed to most 10 million square kilometres and from 5 to 50 million be visualised for the French public using concrete three-diinhabitants. In 1885, in his famous speech in the chambre mensional models, walkable installations, and full-scale des députés, Ferry defended the new “imperialism of the architectural ensembles; the Universal Exhibition of 1889 triumphing Republic” (Girardet 1972, 46–49) with argu- offered the perfect stage. It comes as no surprise that it was ments: (a) on the colonies’ importance for France’s indus- this Universal Exhibition that produced, next to the already tries and commerce, (b) for a humanitarian order between familiar settings like the Champs-de-Mars and the Troca­ the Occidental societies and the ‘inferior races’ as part of a déro, the first decidedly French-colonial section, open-air liberating crusade of civilisation (against barbarism) and and on a life-size scale. The newly designated area, albeit a progress (in the name of Enlightenment), and (c) about the bit peripheral (as a common feature of France’s ‘colonial’ imperative need to defend and propagate France’s national fairgrounds in the future, compare Foucault 1967)3, was grandeur within the atmosphere of colonial conquest located on the esplanade des Invalides in front of the symaround the world. These arguments had been ‘scientifically’ bolic palais des Invalides (Pl. IV.1). justified by publications like Leroy-Beaulieu’s De la coloniThe exhibition opened on 6 May 1889 under France’s sation chez les peuples modernes (1874), which had pro- president Marie François Sadi-Carnot with the responsible duced – based on a fundamental assumption of the “per- ministre du Commerce et de l’industrie, Edouard Lockroy, fectibility of humankind” (Mann 2004, 4) – the notion of and the logistic team of Jean Charles Alphand (directeur France’s cultural superiority as a nation in Europe, the général de travaux), Georges Berger (directeur général de l’exploitation), Georges Grison (directeur financier) and Saint-Simonian faith in indefinite civilising2 as much as economic-scientific progress, and the theory of a secular, ­Alfred Picard as rapporteur général for the official ten-volin this case colonial, mission to spread humanity around ume publication of the exhibition (Picard 1891). It was an the globe. Taken together this constituted the particularly engineering masterpiece that gave the 1889 Universal French character of a both “universalist vocation and na- ­Exhibition its main symbol of French Republican self-estionalist particularity” (Constantini 2008, 21–37, compare teem – the Eiffel Tower. If the introductory example of the

2  This civilising notion in the Saint-Simonian doctrine originally also comprised the vision of a desired ­“union of the Orient with all its fervour, with the Occident with its technical richness” (Peltre 2008, 281). 3  One of the characteristics of Foucault’s heterotopias (temporary fairgrounds were mentioned on his list besides more permanent installations like prisons, cemeteries etc.) was their location at the outside border of cities. Even if the colonial section of the 1889 Exhibition was not yet completely peripheral, this element continued to be important for colonial section/exhibitions for the years to come: Frances national colonial exhibitions were planned outside the French capital in Marseille (1906 and 1922, see chapters V and VI), the whole 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris was planned ‘outside’ the city centre (see chapter VII) and France’s last colonial section of the 1937 International Exhibition (see chapter VIII) was banned on a small island in the Seine River.

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.2a  The lower section of the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Source: Huard 1889, I, 40)

Figure IV.2b  The lower 1889 Universal Exhibition from a sketched aerial perspective (Source: Huard 1889, I, 28)

globe terrestre represented the planet as a manageable ‘miniature’ to be studied in detail from below and mastered from above, then this iron truss structure more than 320 metres in height, built by the engineer Gustave Eiffel, magnified this double-vision in the form of the ‘gigantic’. Act192

ing as a suprahuman entry gate to the 1889 Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower reduced the visitors to submissive spectators before a vertical gesture of Republican triumphalism (Fig. IV.2a), which was reflected horizontally in the exhibition halls to the rear of the Champs-de-Mars (Fig. IV.2b). Once

1. Changing scales: The world as exhibition

Figure IV.3a  The (empty) palais des Machines of the 1889 ­Exhibition (Source: Picard 1891, II, between 60/61)

the French citoyen or foreign guest climbed the first and second level of the tour – its “gigantic[ness] being a metaphor for the abstract authority of state and the collective, public life” (Stewart 1993, xii) – he would gain a masterly overview of the finely ordered and symbolically arranged world unfolding just below that represented the two major elements of the exhibition: art, in the flanking palais des Beaux-arts and the palais des Arts libéraux; and science and industry in the palais des Machines (Fig. IV.3a). After ascending to the structure’s third level by elevator, the visitor stood at the top of the then highest building in the world where he would, through “imperial eyes” and, in what Mary Louis Pratt has referred to in general as the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” scene of colonial mastery, internalise the Republican “civilising mission as an aesthetic project”. The entire urban world of human struggle and its condensed version in the surrounding exhibition complex be-

Figure IV.3b  The upper part of the Eiffel Tower above the city (Source: Huard 1889, I, 107)

low would be transformed into fascinating abstract patterns (Pratt 1992, 201–27) (Fig. IV.3b). From the panorama4 to the gigantic tower two elements came together, as Tony Bennett explained it: “rendering the project of specular dominance feasible in affording an elevated vantage point over a micro-world which claimed to be representative of a larger entity” (Bennett 1988, 97; referring to Roland Bar­ thes’s analysis of the Eiffel Tower in Barthes 1964). The Tour Eiffel was seen to reign over all other built achievements in the world including the Egyptian pyramids, which had once reigned over the European world. This Republican gesture of all-encompassing mastery over the world also provoked criticism in its planning phase. A direct protest addressed to Alphand was published in the daily journal Le Temps on 17 February 1887 and was reprinted two days later in the Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition de 1889. In it a group of distinguished artists

4 Compare Le Tour du monde in the 1900 Exhibition with Angkor on display; see chapter V, Fig. V.6a, and –

in a transcultural perspective – our discussion about the exhibitionary devices inside the Angkor Park itself in chapter IX (compare Figs. IX.23a–c) when the introduction of aerial tourism again reduced gigantic temple sites into voyeuristic commodities.

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and celebrities, including the composer Charles Gounod, born by the invasion of the Aryans”; and (II.3.) “contempothe architect Charles Garnier, and the writer Alexandre rary civilisations of primitive societies, which had no influDumas, called the Eiffel Tower an “inutile and monstrous ence on the general march towards civilisation” (Picard tower of Babel”. It would “dishonour Paris, the city sans 1891a, II, 245). This racist and Eurocentric message, which rivale dans le monde”, and would look like a “gigantic back had a considerable impact on perceptions of Asia due to chimney of a factory, humiliating in its barbaric mass all the popularity of this section of the 1889 Exhibition, was [our] monuments by erasing Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Cha­ brought to the fore in the division of the “historic period” pelle […], the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe” (Bulletin into three “families” of the human race: the “white, the black, and the yellow races”. Of the three “only the white officiel, no. 14, 19 February 1887, 5). In an ironic twist, Charles Garnier, the celebrated family had worked on the historic development of civilisaBeaux-Arts architect of the Paris Opera House, would later tion” (Picard 1891a, II, 247). With our focus on ‘Indo-Chibecome the architecte conseiller commissioned to fill a nar- na’ in the nearby French-colonial section of the exhibition row four-hundred-metre strip along the Seine located to (see below), Garnier’s exemplification of Asia’s relevance the right and left of the pont d’Iéna and situated directly in for a contemporary civilising project (which of course had the shadow of the detested Eiffel Tower. The area designat- its apex in Europe) is important as it ran exactly through ed for his undertaking had been originally reserved for the two constituting parts: India and China. Within the monarchist nations like Great Britain, which had re- white race, which included ‘less important’ sub-branches nounced their official participation in protest of the organ- like the Semitic, only the Aryan people were considered isers’ explicit commemoration of the French Revolution relevant for the civilising present. Their path of success beand the Storming of the Bastille. Garnier’s Exposition his- gan in the Indian valleys of the Indus and Ganges (represented by the maison hindou, Fig. IV.5a) and passed torique des habitations humaines was another cornerstone in the retrospective character of the 1889 Universal Exhibi- through the Persians to reach Europe via the Germains and tion, and its picturesque nature, exotic appearance, and the Gaulois, the Greek, the Romans (with a sample house (perhaps most important for the larger public) its idyllic from Pompeii), and the Gallo-Romains, only to end with a setting as a popular picnic spot along the river made it a – of course, French – maison du moyen-âge from Saint-Lougreat success. As Alfred Picard declared in the second vol- is’s thirteenth century and a Renaissance house sample ume of the exhibition’s rapport général (Picard 1891a, II, from Orléans dating from Henri II’s sixteenth century. 243–62), using a typical ethnographic-anthropological dicRemarks made by Picard are particularly interesting for tion comparable to similar sections of the 1867 and 1878 our previous discussion on the London-Paris connection Exhibitions, Garnier’s project represented characteristic between architectural museums containing Asian architectypes of human abodes. Perceived from a combined “view- ture (chapter III). Supposedly, Garnier’s maison hindou had point of art, archaeology, and philosophy”, it would “revive been inspired by the depictions of bas-reliefs on the Sanchi humanity, show its progressive development across the stupa and James Fergusson’s studies on India, just as the ages, trace out its successive stages in the paths of physical, reconstituted village germain had been based on scenes moral, and intellectual progress, and shed light on the dif- from the Roman Trajan column (Picard 1891a, II, 253, 254). ferent degrees through which it had to pass in order to ar- Both architectures – Sanchi and the Trajan column – formed, rive from its humble beginnings to the marvellous height as previously discussed, the dominant 1:1-scale plaster cast of the contemporary epoch” (Picard 1891a, II, 243). Now features in the South Kensington Museum’s twin Architeclocated right next to the Eiffel Tower (the exhibition’s Re- tural Courts (opened in 1874), which had strongly influenced Louis Delaporte’s Indochinese museum in the Tropublican arc de triomphe and the propagated summit of the world’s built achievements), Garnier’s project sought (com- cadero (opened around 1884). Representing the ‘dead’ pare with Lenoir’s and Viollet-le-Duc’s cultural periodisa- aspects of civilisation, Garnier’s third level in the période tion in relation to Winckelmann, chapter III) to sum up historique, where he located the so-called civilisations and hierarchise human civilisation (Figs. IV.4a,b). Passing isolées that were seen as having no relevance for the march from (I) a “prehistoric period” with examples of natural towards civilisation, differentiated between three branches: cave and man-made rock or earth dwellings, the visitor (a) the race nègre with only one structure in the form of a would encounter three-dimensional specimens of (II) the wood-straw hut for the sauvages d’Afrique; (b) the popula“historic period”, which was considered equivalent to the tions indigènes de l’Amérique with a simple tent for the “birth of nations and therefore of history” and comprised Peaux-Rouges and two archaeologically hybrid reconstituthree paths to reach (or not to reach) an enlightened pres- tions of Inca and Aztec styles (Fig. IV.5b).5 Finally, (c) reent: (II.1.) “primitive civilisations” with examples from an- ferred to the race jaune with samples from Japan and China, cient Egypt, Assyria, to the Etruscan; (II.2.) “civilisations including the associated [Nordic] race boréale with pictur-

5  The latter was simultaneously “totemised” as an icon of the glorious past for the contemporary national in

the pavilion of Porfirion Diaz’s Mexico. Compare with Wyss 2010, 127–137.

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1. Changing scales: The world as exhibition

Figure IV.4a,b  Charles Garnier’s Histoire de l’habitation humaine for the 1889 Exhibition (Source: L’Exposition de Paris 1889, Supplement to number 7; Farge 1892, plate 1, © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.5a  Hindu palace and Persian temple in Garnier’s Histoire de l’habitation humaine (Source: Glucq 1889, © Heidelberg University Library)

Figure IV.5b  The Red Skin Tent in front of the Aztec Palace in Garnier’s 1889 installation (Source: © Bibliothèque historique de Paris)

esque Laplander and Eskimo house structures. Garnier’s few well-known illustrations. According to the latter, “the project was included in all the mass media publications Khmer ruins had fallen out of human memory” and had only been recently rediscovered by Henri Mouhot; speciand guidebooks for the 1889 Exhibition (e.g., in an article series in Charles-Lucien Huard’s Livre d’or de l’Exposition; mens from the temples (the relevance to human habitation see Huard 1889), and it strongly contributed to the propa- remained quite vague) had been brought to the “musée du gation, visualisation, and essentialist iconisation of what Trocadéro” by scientific missions led by himself and Fourare to this day still circulated globally as Occidental and nereau (Garnier/Ammann 1892, 327–33). However, acOriental stereotypes of cultural heritage. cording to Garnier’s normative scale within his book L’haGarnier finally published, with the help of the history bitation humaine, Angkor – at this point in time wrongly teacher Auguste Ammann, a revised and considerably en- (but intentionally?) placed on French and not Siamese terlarged version of L’habitation humaine only in 1892. In the ritory – was attributed to the Indian-Aryan sub-branch of introductory Avant-propos for the nine-hundred-page vol- civilisation but considered isolated, dead, and irrelevant for ume, Garnier/Ammann conceptualised their installation “the general march towards civilisation” and the canon of during the 1889 Exhibition – and the parallels with Dela­ “human [cultural] heritage”: porte’s musée Indo-chinois in the Trocadéro are striking – as a kind of “moving panorama where all habitations are deCambodia is now placed under the protectorate of France. filed in front of us”. There, the visitor could, on “his way” Thanks to the beneficial influence of France and to the sciand by “intuition”, transform the details of “archaeological entific missions which do not cease to explore the dead exactitude” into “an idea of the general types, a kind of concities of the Khmer, one can hope that one day this mystedensation of the disparate elements”, based to a lesser derious civilisation will tell us its last secrets. […] Until this gree on “verity” [vérité] than on the “verisimilar” [vraisemmoment, the study of this disappeared past will only have blable] (Garnier/Ammann 1892, iii, iv). As Delaporte had a purely speculative interest. Certainly, these Aryas of the also propagated in his 1880 publication on Khmer art, GarFar East reached an eminent degree of civilisation; hownier emphasised the “accessible to all” character of his proever, as far distanced they were from the old continent ject, as a “patriotic […] work of the vulgarisation of history and isolated from other Aryan populations, they stayed and archaeology” to make “historic studies palpable and without further action on the general march of humanity; tangible” (Garnier/Ammann 1892, v). He enlarged his theall that they discovered has been lost and could therefore matic scope with a more detailed and slightly less pejoratake its place in the common heritage of humankind [pattive analysis of the African spectrum as well as with midrimoine commun des hommes]. In order to find the real nineteenth-century samples of modern habitations from workers towards progress, we have to turn to those WestVienna’s new Ringstraße and the first US-American skyern Aryas who have spread over to South-West Asia and scrapers. The widened focus of the “Aryan influences in Europe. [italics MF] (Garnier/Ammann 1892, 341) Southeast-Asia” also directly touched on the ancient civilisation of Angkor (Garnier/Ammann 1892, 324–41) and Although Garnier did not mention the 1875 study of the cited Louis Delaporte’s expertise in long passages and a Histoire de l’habitation humaine written by his older con196

1. Changing scales: The world as exhibition

Figure IV.6  The “tree of architecture” in Banister Fletcher’s A history of architecture on the ­comparative method for the student, craftsman, and amateur (fifth edition of 1905), with ­pre-Columbian America (with Mexico and Peru) and Asia (with India and China) as non-active branches towards architectural progress and development (Source: Fletcher 1905, iii; © Library University Heidelberg)

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current Viollet-le-Duc, he not only copied some model houses from the earlier publication but also shared to a certain degree Viollet-le-Duc’s judgement of Khmer art and architecture as “decadent” and “insignificant” (Violletle-Duc 1875, 356, 357). In the search for the “veritable workers of progress”, Garnier and Ammann directed the reader to the Occidental branch of the Aryans, which was best materialised – ironically for its former detractor – in the Tour Eiffel, the crowning symbol of the 1889 Exhibition and a heritage icon to this day. Garnier’s more than forty ‘typical’ habitations – supposedly based on archaeological evidence – represented a kind of architectural “collection” the spatially walkable seriality of which did in fact “replace history with [normative] classification” (Stewart 1993, 151, 154). As a result of this classification, as it was published in 1892 expanded in book form, Angkor and the whole of Southeast Asia was seen as a failed ‘branch’ of civilisation. Adding

India and China to the list, this was a common viewpoint within architectural history for the next decades to come, for example as depicted in the famous “Tree of Architecture” (Fig. IV.6) in the fifth edition (first edition 1896) of Banister Fletcher’s A history of architecture on the comparative method for the student, craftsman, and amateur (Fletcher 1905, iii). However, this devaluation of Asia in general (and in particular Asia with the depicted Sanchi gate, compare its presentation in the South Kensington Museum, Fig. III.22 and Pl. III.5b, and Falser 2013e) did not apply to all sections of the 1889 Exhibition. Only a few hundred metres up the banks of the Seine and with the help of a miniature railway, the visitor to the Champs-deMars could reach the newly installed French-colonial section. There, the pagode d’Angkor was not only the first openair reconstitution of Angkorian architecture in Europe but also a highly regarded landmark of this ephemeral spectacle located in front of the towering dôme des Invalides.

2. Visualising mastered space: the exposition coloniale of the Universal Exhibition of 1889 In 1886 the outspoken Republican and membre de la “proper physiognomy” and to group the French possessions Chambre des députés, Jean-Louis de Lanessan (he would overseas into six “overall groups as far as their geographic become gouverneur général de l’Indochine in 1891), was affinities and interests were concerned” (Lanessan 1886, 991, charged by Édouard Lockroy, the minister of commerce 1003). In a colonial transcription comparable to what Jules and industry, with a mission to the French colonies and Michelet had published in 1875 as Tableau de la France: géographie physique, politique et morale in the form of a protectorates in order to prepare their participation at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. Lanessan published his results visual itinerary through the French métropole, Lanessan in the one-thousand-page comparative analysis called L’ex- identified “les établissement de l’Indo-Chine et de l’Inde” pansion coloniale de la France. Étude économique, politique (as well as three groups within the African continent and et géographique sur les établissements français d’outre-mer. the colonial units of Oceania and America) as one of the In his introduction, he identified the current “universal mi- spatial unities that was not only to be administered in the gration of the civilised people towards new territories” as a different global peripheries but also to be visualised and “grand movement of humanity” and described the French propagated in Paris during the 1889 Exhibition (compare colonial expansion into Asia (with “Indo-Chine” included) Palermo 2006). As we have discussed it in general in the as a quasi-natural process like the “dispersion of animals introduction to this book, the French colonial section in and plants” (Lanessan 1886, iv, v, xxiii). Implicitly referring the 1889 Exhibition (and in all those to come) was indeed to Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionist the- a Foucauldian “heterotopia” – a kind of temporarily “enactories (the latter’s 1864 publication Principles of biology in- ed utopia” – where all colonially mastered (or longed for) troducing the term ‘survival of the fittest’ was translated territories and sites around the globe “could be found [and] into French only in 1877), Lanessan’s work was a typical simultaneously represented” (Foucault 1967/1986, 24). In example of the pseudo-scientific justifications used for the this multipolar relation between the imperial centre and its expansionist politics of the Third French Republic, the diverse colonial peripheries, the French colonial section self-proclaimed inheritor of the colonial conquest of the was a “representational space” (Lefebvre 1974/1991, 39) that ancient Roman Republic (compare a similar British claim). could be “directly lived” – or temporarily experienced – by These justifications would continue throughout the next the visitors; the “associated images and symbols” used to trace out this well-defined and self-contained exhibition decades in publications like Arthur Girault’s Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale (1895) and Jules Har- space were the ephemeral pavilions and staged indigenous mand’s Domination et colonisation (1910); the latter was a villages of the colonies on the one side, and the materialised former participant in Delaporte’s 1874 mission to Cambo- cornerstones of the French mission civilisatrice on the othdia. What made Lanessan’s study important for the first er: war, instruction, assistance, hygiene, communication. French-colonial open-air section during the 1889 UniverAt Alphand’s request the commissaire général, Jean de la sal Exhibition was his effort to characterise each colony’s Porte, the sous-sécretaire d’État à la Marine et aux Colonies, 198

2. Visualising mastered space: the exposition coloniale of the Universal Exhibition of 1889

had written a note-circulaire in November 1886 to the gov- “possessions of the Indian Ocean” and not in “Indochina” ernors of each colony and protectorate concerning their with Cambodia and Cochinchina.8 participation at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. Particular Corresponding to what Derek Gregory has termed in an committees were to be founded in each administrative en- abstract sense the “discursive triangle between power, tity containing local representatives of industry, agriculture, knowledge, and spatiality”, the colonially mastered space and commerce in order to search out (compare with Lanes- had to be “flattened, geometricized, and ordered” (Gregory san’s concept of a colony’s “proper physiognomy”) “the best 1994, 54, 63, compare Gregory 1995) and put on a map. In a dispositions to give the public a striking and exact idea [une certain sense this was applied to the existing surface of the idée frappante et exacte] of the character of each country by Parisian esplanade des Invalides. A plan that survives in the reinforcing the picturesque elements that would attract and National Archives in Paris shows the early stage, probably retain the visitor”.6 In a four-page report on the “Commis- around 1887, when the open terrain of 250 by 450 metres sion d’organisation de l’Exposition coloniale française de between the place des Invalides and the quai d’Orsay border1889” in the Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition universelle de ing the Seine River was roughly divided into lots for the upcoming exhibition. If we read maps in general as “rhetor­ical 1889 of 17 September 1887, Eugène Étienne, an enthusiastic leader of the colonial movement in France and de la Porte’s images” that mediate the “reality of conquest and empire” successor as president of the above-mentioned committee, (Harley 1988, 278, 282), we see that this and the following referred to a dépêche ministerielle dated to 7 February 1887, progressively elaborated plans of the temporarily filled up which he sent to the colonial governors with further in- esplanade des Invalides were a kind of mental map of the structions and with the latest version of the “avant-projet French-colonial imaginaire (Pl. IV.3a): the 110 by 250 metre de la section coloniale française” as well as its “physionomie area for “Colonies” – the word was indicated in ink and sugénérale” (Pl. IV.2). Most probably this plan was executed perimposed over the original plan’s indication of “Invalides” by Stephen Sauvestre who, as one of the three winners of – was placed in the central lower section. Along a centrally the concours préparatoire in May 1886 and collaborator on established visitor’s alley leading from the Seine to the dôme Gustave Eiffel’s tower project, had been nominated in 1887 des Invalides, those colonies were complemented with the by de la Porte (and reconfirmed by Lockroy) the architecte areas reserved for the sections of the ministry of “Guerre” de la section des Colonies françaises et Pays de protectorat à and the installations for “Hygiène” and “Écono­mie sociale”. l’Exposition Universelle de 1889.7 In his speech about the To the right of the colonies were the lots given to the protecCommission d’organisation de l’Exposition coloniale fran­ torates of Tunisia and Algeria, to the left was the placement çaise de 1889, Étienne mentioned the two major sections of of a round panorama next to the section of “Havane”. the colonial exhibition: (a) the palais central des colonies for One of Sauvestre’s more developed draft versions for the major collections of the state, exhibitions on public the colonial section9 was inserted into the predefined space works, and geographic and statistical studies, including a by the responsible ministère de la Marine (Pl. IV.3b) and large section for colonial cartography. And, most impor- sent in a more detailed version to Minister Lockroy for aptant in this context, his indications for the second section proval (Pl. IV.4). The main protagonists of the development (b) the “series of special pavilions”. These were divided into of the sections were already indicated on the plan; these five groups (compare with Lanessan’s 1886 study) to “pro- included Louis Henrique, who as Commissaire spéciale du vide an exact and picturesque physiognomy of each of our ministère de la Marine et des colonies was tasked with manpossessions, […] in picturesque originality and attractive aging the installations and the display of the exhibitors’ products according to the general classification.10 Even reality”. Angkor was at this stage classified as being in the

6 “Les colonies à l’exposition”, in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition universelle de 1889, 2nd year, no. 9 (15 January 1887), 7. 7  CARAN F12/3950, correspondence Lockroy-Alphand of 16 May 1887. 8  “Commission d’organisation de l’Exposition coloniale française de 1889” in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition universelle de 1889, 2nd year, no. 44 (17 September 1887), 2–5. Compare with the second session of Commission d’organisation of 11 November 1887, in: Ministère de la Marine 1887, 3. 9  Another coloured plan has survived in the National Archives in Paris (CARAN F12/3760). In this version the composition of the colonial section was quite different. The Pavillon cambodgien (Cochinchine et Cambodge) had a rectangular floor plan, was placed in the Inde française section with an added Pagode hindou, and was inserted along a perpendicular alley with structures of India, Réunion, Mayotte, Noissi-Be, and ­Obock. 10  Henrique was formerly délégué de St. Pierre et Miquelon aux Conseil supérieur des Colonies and nominated Secrétaire général de la section coloniale française, also called Commissaire spéciale du ministère de la Marine et des colonies. Other protagonists of the French-colonial section were Paul Revoil as Henrique’s Commissaire adjoint, F. des Tournelles, ingénieur et conservateur adjoint de l’Exposition permanente des Colonies as Sauvestre’s Ingénieur-commissaire adjoint, and Jacques Hébrard, sénateur de l’Inde and président de la Sous-commission.

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though the composition would change several times, some ground. Leaving the Champs-de-Mars with its large exhibiof the main architectural elements of the colonial section tion halls in the rear and lateral sides, the crowning Eiffel were already traced out, including the palais central des Tower in the centre, and Garnier’s Habitation humaine inColonies (built by Sauvestre himself), flanked by the large stallation along the Seine, the visitor reached the esplanade structure of Cochinchina and the pagode d’Angkor. The lat- des Invalides by a toy train called Decauville. Introducing ter was also called pyramide in some descriptions and was “les coloniaux à l’esplanade des Invalides”, the 1889 publicaeven accentuated on-site with an allée des Sphinx (in fact, tion Voyages merveilleux à l’exposition universelle de 1889 Khmer stone lions). As a special feature, the pagode d’Ang- used the image of an Arabian “tapis magique” (magic carkor was at this point virtually encircled by ‘live installations,’ pet) to transport its reader to exotic places all over the world such as the village pahouin, sénégalais, canaque, and alfou­ via the “ticket to the exhibition”: “[through this] small piece rou.11 In another plan, the pagode d’Angkor (still with its of paper the visitor enters a dream world and is transport“Allée de Sphinx”, compare Fig. I.19) was situated in its ed, according to his whim, from Cairo to the Americas, composition next to the palais d’Indo-chine, which would from Congo to Cochinchina, from Tunis to Java, from Anultimately be called the palais de Cochinchine (Pl. IV.5). nam to Algeria” (Lenotre 1889, 22). Like the builders of the When Alfred Picard published the final version of the globe terrestre, Émile Monod’s four-volume 1900 publicaground plan in the second volume of the rapport général (Pl. tion L’Exposition universelle de 1889: Grand ouvrage illustré, IV.6), the French colonial universe found its definite, albeit historique, encyclopédique, descriptif celebrated the colonial temporary, imprint on the Parisian esplanade des ­Invalides. A section in eighty pages as a “totally new spectacle, […] one central passageway divided the plan into two major sections. of the star attractions of the whole exhibition […] where In one part, the palais central des Colonies was flanked now this colonial world in a reduced scale […] would bring by the pavilions of Annam-Tonkin and Cochinchine and, to its geography to the grasp of all” (Monod 1890, II, 139–222, the rear, with diverse ‘indigenous villages’. The section Cam- here 140). In his little article “Autour de l’exposition”, he bodge (pagode d’Angkor) was accessed directly from the cen- equally evoked, in the name of the “voyageur”, the picturtral alley but was also visible from a neighbouring square esque and exotic aspects of the Oriental installation, which that would give access to the Kampong ou village Indien and helped to substantiate the idea of Occidental civilising suthe village Javanais of the Dutch-Indies installation; the final periority on the one hand and the “dead” architectural an(southern) end point of the central alley was occupied by the tiquity of the Orient (including the pagode d’Angkor) and panorama de Tout Paris. The other (northern) side of this “tableaux animés” of its barbaric present on the other (Mo­ (eastern) half of the esplanade contained the large palais Al- nod 1890, I, 282). Within our transcultural inquiry into how gérien and palais Tunesien with its inner and rear courts and civilisational hierarchies of the métropole and its colonial further installations. By far the largest structure, occupied by peripheries were constructed in parallel through the medithe bâtiment principal and accompanying pavilions of the um of cultural heritage, Monod’s statement about “dead ministère de la Guerre towards the south and in the direct and living Asia” for the colonial section of the 1889 Univervicinity, the picturesque Oriental ‘pagoda of Angkor’ was sal Exhibition in Paris sounds like a transcription of Moudirectly confronted with the pavilions of Hygiène de l’habita- hot’s exclamation in front of Angkor Wat, which pitted a tion, Économie sociale, and Assistance publique. barbarian presence on the ruined spot against a ‘Michel­ As a next step of analysis, we switch from a reading of angelo of the Orient’ as constructor of the ancient temple the different ephemeral structures on the esplanade des In- (Mouhot 1863, 299; compare chapter I and Fig. I.1a). valides (to form a themed ‘colonial’ entity) as a two-dimenThe ‘real’ (however staged and ephemeral) spectacle sional, symbolic-relational arrangement on plans and maps that the visitor would see when he arrived by train at the to a three-dimensional composition. The same precedure esplanade des Invalides was an amalgamation of very differis followed in chapters IX and XII and epilogue II when the ent architectural reconstitutions from various French-comaking of an other kind of ‘theme park’ (compare the in- lonial countries; these structures of reimagined French troduction to this book), the Archaeological Park of Ang- pasts and presents (Fig. IV.7a) were bound together by kor, will be discussed. In this context, the high significance a veritable forest of flag poles with the French tricolore risof the visitor’s first view of the ensemble comes to the fore- ing above the rest to create a life-size cultural panorama

11  In an undated table of Alphand’s direction générale des travaux all the commissioned architects [permis-

saires] of the exhibition’s section in the esplanade des Invalides were listed along with the building programme of the colonial section: “palais central, Indo-chine, Annam et Tonkin, pagodes d’Angkor et de Villeoux, ­théâtre annamite, restaurants annamite et créole, jeu d’échecs humain, Madagascar, Guyane, Guadeloupe, Gabon, pavillon hindou, villages tahitien, sénégalais (Tour de Saldé), Alfourou, canaque, Pahouin and cochinchinois; colon concessionnaire, bazar agricole, café Bambara, pavillons-kiosques, divers, serre”. See: CARAN F12/3945. A separate Livre d’ordre lists all major operations (constructions and final demolitions) coordinated by Henrique. See CARAN F12/4027–29.

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2. Visualising mastered space: the exposition coloniale of the Universal Exhibition of 1889

Figure IV.7a  First draft version of the French-colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition with the pagode d’Angkor in the upper right section, as published in L’Exposition de Paris (Source: L’Exposition de Paris 1889, Supplement to number 4)

(Fig. IV.7b). When we read this panorama from left to right, the towers included: the minaret of the pavilions of Algeria and Tunisia; the palais central des Colonies and the tower of the pagode d’Angkor (both in the central rear section of the image); the dominating golden dôme des Invalides, which formed the end point of the central alley and the only permanent and ‘real’ feature in the panorama; next to it, the picturesque round towers of the entry gate to the section of the ministère de la Guerre in the form of a medieval French fortification; and finally, at the right edge of the view, the Greek-Revivalist pavilion of Postes et télégraphes, representing the technological device binding these worlds together with modern communication.

The presence of the Indochinese section was announced by a series of rickshaw drivers [pousse-pousse] whose coneshaped hats distinguished them from the visitors, who were invariably dressed in elegant black. From here the visitor reached the core of the colonial exhibition.12 He encountered the pavilion of Annam and Tonkin by the Écoledes-beaux-arts-trained architect Auguste-Henri Vildieu, architecte-adjoint du service local à Saigon (Delaire 1907, 425), with its series of ‘authentic reproductions’ including the entry gate replica of the pagode de Quan-Yen near the north Vietnamese city of Haiphong; two inner courts with a giant sitting Buddha as a plaster cast copy by the sculptor Sylvain Raffegaud (in 1888 he had just come back from a

12  In his general report, Picard provided a detailed analysis of the colonial section: its surface without Alge-

ria and Tunisia totalled 27,000 square metres with 11,000 square metres allotted to buildings and villages, comprising 4,500 square metres for the Indochinese section with the “pavillon du Cambodge” spread over 395 square metres. The pavilions of the Indochinese section cost 325,000 francs with the largest sum of 125,000 francs used to realise Cambodia alone. In addition, a total of 305 indigenous civilian participants animated the section with 203 of these coming from Indochina and including 106 officers and soldiers (Picard 1891a, II, 159–76, here 175, 176).

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.7b  A photograph of the 1889 colonial section towards the dôme des Invalides (Source: © Bibliothèque historique de Paris)

plaster cast mission to Angkor for Delaporte’s Trocadero museum; see chapter III); and adjoining structures like a copy of Hanoi’s pagode des Dieux, a théatre annamite, and a restaurant annamite. At the centre of the colonial section stood the palais central des Colonies, which was designed by the architect Stephen Sauvestre using an abstract language of exotic style quotations and more than two thousand square metres of exhibition space (Fig. IV.7c). As the catalogue officiel listed in detail, the inner two levels housed a great pyramid of “divinities and fetishes from the colonies” in its central court (Exposition universelle de 1889 [1889], 13); exhibitions of the Alliance française and the Société française de colonisation on public instruction in the colonies; a library on colonial literature; and, most important for this study, products and ethnographic exhibits from the Exposition permanente of the palais de l’Industrie. Following the 1889 Exhibition’s classification générale of 9 groups and 83 classes, which basically formed the system used in the 1878 Exhibition (Ministère du commerce 1887, 19–48), specimens of Angkor (both original and copied) were now placed altogether in Group I as œuvres d’art. In Class 3 (sculptures et gravures en médaillons), “lions and 202

chimera in stone from the ruins of Angkor, sculptures from de Lagrée mission” were listed, whereas “fragments and plaster casts [fragments et surmoulés] from the ruins of Ang­kor (mission de Lagrée)” now figured side-by-side in Class 4 (dessins et modèles d’architectures) (Exposition universelle de 1889 [1889], 15, 16). Twenty years earlier, the very same casts from Angkor, products of the famous Mekong mission, had reached the European continent for display at the 1867 Universal Exhibition and were categorised in Group II (materials and applications of the liberal arts) and Class 8 (application of drawings and modelling in the common arts). In 1889 this delicate distinction between primary, original art works and their substitutions in a secondary medium of plaster casts seemed to have lost its importance in relation to the previous universal exhibitions in 1867 (chapter I) and 1878 (chapter II). Leaving the palais central des Colonies and passing the pavilion of Cochinchina, which was conceived by architect Alfred Foulhoux (chef des Bâtiments civils in Saigon and architecte en chef de l’Indo-Chine for the 1889 Exhibition) and entirely decorated by ‘original artists’, the visitor would pass the pagode d’Angkor and reach the final third of the

2. Visualising mastered space: the exposition coloniale of the Universal Exhibition of 1889

Figure IV.7c  A depiction of the palais central des Colonies with the pagode d’Angkor in the right background (Source: Monod 1890, II, 281)

Asian installations via a little open square where the entry into the Kampong javanais was placed (Fig. IV.8a). Here, besides stilted houses and other vernacular wooden constructions from the Dutch Indies, the Javanese female dance troupe formed the main attraction for visitors – in fact, only one or two exhibitions later the reinvented Royal Khmer Ballet entered the metropolitan scene in the post1900 colonial exhibitions of Marseille 1906 and 1922, and Paris 1931 (see following chapters, compare Falser 2013f).13

The end point for the official open-air display of this picturesque (dead or barbaric, according to Monod) Orient was a private indoor spectacle of the lively, civilising centre of Paris, which formed a dual vision of global civilisation similar to the private project of the globe terrestre and Garnier’s official exhibition habitations humaines on the Champs-de-Mars. The Tout-Paris (Fig. IV.8b) spectacle formed another panorama in the 1889 Exhibition (Bapst 1889) and comprised a round metallic structure by the engineer Seyrig that had

13  Interestingly, in his description of the Kampong javanais Monod also provided a long excursus on the

Dutch delegate Cores de Vries’s royales danseuses, the dance of which stood supposedly in “uninterrupted traditions” and the “sumptuous costumes” of which “reproduced almost identically these being depicted in certain bas-reliefs of the Khmer ruins, the glorious debris of the gigantic monuments built by artists coming from India” (Monod 1890, III, 129–139, here 138–9). It was this kind of argumentation that would be reproduced almost identically during the French admiration and systematic cultural rebirth of the so-called Royal Khmer Ballet in the Colonial Exhibitions of Marseille in 1906 and 1922 and Paris in 1931. By then the decorative surface from which these dancers would find their reimagined mythical and decorative source and inspiration had already found its way to Paris. However, the role of the ballet found its modified continuation in Cambodia’s period of independence when it served as a diplomatic tool for Norodom Sihanouk (see chapter X, compare Falser 2013f).

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.8a  A depiction of the pagode d’Angkor next to the kampong Javanais (to the right) and the central alley (to the left) (Source: © Bibliothèque historique Paris)

Figure IV.8b  The panorama building Le Tout-Paris with the pagode d’Angkor in the background (Source: Huard 1889, I, 120)

been transferred from its original place near the place de la République. With an interior diameter of 38 metres, a height of almost 25 metres, and a circumference of 110 metres as well as an 11-metre-high painted canvas by Charles Castellani, it offered a 360-degree panorama that covered the midpoint of the place de l’Opéra with depictions of celebrities 204

from the fields of politics, arts, science, and society in contemporary Paris (Castellani 1889, Archambault 1889, 197). By the time the visitor had left the panorama, he had already walked along the whole central alley from the Seine to the dôme des Invalides. From here, the pagode d’Angkor was more dominant than from the main entry on the other side.

3. The pagode d’Angkor of 1889 — the first open-air pavilion of Angkor in Europe

3. The pagode d’Angkor of 1889 — the first open-air pavilion of Angkor in Europe The principal point of entry to the pagode d’Angkor was tres and topped by a central tower of 40 metres in height. perpendicular to the central alley and was called the allée The structure was planned to have “brick walls with a plasdes Sphinx (compare Fig. I.19 for the real Egyptian version, ter finish into which, occasionally, diverse sculptural elein reality it was made of sitting lions). ments would be inserted”. The cost was estimated at 110,000 Indeed, this may have been a reference to the second francs with an income of 20,000 francs generated by mateFrench Universal Exhibition of 1867 when, with the inven- rials sold afterwards. On 19 October 1888, by recommention of the first freestanding ‘national’ pavilions, the temple dation of the Résident général de France au Cambodge and de Pharaon by the architect Drevet had introduced this fea- following telegraphed ministerial instructions, Étienne ture of Egyptian antiquity (compare chapter I and Fig. I.17), Richaud, then gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine, nominated Fabre as a member of the commission to represent which provided the great comparison with Angkor from the first comments made by Mouhot onwards. The ‘pagoda’ Indochina at the 1889 Exhibition and as architect responsi(Figs. IV.9a,b) had been built by the École-des-beaux-arts- ble for the “construction of a pavilion after the style of the trained architect (Noël-Louis) Daniel Fabre (1830–1902(?)) monuments of Angkor and the classification and conservawho was at that time chef du Service des travaux publics tion of the objects and collections sent by Cambodia for in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. There, he was the exhibition”.16 responsible for later major urbanist refurbishments of the As a 18 July 1888 telegram between Saigon and Hanoi city’s old and restored central monastery hill area into a with affixed paper strips reconfirmed, Fabre had by this time modern French quarter (Delaire 1907, 256; Stapathi 1913; already left for Siem Reap to “get into his possession the Culot 1992, 389; compare Figs. V.3a–c).14 Only a few months boxes of mouldings from the Fournereau mission”, which after the first regulations were distributed in early 1887 for “had to be sent to Saigon to be shipped, together with Fabre, the participation of the colonies in the 1889 Universal Ex- to France and to be used to adorn the Cambodian pavilhibition in Paris, Daniel Fabre sent a five-page letter on 30 ion”.17 This collaboration between Fabre and Fournereau September 1887 to George Jules Piquet, the acting Résident was reconfirmed by the latter’s mission reports in the jourgénéral de France au Cambodge, with his “plans and cost nal L’Architecture, where he not only listed the harvest of estimate for a project of the construction of a pavilion to 520 mouldings from his Angkor mission in early 1888 for display the products of Cambodia at the 1889 Exhibition”.15 Delaporte (compare with our analysis of the musée Indo-­ Fabre emphasised the project’s “double interest” for both chinois) and alluded to his plans for the Angkor Wat and the general public and the specialists as it would help both the Bapuon temples on display in the “salon [and] the salle to understand the high degree of perfection in ancient des missions scientifiques in the palais des Arts libéraux on building construction and that the ancient prosperity was the Champ-de-Mars”. He also mentioned that “a certain based on the fertile soil of Cambodia, which was also the number of the moulages had been communicated to M. Fabasis for the present-day kingdom of Cambodia. In a clear bre, architect of the Indochinese section of the exhibition, reference to the temple of Angkor Wat and the effort to and some surmoulages had been taken [in Delaporte’s mucopy decorative elements with moulds on-site (to match seum] to decorate the Cambodian pavilion” (Fournereau the temple’s ‘architectural affordance’, see introduction), 1889/2008, 143, 144). Although the general interest in Ang­ his proposed pavilion comprised a principle gallery of kor had quickly shifted focus to this and to the following 21.80 metres in length and 5 metres in width, and was open-air reconstitutions, very little information was circucrossed by an identical gallery of 14 metres in length, with lated in the guidebooks on the 1889 Exhibition about Dela­ the addition of a secondary gallery of 2 metres; both of porte’s “musée Kmers [sic] ou du Cambodge”, which was these would be elevated with an ornamented socle of 2 me- located in the far end of the left wing of the Trocadero on 14 As architecte des Bâtiments civils de l’Indochine (1892–1907) in Phnom Penh, he built the city’s palais de

Justice (1892), a hospital and market, the treasury, the bridges over the new canal (around 1889–90) and the post office, along with more buildings in the Cambodian towns of Soai Rieng, Takeo, and Kompong Thom (Culot 1992, 389). 15  Daniel Fabre (Service des bâtiments publics, Phnom Penh) to the Résident général du Cambodge, 30 September 1887, in: ANOM INDO GGI 23194 (Dossier L.31: Participation de l’Indochine à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris de 1889, 180 pièces). 16  Decree of Étienne Richaud, Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine, of 19 October 1888, in: ANOM INDO GGI 23194. 17  Telegram from 18 July 1988 from the Gouverneur Général to the Chef du cabinet in Saigon, in: ANOM INDO GGI 23194.

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.9a The pagode d‘Angkor within the French-colonial section of the 1889 Universal ­Exhibition, as depicted in Le Journal illustré (Source: Le Journal illustré 26, 30 June 1889)

the opposite side of the far more popular musée de Sculpture comparée (Guide du visiteur 1889, 109–11, here 111). In order to judge the overall composition of this ephemeral structure in Paris (here we refer to the Egyptian 206

temple for the 1867 Universal Exhibition, see chapter I and Figs. I.17,19), it helps to compare it with both the quoted section from the ‘real site’ of Angkor Wat as it was depicted (quite accurately) in Garnier’s 1873 publication Voyage d’ex-

3. The pagode d’Angkor of 1889 — the first open-air pavilion of Angkor in Europe

Figure IV.9b The pagode d’Angkor during the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris in a historic ­photograph (Source: © Ministère de la Culture, médiathèque de Paris)

ploration (Fig. IV.10a) and at the very moment when the cast of the tower’s elements were made during Lucien Fournereau’s mission of 1887/88 (compare Fig. III.31a, 37). Interestingly, Fabre referred to the lower eastern section of Angkor Wat’s central tower, the same section Delaporte had used in his indoor reconstitution for the musée Indo-chinois, which was located only a few hundred metres down the Seine River in the palais de Troca­déro (compare Fig. III.36). However, unlike the real site and Delaporte’s (and in the first place Fournereau’s) version, which changed only a few small decorative elements in the 1:1-scale reconstitution to form a cut-away aesthetic without the whole tower, Fabre (a) slimmed and stretched the central tower with a new interpretation of its (now much more pointed) pinnacle; (b) reduced the stepped plinths and transformed and ‘embellished’ the lateral wings with newly invented little turrets; (c) multiplied a reduced set of decorative panels for

all four facades; and (d) introduced modern elements like windows to the gallery walls, the upper pediments, and the lower tower section. A close-up of the main entrance to Fabre’s pavilion (Fig. IV.10b) demonstrates that he also reused important decorations from Delaporte’s plaster cast missions to Angkor: (a) the famous ‘Krishna killing Kamsa’ scene (compare Figs. III.31b, 32; see Falser 2011) was now applied to each pediment field on all four facades; (b) the lower half-pediment was also copied but, due to its augmented overall surface, it was added along with some figures to the main wall; and (c) the copied Apsara figures and decorated piers were now simply multiplied and inserted into a flat and undecorated wall surface. After this discussion of its general proportions and its decoration, the analysis of the detailed construction and inner life of Fabre’s pagode d’Angkor relies on three plans published in Louis Farge’s 1892 Exposition universelle 1889: 207

IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figure IV.10a  The central tower of Angkor Wat from north-east as depicted in the Garnier publication of 1873 (Source: Garnier 1873, 1, II, plate VII)

Figure IV.10b  Detail of the pagode d’Angkor in a historic photograph (compare Fig. IV.9b) (Source: © Ministère de la Culture, médiathèque de Paris)

Les constructions françaises et étrangères. Pavillons, portes small daily-life utensils, to costumes, spices, etc. (Exposition monumentales, édicules, etc. (Farge 1892). Using the same universelle de 1889 [1889], 117–22). Interestingly, the popuapproximate floor plan dimensions (Fig.IV.11a) as indicat- lar exhibition guides and journals, always using the same ed by Fabre in his September 1887 letter, the published el- engraving of the pagoda’s photograph (see above), criticised evation plan (Fig. IV.11b) revealed (a) a much more accu- the incoherence between the exterior appearance and the rate roof structure (but with fake turrets); (b) no window internal display of the Khmer pavilion. Lenotre’s Voyages installations (but with a painted and unsculpted gable merveilleux à l’exposition universelle de 1889 appreciated this field); and (c) a less stretched formulation of the tower pro- “most accurately reconstituted […] mysterious pyramid” the portions and an ‘archaeologically’ more precise pinnacle, visitors to which “came out rather disappointed […] by the which reached approximately thirty metres. The section lack of any Buddhist cult related object on display” (Lenotre was striking in that it revealed the ephemeral nature of the 1889, 159). The same conclusion is found in Émile Monod’s pavilion (Fig. IV.11c), which only simulated a sculpted Grand ouvrage illustré on the 1889 Exhibition where he stone structure but was executed with thin brick walls, ap- ­mentions Fabre’s pagoda as having been “inspired by Angkor plied plaster decoration, and a wooden roof and tower. The Wat as the purest manifestation of Khmer art”, but criticises interior decoration in the section drawing – no photograph the limited internal “space of 210 square metres with 20 cupof the executed inner configuration could be located for boards, which left only less than one square metre for each this study – indicated a partly painted tunnel vault and a of the 232 listed exhibitors” (Monod 1890, II, 153, 155). Ducentrally domed ceiling with paintings; whereas the ‘real’ mas/Fourcaud’s Revue de l’Exposition universelle de 1889 construction was made of giant stone slabs forming a cor- celebrated the structure as a “fragment that gave the visitor belled vault system that was, most probably, originally hid- a good idea of the extraordinary original ensemble” but den by a flat wooden ceiling. ironically commented on the business-­like display in a reliThe official catalogue for the colonial section listed the gious temple from Cambodia being guarded by Indochinese products on display inside the pavilion; these came primar- staffage figures: “Why do we speak of business in a holy temily from Georges-Victor Planté from Phnom Penh and ple of Angkor, which was guarded melancholically by a little ranged from a wooden Buddha, money, music instruments, Annamite soldier?” (Huard 1889, I, 340). 208

3. The pagode d’Angkor of 1889 — the first open-air pavilion of Angkor in Europe

Figures IV.11a—c The pagode d’Angkor of the 1889 Universal ­Exhibition in plan, elevation and section drawings (Source: Farge 1892, plates XLI–XLIII; © Bibliothèque ­nationale de France)

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

4. From emprunt and spécimen to a prospective souvenir Louis Gonse, art historian, editor of the famous Gazette des spécimens légués par les architectes Khmers et utilisés beaux-arts, and member of the Conseil supérieur des beauxpour concourir à l’aspect général du projet. C’est surtout arts, published his eulogy Exposition universelle de 1889 – au groupe d’Angkor Wat que les emprunts ont été faits. l’architecture as the sine qua non for the success of the Ces ruines, par leur état de conservation, par la richesse short-lived 1889 Universal Exhibition in 1889 (Gonse 1889). des détails et le fini de l’exécution, offrent en effet d’inéHe referred directly to the eminent role played by architecpuisables et intéressants renseignements. C’est un spécitural decor, which was also the guarantor for the exotic men du l’art Khmer à son plus complet développement, structures on the exhibition’s colonial section to stage “a c’est en même temps le groupe le plus accessible et le festival for the eyes [and] a theatre of the most alluring fanplus facile à explorer. C’est dont à Angkor Wat que les tasies” (Gonse 1889, 465). According to Gonse, the “40 meétudes complémentaires nécessaires à l’exécution du proters high pyramid of the pagode d’Angkor completed the jet devront être faites. À cet effet, un mouleur et quelques animation of this tableau to create an enchanting scene” coolis devront être attachés à la personne chargée de (Gonse 1889, 474). How the decor of this ephemeral theatre ces études à seul fin de rapporter en même temps que called a ‘universal and colonial exhibition’ could have actudes documents absolument précis, des moulages des ally been created in such a short period of time was the principaux motifs de décoration que le projet comporte: focus of Francois-Guillaume Huard’s 1889 article La décofrontons ornés de personnages, stèles et antéfixes, mouration de l’Exposition universelle in the Livre d’or de l’Expolures diverses et des dimensions indiquées, bayadères, sition [universelle de 1889]. In it he called the décorateur the groupes, bas-reliefs, etc. Ces moulages types, serviront à creator of the “characteristic ornamentation” (parure, comla fabrication des moules dans lesquels il sera tiré à Paris, pare the same term in Dognée 1869 in the context of the les longueurs et le nombre d’exemplaires qu’il sera né1867 Universal Exhibition in chapter I) of the building and cessaire, de telle moulure ou de tel motif de décoration. of a great “spectacle”. Besides decorative painters for the Cette manière de procéder offrira l’avantage de ne voir interiors of the large exhibition halls, it was the “mouleur de employer que des détails absolument authentiques, d’évistaff who moulded all the statues, cartouches, ornaments, ter les frais énormes que nécessiterait le travail de comand pilasters” for the short-lived exhibition structures. As position de sculpture s’il fallait créer tous les motifs Huard explained, the Frenchman de Sachy had invented d’après de simples dessins, elle permettra de mener rapithe moulage en staff, which facilitated lighter plaster casts dement les travaux.18 [italics MF] [moulage en plâtre] using the admixture of tow [étoupe, also filasse] (Figs. IV.12a,b). This technique had, according to He explained that “the disposition of the ground plan, the the author, “decorated the exhibition” and therefore had proportions of the ensemble, and the general forms, details, made this “grand œuvre of the fatherland” possible (Huard and ornaments were reproduced and used as literally as 1889, I, 100, 103, 104). As our analysis of the different Angkor possible [reproductions fidèles] from the spécimens left by pavilions with their ever-growing dimensions from 1889 un- the Khmer architects, to be converged [concourir] into the til 1937 shows, it was this technique of moulage en staff that general appearance [aspect général] of the project”. Thanks made the copy on-site, the transfer, and finally, the partial to “its good state of conservation, richness of detail, and reconstitution of Angkor Wat in the French métropole possi- the final touch in the execution, it had been predominantly ble. We have conceptualised this transcultural process as a the group of Angkor Wat where the borrowing [emprunts] ‘translation’; however, this translation followed distinctive had been made”. For the study of this “specimen of Khmer architectural (artistic, aesthetic) approaches and intentions art” he proposed “a moulder with some coolies” for the on the one side, and served different ideological (political, “moulages of the principle motifs of decoration […] which colonial) exploitation on the other. The first open-air pavil- could, as representative moulds [moulages types], be cast ion of Angkor in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris par- back in Paris”; this concentration on “authentic details” ticularly reveals the full ambiguity of this operation. Daniel might “avoid the enormous costs of recreating sculptures Fabre discussed his architectural and artistic, as well as tech- from simple drawings”. Also, in his official publication of nical, approach in his (already cited) letter from 30 Septem- the plans of the pagode d’Angkor, Farge called this construct­ ber 1887 to the Résident général du Cambodge: ion “an emprunt of the ancient Khmer architecture”, so that Fabre’s project was “not a reduction of the temple of AngLes dispositions en plan, les proportions d’ensemble, les kor Wat as the official catalogues and plans had it, but simformes générales, celles des détails et des ornements, ply a reproduction of one of the numerous tours of this great temple” (Farge 1892, 13, 14). sont des reproductions aussi fidèles que possible des 18  Daniel Fabre (Service des bâtiments publics, Phnom Penh) to the Résident général du Cambodge, 30 Sep-

tember 1887, in: ANOM INDO GGI 23194.

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4. From emprunt and spécimen to a prospective souvenir

Figures IV.12a,b  Decoration and plasterer/staff maker for the Universal Exhibition of 1889 (Source: Dumas/Fourcaud 1889, I, 103, 104)

Also from an architectural-artistic point of view, the p­ agode d’Angkor was not a 1:1 replica (as Delaporte had attempted in his museum with the same section of Angkor Wat’s central tower) but an act of borrowing. Its decorative single elements in the form of exact plaster cast copies nevertheless had to authenticate the project. Fabre called these employed elements moulages types, which placed his undertaking at the end of a long line of similar experiments, including Lenoir’s archétypes around 1810, Viollet-le-Duc’s types after 1880, and Delaporte’s term moulages des types (see chapter III). Like Picard’s rapport général the two-volume 1890 publication Les Exposition de l’état au Champ-deMars et à l’esplanade des Invalides reconfirmed that Fabre had been “inspired by the temples of Angkor Wat for his architectural résumé [and] absolutely exact spécimen of Khmer art”. He had not only moulded decorative elements on-site but had also reused “the moulages taken by Dela­ porte and Fournereau” (Exposition universelle de 1889 [1890], 202–3, compare Picard 1891, II, 169). Émile Monod’s description went somewhat further into the technical procedure and identified Fabre’s copied and reused elements from Angkor Wat as “moulages en staff authentiques” (Mo­ nod 1890, II, 155). Finally, Fabre’s 1889 project made it into the architectural reference journal La construction moderne with a three-page report called Exposition universelle de

1889 – Les pays d’Extrême-Orient: La pagode d’Angkor à l’esplanade des Invalides by the architect, traveller, and balloon explorer Albert Tissandier who would publish his own book Cambodge et Java: ruines khmères et javanaises 1893– 1894 in 1896. He called Fabre’s project a “veritable and complete specimen of the old architecture of the country [of Cambodia]”, and therefore it was only a “chosen detail” that could hardly offer the large public “a complete idea of the erected temples of Angkor” (Tissandier 1889, 508, 509). Strangely, this justification strategy is still alive in (postcolonial) France today as the 2013 exhibition Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe – Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge in the musée Guimet could show (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, see our discussion at the end of the previous chapter). Apart from these architectural points of view, the real aim of the colonial section on the esplanade des Invalides was clearly political, and the pagode d’Angkor was likewise a part of the larger civilising discourse of the République coloniale. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (see his 1874 monograph on colonialism above) prefaced the guide to the colonial exhibition whose cover depicted the pagode d’Angkor. It was issued by the Société des études coloniales et maritimes, an interest group founded in 1876 to defend and popularise France’s interests in maritime-colonial trade. And whereas Louis Gonse had only celebrated the eye-catching effect of 211

IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

the colonial exhibition (see above), Leroy added a more relevant dimension: the “picturesque installations” had to help to burn the country’s “civilising work [and] colonising task […] into the heart and mind” of the visitor (Société des études coloniales et maritimes 1889, v–xii). The guide’s general section on Cambodge mentioned the civilisation and history of the Khmer with the “famous pagoda of Ang­ kor Wat as their most remarkable specimen, […] a reduction [of which] had materialised in the colonial exhibition” (Société des études coloniales et maritimes 1889, 38). A separate section called L’art à l’exposition des colonies françaises was written by Émile Soldi, the executing artist of the 1:10-scale porte d’Angkor in the 1878 Universal Exhibition (compare Fig. II.12; Falser 2013b). Here, Soldi described visiting the colonial exhibition including the “Cambodian pyramid”, which was symbolically “protected by the merlons of the [ephemeral medieval-style pavilion of the] Ministry of War and crowned by the golden dome [des Invalides, MF] that spoke of the grand siècle and sheltered César [Napoleon]”, as a “most touching and instructive voyage”. In addition, he conceptualised the “restitution of the central part of Angkor Wat in real scale” in Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois in the Trocadero palace as a compensation for the “destruction of the monuments of ancient Cambodia that are currently taking place [on-site] with deplorable rapidity” (Soldi 1889, 187, 188, 196). When Louis Henrique, the Commissaire spéciale for the colonial section, proclaimed in his 1889 multivolume Les colonies françaises that it was due to France’s “exhortation, example, and patronage that this country was rising from its ruins” (Henrique 1889, III, 2, 89) the ruins themselves were being exhibited in the French métropole. This double-sided – in the best sense, transcultural – narrative (Falser 2013h) of (a) an exhibited (salvaged/substituted) sample of Angkor for the métropole, and (b) the decaying original source of the same (therefore a task for the colonial archaeology of the École française d’Extrême-Orient on the spot, see chapter IX) was told in the impressive, almost 1,100-page Les merveilles de l’Exposition de 1889, ouvrage rédigé par ses écrivains spéciaux et des ingénieurs of 1889. Here, the “courageous Delaporte” was described as having archaeologically explored the “dilapidating Khmer monuments, the ruins of which were today feared by the ignorant indigenes for straying ghosts”. On the other hand, the “organisers of the exhibition had the idea of reconstructing a fragment of the ruins of Angkor, [and] to give us a specimen of the Khmer architecture, the discovery of which was nowadays, after the revelation of the buried cities of ancient Assyria, the most salient task for the history of the art of the Orient” (Collectif 1889, 407–8). Paul Leje­

nisel’s description of La pagode d’Angkor in Huard’s Livre d’or le l’exposition 1889 even paralleled the efforts of “manpower, science, and art to reconstruct this part of Angkor Wat” on the esplanade des Invalides with the same “efforts of the modern science on the [real] site of Angkor Wat, today in the possession of pythons and monkey, to retell the history of what had been a great people” and to “create a sentiment of the [old] grandeur of the monument”19 (Leje­nisel 1889): La pagode de l’esplanade des Invalides, on verra qu’elle n’est pas dépourvue de charme. On lui a donné tout ce qu’on pouvait lui donner de l’original, et c’est faute de place qu’elle n’éveille que la curiosité dans d’elle-même faire naître le sentiment de la grandeur du monument qu’elle réédite néanmoins, l’on reste songeur devant tout ce qu’évoque ce morceau de passé reconstitué. Pour reconstruire cette partie imperceptible de la grande pagode d’Angkor-Waht, que n’avons-nous pas mis en mouvement de force mécanique et de bras, que n’avons-nous pas employé de science et d’art! Et eux les Khmers d’il y a vingt siècles, les ignorés ouvriers de la merveille originale, il leur fallut à eux aussi notre science, notre art, nos moyens mécaniques […] Ils eurent enfin la sciences qui n’est souvent que la mise en ordre de l’art, car ces monuments sont coordonnées avec une exactitudes et un gout parfaits. Ils eurent leurs poètes, les orateurs, leurs hommes d’état… Aujourd’hui, dans les ruines d’Angkor-What, les serpents pythons et les grands singes sont maîtres, et la science moderne cherche curieusement à épeler l’histoire de ce qui fut un grand peuple. [italics MF] (Lejenisel 1889)

Looking at the perfectly reconstituted (restored) pagode d’Angkor in Paris, we can see that Lejenisel’s 1889 remark was a kind of cultural-political self-fulfilling prophecy about the actual original site of Angkor – at a time when the temples were still part of Siam (itself represented at the 1889 Exhibition by an ‘authentic’ wooden pavilion). Once the territory became part of French Indochina in 1907, the Écôle française d’Extrême-Orient began a project that continued until the early 1970s to restore Angkor to the same picture-perfect condition that had been predefined by the metropolitan test versions in the Universal and Colonial Exhibitions in Paris and Marseille from 1889 to 1937 (with the 1:1-scale version in 1931). Daniel Fabre, the architect of the 1889 pagoda version of Angkor, had understood his project to be a creative act of interpretation, which borrowed its overall aesthetics from the architectural affordance of Angkor Wat – in French emprunt – and only used exact copies of decorative elements – in French moulages – to authenticate his display

19  As a matter of transcultural fact, exactly the same rhetoric of “reestablishing the grandeur of Angkor Wat”

was used by the chief archaeologist of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) at Angkor, Bernard Phi­ lippe Groslier, when he wrote the text for the sound-and-light show in front of Angkor Wat in 1966 when – Cambodia was already independent, but the EFEO stayed at Angkor – King Norodom Sihanouk was presenting ‘his’ Angkor Wat to Charles de Gaulle, president of France (see chapter X, Pl. X.23–24).

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in Paris. However, the great politics into which this architectural display was embedded interpreted the pagode d’Ang­ kor as a spécimen exact of the original source. This helped to underline the French ability to display colonially appropriated heritage in the centre of power and later to manifest its civilising vision for the ‘real’ site. The double-sided status of the French patrimoine culturel during the first peak of the République coloniale also became visible in the various scientific conferences that accompanied the popular side of the exhibition. From 24 to 29 June 1889 the Congrès international pour la protection des œuvres d’art et des monuments took place in the Trocadero palace. In the presence of Charles Garnier, president of the congress, Jean Charles Alphand, Albert Kaempfen (directeur des musées nationaux), Jules Ferry, le baron Haussmann, and Viollet-le-Duc in the Comité de patronage as well as international representatives from all over Europe to India, China, and Mexico, Charles Normand, the architect and director of the Amis des monuments de Paris, described in the first session the “aim and programme” of the congress as an international league of the “civilised nations” for the protection of cultural heritage. In fact, this theme came back in UNESCO’s self-declared taste to salvage Angkor Park around 1990 (see chapter XII and epilogue II): La protection et la sauvegarde des monuments, ou plus généralement des œuvres d’art, intéressant les souvenir et l’histoire de toutes les nations civilisées s’imposent à la pensée de quiconque connaît, aime, respecte les traditions ou les gloires de sa patrie. […] Pénétrés d’une même pensée, nous voulons provoquer un courant sympathique, une ligue internationale, qui puisse constituer, même au milieu des violences de la guerre, une défense efficace du patrimoine légué par le passé à toutes les générations présentes. [italics MF] (Ministère du commerce 1889a, 13,14)

Just one month later and in the same location, the Congrès international colonial (members like Hébrard and LeroyBeaulieu were also involved in the colonial exhibition) was opened on 30 July by Édouard Barbey, the former ministre de la Marine et des Colonies. He indicated the implicit mission of what Normand had termed a ‘civilised nation’: “Today, for all civilised nations colonial expansion is a fundamental issue” (Ministère du commerce 1889b, 8). Reading Normand’s and Barbey’s statements together and applying them to the colonial section of the 1889 Exhibition reveals that the ephemerally staged pavilions of France’s colonial possessions (or in the case of Angkor, the longed-for possessions) played a double role: as materialised emprunts or spécimens of existing monumental sites in

the colonies they stood for the imperial claim of France to incorporate these architectural entities into her enlarged canon of national cultural heritage (Pl. IV.7); and they also prefigured and predefined, in their picture-perfect, complete, and exact appearance in Paris, the result of the efforts that France – as a civilised nation and the caring mother in outre-mer – had undertaken by rediscovering, clearing, mapping, and restoring and/or reconstructing the decaying ruins of the ‘real’ site. Within the endless spectacle of the 1889 Universal Exhibition, the visitor had (a) seen the world as a ‘miniature’ in the installation of the terre terrestre, which oversaw the new global dimension of France’s colonial conquest. He had (b) walked under and crested the ‘gigantic’ symbol of the hosting nation, the Tour Eiffel, to participate in the French Republic’s vision of the mastery of the world. He had (c) admired the serial model ‘collection’ of Garnier’s Exposition historique des habitations humaines to get an idea of the civilising cornerstones of humanity with France as its final end point. And finally, he had (d) walked through the colonial exhibition on the esplanade des Invalides containing the iconised and exotic masterpieces of appropriated cultural heritage from France’s colonial overseas possessions. As formally, aesthetically, and materially condensed (timespace compressed) cultural résumés, the ephemeral pavilions served as ‘souvenirs’ with which not only the colonial republic from its political perspective but also the individual citoyen from an emotional perspective could experience the “longing for its place of origin” (Stewart 1993, xii). As what we want to call a ‘prospective’ souvenir of Angkor (which in reality did not yet belong to France), the pagode d’Angkor in the colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition was “attached to the antique and the exotic” and therefore “transformed and collapsed distances” between the métropole and the colony (Stewart 1993, xii, 140). As an anticipated “specimen and trophy” (Stewart 1993, 147) the pagode d’Angkor prefigured in 1889 Paris what would later unfold in situ in the Parc archéologique d’Angkor, an icon of colonial archaeology after the 1920s (see chapter IX). The pagode d’Angkor also turned the individual visitor of the colonial exhibition into an Oriental voyageur who would commemorate the architectural – iconised and enframed – condensate of Angkor and would seek its larger original at the Cambodian site when earliest mass tourism to I­ ndochina began after 1900. Unlike the three-dimensionally staged rue du Caire on the Champs-de-Mars, the consciously chaotic scenography of which made it impossible for the guest at the Parisian exhibition to find its original inspiration in the inconceivable streets of ‘Cairo around 1900’ (Fig. IV.13a, b) (Gléon 1889; compare Leprun 1986, Mitchell 1988, 1989),20

20  In his 1889 publication, L’architecture arabe des Khalifes d’Égypte à l’Exposition universelle de Paris en 1889. La Rue du Caire containing only a few pages of text and twenty-eight plates, le baron Alphonse Delort de Gléon explained his plan to reconstitute a picturesque streetscape of Arab Cairo with ‘authentic’ and invented decorative elements and scale- or size-reduced architectural sections like, most prominently, the minaret of

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IV  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris — Angkor Wat Goes Pavilion

Figures IV.13a,b The rue du Caire as staged on the Champ-de-Mars of the 1889 Universal Exhibition (Source: Gléon 1889, plates 25, 28; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Figure IV.14  A scene in the French-colonial section on the esplanade des Invalides in a comparable, but more ‘civilised’ stage set as the rue du Caire (Source: Monod 1890, II, 549)

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the visitor on his guided “itinéraire”21 through the colonial section on the esplanade des Invalides would have had an easier time of it (Fig. IV.14). Its well-ordered Oriental pavilions in Paris predefined – in our transcultural perspective to follow the hypothesis of a giant ‘back-translation’ in the second volume of this monograph – what can easily be recognised at the so-called original site of Angkor to this day: tamed, picture-perfect, over-restored, static, and ageless temples are now arranged within a well-defined heritage reserve or archaeological theme park along a predefined circulation system (Falser 2013d) that provides all the conveniences for an ever-growing, global cultural tourism

industry and all good reinvented arguments for a recurring ‘stone temple nationalism’ (compare chapters IX, XII). For Henri Marchal, an École-des-Beaux-Arts-trained architect and famous General Conservator of Angkor Park from the 1930s onwards, was – as he remembered in his unpublished memoirs (Marchal 1956, see quote in subchapter 3.1. in chapter IX) – the 1989 Angkor Wat replica in Paris a veritable inititation to leave France and spend half of his life in Angkor (see chapter IX). Once again, Angkor Wat’s particular ‘architectural affordance’ (as we termed it in the introduction to this book) was mirrored here in a typical French ‘Beaux-Arts’-aesthetic.

the Kaitbay mosque. He argued (similar to Fabre’s description and the politicians’ justification of his pagode d’Angkor) that “the rue du Caire was not an exact restitution, but [Gléon] had tried to invent as little as possible and to limit [himself] to an interpretation of an absolute sincerity. It had been impossible to choose one street in Cairo as a model to be reproduced [because] the monuments of Cairo were badly maintained, and disintegrating day by day. […] As résumé, all the buildings in the rue du Caire are the same types of the old houses, […] monuments that break the monotony of the houses are faithful interpretations of Arab monuments; [he] had composed the architecture from these, but if every monument was not a full restitution, each of them was very close to the reality” (Gléon 1889, 5, 10, 11). Postcolonial critique took up this unique scenario. As an effect of the visit of Oriental scenarios as a form of “éthnologie plastique” (Leprun 1986, 17, compare the discussion in Le movement social, 149/1989) like the rue du Caire, “Europeans in general arrived in the Orient after seeing plans and copies, in pictures, exhibitions, museums, and books – for which they were seeking the original”; in a phenomenon that Mitchell termed “Orientalist dismay” (Mitchell 1989, 233), European artists returned, with their prefigured clichés and expectations from the European Orientalist stage sets, to the ‘original source’, but were, in the case of the writers Nerval and Gautier, disappointed by an inconceivable Cairo. 21  Typical publications like the Guide du visiteur à l’Exposition universelle de 1889: Itinéraire, objets remarquables à visiter, plans coloriés prepared itineraries through the exhibition that also predefined what guidebooks to Angkor after 1910 to this day tell the visitor about the archaeological park: “Notre guide dirige le visiteur au milieu des différents groupes en lui faisant l’itinéraire le plus convenable pour tout voir sans perte de tempe ni fatigue. On peut évaluer à 15 ou 20 km le parcours à faire pour visiter […] Le visiteur devra nécessairement fractionner ce voyage suivant ses forces et d’après le temps dont il disposera” (Guide du visiteur 1889, 23)

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V

The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906: From Lyon, Bordeaux, and Rouen to Marseille La France traverse une étrange période qu’on pourrait appeler la période de l’hypnose expositionnelle. Espérons que cet engourdissement n’aura pas nui à notre action extérieure. S’il en devait être autrement, les bénéfices aléatoires de l’Exposition nous reviendraient cher. […] Que cette lâche conception de la grandeur s’insinuât dans les cœurs, qu’elle en bannît des aspirations plus viriles, et l’on pourrait bien rouvrir tous les dix ans une Exposition, l’emplir de meubles et de bijoux, de restaurants et de théâtres forains; on pourrait y édifier des palais de staff surchargés de ‘staffeuses’, y donner des banquets et des fêtes babyloniennes s’il n’était pas éveillé par quelque secousse salutaire, le peuple qui n’aurait plus d’autre moyen de primer dans le monde risquerait de présenter à ses hôtes, dans son Exposition jubilaire de l’an 2000, un miroir colossal où ces étrangers ne verraient que la décadence de leurs amuseurs. [italics MF] (Vogüé 1900, 399) —Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, La défunte exposition, in: Revue des deux mondes (11.12.1900)

1. Paris 1900: Angkor as a decorative accessory By the time the gifted diplomat and writer Eugène-Melchi- acquaint the metropolitans with their colonies” but also to or de Vogüé wrote the above critique of France’s “exposi- propagate the French “battle with the foreign colonies” tional hypnosis” [hypnose expositionelle] during the run-up (Charles-Roux 1902, 8). Referencing the neighbouring into the 1900 Universal Exhibition with its exaggerated series stallations of the Dutch East Indies (he called their reconof ephemeral “Babylonian plaster cast palaces [as] a floppy stituted Javanese temple complex of Tjandi-Sari with its conception of grandeur” that actually “mirrored the deca- “admirable plaster casts” a “grand and wonderful sensation dence” of the French host itself (Vogüé 1900, see quotation of art”, see below), British India, the Portuguese colonies, above), eleven years had already passed since the presenta- and the Russian colonies in Asia, Charles-Roux saw his tion of the first full-scale outdoor pavilion of Angkor at the section as part of the direct “comparison of [France’s] œuvre 1889 Universal Exhibition. Unlike this earlier event, the coloniale to the [other] principal colonial powers with their 1900 Exhibition – called Le bilan d’un siécle and intended établissements overseas” (Charles-Roux 1902, 376). to “recapitulate the accomplishments of progress since Situated this time on the Trocadero palace hill, on the 1800” (Ministère du Commerce 1897a, 3) – did not stage side nearest the Passy wing, the French-colonial section Angkor as one clou in the French-colonial section. Follow- (Fig. V.1) was governed – both in reality and, in this case, ing the exhibition’s classification générale, comprising 18 also symbolically – by the palais du ministère des Colonies, groups and 120 classes, the French-colonial section was which was built to represent the overall results of France’s part of Group XVII (Colonisation), which comprised Class- “œuvre colonisatrice” and “expansion coloniale” (Exposition es 113–15: here the Class Matériel colonial covered materi- universelle 1903, 309). This message was visually underals and colonial building constructions as well as “dwell- scored by Fernand Cormon’s central ceiling decoration ings of the natives: palaces, public or religious buildings, called Les colonies tendant les bras vers la France qui les bazaars, cabins, and straw huts” (Ministère du Commerce appelle. The whole colonial section was physically dominat1897b, 59). The catalogue général officiel added opium sam- ed by Indo-Chine, which stood right next to Delaporte’s ples from Saigon and French-colonial military model hous- musée Indo-chinois and covered, according to the exhibition’s Rapport général administratif et technique, “more es to the list (Exposition internationale 1900, 15–16). Under Émile Loubet, the French president; Alexandre than one hectare and 4,600 square metres of constructions” Millerand, the ministre du Commerce; and Alfred Picard, (Exposition universelle 1903, 320) (Fig. V.2a). As Pierre commissaire général of the 1900 Exhibition, Jules Charles- Nicolas, the responsible commissaire de l’Indo-Chine, exRoux, the Marseille-born industrialist and colonial politi- plained with a depiction to ‘back-translate’ the Paris exhician was made the official delegate of the ministère des Af- bition into tropical environment (Pl. V.1), “The guiding faires étrangères et des colonies and was responsible for the thought of the organisation in this section had been to give organisation of the French-colonial section as a whole. Ac- the visitors a material sensation of the administrative, ecocording to his report, this section was – for the first time in nomic, and moral unity of our great colony of Asia, which an “international colonial exhibition” – not just created “to has found today its definite form under [the new Gou217

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figure V.1  Ground plan of the French-colonial section on Trocadero hill during the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Indochina in grey) (Source: Nicolas 1900, 8–9)

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Figure V.2a  Trocadero hill with Indochinese section of the 1900 Universal ­Exhibition next to Delaporte’s Musée Indochinois (Chalet-Bailhache 2008, 44)

Figure V.2b  The Phnom Penh monastery hill installation in the 1900 Exhibition (Source: L’Illustration 3001 (1.9.1900), 135)

verneur général de l’Indochine] Paul Doumer” (Nicolas 1900, 3). With the display of all the agricultural, industrial, and artistic products, “the most beautiful specimens of the Cambodian and Annamite architecture, and the reproduction of monuments, great public works, towns, temples, dwellings, sites, and types of the colony”, the section was to provide an “animated synthesis of the life and progress of

all the parts of the Union indo-chinoise” (Nicolas 1900, 12). In fact, Indochina was at this point neither pacified nor geographically settled and was actually in a critical state of territorial transformation caused by the French expansionist aggression in Cambodia towards the Siamese provinces of Siem Reap (including Angkor) and Battambang (see chapter VI).1

1  In his description of Indochina, Nicolas mentioned the colony’s surface of 680,000 square kilometres, but

did not forget to add the supposedly “neutralised provinces of Siem Reap (Angkor) and Battambang” to the French territory. In the annex, he emphasised that “Siam’s frontiers with Indochina were open and non-defined” and the strategic points of Siem Reap and Battambang “were occupied since 1893 by a [French] garrison” (Nicolas 1900, 27, 247, 254).

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Figures V.3a—c  The ‘real’ Phnom Penh monastery hill as depicted in a photograph of the 1950s, circulated with a postcard in the process of urban refurbishment under Daniel Fabre in the 1890s and published in a plan in the Paris-based journal Construction moderne of 1913 (Source: © Collection Charles Meyer Paris; Construction moderne (31 August 1913), 566)

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Figures V.4a,b  The monastery hall on top of the Indochinese installation during the 1900 Exhibition: In the rear the Eiffel Tower from the previous 1889 Exhibition and on the pathway down, passing a Bayon-styled feature next to a Lao-styled hut (Source: Exposition 1900 (1903), vol. 4, 320–21 and 322–3; © Cnum – Conservatoire numérique des Arts et Métiers, Paris)

Supervised by Louis Henri Georges Scellier de Gisors, inspecteur général des Bâtiments civils in Paris, Beaux-Artsteacher of Auguste Delaval (see chapter VI) and architecte en chef de l’Exposition coloniale, the Indochina section comprised of buildings like the palais des Produits de l’Indo-­ chine, the pavillon des Arts, and the pavillon Forestier of Tonkin, as well as a Cambodian theatre built by the architects du Houx, de Brossard, and Decron. But the dominant landmark of the section was Alexandre-Auguste-Louis Marcel’s (1860–1928) 47-metre-high and 1,800-square-metre reconstitution of the same monastery hill of Phnom Penh (Fig. V.2b). The restoration of the ‘real’ hill (Fig. V.3a) had been carried out by the architect of the Angkor pavilion of 1889 and chef du Service des travaux publics in Cambodia’s capital, Daniel ­Fabre, who later integrated the site into a new modern French quarter with a Angkor-styled Pont des Nagas (Figs. V.3b,c), compare its replica in the 1906 Marseille Exhibition (Fig. V.14b,c). As a Parisian Écôle-de-Beaux-Artstrained architect, Marcel was a typical “Orientalist architect” who had already built various picturesque and stylistically eclectic structures, ranging from the Chinese-style cinema La Pagode in Paris, the Moresque baroque-style Spanish pavilion, and the Tour du monde (see below) for the 1900 Universal Exhibition to a Maharaja palace near Lahore and a Hindu-style palace in the European quarter of Heliopolis in Cairo (Delaire 1907, 338; Declety 2003, 57, 60, 63). The visitor to the Cambodian stage set who climbed the steep staircase of the monastery hill experienced the strange visual overlap of an ephemeral Oriental religious hall (vihara) in the foreground and the engineering icon of the 1889 Uni­ versal Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower, in the far background (Fig. V.4a). From this point of view, the visitor also experi-

enced what was described in one of the detailed publications about the 1900 Exhibition in the following manner: The structure that surprised us most is the so-called Cambodian reproduction: the Marcel-Dumoulin project. The architect, Marcel, and Dumoulin, the painter of the Ministry of the Colonies, had the idea of reconstituting the hill of Phnom Penh with the king of Cambodia’s pagoda on the top. On the slopes of the hill they erected Laotian huts framed by exotic vegetation that will impress with its power and virtuosity but is, alas, fictitious. These large trees, eighteen metres in height, are nothing more than monoliths of re-enforced concrete to whose extremities the real foliage of fan palms [lataniers] and palm trees have been affixed. (da Cunha 1900, 213)

The popular journal L’Illustration commented on a different installation along the circular pathway, which was a quotation from the overgrown Bayon temple face tower (Fig. V.4b) and most probably based on Delaporte’s lifesize plaster casts housed in the neighbouring musée Indo-­ chinois (compare with Figs. III.26b and 40): “At the end of the [Laotian] village, there is another Khmer ruin: the head of a giant Buddha, entangled by liana” (L’Illustration 1900, 135). Once the visitor at the top of the hill had taken the entry gate into the stupa structure behind the hall building, he entered the inner core of the monastery hill with its fantastic interior parcours (Fig. V.5a). Descending the spiral staircase, he would once again encounter the same Bayon-­ like faces; this time, Marcel used them not for a freestanding and ‘overgrown’ mini pavilion outside but as multiplied frieze-like elements for the circular decoration of the inner 221

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figure V.5a  A section through the monastery hill installation during the 1900 Exhibition (Source: Charles-Roux 1900, plate 67)

dome ceiling of this artificial grotto (Fig. V.5b). As CharlesRoux termed it, “The decoration of the immense below-­ ground hall was borrowed [emprunté] from the Brahmanic and Buddhist temples of the Khmer built in the souterrain of Ellora” (Charles-Roux 1902, 124). Indeed, the source was not a Cambodian one at all but a fifth- to tenth-century rock-cut architectural site in northwest India! In addition, Marcel’s static display of Oriental antiquity was cross-faded with dynamic scenes of French-colonial improvement in an elaborated scenography created by the painter Louis Dumoulin: “In order to augment the sensation of bewilderment caused by such grandeur, a cinematograph projected rapid visions of the contemporary life that animates the streets of Saigon, and elaborated dioramas poetically evoking the landscapes of the Halong Bay in Tonkin, the banks of the Mekong River at the town of Mytho, Cochin­ china” (Quantin 1900, 182). Images of the newly erected engineering superstructure of the Doumer Bridge in Hanoi were depicted as well. Finally, the visitor to ‘Cambodia in Paris’ would encounter what Alfred Picard, the commissaire général of the 1900 Exhibition, had defined as the overall programme of the event – “education and instruction”. As a part of the 1900 Exhibition’s new thematic group, the “moral and material œuvre of colonisation”, the Cambodian section also contributed to the “justification of the need for colonial expansion of all civilised people” (Encyclopédie du siècle 1900, 1). After the visitor had left the

Figure V.5b  Inside the monastery hill during the 1900 Exhibition with a frieze-like decoration of Bayon faces (Source: Charles-Roux 1900, plate 69)

Cambodian multimedia scenario of plaster and concrete casts and the painted canvas of dioramas with cinematographic images of the French civilising effort in Indochina, the galleries at the exit of the ensemble were reserved for the explorer and diplomat Auguste Pavie. His Indochinese mission for a “territorial aggrandisement” (Nicolas 1900, 269) around 1890 had helped to prepare the treaty of 1893 and to negotiate the ever-expanding frontiers of French-Indochina along and across the Mekong River into Upper Laos (compare Dubois 1902, 807–947, Deloncle 1906, 422–497). Was this the kind of instruction on the colonies of France to which Alfred Picard, in his multivolume exhibition report Bilan d’un siècle, had attributed the status of “large independence, autonomy, a kind of vassal power” (Picard 1906, VI, 88, 89)? Certainly, the strong protests of Cambodia’s Prince Yukanthor against France’s rising political pressure on King Norodom and the commercial exploitation of Cambodia during his official visit to the 1900 Exhibition were left unmentioned in his report. In reality, the prince’s personal address, which was published in the daily paper Le Figaro, created a veritable scandal.2 Although the temple of Angkor Wat was not staged in the 1900 Exhibition as a three-dimensional pavilion, it became a fixed heritage icon on the developing hit list of the universal cultural tourism fantasy, to be encashed at (or ‘back-translated’ in form of) the upcoming Archaeological Park of Angkor itself, compare chapter IX). Back in Paris,

2  The article from the front page of Le Figaro on 13 July 1899, the journalist Jean Hess gave shocking details

about French aggression. Prince Yukanthor protested in a “Mémoire adressé par S.A.R.L. le Prince héritier Iukanthor à Monsieur le Président du Conseil des ministres et à messieurs les membres du Gouvernement de la République française” (16 July 1900) against the “veritable repression” in which “Cambodia had become a slave of the French administration”.

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Figure V.6a  Le tour du monde in the 1900 Exhibition with Angkor-styled roof elements (Source: Baschet 1900, vue 161; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Figure V.6b  The internal panorama of Le tour du monde with Angkor Wat next to India and China (Source: Quantin 1900, 351; © Heidelberg University Library)

the architect Alexandre Marcel and the painter Louis Dumoulin, the same protagonists of Cambodia’s representation in 1900, created yet another hybrid scenario, called Le tour du monde. It was situated near the same spot at the quai d’Orsay at the pont d’Iéna (ironically, placed next to the ephemeral Siam pavilion) where in 1889 the marine panorama and Garnier’s Histoire de l’habitation humaine

had stood in the shadow of the newly erected Eiffel Tower. What from the outside unfolded as an architectural résumé of features from an Indian temple tower, a Chinese pagoda, and the curved roof structure of Khmer temples (Fig. V.6a), could be experienced inside as a series of painted panoramic canvases (Fig. V.6b) in front of which the visitor went on a “extraordinary and marvellous voyage” (Guide 223

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Chaix 1900, 112). This fantasy trip began at the colonial port of Marseille and embarked for Athens’s acropolis (compare the relation of this ensemble as a site of architectural restoration to the parallel discussion at Angkor in chapter IX). The visitor then visited Syria and Egypt, passed through the Suez Canal to Ceylon and India to appreciate the iconised view towards Angkor Wat’s central perspective next to a Bayon face tower, and finally concluded his travels in China and Japan. In the 1900 article Le tour du monde à l’Exposition de 1900 as part of the collection Encyclopédie du siècle – L’Exposition de Paris 1900, Paul Combe explained this installation as a moving world theatre where the immobile visitor could experience a new, even better reality than what would have been experienced on an actual arduous journey: The pleasure of the voyage consists not in the displacement itself. The charm of it is the powerful attraction of the unknown, a spectacle that is without pause renewed before the eyes of the visitor: the picturesque views, the ever-new scenes and ways of life, the different types of people with their strange costumes, in varying sceneries […] a series of screens [une série de tableaux] that give, like the decor of a theatre, the perspectives and a kind of relief sensation in real size, dimension, form, colour, and remarkable views on the principal countries of the world […] The spectator rests immobile, in all darkness, and it is the panorama which turns around him and gives him the illusion of movement. […] The illusion is perfect, a real voyage could not offer more and would, to the contrary, lose the detail that the artist here knew to depict […] never before has reality been more closely touchable [Jamais la réalité n’avait été touchée d’aussi près]. [italics MF] (Combes 1900, 147, 156, 158)

In order to bring the reality effect closer to the spectator, ‘real-life’ protagonists animated each of the moving scenes. One of the impressive photograph collages was created by the famous Neurdein brothers together with Maurice Baschet for the album Le Panorama – Exposition universelle de 1900 and documented the Javanese [!] – not Khmer – female dancers who brought the painted scenes on the Khmer ruins back to life (Baschet 1900, 166) (Fig. V.7a). If in the 1889 Exhibition the Javanese installation was located only next to pavilion of Angkor, it had now already entered into the pathway of Angkor Wat itself. At the moment when Javanese dancers from the Dutch East Indies were popu­

lating the Angkorian past in Paris and prefiguring what would later become the reinvention and total commodification of the ‘authentic royal ballet’ of Khmer dancers in the following colonial exhibitions in France (Falser 2013f), the Dutch-colonial section was also triggering a discussion about the ‘sense and non-sense’ of displaying picture-perfect architectures from Southeast Asian antiquity in the French métropole. The journalist Maurice Talmeyr, in his 1900 article “L’École du Trocadéro” in the Revue des deux mondes, used the supposedly authentic architectural reconstitution of the Javanese temple Djandi Sari from the Indes Néerlandaises3 (Fig. V.7b) as well as the ‘faked’ Cambodian theatre with its disguised French female dancers as case studies with which to criticise the “exoticism” in a spaceand time-compressed “bazaar of architectures […] without soul and atmosphere”. The official aim behind the display was, from a political point of view, to provide visual “instruction [enseignement] in all branches of civilisation and life”. But would, as Talmeyr asked ironically, some salt in a Parisian bathtub replace the experience of travelling to swim in the salty oceans from Africa to Asia? We find ourselves in the temple, in a small hall of white stone, really way too white. It is perfect, it is the Djandi Sari temple, and all plaster casts, I was assured, had been taken from Java. […] a Djandi Sari with no missing line, more complete than ever, a Djandi Sari made anew! All this is conscientious and testifies an ardent industrial enthusiasm for Javanese antiquity. But which Java, ultimately, was reconstituted here? The actual Java? No, since it is actually in ruins. The ancient Java? […] We have our strong doubts, and Java is not at all experienced in this all too white edifice, all too fresh and new, and guarded by the firefighters. One is instinctively a custodian over plaster casts. One feels to be in the hall of a new crematory oven just before its inauguration. Is this really old Java? […] These objects are nothing more than fragments, rubble, misunderstood and incoherent, and they signify nothing and are attached to nothing. One cannot even say that the concept is wrong. It is simply non-existing, not there. […] The whole project has no soul. […] Why does the old temple, being a ruin in Java, look like an all too nice crematory oven along the Seine? Because a simple reproduction of the ruin would have been, in this kind of placement, undesirable. […] Why also a Cambodian theatre outside of Cambodia? […] Always due to the necessity of simple amusement, looking for customers, because this is what

3  The replica was again instrumentalised in the 1930s when discussions started on how to restore the ‘real’

temples of Java and Angkor (chapter IX). In fact, the transcultural circle between Java and Angkor was repeated: the panorama-quality of Borobudur was mapped and progressively re-produced since the 1970s by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency working on the spot with the French (coming from Angkor). This approach influenced the Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann in the 1990s for his work for Angkor Park (see Fig. XII.8). In 2015 the 1900 panorama from Paris came back to (almost) the ‘original’ place when North Korea funded the Angkor (Wat) Panorama in Siem Reap (see Pl. EpII.26a,b).

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1. Paris 1900: Angkor as a decorative accessory

Figure V.7a  The internal panorama of Le tour du monde with Javanese dancers in front of Angkor Wat (Source: Baschet 1900, vue 166; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Figure V.7b  The Dutch East Indies installation with a plaster cast mix from ­Borobudur (in front) and the Djandi Sari temple (in the background) (Source: Baschet 1900, vue 88; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

an exhibition is all about. […] No difficult voyage to take, no difficult language to speak […] Pleasing methods! But are we really sure to take a bath in the sea just by putting a package of salt into our bathtub, and are we coming back from China, India, or the Sudan just becaue we return from the Trocadero? [italics MF] (Talmeyr 1900, 198, 200, 205, 211, 213)

The Javanese temple in its actual state of ruin at the original site was – and we will also see this phenomenon in the case of Angkor Wat in the exhibitions of Marseille in 1922 and Paris in 1931 (chapters VI and VII) – transformed by the colonial ‘possessors’ into a complete and “amusing” substitute for the métropole. As was seen in the Tour du monde installation, the real experience of travel, with all its hard225

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

ships and deprivations (compare our discussion in chapter and the archaeological reserves as a whole which funcIX of guide books for the ‘real’ Angkor Park that aimed to tioned, in the Foucauldian sense, as heterotopias or ‘live-­ bring temples and indigenous people into an enjoyable and enacted utopias’ of heritage. controllable vision for the emerging tourist industry), was Interestingly, it was Jules Charles-Roux himself who substituted for with short-term amusement. But was this, directly responded to Talmeyr’s and Vogüé’s critiques in his as Talmeyr asked, the same sensation? Introduction générale for the French-colonial section (comSeen from our transcultural perspective (see the intro- pare the introductory quotation of this chapter). For him, duction to this book), these scenarios in Paris had direct “atmosphere and absolute verity” had never been part of the consequences for the ‘original’ sites: The “triomphe de plâ- exhibition’s primary goal of public “instruction”. Instead tre”, as it was ironically described because of the exaggerat- the aim was to merely formulate an “approximate idea […] ed decorative surfaces of the temporary architecture in the of the resources, the richness, and civilisation of the French1900 Exhibition (da Cunha 1900, 75–79), also applied to colonial empire, […] exoticism was only an accessory […] the architectural reconstitutions of non-European sites of to develop a tableau matériel for the eyes of the i­ nternational antiquity. The ageless test versions of colonial temple sites public” (Charles-Roux 1901, 227).4 But Vogüé’s critique of in European exhibitions, displayed with the help of ‘au- the overloaded exhibition architecture delved much deeper thentic’ plaster casts, generated aesthetic expectations of into an analysis of the French cultural psyche. He declared picture-perfect conditions that were then reimported that the “palais de staff surchargés de ‘staffeuses’” housing (‘back-translated’) and applied to the temple sites them- “Babylonian banquets and parties” to enchant the French selves. Particularly in the case of Angkor Wat, the disci- public produced a false nationalistic grandeur that contraplines of archaeology and architectural restoration turned dicted the pretended cosmopolitisme of the 1900 Exhibition. the ‘original’ structure in Cambodia into an image that had What had up to this point always been reserved to justify already been established in France. In a more abstract sense, the French civilising mission towards the degenerated coboth sites – the plaster cast temples in French exhibitions lonial sphere was now an indication of the cultural status and the ‘to-be-restored’ temples in the colonies (Angkor of the métropole itself through the entertaining medium of Wat in Cambodia, Djandi Sari on Java, see chapter IX) – the Universal Exhibition: “the decadence of their consumwere constitutive elements of the general exhibition sites ers [la décadence de leurs amuseurs]” (Vogüé 1900, 399).

2. Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, and Rouen 1896: Displaying colonies in the French periphery Running parallel to the master narrative of France’s grandeur that had unfolded in the 1889/1900 Universal Exhibitions in Paris, the colonial exhibitions held in the French periphery were characterised by a more ‘national’ emphasis. And whereas the exhibitions of Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, and Rouen 1896 addressed Khmer antiquity only with few elements, it was in the colonial port of Marseille that a fullscale substitute for Cambodia’s Angkor Wat was gradually put together in France. In December 1892 the French president Sadi-Carnot declared that the Exposition internationale et coloniale would be open from April to November 1894 in the parc de la Tête-d’Or in Lyon (Fig. V.8). According to the règlement général, the exhibition was to receive art works and agricultural and industrial products from France, her colonies, and protectorates and was placed under the direction of the commissaire entrepreneur général Jean Claret, with

strong support from the chambre de Commerce de Lyon. The exhibition’s main structure, a polygonal pavilion of 50,000 square metres, 232 metres in diameter, and an overall height of 55 metres, was accompanied by a number of other ephemeral buildings. On the other side of the lake, the three major colonial pavilions for Algeria, Tunisia, and Indochina were grouped with an African pavilion, panoramas, an Egyptian café-theatre, and an ethnographic exhibition containing ‘black villages’ as well as a village annamite to create, as the Guide illustrée described it, a “perfect illusion through exact reproductions” (Guide illustrée 1894, 20). The exhibition – proudly termed in the Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition de Lyon 1894 as Exposition de Lyon, universelle, internationale et coloniale – was divided into ten groups with fifty-four classes. Group III (Class 7) comprised the “Arts militaire: Marine, colonies et pays de protecorat”5 and was placed under the direction of Ulysse Pila,

4  Interestingly, the term “tableau” was also used in a 1928 guidebook by Henri Marchal to describe the “ex-

otic spectacles” of indigenous villages inside the Angkor Park (Marchal 1928, 203; compare Falser 2013d and chapter IX). 5  “Règlement général”, in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition de Lyon, universelle, internationale et coloniale en 1894 (16 February 1893), 1–3.

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2. Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, and Rouen 1896: Displaying colonies in the French periphery

Figure V.8  The site of the Exposition internationale et coloniale in Lyon 1894 (Source: Exposition 1894 (1897), 27)

the official delegate of Lyon’s chamber of commerce, a prominent silk merchant, a member of the Conseil supérieur des colonies, and the vice-président de l’Union colonial française. The Notice sur l’exposition coloniale in the exhibition’s Livre d’or pointed out that although the colonial display was oriented to a lesser degree towards picturesque installations of the colonies, its main focus was to show “the reciprocal gains to be had by both the métropole and the colonies through the exchange of their products” (Livre d’or 1897, 203). Pila had sent out a circulaire to all political and commercial representatives in the French colonies and protectorates with a more detailed vision that would reduce the “ocean of idols and fetishes, bizarre specimens of art” and bring the “purely commercial” character of the colonies to the fore at the Lyon Exhibition.6 The colonial pavilions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Indochina were designed by the architects Bouilhères and Teysseire who attempted to use characteristic style elements from various sites of the colonies. The Indochinese pavilion (also named palais de l’Annam et du Tonkin) only quoted architectural elements from Tonkin and Annam (Fig. V.9). It remains only a vague hypothesis that stylistic references to Angkor were not added to the pavilion because of the rising political conflicts between the French in Cambodia and

Siam (including its territory of Angkor). However, in an interesting twist, the Bulletin officiel of the Lyon event asked the government to add a Siamese pavilion to the exhibition in order to make the political geography of Indochina7 “not only understood to our soldiers but also to our merchants and producers: Monsieur le ministre des Affaires étrangères, all French Indochina will be represented en miniature et en résumé in one corner of the parc de la Têted’Or. You wanted to add the glory of Siam to our Indo-Chine. Add it also to our exhibition. […] Siam has to be good for something.”8 Like Class 7, the Exposition coloniale was organised by the chambre de Commerce of Lyon. However, Angkor was only vaguely represented inside the Indochinese pavilion in two displays. Besides larger exhibitions on Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, the Exposition permanente des Colonies from the Parisian palais de l’Industrie was represented by its commissaire Fernand Blum. The catalogue for its objects on display in Lyon only listed four entries: “gilded costume and cloth, silk, pepper, and wood” (Blum 1894, 22). As far as the products sent directly from Cambodia were concerned (products from Yunnan and Siam were organised by Auguste Pavie as French minister in Bangkok) the Phnom Penh negotiator, Marrot, was nominated by the

6  “La propagande – Groupe III – Colonies”, in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition de Lyon 1894 (9 November 1893), 2–3. 7  At this point French colonial extremists were urging the annexation of Siam. See the next chapter with a section on the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907. 8  “Chronique hebdomadaire”, in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposition de Lyon 1894 (16 November 1893), 1.

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Figure V.9  The Indochinese pavilion (also named palais de l’Annam et du Tonkin) at the ­Exposition internationale et coloniale in Lyon 1894 (Source: Bulletin officiel, 31.5.1894, 4)

Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine as commissaire délégué du Cambodge to bring a representative collection of industrial, agricultural, and artistic products to Lyon. The catalogue officiel for Group III/Class 7 listed on eight short pages the curious mix of displayed objects. In the section on “Ethnography”, a reduction of Cambodian carts, a model of a Cambodian house, a betel nut box, a trailer for an elephant, and some cooking utensils were mentioned. Along with a little section on musical instruments, objects for exportation, and furniture and jewellery, a short inventory of “Moulages et divinités cambodgiennes” listed bas-reliefs and two plaster casts from Angkor, and Buddha statues in different materials from Phnom Penh and the temple sites of Phnom Basset, Preah Khan, Sambor, and Wat-Nokor (Exposition 1894, 287–195). The iconic quality of Angkor was also displayed in a curious exhibit: as Marrot mentioned in his own exhibition report on Cambodia, some Cambodian coins from the Cambodian monastic court were on display in which the three-tower elevation of Ang­kor Wat was depicted (Marrot 1894, 31; see Figs. EpI.1a,b).9 Last but not least, the palais de l’Art oriental (within a small ­annex building to the palais de l’Algérie) brought together an Indochinese ensemble under the direction of Charles Lemire from Phnom Penh. This included a théâtre Cam-

bodgien with musicians and female dancers, some indigenous people to stage a “vie commerciale” in the Annamite village, and a collection of statues of Cham and Annamite ruins, “which came completely from [Delaporte’s] musée Khmèr from Paris”. As the Bulletin official declared, “These divinities and symbols of such different religious orders are nowadays dominated and protected, as one coherent political union, by the [French-­colonial] flag of the protectorate.”10 However, none of these installations could distract from what would be the biggest political nightmare for all universal or colonial, international or national exhibitions in France: the assassination of Sadi-Carnot, the president of the French Republic, by a young extremist on 24 June 1894 during his official visit to the Lyon Exhibition. Bordeaux, with its long tradition as an important trading port, had been in the early 1850s the first French city to include colonial sections in its commercial exhibitions. These colonial sections grew over the years right up to the city’s thirteenth exhibition in 1895, which occurred between the two most closely comparable events in Lyon in 1894 and Rouen in 1896, and was another provincial response to the success of the first French-colonial section in the French Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris. The 1895 Maritime and International Exhibition of Bordeaux was,

9  Compare the context these coins in epilogue I to this first volume. 10  “Exposition colonial – La section indo-chinoise du palais de l’Art oriental”, in: Bulletin officiel de l’Exposi-

tion de Lyon 1894 (5 May 1894), 5.

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Figure V.10  The palais colonial in the 1895 Maritime and International Exhibition at ­Bordeaux (Source: La Gironde 1895, 155)

like all the previous incarnations, situated on the same spot ture with Chinese facade decorations and an attached minin the place des Quinconces, organised by the Société philo- aret (Fig. V.10). The “French colonies” were mentioned in matique de Bordeaux (a philanthropic society with a focus one of the 3,300 entries in the liste des exposants and dison literature, sciences, music, and archaeology). It was sup- played “products, maps, ethnography, instruction material”; ported by the state, including the département de la Gironde, however, Cambodge was not mentioned in the inventory of the municipality, and the chamber of commerce of Bor- private exhibitors from the colonies (Exposition Bordeaux deaux. The industrial and agricultural products on display 1895a, 284–85). The Guide officiel de l’exposition gave more from the represented French colonies and invited colonial details: the ministère des Colonies had chosen Théophile guest nations, including Great Britain, Belgium, Spain, and Bilbaut as commissaire général of the colonial section, and Portugal, gave the regional character of the exhibition an specimens from the French colonies ranging from Tahiti to added ‘universal’ touch (Lozère 2007, 71–93). With the Sudan and Indochina – including Cambodia – were exhibsecrétaire général J. Avril as ingénieur des arts et manufac- ited on two levels. The Paris-based Exposition permanente tures and the president A.-E. Hausser as ingénieur en chef des Colonies was mentioned as having sent “the principal des ponts et chaussées and engineer of the Compagnie du elements” of the displays (Exposition Bordeaux 1895b, 164). Midi, the exhibition covered 10 hectares and 3,300 square It may be safe to say that at least the basic curious elements metres of constructed surface with more than 10,000 ex- of Cambodia were present in the Bordeaux Exhibition of hibitors. 1895 next to an “Annamite house and a Buddhist temple” in Albert Tournaire, architect and famous École-des-Beaux-­ the ethnographic display (Exposition Bordeaux 1895c, 159). Arts Rome-prize winner, was chosen as directeur des travaux Some original sculptures and plaster casts from Angkor for the general layout plan and he planned the ensemble of were again presented, and were most probably similar to a palais principal with two flanking gallery buildings. The those displayed at the previous Lyon event. Contributing to what Eugène Noel defined in 1897 as a exhibition’s classification générale comprised of ten groups with 133 classes (Exposition Bordeaux 1895a, 12–31); be- “encyclopaedic movement” in the display of progress in the sides a separate pavilion de l’Algérie and villages annamites sciences, arts, and industries through the medium of uniet africains, the tenth group, Commerce et Colonies, in Class versal and national exhibitions (Revue illustrée 1897, 2), the 133 on Colonisation was exhibited in a separate palais colo- Exposition nationale et coloniale de Rouen of 1896 was the nial by the architect Bezault and engineer Caillet (Exposi- third and last regional exhibition in France before 1900 tion Bordeaux 1895c, 157). It had been financed by the that demonstrated a ‘colonial touch’. It was remarkable for chambre de Commerce and executed in a ‘European’ cuba- two reasons: first, it was the first regional (non-Parisian) 229

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figure V.11a  Vieux-Rouen at the 1896 Exhibition at Rouen (Source: Revue Rouen 1896, ­between 91 and 90)

Figure V.11b  Le village nègre at the 1896 Exhibition at Rouen (Source: Revue Rouen 1896, ­between 140 and 141)

exhibition to bring plaster cast decorations from Angkorian antiquity into a larger architectural context; and second, it featured – running in parallel with the exhibition’s goal of displaying industrial, agricultural, social, and aesthetic progress – an architecturally reconstituted ensemble of 230

‘Old Rouen’. Both together touched upon what we might call a Janus-faced vision of the different pasts of the métropole and the colony in the category of the exotic. This has a particular importance for the present research into the story of Angkor’s depiction in France, which had its start in

2. Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, and Rouen 1896: Displaying colonies in the French periphery

Figure V.11c  Le pavillon colonial at the 1896 Exhibition at Rouen with pediment fields decorations from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois (Source: Revue Rouen 1896, between 196 and 197)

the French periphery of Rouen in 1896 and would find its end point in France’s last Universal (called International) Exhibition in Paris in 1937 (see chapter VIII). In 1937 an Angkorian pavilion would be erected for the last time in France when, again in direct proximity, the display of the nation’s own exotic – folkloristic, vernacular, and anti-industrial – past and present was staged in the Centre régional. On 16 May 1896 the Exhibition of Rouen opened its gates. The ministre du Commerce Henry Boucher and ministre des Colonies André Lebon were the official national representatives from Paris. The local side was represented by T. Laurent, the mayor of Rouen; M. Knieder, the local industrialist, conseiller général, and président de l’Exposition; E. Garnier, the secrétaire général and ingénieur hydro­ graphe de la Marine; Georges Ruel, the architect r­ esponsible for the event; and leading representatives of the préfecture of the province and the chambre de Commerce of Rouen. The exhibition took place on the 60,000-square-metre Champs-de-Mars near the Seine River (Pl. V.2), which connected Rouen as an important trading port of Normandy with nearby Paris. Within the exhibition’s approximately triangular plan, the visitor passed the gates at the north-­ western corner (the lower right side of the depicted plan). To his left in the north-eastern corner, the major exhibition complex covering 21,000 square metres provided insight into the latest achievements of artistic, industrial, and scientific progress and therefore covered most of the thirteen groups and forty-eight classes of the exhibition’s classification générale (Le Journal de l’Exposition 1896, No. 1, 6–7). In the third, south-eastern corner of the site (in the central

upper edge of the depicted plan), a totally new feature was installed that heavily contradicted (or complemented in a certain sense) the progress-oriented display. This was the ephemeral 2,400-square-metre and three-dimensional open-air scenario called Vieux-Rouen (Fig. V.11a). Its initiator, the painter Jules Adeline, argued in 1896 in his fifty-page section inside the Revue illustrée de l’Exposition called “Le Vieux-Rouen reconstitué à l’Exposition nationale et coloniale”, that the trend to reconstitute entire ancient sites – using plaster casts and painted boards attached to wooden scaffolding as well as real actors in historic costumes – had been developed at comparable exhibitions in Belgium and Holland (Antwerp 1892, Anvers 1894, and Amsterdam 1895). They replaced similar visual impressions of old Europe on painted canvas within dioramas and panoramas (Adeline 1896, 75–77). As the secrétaire général of the Rouen Exhibition, Eugène Garnier, explained in his rapport général, these urban “restitutions gained much by their presentation in their natural environment”. Unlike the following Paris Exhibition in 1900, where an entire reconstituted monastery hill from ancient Phnom Penh was, on the other side of a Vieux-Paris installation, be visually confronted with the high-tech Eiffel Tower, Garnier argued that VieuxRouen was different. Here, only the low-tech “voisinage of church and bell towers of the city within the clipped silhouette on the horizon [would] give the staff of the exhibition the character of living reality” (Garnier 1899, 39). However, this nostalgic evocation of Europe’s golden medieval age was used to play down the results of modernity at the height of Occidental industrialisation in 1900 and 231

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figure V.12  The Ta Prohm pediment in the musée Indo-chinois as reused in Rouen, compare Fig. V.11c (Source: Guérinet n.d., plate 49)

borrowed from what Western travellers had deplored when they encountered – like in Angkor – the long-past glory of Asian antiquity in its present state of Eastern decadence. The classical colonial topos of an elapsed and much-desired past in a troubled present had returned to colour Europe’s ‘own exotic past’ within the reflexive turn of the fin de siècle. Fabre des Essarts’s nostalgic journey to Vieux-Rouen prefaced one of the special numbers of the Journal de l’Exposition and deplored the “lost towers and smoking chimneys of 232

the old city” (Essarts 1896). It seemed that the stated dichotomy between Europe’s glorious past and the industrial, progress-oriented present was mediated by the colonial enterprise where both aspects of civilisation had been prefigured in the previous universal exhibitions. In the Rouen 1896 Exhibition, the colonial section was indeed placed between both poles. Within the exhibition’s classification générale, Group XIII was called “Les colonies” with Class 48 comprising “ethnographie” and “productions, importations,

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

renseignements divers, produits du sol et de l’industrie, produits importés” (Le Journal de l’Exposition 1896, No. 1, 6–7). It was presided over by Jules Saint, the négociant. Situated opposite the enclosed Negro Village [village nègre], the huts of which were blocked off to the northeast against the older military barracks of Rouen (Fig. V.11b), the colonial section comprised pavilions of Algeria and Oceania. A separate pavillon des Colonies on 180 square metres of exhibition space with 136 exposants (Garnier 1899, 135) gathered, like in Bordeaux in 1895, under the direction of Théophile Bilbaut as delegate of the ministère des Colonies, agricultural and industrial products from all French colonies, including Cambodian tobacco samples from the Exposition permanente des colonies. As Georges Ruel explained in his Notes sur l’Exposition, the colonial pavilion’s distinctive Angkor-style facade “had been constituted with the help of the reproductions of mouldings [estampages] that M. Delaporte had brought home from his mission to Cambodia” (Fig. V.11c); however, as the responsible architect, he had “not thought to give an idea of the antique palaces of India [sic] but just to mount an ensemble of documents which merited attention” (Exposition Rouen 1896/Revue illustrée 1897, 56). Another description in the exhibition’s Revue illustrée of the pavilion’s “facade with [two] coupoles basses” identified Delaporte’s musée du Trocadéro as the source for the plaster casts, “whose various bas-reliefs, chimerical dragons on the roof ridge to watch over French-colonial wealth had been carefully executed [in the Parisian museum] by Edmont Bonet under the supervision of Ruel” (Exposition Rouen 1896/Revue illustrée 1897, 197–200, here 197). As was already the case in the pagode d’Angkor at the Paris 1889 Universal Exhibition, Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois had indeed provided the decorative repertoire for the colonial pavilion à la Angkorienne. This time, the decorative fronton that was used

Figure V.13  The ephemeral Vieux-Rouen under construction at the 1896 Exhibition at Rouen (Source: Revue Rouen 1896, Chronique 1, March 1896, 2)

six times for the two dome-shaped projections in the 1896 Exhibition came from Delaporte’s fragmentary, metonymic collage of the “Ta Prohm” temple as it was illustrated in Guérinet’s photographic album Le musée Indo-chinois on plate 49 (Fig. V.12). In Rouen, these decorative elements were, like the Apsara reliefs, the saddleback-shaped roof decoration, the decorative plinths, and the sitting lions, attached to a wooden inner scaffolding. This made the installation for the Orient structurally comparable to the ‘exotic’ stage set of medieval ‘Old Rouen’ (Fig. V.13). After the small exhibitions of Lyon 1894, Bordeaux 1895, Rouen 1896, and the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1900, it would be up to Marseille to stage the first decidedly ‘national-colonial exhibition’ in France and to prepare the scene for a full-scale replica of Angkor on the European continent.

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906: Representing Angkor in the French periphery before the Siamese ‘retrocession’ of 1907 Marseille is our grand harbour of commerce. And it represents a colonial city par excellence. The ground of its quaysides carries the first steps of our compatriots from overseas when they get back to France, as the country’s silhouette from here had been the last vision of their motherland, burned into their memory, when they left it. Long-haul traffic, mail steamers, transports of the settlers, Marseille is the bond between the motherland [métropole] and its colonies. The ambiance, at Marseille, is colonial. [italics MF] (Charles-Roux 1907, 9) —Jules Charles-Roux, Exposition coloniale et nationale de Marseille 1906, Rapport général

The 1889/1900 Universal Exhibitions of Paris organised French-colonial sections within their larger global parcours, but it was the exhibition in Marseille that first made the colonial aspect a purely national issue in France. Although Marseille’s effort at “moral decentralisation” (Baille 1907, 199) – a shift away from the French capital – was consid-

ered a success, a counter-initiative resulted in the staging of an (much smaller and irrelevant for this study) Exposition coloniale de Paris in the Grand palais between July and November 1906 (Exposition coloniale de Paris 1906, compare Figs. Intro.22a,b). Some background information is needed to explain why the Exposition coloniale et nationale 233

V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

in 1906 took place in Marseille and why this scenario was had a strong expansionist goal and with Charles-Roux ­acting as president between 1886 and 1897. Dr. Édouard so different from the previous initiatives in Paris. As the most important harbour for colonial import in France as Heckel – its vice president, founder of the Musée-Institut well as a “multi-secular tradition of relations to outre-mer colonial de Marseille, and distinguished university profesand more than half of the French-colonial commerce, the sor – had in 1901/2 already formulated the idea of a colocity of Marseille was [around and after 1900] the economic nial exhibition in Marseille to popularise and visualise the capital of the French Empire”; with its “pedagogic and eco- “link between exploration, conquest, and commerce”.12 From nomic mission” to prove the utility of the colonial enter- this moment onwards the institution took the name Société prise, Marseille’s staging of a colonial exhibition was also a de géographie et d’études coloniales and included a special purely “local initiative” on the part of the city, its powerful colonial section for scientific publications on the topic. chambre de Commerce (the oldest in France), the province It seems that the first invitation of the Gouverneur of Bouches-du-Rhône, and the assemblée consulaire.11 As général de l’Indo-Chine to participate at the Marseille ColoJules Charles-Roux (1841–1918) – himself an industrialist nial Exhibition of 1906 was formulated by Amable Chanot, and (vice) president of various enterprises including the the mayor of Marseille. In a letter dated to 19 August 1903, Compagnie de Canal de Suez; a well-connected politician, Chanot emphasised the “action civilisatrice” in the French writer, and patron; the organiser of the colonial section of colonies that had to be exhibited within the “cosmopolitan the Paris 1900 Universal Exhibition; Marseille’s great native milieu” of Marseille – the self-declared “colonial capital” of and old député, adjoint to the city’s mayor; and, finally, the France.13 appointed commissaire général for the 1906 Marseille ExhiFirst meetings between political and commercial reprebition – put it (see full quote above): cosmopolitan Marseille sentatives brought subventions of 1 million francs by the was France’s “colonial city par excellence”; the “ambiance in city of Marseille and 250,000 francs each by the city’s chamMarseille was itself colonial” (Charles-Roux 1907, 9). bre de Commerce and the conseil général in 1903 (only However, in a time of extreme competition from other 150,000 francs came from the central government!). The commercial cities in France like Bordeaux and Rouen, Mar­ president of the French Republic, Émile Loubet, decreed seille’s glory as France’s ‘premier colonial trading port’ was on 1 March 1904 that Charles-Roux (then président honomore rhetorical than an assured social and economical re- raire of the society) and Heckel would be the general comality. As Charles-Roux mentioned in a reunion of the com- missioners of the Marseille 1906 Exhibition.14 With Paul ité supérieur for the 1906 Exhibition on 14 October 1904, Gaffarel and Paul Masson acting as secrétaires généraux of Marseille was passing through a “sad period, [and] a diffi- the exhibition, scholars and professors of colonial geogracult and dangerous crisis”. The staging at this point of a phy and politics were added to the organisational board. “colonial exhibition was most useful and opportune […] to Victor Morel as nominated directeur – previously he had demonstrate to certain ignorant circles that Marseille was acted as secretary of the colonial section of the 1900 Exhithe principal pivotal point of the economic life in our bition and was at that point chef du bureau au ministère country, that its harbour was the great gate through which des Colonies – guaranteed a direct political link to Paris.15 the products from our fine colonies entered […]” (Charles- Amable Chanot became president of the Comité supérieur. Roux 1904, 11). But the notion of Marseille as a ‘colonial The règlement général of the Exposition coloniale nationcity’ was not only based on commercial benefit; it also had ale de Marseille en 1906 was set up by Charles-Roux on 30 an intellectual and ideological, indeed, institutional basis November 1904 in seventy-four paragraphs and published in the Société de géographie de Marseille. Within this pow- in the same year as a small brochure in Marseille and in the erful sub-branch of the national society (above others sup- Journal officiel de l’Indo-Chine française. In §3 the contents porting Delaporte in his plaster cast missions to Angkor) it of the 1906 Exhibition were defined as follows: “all the ag-

11  Jean-Jacques Jordi, “La politique coloniale de la France au tournant du XXe siècle”, in: Archives munici-

pales de Marseille 2006, 19–22, here 21. In a contemporary interpretation, see Boëtsch/Blanchard 2005.

12  Bernard Barbier, “Jules Charles-Roux et la Société de geographie”, in: Archives municipales de Marseille

2006, 39–43, here 39; compare also with the larger context of Heckel and the Institut colonial de Marseille in the same volume. 13  Amable Chanot, maire de Marseille, on 19 August 1903 to Jean Baptiste Paul Beau, Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine, see: ANOM INDO GGI 5881. 14  The present-day Chamber of Commerce of Marseille houses a considerable archive in the old stock exchange. The documents of its involvement in the 1906 Exhibition can be found in files MK 6142 and 8M120, but the institution itself published a separate volume on the exhibition. See: Chambre de commerce 1908. 15  On the organisation of the exhibition, see Aillaud 2006, compare Vieille Charité Marseille 1983, Baudin 2006. Great thanks go to Isabelle Aillaud for her valuable help.

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3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

ricultural or industrial articles exported to the colonies and But how was this instructive lesson to be given through protectorates, as well as all agricultural, industrial, or artis- architecture, the principle medium of the exhibition? Here, tic products from the colonies and protectorates. Addition- building on the achievements of the Paris exhibitions from ally, [the exhibition] may comprise anything that concerns 1867 onwards, Charles-Roux fostered the iconisation of colonial commerce and colonisation”. In §5 “special histor- various cultural heritage features from the French colonies ical, anthropological, and ethnographic exhibitions”, con- in distinctive pavilion architectures. As he explained on tests, and congresses (such as the grand ‘colonial congress’) 18 November 1906 in front of the ministre des Colonies, were added to the list of events (Exposition 1906 (1904), Milliès-Lacroix, his approach should function as a veritable 10). The classification générale of the 1906 Exhibition was “initiation of the public to the colonial project” and underpublished in 1905, comprised ten groups in fifty-six classes, line Marseille’s status as the “métropole coloniale de la and covered all aspects of the resources within the ­“colonial France”.16 Transferring the tactic of direct visual indoctridomain of France”. Group I comprised of “organisation of nation inside the pavilions onto the exterior appearance of the colonies”; Group II of hygiene; Groups III to IX of, re- the architectural structures themselves meant that the most spectively, “outillage”, “mise en valeur”, industries, com- representative architectural elements of each cultural entity merce, navigation, exportation, oceanography; and, finally, in the French colonies, including Indochina, was exposed Group X of “Beaux-arts, arts décoratifs, instruments et in a manner that was equally essentialising, eye-catching, procédés généraux des lettres, des sciences et des arts” (Ex- and instructive. As Charles-Roux summarised it after the position 1906 (1905), 16). The five classes of Group X cov- event in the rapport général: ered topics that are highly relevant for the exhibition’s separate section of Indochina with its buildings and displays First of all, each palais representing a colony was made as in general and its pavillon du Cambodge in particular: Class an exact reproduction of indigenous monuments, or at 52 “Archéologie, arts anciens, arts religieux; reconstitutions least formed after the most characteristic features of diet restaurations” was intended to display publications, colverse architectural sites; […] The architect of Indo-China lections, objects, reproductions, drawings, photographs, has exactly built up the tower of the Bayon temple at Ang­ models, and plans on the topic, whereas Classes 53–55 covkor, the Confucius Tower, and the Annam Gate of Hué. ered classical Beaux-Arts objects, printed materials, and […] However, what was an innovation in this matter was “musique et art théatral, danse et chants aux colonies” (relthe strategy to offer not only maps and graphic illustraevant for the Khmer ballet at the exhibition, see below). tions for the public, but great and perfectly visible inscripFinally, Class 56 comprised all the “construction work, the tions with a focus on numbers, brief formulas, series of installation, decoration and furnishing, and the organisainstruction of the history, administrative structure, and tion of public events and the attraction of the 1906 Mareconomical production of each of our possessions. [All seille Exhibition” itself. this] represented a veritable, documentary state of the Along with this organisation and classification, the arts about the situation of our colonies in 1906. [italics overall goal and approach was summarised by CharlesMF] (Charles-Roux 1907, 20, 21, 22) Roux on a few pages included in his rapport général. He favoured a “well-determined, limited but largely developed” How was this abstract programme of colonial instruction exhibition in which “a vast and utile lesson” should be giv- and its visual application on the interior and exterior to en to the public: not only should the visitor, having passed be spatially organised in Marseille? As the Guide officiel of through the exhibitions gardens and galleries, leave with a the 1906 Exhibition explained with several maps, the old “picturesque and pleasant souvenir”, but he should also find 36-hectare champs de manœuvre du Rouet of the Marseille “instruction” [enseignement] – an emphasis that Charles- military, located ten minutes by electric tramways to the Roux had almost certainly brought to Marseille from his northeast of the city, was adopted for the event (Pl. V.3) experience at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. As an “immediate (Guide officiel 1906, 15–20). Laid out by Léonce Muller, and practical result” of the visit to the Marseille Exhibition, ­architecte en chef of the 1906 Marseille Exhibition and the the “reciprocal commercial, industrial, and intellectual re- official architect of Marseille (together with his architecte lations between France and her colonial domain, […] the adjoint Étienne Bentz), the visitor would enter the site just exchange of products and ideas towards a progressing north of the rond-point du Prado. As various tourist bromovement of the whole ensemble” should be at the centre: chures reconfirmed, the whole exhibition terrain, with very for the “instruction of the large public” as much as for “the few trees to protect the visitor from the southern summer specialists approaching their objects of detailed study” sun of Marseille, was only loosely filled with pavilion struc(Charles-Roux 1907, 20, 21). tures (Pl. V.4a,b). Each thematic section, like the one for

16  In his speech to the newly appointed ministre des Colonies, Raphaël Milliès-Lacroix, made on 18 Novem-

ber 1906 at the exhibition site, Charles-Roux expressed his views about the direct visual indoctrination of every French citizen, “even the lesser cultivated” (Chambre de commerce 1908, 211, 212).

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Figure V.14a  Ground plan of the Indochinese section of the 1906 Marseille Exhibition (Source: Charles-Roux 1907, plate 40; © Archives municipales de Marseille)

Indochina, was conceived quite independently from the others. Thus, it contrasted heavily in its spatial and aesthetic appearance to the overloaded and densely packed colonial sections of the Paris 1889 and 1900 Exhibitions where the different representative architectures of each cultural entity merged into a veritable forest of cultural signs. Along the central west–east axis of the exhibition – the avenue centrale where the pavilions of the Beaux Arts, press and post telegraph, and the African sections of Algeria, Tunisia, and Madagascar were placed to the left and right – the visitor approached the principle grand palais de l’Exportation. Standing in the central open square with its water cascades in front of the main building, the visitor would enter a perpendicular axis with Afrique central to the right. Entering the section of Indochina to the left (Figs. V.14a,b) and crossing a Khmer-style bridge (a similar architectural feature was used in the urban refurbishment of Phnom Penh around and after 1900, see Fig. V.3b) towards the esplanade de l’Indo-Chine, he reached the grand palais central des Produits de l’Indo-Chine, which dominated the scene (Fig. V.14c). East and west of this point, the thematic ensembles and pavilions of the Indochinese section were aligned along another dominant axis located parallel to the avenue centrale of the whole exhibition. In most cases, well conceived in their independent and visually undisturbed setting, the ensembles and single pavilions of Indochina were 236

‘consumed and captured’ during the exhibition as pure, authentic, and therefore highly essentialised cultural entities. This was particularly telling in the palais du Cambodge (Pl. V.5a,b), which was a hybrid mix of the high-rising Bayon face tower with four laterally stretched galleries à la Angkor Wat. The single pavilions were framed and encapsulated as and frozen into picture-perfect motifs for use on popular postcards, which were particularly useful in conveying the specifically ‘colonial’ character of the Marseille event. This medium allowed the visitor to bypass the temporal and ephemeral constraints of the six-month exhibition and to appropriate the contents of the ‘Oriental’ exhibits as part of the French-colonial patrimoine culturel. The eastern end of the Indochinese section around Cambodia’s representative structure (Fig. V.15a) was formed by the Laos pavilion, the théatre Cambodgien, and the small structure of Kouang-Théou-Wan, which represented the latest French-colonial acquisition in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan. To the rear of the central palace, a cinematograph by Léopold Bernard and dioramas by the artist Leloup, executed in the old-fashioned manner also used at the 1889 and 1900 Exhibitions, were installed. As the Guide officiel mentioned, eight sites from Indochina were chosen and above all “the ruins of Angkor were reproduced in perfect art and great fidélité […] with the exact reconstitution of the avenue d’Angkor Wat” (Guide officiel

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

Figure V.14b  The Naga bridge from the principle pavilion in the background towards the Indochinese section, as depicted on a postcard (Source: © Archives départmentales Bouche-du-Rhône)

Figure V.14c  The Naga bridge towards the Indochinese section with its grand palais des Produits de l’Indo-­ Chine (Chevojon, photographer) (Source: Charles-Roux 1907, plate 41; © Archives municipales de Marseille)

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V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figures V.15a—c  Indochinese section of the 1906 Marseille Exhibition: Overview, Porte d’Annam and Rue de Hanoi (© Archives municipales de Marseille)

238

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

1906, 133). Turning west on the Indochinese allée principale Cambodia, François-Marius Baudoin, administrateur des and passing the pavilions of Tonkin and Cochinchina, a services civils de l’Indo-Chine was made président du comité small square was formed by the Annam ensemble (Fig. local in Phnom Penh19 and délégué du Cambodge at MarV.15b) with a gate with elephants and a small market; in seille. After much discussion about the qualities of a suitable architect for the Cambodian section20 the decision was comparison to ‘Cairo Street’ of Paris 1889 (Fig. IV.13) two rather sanitised street scenes were staged with the rue de made with Beau’s decree on 8 December 1904: Henri Saigon-Cholon and the rue de Hanoï (Fig. V.15c).17 Vildieu, again Beaux-Arts-trained architecte de la 1e classe In April 1904 the Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine in des Travaux publics au Ton­kin and chef du Service des bâtiHanoi, Paul Beau – member of the commission to plan the ments civils in Hanoi. Beau specified Vildieu’s tasks: (1) “set Exposition d’Hanoi in 1902/318 – nominated Frédéric Baille up all plans, cost estimates, etc. […] and all necessary eleas Commissaire général de l’Indo-Chine for the 1906 Exhi- ments to construct the buildings, pavilions, gardens, and all decorations”; (2) organise the implementation of the bition. Baille had taken up this position following his role as inspecteur des services civils en Indo-Chine. In June of the approbated plans in communication with the architectural same year, Beau decreed that the Comité central consultatif service at Marseille; (3) “execute, under his direction in In– comprising the directors of the different commercial, ag- dochina, the characteristic pavilions that had to be sent ricultural, infrastructural (architectural), geographic, mil- and put together in Marseille by indigenous workers”; (4) itary, and scientific services of Indochina, including Louis “observe the costs and write a final report on all operaFinot as the director of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, tions”.21 On 15 February 1905 Beau named François Lagisthe newly founded institution for archaeological research quet (together with Charles Lacollonge), inspecteur princiand preservation (see chapter IX) – should set up Indochi- pal des Bâtiments civils du Tonkin in Hanoi as Vildieu’s na’s participation in Marseille. Before all other tasks, this architecte-adjoint for the project. The entrepreneur Haour board set up the regional committees from Tonkin, Annam, was contracted to execute the pavilions for a total sum of Laos, and Cambodia to identify the objects for the exhibi- 560,000 francs, the final sum went up to 900,000 francs as tion and the representatives for each section. In the case of Baille later indicated.22 Charles-Roux stated in his general

17  The construction process of the Indochinese ensemble for the 1906 Colonial Exhibition in Marseille was

well explained in reports by its responsible personnel. The correspondence between Indochina (Saigon, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh) and France (Marseille and Paris) is today housed in the national archive in Aix-enProvence and in other archives in Marseille. The major files for the Marseille Exhibition of 1906 pertinent to this research were: in Aix-en-Provence (ANOM) AGEFOM 984.3384 and INDO GGI 1689, 5879, 5881, 20398, 23194, the Archive Alcazar Marseille 5551.1–9, 5951, Archives départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhône PHI 427, Archive municipale de Marseille 13F2, Chambre de commerce Marseille MK 6142, 8M120. 18 The Exposition d’Hanoi was decreed by Paul Doumer in 1899 as the Exposition des produits agricoles et industriels et des œuvres d’art de la France, des colonies françaises et de pays de l’Extrême-Orient and coordinated by the commissaire général, Paul Thomé. Apart from the representation of all French colonies, foreign countries like the British and Dutch East Indies, China, Japan, Siam, and the Philippines were also represented. Within the exhibition’s first group, “Archéologie, beaux-arts, sciences, enseignement”, in Class 1 “archéologie, art ancien, ethnographie, religions” with “Monuments anciens, Indous, Khmers, Annamites, Chinois, Japonais etc.”, Angkor was, to a certain extent, represented in the Cambodian section (despite the fact that Siam was also invited), where the newly founded École française d’Extrême-Orient displayed the first results of its archaeological work and its future plans for Indochina. However, larger architectural reconstitutions of Angkorian temples were not executed. With Beau, Charles-Roux, and also the Hanoi architect Vildieu, some of the major planners of the Marseille Exhibition of 1906 were present. Compare: Ducarre 1903, Bourgeois/Sandoz 1904, and the exhibition’s Journal bi-mensuel. 19  This committee also comprised, among other French members, the Cambodian Aknha Véang, ministre du Palais of the Cambodian king, who changed in April 1904 from King Norodom to his Francophile half brother Sisowath. 20  This included the architect Freynet in collaboration with Lucien Fournereau who had participated in Delaporte’s plaster cast mission (see chapter III). A document in the file ANOM INDO GGI 5881 mentioned this option. 21 This arrêté of 8 December 1904 of the Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine (no. 3317) and the above-mentioned orders are documented in the French-colonial archive in Aix-en-Provence. See in this context: ANOM INDO GGI 1689. 22  In his report from May 1907, the inspecteur des colonies, Norès, reported on the effective expenses for the Indochinese section of 750,000 francs to the Minister of the Colonies: ANOM AGEFOM 984.3384. Baille in his 1907 report on the Indochinese section mentioned the costs totalling 900,000 francs, which included 232,000 francs for the central palais and 66,000 francs for the Cambodian pavilion (Baille 1907, 21).

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V  The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906

Figure V.16  The palais de l’Indo-Chine on a postcard (Source: © Archives municipales de Marseille)

report that the Indochinese section covered approximately a third of the whole exhibition and formed, “with four hundred indigenous people, eleven pavilions, streets, and boutiques […] a veritable small village” (Charles-Roux 1907, 119). Baille cited in his personal 1907 report to Beau Vildieu’s justification for his design of the central palais des Services généraux et des produits de l’Indo-Chine. Interestingly, Vildieu cited Scellier de Gisors, the Beaux-Arts architect responsible for the Indochinese section of the 1900 Paris Exhibition: “In the midst of the buildings whose diverse characters evoke faraway civilisations, the [central] pavillon des Colonies should conserve the aspect of our architecture and our national art”; therefore, according to Vildieu, “the exterior forms of the palais des Produits de l’Indo-Chine [in the 1906 Exhibition], which represented the central power [pouvoir central] to direct and organise this important section of the Marseille Colonial Exhibition, had to express this mission [italics MF] and reflect the great lines, the national origins of this diversity of civilisations, and the particular artistic feelings of each province of the [Indochinese] Union” (Baille 1907, 21). A detail of the main facade of the central structure revealed an interesting facet: when the visitor to the Indochinese section had crossed the Khmer-style bridge with its Naga-snake balustrades and sitting lions “inspired by the projecting chaussée of the Preah Khan and executed with mouldings from Delaporte’s musée Khmer in the Trocadero” 240

as Vildieu reconfirmed (Baille 1907, 23), he would encounter the facade of palais des Services généraux et des produits de l’Indo-Chine (Fig. V.16). It was flanked by giant Angkorian guardian figures and covered, “with permission of Dela­ porte”, with flattened multiples of decor elements from Angkorian temples. These included “friezes with bas-reliefs of dancers, pediments from the Bayon temple, columns and four-faced caryatids from Phnom Boc, the figures on the top of the octagonal towers inspired by Laos, the central pediment from bas-reliefs of the frontons of Angkor Wat” (Baille 1907, 22). Bringing Vildieu’s explanation of the “mission” and style of the Palace of the Indochinese colonies together with Charles-Roux’s overall goal of public “instruction” through concise and unmistakably clear messages in the medium of speaking architecture leads us to an important conclusion: the use of a predominantly Angkor-­ style language for the central pavilion was not expressing the actually acquired French status in Indochina – to a much greater extent, it formulated the imperialistic desire of the French-colonial project to incorporate Angkor (presently a part of Siam) as a site into its territorial domain and, as an element of past high civilisation, into the larger canon of a French-colonial patrimoine culturel. As Beau mentioned in his 1906 (!) publication L’Indo-­ Chine à l’Exposition colonial de Marseille, the “recent Franco-Siamese treaty would bring a new impetus to Cambodia”

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

Figures. V.17a,b  Inside the grand palais des Produits de l’Indo-Chine with a presentations of goods and ethnographica (Source: © Archives nationale d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence and ­Archives municipales de Marseille)

(Beau 1906, 125). This statement referred directly to the 1893 Traité Franco-Siamois and to the 1904 Convention Franco-Siamoise. Both had – despite the ultimately dis­appointed hopes of the French hardliners in the Parisian parti ­colonial around Chailley-Bert that France would annex Siam as a whole – gradually transformed the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap (with Angkor), under diplomatic pressure from France, into a neutralised buffer zone (or a “zone influenced by France”, see Girbal 1906, 117) within the Siamese territory. It was finally ‘retroceded’ in 1907 (see the introductory discussion in the following chapter VI). In reference to Angkor, Beau mentioned the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the scientific institution that had been formed by decree in 1898 by Paul Doumer, Beau’s predecessor between 1897 and 1902, to explore and preserve Indochina’s archaeological past: “One cannot pass in silence, in a different order of ideas, the works being followed by the EFEO at the ruins of Angkor. Even if they are [still] situated on Siamese territory, the Khmer ruins are interesting for us [italics MF] from a twofold perspective: they contain the enigma of this Khmer civilisation [italics MF] that long ago occupied the actual Cambodian territory, and they constitute a grandiose manifestation of an art that reveals the genius of a disappeared people” (Beau 1906, 126). The eminent imperialist side effects of applied French archaeology in Angkor before 1907 became an integral part

of the message at the 1906 Colonial National Exhibition in Marseille. This was also present in the interior of the palace: the walls of the central space were covered with large painted scenes from Indochina, a map of Indochina from the service géographique, and plans for the Public Works Office. The central hemicycle itself was filled up – compare with the display order of the 1867 Paris Exhibition in concentric circle with radiating spikes – with animals, plants, and ­other smaller specimens from the Mission scientifique ­permanente de l’Indo-Chine and “four thousand samples [échantillons]” of all thinkable commercial products from rice and grapes to wood and rubber (Chambre de commerce 1908, 80, compare Beau 1906, 55–101) (Figs. V.17a,b). More importantly, in one side wing of the building a separate section was reserved for the EFEO. As the EFEO’s own ­Bulletin mentioned, it was filled with vitrines and shelves, and architectural drawings and photographs not only from ­Vietnamese Cham temples (already part of the French-colonial territory), but also from the Angkorian Bayon temple covered the walls.23 Louis Delaporte himself reconfirmed in a letter from 1906 that Finot had ordered some plaster casts of Angkorian bas-reliefs in his musée Indo-chinois.24 The exhibited plans were executed by the EFEO’s chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier together with Henri Dufour and Charles Carpeaux, who had been carrying out archaeological inquiries on-site since 1901 when the territory was

23  BEFEO 1906, Documents administratifs, 489. Compare Charles-Roux 1907, 122; Beau 1906, 59; Baille 1907, 56. 24  “D’autre part, j’ai pu faciliter à M. le Directeur de l’EFEO l’exécuter dans l’atelier du Musée d’une série de bas-reliefs Khmers qui viennent d’être expédiés avec un ensemble de photographies pour figurer à l’expo particulière de l’EFEO à Marseille.” Delaporte on 18 March 1906 to the Commissaire général de l’Indo-Chine Beau, see: ANOM INDO GGI 5881.

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still part of Siam.25 What happened at Marseille was therefore a direct symbolic representation and material translation of what was going on politically at the ‘real’ site. Using this observation about the ideological intentions behind the architectural representations as a point of departure to explain the pavillon du Cambodge, it was even logical that the whole of Cambodge was now represented by the Angkorian temple (Fig. V.18a). In Marseille in 1906 the iconic quality of its central tower made its stylistic features more eye-catching than had been the case with the pagode d’Angkor of the 1889 Paris Exhibition. Explications of the Cambodian pavilion by all responsible persons and collaborators for the Marseille Exhibition – from Beau and Charles-Roux to Baille, Baudoin, and Vildieu, right down to Delaporte himself – in publications, internal reports, and correspondences, provide us with a precise picture of the production process in this third materialisation of Ang­ kor after the 1:10-scale maquette version in 1878 and the pagode d’Angkor of 1889. Now, Charles-Roux honoured the pavillon du Cambodge as a “fidèle reproduction of a part of the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom – probably the most original monument of Khmer art”, but also mentioned that the exhibit at Marseille was “only a fragment of this colossal ensemble, which nevertheless impressed with the sincerity of its reproduction” (Charles-Roux 1907, 141). Beau mentioned the pavilion as well with indications about its interior (Beau 1906, 127–31). Baille even gave details about Vildieu’s deal with Delaporte to execute “forty-two plaster casts” in the museum,26 the decorative elements of which “authenticated” the various Khmer-style elements of the Indochinese section in the 1906 Exhibition: During his work with the artistic decoration of the pavillon du Cambodge, he asked the Department of Public Instruction and Fine Arts to permit M. Vildieu to visit M. Delaporte, conservator of the Trocadero Museum [sic], to check the models of Khmer sculpture. Vildieu travelled to Paris, together with M. Lacollonge, and a contract had been signed on 17 November 1905 with M. Delorme and M. Brobecker, plaster cast sculptors [sculpteurs-staffeurs] to make the selected casts [moulages]. They executed forty-two of them for the planned Chaussée cambodgienne, the pavillon du Cambodge and for the bridges and gardens. The aim was to present to the public the most authentic specimen of Cambodian art [les spécimens les plus authentiques de l’art cambodgien], and I

believe the reconstitution could not have been more faithful [fidèle] due to the authenticity of the used sources. [italics MF] (Baille 1907, 17)

In an internal, unpublished forty-three-page report to Paul Luce27, Résident supérieur au Cambodge, on 20 December 1906, Baudoin, the president of the local Cambodian committee for the 1906 Exhibition, described the structure of the pavillon du Cambodge and the objects exhibited inside (Baudoin 1906). According to his explanations, the whole site covered 460 square metres and the building itself comprised of two structural elements: a gallery wing of 24 metres in length and 5 metres width with the main entrance to the building in the form of a three-sided small end pavilion. This element was, like the two stepped pediments of the central tower, decorated with typical Angkor-style pediments that reused the mouldings of the Krishna-killing-­ Kamsa scene from the lower-eastern part of Angkor Wat’s central tower that had been staged by Delaporte in his museum (compare Fig. III.32 und 36) and ‘borrowed’ by Fabre for his 1889 pavilion (see Figs. IV.9 and 10b; compare Falser 2011). Receiving daylight into the corbel-vaulted interior through lateral narrow window openings formed by small round balusters, this gradually sloping gallery wing led to the principle double-symmetrical central square hall on a platform with decorated plinths. This central element was accentuated with three laterally stepped gates with the same decoration as the entrance element. With an internal surface of 160 square metres and an internal height of 6 metres, it was topped by a 26 metre-high, stepped tower, the decoration of which gave the Cambodian structure its picturesque signature to all four cardinal points with “the even-minded masque of Brahma”, as Boudoin (and all other writers on the building) wrongly identified what were in fact the faces of the Bodhisattva Avalokite´svara with strong references to the temple’s Buddhist patron King Jayavaraman VII (around 1200 CE). What is most interesting for us is Baudoin’s hint at the construction procedure: “The drawings of the pavilion had been executed by architect Lagisquet under the direction of Vildieu, architecte en chef en Indo-Chine. […] As a successful reproduction of a tower of the Bayon temple, it had been reconstituted by casts taken in [Delaporte’s] musée du Trocadéro, […] the mouldings of the decorative motifs had been executed by the sculptor Brobecker, […] the travaux

25  BEFEO 1903, Chronique, 138–39. As the notes explained, these results had already been displayed at and

honoured by the Hanoi Exposition in 1902/3, compare: Bourgeois/Sandoz 1904, 185.

26  The 2013 catalogue of the musée Guimet about the career of Delaporte’s plaster casts for his own museum

in Paris and the different colonial und universal exhibitions mentions correspondences in September and October 1905 in which Vildieu and Delaporte discuss which sections of the “four Brahma face towers” (of the Bayon) were to be copied from the already existing casts in the musée Indo-chinois (see Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 171). 27  Shortly after the retrocession of Angkor in 1907, Luce would play an important role to discuss and define the protection perimeters around the temples of Angkor (compare chapter IX).

242

3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

Figure V.18a  The pavillon du Cambodge of the 1906 Exhibition in a mix of the Angkor Wat and Bayon temples (Chevojon, photographer), as depicted in the Album commémoratif by CharlesRoux (Source: Charles-Roux 1907, plate 42)

Figure V.18b  The ground plan of the pavillon du Cambodge (Source: Charles-Roux 1907, ­detail of plate 40)

en staff and the assembling of the sculptures had been carried out by the sculptor Raynaud. The Maison Haour from Lyon had been charged with the general work and the [interior] wooden bearing structure. Unlike the Cambodian construction at the 1900 Exhibition, the works were executed without any ‘indigenous’ participation; the expenses of the construction totalled 58,000 francs including the

casts taken from the Parisian musée du Trocadéro” (Baudoin 1906, 2). Vildieu reported on his stay in Paris and about his pavilion’s stylistic references: It is for the pavillon du Cambodge that M. Delaporte was so kind to assist in our project. He authorised us to investigate the treasures of his museum. He was also of great

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help by allowing us to replicate [reconstituer] for the I­ndo-Chinese section one of the Bayon towers which enables us to represent the authentic image of the splendour and power of this Greek architecture [idée exacte de la splendeur et de la puissance de cette architecture grecque], which, with its elevations, also references certain monuments in India. The tiered gallery, a motif generally employed in Khmer buildings, gives access to the hall of the tower [préasat] which, housing objects on display, has been inspired by an analogue gallery leading from the first to the second floor of Angkor Wat. [italics MF] (Baille 1907, 22)

including special postcards, glass diapositives of Cambodian life by Dupuy and Andrieux, images of modern power and water plants in Phnom Penh; and finally, “four watercolours of the ruins of Angkor by Colonel Saurin, and plans and drawings of the service de Cadastre” (Boudoin 1906, 3). Baudoin’s sections 2 to 9 covered furniture, jewellery, and palace objects belonging to King Sisowath, as well as Buddha statues and music instruments, silk, and pottery. Section 10 was a “pagode Cambodgienne”, which was “a reduction of a wooden pagoda with five golden towers [as] a precisely modelled reproduction of the temple of Angkor Wat, […] especially executed by a Cambodian artist for the colonial exhibition”. Sections 11 to 18 included masks, bronzes, cotIn March 1906 Delaporte wrote to Paul Beau, commissaire ton samples, and indigenous objects. In section 17 the général de l’Indo-Chine, about his enthusiasm for this archi- “scale-reduced evocation” of the funerary monument on tectural reconstitution of Angkor in Marseille, made from which the former King Norodom had been cremated only “rigorously exact elements of the most beautiful epochs of a few months before the Marseille Exhibition was also inart [and] of “exceptional archaeological value”: cluded; it was as though the French-colonial exhibitors wanted to make sure that their former ‘far less cooperative’ You honoured me to ask me to assist as much as possible Cambodian king was really dead. Above King Norodom’s in the representation of the ruins of Khmer art at the Mar- crematorium and King Sisowath’s jewels, the ceilings of the lateral and central exhibition spaces were decorated in seille Exhibition. I am happy to tell you that from the very first moment onwards I saw my duty in giving all my sup- what Beau called in his report the “purest Khmer style in port to this interesting project. Last October I proposed the form of a relief frieze of danseuses cambodgiennes [apthe Fine Arts Administration to authorise M. Vildieu, chief saras]” (Beau 1907, 131). The dual display mode for Angkor architect in Indochina, to execute in the Trocadero Muse- in Marseille of plans, photographs, and reduced models of Angkor inside a pavilion that was – from the outside – itself um the reproductions [reproductions] of all the elements from great architecture, decorative sculpture, statuary, an architecturally compressed model of Angkor, prefigured what would later become a central strategy for the giant bas-reliefs, steles, etc. […] that might serve to carry out Angkor projects in Marseille 1922 and Paris 1931. There, the decoration of the palais de l’Indo-Chine, and certainly to construct the palais du Cambodge in the ancient from the exterior representation as a ‘gigantic miniature’ model of Angkor Wat provided an interior multilevel exhibition of a Khmer tower, built up with rigorously exact elements from the most beautiful epochs of art. I made the atelier, space where – in an overall decoration à la Angkorienne – the personnel and the material of the Museum available modern vitrines housed original ‘collections’, and largescale photographs of picture-perfect Angkor panoramas to M. Vildieu. Therefore, he was able to quickly produce a great number of reproductions, which were sent to Mar- produced a kind of ‘prospective souvenir’ for potential seille for use. With the disposition of those excellent ele- French tourism (back) to the real temples themselves.29 But this was not enough; what was still a novelty at the ments to realise his plans, he will no doubt produce a 1906 Marseille Exhibition in the staging of Angkor in the work of exceptional archaeological value and of great interest for the visitors of the Exhibition.28 [italics MF] French métropole was the ‘enlivenment’ of the archaeological-architectural representation. After the first successful In his internal report, Baudoin listed a detailed catalogue trial of folkloric scenarios with the Javanese dance troupe – of the 169 exhibitors inside the pavillon du Cambodge (Fig. performing, ironically, right next to the pagode d’Angkor in V.18b) within the predefined ten groups of the classification the 1889 Universal Exhibition or as staffage figures in the générale. He introduced the displayed objects in eighteen Angkor Wat diorama Tour du monde at the 1900 Exhibition thematic sections. The first section, galerie des Photogra- (compare Fig. V.7a) – it was now the danseues Cambodgiphies, comprised of photographs [clichés] of the ruins of ennes that emerged quasi overnight as the “most interesting Angkor by “Félix Faraut during the 1870 Delaporte mission” and most curious exhibition” at the 1906 National Coloni(he meant Delaporte’s 1873/74 mission) and those of the al Exhibition of Marseille (Baille 1907, 125). Now, not only photographer Dieulefils from Hanoi (compare Fig. IX.8a), were the king’s exhibits inside the pavillon du Cambodge

28  Louis Delaporte on 18 March 1906 to the Commissaire général de l’Indo-Chine Beau (ANOM INDO GGI 5881). 29  Compare with the discussion on the ‘miniature, gigantic, souvenir, and collection’ (Stewart 1993) in an architectural translation of Angkor for the French métropole in the introduction to chapter IV.

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3. The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906

decorated by plaster cast (or staff) friezes of flying ‘dancing figures’, but a live dance troupe from Phnom Penh made up of forty-two dancers, twelve musicians, and almost thirty other staff members was now even enhanced by the ‘real’ presence of Cambodia’s King Sisowath in person. Or as Boudoin put it: “La présence de S. M. Sisowath en France a donné, en outre, un très grand relief de curiosité à ce corps de ballet exotique” (Boudoin 1906, 9). Two years before the 1906 Exhibition, Sisowath had succeeded the former Cambodian King Norodom I to the throne in Phnom Penh. More Francophile and therefore more strongly backed by the ruling French-colonial authorities, he was received in France with the highest diplomatic honours but had no real political power. This was, however, the first journey made by a Cambodian king to Europe, and it not only encouraged the French population’s curiosity about exotic French-colonial Indochina, but also framed the king as the official head of a supposedly authentic royal ballet troupe for the Marseille Exhibition. In reality, this ballet group had been organised by George Bois who was inspecteur des Écoles professionelles de l’Indochine and delegate of fine arts and public spectacles for the 1906 Marseille Exhibition. As Boudoin later reconfirmed, the troupe was at first conceived as a private project “apart from the palace for an easier manipulation” but was later “formed into a troupe of royal [female] dancers under the authority of Princess Sumphady”, one of the new king’s daughters (Baudoin 1906, 19, italics MF).30 In his 1913 article “Les danseuses cambodgiennes en France”, Bois reported on how the company for Paris was formed by the private dancers of Col de Monteiro, “ministre de la Marine” (in fact King Norodom’s interpreter), inmates of the prison of Phnom Penh, and, finally, after interventions by Beau, with dancers from the royal palace dancers. Sisowath agreed to contribute under the condition that he accompany them to France (Bois 1913, 261–64; compare Cravath 2007, 124–28). His visit to the Indochinese section of the Marseille Exhibition was staged in full picturesque glamour. Along with a quarter representing the whole Indochinese Union with pavilions of all its countries and a rue de Saigon-Cholon with an Annamite restaurant, an Indochinese theatre, a cinema, a diorama with views on Angkor Wat, dances and chants from Laos, and musicians from Cochin­ china, the ‘Royal Ballet troupe’ enjoyed great success during the Marseille Exhibition. It was – during King Sisowath’s state visit to meet Armand Fallières, the French president, and Georges Leygues, the ministre des Colonies – invited to Paris to perform in the Elysée Palace and, with great public success, in the open-air theatre Pré Catelan. The scenario

that would take place in the second week of June 1906 in Marseille included the royal ballet dancers in ‘traditional costumes’ performing original gestures to authentic music, the Khmer king as the ballet’s patron and guarantor of an unbroken tradition stretching back to Khmer antiquity (and dressed in a hybrid combination of French clothes and Khmer ‘sampot’ trousers), and an Angkor-styled temple reproduced using ‘authentic plaster casts’ as a stage and background. It was a veritable transcultural product created expressly for the cover page of the Petit Journal of 24 July 1906 (Pl. V.6). The ballet’s status as an icon of pure Khmerness and Angkorian antiquity in its combination of temple architecture (we discuss this process at length in chapter X on the years of Cambodian independence) was fostered by two essential modes of publicity. First, its success story in France was, together with the state visit of Sisowath (see above), covered by a series of richly illustrated articles in June/July 1906 by the popular journal L’Illustration.31 In clear reference to the supposedly ‘more accessible’ Javanese dancers at the 1900 Exhibition, Gervais-Courtellemont commented in the first of the articles, “Les danseuses du roi du Cambodge” (2 June 1906), on the “decadent status of Cambodia [un pays déchu] of which only two things had been conserved from its past glory: the incredibly grandiose ruins and their dances, a strange relict of a dead memory and abolished past that they try to perpetuate and to embody” (Gervais-Courtellemont 1906, 344). George Bois closed the article series with his contribution to L’Illustration on July 1906. With the title of his article “Le sculpteur Rodin et les danseuses cambod­giennes” (1906), he referred to the second major mode of publicity: Auguste Rodin, the world-famous sculptor who fell in love with the Khmer ballet dancers during the Paris representation; he followed them back to the Marseille Exhibition and executed a series of about 150 drawings and paintings of the dancers’ fragile gestures (Vilain 2006). Beau as much as Rodin helped to prefigure the topos of the Khmer dancers as having been born from the stone surfaces of Angkor Wat, a topos later ‘pseudo scientifically’ exploited by George Groslier in his 1913 work Danseues Cambodgiennes anciennes et modernes (Groslier 1913, see Fig. X.48a; compare Falser 2013f). As Beau put it in his 1906 report: “It seems that some of the marvellous bas-reliefs of the ruins of Angkor had come to life. The gestures and the costumes themselves on the actual stage are effectively the same as on the secular granite [surface]” (Beau 1906, 177). Also, for Rodin the “friezes of Angkor came to life before his eyes”, the “dancers made antiquity live in him”, and he described them as “animated architecture”:

30  The acting Résident supérieur in Phnom Penh, de Lalande-Calan, reported on 24 December 1905 on the Voyage du Roi et troupe de danseuses cambodgiennes to the Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine. See ANOM INDO GGI 5881. 31 See: L’Illustration, no. 3001 (2 June 1906), 342–45; no. 3303 (16 June 1906), cover, 370–72; no. 3004 (23 June 1906), 388–89; no. 3305 (30 June 1906), 413–15; no. 3309 (28 July 1906), 65.

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Il y a des pierres très anciennes dont on ne dit plus l’époque historique et, quand on les voit, on pense à des mille ans, et tout de suite la nature vivante donne la même chose. Ces Cambodgiennes nous ont donné tout ce que l’antique peut contenir, leur antique à elles, qui vaut le nôtre. Nous avons vécu trois jours d’il y a trois mille ans. [italics MF] (Bois 1906, 65; Bois 1913, 275)

Just as the picture-perfect icons of Khmer architecture in the form of reconstituting pavilion architectures in Marseille and Paris returned – on a transcultural journey from Asia to Europe and back(translated) again – to the ‘real spot’ through the later conservation efforts of the French at the Angkorian temples, so too the reinvented and commodified Khmer ballets at the colonial and universal exhibitions returned to their imagined source. In his famous book of 1912

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Un pèlerin d’Angkor, the Orientalist writer Pierre Loti wrote of his experience at Angkor. He described a dance performance in the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh in 1901/2, as “the Apsara dancers being slipped away from the holy bas-reliefs [of Angkor Wat]” (Loti 1912, 206). The pictorial combination of Angkor temples (as source, architectural background, and cultural-political stage) and the Khmer dancers (reinvented for the 1906 Marseille Exhibition and depicted in the Petit Journal) was ‘back-translated’ to the ‘original’ site of Angkor Wat. This time the Cambodian king acted as host and the French (in fact the gouverneur général of Indochina, Antony Klobukowski) were invited: in 1909 the Art Nouveau poster designer Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn distilled this into a watercolour that was reproduced in the popular trilingual book Indo-China ­picturesque and monumental: Ruins of Angkor (Dieulefils 1909) (Pl. V.7).

VI



Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

1. Making Angkor French: The Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907 Far East France [La France d’Extrême-Orient], which is today Cambodia, Luang Prabang [in Laos, MF] etc., has its Alsace-Lorraine, represented on the right banks of the Mekong with its old Cambodian provinces, the ancient kingdoms of Vientiane and Luang Prabang. We are the inheritors of their past, we have the charge of their historic destiny [Nous sommes les héritiers de leur passé, nous avons la charge de leur destinée historique]. [italics, bolding MF] (Tuck 2009, 216) —Paul Beau to Eugène Étienne, 1903 We have to admit that the reconstitution of Angkor had some advantages. The Cambodians of today hardly cared for it, but back in the old days they had been full of solicitousness for the temple. And it seemed to them desirable and to conform with their best-established traditions to add to our artistic patrimony [notre patrimoine artistique] the temples of Angkor Wat, the Bayon, Preah Khan, and Ta Prom. [italics, bolding MF] (Bernard 1933, 192) —Colonel F. Bernard quoting Jean-Baptiste Boissonnas (chargé d’Affaires in Siam in 1903) in Paris 1906 The most magnificent group of monuments of ancient Cambodia: Angkor the Great and Angkor the Saint [Angkor la Grande et Angkor la Sainte] […] Rediscovered, explored, and studied by the French, they are to a certain extent a kind of heritage of our Orientalism [en quelque sorte partie du patrimoine de notre orientalisme]. [italics, bolding MF] (Harmand 1907, 102) —Jules Harmand, Le Traité franco-siamois et le Cambodge

On 23 March 1907, the Franco-Siamese Treaty was signed in Bangkok by Collin de Plancy, the French ministre plénipo­ tentiaire at Bangkok, and Prince Devawongse Varoprakarn, Siam’s minister of foreign affairs. As was explicitly spelled out in its preamble – and this was the most important point of the whole agreement – the treaty was meant “to ensure the final settlement of all questions concerning the common frontiers between [French] Indochina and Siam through a reciprocal and rational scheme of exchanges” (Tuck 2009, 321; compare for the larger territorial problem above others Preschez 1966, St. John 1998). Whereas the Siamese government ceded (§1) the old Cambodian provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap (for the consequences for the site of Angkor itself, see chapter IX), and Sisiphon to Cambodia (or to the French protectorate, which handed them officially over to the Cambodian king), the French returned Kratt on the southern coastline and Dan-Sai at Luang Prabang to Siam (§2) (Fig. VI.1a–c) and gave up their long-standing claim of ‘extraterritorial protection’ for French Asiatic subjects on Siamese territory (§5). This treaty brought a more than forty-year negotiation process to a

close.1 This process that had been initiated by the Franco-­ Siamese Treaty of 1867, which decided that the provinces of “Battambang and Angkor (Nakhon-Siem Reap) would remain in the Kingdom of Siam” and the frontiers would be demarcated by a Siamese-Cambodian commission (Treaty of 1867, §4; see Tuck 2009, 287, compare Klein 2013). From the 1890s onwards, the colonial-expansionist wing of French politics repeatedly instrumentalised this 1867 incident as a failure of premature French diplomacy in Southeast Asia (Lamant 1985a,b), as a traumatic blow to Cambodia’s self-conception by severing its deeply rooted cultural connection to Angkor, and, worst of all, as another “Alsace Lorraine” in French Indochine (see quotation above). Although the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893 forced the S­ iam­ese government to abstain from “constructing fortified posts of military establishments in the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap or within a zone of twenty-five kilometres along the right bank of the Mekong” (Treaty of 1893, §3; see Tuck 2009, 291, compare Pichon 1893, Vilers 1902), the demarcation of the frontier remained unresolved. After the draft for a further treaty was finally abandoned in 1902, the problem

1  Compare King Mongkut’s trial to visualise Siam’s royal patronage over Angkor around 1860 right before

the French-colonial impact and the following mapping procedure of the territorial borderlines in epilogue I of the first volume of this publication.

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.1a  The modified borderlines between Siam and Cambodia (including Angkor) in the context of the treaties of 1904 and 1907, as published in Colonel Fernand Bernard’s book À l’École des diplomates. La perte et le retour d’Angkor of 1933 (Source: Bernard 1933, map)

Figure VI.1b  The colonial topographer at work, as depicted in the 1931 publication La carte de l’empire colonial français (Source: Exposition coloniale 1931, plate 23)

was reinitiated in §3 of the equally unsatisfying Franco-Siamese Convention of 1904 in which the French sought to further eliminate almost all of Siam’s policing influence “in the provinces of Siem Reap, Battambang, and Sisiphon” (Treaty of 1904, §6; see Tuck 2009, 307). Certainly, the ‘retrocession’ of these provinces “meant much to Cambodia itself – Angkor was Cambodia’s only tie to the most glorious 248

Figure VI.1c  The mapping procedures of French Indochina around 1900–1910 (Source: Exposition coloniale 1931, plate 24)

past any nation of Indo-­China had ever had” (Briggs 1946, 453). But the diplomatic deal also served Siam’s actual politics as it was the country’s final effort, as a supposedly ‘declining state’, to escape imminent annexation by France in the early 1890s and to initiate a much belated reform process under King Chulalongkorn. Its political survival was not just the result of Siam’s skilled resistance tactics against the

1. Making Angkor French: The Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907

French. It was also due to the merit of the strong political and commercial influence of Great Britain (with its neighbouring colonies of Burma and India), which forced France into the Anglo-­French Declaration of London in 1896 and the “Siam Clause” in the bilateral Entente Cordiale of 1904 to “uphold independence of the Kingdom of Siam” (Convention of 1896; see Tuck 2009, 297) and “disclaim all idea of annexing any Siamese territory” (Siam Clause 1904; see Tuck 2009, 315); however, a concurrent acceptance of both nations’ zones of direct influence in the region was also agreed upon. As the Times [London] reported shortly after, there had been “no part of the world in which the jealousy that formerly subsisted between England and France was more dangerously acute than in the Siam peninsula”.2 No other document gives a more detailed – albeit very personal and therefore certainly biased – insight into the processes of the ‘retrocession’ of Angkor than the 1933 publication À l’École des diplomates. La perte et le retour d’Ang­ kor. This publication was written by Colonel Fernand Bernard, who played a decisive role in the French success of 1907 in his function as président de la Commission de délim­ itation de la frontière Franco-Siamoise between 1904 and 1907. It summed up the reasons for the forty-year-long failure (after the 1860s) to find a satisfying solution for the Franco-Siamese borderline as the “incomprehension of the reciprocal situation of the two parties, the ignorance of the positive interests to be defended, and, [finally and most importantly] the influence of the inapplicable general [French political] theories and the outdated [diplomatic] systems” (Bernard 1933, 8). Bernard’s publication also functioned as a means of settling a personal score with the French Min-

istry of Foreign Affairs at the Paris Quai d’Orsay, which had never acknowledged his efforts officially.3 Seventy per cent of Bernard’s 240-page book was used to reiterate – with accompanying illustrations of Angkorian temples abandoned ‘pre-1907’ (Figs. VI.2a–d) – the French politics and treaties after the 1850s: Ang Duong’s 1853 petition to Napoleon III for help; a French–Siamese pact in 1865 where the ‘exact delimitation’ of the border zone was already mentioned but the status of ‘Angkor in Siam’ was protested by Admiral La Grandière; the 1867 treaty with the initiated but rather indifferent delimitation efforts made by a mixed French–Siamese commission; the “confusion period” (Bernard 1933, 124) with the installation of a French-British delimitation commission, including Auguste Pavie and the Englishman, Scott, to set up the borderline in the Upper Mekong zone in Laos; in 1893 the invasion into Bangkok of French ships, which were acting upon a French ultimatum made by Le Myre de Vilers as ministre plénipotentaire in Bangkok and which remained in place until the Entente Cordiale in 1896;4 the efforts made by the new Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, Paul Doumer, and the sous-secrétaire d’État aux Colonies and later minister, Théophile Delcassé, with the failed 1902 treaty (Siem Reap and Angkor were not even mentioned in the draft text); the rising influence of the parti colonial in France clustered around the deputy in Parliament, Eugène Étienne (he was the leading figure in the organisation of the French-colonial section in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris), and the ardent spokesman for the French annexation of Siam, François Deloncle;5 and, finally, the post–1906 election government formed by the moderate prime minister Clemenceau.

2  See the Times [London], 3 April 1907, 7; compare the previous shorter announcement on 25 March 1907, 5. 3  In a sixteen-page letter from 31 March 1907 to the Gouverneur général in Hanoi, Bernard summarised the

main results of the negotiation process in Bangkok, underlined the point that the provinces of Siem Reap and Battambang were officially to be “retroceded to France” (and not directly to Cambodia), and only, in a second step, to be returned by France to Cambodia. In this letter, he complained about his bad reception by the side of the Quai d’Orsay. See the whole dossiers about the delimitation procedure before 1907 in ANOM INDO GGI 24889-24939 (here 24902), and 25796-25876 respectively. 4  As Bernard mentioned about the 1893 treaty, Great Britain was alerted against France’s annexation plans: “In the case of Cambodia, he [Le Myre de Vilers] had once more to proclaim the surrender of Angkor and Battambang, since Lord Roseberry (minister of foreign affairs) via Lord Dufferin (as ambassador in Paris) let our minister of foreign affairs know that he considered our installation in these provinces as casus belli” (Bernard 1933, 120). 5  With the Union Coloniale (founded in 1893 and directed by Joseph Chaillet-Bert with its journal Quinzaine coloniale), the journal Politique coloniale (later directed by Louis Henrique), the Dépêche coloniale, and the Comité de l’Asie Française (founded in 1900 by Étienne, run by Robert de Caix), the colonial movement around the Colonial Party – ever since its foundation around 1890 as a loose interest group; however, it was always more oriented towards French expansionism in Africa than towards a ‘Greater Indochina with Siam’ – reached its maximum influence in French politics after the 1902/3 election in France (Tuck 2009, 205–14). Triggered by the “Anglo-French rivalry [which] converted many [French] nationalists into imperialists” and boosted by the menace of the belated German expansionism, the party was “one of the most powerful pressure groups in the history of the Third Republic” (Andrew/Kanya-Forstner 1971, 101, 127; compare Hefferman 1994). It was influential in official government circles, but had only very little impact on the public, more anti-colonial opinion. The parti colonial partitioned in 1905 and ultimately disintegrated. Étienne’s Ligue Coloniale (founded in 1907) oriented itself towards the colonial education of French citizens; furthermore, World War I triggered a neo-nationalistic movement on the European continent.

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figures VI.2a—d  Illustrations inside Bernard’s 1933 publication La perte et le retour d’Angkor to depict the miserable condition of the temples of Angkor (Source: Bernard 1933, between 12–13, 64–65, 128–29, 192–93)

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2. The Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille en 1916: The role of Jean Commaille in a failed project

In 1904 Bernard had been commissioned by Gaston Doumergue, the ministre des Colonies, “to correct, as soon as possible, the topographical failures of the borderline, which was in some regions purely theoretical, and to avoid any separations of the populations that had always been unified by their race, language, and old administrative organisation” (Bernard 1933, 171). On the French side, the delimitation commission comprised Bernard as president; Pierre Guesde, the administrator of the Pursat province (and in 1914 the appointed organiser of the Indochinese section in the Colonial Exhibition in Marseille, see below); and Ponn, the minister to the king of Cambodia. The Siamese commission was presided over by General Muni Chatidej Udom. The delimitation procedure followed three sections of the coastline all the way to the Tonlé Sap Lake in the south, the area towards Laos to the north, and the area between the lake and the Mekong (including Angkor). For the latter, Bernard proposed the “natural line along the course of the Stung-Sreng River, which formed precisely to the west the limit of the province of Siem Reap (Angkor)” (Bernard 1933, 198). His pragmatic approach of bypassing the supposedly lethargic and snobbish diplomats at the Quai d’Orsay (after his partly failed 1906 visit to Paris to propagate his vision in the diverse ministries) and of communicating directly with the Siamese side found an equally dynamic interlocutor in Bangkok: the newly designated advisor to the Siamese King Chulalongkorn, the American, ex-Harvard professor of international law, Edward H. Strobel, who strongly supported Bernard’s territorial exchange proposals. Influenced by Collin de Plancy, the newly appointed French ministre plénipotentiare in Bangkok; by the Siamese king, with his desire to find a ‘definite’ political solution for the delimitation issue before his diplomatic

tour to Europe (including France); and by French fear that Great Britain along with new nations such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Japan would soon gain stronger influence inside the Siamese territory, the above-­ mentioned treaty was negotiated within a few days via direct telegraph connection with the French Ministry of Colonies. It was signed in Bangkok on 23 March 1907. Even Joseph Chailley, the strongest advocate of French-colonial expansion in Siam, accepted the deal. Two weeks after the treaty, in his pro-colonial Quanzaine colonial he commented on La Rénovation de l’Asie: Le récent arrangement avec le Siam: France could have, two or three times, in 1863 and 1867, in 1893, 1896, and 1904, played a very important role in this part of Indochina. With ignorance, indifference, weakness, and inability, it let every opportunity to take Siam completely in its possession escape […], to create a more concentrated French Indochina, a stronger one, easier to defend and with a better economic future. […] This treaty constitutes a new historic epoch. We have reached, Siam and ourselves, a turning point. For Siam, this means an awakening, a risorgimento. It is raised from a long lethargy. […] For us, this means if not a regression, then a halt. We declare ourselves satisfied [to let go of] what we could have easily obtained forty years ago. Adieu to the declarations of a French Mekong Valley […] no more expansion, no more humiliation, no more interference. This is an episode in the ‘Renovation of Asia’. This is all about a new politics. It seems to be convenient for our times, for our government, for the nation. I give in. This time at least, these politics bring material advantages worthy of appreciation. [italics MF] (Chailley 1907, 245, 247)

2. The Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille en 1916: The role of Jean Commaille in a failed project A few months after the closure of the 1906 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille, the temple range of Angkor became part of French Indochina. What had been termed in the introduction of this book as a constant process of ‘cultural (back)translation of heterotopian sites’, this very moment of the 1907 retrocession had enormous consequences for the transcultural relationship between the ‘real site’ in Cambodia and its ‘re-presentation’ in the French métropole. Before that date, attempts in the museum and exhibition spaces in Paris and Marseille to materialise the much-longed-for Angkor, which was then still located on foreign (Siamese) territory, can generally be read as exotic and picturesque fabrications in the form of pastiche-like translated quotations from different – freely interpreted or ‘authentically’ copied and reassembled – decorative elements and architectural features from Cambodian temples. The

political integration of Angkor “into the French patrimoine” (compare with the above quotation of Bernard), however, changed the subsequent approach to visualising (qua translating) its main attraction, the temple of Angkor Wat, by encouraging a new archaeological exactitude. With the architects, archaeologists, art historians, geographers, and philologists associated with the École française d’Extrême-­ Orient on the ‘real’ site (see chapter IX), the flow of exact structural and stylistic data was exponentially augmented from one day to the next; Angkor Wat’s ephemeral substitute in France mutated from a selective word-for-word quotation for small-scale pavilion interpretations into a monumental 1:1-scale translation of the whole site. After stiff competition between Marseilles and Paris in 1912 and early 1913 about which city would host the event, the French president Raymond Poincaré decreed on 21 July 251

VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.3  A telegram of July 1913 to reconfirm the 1916 Exposition coloniale to be held in Marseille (© Chambre de Commerce Marseille, Collection CCI Marseille-Provence)

1913 that the second Exposition Nationale Coloniale for 1916 would be held in Marseille (Fig. VI.3).6 Jules CharlesRoux, the official initiator of the project, was (once again, after his colonial duties in the 1900 and 1906 Exhibitions) nominated Commissaire général. Adrien Artaud, the president of the chambre de Commerce of Marseille, became his adjunct and Xavier Loisy was appointed directeur de l’Ex­ position. The Actes organiques for the event were published in 1914 and listed the subventions from early 1913 that had made the presidential decision for Marseille and Paris7 possible: as had been the case for the 1906 Exhibition, 1 million francs came from the city of Marseille and 250,000 francs from both the Conseil général du Départment des Bouches-du-Rhône and Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce. Indeed, the first issue of the Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale de Marseille 1916 on 1 November 1913 reported that the foundation stone of the second exhibition in Marseille was symbolically laid by President Poincaré on 2 Oc-

tober 1913. The règlement général of 21 March 1914 (signed by Charles-Roux), assigned again the parc du Rond-point du Prado for the event and invited “all French colonies and protectorates” to the 1916 Exhibition (§2,3). Very similar to 1906, it admitted “all agricultural or industrial products to the colonies and the protectorates” and “all agricultural, industrial or artistic products from the colonies and protectorates” and intended to feature displays “concerning ­colonial commerce and colonisation” and various “special expositions on history, art, literature, anthropology, ethnography and special congresses” (§2,3,6; Exposition national coloniale de Marseille en 1916 [1914], 6–29, here 6,7). The clas­ sification générale counted eighteen groups with seventy-­ seven classes. Above all, Group II (organisation des Colonies) listed Class 6 on “the applied methods and procedures of organisation of the colonies” (including “missions of delimitation”) and Class 7 on “metropolitan propaganda for the idea of colonisation”; Group IV (outillage des Colonies) com-

6  Poincaré’s decree was published in the Journal officiel de la République française on 24 July 1913. Only few

months earlier, a draft publication entitled Exposition internationale coloniale de Paris 1916 et Musée national permanent des Colonies was circulated in which a long list of a comité de patronage and a collection of articles (mostly from La Dépêche coloniale) supported Paris as the venue for an international colonial exhibition (ANOM INDO GGI 66775). 7  A series of articles in the daily newspaper Petit Marseillais from January to March 1913, with statements made by Charles-Roux, Marseille’s mayor Chanot, and Artaud, as well as various journalists, reveal both the tensions that existed between Paris and Marseille in the contest to take the lead in being France’s colonial voice and the patriotic attitude that saw the next Marseille Exhibition as an entirely national event. As Louis Brunet, member of the conseil supérieur put it: “A colonial exhibition cannot be international! This would mean to prepare a triumph for the British colonisation” (Le Petit Marseillais, 14 March 1913).

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2. The Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille en 1916: The role of Jean Commaille in a failed project

prised, above others, Class 21 on “urban agglomerations” and all kinds of building constructions; Group V was entitled mise en valeur des Colonies; and most important for this study, Group VIII (beaux-arts, littérature, tourisme) comprised Class 44 on “archaeology, arts, ancient arts, and religious arts”, including the themes of “reconstitutions and restorations; paintings, sculpture, architecture, engravings and lithographs; art works of metropolitan and indigenous arts; decorative arts” (Exposition 1916 [1914], 31–44, here 40). By August 1913 Charles-Roux had already contacted Albert Sarraut, the former sous-secrétaire d’Etat and current Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, to nominate someone to organise the participation of Indochina. Sarraut visited the exhibition site in January 1914 “to get an idea of the terrain and make his choice for the location of Indochina where a reconstitution of the monument of Angkor Wat was to be set up”.8 In a decree made on 17 May 1914, Sarraut officially nominated Pierre Guesde (résident supérieur de l’Indochine and, according to Bernard’s report, also a participant in the 1904–7 delimitation commission as administrator of the Cambodian province of Pursat and treasurer of the Société d’Angkor in Paris) as commissaire général de l’Indochine for the 1916 Exhibition. Additionally, he nominated four com­ missaires-adjoints: Ythier, Gourdon, and Brenier were in charge of administrative, social, and economic issues; Jean Commaille, since 1908 the EFEO’s Conservateur général for Angkor (see our analysis in chapter IX of his concrete work especially for Angkor Wat), was charged with the “artistic and ethnographic part of the exhibition”. And last but not least, the École des Beaux Arts–trained architect Auguste Émile Joseph Delaval, who was at this time the inspecteur des Bâtiments civils de l’Indochine in Hanoi (Delaire 1907, 235), became responsible for the whole section. Lacollonge, the inspecteur des Bâtiments civils, was nominated his right-hand man.9 Although it had been called Union Indochinoise since 1887, French Indochina was gradually enlarged to include parts of Laos in 1897 and was only considered a complete union with the above-mentioned Cambodian provinces, including Angkor, in 1907. Right before the Siamese retrocession of the famous temple range, the picturesque pagode

d’Angkor in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (chapter IV) and an Angkor-style pavillon du Cambodge in the 1906 Colonial Exhibition in Marseille (chapter V) were just additional elements among others to depict France’s colonial project in the Far East. After 1907, it seemed almost a logical development that the temple of Angkor Wat alone – in contrast to various isolated national pavilions of past exhibitions to represent different territories – was now chosen to represent the whole of French Indochina as one coherent colonial (political, cultural, and symbolic) entity under the unifying name palais de l’Indochine. Already by 5 May 1914, referring to Guesde’s general idea about the building programme and his suggestion to collaborate with Commaille and Brenier, Sarraut sent a dépêche télégraphique from Paris to Hanoi to Vollenhoven, his secretary general and representative ad interim, about the “participation of Indochina with one single palais”. It should contain “nine halls”, including a “salon centrale” devoted to the overall economic, infrastructural, geographic, etc. characteristics of Indochina; eight other halls dedicated to Cochinchina, Cambodia, Annam-Tonkin, Quang-Tchiou-Wan; thematic sections describing “the French expansion in the Far East”; as well as art and artefact collections. Interestingly, Sarraut referred to a “scrupulously exact exoticism to give the visitor, wandering through the diverse halls of the palais de l’Indo­ chine, an impression of the grandeur of our colony”, but only mentioned Commaille’s help with “a relief-like reconstitution of the temples and palais of Angkor Wat [sic] in a special hall inside the palais de l’Indochine”.10 Also, Guesde’s letter dated to 20 June 1914 from Paris addressed to “Monsieur Commaille, Conservateur des Monuments de Groupe d’Angkor” informed the latter only of having been charged with the “artistic exposition of the colony” with the general sections of “the beaux-arts, the indigenous decorative arts, and the professional schools of indigenous arts”, and in particular, with “geographical and ethnographical sections of the local exhibitions of the different parts of Indochina […] with the help of costumed dummies wearing authentic wigs” and “miniature temple models”.11 It seems that in early 1914 the overall appearance of the palais de l’Indochine à la Angkor Wat was not yet fully clear.

8  Quoted in: Rapport fait au nom de la chambre de Commerce de Marseille sur la proposition de M. Ernest Outrey rendant à la tenue à Paris, en 1921, d’un exposition coloniale interalliée (Archives départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 8M121). 9  Albert Sarraut, Gouverneur général de l‘Indochine to the ministre des Colonies, Jean Morel, on 2 June 1914 (ANOM AGEFOM 984/3385). Delaval was born in 1875 in Nevers, finalised his studies at the Paris École des Beaux-Art in 1903, became architecte DPLG (government architect) in 1909, followed a difficult dual career in the French military and as an architect with several stays in Indochina (Hué and Hanoi), built important buildings (such as the Lycée d’Hanoi, the musée Cham in Danang, the temple du Souvenir Annamite, and the musée Blanchard de la Brosse in Saigon), was a gifted painter (see illustrations below) throughout his life, and died in 1962 in Hennebont. The author would like to thank Mr. Jacques Guilchet, archivist in Hennebont, for his information about Delaval (compare Guilchet 2011). 10  For this correspondence in different versions, see: ANOM INDO GGI 66775 and ANOM AGEFOM 969/3314. 11  Guesde to Commaille, Paris 20 June 1914 (ANOM INDO GGI 66775).

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

On 18 August 1914, when the First World War broke out, Charles-Roux informed Albert Lebrun, the ministre des Colonies, that he “had stopped all expenses for the presentation of the 1916 Exhibition because of the war, […] and transported the archives of the exhibition to Marseille’s chamber of commerce”. Additionally, he hoped that once the war was won, “the fatherland would be able to enlarge its colonial empire as the honour of the republic and that the [our] Marseille Exhibition would finally be its magnificent glorification.”12 In a letter to the colonial minister on 16 December 1914, Delaval resigned from his post as architect and planner of the Marseille Exhibition because of his mobilisation as sergeant in the 88th régiment d’Infanterie territorale; but already by January 1915 Guesde had assured him of a future collaboration after the war. He even sent him a draughtsman called Morel to help continue his work while he performed his military service. Delaval responded to Guesde in the same month, informing him that he and Morel had finalised the bidding documents [dossier d’adju­ dication] and had further developed the plans to “make the character of the Indochinese section as monumental as possible, the details of which [he judged] to be marvellously documented” in two major sources: “on the one side in reproductions from the Trocadero [Delaporte’s musée In­ do-chinois], and on the other, kindly arranged by Guesde himself, at the advice from Monsieur Commaille”. All “technical issues and aesthetic aspects” had been reviewed at this point, additional water pavilions [bassins au pièces d’eau] for a more spectacular perspective towards the main structure were planned, and questions of the interior furnishing as well as the pavilion’s illumination for nightly festivities solved.13 However unusual it may seem that in 1915 Delaval continued to correspond with Guesde regarding the suspended exotic pavilion construction for the Marseille Exhibition while serving in the military during the First World War, there is yet another detail in this story that is even more extraordinary. The post-1907 connectivity between the ‘real’ French colonial site of Angkor in Cambodia and the location of its planned pavilion-like re-materialisation in the French métropole was kept alive during times of war and over thousands of kilometres through the conservator general of the former (Angkor Wat) and the planning architect of the latter (the Marseille pavilion). Although no concrete architectural plans of ‘Angkor in Marseille’ could be located as evidence for this very moment in the planning phase in 1915, a three-page letter by Jean Commaille, written to Guesde from “Angkor Thom” on 31 July 1915 and commenting on Delaval’s suggested form for the Angkor Wat–style tower silhouette in Marseille (Figs. VI. 4a,b), is preserved in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Pro­ vence. The document is a unique source for our focus on the

mutual ‘translatability’ of architecture in instances of transcultural exchange and in transfer situations. Commaille’s 1915 suggestions regarding the fully restored appearance of Angkor Wat’s tower silhouette were negotiated and (only partly) implemented in the construction of the temple’s picture-perfect and ephemeral substitute in Marseille in 1922 – before this test version actually migrated back (or was ‘back-translated’) to the ‘real’ site through the means of the archaeological and architectural restoration work of the EFEO. Mon cher Guesde, Le courrier vient de m’apporter la vue cavalière du Palais d’Indochine [for the 1916 Marseille Exhibition, MF]. Pris dans son ensemble, ce projet est excellent […] De plus, la disposition générale du projet est séduisante; elle permet de voir la totalité du palais sans autre anachronisme que celui de la coupure de l’entrée et qu’il était impossible d’éviter. […] Mais, en ce qui con­ cerne les détails, il y a beaucoup de choses à revoir car il est inutile de commettre des erreurs lorsque, sans plus de frais, on peut mieux faire. Ainsi, l’auteur du projet donne à ses tours une section carrée. Jamais les Cambodgiens n’ont adopté ce modèle. Les tours sont à gradins et d’une forme galbée […] De plus, les gradins qui, nus, auraient marqué dans le sens verticale de la tour — sur l’élévation — de trop fortes accusations […] Rien n’est aussi facile que d’obtenir par des moulages le nombre nécessaire de ces antéfixes et de les mettres à leur place en les fixant par un crampon. Quant au pinacle, il ne ressemble en rien à celui qu’indique l’auteur du projet. J’ai retrouvé les éléments complets d’un sommet de tour et c’est le moment d’en profiter. En voici un croquis. […] [...] Vous comprenez que cet élément n’est pas à perdre car il termine très heureusement les tours dont le pinacle était jusqu’à maintenant, inconnu.[...] Et à ce propos, mon cher ami, dites bien à votre architecte que je suis à son entière disposition pour lui fournir tous les motifs et tous les renseignement dont il pourrait avoir besoin. Je vois encore bien d’autres choses à répondre dans votre projet: largeur des galeries, éclairage; galeries sursautâtes qui s’accrochent mal… etc., mais cela n’est qu’une affaire de détails. L’essentiel pour l’instant est d’avoir un ensemble qui se tienne et ça y est. […] En fervante amitié, Jean Commaille. [italics MF] (Commaille 1915)

As we can read in the original French quote, Commaille found Delaval’s project “excellent” and his overall layout in plan and elevation “seductive”; he accepted the “anachronism” of two cropped entry pavilions to compress and augment the visitor’s perspective towards the palais de l’Indo­ chine (compare with the overall plan versions of 1919 below) but corrected Delaval’s design for the towers (square

12  Charles-Roux to the ministre des Colonies, Paris, 18 August 1914 (ANOM AGEFOM 984/3385). 13  Delaval to Guesde on 5 January 1915 from Lorient (ANOM AGEFOM 984/3385).

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figures VI.4a,b  The 1915 letter by Jean Commaille sent from Angkor Thom to Pierre Guesde about Auguste Delaval’s Angkor Wat replica for the planned 1916 National Colonial Exhibition at Marseille (© Archives Nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

in plan) back into their originally curved (and in plan, round) form and suggested using the medium of plaster casting [moulage] to copy and paste the figurative decoration of the towers. Ironically, Commaille’s idea to attaching those elements back to their architectural replica with brackets [crampons] sounded like a forecast of the applied archaeological techniques at the ‘original’ site in the decades to come (compare chapter IX). Additionally and perhaps most importantly, he transmitted from “Angkor Thom” to Lorient (via Paris) the latest

archaeological findings of the missing pinnacle in a sketchlike reconstitution that would be relevant for the back-­ translated test version of the structure realised in the 1922 Marseille Exhibition. A few months later, this direct contact with Angkor was brutally interrupted: according to the official obituary, Jean Commaille was assassinated on 29 April 1916 by bandits; his commendable involvement in the planned Marseille Exhibition of 1916 was not mentioned in his obituary (Parmentier 1916a) and is until today totally unknown.

3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille On 12 November 1918, the day after World War I armistice, the comité supérieur de l’Exposition met in Marseille’s town hall.14 With the death of Charles-Roux in the same year, Adrien Artaud, still president of Marseille’s chamber of

commerce, was elected Commissaire général for a new ex­ position coloniale that was scheduled for 1922. In his speech before the chambre de Commerce de Marseille on 21 February 1919, Artaud defended the ‘national’ character of the

14  One meeting had been organised on 17 September 1917 (Archive Municipale de Marseille 13F3).

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future event against an Exposition coloniale interalliée in Paris which had been proposed for 192115 but finally fixed for 1925 and then postponed to 1931 (see the following chapter VII): An atmosphere of reciprocal trust will be created by the demonstration of loyalty up to the greatest sacrifices of the indigenous people living in our possessions, and this celebration of the union of the elements of our rich [French-colonial, MF] domain, of la mère-patrie, does not require any foreign presence and comparison. [italics MF] (Chambre de commerce de Marseille 1919, 11)

The Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille de 1922 was reconfirmed by Poincaré’s presidential decree made on 15 April 1919. The new classification générale16 included a “section coloniale” (here with “Groupe VI – Beaux Arts, littérature, tourisme”) and a “section métropolitaine” (with “Groupe VII – Colonisation”), altogether forming nineteen groups with seventy-eight classes (Artaud 1923, 45–46). Albert Sarraut revisited Marseille in 1919, and the restarted Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale de Marseille reprinted, under the title “Angkor à Marseille”, Sarraut’s wish of 1916 to “reconstitute Angkor Wat”, a temple worthy of all superlatives: “C’est sublime et surhumain. Et tout, en vérité, dans ce spectacle de magie, tout conspire à l’émerveillement des yeux, à l’extase de l’esprit, au vertige de la pensée […] un chef d’œuvre génial.”17 Also, Guesde as the man responsible for the Indochinese section – with his commis­ saire-adjoint Pauher and the technical director Henri Gourdon – was back on duty and contacted the ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts in October 1919 to get a copy of Delaporte’s 1914 publication Les monuments du Cambodge. Études d’architecture Khmère. He was seeking to obtain a better understanding “of the style and ornamentation of the monuments of ancien Cambodge” for the ­Marseille project.18 Delaval was demobilised from military

service in March 1919 and started to work again on ‘his’ Angkor Wat temple. The earliest found elevation drawing of Delaval’s depiction of Angkor Wat dates from 20 September 1919 (Fig. VI.5a).19 Although we can assume that Delaval had certainly visited Angkor during his stays in Indochina (Hué and Hanoi) and that during his tenure as architect of the French colonial government in 1908 and from 1909 to 191320 he had sketched and painted the temple, his elevation drawing for Marseille’s Angkor Wat version was nevertheless a combined product of two already published sources. His central three-tower elevation, referring to the central inner (third) enclosure of the ‘real’ temple of Angkor Wat, was almost entirely copied (including the form of the pinnacle) from Lucien Fournereau’s drawing called “Angkor-Vat: Restauration – Coupe transversale des 2mes et 3mes étages” (though seen from the other side) from his 1890 publication Les ruines d’Angkor of 1890 (Fournereau/Porcher 1890) (Fig. VI.5b), a drawing which had also been exhibited during the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (compare Pl. III.10b). Only the lower galleries to the left and right of the central tower – more in keeping with the window-like aesthetics of Delaval’s interpretation than Fournereau’s depiction of open galleries – were a little laterally stretched. And whereas Fournereau depicted the towers of the existing second enclosure on their own metre-high socle, Delaval detached these from the central massif (placing them directly on the ground) and quoted them as flanking galleries inside as two separate and reflecting water basins [pièces d’eau]. These formed a baroque castle-like entry à la Vauxle-Vicomte that visually framed the central structure in the background and accentuated the central passageway at a third of its total length. This spatial arrangement of detached entries flanking the passageway might have been inspired by Delaporte’s well-known perspective towards Angkor Wat’s central massif – he called it “Angkor-Vaht – vue restituée” – published in his 1880 book Voyage au Cambodge

15  Rapport fait au nom de la chambre de Commerce de Marseille sur la proposition de M. Ernest Outrey ren­

dant à la tenue à Paris, en 1921, d’un exposition coloniale interalliée [undated], see: Archives départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 8M121. 16  As early as 26 September 1919, Pierre Guesde presented a draft for the new plan général de l’Exposition, which responded, as he explained, not only to the new political situation after World War I, but also to the current critique that previous exhibitions had neglected the overall picture of France’s colonial task. In favour of a “conception synthétique”, he suggested four sections: “organisation administrative, activité économique, activité intellectuelle et artistique” (including Groupe J – Beaux-Arts et arts indigènes), and “Les pays de l’Indochine” (Guesde 1920). 17  “Angkor à Marseille”, in: Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale de Marseille 1922, 2nd year, no. 22 (1 June 1919), 4. 18  Guesde to ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts [Louis Lafferre] on 13 October 1919 (ANOM AGEFOM 792/1793). 19  Also in 1919 the famous German architect Bruno Taut published Die Stadtkrone. In this book he depicted various “city crowns” from Europe and Asia, including “Angkor-Vat” (illustration 23), in exactly the same elevation aesthetics as Delaval. 20  In his biographical study on Delaval’s career, Guilchet remarks that the artist “had never been at the site [of Angkor] and worked [on his sketches and drawings] on the basis of documents” (Guilchet 2011, 62).

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figure VI.5a  Auguste Delaval’s 1919 drawing of the Angkor Wat replica called Palais de l’Indochine for the 1922 National Colonial Exhibition at Marseille (© Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Figure VI.5b  Lucien Fournereau’s elevation drawing of Angkor Wat as published in his 1890 publication Les ruines d’Angkor (Source: Fournereau 1890, between 108–109)

where the freestanding ‘library’ buildings were partially quoted in the illustration (Fig. VI.6). What we termed in the introduction as the ‘architectural affordance’ of Angkor Wat became highly explicit at this point: The whole architectural composition of strictly symmetrical axes and the well-balanced clustering of the different structures to draw

attention towards the culmination point of Angkor Wat’s replicated central tower was certainly influenced by Dela­ val’s classical Beaux-Arts formation as an architect. Or in other words: the original architectural and spatial composition of the twelfth-century site of Angkor Wat itself had a high quality of affordance for its Occidental appreciation 257

VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.6  Louis Delaporte’s “vue restituée” of Angkor Wat as published in his 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Source: Delaporte 1880, between 206–207)

and later translation into the realm of French museums and exhibitions during the climax of Beaux-Arts aesthetics.21 Along with a sketched out bird’s-eye view of the ensemble (Fig. VI.7a), a three-dimensional model of Delaval’s project had been presented on several occasions (Fig. VI.7b), above all at the office of La Dépêche coloniale in Paris on 6 January 1921 when Sarraut, now ministre des Colonies, and Maurice Long, Gouverneur général de l’Indo­ chine, inspected it in the presence of Guesde, Delaval, and his adjunct architect Johnson.22 The overall site of the 1922 Exhibition (enlarged from twenty-three hectares in 1906 to thirty-six hectares by the architecte en chef, Léonce Muller) was published in a plan and in a sketchy bird’s-eye view in the Journal officiel in September 1920 and June 1921 (Figs. VI.7c,d). Now, the Indochinese section, with its dominant axis towards Angkor Wat, was grouped perpendicularly to the south of the central grande allée. This allée connected – like in the 1906 Exhibition, which was held on the same

spot – the entrée principale at the rond-point in the west with the grand palais to the east, the accompanying sections from Algeria to Morocco and Tunisia to Madagascar to Afrique occidentale, and the single pavilions such as of the ministère des Colonies and others (Fig. VI.7d). An overall plan dating from about mid-1920 (Fig. VI.8) corresponds to a general description of this so far largest re-materialisation of Angkor Wat on the European continent: The project of the palais de l’Indochine is an adaptation of the general plan of Angkor Wat reduced in order to fit the ensemble’s proportions of the Exhibition of Marseille. The chosen site for the execution of the project will constitute, with its mountainous horizon, a picturesque setting for the monument. As regards its exterior appearance, this construction converged as much as possible with the harmonious proportions of the original. Only the interior distribution had been profoundly modified to respond to the

21  Interestingly, François de Tessan came to similar conclusions in his analysis of the reconstitution of Ang-

kor Wat, “Les aspects intimes et pittoresques de l’Indochine”, which was inside the special issue of L’Illustra­ tion on Marseille’s 1922 Exhibition: “Here we find a quite curious analogy between the conception of Angkor Wat and the plans of our grand prix de Rome as they were executed forty years ago [in the École des BeauxArts, MF]. The same ordinance [ordonnance], same balance of the masses [équilibre des masses], same feeling to produce an effect [sentiment de l’effet] in relation to a central point around which all the rest is subordinated, the same utilisation [utilisation] in this drawing of the terraces, foundations, platforms, and accessing passageways” (L’Illustration 1922, no. 4155 (21 October 1922), 386. 22  “La maquette du palais de l’Indochine exposé à Paris”, in: Journal officiel de l’Exposition, 4th year, no. 37 (January 1921), 5.

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figure VI.7a  Auguste Delaval’s draft of the palais de l’Indo-Chine as published in L’Indo-Chine à l’Exposition de Marseille de 1922 (Source: Exposition nationale coloniale Marseille 1922 n.d., n.p.)

Figure VI.7b  Delaval’s executed model palais de l’Indo-Chine as photographed and published in Midi coloniale et maritime, Annuaire illustrée (Source: Midi coloniale et maritime, Annuaire illustrée 1922, 421)

exhibition’s requirements. Even if the massif central represents in its width and height the same proportions of the temple of Angkor Wat, the foundation’s walls had been reduced from originally twelve to nine metres. For the better utilisation of the construction, these foundations, originally filled with earth at Angkor Wat, are now equipped with exhibition rooms. […] like at Angkor Wat,

the visitor will find that two galleries form a cruciform ground plan.23 [italics MF]

For the general spatial organisation of the palais, Delaval again merged different and separate features of the ‘real’ temple for his version at Marseille. In reference to the ground plan in Garnier’s 1873 publication (see Fig. I.4b),

23  Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille – Palais de l’Indochine et annexes du palais (undated, c. Sep-

tember 1920), see ANOM AGEFOM 792/1792.

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.7c  A map of the planned 1922 Marseille Exhibition as published on 25 September 1920 in the Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale (Source: © Archives municipales de Marseille)

Figure VI.7d  A sketched bird’s-eye view of the planned 1922 National Colonial ­Exhibition as published in June 1921 (Source: Journal officiel de l’Exposition ­coloniale, no. 42, June 1921, 5; © Chambre de Commerce Marseille, Collection CCI Marseille-Provence)

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

reinterpreted in Thomson’s 1875 book (Thomson 1875, 136– 37) and Fournereau’s 1890 publication (Fig. VI.9), he made the ‘cruciform galleries’, which were ‘in reality’ situated as a spatial feature between the innermost and second enclosure, a part of the central massif with sixty metres (some sources speak of seventy metres) side length, forty-­metre cornet towers, and a fifty-four-metre central tower! As a consequence, the two lateral ‘library’ buildings on both sides of the ‘original’ cruciform galleries were now quoted as flanking structures to the widened square platform where the Marseille visitor could climb the mountain temple via the principal (enlarged and less steep) staircase. Around the massive palais with a wide range of other ar­chitectural features like a rue Annamite, restaurants, and pagodas, three rectangular Khmer-style pavilions were grouped immediately to the eastern, southern, and western entrances of the palais and represented other provinces of Indochina. However, nothing gives us a more precious insight into the enormous political efforts made to stage Angkor temporarily in France than studying the documents of its incredibly sophisticated structural and decorative execution in Marseille between 1920 and 1922. It not only surpassed all earlier financial, logistic, technical, and artistic undertakings to represent Indochina in French universal and colonial exhibitions but can now also be read as part of the new trans­ lational practice of colonial France after the 1907 retrocession of Angkor: to convert Asian temple architecture of massive stone into ephemeral exhibits that could act as symbolic substitutes within a French colonial patrimoine culturel. It is interesting to compare Adrien Artaud’s above quoted cultural-political eulogy for the cultural heritage of la France d’Asie as embodied in the synthesised form of ­Angkor Wat and his short list of technical superlatives for its ‘re-presenta­ tion’ in Marseille. He seems in fact to suggest the achievements of the Khmer master builders of the twelfth-century stone temple of Angkor Wat had been replaced and surpassed by French construction and decoration firms who had built the temporary exhibition replica made of an inner wooden scaffolding with attached fibreboards of selective but multiplied decorative patterns copied from the ‘real’ temple: The participation of Indochina in the colonial exhibition was, without a doubt, the most important element for the visitors […] What had to be highly appreciated was its commercial activity, economic vitality, and its unlimited resources — in a word, the incomparable richness of our France d’Asie. To offer, with an architectural marvel, an exact and complete synopsis of this immense ‘Promised Land’, where through centuries the oldest civilisations of the world have met, where side by side so many different races are conjoined by a common love for ‘la France protectrice’, where we have to accomplish what had rightly

been termed the ‘Miracle français en Extrême-Orient’, a Union Indochinoise of 775,000 square kilometres. […] A unique pavilion [was chosen] to represent through its prestigious grandeur and its splendour of a millennium the present entity of the Indochinese union, and to give the most vivid impression and the best materialisation of the potency of ‘la France d’Asie’. Being inspired by this idea of an architectural unity, we searched and found a specimen of local architecture, which, through its decorative richness and monumental character, represented one of the most beautiful examples of the art of the Far East […] The palais de l’Indochine and its annexes were an adaptation of the general plan of Angkor Wat in Cambodia reduced to the proportions of the Marseille ensemble. […] Some numbers give an idea of the importance of this enterprise. The terrain of 5.5 hectares for the Indochinese section had first to be cleared of existing structures over the course of six months. The [newly built] structure needed 396,000 working hours for the carpenters, masons, and workers for a construction made of 5,000 square metres of timber work, 55 tons of iron, 5,000 square metres of glazing, etc. This work had been directed by M. Molinari of the firm Blanchet et Molinari from Grenoble. The supply and positioning of the plaster fibreboards [staff] was the work of la maison Auberlet et Laurent. 50,000 square metres of external and internal cladding and 35,000 plaster casts [épreuves de moulage] were needed. Seven workshops worked simultaneously on the execution of such a surface of staff. The musée Cambodgien du Trocadéro [of Louis Delaporte, MF] and the musée Guimet had contributed the largest part of the documents, decorative motifs, sculptures, decorative strips, and bas-reliefs. [italics MF] (Artaud 1923, 159, 171—72, 174—75)

The construction process of the palais de l’Indochine and its subsidiary buildings is well documented in the various files holdings of the French Archives nationales d’outre-mer. Generally, the whole project was broken down by Delaval and his adjunct Johnson into three parts [lots] for public bidding: (1) the “entreprise général de la construction”, ­including the preparation of the construction site, the construction of the inner wooden scaffolding with its integrated iron works, and the demolition of the whole structure after the exhibition; (2) the delivery and renting out of the decorations on painted cloth; (3) the overall decoration including the covering of the scaffolding inside and outside with the walls, ceilings, water basins, reliefs, etc. in lightweight-plaster fibreboards [revêtement en staff], the delivery of all freestanding elements à la Angkorienne like sculptures, furniture, etc., and finally, the covering of all surfaces in a reimagined colour scheme imitating a stone surface with a patinated appearance.24

24 These cahiers des charges, lots, procès-verbaux d’adjudication pour la construction, and discussions with the

contractors were basically all established from mid-1920 onwards and are documented in several dossiers. See the most important files in: ANOM AGEFOM 781/1729, 792/1792, 799/1715, and 969/3314.

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.8  Plan of the Indochinese section of the 1922 Exhibition, from about 1920 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

In October 1920 the Entreprise Blanchet & Molinari from Grenoble was assigned the overall construction of the Indochinese section with a cost calculation of 3,150,000 francs. Various illustrations in the exhibition’s Journal offi­ ciel and in the 1922 documentation Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille, décrite par ses auteurs show the construction processes of the enormous wooden skeleton of Angkor Wat (Figs. VI.10a,b), onto which a thin decorative skin was applied. Following Delaval’s devis descriptif of August 1920, we can see that this second phase comprised not only the inner decoration of the palais itself but also “a se-

ries of seventy-eight additional motifs of exterior decoration composed of statues, architectural fragments, sculptures, installed on a socle and forming a musée en plein air around the palais central”. Delaval also states that “all [surrounding] constructions were to be executed in Khmer style, according to the dossier d’adjudication and after selected models of the musée cambodgien au Trocadéro […]; and to be patinated like the decayed sandstone of Angkor Wat, […] whereas the very summits of the towers were to be gilded”.25 The decoration firm (Émile) Auberlet & (G.) Laurent from Montrouge near Paris26 (Figs. VI.11a,b) re-

25  Construction du palais de l’Indochine – Devis déscriptif, 10 August 1920 (ANOM AGEFOM 779/1715). 26  This firm still exists today; the author would like to thank its director, M. Lebufnoir, for granting access to

this information during a visit to Montrouge in 2011 (see Pl. Intro.15a–c). See the homepage: http://www.au-

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figure VI.9  The plan of Angkor Wat as published in Fournereau’s 1890 publication Les ruines d’Angkor (Source: Fournereau 1890, between 94–95)

ceived the contract on the basis of a cost calculation of almost 3.5 million francs with 2 million alone allocated for the central palais. In a series of invoices dating from the

second half of 1920, the acquisition process for the mouldings [moulages et surmoulages] of architectural “partial models” up to several metres in size and decorative elements

berletlaurent.com/index.html (accessed 15 April 2013). Émile Auberlet (born 1873) continued the firm Larue – Auberlet – Laurent (1867-1873-1896), was decorated chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and was laureate of the Société centrale des architectes.

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figures VI.10a,b  The construction site of the Angkor Wat replica around 1921 (Source: a) Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale, July 1921, 4; b) Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 44)

Figures VI.11a,b  Sample page of a sales catalogue of Auberlet & Laurent of the 1920s, here with capital and corbel decorations “in all styles”, executed in staff or carton-pierre (Source: © Auberlet & Laurent, Montrouge)

(balustrades, capitals, arabesques, lintels, friezes, pediments) as well as of freestanding sculptures (Naga-snakes, guardian figures, lions, monkeys, etc.) from both Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois and the musée Guimet in Paris can be retraced. They were brought to Marseille by train and were multi264

plied on site. In comparison with the enormous amount of copies brought directly from the Paris museum, it seems that additional new mouldings from Angkor itself were quite rare and primarily concerned the mobile decorations inside the palais.

3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figures VI.12a—b  The construction site of the 1922 Angkor Wat replica with a wooden scaffolding and lightweight staff boards (Source: a) Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille 1922b, 21; b) Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 45)

Figure VI.12c  Detailed photograph of the figurative decorations of the palais de l’Indo-Chine (Source: © Musée d’Histoire de Marseille)

In May 1921 Delaval reported to Guesde on the pro- painters with their two foremen and one head decorator gress of the construction site, stating that “all the models of were also involved.27 In late August 1921, the major part of sculptures, mouldings, bas-reliefs, etc., all the motifs for the staff decoration on the outside was finalised and applied the inside and outside of the palais and its annex buildings on “the central palais, the terraces, three pavilion annexes, were finalised. [Additionally,] all the staff elements after the two small pavilions, and the introductory water pavilions”28 models of Auberlet and Laurent have been executed”. This (Figs. VI.12a–c)29, whereas the interior decoration was to giant ‘translation project’ comprised altogether seven work- be completed the upcoming winter. In December 1921, the shops [ateliers] with almost two hundred workers, includ- firm Auberlet & Laurent staged a banquet for its more than ing the firm’s headquarters in Montrouge, four factories in two hundred plasterers and staff decorators and celebrated – Vichy, Nimes, and Marseille, and two workshops directly justifiably – Marseille’s plaster replica of Angkor Wat as the on-site containing ninety-five workers alone; additionally “most important œuvre ever executed in the métier of plassubworkers, draftsmen, and a foreman, as well as ten staff ter casting”, a proof of the “collective efforts of the labour-

27  Rapport Delaval sur la marché des travaux (31 Mai 1921) à Pierre Guesde (ANOM AGEFOM 781/1729). 28  See ANOM AGEFOM 779/1715. 29  I would like to thank Laurent Védrine (today director of the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux) and Ann

Blanchet for archival material from the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille and their shared knowledge about the Marseille exhibitions.

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ing class” as well as a patriotic act: “The Lilliputian image antique]” was in fact part of a film of the Opérateurs ciné­ [of Angkor Wat, MF] had turned into the same proportions matographiques Maison Pathé (other sources mention the of the giant Gulliver.”30 cinématographiste Guichard and the opérateur Goepfert), Six years after Commaille’s letters from Angkor Thom which had been commissioned by the Indochinese section about reconstituting Angkor in Marseille 1916 (see above), of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition. The whole scenography of the transcultural heterotopia – and this meant the mutual this project had been organised by the directeur du service (back)translations between the real spot and its ephemeral des fêtes et attractions for the Marseille event, Devé.33 With substitute, between the historical stage and the staging of these earlier scenarios as important forerunners, only the historic reconstitutions in front of Angkor Wat that were its history, and between Khmer royal ancestry at a religious temple site and the propagated French colonial patronage staged by King Norodom Sihanouk during Cambodia’s postof the same in the name of cultural heritage – became es- colonial 1950s and 1960s: this time with Charles de Gaulle pecially visible at one particular moment during the com- or Tito as prestigious guests, not only mimic but actually pletion of Angkor Wat’s replica. On 11 November 1921, the surpass this staging of ancient grandeur (see chapter X). World War I veteran Maréchal Joffre visited the construcAt the same time, the process of ‘authentic decoration’ tion site of the Marseille Exhibition and passed, as the Jour­ inside the Angkor replica in Marseille was in a full swing. nal officiel later reported, before the plaster cast replicas of The furnishing of the Indochinese section with all kinds of Naga balustrades, guardian figures, etc. belonging to “the ‘original’ – living and non-living – decor was all-embracing. splendid reconstitution, in the process of completion, of It was also Devé who – with the help of Thioun, the minis­ the famous temple of Angkor”31 (Fig. VI.13a). Shortly after, tre de Palais at Phnom Penh; Rousseau, the délégué admi­ Joffre left directly for Indochina where he participated in a nistratif du Cambodge; and François Marius Baudoin, the kind of historical re-enactment of the 1887 battlefield near Résident supérieur au Cambodge, – supervised the estabHué where Joffre had himself fought and which had been, lishment and the sending of a newly equipped Khmer Ballet according to the Journal officiel, “reconstituted by the Rési­ dance troupe to Marseille (compare Falser 2013f). 34 After dent supérieur [and himself Gouverneur général de l’Indo­ his visit to the 1906 Marseille Exhibition, the Cambodian king sent a small group of notables to Marseille in the enchine between 1928 and 1934, MF] Pierre Pasquier in the most exacting detail after the historic plans stored in the tourage of Prince Norodom-Montana.35 As an undated list archives in Hanoi”.32 Just a few weeks after his visit to Mar- by Pierre Guesde (most probably made around late 1921) seille’s Angkor Wat replica and this time captured in a se- tells us, almost three hundred authentic “indigenes” particries of photographs for the 1922 publication Souvenir du ipated in the Indochinese section alone. These included Cambodge: Ruines d’Angkor (Fig. VI.13b), Joffre reached “technical personnel” like interpreters, guardians, draftsthe ‘real’ site of Angkor Wat where he was invited to expe- men; “workmen” like plasterers [sculpteurs-ébénistes] and rience a historicising “procession with more than ninety staffeurs, masons, carpenters, and painters; “artisans” of the elephants and five thousand participants [including the rue Annamite like embroiderers, lacquerers, potters, etc.; Cambodian King Sisowath, his princes and ministers, MF] artists for the “representations and dances” with twenty in honour of Maréchal Joffre” (Crespin 1922. n.p.). Together danseuses cambodgiennes and twenty male dancers from with scenes captured during the Water Festival in Phnom Annam and a whole orchestra; and one hundred indigenous Penh, this “reconstitution of a historic pageant [cortège royal militiamen.36

30  Allocution prononcée au banquet offert aux ouvriers sculptures et mouleurs à l’occasion des travaux ex-

écutés au Palais de l’Indochine à l’Exposition Coloniale de Marseille, le 1 Décembre 1921 (ANOM AGEFOM 792/1793). 31  “Le Maréchal Joffre à l’Exposition Coloniale”, in: Journal officiel de l’Exposition de Marseille de 1922, 4th year, no. 47 (November 1921), 5. 32  “Le Maréchal Joffre en Annam et à Angkor”, in: Journal officiel de l’Exposition de Marseille de 1922, 5th year, no. 50 (February 1922), 8 (originally written by André de Temperas, signed “Hanoi, 16 January [1922]”, and published in the Petit Marseillais). 33  A series of letters written around October 1921 exist between Devé, the Résident général in Phnom Penh, and the gouverneur général de l’Indochine in Hanoi, see: ANOM AGEFOM 808/1936. 34  Several letters deal with the danseuses cambodgiennes in the second half of 1921 (ANOM AGEFOM 808/ 1936). Artaud mentioned M. Ouck as being the “ministre supplément du palais”, who was assisted by Mme Meleck the “maîtresse de ballet and director of choreography for the danseuses royales […] the costumes, the adornment, the clothes and accessories from Phnom Penh were made bespoke for the exhibition” (Artaud 1923, 206). 35  This was decreed by Maurice Long on 6 March 1922 (ANOM AGEFOM 823/2147). 36  Tableau récapitulatif du personnel indigène par pays by Pierre Guesde, undated (ANOM AGEFOM 792/ 1792).

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3. The 1922 National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille

Figure VI.13a  Maréchal Joffre’s visit of the 1922 Angkor Wat replica at Marseille in November 1921 (Source: Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale, November 1921, 5)

Figure VI.13b  Maréchal Joffre’s visit of Angkor Wat in Cambodia during his ­travel to Indochina in 1922 (Source: Crespin 1922, 7)

The transcultural entanglement between Indochina and Marseille also concerned – as we have already seen with Commaille and the EFEO – institutional connections. In an effort to attain ‘authentically made’ decorative elements from Cambodia, the Phnom Penh–based École des arts

Cambodgiens, under its director George Groslier, was contracted to produce a long list of objects ranging from furniture, masks, instruments, clothes, bronzes, and gold works as well as reduced models of traditional building types such a Cambodian pagoda and, most important, the giant 267

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wooden entry doors to the palais de l’Indochine.37 Georges Serré, the former director of the École d’art appliqué in Bien Hoa in Cochinchina (compare Serré’s and Groslier’s similar role in the 1937 Paris Exhibition, see chapter VIII), was equally involved in the effort to “reconstitute pots, vases, antique jars of Far East Asian art”.38 As far as the interior furnishing of the grand palais was concerned, André Joyeux, inspecteur des Écoles d’arts décoratifs et du dessin en Indo­ chine, was commissioned, as délégué adjoint for the Marseille event, to find original art objects from Indochina as well as to execute plaster casts at Angkor. Those arrived in Marseille in “26 boxes”, and seems to have been used as models by the cabinetmakers [ébénistes] for the furniture à la Angkorienne. With him was the mouleur staffeur Marcel-­ Eugène-Charles Pfeiffer to “take a series of mouldings and to establish models [maquettes] of Angkor”.39 As it was reported in the journal L’Illustration, Marseille’s project of ‘copy-pasting’ Angkor had left marks on the real spot where “traces of plaster were still visible on the millennia old temples” (Naudeau 1922, 372). In late 1921 hundreds of decorative items in about one hundred boxes weighing several tons were shipped from Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Saigon to Marseille in order to furnish the pavilions and the grand palais. Exotic plants came from Saigon, which had to be overwintered in Marseille’s greenhouses.40 Above all, the 23 November 1921 in­ ventaire des colis from Cambodia comprised of an oxcart, an elephant’s packsaddle, a large pagoda model, wooden boxes, and large photographs of Cambodia. The aerial photographs of the temple range of Angkor, which were en-

larged and applied to the interior walls of the exhibition parcours inside the palais, were most probably included among them. The photos had been organised by Victor Go­ loubew, pensionnaire de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient and the man in charge of the archaeological installation inside the palais (Goloubew 192341), as the fruit of a collaboration with the French colonial Aéronautique militaire in Indochina from Saigon, headed by Lieutenant Casse, and the service du Cadastre du Cambodge. Additionally, the EFEO contributed original (and plaster cast copies of) Ang­ korian artefacts from their museum in Phnom Penh and from the musée Guimet in Paris.42 The painter François de Marliave – who also made the drawings for the 1946 reprint of Pierre Loti’s famous book Pélerin d’Angkor – had been commissioned to execute large panels of typical views and scenes in Indochina (including Angkor) for the small dioramas and the exhibition halls of the grand palais.43 In June 1921 Delaval summed up the estimated costs of 2.8 million francs for all the Indochina installations that did not directly concern the construction of the palais de l’Indochine itself.44 Another (undated) programme de dé­ penses mentioned almost 4 million francs for the entire Indochinese section.45 Starting with a subvention of 6 million francs (4 million from the city and 1 million each from the département and the chamber of commerce, compare with Richefort 2006, 109) – the “total credit” for the whole 1922 Marseille Exhibition was estimated to be “12 million francs” (Commissariat général 1922, 32). However, the “overall expenses” after the closure of the exhibition were calculated at “18 to 19 million francs” (Artaud 1923, 505).

37  For the list of commissioned items from October 1920, see: ANOM AGEFOM 808/1936. However, it

seems that Groslier’s participation caused schedule problems, since Delaval discussed with Guesde the possibility of having Groslier’s wooden doors replaced with a staff version by M. Auberlet (ANOM AGEFOM 792/ 1792). 38  Guesde to Serré, 22 December 1921 (on the same topic to Maurice Long, the Gouverneur général de l’In­ dochine, in January of the same year (ANOM AFEGOM 823/2147). 39  For both missions, see ANOM AGEFOM 823/217. For Pfeiffer, additionally see: ANOM AGEFOM 808/ 1936. 40  For these inventory lists, see: ANOM AGEFOM 969/3310. 41  Here Goloubew also made an interesting critique of the general appearance of the palais d’Indochine as a “gigantic plaster cast”, the summit of the towers of which did not, according to him, correspond to the latest archaeological research (compare with our discussion with Jean Commaille’s sketches): “But we have to take into account that the artists charged with the plaster casts only had a small number of authentic documents available to them. In conclusion, they had only the casts of the Trocadero as a reference” (Goloubew 1923, 561). A seventeen-metre-long series of the bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat (the scene of the ‘churning of the milk ocean’, compare Pl. Intro.10c) was shown as well as two hundred photographs of Angkor. For the comparable scenario in Berlin, see Figs. III.44a–d). 42  For a discussion of these photographs, see: ANOM AGEFOM 808/1936, 823/2147. 43  ANOM AGEFOM 969/3314 and 823/2147, compare with André-Pallois 1997, 99–104. 44  This comprised 800,000 francs alone for the rue Annamite, 350,000 francs for the three main pavilions around the palais, and 200,000 francs for the furniture inside the palais’s exhibition parcours. In: Prévisions des dépenses pour travaux hors marché, Delaval to Guesde on 10 June 1921 (ANOM AGEFOM 792/1792). 45  This comprised 200,000 francs for “I. Personnel”, 80,000 francs for “II. Materiel”, 1.8 million francs for “Exécution des travaux” with 700,000 francs alone for the rue Annamite and 250,000 francs for the grande pa­ gode; 630,000 francs for “IV. Exploitation (nourritures, chauffage, etc.)”, 300,000 francs for “V. Aménagement intérieur” and another 800,000 francs for transport, publication, and conferences, etc. (ANOM AGEFOM 862).

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Figure VI.14  Sketch of the palais de l’Indo-Chine of 1922, as seen by oriental people from an airplane or through a window, as published in the Livre d’or of the 1922 Exhibition (Source: ­Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille 1922b, 11)

4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’: From the overall bird’s-eye view to the ‘altar of the ancestors’ When the second National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille was inaugurated on 16 April 1922 by Albert Sarraut, minis­ tre des Colonies (together with Lucien Dior, ministre du Commerce, and the mayor of Marseille, Siméon Flaissières), he described the overall programme of the event: “A colonial exhibition serves the interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies” (Artaud 1923, 409). But how was this French colonial project of transcultural interpenetration experienced by the visitor of the Marseille Exhibition on site? How was it propagated in the exhibition media? And what was the concrete role played by the reconstitution of Angkor Wat in this programme? From the outset, the overall tourist folder for the event – subtitled “All about indigenous arts and craft” [Tout ce qui a trait à la vie aux arts et aux métiers indigènes] – introduced it, in the best sense of a Foucauldian heterotopia (compare the introduction to this book), as a peripheral, encapsulated, and illusionary place of festival-like deviation, where the concrete city of Marseille as the Mediterranean colonial port of France was synchronically connected with its colonial sites in outre-mer by their ephemeral re-presentation and re-materialisation (Pl. VI.1a,b); and Angkor Wat was its most impressive specimen. On the official site plan (Pl. VI.2) – entitled “In 50 pavilions all of what France sends to and receives from its col­

onies” [Dans 50 palais tout ce que: La France envoie à/reçoit de ses colonies] – the stops on the parcours through the colonised countries were summarised by their different heritage icons. A “vue d’ensemble à d’avion” inside the L’Illustration issue on Marseille’s exhibitionary complex (Pl. VI.3) gave its reader a kind of “monarch-of-all-I-survey” perspective of cultural mastery (as it was termed by Pratt 1992, 201–27) in which the “collection of miniatures” (compare Stewart 1993 and our discussion in chapter IV) represented by the reconstituted temples, mosques, and exotic palaces formed a colonial toy world dominated by the ‘gigantic’ high-rise of Angkor Wat. All this happened at about the same time that aerial tourism was introduced at Angkor proper, with the same effect of ‘miniaturising’ large temples (compare Figs. IX.12 and 23a–e, and Falser 2013d). In an attempt to include the ‘indigenous other’ into the picture, the Livre d’or of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition published a drawing (Fig. VI.14) in which a group of individually unidentifiable Arab, Black African, and Asian, and supposedly French colonial subjects passively and from a safe distance observed (through an elephant-framed window of an airplane whose right wing bore the flags of Marseille and France) the cultural masterpieces of their own ‘world [displayed] as an exhibition’ (compare Mitchell 1989). The message was clear: the ‘natives’ were incapable of understanding, maintaining, and 269

VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.15a  Parts of the Palais africain and Angkor Wat in the background (Source: © Archives municipales de Marseille)

Figure VI.15d  The presidential visit of the Indochinese section of the 1922 Exhibition on 7 May 1922 (Source: Exposition ­nationale coloniale de Marseille 1922b, 8)

Figures VI.15b,c  The Laotian lake and the Rue d’Hanoi as pictured in a souvenir album of the 1922 Exhibition, today preserved at the Historical Museum of Marseille (Source: © Musée d’Histoire de Marseille)

protecting their own cultural heritage, and therefore colonial France had now appropriated it via a temporary, picture-perfect reconstitution in the métropole. Whereas the careful staging of Indochina as a distinct cultural entity might have worked in the circulating propaganda of publications, folders, and posters (Pl. VI.4a), the time- and space-compressed version of the French colonial world inside the Marseille Exhibition created unexpected superimpositions when, in uncontrolled moments, the indigenous actors on the scene changed their roles, sites, and accessories and temporarily merged with the gaze of the French crowd. The cover photo of L’Illustration’s special edition on the event depicted these blurred boundaries in the image of a distinguished French lady ­being passed by an Annamite indigène on a camel who was being guided by 270

a barefoot African guide (Pl. VI.4b); equally incongruous was the photo of rickshaw [pousse-pousse] drivers wearing cone hats, gentlemen wearing straw hats and suits, and militiamen at a tent site located in front of adobe structures from Afrique occidentale. These adobe-like structures were joined by the round Franco-Annamite restaurant and dominated by the crowning towers of Angkor Wat, which were visible in the misty background. The ‘high culture’ site of Angkor could be used to accentuate – as the guide 8 jours à l’Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille 1922 put it – the “civilising contrast to the barbaric and wild palais afri­ cain” (Régismanset 1922, 30) with its round mud, straw huts and grazing sheep (Fig. VI.15a). It was set in relation to the vernacular-traditional world of a Laotian ‘indigeneous village’ (Fig. VI.15b) or to the urban stage of the ani-

4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’

Figures VI.16a,b  Postcards of the grand palais de l’Indo-Chine of the 1922 Exhibition (Source: © Archives départmentales Bouches du Rhône)

mated, Vietnamese Rue d’Hanoi (Fig VI.15c). On the other side of the spectrum, the whole passageway towards Angkor Wat’s central massif was captured in an official press photograph at the moment when the president of the republic, Alexandre Millerand, visited the Marseille Exhibition on 7 May 1922. On that day ‘Angkor in Marseille’ was merged with the French-colonial métropole and virtually invaded by elegant French gentlemen in tailcoats and top hats or highly decorated military uniforms, and the stakeholders of the ‘original’ temple site were completely expulsed from the scene (Fig. VI.15d).46

For the general visitors to this public mass event, the major preselected captions of the Angkor Wat scenario were available in the form of souvenir postcards (compare with Marseille 1906), which could also be – using stamps depicting the whole range of French colonial exotic subjects (Pl. VI.5a,b) – sent around the world. Using these motifs as the base for a parcours through the finalised section of Indochina, the visitor who entered the central passageway was confronted with the great perspective towards Angkor Wat (Fig. VI.16a) via a small flight of stairs with flanking casts of lions and snake-headed balustrades. As a

46  Compare Fig. VI.13a in this chapter with the photo of Maréchal Joffre’s visit to the 1922 site. Compare

also Figure 1a in the Introduction where Maréchal Lyautey was photographed in front of the 1931 Paris version of Angkor Wat, as explained in chapter VII).

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.17  The entry pavilions of the Angkor Wat replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 11)

next stop, he came across the gate-like pavilions to the left and right of this pathway whose reflections in the nightly illuminated water basins referenced similar effects in the giant moats and water tanks at the ‘real site’ (Figs. VI.16b, 17, compare Figs. IX.17a,b; 33a; 68). Whereas Commaille’s on-site watercolours of Angkor Wat between 1900 and his death in 1916 were more picturesque (see Pl. IX.11a–f), Dela­ val documented ‘his’ Indochinese section in a series of watercolours with more useful indications (Pl. VI.6a,b): at a time when colour photography was not yet used systematically for documentary purposes at archaeological sites and the ancient chromaticity of the ‘real’ site of Angkor Wat was yet rarely investigated (compare Fournereau’s interpretation of 1889, Pl. III.13) Delavals’s colouring schemes of the reconstituted Marseille version of 1922 added a new ­aesthetic quality to the mutual translation history of the temple. Circumambulating the water pavilions (Figs. VI.18a,b) or even climbing the grand tour ascenseur of the neighbouring section of Afrique occidentale, the visitor could get an impression of the entire sculptural quality of this three-dimensional reconstitution of Angkor Wat with the quartier annamite on its rear side (Fig. VI.18c). He would perhaps have remarked that the most important differenc-

es from the ‘real’ site (Fig. VI.18d) were not only the central staircase constructed in a different, more comfortable gradient, and the lateral staircases, which were just staffagelike decor without any real function; from these views, the large lateral entries (with balconies above!) into the ground floor of the grand palais also became visible. Taking ‘the view from above’, the spectator certainly discovers the roofs over the originally open inner courts and the strangely incongruous rural and semi-industrial surrounding of Angkor Wat in Marseille’s suburban scenery. Finally, the visitor found himself in front of one of the most spectacular features of the replica, the central staircase (Pl. VI.7a) leading up to the main upper entry and topped by the same Krishna pediment motif that had come directly from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois in Paris (see Fig.III.36) and had already been used in Paris in 1889 and Marseille in 1906 (compare Figs. IV.9, 10b and V.18a, as discussed in Falser 2011, 2013g). Contributing to the rich fêtes-de-nuit programme of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition, this platform in front of the grand palais was used for spectacular events like the fête Cambodgienne (Pl. VI.7b, compare Pl. VI.7c) where – as part of the dramatic illumination of Angkor Wat47 – the reinvented danseuses cambodgiennes

47  In fact, the illumination project under the direction of the Paris firm La Maison Lançon et Cie. had been

prepared a great deal. It concerned the “electrical illumination of the bassins des galeries sur l’eau” and the “éclairage par projection” of the northern and eastern facades of the grand palais, for which – along with the projections towards all minor structures of the ensemble on a “circuit d’illuminations” – a complex canalisation system to run the electrification was installed. In the Devis des travaux d’électricité à exécuter pour le compte de l’Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille 1922 dating to 15 February 1922, Delaval explained the complex illumination system, for which the grand palais should consist of “the latest models of projectors with lamps of three thousand light bulbs [bougies], arranged in three groups of two projectors each” (ANOM AGEFOM 792/1793). On the éclairage, including a full plan of this project, see: ANOM AGEFOM 969/3313.

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4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’

Figures VI.18a—c  Postcards of the grand palais de l’Indo-Chine of the 1922 Exhibition in Marseille (Source: © Archives départmentales Bouches-du-Rhône)

Figure VI.18d  The central massif of Angkor Wat from above as photographed and published in the bilingual 1929 brochure The opening of aerial tourism in Indochina. From Saigon River to Angkor-Vat on a straight wing by Henry Bontoux (Source: Bontoux 1929, 10)

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VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.19 The danseuses cambodgiennes in front of the Angkor Wat replica of 1922 (Source: Journal officiel de l’Exposition coloniale, May 1922, 7)

(Fig. VI.19) were essentialised as “the direct descendants of the Apsaras from the bas-reliefs of Angkor [Wat]” (Artaud 1923, 207, see for the 1906 Marseille Exhibition on Pl. V.6 and 7; compare Falser 2013f). Standing in front the giant palais, the visitor could enter the exhibition parcours from the ground floor (Fig. VI.20) and walk through the cruci274

form galleries and the four adjacent square courts (both features quoted similar floor configurations at Angkor Wat). Through a combination of twenty-four dioramas depicting the pathways of all kinds of products he could encounter a full instruction on the agricultural, commercial, and industrial exploitation of the Indochinese colony (Fig.

4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’

Figure VI.20  The ground plan of the lower level of the 1922 palais de l’Indo-Chine (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

VI.21a). Subsequently, the visitor used the central spiral staircase to reach the upper floor, which, as a primary access, was also reached through the main outer staircase of the grand palais. On this main floor (compare Fig. VI.8), the visitor could walk through the peripheral connecting galleries fully painted à la Angkorienne (Fig. VI.21b, com-

pare Pl. VI.6b) or enter the four central galleries radiating from the central staircase over a cruciform layout (Artaud 1923, 177–83). After the exposition artistique indigène on past and present art production in Indochina, and the ex­ position administrative of the French colonial finance system, its army, geographical service, medical assistance, and 275

VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.21a  The ground plan furnishing of the lower level of the 1922 palais de l’Indo-Chine with a display of “Cochinchine: Plantation de Caoutchouc” (Source: Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 231)

Figure VI.21b  The open galleries of the 1922 palais de l’Indo-Chine (Source: © Archives municipales de Marseille)

public instruction, the last two galleries formed the apex of the whole parcours. In the exposition archéologique et expo­ sition d’art moderne français, the main focus was placed on the achievements of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Fig. VI.22a) (Gouvernement général de l’Indochine/EFEO 276

1922, 39–45). Around the glass cases of real and copied ancient artefacts from the musée Sarraut in Phnom Penh (inaugurated in 1920), publications, manuscripts, maps, rubbings from old inscriptions, and the series of previously mentioned photographs on the walls, the EFEO’s heroes

4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’

Figure VI.22a The salle de l’EFEO on the upper level of the Angkor Wat ­replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 85)

Figure VI.22b The hall with the portraits of the Gouverneurs généraux de l’Indo-Chine on the upper level of the Angkor Wat replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 84)

(they altruistically sacrificed their lives for the French ‘white man’s burden’ to explore, rediscover, classify and restore Indochina’s forgotten patrimoine culturel) were commemorated: besides the ethnographer Prosper Odend’hal (assassinated in 1904 in Laos) and the artist Charles Car­

peaux (son of the famous sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and assistant at Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois who died in 1904 from dysentery during a plaster cast campaign at Ang­ kor’s Bayon temple), Jean Commaille was also honoured for his role as the first General Conservator of Angkor. He 277

VI  Representing Angkor as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922

Figure VI.23a The salon historique (salle des ancêtres) on the upper level of the Angkor Wat replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: Commissariat général de l’exposition 1922a, 87)

Figure VI.23b The salon historique with the danseuses cambodgiennes (Source: Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille 1922b, 22)

was supposedly assassinated in Angkor Park in 1916 (compare Fig. IX.19). As a next step, the visitor would enter the exposition historique et rétrospective. Also termed the salle des ancêtres, it presented the history of French “civilising initiatives in the Far East [notre action civilisatrice en Extrême-Asie]” 278

(Guesde 1922, 98) from the first colonial impact to the recent creation of the Union Indochinoise. After passing portraits and busts of French missionaries, explorers, and politicians (Fig. VI.22b) as well as “grand decorative friezes depicting scenes like Fouqueray’s L’arrivée de la mission Doudart de Largée à Angkor (1866)” (Artaud 1923, 178,

4. The ‘interpenetration of the métropole and the colonies’

Commissariat général 1922b, 38)48, the visitor reached the endpoint of the journey: in the centre of the grand salon his­ torique, the Vietnamese-styled ‘altar of the ancestors’ [autel des ancêtres] was placed prominently in front of a full-scale plaster cast entry in the classical Angkor style (Fig. VI.23a). On the flanking panel to the left the tower silhouette of Ang­ kor Wat was depicted. As the ultra-colonial journal L’Asie française explained, the venerated ‘ancestors’ inside this temporary reconstitution of Angkor Wat were rather different from those at the ‘real’ Indochinese temple sites: However, the ancestors who are present in this room are certainly not the old inhabitants of the region; it concerns the principal agents of the French efforts in Indochina from the last centuries. Rightly, it was aimed at the visitor standing in front of the altar and intended to state the present status of our magnificent empire in the Far East, to evoke the memory of the pioneers of our influence in these countries, and to follow the stages of the different French interventions in the different regions of [our] Indochine orientale chronologically. [italics MF] (Froidevaux 1923, 5—6)

When in August 1922, Gaston Doumergue, senator and later President of the French Republic between 1924 until 1931, summarised his thoughts on the “Instruction of the Marseille Exhibition”, the transcultural interconnectedness of the French colonial self-appointed task to ‘salvage the real site of Angkor’ in the name of civilised humanity and

the ephemeral plaster cast reconstitution of Angkor Wat in Marseille was fully present: The temple of Angkor — which we have reproduced in the centre of this exhibition and which enlightens and adorns this exhibition by its noble and impressing beauty — is for those, like me, who saw it thirty years ago being invaded and almost devoured by a tropical vegetation whose roots had grown into all the joints and cracks of the temple’s walls, the real symbol of the achievements that we have realised in Indochina. Annam, Cochinchina, Tonkin, and Cambodia — we succeeded in reviving these countries, once brilliant but long since soiled civilisations. We brought them back into the flows of modern civilisation; we have uncovered them from lianas and from the devastating scrubs that suffocated them, as we have done it with the great temple of Angkor [Wat]. [italics MF] (Artaud 1923, 518)

Apart from the great rhetoric of a French mission civilisa­ trice carried out in the name of Angkor (compare Falser 2015c), different journals complained about the absence of a larger international or even French public at the event.49 In the meantime, the young dancers of the Khmer ballet used the offering tables placed in front of the secularised ‘altar of the ancestors’ – the ideological centrepiece of the French-colonial installation inside of Angkor Wat – as a place to stretch their tired legs before their next dance performance (Fig. VI.23b).

48  Unfortunately, this painting could not be identified in actual collections in France. According to André-­ Pallois, seven other oil paintings by Charles Fouqueray (1869–1956) were executed for the 1922 palais de l’Indochine with the following scenes: La fondation de Saigon; La victoire des Tay Son; La destruction du sceau symbolisant la vassalité de l’Annam sur la Chine; Inauguration du pont Doumer; Remise en état des ruines d’Angkor; Inauguration de l’Université de Hanoi; and Les Docks d’Haiphong (André-Pallois 1997, 107–9). However, the fact that some of the paintings were published in 1931 supports the hypothesis that they were more likely executed for the Paris International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (compare chapter VII and Figs. VII.33a,b; also Trillat 1931, 328). 49  J. Kessel in La Liberté on 19 August 1922 proclaimed under the title Une richesse gachée, faute de publicité. L’exposition coloniale est vide: “It seems that the colonial exhibition has turned into a kind of local garden, where lovers have their peaceful rendez-vous or locals have an aperitif. No foreigners! Not even Parisians! […] I am even ashamed in front of the sacred perspective of Angkor Wat.”

279

VII



Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

1. ‘Refusing the copy and the pastiche’? The 1925 Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris and the pavillon de l’Indochine Cette exposition doit être exclusivement d’Art moderne. Aucune copie ou pastiche des styles anciens n’y seraient admis. Une exposition en deux sections, l’une de style moderne, l’autre de styles anciens est absolument impossible. (Rapport 1911, 15) —Rapport sur une Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs modernes in Paris 1915 (1 June 1911)

By 1911 when the Société des artistes décorateurs presented tistes décorateurs in 1901, which held annual exhibitions their French Report for an International Exhibition on Mod- with the Union centrale des arts décoratifs. ern Decorative Arts in Paris for the year 1915, other nations In 1912 a new Paris exhibition was planned for 1916 but like Italy, Germany, and Austria had already organised sim- was delayed because of the First World War, the outcome ilar events. Just two years after the 1900 Universal Exhibition of which, as an ironic side effect, helped to popularise the in Paris (see chapter V), with its elaborate parcours through movement’s social crusade for simplicity and functionality. a wonderland of stucco palaces and exotic plaster cast pas- All this took place in a “period of transformation” where the tiches of the colonial world, the Turin Exposition of 1902 “influence of science [and] machinism [machinisme]” also had – as the 1911 report mentioned – accepted in their reg- encouraged “the search for direct solutions” in architecture, ulations only original artworks that made a strong contri- as Michel Roux-Spitz, the chief editor of the architectural bution to an “aesthetic renovation of the form”. Therefore, journal L’Architecture, put it in his 1928 publication on the exhibition (Roux-Spitz 1928, 9). both “imitations of old styles and industrial productions without any artistic inspiration were not admitted”. This A 1919 proposal for the opening year of 1922 (the year last phrase was used for the 1911 draft for a Paris exhibition of the Colonial Exhibition in Marseille, see chapter VI) was in 1915 (see original quotation above). This tendency clear- revised, and finally a decree in 1921 fixed 1925 as the year ly marked a counter-movement against the continuing tra- for the Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. dition in universal and colonial exhibitions that (a) created Its main protagonists were Fernand David, senator and fora dual representation of state-of-the-art and retrospective mer minister of commerce and agriculture, as Commissaire sections side by side, and (b) made reference to the style of général; Paul Léon, Directeur des beaux-arts (compare with the antique, exotic, and picturesque past. Together this was his role in the 1937 Exhibition), as David’s adjunct; Louis (c) a strategy used by the exhibitor as a form of cultural Bonnier as directeur des Services d’architecture, parcs et jarself-justification emphasising his own vital and continuing dins; and Charles Plumet as architecte en chef (Brunhammer history in contrast to the colonised countries’ nonexistent 1976, 10–18). In a clear reference to the above-mentioned or extinct history, and decadent presence. These points report from 1911 (quoting Turin 1902), §4 of the 1925 Exformed in fact the major reasons for the staging of Angkor hibition’s règlement admitted only “works of a new inspiraWat in French exhibitions since 1878. tion and real originality, executed and presented by artists, Raymond Koechlin’s 1925 article “L’Exposition des arts craftsmen, industrial creators of models, and editors, and décoratifs modernes: Les premiers efforts de rénovation belonging to decorative and modern industrial arts. Rigor(1885–1914)” in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts contextualised ously excluded [were] copies, imitations and reproductions the new renovation efforts. He identified the Universal Ex- of old styles (copies, imitations et contrefaçons des styles hibition of 1889 as the “first stage of modern art” where a ­anciens, compare introductory quote)”. The classification real “new art” had been presented. However, the “rigorous générale in five groups with thirty-seven classes placed ‘artechnological classement” not only hindered the apprecia- chitecture’ (Group I, with architect Auguste Perret in the tion of artistic and industrial design as one coherent entity, committee) at the top of the pyramid with Groups II to V turning these efforts, along with the 1900 Exhibition, into comprising furniture, decorative objects [parure], the arts a near flop [demi-échec] (Koechlin 1925, 254, 258–59). It of theatre, the street and the gardens, and public instrucalso helped encourage the founding of the Société des ar- tion. The Comité général d’admission was presided over by 281

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

François Carnot, the president of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, and was co-chaired by the architect Frantz Jourdan, president of the Société des Architectes modernes, and by G.-R. Sandoz the secretary-general of the Société d’encouragement à l’art et à l’industrie and former organiser of the Hanoi Exposition of 1902/3 (Ministère du commerce 1925, 18, 12–17, 27). When the president of the French Republic, Gaston Doumergue, inaugurated the 1925 Exhibition, Fernand Da­ vid was able to proudly present more than twenty nations with 120 entirely ephemeral pavilions and stands. These represented, as he pointed out in his own speech, “not only the materialisations of [new] ideas but the ideas themselves, [in the form of] entirely modern œuvres, excluding all kinds of pastiches” (Paris 1925 [1925], 32), or as Plumet and Bonnier, the architectural appointees, put it: “all the human efforts towards a reconciliation of beauty and industry” (Pa­ tout 1925, n.p.). The exhibition area covered twenty-three hectares (Fig. VII.1a). It stretched from the esplanade des Invalides (where the first Angkor pavilion materialised in 1889), with its main entrance located on the cours des Métiers, to the banks of the Seine River, and from the porte de la Concorde to the place de l’Alma. The reused Grand palais of the 1900 Universal Exhibition (adjusted to the new requirements by architect Letrosne) acted as a frame for the Porte d’honneur. Following Paul Vitry’s 1925 article “L’Exposition des arts décoratifs modernes: L’architecture” in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, this pavilion-oriented “cosmopolitan fair” tried to combine “utilitarism and [artistic] composition”; however, it lacked a sufficiently urbanist concept with which to develop a larger “harmonious ensemble” for the massive pavilions (Vitry 1925, 1, 3, 6, 10). Passing architectural highlights like Mallet-Stevens’s pavillon du Tourisme and Tony Garnier’s pavillon de Lyon-Saint Étienne on the French side and foreign or independent structures like Austria’s pavilion by Josef Hoffmann/Peter Behrens, Belgium’s pavilion by Victor Horta, Denmark’s pavilion by Kay Fisker, Le Corbusier/Pierre Jeanneret’s pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Fig. VII.1b), and Melnikov’s pavillon de l’Union des Républiques socialistes soviétiques, the visitor entered through the porte Victor-Emmanuel III into a more picturesque section. Here, the boundaries between the past and the present on the one side, and the new, the copied, and the pastiche, on the other, became more fluid. Between the Grand palais and the Seine River and along the cours Albert 1er street to the place de l’Alma, a strange combination of pavilion architecture was presented: passing the structures representing the art and architecture of Alsace, the visitor entered the Village français, which contained a bakery, a tavern, a cemetery with a chapel, houses in the style of the French provinces like the pavillon Breton, boutiques, etc. All was arranged in a hybrid, regionalist, and half-modern architectural language developed by the groupe des Architectes modernes under Charles Genuys, the inspecteur des Monuments historiques (Fig. VII.1c). The Guide pratique du visi282

teur not only introduced the “French village” as an “alliance of provincial traditions with modern tendencies”. It also identified the raison d’être of the subsequent section coloniale as “an exoticism that was emerging in all levels of society since the facilities of communication had pushed back the limits of individual travel and had let enter the local characteristics [la couleur locale] and the unexpected customs and costumes of our [also French colonial, MF] unified provinces” (Guide pratique 1925, 238–39). This aesthetically similar representation of a kind of picturesque regionalism of metropolitan France and the exotic approach for the French colonies became manifest in this 1925 section. It would reach its climax in France’s (last) International Exhibition in 1937 (see chapter VIII) when the Centre régional not only furthered France’s self-exoticising gaze onto its own architectural past and traditional cultural heritage. It was also placed right next to the Centre colonial where Angkor was staged, in a small pavilion and for the last time on the continent before the end of the European colonial project. In the 7 November 1925 issue of Les annales coloniales: Journal quotidien, a special dossier was consecrated to “The colonies in the 1925 Exhibition”, which were (like Marseille in 1922) under Pierre Guesde’s direction as délégué général. In this paper, Henri Gourdon, directeur téchnique of the section, was quoted on the title page evoking the (however hierarchising) “reciprocity of the French artistes and the indigenous artisans”. Here, the “indigenous arts” were considered not “simple echoes of the past and a reminiscence of an old and forgotten art” or mere “models for the French modern artists”, but were praised as veritable “indications of unknown techniques and inspirations of new forms” (Les annales coloniales 1925, 1). In this context, the exhibition’s explicit interdiction against copying traditional decoration patterns was not respected. Here, the French propaganda of colonial patronage (rooted in the term patrimoine) only functioned with explicit references to the colonies’ past in traditional craftsmanship and not to its modern presence by innovative artists. Facing a pavillon colonial, created by the architects Jules Josse and Charles Blanche, the pavilion of Afrique-occidentale française by the architect Germain Olivier was consequently conceived not in modern forms (this is especially clear when one compares the structure to Le Corbusier’s pavilion located some hundred metres up the Seine River), but on the basis of an existing royal building in Dahomey. An elevation drawing from 1 March 1924 proves that the pavillon de l’Asie française – Indo-Chine, referred to as a “féerie exotique” in the above-mentioned journal, had been designed in Hanoi by Auguste Delaval while on a three-year stay in Indochina (Fig. VII.1d); the execution of the pavilion in Paris was supervised by the architect Charles Blanche (the postcard mentions André Joyeux, inspecteur des Écoles d’Art de l’Indo-chine, as executing director). When the Indochinese pavilion was finally inaugurated on 15 May 1925 by André Hesse, the acting ministre des Colonies, the exterior was a

1. ‘Refusing the copy and the pastiche’?

Figures VII.1a—d  The 1925 Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris: Vue générale, the Pavillon de l’Esprit nouveau by Le Corbusier/Jeanneret, the Village français by Genuys/Dervaux, and the Pavillon de l’Asie française by Auguste Delaval (Source: a,d Personal archive Michael Falser; b,c Roux-Spitz 1928, plates 62 and 67)

precise quotation of Annamite pavilion architecture. Cambodia was only represented with a collection of artworks from George Groslier’s art school in Phnom Penh under the director Silice. These and other exhibits were organised in and around an interior court, which was, as a guidebook explained, a stylised quotation of a “Mandarin house of Hué” (Guide pratique 1925, 277). Despite the 1925 Exhibition’s claim of artistic originality without historic references, architectural plagiarism, direct copying, and even stylistic reuses occurred often and primarily concerned the Indochinese section. Ironically, while Delaval was pursuing a court case about whether Charles Blanche, his executing architect for the 1925 Exhibition, had stolen his 1922 Marseille Angkor Wat design for

the future replica at the Paris Colonial Exhibition (originally planned for 1925 and postponed to 1931), 1 he had himself reused his own (and durable) temple du souvenir Annamite for the Botanical Garden in Saigon (Guilchet 2011, 90–93) as a template for the ephemeral 1925 pavillon de l’Indo-Chine in Paris. Additionally, Delaval’s 1925 pavilion was also reused in the 1931 Exhibition as the seat of the administration and placed next to the largest Angkor Wat replica – most probably the largest Asian building ever rebuilt on the European continent under the direction of Charles Blanche. To sum up, the 1925 Exhibition’s motto of ‘Refusing the copy and the pastiche’ became fluid when representing the French colonies in general and Indochina in particular.

1  A letter dated to 8 April 1925 from Baschet of the journal L’Illustration to Blanche mentions this problem:

Baschet refused to publish an illustration of the 1925 pavilion under his name because the journal had already been fined in courts after having published Blanche’s plagiarism of Deleval’s Angkor Wat design in an earlier issue. See: ANOM AGEFOM 945/3090.

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2. Angkor Wat as a permanent colonial museum in Paris? Discussions around 1927 It is not just a useless archaeological or technical discussion. […] one can simply not take for an exact reconstitution, for a faithful replica [une reconstruction exacte, une réplique fidèle] the forgery [contrefaçon] of a Khmer temple on which a Loire castle staircase is attached for better access, or into which one simply drills openings for windows into the plain basement surface.2 [italics MF] —Pierre Pasquier to Alexandre Varenne, Hanoi 8 January 1927 That it would be a crazy idea to reconstitute an ancient monument, to rebuild it as a ruin, is not my personal opinion: if the architects had always stopped at such an objection, then a good third of all European monuments would undoubtedly not exist; if the whole world had found it inadmissible to utilise a temple for other purposes than for the cult of divinities for which it had been built, then a majority of parliamentary, financial, and religious buildings in Europe wouldn’t have been constructed in respect to the Pantheon of Agrippa and the Parthenon they reproduced. 3 [italics MF] —Pierre Guesde to Varenne, 17 March 1927

In the context of the 1922 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille, the heavy competition with Paris dated back to around 1912 when Louis Brunet, député de la Seine, also proposed a similar colonial exhibition for Paris in combination with the installation of a musée permanent des Colonies. When Marseille’s ‘national’ event was planned for 1916 (later postponed to 1920 and then to 1922), an Exposition coloniale interalliée with an explicit international character was planned for Paris in 1920 (later postponed to 1925 and then to 1928) and finally realised in 1931 (Olivier 1932, I, 1–216) – six years after the British Empire Exhibition was held in Wembley (1924/5) and only one year after the Belgium Colonial Exhibition in Antwerp/Liège. As Senator Charles Deloncle emphasised in a 1926 report for the French Senate (and this kind of argumentation continued until the official event publications in 1931 and afterward), “Colonial exhibitions [in general] had an undeniable influence on the development of the economic relations between France and its possessions of outre-mer.” But even if the public had appreciated after World War I “how much the heroism of the sons of la plus grande France had attributed to the victory of the mère patrie”, this explicitly “international” exhibition was intended to help to overcome public doubts about the utility and necessity of the “methodical and rational exploitation of the colonies’ richness”. Thus, the planned exhibition was to be “an inventory of the fortune of our [French, MF] colonies […], as a living instruction [enseignement vivant], a demonstration” (Deconcle 1926, 3,4).

An undated twenty-page typescript within the internal documents for the Paris Exhibition, entitled Notes sur l’Exposition coloniale, brought the reader to the exhibition site as a “city of dreams and exoticism” and asked “Why this exhibition?” This was building on a concept of the empire that the French World War I and colonial war hero General Charles Mangin (who also fought for Lyautey in Morocco) emphasised in the following speech: “Frenchman, your frontiers are not the ones of the small pentagone on which you looked as a schoolchild; [today] the frontiers of your empire are at the end of this world.” The text developed further what Deloncle had already formulated (see above) and what Lyautey would later cite in a more diplomatic manner (see further on in this chapter): It is this imperial notion that the exhibition wants to develop in our youth. This notion that the English cope with so well, which the Germans had cultivated between 1900 and 1914, and which Italian fascism has already generated in the profound masses of the people. And this is as well what has made this exhibition necessarily ‘international’ so that the example of our neighbours overexcites our indolence.4

In 1920 when a Commission interministérielle préparatoire for the event was constituted, Albert Sarraut (at this time minister of the colonies) nominated Gabriel Angoulvant, Gouverneur générale de l’Afrique Équatoriale, to serve as the Commissaire général for the exhibition. Angoulvant later

2  Rapport de P. Pasquier à GGI Varenne, Hanoi, 8 January 1927, see: ANOM INDO GGI 66711. 3  Pierre Guesde, commissaire général de l’Indochine à l’Exposition coloniale à Alexandre Varenne, gouverneur

général de l’Indochine, 17 March 1927, see: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25. 4  Notes sur l’exposition coloniale (undated, unsigned, twenty-page typescript), see: ANOM ECI 14.

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2. Angkor Wat as a permanent colonial museum in Paris? Discussions around 1927

Figure VII.2  The draft plan of the area for the International Colonial Exhibition 1927 (1931) in Paris (Source: La Dépêche coloniale, 11 March 1923)

renounced his duties after his election as député de l’Inde française in 1924. In addition to the classical urban setting between the Trocadero palace, the Champs-de-Mars, the quai de la Seine, and the esplanade des Invalides, more natural settings were discussed for the exhibition, which had already assigned Léon Jaussely as its architecte en chef. The bois de Boulogne, the immense park to the west of Paris, was ranked second after the favoured bois de Vincennes to the east of the city, and La dépêche coloniale of 1923 published a first sketch plan of the terrain around the lac Daumesnil to the south of the fortified Vincennes castle (Fig. VII.2). What Marcel Olivier, Gouverneur général de Madagascar and the later Délégué général à l’Exposition coloniale internationale of 1931, termed “the decisive year 1927” (Oli­ vier 1932, I, 77–118) involved the complete reorganisation of the undertaking, including the nomination of Maréchal Lyautey as Commissaire général. This was crucial to the idea of reconstituting Angkor Wat as the exhibition’s overall clou. Pierre Guesde, Résident supérieur honoraire en Indochine and planner of the Indochinese sections of the 1922

and 1925 Exhibitions, had already been re-nominated commissaire for the same task in January 1921. In a four-page report from 30 April 1926 to Alexandre Varenne, the Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, Guesde explained his idea for a “reconstitution fidèle” of the “central massif of Angkor Wat” which (a) combined “noblesse”, “mass and monumentality”, and “power and richness”; (b) depicted both cultural antiquity and the character of an emerging “grand modern state” (of Indochina); (c) was to be seen from its exterior and “reproduced as an exact document in its exact proportions without additions, adaptations, and interpretation (like in Marseille 1922)” and equipped with three inner levels of a showroom parcours in “a very modern conception”; and was (d) therefore suitable – and this was a new twist in the European career of this Khmer temple – to be built “in a durable manner to become, after the exhibition, the Permanent Museum of the French Colonies”.5 This issue was hotly debated in metropolitan Paris and colonial Hanoi up to the end of 1926. As a report written by Pierre Pasquier (at this time the Gouverneur géneral de l’Indochine per in-

5  Rapport à Monsieur le Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, 30 April 1926 (no name and place), see: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

terim) to Varenne on 8 January 1927 reconfirmed, Guesde’s idea of Angkor Wat as a permanent palace and a “grand musée colonial de la métropole” would clash with the temple’s (previous) “function of impressing the crowds as a fancy and exotic ensemble” and its obvious “caducity as an ephemeral palais in carton-pâte”. In fact, “serious objections from the aesthetic and the practical side” led him to the conclusion that “an exact and sincere reproduction of the temple of Angkor Wat [for a permanent museum, MF] was definitely unfeasible [assurément irréalisable]”.6 However, the most astonishing detail in this discussion was Pasquier’s citation of Louis Finot, the director of the institution that had the largest interest in a proper aesthetic appreciation, exact presentation, and adequate public propagation of Indochina’s most spectacular archaeological heritage – the École française d’Extrême-Orient (see this institution’s role at Angkor in chapter IX). In a letter written on 14 July 1926, Finot explored the arguments against a permanent Angkor Wat building for Paris, which were roughly grouped into three points (Finot 1926) detailing, from a general viewpoint, the major implications of an architectural ‘translation’ of the real Cambodian site for a temporary exhibition space in Paris: (a) the essentialisation of the main architectural features, (b) the highly hypothetical representation, and (c) the temple’s social (religious) and aesthetic decontextualisation. As far as the first point was concerned, the “arbitrarily limited reconstitution would give a false idea about this grand Khmer temple” since the Paris project exclusively used (like in Marseille in 1922) Angkor Wat’s central massif. In reality this feature was “logistically” embedded into a much larger spatial building programme containing galleries and enclosures. Additionally, the embedding of Angkor Wat into a Paris exhibition would “eliminate the temple’s impression of solidity and structural compactness” and therefore “its spirit [esprit] as the most impressive example of Khmer architecture”. Second, the picture-perfect and complete reconstitution in Paris would be based on uncertain “hypotheses” since many features at the real site (such as the pinnacles) “were in ruins and no documents were yet available about their original forms” (compare with the correspondence of Commaille and Delaval in 1915, as discussed in the previous chapter). Additionally, the ‘real site’ was “located in a tropical climate so different from Europe” and, in Finot’s opinion, the “Khmer architects had been pure artists but poor builders [purs artistes, mais de mauvais constructeurs] using incor-

rect buildings techniques, the faithful reconstitution of which [in Paris] would therefore be both difficult and dangerous”. Third, real “Angkor Wat was consecrated to a divinity”, had “never been accessible to such a large number of [secular, MF] visitors”, and was originally approached via several introductory features (the central pathway, the enclosures, and galleries) that provided a kind of private and individual “initiation for the single pilgrim”. This function would be lost in Paris, and a mere “replica of Angkor Wat’s central massif would have little documentary value”, since it abolished the “mysterious appearance of this religious building” under pure “functional aspects”. Following Finot’s line of argumentation, Pasquier ­labelled the Angkor Wat project for Paris a “counterfeit wherein a Loire castle staircase was simply attached to a Khmer temple” (see quotation above). He voted, clearly referring to the rhetoric of artistic originality as was used for the 1925 Exhibition, for the construction of a permanent colonial museum in “French type and style, as an original conception without any tracing or disfiguration of architectural motifs from palaces, temples, or pagodas from Indochina, executed by the best French architects, expressing the French colonial ideology”.7 Just a week later, on 14 January 1927, a long article entitled “L’Exposition coloniale de 1929” was published in the journal France Indochine. Pondering the replica of Angkor Wat as a permanent colonial museum, the author under the acronym “C.M.” concluded: Do we really have to throw our money out of the window? Do we really have to devote ourselves to so-called ‘artistic’ reconstitutions that would be nothing more than bad pastiches, without any originality and artistic pretence? Would one have, for example, the idea for the Chicago Exhibition [of 1893, MF] to rebuild the church Nôtre-Dame de Paris under the pretext of building the French pavilion? […] we want to modernise the methods of the exhibition, bring a bit more practical sense into the organisation of the [colonies’] participation. A [colonial] exhibition is not the reconstitution of the past. It has to be a lesson of general awareness, instruction [vulgarisation] and publicity.8 [italics MF]

A few weeks later in a letter to Varenne from 17 March 1927, Pierre Guesde complained about this article and thought to identify Victor Tardieu, the director of the École des BeauxArts in Hanoi (founded in 1925), as its author because Tardieu had used a supposedly similar word choice when

6  Rapport de P. Pasquier à GGI Varenne, Hanoi, 8 January 1927, see: ANOM INDO GGI 66711. 7  Interestingly, an unsigned report from 1 December 1926 to Varenne mentions the palais central in the form

of Angkor Wat, disclosing that the responsible architect, Charles Blanche, was already planning in “light materials” with three inner levels, despite the fact that “the minister of the colonies had decided that the palais de l’Afrique du Nord would be built “en dur” to serve a musée des Colonies françaises after the 1931 Exhibition. See: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25. 8  “C.M.: L’Exposition coloniale de 1929”. In: France Indochine, 14 January 1927, paper clipping from: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25.

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

making contact with Joseph Trillat, Guesde’s adjunct during the Paris Exhibition. Guesde defended the desire to “reconstitute old monuments and to rebuild ruins”, using as his examples Rome’s Pantheon and Athens’s Parthenon, which had served as models for many other European buildings in Europe with different (parliamentary or financial) functions (compare original quotation above). And he underscored the influence of public taste and the mass media press, which had appreciated these supposedly “mauvaises pastiches”.9 Correspondence proves that Charles and Gabriel Blanche (father and son), the architects responsible for the Angkor Wat replica, had finalised “a 1:2000 sketch plan of the whole Indochinese section and a definitive series of seven plans of the palais [Temple d’Angkor]” by mid-July 1927 and had sent them to Hanoi for approval.10 Two early site plans by Blanche also fall under this period of discussion. The first plan (Fig. VII.3) showed – and Garnier’s 1873 and Fournereau’s 1889/90 site plans certainly served again as a reference (compare Figs. I.4b and VI.9) – the central massif of Angkor Wat as the palais du Gouvernement général framed in a correct spatial relationship by what at the real spot would have been the second inner enclosure. Like Delaval’s 1922 plan, the original ‘cruciform gallery’ with its multiform, gate-like, and intimate, view-­ blocking design as well as the flanking ‘libraries’ had been omitted, and the central passageway brought the visitor directly to the main entrance with a less steep central staircase (compare Figs. VI.18c, 19). In a very Beaux-Arts-like gesture in relation to Angkor Wat’s ‘architectural affordance quality’ (see introduction), Blanche garnished the central passageway, which started directly at the lac Daumesnil, with two parallel ensembles containing round focal points for the Indochinese provinces of Tonkin and Annam. In front of the central massif, the central passageway was enlarged to form a rectangular platform, which was itself crossed almost perpendicularly by an axis called the “axe

de la pelouse”. Whereas the general composition around the central structure and the long entrance with crossing pathways was kept in the second plan (Pl. VII.1), the overly formalistic positioning of the overall design was abandoned in favour of a more loose arrangement in the accompanying pavilions and thematic sections. In 1927 Guesde also published the Programme général de la section indochinoise for the Exposition coloniale internationale in 1929. Referring to his 1926 report (see above), he explained the “exposition synthétique” inside the “palais central de la Colonie” where all provinces of Indochina would be represented in three sections: (a) economy, (b) sciences, letters and arts, and (c) history, geography, ethnography, political organisation, administration (Guesde 1927, 1, 2). The art section comprised of French art and a retrospective of (modern) indigenous art, whereas the ethnographic part focused on “secondary races of the colony” with, for example, “the group of half-civilised populations from Cambodia [including] models of habitations, tombs, and life-size reproductions of indigenous human types”. As “the most important part of the science section, the archaeological and linguistic exhibition was organised by the École française d’Extrême-Orient, [besides the smaller] exhibitions of the Société des Études Indochinoises, the Société des Amis du Vieux Hué, and the Société des Amis d’Angkor” (Guesde 1927, 10–12). Comparable to the scenario at the 1922 Exhibition in Marseille, the religious pilgrim to the real site of Angkor (keeping Finot’s critique in mind) had been replaced by French and foreign visitors approaching Angkor Wat’s picture-perfect stage and ultimately full-scale replica in Paris to worship in the inner core of this ephemeral re-presentation. The difference was that it was not the Hindu or Buddhist deities that they were paying deference to, but instead the French mission civilisatrice in general and the EFEO’s archaeological mission to preserve French Indochina’s cultural heritage in particular.

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism In a neutralising space for the “picturesque installations of colonial productions depicting certain aspects of indigenous life”, according to Olivier (Olivier 1932, I, 38), the temporary stage setting of the 1931 Exhibition was situated within a safe, manageable, and controllable distance from the city centre of Paris in a working-class banlieue. This was an interesting choice at a time when the French colonial ideology was in full decline and, as we shall discuss later, was an object of heavy political dispute amongst ris-

ing socialist and communist voices. Even more than had been the case for the National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1922, the grounds of the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris in 1931 formed a peripheral island for controlled public deviation within a strictly confined theme park atmosphere, all in the sense of a Foucauldian heterotopia (see introduction to this book). However, this temporary staging an ‘enacted utopia’ (called colonialism) was infrastructurally well-connected with the city centre by

9  Guesde to Varenne on 17 March 1927, see: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25. 10  Guesde to the technical director Gourdon, 2 June 1927; see: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25.

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.3  The draft plan of the Indochinese section for the 1931 Exhibition in Paris by ‘Blance architects’ – compare Delaval’s plan of the Angkor Wat replica for the 1922 Marseille Exhibition (Fig. VI.8). (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.4  The public transportation map of Paris with the new stations for the 1931 ­Exhibition in the lower right corner (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, ­Aix-en-Provence)

two newly installed stops of the metro line (Fig. VII.4). The grande avenue des Colonies françaises to the southwest last three years before the opening of the exhibition – Oli­ and -east of the Daumesnil lake, with Indochina by far the vier called them “la période d’action” (Olivier 1932, I, 121– dominating element along a perpendicular passageway 34) – were introduced by the 1928 decree to hold the exhi- from lac Daumesnil. Finally, the programme included (c) bition in the year 1931, by an administrative reorganisation the participation des Puissances étrangères, which were of the conseil supérieur de l’Exposition, and by the formula- spread around the lake and included the most dominant ensembles of Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, the United tion, under the guidance of Maréchal Lyautey, of thematic sections, which dominated the ninety-three-hectare exhi- States, and Portugal. Other colonial powers were absent; bition grounds under the new architecte en chef de l’exposi- Great Britain renounced its place at the exhibition for potion, Albert Tournaire (Pl. VII.2). These thematic sections litical but primarily financial reasons after its own great included (a) the section métropolitaine on exported prod- Wembley Exhibition of 1924/5. The military dictatorship in ucts and know-how, including a section rétrospective Spain did not participate before becoming a republic in française on French colonial history with the musée perma- 1931 and neither did Japan, which had become a serious nent des Colonies, two palais to the northwest and -east, colonial rival to France with its rising influence in Siam and the cité internationale des Informations coloniales to the and China pursued under the slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’11. west, serving as an economical documentation centre of The règlement général listed three thematical groups: (a) colonial affairs and applied methods. Further the sections “the agricultural, industrial, and artistic products from Alcomprised (b) of the section coloniale (section synthèse) of geria, the French colonies, protectorates, and mandated the Ministry of the Colonies with all French colonial instal- territories documenting the physical, moral, intellectual lations and pavilions, situated primarily along the extended and social development of the indigenes”; (b) the products 11  Compare Japan’s temporary occupation around 1945 of Indochina in general, and of Cambodia and Ang­

kor in particular, as discussed in chapter IX.

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that France exports to the colonies; (c) the products from foreign colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories or similar types (Olivier 1932, I, 225–43, here 226). Building on the classification of the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, the classification générale of 1931 comprised of eighteen groups with 122 classes (Olivier 1932, I, 247–80). In total, the programme covered virtually all themes, including colonial politics, instruction, and art; maritime affairs; agriculture, extraction, and chemical industries; decoration, textiles, and clothing; social and hygienic issues; and sports, tourism, and defence. The most important groups and classes in the context of this book were: Group I (Politique coloniale) with Class 1 (origins and history of colonisation, exploratory missions, etc.), Group IIb (Œuvres d’art d’inspiration coloniale ou destinées aux colonies) with Class 10 (architecture, drawings, photographs, and working models; restoration from ruins or documents [restauration d’après les ruines ou les documents]), Group XII (décoration et mobilier des édifices publics et des habitations aux colonies) with Class 66 (immobile decoration of public buildings and habitations), and Group XVId (Tourisme coloniale) with Classes 114 and 115A/B comprising all aspects of touristic propaganda material, the mise en valeur of touristic resources in the colonies (with the Angkor Park as the fastest developing asset on the Indochinese scene), and related tourism industries, such as hotels and travel guides. Volume 5.2 in Olivier’s Rapport général on Les sections coloniales françaises presented a general introduction to L’Indochine française, which had been drafted by Guesde himself in an unpublished typescript of 120 pages alone (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 631–752; compare Guesde n.d.). The pre­ face stated that “Indochina [with its 700,000 kilometres, 20 million inhabitants, and 7 billion francs of external commerce] had, by the extent of the majesty and picturesqueness of its palais and pavilions, the variety of documents and exhibited products, and the number of its indigenous collaborators, obtained its place in the grand colonial manifestation of Vincennes in relation to its considerable role within the French colonial empire”. In fact, the most important installation of the whole exhibition, stretching “from the lakefront [Daumesnil] to the domes of Angkor”, was celebrated as an “imperishable souvenir” (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 631, 633). As the report mentioned, the Commissariat général had expressed the wish to have in Paris a pavilion equivalent to the clou at the Marseille Exhibition [of 1922] in the reconstitution of the central massif of Angkor Wat and had therefore contributed 1 million francs as subvention. Along with Pierre Guesde, the designated Commissaire général, by a decree of 1921 the three Commissaires adjoints de Montoye, Eckert (also Délégué général de l’Indo-

chine), and Gautier were also nominated. The personnel of the local committee of Cambodia were formed with Poiret, administrateur des Services civils, and Surleau, ingénieur des Travaux publics de l’Indochine. George Groslier, directeur des Arts cambodgiens at Phnom Penh, was nominated Délégué artistique, along with the Cambodian, Sum Hieng. In the section générale, Tardieu and Groslier were responsible for the section des Arts indigènes (compare Groslier’s role in the 1937 Paris Exhibition, chapter VIII). Other colleagues participated, including Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard, the already mentioned negotiator of the 1907 retrocession of Angkor (see above) who worked for the section militaire, and Victor Goloubew of the EFEO, who planned (as in Marseille in 1922) the section archéologique. The following museums in Paris were mentioned as major contributors to the exhibition: muséum d’Histoire naturelle, service géographique de l’Armée, musée Guimet, musée Ethnographique, and Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois du Troca­ déro (the latter was in the process of closure after Dela­ porte’s death in 1925) (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 661–65). Charles Blanche was, with the help of his son Gabriel Blanche (both ‘state-graduated architects’, called D.P.L.G.), entrusted with the architectural ensemble of Indochina. On a total terrain of 7 hectares for the Indochina section, 11,450 square metres had been covered with buildings, 13,800 square metres by artificial earthworks and avenues, and 16,200 square metres by lawns and gardens (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 631, 686). The adjudications called out 12 million francs for the grand palais de l’Indochine in the form of Angkor Wat alone, 9 million francs for the other structures, and totalled 21 million francs with a supplément of almost 2 million francs; the total costs of the Colonial Exhibition were precalculated with 44 million francs [prévisions]; at the end, 32.7 million francs had been finally spent [dépenses liquidées], with only 1.6 million worth of incoming receipts [recettes] (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 674–79, 747–48). As a sketched bird’s-eye view of the 1931 Exhibition reveals, the reconstituted Angkor Wat now stood at the end of a long Khmerstyle passageway flanked with the following installations12 between the lake and Angkor Wat (Pl. VII.3a–c): Laos (Charles Batteur of the EFEO and Serleau), Indochinese restaurant (Blanche), Presse coloniale (Blanche), Commissariat (Delaval, pavilion of the 1925 Exhibition), Tonkin and Cochinchine (Paul Sabrié, architecte des Bâtiments civils de l’Indochine), diorama (Blanche), Annam (de Saint-Nicolas and Chaste as architects of the EFEO), Cambodge (George Groslier), Grand palais, chaussée dallée and transformateurs (Blanche). Although a sketched perspective of the new Paris version of Angkor Wat was published officially only in May

12  Olivier (Guesde) listed all sixteen structures of the Indochinese section: the grand palais de l’Indochine;

the pavillons of the forester, of the press, of Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, and of the administrative staff; the logements for the militiamen, the dancers, and the indigenous people; a great d ­ iorama, an Indochinese restaurant, the Bayon tower-style transformers, and the construction of the grande chaussée dallée (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 674).

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1930 in the important architectural journal La construction moderne (Fig. VII.5), the Blanche father and son had ­already circulated similar presentations in the previous years of discussion. In relation to Delaval’s perspective from 1922 (compare Fig. VI.5a), the composition was now more accurate in detail but highly dramatised with a gradually increasing path towards the more pronounced socle of the central massif, which was, as Finot had remarked in his 1926 critique, originally not visible to the religious pilgrim approaching the inner sanctuary at the ‘real temple’. A watercolour by the architects (Pl. VII.4) placed their reconstitution into the attractive setting of late afternoon southern sun and lines of clouds that emphasised the perspective. At the same moment of publication, the ‘real site’, depicted in a comparable black/white photograph within the fundamental 1929 publication Le temple d’Angkor Vat: L’architecture by the EFEO, seemed to be a pale and even boring variation of the Paris project (Fig. VII.6). However, it was this 1929 monograph on Angkor Wat in which Finot had published his thirty-page introduction to the temple and praised it as a “universal celebrity with an ever-growing number of visitors”, a “major pilgrimage site”, and even as a “national sanctuary” (Finot 1929, 5, 15, 17). These terms fit perfectly into the colonial transcription process of the temple from a religious site in situ into a kind of temporary para-religious pilgrimage site where the French citoyen could venerate the achievements of the French mission civi­ lisatrice in Paris of 1931. Together with the EFEO’s second 1930 volume, Le temple d’Angkor Vat: La sculpture ornementale du temple (a third volume, La galérie des bas-relief, was added in 1932), all possible viewpoints on the temple – from large perspectives to the most detailed sculptural surfaces – had been photographed and published in several hundreds of plates; these almost certainly served Blanche’s planning for the Paris project. As a result, the propagated photographs of his 1931 reconstitution, which were published in the professional journal La construction moderne and the popular journal L’Illustration (see below), could in some cases even create a heterotopian confusion between two separate but somehow temporarily connected twin sites called ‘Ang­kor Wat’ (compare Foucault in our introduction). Charles Blanche’s preliminary eight-page Rapport technique sur la section de l’Indochine, aménagement du plan d’ensemble, construction du palais d’Angkor et des pavillons de la section most probably dated from mid-1928 (Blanche 1928a). He mentioned that in an earlier exhibition concept from the 1920s by the overall planning architect Jaussely, the “temple of Angkor Wat” had been positioned opposite the porte de Reuilly to the southwest of the park where in the final layout plan the grande avenue des Colonies fran­ çaises would begin. Moving the Angkor complex to the southern centre of this great west-east axis turned the temple’s own central passageway almost perpendicular to the ‘colonial avenue’ and widened the longitudinal character of the latter into an almost membrane-like trapezoid intersecting arrangement. As Blanche continued, “Neither any

construction outside of the bois de Vincennes nor any neigh­ bouring pavilion structures inside the exhibition grounds should obstruct the general silhouette of the monument; rather they should underline, frame, and expose its perspective [to form, MF] a coherent unity [of the Indochinese section] in decoration and scale.” The Paris Angkor and the ‘real site’ of Angkor entered once more, and this time to an extent larger than ever before, into a transcultural relationship of similar (or totally opposing) expectations and requirements. Seen from the lake in Paris, the ‘colonial avenue’ should be invisible, and the vista be enhanced with the trimmed vegetation of existing trees, the planting of new palm trees (compare Pl. VII.14 with Fig. IX.22a), and the forbidding of commercial stalls. Exactly the same strategies were being used to bring the ‘real site’ of Angkor Wat into a picture-perfect state for the fast-growing tourist industry of the 1920s and 1930s: the existing Buddhist monastery structures in front of the temple silhouette had already been cleared and relocated, the vegetation cut, picturesque palm trees planted around artificially remade water tanks in order to mirror, to this day, the towers of Angkor Wat in their lotus-overgrown surface (compare Falser 2013d). Additionally, all souvenir sellers were banned from the great perspective at both sites. In his circa 1928 report, Blanche pondered the three possible construction materials that could be used to realise ‘his’ Angkor Wat in Paris: “iron, reinforced concrete, or wood, [the last option] being more fraught with the risk of fire but half as expensive, faster to be built and cleaned up.” And whereas on the ‘real site’ all possible high-tech conservation techniques were (and still are) developed, tested, and applied to rebuild, restore, and preserve the site for future generations, the replicated structure in Paris was executed with diametrically opposed intentions. As Blanche noted, “It has to be remarked that it should be possible to demolish the Temple of Angkor entirely in few weeks only.” Furthermore, Blanche’s “water tightness” [étanchéité] was in fact a crucial point at both sites: whereas the site in Ang­ kor suffered from heavy tropical rain infiltrating the lacunae of the massive stone layers without mortar, the exotic pavilions in Paris suffered because of their ephemeral structure of wood-and-plaster [staff]. At the same time, when Blanche recommended simple foundations of reinforced concrete for the wooden scaffolding above the temporary palais d’Angkor, the imported technique of anastylosis at ‘Angkor proper’ comprised of a reassembling of dissembled stone and brick temples on top of (similar to Paris) newly erected foundations in “beton” or “ciment armée” (for the discussion on anastylosis, see chapter IX). The “inner exposure to natural light” [éclairage] did not pose a problem for the solid structure in Cambodia, whereas the inner three levels of the Paris replica necessitated newly developed translucent glass bricks to be placed on flattened cupolas above all four court roofs which did not exist at all in the open courts in Cambodia. However, a “system of illu291

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.5  Elevation perspective for the planned Angkor Wat replica in Paris by architect Blanche in 1930 (Source: La construction moderne, 25 May 1930, plate 135)

Figure VII.6  Angkor Wat in Cambodia as photographed for the Angkor Wat monograph of 1929 (Source: Finot 1929, 56)

mination” for the temples’ passageways and high-rising towers with hidden large projectors was indeed discussed at both sites – an exhibition site in the West and an archaeological park in the East – at the same moment in time. As a result, the same techniques were employed through the medium of light to produce the same effect at both ends of the planet – namely, their mise en valuer and iconisation as patrimoine culturel for a primarily Occidental gaze. 292

In October 1928 Charles Blanche produced the drafts for the bidding documents [devis descriptifs des travaux] for the first two charges [lots]: the first was for the general construction of the building, the second was for its decoration. For “Lot 1 – concerning the supporting construction [ossature], the internal partitions [cloisons], the staircases, the flagging in concrete [dallages en béton], the sealing [scellements], the removal of the building rubble, the dem-

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

olition and the recreation of the original soil, the building of the translucent floors, the canalisation and plumbing, carpentry [menuiserie], and the armature [quincaillerie]” (Blanche 1928b), Blanche explained the detailed construction in nineteen pages, which came with a set of plans and section drawings from his original project for a 1929 exhibition (Figs. VII.7, 8a,b). In this version, the palais on a square base of 50 metres and an overall longitudinal length of 95 (!) metres (including the flattened central staircase with four intermediate landings and a security staircase on the rear side13) comprised a “substructure [soubassement] with 12.60 metres’ height with two internal levels” and internal staircases) to support the attached decoration and the visitors. “One level of superstructure [was built] in light materials” with additional halls, galleries, and a 53-metre central tower and four 41-metre-high lateral towers, which were intended to be resistant against wind and, unlike what would be required in the tropical climate at the original temple site, “against snow”. Additionally, Blanche explained the construction and the carrying capacity (based on the safety codes of the préfet de Police) of the “fire-resistant wooden inner construction” [bois ignifugé], as well as the construction of the staircases in hollow bricks [briques creuses], of the translucent ceilings and glass brick courts, and of the plaster decoration on lathing and the final coating [plâtre sur lattis, plâtre aux sas]. The “Lot 2 – concerning the work of pattern models, sculpture, and the execution en staff” (Blanche 1928c) demanded a “reconstitution of the central part of the temple with a central tower and four corner towers [to be] as truthful as possible, […] absolutely in the esprit of the Cambodian sculpture and statuary with examples to be found and studied in detail in the musée du Trocadéro for all drawings, documents, and suggestions following the strict indications by the architect”. The work comprised all attached and freestanding decorations inside the palais central, the “tiger-” (in fact ‘lion’-) ornamented staircase, the adjacent buildings, and the “grande terrasse with balustrades, socles, and Naga-snakes, executed en staff with sufficient reinforcement”. Both major tasks, the general construction and its ornamentation, were published in November 1928 in colonial journals like the Économiste colonial, La Dépêche coloniale,

Le Midi colonial, and in other technical media like L’Entreprise, Le Moniteur des travaux publics, or Le Bâtiment, but it was also circulated as a public announcement identifying Lyautey as Commissaire général de l’Exposition in the name of the ministère des Colonies. (Fig. VII.9) A few months later, when the Paris Exhibition was definitely postponed to 1931, specifications for the public bidding for the “Reconstitution of the Temple of Angkor”14 were established with six major tasks: (1) the general work [entreprise général] with the above-mentioned elements of the bearing structure (with an internal “limit load of 500kg/m2, and 130 kg/m2 for the staff decoration”); (2) the external and internal decoration, including “a demountable 0.02 par mètre-scale with transportable parts”; (3) electricity, lighting, and nocturnal illumination with apparatus; (4) the temporary supply of exhibition furniture and decoration; (5) the internal and external coating/painting including patinage for the structure’s aged stone temple appearance; and (6) the gardens and plantations. In order to make this reconsti­ tution project in Paris more authentically exotic, §9 of the cahier des charges emphasised the “preferable use of materials from the colonies”. On 20 December 1928, the responsible directeur de l’Architecture, des parcs et jardins of the Paris Exhibition, M. Martzloff, reported, after the meeting with the Comité technique and the commission des marches with Tournaire and Gourdon, on the incoming applications of nineteen entrepreneurs for Lot 1 and five firms for Lot 2. Finally, the Paris-­ based Entreprise (Paul) Lajoinie (already contracted for the gros-œuvre of the musée permanent des Colonies on the same exhibition area) won the first project with a bid of 5,490,000 francs, and Auberlet & Laurent from Montrouge near Paris, the decorators of the 1922 palais de l’Indochine in Marseille, won the second.15 Dating from 3 May 1929, a structural plan from the firm Lajoinie described how to build up Angkor Wat not with stone blocks around an internal mound of earth and rubble, as was used on the ‘real spot’, but instead with a fir wood scaffolding based on Blanche’s plan: for the four angle quadrates around the cruciform inner bearing structure, different types of wooden pillars and diagonal bracings were proposed (Fig. VII.10)16. Auberlet & Laurent had won Lot 2 (decoration) with a cost

13  This security structure was indeed a crucial discussion since the Préfecture de Police calculated at most 1,000 visitors at a time on the superior level and 2,500 people in each of the intermediate and lower levels, which finally necessitated – given the inner bearing structure in inflammable wood – additional rear exits on all levels as well as a special iron staircase and fire-protecting walls [cloisons coupe-feu] inside. The translucent surfaces executed by the Société de Saint-Gobain for the interior exhibition spaces had to be augmented, and the overall height of the whole structure elevated by one metre due to incorrect data about the nivellement. See documents and sketches: ANOM ECI 137.CT. 14  Cahier des charges particulières relatif à l’adjudication en six lots des travaux de construction à forfait du Palais de l’Indochine (Reconstitution du Temple d’Angkor. Paris 1931), see: ANOM ECI 137.CT. 15  Directeur de l’architecture, des parcs et jardins au commissaire général, 20 December 1928, see: ANOM ECI 133. 16  For the plan see: ANOM ECI 137.CT Indochine, Angkor.

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Figure VII.7  A ground plan of the étage supérieur for the Angkor Wat replica of the planned 1929 Exhibition (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figures VII.8a,b  Section plans of the 1931 (originally 1929) Angkor Wat replica in Paris (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.9  Call for bids in 1928 for the construction of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

calculation of 5.4 million francs and a list of convincing reference projects from previous years. Most important among these was the palais de l’Indochine at the Marseille Exhibition of 1922, which had almost the same logistical requirements and provided an enormous pool of decorative patterns and moulds from which to draw; furthermore, 296

they referred to their decoration projects like the 1923 theatre of Carcassonne, the porte monumentale of the 1925 Exhibition in Paris, the monument du Souvenir indochinois in the 1927 colonial garden at Nogent-sur-Marne near the Parc de Vincennes, and, above all, the monument aux Cambodgiens et Laotiens in Montpellier 1927 (Fig. VII.11).

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.10  The construction details for the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: © Archives ­nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Figure VII.11  A brochure of Auberlet&Laurent with the 1931 Angkor Wat replica as reference (Source: © Auberlet&Laurent, Montrouge)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.12  Electricity canalisation for the 1931 Angkor Wat replica in Paris (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.13  The projectors for the illumination of Angkor Wat in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives ­nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

The Paris-based maison Cottin et Fils won Lot 3 (electricity) for the whole Indochinese section with its plan for a complicated underground system of canalisation for the cables to each pavilion; a complete electrification plan was turned in on 28 October 1930 on the basis of the fixed site plan of all installations17 (Fig. VII.12). The issue of the effective illumination itself was the subject of a different bid, and the Société française des établissements Jacopozzi was chosen in January 1931 for its offer of 595,000 francs. Its cover letter from early 1931 included an impressive list of references to similar projects: the nocturnal illumination of the major shopping malls of Paris [Grands Magasins], of the Louvre Museum, the arc de Triomphe, the place de la Concorde, the Opera House, Notre-Dame de Paris, and, most spectacular of all, the Eiffel Tower.18 With all the other structures in the section, the illumination work of “Angkor [Wat]” was detailed in the Devis descriptif (Description des palais et pavillons éclairés, nomenclature des parties éclairées,

indication des effets à obtenir) from 9 January 1931 as “covering the whole palais as such, the principal facades [the main facade towards the visitor and the exhibition grounds, MF], the galleries of the enclosure, the five towers of the palais, and the two towers above the angles of the galleries. The towers are illuminated by 2/3 of their circumference”. The Parisian Angkor Wat replica was, according to the report, illuminated by seventy “Diffuseur ‘Triomphe’” for the different levels and fifty “Projecteur ‘Obélisque’ with a coverage of 70 metes by a lamp of 1000 watts with 2000 light bulbs”, with 14 installations alone needed for the central tower (Fig. VII.13; Pl. VII.5). All together, the Indochinese section was illuminated by almost 400 different projectors and 840 ‘diffusers’ with a strong accent on the more than 300-metre-long central passageway (compare Pl. Intro.11). Lot 4 for the interior decoration and equipment [aménagement] is the most difficult to dissect on the basis of the overall exhibition concept by Charles Blanche, as he ex-

17  For the whole dossier with a very technical Devis descriptif – Électricité, canalisations électriques (à l’ex­

ception des illuminations) with the data about every single line, cable, lamp, and electrical outlet for every pavilion, see: ANOM ECI 134#3. 18  Établissement Jacopozzi on 20 February 1931 to the “Inspecteur vérificateur” of the Paris 1931 Exhibition concerning the illumination of the “Pavilions of Indochina”. See: ECI 135. Indochine #5 (Jardins, éclairage).

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Figure VII.14a The étage inférieur of the Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

plained it in three revised floor plans (Figs. VII.14a–c). The lowest level [étage inférieur] (Fig. VII.14a) was of special interest with four internal partitions which, framed by a series of product displays in the alcoves inside the outward wall structure (Fig. VII.15a), covered the themes of industrial raw materials, mines, and industries (Fig. VII.15b), 19  ANOM ECI 134#4 (Staff, aménagement).

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food products, and textiles. It is probable that Auberlet & Laurent also executed this decoration project for 130,000 francs as part of its Lot 2 for the staff decoration (see above).19 Long and detailed lists of every piece of carpentry were established both for the intermediate level on French and indigenous art, art schools and public instruction,

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.14b The étage intermédiaire of the Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

medical assistance, and sciences; and for the top floor (Fig. VII.14c) intended for the EFEO with its long galleries and central showroom (see discussion below). The vitrines built to contain all kinds of industrial art and archaeological objects were designed by Blanche himself (Pl. VII.6) with a separate call for tenders.20

Lot 5 on peinture was detailed in an undated four-page devis descriptif with a general description of the coloured tonality of the ‘real temple’. This was done at a time when the photographic documentation of Angkor was circulated in the remarkable 1929–32 publication on Angkor Wat by the EFEO, but colour analyses of the original and highly

20  ANOM ECI 136 Angkor (Fourniture des vitrines en location).

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.14c The étage supérieur of the Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

weathered surfaces were rare and highly hypothetical (com­ pare the study by Fournereau of 1889, Fig. III.65). Above all, colour photography was not yet used in extenso for larger scientific documentations. With this background in mind, the written descriptions in these internal reports were not

only of eminent importance for the ‘aesthetic translation’ of Angkor Wat into the French métropole for the Exhibition of 1931, but also for our present understanding of the tonality of the site, which was mainly destroyed after several restoration campaigns:21

21  Notably, the most destructive impact was effected by the conservation campaign of the Archaeological

Survey of India in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the surfaces of Angkor Wat were rubbed with brushes and entirely covered with a chemical solution (see Fig. XI.27b and Pl. XI.28a,b) that totally changed the biological microclimate and later resulted in a black tonality on the exterior that can still be seen today (see chapters XI and XII).

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.15a  A partial section plan of Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Figure VII.15b  A partial section through the section Mines et Industrie inside of the replica (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Generally, for the palais du Gouvernement général de l’Indochine in the form of the reconstitution of a part of the temple of Angkor Wat (Cambodge), the entrepreneur has to be inspired for the execution of the colouring of this building by coloured drawings by the architect and by all available documents to give the impression of the patinated stone surface of the original temple. It is entirely built in green sandstone [grès vert] with the exception of the wooden ceilings, which are actually destroyed, and only few examples show a very vivid polychrome coloration. These sandstone surfaces have taken a very varied tonality due to different exposures to the weather. The horizontal parts on which no public circulation takes place, the roofs in particular, have a tinge of terre de ­sienne brulée or of old rust, reminding us of the old tiled roofs of France. The vertical parts and these being used by circulation remained in general a greyish-green tone on which large brownish stains originate from the water running down the roofs. Besides the general grey-greenish tonality, one finds that all the different tones from yellow to blue are turned grey-green by the weathering years.22

Applying the above-mentioned descriptions to the Paris setting, the devis differentiated, along with further technical requirements, between the relevant surfaces to be artificially aged by traces of imperfection: the staff boards with coloured imitations of stone, wood, etc. on the one side, and the horizontal surfaces of circulation and the staircases on the foundation structure, in cement and not coloured, on the other. On the exterior decorative surfaces, “the enterpreneur should – on the basis of documents, samples, and models with artistic value – propose an economical painting using oil and lime, waterproof for the six-months’ duration of the exhibition, […] in varied patinated tones and partially imitating the stains from humidity or the water from the roofs”. In October 1929, Auberlet & Laurent turned in the winning bid of 1,095,000 francs for Lot 5, with a proposal to “cover the external facades with a coat of linseed oil and plumb carbonate [peinture de lin et céruse] […], adding oil of petroleum and lime [huile de pétrole et chaux] for the gradation, lime and oil of patina, and ochre tones for dec-

orative effects based on a sample collection [échantillonnage] of five motifs”.23 With a separate project for the “Staff et peintures décoratives dans les salles de l’exposition de temple d’Angkor” for 165,000 francs alone, Auberlet & Laurent detailed the inner wall decoration and colour scheme of Angkor Wat.24 The long lists of all details covered wall panels, friezes, signs and signals [pancartes décoratives], colour studies for the interior staircases and the wall hangings in the different halls (Pl. VII.7a,b), and master plates [pochoir] for the bas-reliefs and colour decorations à l’Angkorienne (Fig. VII.16). Finally, Lot 6 (Garden) was won by the Paris-based Entreprise générale de parcs & jardins Toutin & Roussel, which turned in a detailed plantation concept for the Indochinese section by November 1930 with a total cost of 310,000 francs.25 The indicated area for the works of terrassement, jardinage, and plantations comprised almost forty thousand square metres, and the variety of exotics plants was extraordinary (Fig. VII.17). They ranged from two hundred bamboo bushes to forty aquatic pants, sixty climbing plants [plantes grimpantes], and four giant palm trees, which – similar to the iconised palm trees framing the vista at the original spot (compare Fig. IX.22a) – were situated in front of the opening perspective from the widening piazza towards the central massif of Angkor Wat. According to the overall listing of all contributing firms for the Indochinese section, Lajoinie (construction), Auberlet & Laurent (decoration), and Cottin (electricity) more or less built the entire Indochinese section (Olivier 1933, II, 455–58).26 According to Olivier’s further report, the construction site of ‘Angkor in Paris’ was opened on 1 August 1929 and was completed on 15 October 1930, whereas the inner decoration continued until 10 February 1931 to prepare the space for the subsequent installations of the internal exhibition parcours (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 684). Interestingly, the colonial-Orientalist and – after the decidedly ‘pro-spective’ approach of the 1925 Exhibition – again ‘retro-spective’ and pastiche-like enterprise to stage the ancient Cambodian temple of ‘Angkor Wat’ in the French capital was worth a series of articles in the architectural journal La construction moderne. With Antony Goissaud as their author, the most detailed report, fifteen pages and entitled “Le temple d’Angkor Vat et les pavillons de la section de l’Indochine”,

22  Devis descriptif des travaux 5e Lot (peinture) (no exact date, about 1929). In: ANOM ECI 137 – CT Indo-

chine. Angkor (poteaux, statique, peinture).

23  Auberlet & Laurent – 5e Lot (21 and 30 October 1929): peinture intérieure et extérieure du temple d’Ang-

kor et de ses enceintes; silicatage et patinage, see: ANOM ECI 137 CT Indochine, Angkor.

24  Several lists around the end of 1930/early 1931 were established, see: ANOM ECI 134#4 (Staff, aménage-

ment).

25  Entreprise générale de parcs & jardins Toutin & Roussel, Devis descriptif des travaux (10 November

1930) and other correspondence, also with the Conservateur en chef des promenades, Demorlaine. See: ANOM ECI 135. Indochine #5 (Jardins, éclairage). 26  For the pavilions, see: ECI 135. Indochine #6, 7. For the reports of the delegates for each sub-section and pavilion: ANOM AGEFOM 533/54.

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.16  Decorative master plates for the Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Figure VII.17  The scheme for the planting in front of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

was published on 25 May 1930 along with a large number of photographs of the temple as a work-in-progress, which even made it onto the journal’s cover page. Ironically, this brought the ephemeral effect-oriented character of the un-

dertaking to the forefront (Fig. VII.18) through the comment “The one who adds the tails to the dragons of the Temple of Angkor” (Goissaud 1930). This was accompanied by an image of a décorateur-staffeur (probably Émile Au305

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.18  The construction process of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica in La construction ­moderne in 1930, compare Fig. Intro.23 (Source: La construction moderne 34, 25 May 1930, cover)

berlet himself), in working clothes and smoking a pipe, adding a white tail in plaster cast to the lions in front of one of the entrances to Angkor Wat. As the illustrations indicated, the entire structure was covered with thin decorative staff elements but, as was deliberately shown along the lower edge of the picture, the structure was also sup-

ported by a fragile inner wooden scaffolding. When the newly founded Bulletin d’informations of the General Commissariat for the 1931 Exhibition announced the “Revelation of the Temple of Angkor” in its June 1930 third issue with essays by French writers from Mouhot to Loti,27 Goissaud paralleled (in a kind of transculturally embedded dis-

27  “La première révélation du Temple d’Angkor”, in: Bulletin d’informations, 3 (30 June 1930), 6–7.

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Angkor Wat. His parcours approached the enormous overall structure during construction (Fig. VII.19a) and covered the central tower’s entire wooden framework and staff decoration (Figs. VII.19b,c). This execution of the towers, Indochina occupies one of the most important places in as photographed from an unusaul perspective for the jourour domaine d’outre-mer: as a consequence, it will form nal Le monde colonial illustré in May 1931 (Fig. VII.20a), a large part in the Exposition Coloniale Internationale of was in fact different to the version discussed in Commaille-­ 1931 […] Angkor was chosen [after Marseille in 1922, MF] Delaval correspondence of 1915 (compare Figs. VI. 4a,b) one more time because no other monument could sym- and based on Blanche’s elevation plans (Fig. VII.20b) and bolise with more majesty and harmony the prestige of our Auberlet & Laurent’s sophisticated logistics of fabrication, domain in Asia, the grandeur of its past, and the care [sou- delivery, and mounting (Fig. VII.20c). From a more abci] with which we have always respected its masterpieces stract viewpoint, the ephemeral and only surface-oriented […] The palais du Gouvernement général de l’Indo-Chine, ‘spectacle’ of Angkor in Paris could also be read as a metain the form of this temple [of Angkor Wat], will be conse- phor of the whole exhibition’s ‘hollow’ rhetorical framecrated to the group of these countries which constitute work during France’s public self-justification for the mergIndo-Chine française: Cochinchina, Tonkin, Annam, Cam- ing of colonial Asia and metropolitan France into one bodia, and Laos, which will also have their own particular coherent entity. pavilions. In the temple, we want to celebrate the fecund In 1933 when Marcel Olivier published the second volassociation of the races that we protect and the results of ume Construction within the impressive Rapport général of our work of cooperation. […] The photographs that we the 1931 Exhibition, twelve pages were devoted to the making of the Indochinese section. Focusing on the “Temple publish here will certainly be of great interest for the reader. These on the whole as such emphasise the signif- d’Angkor” with its 5,000-square-metre surface, its 70 by icance and the volume of the building; these in detail 70-metre square and 14-metre-high foundation, 55-metre-­ high central tower, and 43-metre-high corner towers, he demonstrate the really fantastic ornamentation of the temple of Angkor [Wat]. Here […] once more the French proudly mentioned the “décoration en staff, which necessihave done a lot: before our arrival in Cambodia, the tem- tated 2,350,000 kilograms of plaster, 33,600 kilograms of ple and its surroundings, more or less in ruins, disap- jute and 39,800 kilograms of paint” and which contributed peared under the trees of a large forest that covered may- to the overall cost of the replica of Angkor Wat as the be a thousand strange and several-centuries-old temples. ­“œuvre remarquable, [the] véritable clou de l’Exposition” of We had to remove the scrub [débroussailler], deforest 12.4 million francs (Olivier 1933, II, 109–20, here 111–12). Entitled “Construction du Temple d’Angkor” (Fig. VII.21), [déboiser]. […] The reconstitution of these [overgrown] parts of the temples, their restoration, this enormous but the legends for his published photographs did not even bother to distinguish anymore between the real and the methodically executed clearing contributes to the work to which France and the Gouvernement général de l’Indo-­ reconstituted site. When the Indochinese section was finalised in 1931, the visitor was invited to experience an heterChine have dedicated their efforts and, naturally, also a lot of money. Today, the temple is cleared […] The travellers, otopian dream world of Colonial France, with its centre the artists, and savants from all countries can see this edi- around the style- and time-compressed architectures from every part of Indochina. Rare aerial photographs of the enfice and its surroundings, which uncontestedly constitute one of the marvels of the world. […] These visitors who sembles were published in public media such as the art can come to the construction site of the palais de l’Indo-­ journal L’art vivant (Figs. VII.22a,b). The whole IndochiChine at the Vincennes Park already envision with regret nese section was assembled to frame the great perspective the disappearance of this reconstitution of Angkor. May- towards the full-scale version of Angkor Wat, as depicted be it would have been preferable to make it more expen- on circulating postcards (Fig. VII.22c): without their legsive and solid to conserve this temple near Paris since not ends to indicate the concrete Paris event of 1931, their illuseveryone can make a trip to Cambodia, and the musée trations from the central alley towards the main temple de Sculpture [Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois, MF] in the could have easy passed as a photograph ‘from the real site’ Trocadero palace is too small to receive all the plaster (compare the cover illustrations of both volumes of this casts [of this exhibition], which are admittedly very curi- monograph). ous and interesting. [italics MF] (Goissaud 1930) Within the Indochinese ensemble, the pavillon du ­Cambodge helped to introduce and visualise the intended In Goissaud’s first article, along with several others in later cultural taxonomies from a perspective of frozen-in-time issues of the journal (compare Goissaud 1931b–e), the tradition, colonially revived arts and architecture, and rereader was taken, through twelve illustrations and some of discovered antiquity (Figs. VII.23a,b). As internal reports Blanche’s sketches (compare Fig. VIII.5) and details (report- on the reunions of the Comité local for Cambodia (decreed edly “based on on-site studies by Gabriel Blanche at Angkor in 1926, directed by Poiret; see above) indicated, the execuitself ”), on a journey describing the unique construction of tion of a 1:10-scale compressed “reproduction of the musée course in official ideological rhetoric) the efforts to reconstruct Angkor in Paris with the French-colonial civilising task in Indochina on the ‘real site’:

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.19a—c  The construction process of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica as published in La construction moderne in 1930 (Source: La construction moderne 34, 25 May 1930, plate 133, pages 525 and 527)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.20a  The construction process along the avenue des Colonies inside the 1931 Exhibition as seen from the spires of the Angkor Wat replica (Source: Le monde colonial illustré, May 1931)

Figures VII.20b,c  The spire construction of the Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 in ­ detail (left in an elevation drawing by architect Blanche, right as a list of staff elements by Auberlet&Laurent) (Source: La construction moderne 34, 25 May 1930, 258; © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

309

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.21  Details about the Construction du temple d’Angkor as published in the Rapport général of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (Source: Olivier 1933.V2, 117)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figures VII.22a,b  Aerial photos of the French-colonial section and the Angkor Wat replica in the journal L’art vivant (Source: L’art vivant 151 (1931), 396 and 403, made by Photos Wide World)

Figure VII.22c  The passageway towards the 1931 Angkor Wat replica as depicted on a postcard, compare cover illustration of the volume one (Source: Personal archive Michael Falser)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.23a,b The pavillon du Cambodge by George Groslier for the 1931 Indochinese section, in a sketched elevation and depicted in L’Illustration during a nocturnal illumination; compare with Pl. EpII.25c (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence; L’Illustration, no. 4612, 25 July 1931, n.p.)

312

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figures VII.24a,b  Scenarios inside the pavillon du Cambodge of the 1931 Exhibition as ­depicted in the journal L’Illustration: A staged praying ceremony with life-size puppets (left), and the reconstitution of la vie rustique in a stilted wooden house in rural Cambodia (right) (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4612, 25 July 1931, cover and 4)

Albert Sarraut as the best specimen of a modern and strictly Cambodian architecture”28 was proposed by and placed under the supervision of George Groslier as the director of the ‘real’ museum in Phnom Penh (compare his involvement in the Marseille Exhibition 1922, chapter VI). However, inside this supposedly ‘modern’ structure with refined references to Cambodia’s traditional pagoda design, Groslier realised for the Occidental gaze a combined ‘frozen image’ of Cambodia’s deeply rooted tradition, religiosity, and primitivism. Groslier’s fabricated scene of a religious ceremony was made out of about fifty life-size puppets [mannequins] (Beauplan 1931, n.p.) that even made it onto the title page of L’Illustration in 25 July 1931 (Fig. VII.24a). Other features inside the Cambodian pavilion included a showroom of ‘re-traditionalised’ artefacts and clothing by Cambodia’s (Groslier’s) new art school in Phnom Penh and the display of the country’s ‘traditional rural living’ in the form of a stilted wooden house complete with figures dressed in traditional garb (Fig. VII.24b). It was this combined image of ‘traditional housing and living’ which was,

shortly after Angkor’s nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992, ‘back-translated’ to the ‘real’ site, repackaged and reinvented as ‘traditional heritage’, and finally staged inside and outside the archaeological parcours of Angkor Park (compare the discussion in the epilogue II of volume 2 and Figs. EpII.8b; 9a,b; Pl. Ep.II.20b–f). Continuing this staged inside-outside display mode between an exterior picturesque surface and an interior modern function, the visitor left the Cambodian pavilion and immediately passed two electrical transformers in front of the Angkor Wat replica that – in a different approach than the more ‘serious’ reconstitutions of the same stylistic language in the 1889 and 1906 Exhibitions – were camouflaged in a Bayon face tower–like decoration according to the planning of Charles Blanche29 (Figs. VII.25a,b). From here the large sound-and-light-shows of Angkor Wat were staged (see Pl. VII.16), and the photographic campaigns by Frédéric Gadmer in the wider context of Albert Kahn’s ­Archives de la Planète covered the strange scenario during daytime (Pl. VII.8, 14). Crossing the intersecting avenue

28  Rapport (Délégué du Cambodge, Poiret, administrateur des services civils), 15 September 1931 (including

the interim reports of the preparatory sessions in Phnom Penh on 16 June 1928 and 5 August 1929) with Groslier as the most important protagonist. See: ANOM AGEFOM 533/54 (Rapports des délégués). 29  The discussion about and the plan for the tours transformateurs in a wooden scaffolding and staff decoration in: ANOM ECI 133, Comité technique section Indochine #2.

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.25a,b  The transformators of the Angkor Wat replica in a Bayon-like disguise, as sketched by Blanche and finally executed in 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence; Roger-Viollet Paris)

Figures VII.26a,b  The main staircase and lateral entry of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica in Paris as published in La construction moderne (Source: La construction moderne, 16 August 1931, plate 181 and page 728, photographs Cadé)

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figures VII.27a—d  Decorated inner staircases and galleries of the Angkor Wat replica (Source: Olivier 1933.V2, 690–91, 748; Collection Charles Meyer, Paris)

des Colonies, the visitor stood in front of Angkor Wat’s central and originally more inclined staircase (Fig. VII.26a) designed after Blanche’s (André Maire’s) dramatic preparatory sketch (Pl. VII.9). Alternatively, he could enter the main structure by the lateral entries au rez-de-chaussée (Fig. VII.26b) and reach the ground floor’s ‘economics section’ on all kinds of products from all over Indochina (no illustrations could be located for this study). To enter the next level, the visitor would take the massive internal staircases,

which merged a pure modern functionality of direct inner circulation with a Khmer-style design of square pillars, cropped Naga balustrades, and a reconstituted ceiling decoration à la Angkor Wat with frieze-like paintings and floral patterns of Auberlet & Laurent’s design (Figs. VII.27a–d, Pl. VII.7b, 10). Reaching the étage intermédiaire, the palais’s narrative of a “reciprocity of the influences” (Olivier 1933, 5.2, 709) was the main goal of the display (compare floor plan Fig. 315

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.28a,b  The inner showrooms of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica with the translucent, flat, dome-shaped ceilings (Source: La construction moderne, 23 August 1931, 750; © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

VII.14b): indigenous art practice by the five Indochinese Écoles artisanales d’Art appliqué from Hanoi, Gia-Dinh, ­Bien-Hia, Thudaumont, and Phnom Penh30 in one corner was mediated by a section on the different participating Écoles des Beaux-arts institutions (Fig. VII.28a). This was

linked, on the other side, with French art practice of supposedly Indochinese influence, including practicing city planners and architects like Ernest Hébrard and Georges Trouvé (the latter was also an archaeologist for the EFEO in Angkor; his work is discussed in chapter IX). The same

30  A brochure called L’Instruction publique en Indochine told the success story of public (also artistic) in-

struction in Indochina. See: ANOM AGEFOM 989/3416.

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

civilising effort was exemplified in the other half of the exhi­ bition parcours where the section on medical assistance in Indochina was displayed next to the science department and the section on ‘models, schools, instruction’ (Fig. VII.28b). Each of the four corners of this level were exposed to natural light by the flat glass ceiling cupolas. Consequently, the floors were equally made of translucent glass bricks to bring light into the level underneath. From an ideological viewpoint, the uppermost level of the palais du Gouvernement général was the most important for bringing the giant gesture of the Angkor Wat replica into congruity with the content of the ‘original’, as the internal exhibition scenario and the single archaeological, architectural, and artistic exhibits were concerned. Here, the most prominent exhibiting protagonist was the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), which was founded in 1898 for the exploration, mapping, and preservation of Indochina’s cultural heritage (compare its role in the second volume of this book). The first version of the EFEO exhibition project had already been designed in August 1928 by its director Louis Finot (compare above his concern about the Angkor replica) and primarily comprised (a) of ‘secondary sources’ like photographs, plans, drawings of temples from the school’s museum in Hanoi; (b) mouldings and rubbings [moulages and estampages] of inscriptions, steles, and decorative motifs from Angkor and the archaeological museums of Tourane and Phnom Penh; and (c) publications and guides. After 1929 a retrospective ethnographical art collection was added (Fig. VII.29a) as well as twelve plaster casts of Angkor Wat from the “musée Cambodgien du Trocadéro” including seven pediments (also from the temple’s central tower), three lintels, and bas-relief figures.31 An undated draft programme differentiated three thematic sections: an

Exposition historique on extinct civilisations in Indochina and the French mission of cultural recovery, an Exposition des arts anciens de l’Indochine with archaeological artefacts, and finally, an Exposition des services de l’EFEO.32 The main representative of the EFEO for the 1931 Exhibition was (again) the archaeologist Victor Goloubew. In his final report to Pierre Guesde in August 1931, he presented what had been, after a similar project in the 1922 Exhibition, the major task of the exhibition parcours: to link the (in fact slightly older) history of the EFEO (founded 1898) with its self-sacrificing mission to salvage the archaeological heritage of Angkor (retroceded from Siam only in 1907).33 The visitor could reach the upper level either by the principal exterior staircase or by the two internal stairways. Their walls were plastered and patinated by Auberlet & Laurent in order to narrow the mimetic gap between Angkor Wat’s original mythical and religious architecture – as it was photographed in the 1929 EFEO publication – and its ephemeral and secularised Paris replica of 1931. The circular galleries featured the work of the EFEO, as documented in photographs, plans, and drawings about Indochina’s ethnographic and archaeological heritage (Fig. VII.29b). This secularised presentation had replaced the original galleries full of venerated religious sculptures (Fig. VII.29c). The visitor to the upper galleries would encounter four open court-like spaces with the flat glass ceiling cupolas (Fig. VII.30a). At the ‘real’ site, the inner courts of Angkor Wat were filled with various unidentified sculptural debris and dominated by partly collapsed corner towers (Fig. VII.30b). Besides other stages during the exhibition (Cadilhac 1931, Olivier 1933, 5.2, 725) (Pl. VII.11a), some spectacular performances took place on the giant piazza in front of the Angkor Wat replica (Pl. VII.11b). Its inner courts were also used by the danseuses Cambodgiennes34 who posed –

31  See the correspondence from 1928 to 1929 in: ANOM INDO GGI 66722 (participation EFEO). 32 Exposition coloniale de 1931, Commission de Indochine, directives générales, suite au programme

général du 28 mars 1927. See: ANOM INDO GGI 66711.

33  “L’effort principal de l’École a porté, dès sa fondation, sur le groupe d’Angkor. La reprise de cet incompa-

rable ensemble monumental, que le traité franco-siamois du 23 mars 1907 avait rendu au Cambodge, impliquait la responsabilité de son entretien méthodique [italics MF]”. See Goloubew 1931a. 34  The correspondence between Guesde and Eckert around 1929 indicates that the old-fashioned, Orientalist-voyeuristic attitude to staging indigenous people within their typical building types and ‘authentic’ living environments to live-perform their artistic practices was still alive. The “presence of the female element”, however, was judged critically within the exhibition’s suburban working class environment. In a letter of 14 July 1929, Eckert suggested for Cambodia, Laos, and Tonkin “typical village or agglomeration types to represent the characteristic representatives of each predominant race in their habitual social, religious, and artistic milieu and authentically reconstituted habitations to perform the most curious and attracting applied traditional handicraft […]”. Guesde pleaded for the “indigenous ensembles […] the reconstitutions of each village in its normal life in a setting [cadre] to be reproduced as exactly as possible”. Interestingly, in the case of female representatives, Guesde explained on 16 December 1929 what was the most frightening scenario for every typical colonial ruler in exhibitionary complexes – direct interference between the exotic living exhibit and the Occidental observer: “Your conception [of live environments, MF] demands the presence of female indigenes. For multiple reasons, I do not wish any presence of the female element in the exhibition apart from the danseuses Cambodgiennes, which form a homogeneous group of one strict discipline. We are not in Marseille where the population behaves like a ‘good child’ but in Paris where the crowds have less a jovial mood, particularly in the area around the exhibition grounds.” Both sources in: ANOM AGEFOM 527/25. As in the

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.29a  The inner showrooms of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica with the modern-style glass boxes for ethnographic displays (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Figure VII.29b  The upper open galleries of 1931 Angkor Wat replica with plans and photographs (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

318

Figure VII.29c  The open galleries of the ‘real’ Angkor Wat temple with sculptures (Source: Finot 1929, 109)

3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.30a  The upper open galleries of the 1931 replica of Angkor Wat towards the inner courts with glass brick paving (Source: La construction moderne, 23 August 1931, 747)

Figure VII.30b  The inner courts of the ‘real’ Angkor Wat (Source: Finot 1929, 132)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.31a  One of the corner towers of the 1931 ­Angkor Wat replica (Source: La construction moderne, 23 August 1931, plate 186)

one more time since their French reinvention for the 1906 and 1922 exhibitions in Marseille (see chapters V, VII and X; compare Thiounn 1930, Falser 2013f) – for the Occidental (photographic) gaze. This time their ‘authentic’ formation dance took place above the anachronistic glass bricks and translucent concrete paving of the reconstituted temple (Pl. VII.11c). The central tower and the corner towers of the Paris version (Fig. VII.31a) replicated once more, for their lower section, the eastern part of the central tower of

Figure VII.31b  The central tower of the ‘real’ Angkor Wat temple in the 1929 EFEO publication (Source: Finot 1929, 150)

Angkor Wat (Fig. VII.31b, compare Fig. III.31a). One more (and last) time, their surfaces were ornamented – in all four directions of each tower! – with the recurring ­Krishna motif from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois (compare Figs. III.36 and 39). After climbing the central staircase, the visitor would finally enter what Goloubew described in his published report for the bulletin of the EFEO as “a veritable museum” (Goloubew 1931b, 641): the first of the inner spaces (Fig.

French exhibitions after 1900, the issue of bringing ‘authentically’ dressed and performing Khmer female dancers to France was a long debate involving costly planning. The internal report from the second meeting of the local Cambodian committee in 1929 reconfirmed, “the organisation [for the 1931 event] was more difficult than in the past”: The quality of the ‘real dancers’ of the royal court in Phnom Penh had, according to the report, dramatically declined, but “a trial to organise a free theatre under the direction of the Service des Arts […] to resurrect the Cambodian choreography for the Paris Exhibition of 1931 finally failed”. As a result, a mix of royal dancers with, as Pasquier reported in 1930, an additional “group of total débutantes” as a “troupe privée” under the supervision of “Madame Soysangvann, […] married to Prince Vongkat, the brother of the ruling king”, was finally equipped by the Service des Arts. Since Pasquier justified this constellation of a useful “accroisement de la valeur choréographique du ballet” with a final cost of “76,000 piastres” (ten times the value in French francs), we might conceptualise this colonial practice as a systematic, hybridising ‘reinvention of tradition’. For all data, see: ANOM INDO GGI 66767 (“Danseuses Cambodgiennes”) and for the “Rapport du délégué du Cambodge, 15 September 1931”, see ANOM AGEFOM 533/54).

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3. Angkor Wat in 1931 Paris: The logistical masterpiece of applied French Orientalism

Figure VII.32  The central hall of the EFEO inside the uppermost floor of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: La construction moderne, 23 August 1931, plate 187)

VII.32) was an archaeological hybrid made up of an entirely ings by Charles Fouqueray, which were later brought somestaff-decorated interior à la Angkor Wat with lateral piers where else” (Goloubew 1931b, 641), most probably to the under a kind of clerestory with stylised balusters, original adjacent rear hall as the salle historique of the EFEO’s mission. As explained in Antony Goissaud’s eulogy, “À l’Exposisculptures from EFEO’s dépot d’Angkor or the the musée Guimet, and a copied pedestal from the Cham (South-Viet­ tion coloniale: Panneaux décoratifs de Charles Fouqueray”, namese) temples of Mi-Son in the centre of the room. Con- in La construction moderne, Fouqueray had been travelling tinuing through the plaster cast temple gate architecture through French colonial domains for the Ministry of the with its accentuated glass brick skylight, the visitor would French Navy and the Ministry of the Colonies and had reach the geometrical and ideological centre of the whole ­executed for the Paris Exhibition eight paintings for the floor, if not of the whole Angkor Wat replica. According “salon d’honneur of the palais d’Angkhor [sic]” (Goissaud to Goloubew’s short remark, this space was “originally 1931a, 518; compare Trillat 1931, 328).35 Two of these brought equipped with some bronze bustes-portraits and wall paint- the political, the civilising, and the archaeological elements 35  The titles (or descriptions in the legends) of the eight panels were as follows: La défense des Tay-Son, Fon-

dation de Saïgon; Destruction du sceau symbolisant la vassalité de l’Annam à la Chine; Inauguration de l’Université d’Hanoï; Rétrocession au Cambodge par le Siam des provinces de Battambang et de Siem Reap; Dégagement et restauration d’Angkor; Visite du Gouverneur général Pasquier aux Indes Néerlandaises; and Inauguration du pont d’Hanoï par le Gouverneur général Doumer. Other panels, for example at the exhibition’s musée permanent des Colonies, depicted busy harbour scenes from different French colonial domains. Parts of these paintings might have been used already for the 1922 Exhibition. See André-Pallois 1997, 107–9.

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Figures VII.33a,b  The paintings Rétrocession au Cambodge par le Siam les provinces de ­Battambang et de Siem Reap and Dégagement et restauration d’Angkor by Charles Fouqueray for the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: La construction moderne, 17 May 1931, 519, 518)

of the French mission in Indochina to a perfect fusion. As crowd of Cambodian workers to bring the dilapidated was written directly on the canvas as “Rétrocession au Cam- sculptural blocks into their former position (Fig. VII.33b). The success story of the EFEO found its way into print bodge par le Siam des provinces de Battambang et de Siem Reap”, one panel depicted high French officials in typical in many venues. As Sylvain Lévi proudly enumerated in his white colonial uniforms taking over the territory from the two volumes on the French mission civilisatrice in Indo­ Siamese authorities (Fig. VII.33a). As a logical consequence, china, the EFEO already governed (protected) in 1931 a second panel (possibly already shown in the 1922 Exhibi- “1,049 historic monuments in Indochina”, of which 670 tion at Marseille; see above) depicted a scene of the busy were on Cambodian (mainly Angkorian) soil (Lévi 1931.2, restoration work, initiated by the French, at one of the giant 183–95, here 187; compare chapter IX and Fig. IX.72).36 In entry gates of Angkor Thom where the same kind of white- the final published photographs, however, the central octagdressed French colonial functionary directed a dark-skinned onal hall was called salle du dieu. By placing a plaster cast 36  As was proudly presented during the 1931 Exhibition, the EFEO with its archaeological efforts in Angkor was part of a Conseil de recherches scientifiques de l’Indochine, with the EFEO’s acting director George Coedès as its vice president. See: Exposition coloniale 1931, 39–40.

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4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figure VII.34 The salle du dieu in the centre of the uppermost level of the 1931 ­Angkor Wat replica (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

of the giant Shiva statue in a solemn, dark ‘archaeological cella’ as the very core of the scenography (Fig. VII.34), the EFEO gave the whole Angkor Wat replica of Paris 1931 the same status as the ‘real site’ of Angkor Wat where archaeological interventions had systematically occurred since 1907. It was turned into a dead ‘re-Hinduicised’ archaeolog-

ical ruin of scientific-Orientalist investigation and colonial tutelage, which (we remember Finot’s remarks about a permanent Angkor Wat structure in Paris) marginalised the living religious significance of Angkor Wat as a site of contemporary Buddhist and even animist veneration by the local stakeholders (compare Figs. IX.92a,b).

4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931 The 1:1-scale replica of the central massif of Angkor Wat was the undisputed clou of the Paris Exhibition of 1931, and even the Guide officiel of the event propagated its spectacular perspective towards the temple’s giant massif as a picture-­

perfect “sunset point” for visitors (Demaison 1931, 61). Of course, politically conservative newspapers like Le Figaro or mass-oriented journals like L’Illustration praised the whole Indochinese section for its “picturesque seductions, 323

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.35a,b  Advertising for colonial clothing and refrigerators with the Angkor Wat ­temple as background (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, Annonces S3 and S77)

[the] irresistible magic of its art” and the “exactitude” of the undertone was published in the Revue des deux mondes in reconstitution of Angkor Wat (Beauplan 1931); in both 1931; these were framed by introductory and closing statepublications the temple of Angkor Wat formed an exotic ments by Marcel Olivier, the rapporteur général of the event. background against which to display all kinds of consumer In “Les originales et les buts de l’Exposition coloniale” in products, from colonial white clothing to electrical refrig- the 15 May 1931 issue, Olivier referred to France’s colonial erators “for all climates” (Figs. VII.35a,b). Curiously, one “work of civilisation” within “the notion of human solidarity” of the authors also felt obliged to “[deny] the rumour that as “a work for world peace” (Olivier 1931a, 52, 55): terms Angkor Wat was even sold as a film set to an American cin- which re-emerged regularly in the context of the cultural ematographer to be burnt down in a final scene of a spectac- heritage of Angkor up to its nomination as UNESCO World ular movie”.37 If the ‘mobility’ of Angkorian architecture was Heritage is 1992 (see chapter XII, epilogue II; compare Falmade possible through the medium of plaster casts in muse- ser 2015c). In his closing comment, “Philosophie de l’Exum and exhibitions displays, then did the advertising indus- position coloniale”, on 15 November 1931 Olivier praised try, such for elegant cars, ‘accellerate’ its proliferation as a the “enchantment” of the 1931 Exhibition in its form as “an ‘global’ icon of cultural heritage (Pl. VII.12). ephemeral colonial city” (Olivier 1931b, 278). He employed Perhaps the most complete and elaborately discussed the decorative staff membrane used for the diverse exhibiseries containing more than fifteen articles about the Colo- tion pavilions (with their inner wooden cores) as a metanial Exhibition with a positive, if not politically aligned, phor to explain the solid (“cemented” as he called it) ideo-

37  See Beauplan 1931. The same theme was quoted in several anti-colonial and satire magazines like Le rire

in its special issue on the Colonial Exhibition from 23 May 1931. In its Guide presqu’officiel de l’Exposition coloniale, the “French and foreign pavilions in carton, stuc, and staff” were executed in a perfect material to be burnt down in a film set by “Paramount or the gentlemen Zukor and Jane Lasky” (n.p.). Compare with another satirical comment on the 1931 Exhibition called À Lyauteyville: Promenades sentimentales et humoristiques à l’Exposition coloniale, see: Camp 1931.

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logical sense of the exhibition. Interestingly, his critics used the same metaphor to expose the ‘inner’ ideological insubstantiality of the whole project (see below): Under the staff of the fragile pavilions of Vincennes, it will be easy for the visitor to discover the solid edifice that the colonialists of all epochs and all races had cemented with their blood. There is not a single showroom, not a single stand of these pavilions that does not translate something of the substantial victory of colonisation over the ignorance, the violence, the corporal and spiritual squalid­ ness [les misères du corps et de l’âme]. [italics MF] (Olivier 1931a, 53)

be experienced with all five senses” during a real voyage, was missing (Sizeranne 1931, I, 805, 806). However, using the Angkor Wat pavilion as his central case study, he continued: Vincennes could give us something a voyage could not provide: an immediate view confronted with forms, lines, masses, and monumental and decorative ordinances that, in reality, were separated by thousands of miles, of which we had as yet only little or no knowledge. […] At Vincennes, thanks to the perfection of the chosen examples and the care of their reproduction down to the smallest detail, the types of exotic architecture give us a lesson of compared styles [leçon des styles comparées]. To be read as in a museum, we are confronted with three sorts of styles: the faithful and literal reproduction of monuments like Angkor Wat or Leptis Magna […], the scientific and conscious representations of very pure, indigenous styles like the Dutch Indies or the Cambodian pavilions […], and new and lively creations derived from indigenous styles and adapted to modern needs. [italics MF] (Sizeranne 1931, I, 805, 806)

With Foucault’s classification of ‘colonies’ as heterotopias (see introduction), we can read three other contributions as general comments in a new light: Pierre Mille, in À l’Exposition colonial – Vue d’ensemble (15 May 1931), cele­brated the “palais d’Angkor-Vat” as the “centre of the whole exhibition” and showcase for the interpene­trating “reciprocity of Asia and Europe” (Mille 1931, 265, 272). Paul Morand, in Rien que la terre à l’Exposition coloniale (15 July 1931), emphasised the space-time-compressed “new geography” of the exhibition where, in a “modern volition”, all parts of the Continuing to explore the “three [types of] architectures”, world were synchronously represented around France as Sizeranne judged (a) “Khmer art” in general more valuable the “nourishing motherland [patrie nourricière]” (Morand than the “Arab and Negro art”, and considered it (b) (as a 1931, 334, 331, 330; compare Chassigneux 1932). And final- political remedy against the lost French territories and inly, Henri Gourdon, directeur technique of the Indochinese fluences in India and Southern China) more relevant than section, gave a written tour of the Angkor pavilion and jus- both stylistic influences of the art from India and China; he tified the decision to reconstitute it simply, by referring to also (c) essentialised the reconstituted “Angkor-Vat” monthe public popularity it enjoyed during the event: “le succès ument in Paris as the epitome of the purest “national and est le but suprême” (Gourdon 1931, 775). homogenous art”. As a “quasi classic-style building” similar The most comprehensive coverage was written by Robert to Europe and France with its “Notre-Dame church” in Paris, de la Sizeranne under the title L’art à l’Exposition coloniale Angkor Wat was finally made part of the French patrimoine: in five different issues of the journal from 15 June to 1 Oc- “the most beautiful aesthetic conquest” of French colonialtober with a clear focus on the Indochinese section and the ism (Sizeranne 1931, I, 824). On a more comparative level within the event’s decided­ “temple d’Angkor-Vat”. This was followed by section two on Les dieux et leurs cortèges (on Khmer kings and gods), sec- ly international direction (compare Fig. Intro.28), Angkor tion three on La renaissance des arts indigènes (celebrating Wat was only one among many other architectural solutions the “purity” of the “minor and applied arts” of Cambodia to used to materialise the exhibiting powers’ different missions “revive” the high, but decadent art practice in France [Size- to civilise the colonial world (Fig. VII.36). This was charted ranne 1931, III, 577]), section four on Les fauves et leurs along a strict cultural taxonomy as an all-comprising “index images (about Angkor’s figurative decorations), and section of difference” with authenticity as the major criterion (Morfive Le bon et le mauvais exotisme (on the pittoresque but ton 2000, 217). Besides other popular journals, ranging from also instructive side of representing the exotic Orient); the L’art vivant (a special issue of the Exposition coloniale was first part entirely covered Le temple d’Angkor of the 1931 published in August 1931 with a preface by Albert Sarraut38) Exhibition. Interestingly, Sizeranne commenced with the to La construction moderne,39 no other critique analysed the slight critique that, besides all the “enchantment and magic” architectural quality of the Colonial Exhibition more conof the exhibition, “only the [external] appearance of the vincingly than Pierre Courthion’s sixteen-page article “L’arthings” and the “picturesque ambiance was reproduced” – chitecture à l’Exposition coloniale” in the July 1931 issue of while “the human ambiance”, which could in fact “only Art & Decoration: Revue mensuelle d’art moderne. 38  Here Sarraut described the exhibition as “a subject of meditation, a lesson of all things [leçon de choses] with an exceptional educative value for politics, sociology, philosophy, for the man of action and business, but also an invaluable source of emotion and inspiration for the artist” (Sarraut 1931). 39  For an important overview on different journals and a series of illustrations, see Grandsart 2010.

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Figure VII.36  Unfolded souvenir card box for a selection of French-colonial pavilions and other sites of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (Source: © courtesy Auberlet, Montrouge)

His classification divided the ‘re-presented’ buildings in (Figs. VII.37b,c). Inside the building the Cambodian dancrelation to their intended audience(s) into three categories: ers were now depicted in combination with the Indian (a) “new creations in a more or less independent environ- Sanchi stupa (Pl. VII.13, compare Pl. III.5b). ment” that were appreciated by artists; (b) “stylised interCourthion’s second category of ‘stylised interpretations’, pretations of certain groups of inhabitants and buildings to for which exotic architectural elements were used to form create a characteristic ensemble” in the style of an open air creative assemblages in a partly modern approach, covered museum, to address the “dilettante”; and (c) “copies and the ensemble for the Belgian Congo designed by architect exact reconstitutions of buildings and indigenous palaces” Henri Lacoste (Fig. VII.38a), for Madagascar by architect for the pleasure of “ethnographers and scholars” to “con- Gabriel Vessière (Fig. VII.38b), and – next door to Angkor template a picturesque folklore” (Courthion 1931, 37, 38). Wat – the giant pavilion de l’Afrique Occidentale Française Logically, the most eloquent new creations covered France’s (AOF), which had been built by the architects Olivier and own cité des Informations and the palais de la Section métro- Lambert (Fig. VII.38c). The latter could in fact be described politaine with a typically rational 1930 design of undecorat- as “a copy of a copy” (Hodeir 1991, 45; compare Leprun 1986, ed white external surfaces and large geometric forms (Fig. 108–27) since its reference, the original grand mosque of VII.37a). In the same category, but bridging the gap of an Djenné, had been reconstructed by the French in an idealexotic architectural language, the much discussed musée ised Neo-Sudanese style at the beginning of the century. permanent des Colonies was not executed in the form of Most interesting in this typology, the Bali-style pavillon Angkor Wat or an African pavilion structure but in a neo-­ Néerlandais (Figs. VII.38d,e) – officially described as “not classicistic gesture by the architects Laprade and Jaussely. an exact reproduction but a creative evocation of local art The facades of the museum were covered by a giant art forms by the responsible two architects Pieter A. J. Moojen ­déco-influenced bas-relief by Alfred Janniot containing and W. J. W. Zweedijk” (Olivier 1934, VII, 233–310, here scenes of the colonised world with its predominantly ‘no- 277) – offered some interesting parallels to the French Ang­ ble savage’ people, agricultural products and industrial raw kor Wat project. Both the Dutch Indies and the French materials, untouched nature, and picturesque buildings ­Angkor Wat pavilions combined decorative elements of 326

4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figure VII.37a The pavillon de la Section métropolitaine of the 1931 Exhibition (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, n.p.)

Figures VII.37b,c  Le musée des Colonies of the 1931 Exhibition by Laprade/Jaussely, detail of the facade (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, n.p.; photo Michael Falser 2010)

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.38a—c  The Belgium ­Congo pavilion of the 1931 Exhibition by architect Lacoste (above), the Madagascar pavilion of the 1931 Exhibition by architect Vessière (middle), and the pavillon de l’Afrique Occidentale Française by the architects Olivier/ Lambert (below, in the left upper background the replica of Angkor Wat) (Source: Nicoll 1931, 186, 148; L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, n.p.)

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4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figures VII.38d,e  The Dutch East Indies pavilion before its destruction by fire (above), built by the architects Moojen/Zweedyk, and the new interior of the pavilion after its destruction (Source: Nicoll 1931, 201; L’Illustration, no. 4616, 22 August 1931, 575)

(here Balinese) temple architecture on the outside with ‘exact’ plaster casts of (here both Hindu and Buddhist) architectures and sculptures to build up the structure. Both provided modern interiors with exotic decorations and dioramas. And finally, both used the internal parcours to display and celebrate the colonial power’s civilising (in this case archaeological) missions.40 Most probably, Courthion might also have counted the small but curious kiosque of the Bureau des renseignements in this category, which, situated right at the exhibition’s principal entry at the Porte dorée, had been conceived by the architecte-décorateur Jean Louverse as a creative hybrid of Angkorian style elements

(Fig. VII.39). It was judged by La construction moderne as a “pleasing and precious harmony without any notion of a mere copy-paste from the original” [échantillonnage] (Goissaud 1931d). The third category of “exact copies and reconstitutions” was excoriated by Courthion, who cited the replica of Ang­ kor Wat as its worst example: This [section of exact copies and reconstitutions, MF] is the dead part of the exhibition. This is what one could find out by travelling, by reading a book, going to the cinema, by paying a lot of money. During the day, Angkor may

40  The Dutch East Indies pavilion had to be reconstructed after a fire that destroyed many original art ob-

jects from Java and Bali. This was heavily criticised by the Surrealist art movement (see its counter-exhibition project below) in a short declaration, “Premier bilan de l’Exposition colonial”, in 3 July 1931. See: Pierre 1980, 198–200.

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.39 A kiosque du Bureau des renseignements of the 1931 Exhibition on Angkorian style as depicted in La construction moderne (Source: La construction moderne, 27 September 1931, cover)

probably work as an illusion, but at night its illumination in a saffron colour reveals its whole lamentable condition as a construction of papier mâché [carton pâte]. [italics MF] (Courthion 1931, 52)

“strange” for the European gaze, their exact reconstitution in the exhibition was consequently “a too strong drink, the merit of which we [the Europeans, MF] might appreciate, but that will leave us dizzy” (Cogniat 1931, 339, 365). Interestingly, in his 1931 publication L’art de reconnaître les styles A comparable judgment of the structure as a dishonest “il- coloniaux de la France (where he tried to parallel and even lusion that seems from afar a faithful copy” but that has a incorporate the architecture of the French colonial domains “totally adapted interior” came from Raymond Cogniat in into the heritage canon of the French métropole) Émile an issue of L’Architecture in the same year. In general, he Bayard spoke of these stylistic reconstitutions as “ornamenjudged decorative art forms from Africa and Asia as too tal exaggerations” and “hallucinating marvels” with the 330

4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figure VII.40a  The USA pavilion as a replica of Mount Vernon, by architect Bryant (Source: Olivier 1934.VII, 131)

Figure VII.40b  The Italian pavilion as a replica of Leptis Magna, ­architect Brasini (Source: Nicoll 1931, 208)

same effect (Bayard 1931, 220). Courthion included the following in the same category of deplorable, soulless architec­tural copies: the reproduction of the Somalian mosque of Djibouti, the Moroccan pavilion, the United States’ replica of George Washington’s residence, Mount Vernon (Fig. VII.40a), and Italy’s “monstrous stucco copy” (Courthion 1931, 52) of the Roman basilica of Septimus Severus at Leptis Magna by the architect Brasini. The latter was intended to stage, in a manner comparable to Angkor for La Plus Grande France (Pl. VII.14), an archaeological

site in colo­nial Libya as a heritage icon of La Plus Grande Rome (Fig. VII.40b). While the above-mentioned critiques by Courthion and Cogniat were conceptualised from an architectural-aesthetic point of view, the formula of carton-pâte facades of supposedly ‘exactly copied and reconstituted’ temples with a totally different interior served as a strong metaphor for the political confrontations between the right-wing exhibition makers and the leftist milieu, ranging from artists and writing intellectuals to the extremist French Communist 331

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Party (compare the following statements with those of the Maoist Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia and the 1980s in Paris, chapter XI). Interestingly, ­Indochina and the temple of Angkor Wat in Paris played an important role in this discussion. When the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 approached its official inauguration on 6 May, the moderate socialist politician and later French prime minister (from 1936 onwards), Léon Blum, made parallels with the reconstituted Khmer temple in his anti-­ colonial ‘May 1 statement’ “L’exposition colonial: Moins de fêtes et de discours, plus d’intelligence”, published in the leftist journal Le Populaire: The Colonial Exposition is doubtless a beautiful spectacle, fertile in instruction and insights of all sorts. We do not object to the people of Paris, of France, of the universe taking pleasure and profit from it. Except that we must not forget what reality hides behind this decor of art and joy. We must not forget that everywhere conquered or subject peoples begin to reclaim their liberty. We have imposed on them our ‘superior’ civilisation; they recall against us its first principle: their right to dispose of themselves, of the fruit of their labour, of the riches of their soil. At the exhibition, we reconstitute the marvellous stairway of Ang­ kor [Wat] and make the sacred dancers twirl, but in Indochina we shoot, or deport, or imprison. That is why we do not take part in it with enthusiasm. We would like less festivity and talk, more human intelligence and justice. [italics MF] (Blum 1931)

In the same month of May 1931 the group of Surrealist artists in Paris, centred around Andé Breton, Georges Sadoul, Paul Éluard, André Thirion, Louis Aragon, and Georges Malkine, formulated their famous pamphlet Ne visitez pas l’Exposition coloniale. It expanded upon Léon Blum’s insinu­ ations they drew direct links between the communist riots in Vietnam and the colonial “Luna Park of Vincennes” to celebrate “the bourgeois birth of the new and particularly intolerable concept of la ‘Grande France’” (Pierre 1980, I, 194–95). The context of the riots in French Indochina was sustained in several short notices during May 1931, most importantly in L’Humanité, the official journal of the French Communist Party; again, Angkor Wat was one of the focal points. The first notice, from 3 May 1931, was entitled “L’impérialisme français contre les révolutionnaires indochinois. Au secours de notre camarade N’guyen Van Tao: Une déclaration du comité central du Parti Communiste Français” and reported on the anti-colonial activist and party member Van Tao who had been arrested in Paris and deported to Indochina. On 7 May the title page placed the heading “La vie de Tao est en danger” next to the official headline “Tandis qu’en Annam le sang coule… La foire de Vincennes a été ouverte hier par un discours impérialiste de Paul Rey-

naud”. Small photographs depicted “poor black figures with ridiculously small French tricolored flags” greeting Prime Minister Doumergue, Colonial Minister Reynaud, and the exhibition’s principal organiser Lyautey in front of Angkor Wat, which was then still unfinished and had the much-criticised charm of “a subway construction site” (Gaillard 1931). Further issues explored the practices of colonial exploitation and the French colonial massacres during the Yen-Bay mutiny in February 1931 “with several hundreds of causalities” (16 May) as well as subsequent French air raids (22 May) and calls for help for Van Tao and for anti-colonial action (17, 19, 20 May). The climax of this series was reached with a cover on 22 May bearing the title “Avec les Indochinois en révolte! Les assassins ont inauguré hier la section indochinoise de l’Exposition coloniale… Mais derrière le décor de Vincennes la Révolution annamite se poursuit invincible” (Renoult 1931). Reporting on the opening of the Indochinese section on 21 May with the Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, Pasquier, and Reynaud, the article brought Angkor in Cambodia and in Paris back to the contemporary context of revolutionary Indochina where a certain Nguyen Ai Quoc (later known as Ho Chi Minh) helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930: The temple of Angkor had been opened to the curiosity of the public. The temple of Angkor [Wat, MF], even at the gates of Paris, testifies, in front of the working class of France, the high civilisation of these races of Asia that our imperialism brought into the most degrading slavery. The temple of Angkor, astonishing testimony of the Indochinese past, of the time of the grand dynasties and of the power of the sacerdotal castes in Cambodia and Annam! However, also a testimony of a bygone past, since it is neither palaces nor temples that the arisen people of Indochina are ready to build up, but, with their Soviets already in place and the dictatorship of the workers and peasants, the socialist laicity. [italics MF] (Renoult 1931)

A low-quality photograph of the illuminated replica of Ang­ kor Wat in Paris during the inauguration ceremony of the Indochinese section on 21 May (Fig. VII.41a) depicted this highly criticised decorative illusion from the outside, which could – following the leftist discourse and a caricature in the journal’s 25 May issue showing pierced Indochinese heads in front of the “pavillon de l’Indochine” with a guillotine as the entry gate to the wooden structure – only temporarily hide the deeper character of French colonial brutality in Indochina (Fig. VII.41b). As a matter of fact, the organisers of the Colonial Exhibition were well aware of these subversive anti-colonial tendencies.41 Joseph Gaston, directeur des Affaires politiques within the Service de contrôle et d’assistance en France des indigènes des colonies françaises, reported on 14 April 1931

41  All the below quoted sources in: ANOM AGEFOM 908/2700 (Dossier Propagande révolutionnaire et

projets de manifestations contre l’Exposition coloniale).

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4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figures VII.41a,b  Headline and cartoon in L’Humanité in May 1931 (Source: L’Humanité, 22 May 1931, 1,2)

in a “Note pour le Ministre (secret)” about all ongoing activities including Van Tao’s efforts to “demonstrate that the Colonial Exhibition had been an insult against the Soviets that defended the suppressed people and a provocation of the capitalists against the proletarians”. “His techniques” had been the use of “red flags in trees and black banderols with white inscriptions on balloons, which were to be launched during the exhibition”. Along with other evidence of anti-colonial activities, Gaston’s secret service had found “three flyers of the Parti Communiste français” depicting caricatures of colonial repression and indigenous defence. He also mentioned the anti-colonial propaganda leaflet Le véritable guide de l’Exposition: L’œuvre civilisatrice de la France magnifiée en quelques pages. Interestingly, as the coordinator of the Indochinese section even Guesde took

part in these investigations and in April 1931, shortly before the opening of the exhibition, reported all findings to the Gouverneur général in Hanoi. A few weeks later, L’Humanité announced in its 4 July issue “L’exposition anti-impérialiste se prépare. Elle montrera la vérité sur les colonies”.42 Coordinated by the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, the exhibition at the Maison des Syndicats (8, avenue Mathurin Moreau) would, as the journal explained, “give the visitor a lively summary about the truths of imperialism […] with photographs, diagrams, […] art objects, and conferences with projections”. With its title La vérité sur les colonies, this counter-exhibition against the Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes opened its doors only on 19 September in the former site of the Soviet Constructivist pavilion by Konstantin

42  A lot of scientific literature has been published on this event. Compare the analysis in Geppert 2010, 179–200; Grandsart 2010; Palermo 2009; Morton 2000, 96–110; Norindr 1996, 52–71; Hodeir/Pierre 1991, 125–34; Lebovics 1990, ­Hodeir 1981, Ageron 1984).

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figures VII.42a,b  Angkor Wat used for a poster of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931 (left) and the anti-colonial exhibition (right) (Source: © Online resource; republished poster in Grandsard 2010, 101)

Melnikov for the Art Deco Exhibition of 1925. The in itself quite ambiguous exhibition comprised three rooms over two storeys with a ground-floor section designed by the Communist Party activist André Thirion on anti-colonial propaganda, nationalist movements, and communist expan­ sion. The first-floor section was organised by Louis Aragon, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, as a kind of culture- and religion-critical parcours intended to confront ‘primitive’ artefacts of the labelled “sauvages” (Cachin 1931, compare Peyralbe 1931) with mass-produced French art kitsch, ironically termed “fétiches européennes” (Palermo 2009, 30). Interestingly, the confrontation between mass-produced art-kitsch on the European side and non-European, ‘indigenous art objects’, which had been formerly ranked as ethnographic pieces, might, from a wider perspective, find its equivalent in the circulating posters of the colonial and the anti-colonial exhibition projects which both used the silhouette of Angkor Wat as their background (Figs. VII.42a,b). Following the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris when original Khmer sculptures had their larger coming-­ out in the French public as ethnographic artefacts, the 334

­subsequent 1889 Universal Exhibition expanded the voyeuristic gaze with a whole French-colonial section (Fig. VII.43a). Now, the representation of Angkor’s ancient art world had, for the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, mutated into endlessly reproduced decorative surface elements on a giant architectural reconstitution that had itself been criticised as a kitschy copy, and which served, as Jean Peyralbe termed it in L’Humanité on 5 November 1931, the “imperialist exhibitionism at Vincennes” (Peyralbe 1931). Anti-colonial critique commented on this ongoing deficit on the human side (Fig. VII.43b). On the architectural side, the thin, decorative skin of the ‘spectacular’ Angkor Wat replica concealed a hollow core – made of lightweight staff on the basis of original plaster casts from Angkor that Delaporte had initiated sixty years earlier (compare Fig. III.40; Pl. III.17,18b) – and had now mutated into a metaphor for the whole French colonial project with its loud rhetoric and, by then, quite rotten core. However, all these critiques counted for nothing when Angkor Wat was openly exploited in the context of the Colonial International Exhibition in Paris. Certainly, the first volume of the rapport général by Marcel Olivier was intro-

4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

Figures VII.43a,b  Europe’s voyeuristic gaze during the 1889 Universal Exhibition (left) and the opposite scenario of “The other colonial exhibition” as depicted in a cartoon about a colonial exhibition in Africa (right) (Source: Huard 1889, vol. 2, 488; © Fantasio/Vallée 1931, reprinted in Blanchard et al 2011, 231)

duced by the words of Paul Reynaud, the ministre des Colonies, that “all French did not only have to know that there was a French colonial empire, but they had to feel it”, and the 1931 Exhibition was considered the perfect tool in this mission (Olivier 1932, I, xv). Maréchal Lyautey was cited as paralleling “Christianity as a colonisateur d’âmes” with “colonisation [as such] to have modelled the face of the Occident”. Olivier added to this his idea of the “Occidental colonisers continuing the dream of Alexander the Great to work on a common civilisation, a common motherland for humankind” which included their “fecund task [tâche féconde] and tutoring role [rôle tutrice] in Asia and Africa […] to cultivate uncultivated lands and take its population out of its lethargy” (Olivier 1932, I, xviii). The Livre d’or of the 1931 Exhibition quoted Reynaud’s “France’s colonial vocation” and judged, with Angkor Wat as its “moving sym­ bol [symbole émouvant]”, the “œuvre civilisatrice of France in Indochina, despite its slanderers [détracteurs], [as] one of the most beautiful manifestations of the génie français” (Livre d’or 1931, 9, 118, 120). In any case, these were not the publications read by the larger public at a time when Albert Sarraut’s 1931 publica-

tion Grandeur et servitudes coloniales was circulated to spread the recent idea of a pacte colonial within the rhetoric of the new ‘politics of association’. Probably no other popular journal brought the above-mentioned verbal exploitations of Angkor Wat in Paris more to the point than L’Illustration with its special May 1931 issue on the Exposition coloniale. In their unctuous contributions, Marcel Oli­ vier (Rapporteur général of the whole exhibition), Pierre Deloncle (Sécretaire général of the exhibition and Rapporteur général of Group I Politique coloniale), and Claude Farrère (an academic journalist) referred indirectly to the inauguration ceremony on 6 May 1931 when the French president Gaston Doumergue, together with Maréchal Lyautey, walked by the Angkor Wat replica in the presence of the larger public (Fig. VII.44). Similar political or satirical messages and depictions were transferred into public media, such as Le Miroir du Monde, Le Pèlerin or Le Rire (Pl. VII.15a,b; compare Fig.Intro. 1a). As these authors suggested, the Angkor Wat replica served during the 1931 Exhibition (a) as a symbolic pars pro toto for the French colonial mission civilisatrice, (b) as a temporary stage set for all kind of political scenarios dur335

VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.44  Inauguration of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, scene in front of the Angkor Wat replica (Source: © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet Paris)

Figures VII.45a,b  Visit of the Duke and the Duchess of York at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris with Cambodian women delegation (left); on the pathway of the Angkor Wat replica after a nocturnal dinner party inside the structure (right) (Source: L’Illustration, 25 July 1931, 449, © photo Keystone; Olivier 1931.IV, between 442–43, © photo Keystone)

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4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

ing the exhibition’s inauguration and during official state visits from other colonial powers, and, finally and most important (c), to invent France not only as the re-discoverer and protector of Angkor Wat, but as its legal inheritor and even owner (see especially Farrère’s comment). However, insinuations about the anti-colonial and communist counter-movements were hidden in these exclamations: At this very moment, when somewhere on this planet ­diverse intellectuals and certain political parties speak so easily about a failure [of the colonial project, MF] or a supposed “decline of the West”, the International Colonial Exhibition in the Vincennes Park strongly affirms that none of the great European nations (including the United States) are willing to admit any failure or to renounce the civilising mission upon which they [have] embarked. [This exhibition] is a brilliant manifestation […] of the legitimacy of the participating nation’s pride in their colonial past. In this vast comparison of their applied methods, the colonisers will also gain an equally precious double lesson: of the legitimacy of their mission and of the solidarity that unites them in their ongoing effort to propagate and ­defend a civilisation from which humanity will receive so many benefits. [italics MF] —Pierre Deloncle, “La continuité de l’action coloniale française”, in: L’Illustration, May 1931 The inauguration of the Colonial Exhibition was a global event […] Our custodial role [rôle tuteur] is vital […] To agitate the Orient against the Occident is a dangerous and fruitless undertaking. For those who doubt the possibility of living side by side and even uniting, for the ­benefit of all, the thinking of the Occident with that of the Orient, I simply advise meditating for some hours in the halls of the Indochinese or the Dutch Indies sections! [italics MF] —Marcel Olivier, “L’exposition coloniale: Œuvre de paix”, in: L’Illustration, May 1931 Only few, timid Khmer ruins have survived that had for whatever reasons been saved from total destruction by the invaders from Hué and Bangkok. By placing the flag of our [French, MF] republic on this debris that is today on Cambodian soil, and by forcing the Siamese to restitute Angkor to the oppressed and deprived Cambodians, we realised not an œuvre of a simple imperialism but [a veritable] freeing [affranchissement]. And the temples of Ang­kor symbolise much less a united and inseparable Indochina — following the childish conception of the Sovietised political agitators [politicailleurs] and their blind adherents, their dupes — than a dead civilisation, which had been killed by the worst violence and is now revived by France. […] This reconstitution of Angkor is the star attraction of the Colonial Exhibition, and Angkor itself is the masterpiece of the

entire section of Indochina. […] For those who gaze at this splendid reconstitution of Angkor […] I wish the discretion to understand that it is us, the French in Asia [Français d’Asie], us, the Occidental pacifiers of the Far East, who are the legitimate inheritors of this antique Khmer civilisation, us, certainly better than all who followed this old civilisation until our arrival in these far away and holy regions. It is us there, where we are now, who banned further violence, killing, and the destruction of the past, who is the natural teacher of the ­future. This, our œuvre, is beneficial. We shall continue! [bolding, italics MF] —Claude Farrère, “Angkor et l’Indochine”, in: L’Illustration, May 1931

With the absence of Great Britain’s pavilion structure, a great emphasis was placed on the visit of the Duke (later King George VI of Great Britain) and the Duchess of York to the Colonial Exhibition on 17 July 1931. Lyautey walked the guests in front of the perfectly organised stage set of Angkor Wat (compare Fig. Intro.1a), where they were greeted by a Cambodian women delegation (Fig. VII.45a) and, later that day, promenaded along the illuminated passageway of Angkor Wat (Fig. VII.45b) after “a sumptuous dinner in the Angkor Wat pavilion” (Beauplan 1931a) with Colonial Minister Reynaud. In these moments, the mimetic gap between the real site of Angkor Wat and its ephemeral replica suddenly disappeared, spatial and temporal constraints collapsed, and the most important colonial powers of Europe, Great Britain, and France walked side by side in their common goal of colonial tutelage. When Ang­ kor Wat was illuminated at night in different colours and accentuated by a radiating star as a “fée électricité” (Beau­ plan 1931b), the “vision apothéotique” (Nicoll 1931, 225) of France’s political and cultural claim over Cambodia’s giant temple site was, for a short moment at least, as perfectly staged and commodified in Paris (Fig. VII.46, Pl. VII.16) as at the ‘real’ twin site back in the Parc archéologique d’Ang­ kor which had just been established few years earlier in 1925 (compare Pl. X.22–24) In the meanwhile, ideas began to emerge about how to use the site after the closure of the Exposition coloniale.43 The Société pour l’esthétique générale de la France, with its president Henri Texier, proposed keeping the temple site open for future tourists to Paris and for school classes, and even Maréchal Lyautey supported this option in a letter to the colonial minister in December 1931. An internal report of the Entreprise Lajoinie (the original construction firm commissioned to built Angkor Wat for the 1931 Exhibition) reconfirmed the feasibility of stabilising the temple site for a reopening in 1932. Most interesting was a project for a “Parc colonial permanent” by the journalist Paul-Yves Sébillot who proposed a picturesque, slowly dying, and overgrown site in the eastern suburbs of Paris that would,

43  For all the following projects, see ANOM ECI 7 (Inauguration, fermeture, reouverture, Angkor).

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VII  Going Real Size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris

Figure VII.46  The nocturnal illumination of the Angkor Wat replica during the 1931 Paris Exhibition as published in L’Illustration (Source: © Pacific and Atlantic, published in L’Illustration, no. 4616, 22 August 1931, n.p.)

Figure VII.47  The destruction of the Angkor Wat replica in the 1931 Paris Exhibition after the closing of the event (Source: © Mondial Photo Press, republished in Grandsard 2010, 255)

in fact, bring the structure in Paris aesthetically much closer to its original counterpart in Cambodia: The Temple of Angkor [Wat] will not be destroyed but emptied of its collections. Nobody will access its interior anymore, but the whole structure will be repaired to the point that it will not collapse for the time shown to the

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public. We could make the vegetation moderately invade the structure. Like this, we will have at the gates of Paris the new ruins of Angkor for the next twenty or thirty years (relating to its resistance), starting in May 1932. The nightly illuminations will be re-installed for paying visitors and the central passageway of Angkor [Wat] conserved. [italics MF]

4. Architectural taxonomies and (anti-)colonial discourses around 1931

However, all these ideas were in vain. A ministerial decree had already decided in October 1931 that Angkor Wat in Paris had to die with almost all the other ephemeral exhibition structures when they were dismantled by March 1932; what had started as “the triomphe du staff ”44 when the exhibition opened, now was called “La fin d’un rêve” – “La fin d’un monde”45 (Fig. VII.47). Almost no traces remain until today from Angkor Wat’s replica in Paris (compare Fig. Intro.15b). Eighty years later, the former site of ephemeral French-­ colonial glory offers today an ironic and even sad impression to the strolling visitor: The former musée permanent des Colonies is today converted into a Museum of French Immigration History (Bocard 2018) and is occasionally oc-

cupied for demonstrations by immigrants sans papiers from former colonial countries that were supposed to be protected by the caring mère patrie as depicted in the main hall’s rear wall. The paved imprint of the major axes of the former avenue des Colonies and the chaussée centrale towards Ang­kor Wat is still visible in the park around the lac Daumesnil, but today inline skaters make their rounds on the site where Lyautey promenaded in 1931 with the future king of Great Britain. The site where what was probably the largest ephemeral reconstitution of an Asian temple on the European continent stood for a mere six months representing French colonial grandeur is now deserted and temporarily reserved for sad circus tents and flea market events (Pl. VII.17).

44  This exclamation was cited in E.-H. Weiss’s article “Comment on monte une exposition” in the 3 June 1931 issue (number 168) of Vu: L’Illustré français, 795. 45  “La fin d’un rêve” was the title of a summarising article by Jean d’Erleich in the journal Vu: l’Illustré français 193, (25 November 1931); “La fin d’un monde” was written by Paul-Émile Cadilhac in L’Illustration, 4630 (28 November 1931). Compare Grandsart 2010, 112–16.

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The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

1. The regionalist turn, or Le plus grand régionalisme: From the ‘colonial picturesque’ to the ‘French indigenous’ An exhibition, this is a kind of immense architectural, artistic, and technical laboratory. […] I have confidence in the future of regionalism. Above all, in its technical dimension, this means, craftsmanship. […] Let us remember the festivities of the Colonial Exhibition of 1931. […] There, visions of our overseas empire [des visions de notre Empire d’Outre-Mer] had been constituted, with special concern for the veracity [vérité] and for the picturesque quality of the reconstitutions. All this was a unique spectacle both of practical instruction and effective propaganda. Why could our French regions not offer the same coloured pictures in their living reality [tableaux aussi colorés dans leur réalité vivante]? The ‘Regional Centre’ will be the key event of the 1937 Exhibition. It will be picturesque, attractive, but it will also be fecund in economical and social instruction. [italics MF] (Labbé 1935, 5, 14, 15) —Edmont Labbé, Le régionalisme à l’exposition internationale (1935)

On 9 October 1935, when Edmond Labbé, the Commissaire The “future of regionalism”, Labbé’s fourth point, lay “first général of the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et des of all in its technical aspect”, in “craftsmanship [artisanat]”, techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris, gave his speech at which “in the human scale of the atelier could not be disthe “réunion d’étude and at the reception of the presidents, placed by the factory in its own scale of the machine”. In his secretaries, and architects of the regional committees”, his fifth point, Labbé brought together “regionalism and French main topic was not (as at previous exhibitions) the old quality” where “craftsmanship and art were the two [most] Saint-Simonian blend of progress, industrialism, scientific noble sorts of human activity”. As far as the architectural discovery, and a French vision of global expansionism and language of the planned exhibition was concerned, he colonialism but supposedly the exact opposite: regionalism. sought to “get rid of decadent styles, […] to humanise a He developed his speech along six major points. Responding new kind of art against the avant-garde”, and to help “the to the first question, “What do we mean by regionalism?”, decorative element in order to bring a soul into the new Labbé encouraged his collaborators to celebrate and rein- forms” (Labbé 1935, 5–6). In his sixth and last point on force (a) “all artistic and technical forms” of regionalism, “regionalism and tourism”, Labbé turned to the commercial (b) “the singular traditions that gave each [French] prov- aspect of his project for which “France had, maybe more ince its particular physiognomy” (compare with Lanessan’s than ever, a double interest in remaining régionaliste”. approach for the colonial section of 1889), and (c) “the efIn his address to the regional committees from the difforts to adapt these traditions in a new way to the needs of ferent French provinces participating in the Paris Exhibithe present [modern] life” (Labbé 1935, 4). tion, Labbé came closer to the specific stylistic programme He defined “the politics of regionalism”, his second point, of the intended Centre régional: “The houses of our prov“not only as politics of pure and simple reaction against cer- inces will borrow [emprunter] from the old architectures tain tendencies of industrial civilisation, such as cosmo­ their fundamental lines that seem to be best adapted to the politism and abstraction, but as a policy of adaptation”. As exigencies of the climate and the colour of their specific region.” Their individual construction would employ the he explored in his third point, his “overall goal” was to re-evaluate the past in a way that the planned “Centre ré- best materials transcending technical progress. Referring gional” for the upcoming exhibition, with the French prov- to the 1925 Exhibition he wrote, “Neither the architecture inces in specific pavilion structures, would not be “a mere nor the regional arts should be copies or pastiches of museum, a collection point of old junk and time-barred the past, without soul and full of deformation” (Labbé 1935, forms, or a charming but totally outmoded and unusable 12, 13). bazaar”, but rather “a fecund experience to discover what What was most astonishing in Labbé’s speech was that had to be preserved from all French regionalisms, what was his major reference for the new French regionalist project missing or to be developed”. From this viewpoint, Labbé was not the 1925 Exhibition on French decorative art and understood ‘his’ exhibition “as a sort of immense architec- architecture (his ‘anti-pastiche’ term certainly originated tural, artistic, and technical laboratory” (Labbé 1935, 5). from this 1925 context) but was instead the exotic pavilions 341

VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. It was here that the indig- building on federalist thinkers from the second half of the enously French ‘regionalist’ scene would find its inspiration. nineteenth century (like the utopian socialist Pierre ProudAccording to Labbé, the colonial pavilions of 1931 had hon or the writer and founder of the regionalist Félibrige “represented the visions of the French Empire d’Outre-Mer movement, Fréderic Mistral) who pleaded for the decenwith a great exactitude and their [architectural] reconstitu- tralisation and deconcentration of the Parisian political, tion and picturesqueness had not only produced a unique administrative, cultural, industrial, and economic system, spectacle, but also served for practical instruction and Charles-Brun founded the Fédération Régionaliste Française fructuous propaganda”. In reference to the colonial ensem- (hereafter FRF) in 1900 and formulated its manifesto in bles of 1931, he asked: “Why should our French regions [for 1901.1 He also initiated the journal L’action régionaliste in the 1937 Exhibition, MF] not offer the same colourful picture which diverse political (and colonial) actors, such as Paul in their living reality?” (Labbé 1935, 14, see quote above). Doumer, Albert Lebrun, and André Tardieu, published esFinally, keeping the same image of the 1931 Exhibition with says. its colonial ‘human installations’ in mind (compare Bancel With strong influences coming from the Géographie hu2002, Grandsart 2010, Blanchard 2011), Labbé encouraged maine by Paul Vidal de la Blache and Jean Brunhes after the different regional representatives of France “to find the 1900, though more a political than a geographic, aesthetic, or [same] folkloristically costumed groups” and the authentic even artistic treatise, Charles-Brun’s most important work, “indigenous” artists for their “Centre Régional” (Ministère Le régionalisme of 1911, became the bible for a country-­ du commerce 1938, 191–92). wide regionalist movement (compare Wright 2003, Meyer In a paradigmatic shift, and contradicting the old-fash- 2004). This movement would materialise in the Centre réioned, imperial one-way export of France’s own metropol- gional for the 1937 Exhibition with Charles-Brun as an emitan culture into its receiving colonies, Labbé’s ‘cultural inent but heavily criticised member of its Commission rélaboratory’ in the form of an international exhibition at the gionale. In general, régionalisme can be conceptualised as a centre of French power applied the notion of authentic pa- multiform “ideological crossroads” (Flory 1966, 108; comvilion structures, cultural performances, and craftsmanship pare Moentmann 2003). It bor­rowed from different politi(not art!) from the colonies – or, better still, from the colo- cal directions and different protagonists to amalgamate the nies as they had been re-presented in the 1931 Exhibition emerging human sciences, decentralist politics, a rising in Paris – onto France’s own ‘regionalist and indigenous’ awareness of France’s rural and vernacular culture, nationcultural heritage canon. In the spectacular 1938 Livre d’or alist cultural pride (with a strong focus on patrimoine culofficiel from the 1937 Exhibition, Labbé’s 1935 comment turel and commercial interests in the touristic exploitation was reprinted as the “same coloured tableaux of living real- of France’s provinces) into a larger regionalist package for ity”, and it was suggested that the Outre-mer pavilions of the 1937 Exhibition. Although Le régionalisme was pubthe 1931 Colonial Exhibition would now “symbolise a lished before World War I in the form of a book by CharlesFrench union” in which patriotism and regionalism would Brun while Labbé’s promotional tour for the Centre région“serve the national cause”. Only at the moment of great po- al occurred during the last years before World War II, it is litical rhetoric before and during the 1937 event was this astonishing how similar both protagonists’ thoughts were paradigm shift, as we shall see, rephrased into a politically in the context of the 1937 Exhibition. correct parlance of protective and paternalistic transfer This observation requires a brief analysis of CharlesBrun’s 1911 arguments. Interestingly, he introduced the from the French centre into its colonial peripheries. Certainly, régionalisme in the French context was not “fashionable term régionalisme” in 1911 not as a rigid ideojust invented in the context of the 1937 Exhibition but had logical programme but as a “mot d’attente”, a term awaiting developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, a better all-comprising conceptual umbrella, which was gained public and official attention after 1900 as a term and never found or formulated. In his book, containing almost concept, and ‘materialised’ in its most spectacular but also 350 pages with several appendices (including on the promost ambiguous form in the 1937 Exhibition. If there is one jects established to divide France into regions and the faperson who can be quoted as the father of the regionalist mous ‘Appeal of the FRF’), he pondered régionalisme from movement in France, it is the poet, writer, teacher, and po- four main perspectives: (a) the political and administrative, litical thinker Jean Charles-Brun (1870–1946). Strongly (b) the moral and social, (c) the intellectual, and (d) the

1 The Manifeste de la FRF as it was redacted by Charles-Brun in 1901 focused on administrative, economic,

and intellectual issues. In his discussion of intellectual issues, he defined the FRF’s “essential goals and means” in six points, where, apart from the claim for a total regional renewal of the political, artistic, and scientific parameters, the second point was important for the following discussion: “An intelligent choice of traditions and instruction in local history and folklore connect the child to his ancestors and give him the pride of the native soil [sol natale] as much as a patriotism for the tangible realities [réalités tangibles].” In: Flory 1966, 111–12.

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1. The regionalist turn, or Le plus grand régionalisme

economic. However, the first chapters were used to introduce the term more widely. In the third chapter on “Le plus grand régionalisme”’, Charles-Brun wrote: One is regionalist, even not using the term itself in a ­virtual way, if one loves his own piece of earth and his church spire [son coin de terre et son clocher] — this love is the sentimental foundation of regionalism — even if one is far away. One is also regionalist if one is interested in his past with its monuments and landscapes; and if one regrets, besides of all systems, the [lost] picturesque of our old provinces, their costumes, dialects, legends, and songs. Or better said: It is these regrets as they were formulated by poets and artists that have prepared the soil for the regionalist movement all over France. (Charles-Brun 1911, 45)

la région and le centre régional” (Charles-Brun 1911, 79). In the sixth chapter on “Régionalisme intellectuel”, CharlesBrun called for a “veritable provincial renaissance of regional art and literary regionalism”, both of which should be – and this was an important hint at the plans of the Centre régional of 1937 – “translated with a particular sensibility of each region, […] a quality of the proper imagination and choice of the borrowed images [choix d’images empruntées] in the regional decor, […] in the idiom of the region” (Charles-Brun 1911, 141, 143). Had not this very term ‘stylistic borrowing’ been central in describing and justifying the hybrid representations of colonial (in this case Asian, Angkorian) architecture in previous universal and colonial exhibitions? In his 1911 work, in the sixth chapter on “Régionalisme intellectuel”, Charles-Brun warned about the stylistic exaggerations and commercialised (above all centrally controlled) perversions of a “régionalisme d’opéra-comique” of which he was himself later accused when the Centre régional finally opened as part of the 1937 Exhibition:

What is important in this context is Charles-Brun’s above-­ cited third chapter where he defined the “virtual character” of régionalisme as a “sentimental foundation” formed by each person’s local bond to “customs, costumes, dialects, legends, and songs” and a specific “piece of earth” [amour We have to know that artistic regionalism is not the task of du coin de terre], symbolised by the quintessential architecjunk dealers and embalmers [bibelotiers et embaumeurs] tural, “provincial and picturesque” landmark – the “church anymore; we know that our provinces have a soul, or, betspire” [clocher]. This place was longed for “from a distance ter, ‘particular nuances’ of a soul, which we have to deteror even from further away” [éloigné, d’ailleurs] (Charlesmine and to translate — all the rest would be parade or Brun 1911, 45). However, the term “d’ailleurs” did not refer, exploitation. (Charles-Brun 1911, 141, 143) as one might think from the term’s typical French usage at the time, to the French compatriots in France’s far-away After a detour into “linguistic regionalism”, which he saw colonies who were longing for their beloved métropole but (and this is useful for our discussion of style formations of to French immigrants living in Paris and their love for their regionalist ‘languages’) as a “purification as well as propahome provinces. In a footnote, Charles-Brun guided the gation of the use of a local idiom” (Charles-Brun 1911, 161), reader to his 1901 article “Les colonies provinciales à Paris” Charles-Brun pushed for the foundation of “regional muwhere he had also introduced the terms “population in- seums” and the “formation of the youth and the artisan”. In digène” and “autochthones”, not in reference to the colo- his last chapter on the economic and social aspects of nised inhabitants in French colonies, but to the Parisians ­regionalism, he advocated regional associations of rural who were now confronted with a massive influx of immi- industries (to “translate the aesthetic of each region” as grants from the countryside. These new classes in the French ­“regional brands, a label [sic]” under the “authenticity of capital formed their own “provincial colonies” and patriotic regional products”) and preconfigured what Labbé would (particularistic) “associations”, which Charles-Brun judged advocate about fifteen years later: the nationalist tourist a “considerable agent of the French regionalist movement” industry under the regionalist paradigm. In Charles-Brun’s (Charles-Brun 1901, 465, 475, 486). Counting all trends and words, the “Touring Club helped to propagate the regional politically varying attitudes of “provincialisme, traditional- beauties, to maintain the picturesque where possible, to isme, décentralisation, anti-réglementation, décentralisation, build traveller’s inns in regionalist architecture”, while “loparticularisme, féderalisme, l’école de retour aux champs” as cal hoteliers asked for the maintenance of regional gastronpart of this movement, he defined “regionalism [as] a meth- omy” and private regionalist associations and their conod rather than a system, [more] a discipline and an attempt gresses (ironically, he mentioned the Amis du Vieux Paris) to reconcile [essai de réconciliation] tradition and progress, encouraged the “protection and embellishment of [culturindividualism and utilitarism, particularism and patriotism al] sites, historic monuments, and landscapes” (Charles[within] national unity” (Charles-Brun 1911, 60, 65). Brun 1911, 190–96). Most of these regionalist ideas, which In 1911 Charles-Brun claimed for the French provinces the (in fact, Paris-based) Charles-Brun described in his what Labbé would announce in 1935 to be temporarily 1911 publication as developments originating from French staged as a regional section, ironically, during an interna- peripheries and influencing centralist politics in Paris, tional exhibition in the very political centre of France (and would be – twenty-five years later and with an even larger with Charles-Brun as planning coordinator): “Against the impetus driven by the radicalised politics of France in the interwar period – renegotiated, appropriated, and directly Parisian almightiness, […] regionalism essentially claims 343

VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

applied by the centralist, Paris-based planners for the 1937 gionalist turn, the colonial exhibition modes of la plus Exhibition. As has been concluded elsewhere: “The Exhibi- grande France finally mutated into la plus grande régionation of 1937, the 1937 Congress of Folklore, and the ses- lisme within France proper – as Charles-Brun entitled the sions of the FRF were the geometrical [synergetic] spots above-quoted third chapter in his own book from 1911 where scientists, politicians, regionalists, and folklorists (Charles-Brun 1911, 43–48) and which term Labbé took up met, each with their own preoccupations and objectives” again in 1935. With one very short remark in October 1934, (Meyer 2004, 38). Labbé had relaunched the idea of a colonial section under The interconnectedness before and after 1900 of the re- the motto of regionalism and local handicraft in the very gionalist concepts of the evaluation, protection, and pro- journal – Charles-Brun’s L’Action régionaliste – that defendmotion of art, architecture, and cultural heritage (défense ed the same terms in France: du patrimoine) between the French regionalist scene and the developments in the French (in our case Indochinese) To maintain the regionalist character in our exhibition, we colonies was already visible: regionalist amateur associapropose to let participate our grand provincial cities at tions like the Société Normande d’ethnographie et d’art pothe great artistic and scientific festivities that we are planpulaire ‘le Vieux Honfleur’ (1896, compare in the same year ning. And we have also thought about our colonies and the installation of Vieux-Rouen in the Rouen Exhibition; protectorates. In Morocco as well as Indochina, the renaissee chapter V) found their counterpart, for example, in the sance of the indigenous art industries [métiers] give reaSociété des Amis du Vieux Hué in today’s Vietnam (1913); son for great hopes and expectations.3 [italics MF] an antiquarian Société pour la protection des paysages et de l’esthétique de la France (founded in 1901) was mirrored in The regionalist movement was a highly heterogeneous inthe Société d’Angkor pour la conservation des monuments terest group and its journal published many different opinanciens de l’Indochine of 1908; the discourse on the deca- ions. Labbé’s invitation for the direct participation of the dence and revival of regional arts and crafts in France like FRF and Charles-Brun’s positive answer were, from 1934 in Charles-Brun’s FRF of 1900 had had its counterpart in onwards, hotly debated by regionalist purists as they feared George Groslier’s applied arts renovation programme in (a) the loss of regionalist interests during the centralist Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh since the 1910s (Muan planning of the event, and (b) that revived, retroacting ten2001), or in the foundations of regional art schools all over dencies of a former ‘colonial’ pastiche style in French exhiIndochina (see discussion below); the Touring-Club de bitions would now be reconfigured in a newly invented France (founded 1890 and cited by Charles-Brun) also fos- regionalist language with the same aesthetic effect. tered cultural tourism in Indochina2 and especially at Ang­ As H. Godbarge explained in his contribution “L’Exposi­ kor, which was slowly turned into a picture-perfect archae- tion de 1937 et la section des arts régionaux: Le régionalisme ological reserve (Falser 2013d). Finally, the French legal vu par un régionaliste de province” in the January 1935 isframework of the Classement, protection et conservation des sue of L’Action régionaliste, the “centralist stamp [estampille] monuments historiques et des objets d’art in 1913 was direct- ‘made in Paris’ from the high official aréopage” for the ly applied as a legal instrument for Indochina in 1925 “transplanted regionalist houses” would turn these into (Gouvernement général de l’Indochine 1925, compare the “masquerade and exotic objects” in the old colonial language protection measure for Parc archéologique d’Angkor from of “imitated far-away mosques, copies of Swiss chalets, or the same year onwards; see chapter IX). Although these reproductions of Seville-style patios” – all together a “reapsocial, aesthetic, artistic, commercial, and legal concepts of pearance of exoticism as a regionalism of junk [exotisme ou patrimoine culturel ran from the métropole of France to the régionalisme en toc] in the form of provincial houses en colonial peripheries, the concept of French ‘indigenous ar- carton-pâte, rustic houses as plagiats next to the gigantic tisanat’ was first developed in the colonial sub-committees lines of a Parisian caravansary” (Godbarge 1935). This disand their colonial sections of French Exhibitions (1855– cussion continued in the journal throughout 1935, and 1931) and only migrated, as a second step, to the sections of Charles-Brun himself suggested in the July/August issue France’s own vernacular and provincial culture. In a re- something that brought his idea dangerously close to what

2  See for example F. Bernard’s and M. A. Umbdenstock’s publication L’Indo-Chine of 1912 as part of the Conférences de propagande avec projections, en faveur du développement du tourisme en France. 3  Quotation by Labbé in “Exposition 1937 (suite)”. See: L’Action régionaliste (October 1934), 7. Interestingly, in the November 1935 issue of the journal, Labbé redirected (rephrased) his quote from his 9 October 1935 speech about the picturesque presentation of the colonies in the 1931 Exhibition as a positive example and direct reference for the upcoming scenario of the French Centre régional of 1937 (see introductory quotation) to the “living reality” French provinces themselves: “Pourquoi nos régions françaises n’offriraient pas des tableaux aussi colorés que dans leur réalité vivante?”. Labbé’s 9 October speech quoted in the continuing report of the 1937 Exhibition, in: L’Action régionaliste (November 1935), 8.

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1. The regionalist turn, or Le plus grand régionalisme

in his 1911 publication he had feared would be the com- In the same 1936 issue, in his contribution “Overseas mercial and centralist exploitation of stylistic stereotypes France” a few pages earlier, Léon Géraud, introduced as of regionalist architecture: a “large concours comprising the “honorary governor of the colonies”, brought the colonial French regions after which, following the sage project of craftsman into the French project: the president of the Touring Club, each regional pavilion would be constituted as a sort of [regional stylistic, MF] We consider colonial France like one of our provinces. sample [une sorte d’échantionnage] and help the effort of Overseas France will manifest as a cultural and artistic aschannelling the exhibition visitors to the [real] provinces pect of all France. We are glad our colonies have, so many where a calendar of attractions should be established”.4 Inof them, such different civilisations and arts. What we interestingly, he hurried to comment a few months later in this tend to show is France, integral, in arts, crafts, and scienccontext about the danger of “music hall, opéra comique– es. […] Native craftsmen […] will have a high rank in the like manifestations, and a commercial exploitation of reexposition. The Colonial Exhibitions that we had before — gional costumes”, and he provided the conceptual clarificathat of Marseille in 1922, even that of 1931 — really did not tion that all artistic and handicraft treasures from the give the craftsman his full place in the sun. […] We hope provinces themselves qualified for the term “régionale”, to show all international visitors that our colonies have whereas only “the attempt to preserve everything regional not been established in vain. [italics MF] (Géraud 1936) was called régionaliste”.5 Within the wide media coverage explicitly produced to Using the new public medium of the radio, the president of announce the 1937 event, the link between the French-re- the commission for the overseas section, Henry Bérenger, gionalist’ and the ‘French-colonial’ was established only by explained in June 1936 that the latest development of the mid-1936 when a Colonial Centre was officially announced. section La France d’outre-mer involved a “pavillon de synAs early as 1 May 1936 the French Magazine officiel for the thèse” to “explain the technical and cultural advancements 1937 event was published in English as Official Magazine – of all French colonies, protectorates, and mandated territoExposition Paris 1937: Arts, Crafts, Sciences in Modern Life. ries” that would form a “picturesque presentation with four In its second issue in June 1936 the French term régional- facades” (two exterior elevations looking towards the shores isme in the colonial connection was explained to the An- of the Seine and two along the inner central pathway on the glophone readership by Adolphe Dervaux, vice president island), “grouped in a geographical order”. Now the “French of the Society of Modern Architects and president of the overseas provinces and possessions on five continents would French Society of Urbanists: complete, in a quasi-natural prolongation, the tableau artisanal et technique of the French metropolitan provinces” (Bérenger 1936a). In the third 1936 issue in July, Bérenger It is a new word, recently invented, and coined by the French. ‘Régionalisme’ is a sort of cult of native and pro- brought the supposedly fruitful direct encounter between vincial customs and thoughts and products. […] It is sim- (and “emulation” of) the colonial exotic and the French regions into a rhetoric of renaissance (implying decadence) ply desired to show that each country keeps its timbre, its own beauty, and its fascination. And since the Exposition and progress. What Foucault in his 1967 essay on heterotoof 1937 has to mark, for its programme, the definite pia called out a ‘side-by-side’-constellation of colonies (see stamp of modern civilisation, it will be seen that each re- introduction) came here as a new configuration: gion possesses as much faith in the future as it does love for the past. […] The plans for the Regional Centre — which is really a double group, as the Colonial Centre is a part of it — show what a charming ensemble it will be, and that respect for the traditions will play an important part in these modern buildings. The Regional Centre will not respect geography: however, the Seine will very often play the role of seas and oceans, whenever visitors wish to explore the pavilions symbolising France’s overseas colonies or protectorates. Boats, leaving the embankments of the river, will take them to Madagascar, the French South Sea Islands, or Algeria. […] every country has its ‘Régionalisme’. […] Though we are pioneers in ‘Régionalisme’, we hope that all other nations will join us in this interesting work. [italics MF] (Dervaux 1936)

As to the craftsmen, they will be chosen by the governors of our colonies from among those who have preserved the best local traditions. The fact that colonial craftsmen will — for the first time — work side by side with our own craftsmen from the provinces will contribute to the creation among them of a happy emulation that will in its turn help artistic and technical progress. Thus, the 1937 Exposition will not only give us an interesting picture of life in overseas France but will be the starting point of a renaissance of colonial arts and crafts in contact with the most modern forms of metropolitan social life. Thus, we will show both to European France and to the whole world the real aspect of intercontinental France, in its essential unity and its varied beauty. [italics MF] (Bérenger 1936b)

4  Charles-Brun’s Editorial in: L’Action régionaliste, July–August 1935, 1. 5  Charles-Brun’s Editorial in: L’Action régionaliste, December 1935, 1.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figures VIII.1a,b  French (left) and colonial (right) craftsmanship, as depicted in the official ­English journal for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris (Source: Exposition Paris 1937. ­Official Magazine, 2 (6.1936), n.p.; and 3 (7.1936), 13)

The first illustrations of the various types of handicraft in the had fallen asleep on a concrete staircase and was wearing 1936 English journal, however, spoke to the old-fashioned, rather ‘Occidental’-looking rubber sneakers. When the hierarchising language of a well-ordered, even institution- tourist guides (like the bilingual Album-programme) of the alised, handicraft in France that existed alongside a ver­ 1937 Exhibition came out, the “overseas provinces” were nacular, primitive, and uncontrolled version of “colonial indeed sold as “Cité artisanale de la France d’outre-mer” to craftsmanship” (Figs. VIII.1a,b). When the one-page con- “complete, as a natural prolongation, the artistic and culturtribution titled “The Arts and Crafts of Indo-China at the al panorama of la France totale”. However, as had been Exhibition of 1937” in the October 1936 issue announced done in all previous exhibition projects, “the incomparable that “these arts which have their origin in a very remote artistic richness of the French domaine ultra marin” was past may also be seen [at the exhibition] in their most re- still differentiated into “half savage” [demie sauvagerie] and cent developments due to the influence of the French “millennia old civilisations” that were themselves not part schools of Art” in Indochina, the accompanying illustra- of but could only contribute their old traditions to “the tion showed – above one depicting an old cigar-smoking modern life” of the “métropole” (Exposition internationale women at a bazaar – a female “Hawker selling combs” who Arts et Techniques Paris 1937 [1937a], 40).

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2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies

2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies En dehors d’Île des Cygnes, il n’y a pas de participation coloniale!6 —Edmond Labbé quoted in a preparatory session on 6 February 1936

The self-reflective turn of the 1920s and 1930s towards France’s own ‘indigenous culture’ is difficult to dissect as it comprised a veritable “polysemy of [different] regionalisms”,7 and “references to rural France, regionalism [as a political, economic, aesthetic, and artistic movement, see above, MF], and folklore figured prominently in efforts to rearticulate France’s national identity during the twilight years of the Third Republic, recurring in the discourses of both Left and Right, and culminating in the 1937 Exposition” (Peer 1998, 3). Although it seems clear that the concept of exhibiting (now French!) ‘authentic craftsmanship’ in a public mass event originated in the colonial sections of the Universal and Colonial Exhibitions from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the plan to stage a ‘colonial centre’ at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris itself was not foreseen from the beginning. The 1931 Colonial Exhibition had only very recently closed its doors and had saturated the politicians and the larger public with a colonial imaginaire; and the dramatic and fast-changing, and even chaotic, political and economic developments in the early 1930s had modified the focus considerably. Right after the foundation in 1928 of the Bureau international des Exposition (BIE) in Paris to formalise these kinds of mass events – it ranked the Paris 1937 project in the second category of exhibitions as ‘international’, not ‘universal’ – three quite diverging proposals, or “regionalist imaginaries” (Namer 1981), were turned in by different politicians in the space of a couple of years. Bits and pieces from all three options were finally merged into what would in 1937 open as the Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne.8 In late 1929 the radical deputy Julien Durand’s vote for a new Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes to be held in 1935 was part of a nationalist attitude that sought to protect the French art industry in the wake of

the emerging world financial crisis. To a certain extent, it found its continuation in the New Deal–like grands travaux initiatives of the French government during the second half of the 1930s, in which the exhibition project itself was considered an important element of the artistic sector that employed hundreds of architects, painters, and sculptors. In 1932 an Exposition internationale de la civilisation to be held in 1937 was proposed by the Republican-Socialist senator Tournan and based on the idea of an ‘intellectual cooperation of humanity’ in the sense of the recently founded Société des Nations in Geneva. After further victories on the political left, a third proposal was launched by the Socialist deputy Fiancette for an Exposition internationale de la vie ouvrière et paysanne. This idea survived in the Centre rural as a model village in the 1937 Exhibition and anticipated the “defensive ruralism of the left-wing politics and Front populaire” (Lemoine in IFA 1987, 22) that gained power in June 1936 under Léon Blum (compare his critics about the 1931 Colonial Exhibition).9 However, Blum’s direct influence in turning the exhibition into a propaganda machine for his own party at the last minute was limited. He had to step down from power in late June 1937 during the event itself. Amongst the incoming proposals for highlights of the exhibition was an old-fashioned picturesque approach launched in 1933 by the artist Raymond Ritter (and published in L’Illustration) in the form of a folkloristic village reconstitution called “Vieille France” (Fig. VIII.2). Ironically, an installation of the same name was later installed inside the exhibition’s temporary amusement park at the esplanade des Invalides. Ritter himself referred to similar ‘old town’ projects like the Village espagnol in the Barcelona Exhibition of 1929 or the Vieille Belgique in the Antwerp Colonial Exhibition of 1930. However, the numerous (orderly disordered) Rue du Caire scenarios after 1889 (compare Figs.

6  Labbé on 6 February 1936 during the réunion des commissaires commenting on the wish by the France

d’Outre-Mer commission to enlarge the colonial section (CARAN F12/12384).

7  Rébéioux, Madeleine, “L’Exposition de 1937 et le contexte politique des années trente”, in: Institut français

d’architecture (IFA) 1987, 29. 8  We refer to insights that were published in the above-mentioned 1987 publication Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne with the following useful contributions: Bertrand Lemoine, Préface (13–23); Madeleine Rébéioux, “L’Exposition de 1937 et le contexte politique des années trente” (26–29); Pascal Ory, “Le Front populaire et l’Exposition” (30–35); Jean-François Pinchon, “La conception et organisation de l’Exposition” (36–43); Jean-Claude Vigato, “Le Centre régional, le Centre artisanal, et le Centre rural” (268–79); and Catherine Hodeir, “La France d’Outre-mer” (284–91). For other interpretations of the 1937 event, see Peer 1998, Herbert 1998, Pivard 2007, Hale 2008, 146–60, Storm 2010, 219–46. 9  For the cultural visions of the Front Populaire and Léon Blum, see Ory 1975, 1994; Weber 1994.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.2  The Vieille France draft project of 1933 by Raymond Ritter, as published in ­L’Illustration in August 1933 (Source: Ritter 1933)

IV.13a–c), the Vieux Rouen installation in the Rouen Exhibition in 1896 (see Fig. V.11a), the Vieux Paris or Vieille Auvergne in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 (chapter V), or the French village installation of the 1925 event (see Fig. VII.1c) are earlier examples in France. Two years earlier than Labbé, in his 1935 speech citing the colonial picturesque as a reference (cited above), Ritter equally chose the colonial installations of the 1931 Exhibition (chapter VII) as an archetype and a justification for the exhibition of a ‘colonising’ view of France’s own traditional heritage: In 1931, at Vincennes, by exposing the treasures of our colonial empire, we proved our magnificent expansionist power, our constructive genius, and, most of all and despite all difficulties and all risks, our ambition as pioneers

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of civilisation. However, the profound reasons for this charisma [rayonnement] can best be understood and admired by opening up views on the French regions and the French people themselves. [italics MF] (Ritter 1933, 559)

For his “factitious city [cité factice]”, Ritter used, conscious­ ly or not, the same strategies as the planners of the colonial ensembles who had come before: in order to avoid “dissonances and juxtapositions” between and of the architectural languages of different pavilions, thematic (sub-regional) ensembles of the most typical provincial features were proposed. Those included, “for the pleasure of the eyes, […] perspectives and hideaways, […] dioramas with [famous] sites and monuments inside some houses, [and] historical parades with traditionally costumed people” (Ritter 1933,

2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies

603–5). Interestingly, the closing comment of the editors of L’Illustration pleaded (comparable to the similar plan for a durable Angkor Wat pavilion as a permanent colonial museum for and after the 1931 Exhibition, see chapter VII) for the option to build the ensemble in lasting materials in order to form a “Musée permanent des provinces françaises”. In the meanwhile, the first commissaire général for the exhibition project, the radical leftist politician Aimé Ber­ thod, who had been nominated in 1933 during the extreme left politics in France and even intended to cancel the exhibition all together, had been replaced in July 1934 (through the new conservative government of Gaston Doumergue) by Edmond Labbé, the first director of technical instruction since 1920, as the sous-secrétariat d’État. Paul Léon, professor at the Collège de France and honorary general director of the Fine Arts Department, was made commissaire général adjoint. The final decree from 12 November 1934 issued by the minister of commerce and industry, Paul Marchandeau, defined the programme of the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne: The International Exhibition of the Arts and Techniques in Modern Life, which […] try to show that the detailed care for the art in our daily existence can bring everybody, from whatever social level, a sweeter life, that no contradiction exists between the beautiful and the utile, that art and technology are indissolubly intertwined, and that, if material progress develops under the sign of art, it brings to the forefront the spiritual values as the superior heritage of humanity. [italics MF] (Exposition internationale de Paris 1937 [1936a], 3)

The classification générale for the 1937 Exhibition, first published in 1936, defined fourteen groups with seventy-five classes (Exposition internationale de Paris 1937 [1936a], 5–10, compare Labbé 1938, I, 301–4). Whereas the first three groups comprised general intellectual and social aspects (Group I: Expression de la pensée; Group II: Découvertes scientifiques dans leurs applications techniques; Group III: Questions sociales, with Class 8 including “Hygiène” and Class 9 about “Artisanat”), the other eleven groups covered questions of artistic and technical formation and diffusion, urbanism, and architecture (Group V, including Class 24 Constructions et exploitations rurales, Class 25 Cités ouvrières, and Class 25bis Conservation des monuments historiques), graphic and plastic arts, construction, interior decoration and furnishings, transport and tourism (Group XII, including Class 69a about “International tourism”), events and attractions, and publicity. The term ‘colonial’ was not even used once. In late 1934 the regionalist theorist and architect Charles Letrosne was architecte en chef de l’Exposition. Until mid1935, he did not consider adding a colonial section to the

1937 Exhibition, despite the fact that the architect of the 1931 replica of Angkor Wat, Charles Blanche, contacted him in July 1933 with his proposal for the “participation of colonial arts and craftsmen” and the request “to have 3,000 square metres reserved for him for the construction of a colonial section with a theatre for 1,000 people, galleries, and restaurant and other services for the total cost of 1.5 million francs”.10 As author of the ‘regionalist bible’ for architects entitled Murs et toits des pays de chez-nous (in three volumes, 1923–26), Letrosne had conceived the Centre régional in the 1937 Exhibition as the star attraction of the event. The plan directeur préliminaire was established in October, published in November 1934 with a notice descriptive in a separate little publication and in L’Illustration, and reprinted in the first issue of the Revue de l’Exposition: Arts et techniques in June 1935 (Fig. VIII.3). The Trocadero area (which was to be rebuilt in a new version but keeping the general old form) was dominated by the sections “Expression de la pensée – Questions sociales – Formation artistique et technique” and augmented with the newly planned musée d’Art moderne (indicated as “Arts graphiques et plastiques”). This side of the river was counterbalanced on the other side with the sections “Arts appliqués – Métiers d’art” to the northeast, with the neighbouring “Sections étrangères” along the river with installations of “Diffusion artistique et techniques” and “Publicité” around the Eiffel Tower, and, finally, with the “Centre régional” at the south-western end of the exhibition terrain. The latter was introduced using a description similar to that used for the colonial section a few months later: Around a great inner square, streets and small crossroads will group the new architectural creations, adapted to different regions [territoirs] and varying skies, without any archaeological research or retrospective recalls. [They will represent] not the provinces in their ancient delimitations but the régions […]. Picturesque through the variety of their alignments and silhouettes and differences in elevation, [they are] favourable to open-air spectacles […]. Different architects from all France will be able to show that regional art can renew itself without the use of the pastiche. Along the river, maritime villages spanning three hundred metres will show house types of fishermen of different climates. […] Festivities and corteges, which will hopefully remind us of the joyful tradition of costumes, dances, and disappearing songs, will be the only concession made to the notion of the past. (Exposition internationale de Paris 1937 [1934], 7.)

The pont de Passy, as the south-western delimitation, was conceived as a “passerelle” and “extension of the Centre régional with amusing boutiques along its parcours”, whereas the Île des cygnes as a whole was at this point not included.

10  Charles Blanche in two letters of 19 and 21 July 1933 to Charles Letrosne (CARAN F12/12521).

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.3  Plan directeur préliminaire by Charles Letrosne (architecte en chef) and Jacques Gréber for the 1937 Exhibition, as published in 1934 (Source: L’Illustration, 3 November 1934, no. 4783, 321)

This changed partly after the officially announced concours d’architecture (involving competing architects for each of the proposed regions), which was discussed in April 1935 by the argumentative regionalist architect Léandre Vaillat. In his personal preface to Letrosne’s Murs et toits he had called for the replacement of the general architectural attitude of the time, marked by building “chimerical palaces” and “picturesque falsifications”, with a more sincere “period of certitude and regional logic” (Letrosne 1923, 11, 20). This 1935 comment helped to turn the initial project of a “folklorist village into an architecturally authentic regionalist centre”11 for the Exhibition of 1937 (Vigato 1994, 199– 274). The new version of the Centre régional was planned, according to the architect, without an out-dated decorative and staff-loaded ‘exhibition style’: “Tradition does not mean immobilité, but movement.12 As a consequence, renunciation

of pastiche towards évolution is the slogan for the future Centre régional, [a veritable, MF] village de France” (Vaillat 1935, 467, 471). In the final overall plan containing twenty-­ seven ‘regional pavilions’ for seventeen regions, a colonial extension on the Île des cygnes was not yet included, but the island’s north-eastern tip right next to the pont de Passy was now planned by different architectural projects with the ensemble of Corsica – by this time indeed considered a ‘colony with a strong separatist attitude’ – which was to be reached by boat in order to imitate its island topography (Figs. VIII.4a,b). The director of the Centre régional was Maurice Petsch (député and former sous-secrétaire of the Ministry of Fine Arts). Léandre Vaillat was one of the délégués aux régions, whereas Émile Maigrot was responsible for the architecture itself, and Charles-Brun for the third section, called vie régionale.

11  Vigato in IFA 1987, 268. 12  Vaillat had already developed a decidedly regionalist-nationalist, de-accelerating standpoint in his publi-

cation Le rythme de l’architecture (Vaillat 1923) in 1923, the same year that Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture was published as an anti-regionalist-cosmopolitan pamphlet in the name of streamlined and blank whitewashed architecture representative of the accelerating age of machines, cars, and paquebots.

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2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies

Figures VIII.4a,b  Centre régional for the 1937 Exhibition, as published in 1935 in L’Illustration: Plan and project presentation by Chantenay/Ferret of the viaduc de Passy over Swan Island with the harbour of Corsica and some Orientalist architecture (Source: L’Illustration 20.4.1935 (4807), 467)

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

In the meantime, in January and February 1935 the ministre des Colonies, Louis Rollin, had successfully discussed with Marchendeau the idea of installing a colonial section in the form of a “Maison de la France d’Outre-Mer” under the strict planning control of his Ministry of the Colonies. The latter was agreed upon as long as “the construction of the pavilions itself stayed within the direction des Services d’architecture and the Comité d’esthétique de l’Exposition”.13 Both the colonial section and the Centre régional were planned to exhibit France’s exterior and interior provinces; the decisive coordination of the same, however, stayed in the very centre of centralist power. As late as 8 April 1935, Rollin finally decreed a Commission de la France d’outre-mer à l’Exposition de 1937 and appointed the senator of Guadeloupe, Henry Bérenger (see his early statements above), as its president, and Léon Géraud, Gouverneur honoraire des Colonies, as commissaire of the section (Labbé 1938, I, 338, 336). Despite the rapidly changing political and certainly anti-colonial climate in these months, the continuities (Hodeir 1987) from the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 to the 1937 Exhibition became evident with the nominations of: Marcel Olivier (the Délégué général of 1931) as “vice-président pour les colonies” (besides Senator Saint representing Afrique du Nord/Méditerranée), of Robert Martzloff (again) as directeur de l’Architecture, des parc et des jardin, and of well-known protagonists of earlier colonial exhibition projects for the 1937 Commission de la France d’outre-mer, such as Henri Gourdon, Pierre Deloncle, Pierre Guesde, and Charles Fouqueray (as président de la Société coloniale des artistes Français). For the section France d’outre-mer (hereafter FOM), Jacques-Georges Lambert (the architect of the AOF pavilion of 1931 and the French colonial pavilion at the Brussels International Exhibition of 1935) became architecte en chef. For the commissariat de l’Indochine, Aristide Le Fol, directeur de l’Agence économique de l’Indochine, was nominated commissaire. As one more Beaux-Arts-trained architect to be responsible to ‘translate’ Angkor into the French métropole, Paul Sabrié, the Hanoi-based architecte des Bâtiments civils indo-chinois (and already active in the 1931 Exhibition with the construction of the pavilions of Tonkin and Cochinchina) was made its executing architect. The first internal session on 11 July 1935, in the presence of Rollin, voted for the “same character” of the FOM installation as the Centre régional, including “habitations for the indigenous craftsmen” and a “special pavilion” to sum up all progress in the colonies. A credit of 6 million francs was planned. However, a critique was circulating in June of 1935 about a newly formulated general site plan that supposedly assigned “insufficient space” to the colonies on the

Île des cygnes and the right river bank.14 These complaints continued during the next sessions until the end of 1935 (a draft plan for the arrangement of the different colonial ensembles must have already been circulated but could not be located for this study). Constraints on the e­ xtremely narrow and approximately eight-hundred-metre-long island as a construction site were as much a topic as was its inappropriateness for the accommodation, alimentation, and surveillance of the ‘indigenous craftsmen’ in their intended ‘authentic’ living and working environment. On 17 December 1935, the ministère des Colonies launched a request to the commissaire général for a new construction site. Labbé’s answer, quoted in a session in February 1936, was clear enough (see original quotation above): “Outside of the Île des cygnes there will be no colonial participation.”15 Filtering out the subtext from these early internal negotiations, it seems that the colonial section was a heavily contested issue in the planning phase of the 1937 Exhibition: while selling the island setting in official publications as a picturesque project in combination with the neighbouring Centre régional, critical voices saw the colonial section intentionally ‘disposed’ of by the mostly anti-colonial planners and shifted towards the exhibition’s visual periphery with extremely poor visitor’s access. In October 1935 Letrosne published a revised plan “État actuel des extensions” in which the Centre des colonies was roughly sketched out. He resigned from his position for health reasons in November 1935, was made architecte en chef honoraire, and was replaced by his former adjunct, the urbanist architect Jacques Gréber. On 22 December 1935, the Hanoi-based journal France Indochine published one of the earliest comments on the ‘colonial centre’. Surprisingly, the limited space on ‘Swan Island 1937’ was even judged positively as “a radical prohibition on developing megalomaniac and expensive structures” like those built in 1931: No option to reconstitute Angkor, the great pyramid, or other fantasies of the same dimension. For the colonial section, all ‘palais ideas’ will be banned. The FOM will be a cité continué built by the massing of all types of indigenous constructions with their local atmosphere. The position of Indochina will be at the far end of the island, next to the pont Grenelle and the foot of the Statue Liberté éclairant le monde [the model of New York’s Statue of Liberty, MF] by Bartholdi. Is this by chance or on purpose?16 [italics MF]

When the new architecte en chef, Gréber, published in the fifth issue of the Revue de l’Exposition of February 1936 his description “L’architecture à l’Exposition de 1937”, he

13  The exchange of letters dates of 8 and 18 January and 26 February 1935. See: Géraud 1937b, Annex 1–3. 14  Séance de la Commission d’organisation du 11 Juillet 1935 (four-page and nine-page report). See: Géraud

1937b, Annex 7. 15  Procès-verbal de la séance (6 February 1936). See: CARAN F12/12384. 16  France Indochine (22 December 1935), author “C. M.” (most probably Charles Meyer, see chapter X).

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2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies

Figure VIII.5  The final plan of the 1937 Exhibition grounds, with its colonial section (Source: Labbé 1938, vol.1, between 76–77)

emphasised a “notion of collectivity” where the Seine River musée Indo-chinois by mid-1936, most probably due to the idea of a ‘purely French’ exhibition parcours pitched by the functioned as a “magnetic mirror” in which “all buildings would be doubled”. In contrast with earlier exhibition pro- nationalist director of the musée de Sculpture comparée (at jects where pavilions were developed individually, all indi- that point named musée des Monuments français), Paul Devidual pavilions and ensembles would follow one coherent schamps. Until quite late, a gallery of Indochinese art was aesthetic framework of form, low-key tonality, illumina- foreseen and even annotated in architectural plans and is tion, and even sonorisation along urbanist parameters and to this day announced in the external decoration above the conceived and tested in a giant model (Gréber 1936, 1937a). left entry to the new palais du Chaillot18 (see Figs. III.50a,b). The same journal issue of February 1936 announced the Under point 8 in Gréber’s description, “France d’outre-mer” “plan définitif de l’Exposition”, 17 which Gréber issued in on the Île des cygnes was now included in the programme March and published in May 1936 (Fig. VIII.5). In the at- and the regionalist undertone was made clear: as an “architached Notice descriptive du plan directeur définitif, he ex- pelago of the most picturesque effect”, the different strucplained the enlarged concept once more. The musée de tures close to and even on the water were planned to create Sculpture comparée was “reinstalled” in the newly adapted a “vivid painting of indigenous artisanal life” for which Trocadero (compare chapter III). Unmentioned, but still “characteristic inhabitants from each region [contrée] would visible in internal documents, the architects of the new replace the [old-fashioned] colonial pavilions with their official style and interior glass boxes of statistical lists and building, Boileau, Azéma, and Carlu, only eliminated the idea in order to re-exhibit the plaster casts of Delaporte’s cases of exotic products” (Exposition internationale de Paris 17  “La préparation de l’Exposition de 1937 à la date du 21 Janvier 1936”, in: Paris 1937: Revue de l’Exposition

arts et techniques 5 (February 1936), 75–76.

18 The musée Guimet has preserved several dossiers concerning the fate of the musée Indo-chinois around

1935–37 when the original objects had already been transferred to its collection and the plaster casts disposed of in factory storage in Clichy. A published Memorandum, relatif à la transformation du palais du Trocadéro of January 1936 speaks in the section “Les musée en péril” about the “precious collections of the Musées d’Éthnographie, de Sculpture comparée et d’art indochinois” (Archive musée Guimet).

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Figure VIII.6a  An aerial photograph of Swan Island during the first installation of the ­foundations for the colonial section of the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Exposition Paris 1937. Official Magazine, 6 (10.1936), 7)

Figure VIII.6b  The site of the old gare du Champs-de-Mars for ­re-use for the Centre régional of the 1937 Exhibition; model for the Centre régional (Source: Expo 1937, Guide officiel, viii)

Figure VIII.6c  The model (detail) for the Centre des colonies on Île des cygnes (Source: Expo 1937, Guide officiel, vii)

Figure VIII.6e  The model of the ­pavillon de l’Indochine for the Centre des colonies (Source: © Réunion des musées nationaux, France)

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Figure VIII.6d  The model of the ­pavillon de l’Indochine for the ­Centre des colonies as published in VU (Source: VU, 1937, no. 477, 603)

2. Spatialising the last breath of French colonialism: A Swan Island for the colonies

Figure VIII.7  The Plan axonométrique of the 1937 Exhibition, here the Centre colonial on the right side (Source: Architecture aujourd’hui, May/June 1937, 103)

1937 [1936b], 9). In contrast to France-Indochine in 1936, La Presse Indochinoise judged the idea of a colonial section on a tiny strip in the Seine “a real folly” and even “disgraceful”.19 In the meantime, the minister of public works had informed the préfêt de la Seine in January 1936 that the Île des cygnes, formerly reserved for the amusement park at the 1937 Exhibition (later on the esplanade des Invalides where the first Angkor pavilion had been staged in 1889), was now dedicated to the “section coloniale” (Fig. VIII.6a). Now the project to transform the site of a charcoal depot at the old gare du Champ-de-Mars into a Centre régional was seen in combination with the development of a colonial section on the neighbouring island (Fig. VIII.6b). Along the Seine, which was to act as the separating and at the same time connecting medium, model studies of France’s national and colonial “vernacular [were] updated into [one and the same concept of, MF] modern regionalism” (Peer 1998, 78): the visitor coming from the regionalist model city of France over the pont de Passy was introduced to the ‘colonial Swan Island’ by non-colonial Corsica and then continued past the Levant to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria (Fig. VIII.6c) and then to the African section with AEF, Cameroon, and AOF, then Reunion, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. As the popular journal VU described it in one of its issues:

Although “[t]he pavilions did not exist yet” (Daninos 1937), their appearance was, well before their real execution, already iconised in model form. Along with the installations of Madagascar and Les Indes Françaises, Indochine was fabricated as a miniature (Fig. VIII.6d), implanted as a miniature into the model at final tip of the Swan Island next to the pont Grenelle (Fig. VIII.6e), and finally transcribed from photographs of the model into a pseudo-realist aerial view for the later Guide officiel (Pl. VIII.1c). At first glance, the central pavilion of the Indochinese section looked – with its blend of a Bayon-style faces and the gates above the stepped tower elevations after Angkor Wat’s central tower – like a simple reinterpretation of the pagode d’Angkor at the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1889 (Fig. IV.9), or a stylistic quote from the pavillon du Cambodge at the National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906 (Fig. V.18a): both elements had originally materialised before 1900 in the first Trocadero’s mu­sée Indo-chinois (Fig. III.40), which closed at an uncertain point in time after Louis Delaporte’s death in 1925 and had finally not been reopened in the new palais du Chaillot of 1937. Now the final layout of the 1937 Exhibition was established (Fig. VIII.7) and the spatial relationship between the Centre régional and the Centre des colonies circulated in public guidebooks (Pl. VIII.1a,b).

19  “Exposition 1937. L’allée des Cygnes ou l’empire colonial français sur un radeau”, in: La Presse Indochinoise

(23 March 1936) (CARAN F12/12153).

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France Commissaire Léon Géraud described the overall idea of the section France d’outre-mer (in the following FOM), which was also valid for the Indochinese ensemble, in the guidelines of the Commissariat général: “the FOM participation [was planned] in the same character as the Centre régional […] to represent, […] in a lively and spectacular way, […] indigenous life and craftsmanship in its original state but modified by European techniques”. He continued: The indigenous directly from the colonies will live in villages, which will resemble those of their originating countries, and they will execute their industries and businesses under the eyes of the public. In each section, a characteristic construction will unite the most beautiful examples [échantillons] of local art, professional schools [écoles de métier], and schools of indigenous art. The proximity to the Seine River will help to create a picturesque part with the life of fishermen and sailors with pirogues. (Géraud 1937b, 9)

Concerning the ever-present topic of artisanat within the FOM section, Géraud intended to show “the natural genius of the races that had not yet been affected by mechanical civilisation”. This would be achieved in the form of “living museums as markets and bazaars from Africa to the Far East” (compare the same term of “living museum” brought up in the context of Angkor Park after 1992, see Pl. Intro.22; and the discussion in epilogue II). This idea was to expose the “intimate relationship between the object and the human being, his country, its flora and fauna”, and through “the subtle soul of the landscape and the human being within the humble material of the most modest accessory” (Géraud 1937b, 29). In speaking about the architecture of the ensembles, concrete indications were also given for the Indochinese section, the workshops as well as the central pavilion which were – surprisingly – characterised as a mere decorative element: The small houses built on the Île des cygnes evoke indigenous quarters of different centres of the Indochinese Union. In the centre of this artisanal agglomeration, a central motif is erected with the only goal being to provide a decorative silhouette, not an archaeological reconstruction. On a cruciform ground plan, the composition is inspired by different monuments from Angkor. The square pillar-columns come from the Angkor Wat, Preah Khan, and Bapuon temples. The superior part is decorated with Shivaist faces from the Bayon temple, centre of the Khmer world of the tenth century. [italics MF] (Géraud 1937b, 28)

In November 1936 the planning architect Paul Sabrié explained his project for the Indochinese ensemble in an in356

ternal report comprising thirty-eight pages and eight architectural drawings. Five sections were planned: “a principal pavilion, an ensemble of boutiques, a group of restaurants, two jetties [embarcadères], and a lacustrine village [village lacustre]” (Sabrié 1936). As indicated in Sabrié’s plan d’ensemble (Fig. VIII.8), the “principal pavilion” was planned as the “central motif inspired from the Khmer temples at Angkor Thom” (Fig. VIII.9) and placed directly on the “axis of the island’s platform. Interestingly, Sabrié himself did not give – apart from technical instructions (see below) – more stylistic explanations about the pavilion. Only the commissaire of the Indochinese section, Aristide Le Fol, explained the central structure in his retrospective report as regards the “exiguity of the placement [of the FOM section in general] and the eccentric position [of the Indochinese ensemble in particular, MF] in relation to the other principle palais structures”, which could finally only lead, according to him, to an “incomplete and fragmented image of French empire d’outre-mer”: The Indochinese section represented a rue indigène with its craftsmen, its boutiques, its Annamite restaurant, its rustic cabins of the fishermen, a varied synthesis of Cambodian and Annamite life dominated, under the sign of Khmer art, by the elegant Bayon tower. Its ground floor formed the salle principale for the exhibition of selected collections. This Bayon tower aroused, from the strict archaeological viewpoint, certain critiques. The problem for the architect was complex: he had to build, in a very restricted space, a building inspired by the artistic traditions of Indochina. It was necessary that this construction left enough space and air, despite the exiguity of the terrain, for the houses and ateliers of the craftsmen. Additionally, a sufficient height and quite light verticality were needed to be harmonious with the very stretched profile of the Île des cygnes and to counterbalance, with the superior elevation of the construction, the silhouette of the minaret of the Algerian section at the other end of the colonial section. In order to solve these difficulties, the architect planned to built one of the four face towers of the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom above an ensemble of architectural elements borrowed from the temple of Angkor Wat. This mélange of styles appeared to certain purists of Khmer art as a sort of regrettable heresy. The impression of the overall ensemble was nevertheless very favourable. And the majority of the visitors, even those considered to have culture and taste, appreciated this synthesising effort to evoke the architectural marvels of Angkor Thom and Ang­kor Wat. [Additionally] the rue des artisans indo-­chinois, with its Cambodian and Annamite houses, was erected. […] the public of the exhibition could see a small but rigorously authentic Indochinese community, the life of which

3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figure VIII.8  Plan d’ensemble of the Indochinese section, presented by Paul Sabrié in 1936 (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

was exactly represented in the daily existence of craftsmen from Hanoi, Saigon, and Phnom Penh. These twenty-two artisans were placed in ten selected ateliers to represent the principal artisanal specialities of Indochina [italics MF] (Le Fol 1938, 3, 4; reprinted Labbé 1939, IV, 101—2).

Sabrié’s indications for the accompanying buildings give us a detailed insight in to what he himself understood as an authentic ensemble of regionalist architecture from Indochina. According to his overall ground plan, the visitor – approaching from the Centre régional across the pont de Passy and walking along the whole Île des cygnes from the northeast (to the left side of the plan) – entered the Indochinese section after the pavilions of Madagascar and the French In­ dies; the first feature to his left was the “Village de pêcheurs – Habitations lacustres” (Fig. VIII.10a). The U-shaped ­“fishing village” was to be “built in bamboo or bamboo-like roundish wooden poles, in the form of two-levelled pile structures [maisonnettes sur pilotis] with roofs en staff [lightweight fibre plaster] to imitate straw huts”. A “rustic bridge” connected one side of the water-flooded structure with the “onshore”. On the other side of the central axis, a wooden jetty was ready to receive guests arriving by boat. Continuing the passageway towards the central core of the Indochinese ensemble with the Angkor-style pavilion but looking

to the left (the central upper part of the ground plan), the visitor entered the “Cambodian- and Annamite-style ateliers” of the various Indochinese craftsmen [échoppes des artisans] in a polygonal arrangement with three gates opening to the Seine (including a projection room in the central part) and an extension to the southwest (Fig. VIII.10b): built on two levels with open shops to offer “merchandise” on the ground and space for lodging on the first floors, “the vertical surfaces were executed in plaster, the decorations and roofs with imitated wooden tie beams in staff texture”. Leaving the section towards le pont Grenelle, one “Franco-indigène” and two “indigène” restaurants catered to visitors in a two-­ storey structure similar to the “indigenous boutique” architecture (Fig. VIII.10c). Before the Angkor-style pavilion and the FOM as an entity could be erected as standing structures, the whole island had to be totally modified. By the end of January 1936, Olivier and Lambert had worked out a devis descriptif and ground plan for Swan Island in which its original horizontal surface of 8,000 square metres was enlarged to 32,000 square metres by a supporting grid of ram piles [pilotis, pieux] for the wooden plank system [patelage mode charpente], and by “swimming elements on barges [corps flottents par des péniches]”. The different colonial pavilion ensembles would be situated above this elaborate system of 357

VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.9  Elevation drawing of the Khmer tower inside the Indochinese section by Paul Sabrié in 1936 (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figures VIII.10a—c  Drawings of the village de pêcheurs, échopes [sic] des artisans and the pavillon des restaurants of the Indochinese section by Paul Sabrié in 1936 (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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Figure VIII.11  The construction process of the Indochinese section on Swan Island for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, compare Pl. VIII.4a (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

Figures VIII.12a,b  Sections of the pavillon de l’Indochine (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figure VIII.13  Plan of the pavillon de l’Indochine (© Archives ­nationales, France)

supporting structures: both the Levant, Tunisia, and Alge- (Figs. VIII.12a,b), including the “four lower gates (two of ria near the pont de Passy, and the ensembles of Indochina, them blind)” and the dominating element of the “four faces the French Indies, Madagascar, and the Caribbean domains of Shiva being crowned by a lotus flower”. For the execution closer to the pont de Grenelle had by this point in time their of the staff elements and the sculptures, the responsible architectural ‘footprints’ well established in the middle of “entrepreneur had to refer himself to publications of the the Seine River.20 A photograph during the early construc- monuments of Indochina and to consult the necessary doction phase in 1936 indicates how the Indochinese section uments for the [stylistic] perfection of his work. Concernincorporated the island’s solid core and appeared to virtu- ing the central motif, he had to absolutely follow the esprit ally float in the Seine River (Fig. VIII.11). The inner core of of the Khmer sculpture and statuary, of which many examthe Angkor-style tower for the 1937 Exhibition in the ephem- ples were available in the musée du Trocadero to be studied eral form of a simple wooden skeleton looked like an ironic in close detail” (Sabrié 1936). In reality, this museum as a counterpart to the Eiffel Tower, the giant iron scaffolding stylistic reference did not (as already mentioned) exist any­ more. As regards the peinture, the main structure was, simthat was originally planned for 1889 as ephemeral but was now a permanent landmark.The pavillon de l’Indochine ilar to the other buildings, “to be covered with layers of oil seemed to grow out of the wooden foundation of the whole colour and a special patina to imitate an aged stone surface”. island (as a 5-metre-high substructure to the pedestrian In the interior of the Greek cross–shaped space of 12 metres level), towards a 24-metre-high tower. As had been done length and depth with two galleries and two exhibition spaces (Fig. VIII.13), the ceilings were made translucent since the first freestanding pagode d’Angkor in 1889, and as Sabrié himself indicated in his report, repetitive “vertical (the central dome-shaped ceiling reached a total height of plaster cast and decorative staff elements” were attached 12 metres), the walls were covered with panels and “decora-

20  A whole dossier was sent by Lambert to Martzloff on 29 January 1936. A Cahier des conditions particu-

lières aux Travaux d’élargissement de l’Île des Cygnes à Paris (Travaux de substructure) was ready in March 1936 (both CARAN F12/12521). A report of the sondages de reconnaissance was finalised in early July 1936 (Société sondages 1936).

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tive friezes by students of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine”, the niches contained indigenous art objects, and the paving was made of cement with a “dallage magnésien”. In January and February 1937, the bidding documents for the three workloads [lots] – (a) general construction [gros œuvre], (b) “staff, sculpture, decoration, peinture” (Auberlet & Laurent were again making a bid after their work for the 1931 Exhibition), and (c) electricity, worth a total cost of approximately 1.7 million francs, were advertised and the incoming proposals negotiated. Due to severe labour disputes and strikes, the introduction of the forty-hour week, the radical politics of the Front populaire in the final phase of the preparations, and the extremely difficult workflow and construction logistics on the narrow Swan Island, completion was delayed.21 On 11 May 1937 (two weeks before the official inauguration of the 1937 Exhibition!), La Dépêche coloniale reported on the unfinished construction site where loads of wooden building materials for the rest of the island were transported “through [sic] the Bayon tower, the lowest sections of which could only be finalised when the general delivery process was over”.22 When the Colonial Centre on Swan Island finally opened after one month of delay (for a popular description, see Lange 1937, 31–40), the Indochinese section was hardly identifiable at the south-western periphery of the exhibition parcours (Fig. VIII.14, compare Figs. VIII.6a–e). Its central pavilion à la Angkorienne (Fig. VIII.15) was only one small landmark within the densely packed exotic island scenario, located between the pavilion des Indes françaises and the Chinese-style pagoda at the tip of the island, which temporarily competed with the miniature of the Statue of Liberty (Fig. VIII.16). The same problem became apparent within the exhibition’s mise en scène through its nightly illumination (see above, Gréber 1936). A whole dossier was established in early 1937 to ensure the “alimentation électrique” of the pavilions along the internal path through the island and to ensure that their fa-

cades would be seen reflecting across the surface of the Seine. With an estimate of “3,000 diffusers and projectors”, 23 a detailed ground plan was worked out for the island and for each pavilion. The architecte en chef, Jacques Lambert, executed an impressive coloured study of the island’s effect during day and night in which the reader of the 29 May 1937 issue of L’Illustration could see Angkor emerging under the starry sky of Paris (Pl. VIII.2a,b, compare 2c,d). The detailed studies of the internal reports prove how the various facade elements and architectural features of each pavilion were painstakingly mapped out for a subtly nuanced interplay of dark and illuminated wall sections. Like the monumental ‘adobe’ tower of the AOF section, only the archaeological features of the Indochinese section – most prominently the Bayon-like ‘stone’ faces – were highlighted (Pl. VIII.3a,b). The regionalist element of artisanal ateliers, including their authentic inhabitants, however, sunk into the dark. A “fête des colonies” was organised in early September 1927: more than fifty swimming elements from totems and masks for the African section, palm trees and junks, lanterns, dragons, and “Indochinese acrobats” for the “Orient” section participated in the nightly cortege over the Seine River24 (Fig. VIII.17). What the architect Sabrié certainly exaggerated in a drawing of the nightly staging of ‘his’ temple on Swan Island (Fig. VIII.18) became most true for the illumination of the crown of the 1937 Exhibition, the newly built Trocadero palace (Fig. VIII.19a). Early universal and special exhibitions until 1900 – most prominently the Paris Exhibition of Electricity in 1881 (Carré 1989) – initiated the use of electric lightning to iconise architectural landmarks in Europe’s cities, archaeological sites, and parks. This trend migrated into the nightly staging of exotic sections and theme parks in the colonial exhibitions after 1900, and from there back to the ‘real site’ in Europe’s colonies: What had been tested in earlier exhibition projects and found its climax with the illumination of Angkor Wat during the 1931 Exhi-

21  The situation of the different work-loads, conflicts, etc. is difficult to dissect in this particular case. The Service technique d’architecture for the 1937 Exposition was contacted in November 1936, the different positions were listed in a devis descriptif from 8 January 1937, working meetings were held until March 1937, and the final sum of approximately 1.7 million francs for the Indochinese section was reported by Le Fol on 9 April 1938. See the different documents in: CARAN F12/12386 and F12/12527. Le Fol also reported on the problems during the construction period itself because of the narrow path of the island and the centrally positioned Indochinese pavilion: no offices were available, no space to store construction timber provided, theft occurred, canalisation was insufficient, the ram piles created problems, and the constant jamming caused by circulating construction workers with their building materials created accidents and, together with the strikes of the workers, finally delayed the completion and increased the subventions for the FOM section from 6 to 10 million francs (CARAN F12/12384). 22  “À l’Exposition 1937 – Au Pavillon de l’Indochine, le gros œuvre est complètement terminé”, in: La Depêche Coloniale (11 May 1937). 23  See the general file Exposition 1937 – Illumination d’Île des cygnes (no date), Île des cygnes – Projet d’illuminations en variante sur le projet primitif (28 January 1937), and a detailed Cahier des charges spéciales pour les illuminations de l’Île des cygnes (CARAN F12/12522). 24  The planning of the performance was carried out by Henri Barbeau, chef de Services des fêtes et spectacles of the 1937 Exhibition. See the correspondence for the FOM section in: CARAN F12/12213.

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figure VIII.14  Aerial photograph of Île des cygnes with the colonial section, in the far background next to the bridge with the Indochinese section (Source: Labbé 1938.I, plate 37)

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.15  Different photos of the Indochinese section with the Khmer-styled central tower as published in Favier’s L’architecture. Exposition 1937 (Source: Favier 1938, plate 30; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figure VIII.16  The arrangement of the colonial sections on Swan ­Island for the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Géraud 1937, plan)

Figure VIII.17  The planning of a nocturnal pageant around 1937 Swan Island (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.18  Study of the nocturnal illumination of the Khmer tower on Swan Island by architect Paul Sabrié (Source: L’Illustration, 29 May 1937, n.p.)

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3. The silent end of a seventy-year long era: The last Angkor-style pavilion in France

Figure VIII.19a  The illumination of the crowning palais du Chaillot at the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Lemoine 1987, 405)

Figure VIII.19b  The illumination of French cultural heritage icons as propagated in La construction moderne in 1937 (Source: Lemoine 1987, 405)

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bition continued within the 1937 International Exhibition with its special emphasis on fostering national (regional) and international (colonial) cultural tourism. At both events, the maison Jacopozzi illuminated the exhibition structures as it had done years earlier with the Eiffel Tower. In a second step, these scenarios in the Regional and Colonial Centres of 1937 migrated back to the ‘original heritage sites’ in France’s provinces and colonies. When a professional journal like La construction moderne published a series on the “symphonie de l’ombre et de la lumière” of France’s patrimoine culturel through all its 1937 issues under

the title “La tour de France de la lumière” (Fig. VIII.19b),25 Lambert’s and Sabrié’s sketches to illuminate colonial Swan Island were only a small element in the development of picture-perfect illumination at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat both in France and Cambodia (compare Pl. Intro.11, 26b; Pl. VI.7b; Pl. VII.16; Fig. IX.78a–c). It reached its climax in the country’s short era of independence (1953/4–1970) with prestigious European guests like de Gaulle and Tito sitting in ­son-et-lumière shows in front of Angkor Wat (see chapter X; Pl. X.23–24), but continues until today unter the globalised UNESCO World Heritage status (see Pl. Ep.II.17b–c).

4. The Colonial and Regional Centres — and Indochina: Architectural hybrids The 1937 Exhibition is a triumph of modern architecture. The 1925 Exhibition killed the disgusting pastiche, the shame of the nineteenth century. [The current exhibition] has buried it so that it is a mere memory, and we are not unhappy about it. […] One might even conclude that the modern regionalist architects are the most modern of all because they satisfy the two conditions of temporality and locality [temps et lieu] (the modern internationalists have just realised the first), and they prepare the basis for what will form our modern architecture at its apogee. […] What remains to be done is now to clothe architecture à la française, to place it in its local framework, and it will soon regain its smile. [italics MF] (Cloizier 1937a) —René Cloizier, Le bilan architectural de l’Exposition (1937)

In December 1937 when the regional architect René Cloi- is a deformed mirror for a special optics. The buildings bezier published Le bilan architectural de l’Exposition in the come poster-like [le bâtiment tient à l’affiche], exaggerate their essential characteristics, take on a symbolic sense” journal La construction moderne (see quotation above), he celebrated the 1937 Exhibition as the triumph and climax (Ministère du commerce 1938, 51). It was this symbolic valof a new architecture. Additionally, he praised the “region- ue that made Edmond Labbé, in his contribution to the alist architects as the most modern architects of all” because publication “Les leçons de l’Exposition” (Ministère du comthey finally brought the two supposedly concurring move- merce 1938, 19–26), talk about the “poetics of the exhibiments of the purist international and the regionalist trends tion”. In a new “alliance of the arts and technology”, these into reconciliation. Cloizier was fully aligned with region- comprised of “the poetics of the ornament to revenge the alism à la Charles-Brun. From an architectural standpoint, integral nudism of modern architecture; the poetics of the he summarised earlier publications written by his colleagues, pavilions, and of the poetics of exhibition’s elegance, with including Léandre Vaillat’s Le rythme de l’architecture (1923), its gardens, festivities, and lightning”. All this contributed Letrosne’s Murs et toits des pays de chez-nous (1923–26), to Labbé’s programme to make the 1937 Exhibition both Gustave Umbdenstock’s 1933 series La défense de nos tradi- “an œuvre of peace, a peaceful [world] civilisation” and “a tions artistiques dans le domaine architectural in the journal manifestation of the genius of France”.26 But how were these Art national (Umbdenstock 1933), and, last but not least, poetics and reconciliatory claims applied to the architechis own 1936 monograph L’architecture: Éternel livre d’im- tural language of the 1937 Exhibition? And what role did ages in which he had also tied modern architecture back to France d’outre-mer play with its Indochinese section in rethe localist parameters of “the nature of the soil, the exi- lation to the Centre régional? gencies of the climate, and the human needs” (Cloizier In order to approach this question from a comparative 1936, 132–44). However, Paul Léon, the Commissaire géné­ standpoint with the earlier ‘International’ Colonial Exhibiral adjoint of the 1937 Exhibition, pointed out the exhibited tion in Paris, it is important to recall (compare chapter VII) forms and decorations in the exhibition’s Livre d’or: “An Pierre’s Courthion’s analysis L’architecture à l’Exposition exhibition is never the exact representation of an epoch. It coloniale [of 1931] with his three basic architectural catego-

25  Here as an example depicted in La construction moderne, 4 (24 October 1937), xxv. 26  These elements also served Labbé for his inauguration speech on 24 May 1937 in which he did not use the

term ‘colonialism’ once, see Labbé 1940, vol. 11 (La vie et les résultats de l’exposition), 549–53.

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ries and addressed spectators: (a) “new creations in a more only selective architectural and decorative references to or less independent environment” appreciated by artists; their archaeological antiquity (Fig. VIII.20c). However, In(b) “stylised interpretations of certain groups of inhabitants dochina’s neighbouring country Siam continued to follow and buildings to create a characteristic ensemble” in the Courthion’s old-fashioned third category of ‘copies and exstyle of an open-air museum meant to address the “dilet- act reconstitutions’ with a wooden pagoda structure that tante”; and (c) “copies and exact reconstitutions of buildings was executed by the Siamese (French-qualified) architect and indigenous palaces” for the pleasure of “ethnographers Mon Chaosmai-Chalerm with ‘French assistance’ by archiand scholars” to “contemplate picturesque folklore” (Cour­ tect Rotter (Favier 1938, comment for plate 4, n.p.). thion 1931, 37, 38). In a period of only six years between the Interestingly, the question of architectural copies was also discussed by the French regionalists who used the 1931 and the 1937 Exhibitions, these three categories seem to have been considerably remodelled. In February 1937 term ‘folklore’ – a term that was emerging at that time – the general mastermind behind the architectural pro- primarily in the context of performed cultures ranging from songs, costumes, and dance to handicraft. The govgramme, Jacques Gréber, published his essay “L’architecture ernment architect Henri Pacon – in his paper for the secà l’Exposition de 1937” in the journal L’Architecture of the Société centrale des architectes. The two major directives tion “Construction moderne” (Huisman 1938, 364–76) of were important: first, architects should “abandon the style the first Congrès du Folklore, which took place during the d’exposition of painted staff” in order to follow “a maximum 1937 Exhibition – described “the house [as] an eminently folkloristic œuvre” (Pacon 1937). What he referred to as of sincerity”. Second, they should refer to “a classic style, in which proportions, building masses and fundamental dec- “the great task of reviving a collective popular soul [ressusorative facade elements were in line with the great epochs; citer une âme populaire collective]” through the medium of however, without pastiche or direct reminiscences”. Com- folkloric architecture touched upon what Hobsbawm/ bining both directives meant, according to Gréber, to “re- Ranger circumscribed almost fifty years later as the ‘reinturn to the logical tradition of a decoration based on limit- venting of traditions’ and as a “set of practices to establish ed but essential points on simple volumes” (Gréber 1937b, continuity with a suitable historic past, […] in response to 37, 42). This considerably affected what Courthion would novel situations which take reference to old situations” have considered the exhibition’s ‘new creations of artistic (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1983, 1, 2). Pacon voted against a mere value’: In comparison to the purist white-washed pavilion static conservation and maintenance of folkloric forms as of the metropolitan section in the 1931 Exhibition (com- a “banalisation”. He was in favour of their artistic reinterpare VII.37a), the permanent French structures in the 1937 pretation, which his colleague René Cloizier, architect and Exhibition – the new Trocadero palace (as palais du Chaillot) delegate of the Charles-Brun’s Fédération Régionaliste Fran­ (compare Fig. VIII.19a) and the musée des Arts modernes çaise, called in his paper at the same event “L’architecture (Fig.VIII.20a) – returned to a more (however reduced) dec- moderne régionaliste et le Folklore” an enriching regionalorative attitude. With their combined monumentality, sym- ist strategy of “diversification” through “the adaptation of metry, and functionality, they illustrated a second “region- modern architecture to its regional situation” (Cloizier alist tendency” besides a mere rapprochement of regionalism 1937b, V; Huisman 1938, 368). In previous exhibition proand modernism: the “alliance between regionalism and the jects, architectural and engineering modernism on the one [French] Beaux-Arts tradition” (Vigato 1994, 245–63, com- side and (in this specific case, archaeological) exotic pastiche reconstitutions on the other had been used as two pare Vigato 1983, 2008). This French gesture was augmented with two interna- stylistic extremes to display the civilising taxonomies of the tional trends, the characteristics of which became best vis- progress-oriented French métropole in direct contrast to ible in the exhibition’s prominent viewpoint from the new the supposedly decadent and backward present of its colopalais de Chaillot towards the Eiffel Tower (Fig. VIII.20b): nies with (especially in the case of Cambodia) their magnifhere, the giant pavilions of Nazi Germany and of Soviet icent past and forgotten and neglected antiquity. What maRussia displayed two versions of stone monumentality rep- terialised in the 1937 Exhibition in a now completely resenting ambitious global super powers, whereas other intertwined, modern-regionalist entity of the French ‘indigforeign pavilions like Belgium and Great Britain spoke a enous’ Regional Centre and its colonial ‘prolongation’ of totally modernist language of large geometric, often round- overseas France on the neighbouring Swan Island (Fig. shaped forms of ‘stone-less’ and glass-dominated material- VIII.21) was a totally new phenomenon. It contributed, ity. The same was true for France’s ephemeral pavilions, from two different sides, to what Courthion had termed his which, like those on aviation and electricity, adhered to an second category of “stylised interpretations of certain international style with an even futuristic attitude. Emerg- groups of inhabitants and buildings to create characteristic ing ‘Oriental’ nation-states such as Iraq and Egypt (still ensembles”. built by French architects, compare 1867 in chapter I with On the temporary platform of the 1937 International Figs. I.18 and 19) had their pavilions – in contrast to their Exhibition’s interconnected French regional and colonial nineteenth-century exhibition styles in archaeological pas- centres, the same forms of ‘métissage’ between European tiche – represented in a more modernist cubage style with modernity and local traditions were negotiated and mate369

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Figure VIII.20a  The musée des Arts modernes as opened for the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Exposition 1937 (1938), 60)

Figure VIII.20c  The Iraq pavilion by Laprade/Bazin (Source: L’Illustration 29 May 1937, n.p.)

Figure VIII.20b  A postcard of the grand perspective of the 1937 Exhibition towards the Eiffel Tower with the German Nazi pavilion to the left and the Russian pavilion to the right (Source: Personal archive Michael Falser)

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rialised in space-time compressed scenarios just as they also existed in the colonial peripheries and in the metropolitan centres themselves: both poles represented different “varieties of cultural interference in a bilateral exchange” situation (Thomine-Berrada 2006). Léon Blum, the président du Conseil of the extreme left, had rightly explained in his preface “La France s’apprête à recevoir l’univers” to the Album-programme of the 1937 Exhibition (Exposition internationale Arts et Techniques Paris 1937 [1937a], 3) that the changing designs of each universal exhibition in France could be read as a direct architectural manifestation of ­dramatic changes in French politics. However, his own references to the “severe political crisis” of the last years and the “great social changes since the last elections” (which he had won with the Front populaire) could only to a limited extent explain the above-mentioned new architectural rapprochement and even overlapping of the French regional and the French colonial, which represented two different possibilities for “updating [of] the vernacular [into] modern regionalism” (Peer 1998, 78–84). To a much larger extent, the regionalist nexus between the métropole and its colonies can be read as the twofold materialisation of (a) France’s reflexive, early ‘post-modern’ turn towards a cultural rediscovery and aesthetic re-invention of its own vernacular past in a nationalist disguise, and (b) the – at least rhetorical, and in our context this meant stylistic – French turn from a theory of forced assimilation of its overseas domains to colonial politics of association in which a new regionalist attitude stood for the acknowledgement and incorporation of the cultural (mental, social, physical) characteristics of the colonised into a newly formulated, less elitist mission civilisatrice (Betts 1961). The Centre régional with its twenty-seven pavilion structures representing seventeen provinces of France (Fig. VIII.22) was supervised by the Regional Commission with artists, architects, folklorists, and regionalists on the one side, and politicians, representatives of the artisans’ federation, and the tourist industry on the other. The commission’s chief architect, Émile Maigrot (together with the École-des-Beaux-Arts professor Louis Hautecoeur as artistic director), was responsible for the centre’s overall regionalist message of what he called an “essentially French demonstration” (Maigrot 1937, 171, compare with popular description such as in Dupays 1938b, 235–37). However, “the attempt to invent or reinvent [French] regions as relatively coherent cultural units” initiated a strange “process of inventing regional styles” or “neo-regionalist styles” (Peer 1998, 82, compare Leprun 1986 and Falser forthcoming2) in which “borrowing” – the expression of “choix d’images empruntées” had been introduced by Charles-Brun for the French scene in 1911 (see above) – now migrated as a strat-

egy from the formerly colonial pavilion constructions (compare for example the discussion for the 1889 pagode d’Angkor) to the French regional pavilions of 1937 (compare Falser 2017a). Finally, the overall directives for the Regional Centre were – as representatives of French provinces like Godbarge had justifiably feared years earlier (see quotation above) – as much strictly controlled by the centralist Paris authorities as the colonial sections in all exhibitions had been ever since their invention in the 1867, 1878 and 1889 Universal Exhibition. If, from a stylistic and rhetorical point of view, metropolitan and colonial France were closer to each other, the political division was still active: the French island, the rather separatist province of Corsica, was symbolically distanced from the core of the Regional Centre towards the tip of colonial Swan Island, whereas the request of Algeria, which had special status as an overseas département, to be represented at the edge of the French section was turned down.27 Some critiques were heard about the Regional Centre, which still followed strategies of “subtle imitations, truquages patients, ersatz, and camouflage” (Lécuyer 1937). On the other side of the spectrum, some architectural solutions within the colonial section even surpassed, for the first time ever as regards stylistic abstraction and the quality of artistic expression, their neighbouring French-regionalist counterparts (Figs. VIII.23a). This was certainly the case with the ensemble of Indes françaises by the architects Hart­ wig and Gerodias in the form of “a modern adaption of a Hindu palace” (Favier 1938, III, text for plate 29) that directly neighboured the Indochinese section but exist­ed (in reality it was a lost French colony) only in the imagination or in nostalgic, wishful thinking (Fig. VIII.23b). Interestingly, similar elements were used both in the Regional and Colonial Centres to stylistically purify their structures: three-dimensional decoration was often externalised onto freestanding figurative columns in front of the pavilions themselves. From this point of view, the pavillon de la Bre­ tagne (Fig. VIII.23c) was not far from the colonial AOF pavilion on the other side of the Seine River (Fig. VIII. 23d). What was even more relevant in the overall negotiation and invention process of a new architectural language that blurred the formerly distinguishable boundaries between modernist, traditionalist, and regionalist (and in this case, colonial) positions: the Centre régional and France d’outre-­ mer at the 1937 Exhibition in Paris mirrored – in their neighbouring settings and ephemeral test pavilions – the processes of an architectural rapprochement of ‘regional styles’ between France’s provinces and its colonies. After a first phase of direct export of French Beaux-Arts styles from France to Southeast Asia (the Saigon Opera House in the style of the Petit Palais in Paris might be the best exam-

27  As Peer explored in her detailed analysis: Gréber retorted in a patronising tone, “This issue can be easily

dismissed, and shows some education is needed on the colonial side” (Minutes of the Regional Commission, 7 March 1935 (CARAN F12/12971), as quoted in Peer 1998, 76.

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Figure VIII.21  The double vision of the Centre régional in the foreground and the Centre colonial in the background (Source: © Réunion des musées nationaux)

Figure VIII.22  The plan of the Centre régional (Source: Favier 1938, III, pl.3)

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Figure VIII.23a  A view into the Centre ­régional (Source: Labbé 1938.I, plate 34, page 223)

Figure VIII.23c  The pavillon de la Bretagne in the Centre régional (Source: © Réunion des musées nationaux, collection Henri Bérenger)

Figure VIII.23b  The French-Indies pavilion in the Colonial Center (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

Figure VIII.23d  The AOF pavilion in the Colonial Center (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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Figure VIII.24a  The Hanoi-based musée Finot of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (1932) by Ernest Hébrard and Charles Batteur (Source: BEFEO 1926, plate XXIV)

Figure VIII.24b  The pavillon de la Champagne in the 1937 Centre régional by the architects Rapin and Rabusier (Source: Expo 1937 (1938), 190)

ple of this), French architects and urbanists like Ernest Hé­ brard (1866–1933) tried to develop, in a second phase after 1900, a regionalist neo-style termed style indochinois28 (Rabinow 1982, Culot 1992, 390, Le Brusq 1999, Herbelin 2013,

2016). Displaying a context-based interest in local materials, climate, colour, and traditional decoration – recalling that the same approaches were used in the French scene – Hébrard’s Hanoi-situated musée Finot of the École française

28  Early studies termed these tendencies “architecture of association” (Wright 1991, 188, compare AlSayyad 1992) or “architecture localiste [and] régionalisme critique” (Pédelahore 1992, 302, 304) in the context of re-traditionalising colonial city plans (Hamadeh 1992). Deeper inquiries into the formation processes of colonial styles in Indochina in the context of a French patrimoine were initiated only quite recently (Pabois 2005, 2006) and only a few protagonists voted for a new architectural historiography, which acknowledges colonial architecture formations as creative laboratories themselves (Thomine-Berrada 2006).

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d’Extrême-Orient (1925) (Fig. VIII.24a), the city’s university, and diverse school and administrative buildings were original results from the colonial “laboratory” of architecture (Hamadeh 1992, Le Brusq 1999, 187) that may have predated later solutions in the motherland such as those exhibited in the 1937 Exhibition in Paris (Fig. VIII.24b). Like Hébrard’s colleague Charles Lacollonge, Paul Sabrié, architecte des Bâtiments civils indo-chinois and realiser of the Indochinese section of 1937, was part of this French project to re-traditionalise Indochinese urban ensembles and habitations – unlike his predecessors Auguste-Henri Vildieu and Auguste Delaval who had executed their Indochinese pavilions in earlier French exhibitions pavilions in a more ‘archaeological’ style. Louis-Georges Pineau – in direct contact with the France-based architect Vaillat to discuss regional styles (see Le Brusq 1999, 108) – worked after 1930 (as had Hébrard before) on the urban plans for Hanoi or the neo-Vietnamese-style Dalat Hill station towards more “contextual interventions” in which architecture from city plans, official, and cultural buildings down to the indigenous habitations could play the “role of a social corrector” (Pédelahore 1992, 307) within France’s new colonial politics of association. As a result of this transcultural entanglement, the Indochinese-style villas by Arthur Cruse in Hanoi around 1930 or by Léo Craste in Saigon looked like Oriental-modernist, long-term versions of some provincial, short-term test pavilions within the 1937 Centre régional in Paris. Pineau’s newly developed ‘compartmental houses’ for the local craftsman quarters of Hanoi (Fig. VIII.25a) might have, in their two-storey character, influenced his colleague Sabrié to design the craftsmen stall houses in the 1937 Indochinese section (Fig. VIII.25b, compare Fig. VIII.15) “to evoke, as a little village of huts and shops with animating craftsmen around a Khmer-style structure, the veritable physiognomy of the streets of Hanoi, Hué, or Saigon”, as an author of L’Illustration of 29 May 1937 described it (Gallotti 1937). However, intending an orientation towards the Angkor-style central pavilion of the Indochinese section, Sabrié topped his indigenous ensemble on Swan Island with Cambodian pagoda-style roofs. These, in turn, followed George Groslier’s 1920 musée Albert Sarraut in Phnom Penh, which itself had been exhibited as a smallscale version in the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, with astonishingly closeness (compare Figs. VII.23a,b). But the entanglement between centre and periphery moved even further into a philosophical and aesthetic discussion. Jean Royer, director of the journal Urbanisme, administrative director of the École spéciale d’architecture in Paris, and organiser of the Congrès international de l’urbanisme aux colonies et dans les pays de latitude intertropicale during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (where the protagonist

Figure VIII.25a  The neo-traditional Quartier commerçant in Hanoi by Louis-Georges Pineau (Source: Culot 1992, 308)

Figure VIII.25b  The huts of the colonial craftsmen in the Indochinese section of the 1937 Exhibition as depicted in L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration Auguste 1937, n.p.)

of the 1937 Centre regional, Léandre Vaillat, had also participated and called the aesthetics of the colonies “conservatoires of the Oriental life and laboratoires for the Occidental life”29) contacted Géraud, the Commissaire genéral of the FOM section in 1936 for the planning of a new Congrès international de l’urbanisme d’outremer during the 1937 Exhibition. Here, “indigenous habitations in urban and rural

29  Hébrard discussed his papers “La conservation des monuments anciens et des vieilles villes indigènes de

l’Indochine” (25–26), “L’architecture locale et les questions d’ésthetique en Indochine” (32–34), and “Habitations en Indochine” (58–62) right after Vaillat’s contribution “L’esthétique aux colonies” (21–23) with references to “artisanat indigène”; all in: Royer 1935, compare Falser 2017a.

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centres” were once more an important issue to be debated both by colonial architects like Henri Prost and French regionalist architects like (again) Vaillat.30 Congresses on colonial matters like the Congrès de la recherche scientifique dans les territoires d’outre-mer, the Congrès de l’architecture tropicale et subtropicale, the Congrès de l’évoluation culturelle des peuples coloniaux,31 the Congrès international du tourisme maritime, cynégétique et coloniale, the Congrès d’action et de propagande coloniale, and a Journée de rapprochement franco-coloniale, a Semaine coloniale, and a Congrès des orientalistes during the 1937

International Exhibition served, even more than during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, as a transcultural exchange platform of aesthetic concepts and applied practices between the French motherland and its colonies. Unlike the 1931 congresses, with their hegemonic top-down discourses from a metropolitan Leitkultur about an inferior ‘colonial other’, now indigenous culture (here especially architecture and habitation styles) was rehabilitated and finally infiltrated – in a ‘self-colonising’ reflex – into the representation of the French vernacular and regional cultures as they were temporarily staged in the 1937 Exhibition (Falser 2017a).

5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina: From architectural pastiches to living heritage performance [artisanat] If the nexus (a) between the Regional and the Colonial Centres, and (b) between both sections’ ephemeral installations in 1937 Paris and the ‘real’ scenarios in the far-away colonies was evident through architecture, then another thematic umbrella was even more constitutive for this transcultural scenario as a whole: the notion of craftsmanship or artisanat. In its seventy-year long career in French universal and colonial exhibitions (1867–1937), ‘ephemeral Angkor’ had always visualised the dramatic changes in the French-Asian entanglement as far as its aesthetic receptions and architectural reconstitutions were concerned. In 1937, in the last French exhibition, it again materialised the paradigm shift in the cultural representation of France’s ‘own and colonial’ spheres from architectural pastiche to living heritage performance (see ‘living heritage’ in epilogue II). Charles-Brun’s sixteen-page leaflet Qu’est-ce le Régionalisme for the 1937 Exhibition, twenty-six years after his principle œuvre in 1911, focused more than ever on the “encouragement of artisanat”. His introductory and closing sections about “The present expansion of regionalism” and “La France future” (Charles-Brun 1937a, 3, 6, 15) could implicitly (he himself did not overtly refer to France’s overseas ambitions) be applied to an action programme in the colonial arena. In 1939 when Labbé published the fifth volume of the rapport général, he called the FOM section a “natural exten-

sion of the Centre Régional” and a “Cité artisanale de la Plus Grande France” in a way that could be read as a reference to Charles-Brun’s 1911 concept of “la plus grande régionalisme” in the French-national context (see above): The French section, and this included the participation of overseas France, was made to affirm the unity of empire, to visualise [mettre en relief] the brotherly love of France d’Europe for la France d’Outre-Mer, in a presentation that did not try to rival the magnificent installations of the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, but represented in the form of a ‘craftsmen city of Greater France’, a natural extension [complément naturel] of the Regional Centre, being enlarged, following the happy formula of Paul Léon, to planetary dimensions. […] It represents 64 million inhabitants, which live on 13 million square kilometres, it displays our colonial empire de la Métropole de l’Outre-Mer to visiting foreigners and the way our country defines the contact between its own civilisation and those of its protected people [italics MF] (Labbé 1939, IV, xiv—xv).

In early 1936 the colonial journal France-Indochine raised the question of “the role of Outre-Mer during the 1937 Exhibition” and referred to the debate on craftsmanship and regionalism:

30  See CARAN F12.12300 on the diverse congrès outre-mer. 31  With its president Paul Rivet, “professor of the muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and director of the

musée de l’Homme”, this congress took place in late September 1937 in the pavillon de la Synthèse of the FOM section on Swan Island. It discussed, in the context of the exhibition’s topic of arts and techniques in combination with ethnological research as part of the civilising efforts in French colonialism, “the interpenetration of autochthone and imported civilisation […] towards a favourable transformation” of the first. In the “adopted wishes of the congress”, the installation of a “service des arts and métiers indigènes” within the context of an “intercolonial collaboration” was formulated and the term “évolution dirigée” of the colonised in the name of craftsmanship introduced in the black-African context (5, 6, 10, 16, 113). For Indochina, the paper “L’évolution de l’instruction publique en pays annamites du début de l’occupation française à nos jours” by H. Deletie shortly mentioned, under point “E. Enseignement supérieur indochinois”, the establishment of an École des Beaux-Arts in Indochina (164–78). All in: Exposition internationale de Paris 1937 (1938).

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It is in the domain of craftsmanship [domaine artisanat] that our colonies will be invited to expose their most significant expressions and most original contributions. […] Indigenous craftsmen, the veritable keeper of the cultures the origins of which are lost in the night of time, will be in the first place at this exhibition. […] The craftsmen will be grouped in geographical order and not work in pavilions and ‘exhibition style’ palaces but in their real habitations with furnished interiors like at home. […] We will therefore not see a mosque, a miniature temple, or fantastic adaptations of half-European and half-indigenous style, but local styles and selected art practices. The visitor will be able to compare these different styles, tools, and techniques in our colonies — not in dead glass boxes in an ethnographical museum, but in the movement of life itself.32 [italics MF]

If artisanat – and not archaeologically ‘correct’ reconstitutions of ancient temples like Angkor Wat – was now the favoured topic in representing France’s newly formulated mission civilisatrice in its overseas colonies, then each colonial ‘handicraft village’ within the Colonial Centre of 1937 could be read as an ephemerally staged ideal miniature version of this new civilising vision. And few other ensembles on Swan Island were more suitable to represent this new agenda than the Indochinese section. Paul Dupays’s 1938 publication Voyages autour du monde: Pavillons étrangers et pavillons coloniaux found that Swan Island was the perfect site for the “Cité artisanal de la France d’outre-­ mer […] to display faithfully the indigenous civilisation and modern life of these regions, which were still savage in the last century”, and the ensemble of Indochine was explained as a site where “the activities of the Far East were represented in a purely indigenous frame” (Dupays 1938, 235, 263). As described by the editors of the 1937 publication L’Empire colonial français à l’Île des Cygnes, ses pavillons, son histoire, sa géographie, the section’s layout was to be read as an architecturally translated and space-time compressed mini-version of the colonial arts-and-craft politics in situ: It is exactly the definition of ‘arts et techniques’ in the spirit of which the plan of the Indochinese section had been conceived and realised. First of all, the General Commission had grouped in the central pavilion all selected specimens of indigenous art from all over the Indochinese Union. Around this kind of museum, the stalls [comptoirs] are positioned where the public can get current replicas of the exhibited masterpieces, which represent the unlimited variety of production within the diverse branches of indigenous craftsmanship. Finally, in the immediate proximity of the central pavilion, at the shores of the Seine

River, Annamite, Cambodian, and Laotian huts are installed where Indochinese craftsmen, under the eyes of the visitor, execute their objects for sale. The central pavilion is the reproduction of one of the towers of the mysterious Bayan [sic] temple, which, at the shore of the great Cambodian lake, dominates its extraordinary mass of stone ruins in the ancient city of Angkor-Thom. The plan was conceived by Mr. Sobrié [sic], architecte des Bâtiments civils de l’Indochine. The details of the interior decoration were studied and prepared in Indochina, under the direction of Mr. Tardieu, director of the École des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi, by the students and alumni of the art schools of Indochina. […] At the same time that the exhibited art pieces were chosen by the École des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi, a certain number of indigenous craftsmen were selected and shipped to France with all the necessary material for their installation on Swan Island and the fabrication of their products. With their archaic and ingenious working instruments, and their coloured and picturesque costumes, they animate the exotic huts near the Seine River in the form of faithful representations of their ancestral houses. Every day, their professional and restless hands produce objects of an astonishing diversity of forms [like] modernised replicas of the immortal stone sculptures and bas-reliefs by the great creators of the Angkorian epoch. What distinguishes the arts-and-crafts production of Indochina from other colonies is the secular perfection of their procedures and certainly the great quality of their original sources of inspiration. […] France, after having re-established peace in Indochina, liberated the indigenous populations from the heavy burden of piraterie, and after having re-organised a sufficiently resisting political and administrative system, made it its honorary duty [point d’honneur] to renovate the indigenous art and to revive the ancient traditions, which had represented in the past centuries the grandeur of the Indochinese population. […] The three main goals of the established art schools are: the return to the purity of the original traditions of Hindu and Chinese art, the perfection of the techniques of execution, and the adaptation of Indochinese art towards the multiple exigencies of the modern life. [italics MF] (Géraud 1937c, 76—77)

This in extenso passage about the Indochinese section described how the ephemeral materialisation of Angkor in the French métropole had changed its function considerably: if Indochinese village settings had only ever accompanied the increasing archaeological reconstitutions of the Bayon and/or Angkor Wat temples up to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, then Angkor was now transformed for the Parisian visitor into a scale-reduced focal point of eternal antiquity for an imagined model world of traditional artisanat.

32  “Quelle sera la part de la France d’Outre-Mer dans l’Exposition de 1937”, in: France-Indochine, Hanoi (28 February 1936), see: CARAN F12/12153.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.26  The Indochinese section on Swan Island with a view towards the Angkor-styled central pavilion (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

Comparable to the Centre régional with its church tower-­ like landmarks – the clocher was the reassuring architectural motif of the French regionalist ideology (compare with Letrosne 1923-26) – or decorative columns like that of the already mentioned pavillon de la Bretagne (compare Fig. VIII.23c), the Bayon-style spire mutated into a giant antiquarian totem pole of the Angkorian ancestors in order to reassure the exhibited craftsmen in their shophouses around it of the living (reinstalled) presence of traditional heritage (Figs. VIII.26). How much this ‘presence’ – temporary and ‘ethnographic’ in its staged character (see Fabian 1983) – was in fact the result of strict colonial control became apparent in the internal correspondence of the organisers and in popular publications like the exhibition’s Livre d’or with Marc Chadourne’s contribution “Arts, artistes et artisans de la France d’outre-mer” (compare Géraud 1937a): The Cité artisanale d’Outre-mer […] In the world of the coloured people today, like long ago in Europe before the era of the great mechanical progress, the pottiers, vaniers, forgerons, tisserands are not only craftsmen, but

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artists the traditions, the creative genius and techniques of which express the cultural coefficiency of their tribes [tribus], races and regions. […] The effort to reconstitute the milieu and the working atmosphere of the indigenous craftsmen necessitated the control of the quality of their productions, in order to assure their clientele of the authenticity of their purchases. The experience of the preceeding exhibitions has shown the inconvenience of concessions of selling stalls where the offered goods under the name of artisanal products are, in fact, mass-fabricated products [articles fabriqués en série], sometimes even in foreign factories. In the Artisanal City, these abuses had been prevented by a careful preselection of the artists [filtrage soigneuse des artistes] which, chosen and delegated by the participating countries by their professional capability, were not allowed in any case to sell their fabricated objects. [italics MF] (Chadourne 1937, 213, 221)

Interestingly, the official responsible for the Moroccan ensemble had also contacted the Commissaire général as early as May 1936 with his fears that the “patrimoine traditionnel of the craftsmen might be not sufficiently protected against

5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

imitations and fakes [imitations et contrefaçons] from outside the colonial perimeter during the exhibition”.33 This typical ‘salvage paradigm’ (Clifford 1989), calling for measures of colonial protection for what was artificially invented as ‘heritage’ (in the context of Cambodia, this patrimoine culturel had migrated from a late nineteenth-century paradigm to salvage archaeological ruins lost in the jungle to an early twentieth-century paradigm to salvage traditional handicraft), was also a rhetorical trick used in all the inauguration speeches of the FOM section on 25 June 1937. The ministre des Colonies, Marius Moutet, praised – and essentialised without any regional, ethnic, or artisanal differentiation between “le ciseleur annamite, le graveur malgache, le céramiste marocain, le sculpteur noir” – “the flourishing indigenous handicraft” as it was displayed in the “atelier vivant” on the Île des cygnes expressed by the “naive, fresh, infantile, or serious soul of France’s protected subjects [nos protégés] (Labbé 1939, vol. 4, 593–95). Referring to Labbé’s definition of the FOM section as a “comparative study of the colonial art industries” [étude comparée des métiers d’art aux colonies] (Labbé 1939, vol. 4, 2), Géraud called for the French “protection of the [colonial] artisanat against a dangerous and sometimes disloyal concurrence” (Labbé 1939, vol. 4, 591) without giving more details about the imminent danger. Additionally, according to the Catalogue général officiel of the 1937 Exhibition, a second danger existed besides the “gross imitations [imitations grossières] that seriously affected the reputation” of good handicraft – namely, “the development of tourism, which brought along with it a hasty production to satisfy the clientèle and the invidious influence of imported objects that brought decadence” into the good, honest, but fragile artisanal practice (Exposition 1937 [1937b], 489, 490). Ironically, with respect to this paternalistic undertone, the ephemeral microcosm of the FOM section on Swan Island collapsed at the end of the exhibition. As Géraud reported to Labbé in September 1937, “The majority of the indigenes could not be exposed to the cold and humidity of the beginning autumn any longer without danger and had to be repatriated before 15 October.” Along with the Muslim artisans who were returning for the beginning of Ramadan, “shops and ateliers were empty, and, for some activities at least, rented out to merchants of comparable businesses, […] for which the same authenticity of products could not be guaranteed as was the case for these still being sold in

the sales offices within the pavilions”.34 Labbé responded a week later with a warning about the new merchants who, with their sale of thousands of trash objects, would give the Centre colonial the “allure of a vast bazaar” (without control from above). He deplored the constant rain, which necessitated the destruction of some of the installations of the lower exhibition zone.35 As far as the regional-colonial nexus within the 1937 Exhibition was concerned, the topic of the ‘French indigenous’ (vernacular) culture with the Centre régional was thematically augmented with the Centre artisanal and the Centre rural36 inside the peripheral Annexe Porte Maillot (see Fig. VIII.7; compare Vigato 1987, Collet 1987, Peer 1998). The two-page contribution “L’artisanat en France et en France d’outre-mer” in the August 1937 special edition of L’Illustration by Henri Clouzot (a retired museum curator and member of the Regional Commission of the Centre régional), celebrated a “pure state of craftsmanship [artisanat à l’état pur]” on Swan Island where traditional craftsmen executed their work “without taking note of the factor time”. He published a poster-like collage of working craftsmen (Fig. VIII.27a) that was comparable to an illustration of French artisans in Labbé’s rapport général (Fig. VIII.27b). One of the very rare photographs of “the boutiques of the Indochinese huts” (compare VIII.25b) reflecting a situation of a ‘colonial’ gaze on vernacular art practices can be directly paralleled with an illustration of a “maison d’artisan” and a “boutique de la piqueuse” of the Centre artisanal where head architect Armand Néret “had erected, not without lyrisme, a temple of individual work” (Clouzot 1937). Here, “twenty-two prototypes of artisanal houses [or] habitations artisanales-types” were grouped around a palais des Métiers and formed an ensemble where – comparable to the Indochinese ensemble on Swan Island – “intellectual and social organisation, exhibitions of artisanal production, and commercial centralisation” into artisanal cooperatives was staged as an independent unit (Favier 1937). When on 15 June Labbé used, for the inauguration of the Centre artisanal, the terms “saving the living forms against the dangers of serial production […] reviving [ressusciter] the viable forms of handicraft [as a] supplement of soul for our industrialised existences” (Labbé 1939, V, 499–500), his speech for the FOM section a few days later on 25 June must have sounded like a transcultural ‘copy-paste procedure’ of terms, concepts, and values which could be applied interchangea-

33  34  35  36 

Commissaire général du Maroc au Commissaire général, 28 May 1936 (CARAN F12/12384). Haut-Commissariat of the FOM to the Commissaire général, 17 September 1937 (CARAN F12/12384). Commissaire général to the Haut-Commissariat of the FOM, 23 September 1937 (CARAN F12/12384). This ensemble, under the leading aegis of the ministère de l’Agriculture, was built as an ideal rural, peasant village, “a veritable centre to propagate agricultural life” (Gille-Delagon 1937) with modern farm buildings, a working cooperative, a schoolhouse, community services, etc., and therefore formed an important additional ensemble to discuss and display idealised vernacular culture in a regionalist attitude. Astonishingly, the ‘vernacular’ was also recooked in Angkor Park after 1992 when UNESCO’s new (in fact rather old) slogan of ‘living heritage’ were translated by local elites in a ‘neo-vernacular’ test site called ‘Run Ta-Ek’ just outside of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Angkor (see epilogue II, compare Pl. EpII.20c–f).

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.27a  The colonial craftsmen of the 1937 Exhibition at work as depicted in L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration, ­August 1937, n.p.)

Figure VIII.27b  French craftsmen in the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Peer 1998, 93)

bly for the French-national vernacular and the French-colonial exotic. What is of interest in the context of the Centre régional is less the similar display of craftsmanship in relation to the Colonial Centre (previously mentioned in relation to architecture), but rather the modes of centralist control behind the regionalist scenes of French craftsmanship and folklore. These will provide some useful insights into the last point of analysis: the transcultural link between the last French reconstitution of Angkor in 1937 and the French-colonial strategies of a revival craftsmanship in Indochina in the name of Angkorian antiquity. As regards the French metropolitan side, Shanny Peer’s detailed analysis of the 1937 Exhibition is extremely useful in understanding how “rural France, regionalism, and folklore figured prominently in the efforts to rearticulate French national identity during the twilight years of the Third Republic” with the assimilative (however conciliatory) and even regenerative strategies to “appropriate peripheral cultures” initiated by the controlling centre to “reclaim regional particularisms as national heritage” by “recontextualising them in Paris as parts of the unified national whole” (Peer 1998, 3, 9). In one chapter,

Peer explores how the Paris-based Commission régionale, with Henri Clouzot and Pierre-Louis Ducharte as its artistic directors, “elaborated an interventionalist policy of guidance for artisans [artisanat dirigé]” with supposedly free designs [modèles]. With these designs “provincial artisans were expected to replicate ‘regionalist’ products [and] the Parisian authorities intended to dictate the terms of an ‘authentic’ and ‘tastefully’ evolved regionalism to its producers in the provinces (compare Zdatny 1990). These authorities claimed that they were just “accelerating a process that conscientious provincial artisans should have followed spontaneously”, and that it was their job “to ‘correct’ and ultimately redefine regional styles” (Peer 1998, 88, 91) – or as Maurice Petsch, president of the Regional Commission, defined it in the preparatory phase of the 1937 Exhibition for the regional representatives in the various French provinces:

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What we need to do, in effect, is to foster an evolution that would have taken ten years to happen on its own. In a word, we need to artificially produce a movement that should result from the adaptation of ideas, customs, and

5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

aesthetics in the provinces, were they to become more aware of their own ethnic tendencies and characteristics.37 [italics MF]

As a result, the Paris-based committee, which also included Georges-Henri Rivière (the founding director of the newly founded musée national des Arts et traditions populaires) and Jean Charles-Brun (the true inventor of régionalisme), reviewed every exhibit or planned performance intended for the Centre régional for its regionalist quality, a strategy which instigated much protest and even resistance on the regional side (see Godbarge’s quote above). As the president of the Breton committee summed it up in a return letter of January 1936: “Nous réclamons une collaboration, nous repoussons une tutelle” (collaboration, yes; tutelage from Paris, no!).38 In their twelve-page and richly illustrated contribution “Le centre régional” in the August 1937 special issue of L’Illustration, Clouzot and Ducharte admitted their intent to reinvent artisanal traditions where they might not even exist anymore and to inscribe these artificial products of a centrally controlled renaissance into the canon of French patrimoine: The Centre régional instructs the grand public that many foyers are still living and need nothing more than to be multiplied by their reanimation through a cold shower. The first remedy is to make them better known, since nothing is more mysterious than the exact origin of a traditional object, which will gain its beautiful place as artisanat in the Centre régional through the efforts of the commissariat général. […] What we have said is enough to bring to light all that the artistic heritage of France [patrimoine artistique de la France] has to gain through the renaissance of craftsmanship, of which the Regional Centre has shown us more than promise. [italics MF] (Clouzot/ Ducharte 1937)

In their concluding section – keeping in mind CharlesBrun’s 1911 publication with a similar focus – Clouzet and Ducharte added other entries to the list of revived French heritages or even heritage industries: (a) gastronomy, (b) costumes, music, and dance, and (c) tourism. Their side comment on Charles-Brun’s involvement in the revival of regional costumes certainly referred to his two-volume publication Les costumes des provinces françaises (1932 and 1937), which qualified Charles-Brun, besides many other

writings on France’s regional cultures, to be made responsible for the Regional Centre’s vie régionale. In this section, folklore and artisanat were one of the most powerful living expressions by which to nationalise cultural heritage while at the same time regionalising and provincialising it; and Charles-Brun was well aware of both the chances and dangers that were hidden in the cultural revival of both. Comparable with his efforts to rebirth artisanat, he acknowledged the “celebration of the costume, even the reconstituted ancient costume, for its high moral significance”, and he also judged the latest fashion of “veritable liturgies where Old France reappeared in all its colours and forms” as being not far from “opéra comique”-like scenarios (Charles-Brun 1932, v, vii, viii). In any case, he valued the provincial efforts of “folkloric groups” for “historic reconstitutions […] the faithfulness (but not stylisation) of which was valuable in festivities and ceremonies, for the amateur of the picturesque and for its symbolic sentimental value” (Charles Brun 1937b, 5,7,8, compare with Charles-Brun 1945) (Figs. VIII.28a,b). In August 1937, after severe critiques from regionalist colleagues, Charles-Brun resigned from his official duties for the 1937 Exhibition. As he explained in the editorial of L’action régionaliste in the same month: he judged the realised project of the Centre régional “worse than hoped for, and better than feared, [altogether] an effort, a trial [essai]” to which ‘his’ FRF had (unofficially) contributed the “directing principles”. After the Folklore Congress of 1937 with the important panels on “descriptif folklore” and “folklore applied to social life”, he repeated his engagement to “reviving” regionalist traditions.39 All that finally served the regionalist case for Charles-Brun was “propaganda”, even if not all tendencies and efforts had always followed the exact regionalist framework: “It does not matter: quand un cliché est bon, nulle honte à l’employer.”40 Along a gradual commodification process, the French-colonial authorities, with George Groslier as one of the protagonists (see below), had helped to reinvent, the heritage product called danseuses Cambodgiennes for the universal and colonial exhibitions in France as well as for the local scene in Phnom Penh and Angkor (Falser 2013f). In a quite comparable context Charles-Brun also supported regional ‘costumed folk troupes’, which in many cases came from Paris itself. These groups also performed outside the controlled perimeter of the Centre régional on the esplanade des Invalides where, during the 1937 Exhibition, a fun park with old-fashioned

37  Petsch, Maurice: Instructions pour MM les présidents des Comités régionaux concernant l’artisanat et les

petites industries traditionnelles. See: CARAN F12/12388, as quoted in Peer 1998, 88).

38  Letter from O. L. Aubert to the presidents of the regional committees, with questionnaire enclosed,

17 January 1936, see CARAN F12/12388, as quoted in Peer 1998, 95. 39  L’Action régionaliste (August 1937), 1, 6. 40  In the same September issue of the journal, the governor of the French-colonial island of Réunion published his short comment “Régionalisme colonial” in which he proposed to “protect the island’s local architecture”. In: L’Action régionaliste (September 1937), 1, 6–7.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figures VIII.28a,b  Reconstituted French folklore and regionalist groups as depicted in CharlesBrun’s 1937 publication Les costumes des provinces françaises (Source: Charles-Brun 1937b, 7, 9)

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5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

Figure VIII.29  A postcard of La vieille France in the Parc d’attractions outside the Centre régional (Source: Personal archive Michael Falser)

Vieille Paris stage props offered an even more picturesque setting (Peer 1998, 158–74) (Fig. VIII.29, compare Fig. V.11a). Interestingly, Peer’s study paralleled the 1937 Exhibition makers’ hidden “control of the means of representing”41 French folklore with what Eugen Weber had called internal “colonisation”42 in the modern-time process of forced acculturation and administrative integration of the rural masses of France, including their performed cultures (artisanat and folklore), into a national-collective entity. However, these processes of appropriation and/or reinvention of peripheral vernacular traditions within and for France’s modern centre – as it was ephemerally staged during the 1937 Exhibition ranging from built picturesque environments down to cultural performances including ‘craftsmen at work’ or folkloristic dance shows – cannot be treated as an

exclusively national phenomenon within the strict territorial borders of continental France. In 1937 – and this is our second and even more relevant focus on the regional-colonial nexus – the above-mentioned processes had already been transculturally embedded for more than half a century since they were negotiated in the diverse colonial settings and, from these peripheral laboratories, ‘translated back’ to the French-metropolitan centre. All this happened at a moment when artisanal practices in the colonies were also ‘rediscovered’. With the Revue de folklore français et de folklore colonial of the Société du folklore français et du folklore colonial,43 for example, a ‘civilised status’ of the traditional populations in both the French provinces and the French colonies came into sight when their cultures were now slowly acknowledged under

41  Concerning the politics behind the display strategies of vernacular culture, “the struggle is not only over what is to be represented, but who will control the means of representing” (Karp/Lavine 1991, 15). 42  See the chapter “cultures and civilisation” in which Weber called “the famous hexagon itself a colonial empire being shaped over centuries” through the constant process of acculturation and integration of premodern cultures and the rural masses into a modern nation-state (Weber 1976, 485–96, here 486; compare with Weber 1994). 43  Under this combined name, both the journal and the society existed since 1932 with Charles-Brun, delegate of the FRF, as one of its vice presidents, along with Marcel Mauss as sociologist, and Paul Rivet, director of the ethnography museum. It has been renamed musée de l’Homme since 1934.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

the term of living folklore and not – as was initially the case ilar pamphlet entitled L’enseignement et la mise en pratique (also in the case of Angkor) in the Trocadero exhibition dur- des arts indigènes au Cambodge (1918–1930) (Groslier 1931, ing the 1878 Universal Exhibition or in the colonial section compare chapter VII). With no general introduction, the of the 1889 Universal Exhibition – as “living ethnographical two main sections with thirty-three continuing paragraphs exhibits”(after Mathur 2001, compare Maxwell 1999).44 As we written in an administrative tone, even legal ductus (“I.- La have seen, the control and display strategies used within the doctrine” with seven paragraphs and “II.- La fonctionneneighbouring Centre regional and France d’outre-mer during ment du Service des arts cambodgiens” with twenty-six the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris were almost ex- paragraphs), this publication summarised the colonial artschangeable in the officially propagated programme of region- and-crafts revival programme in Indochina. The first section alist architecture and in France’s civilising (salvatory) mission “La doctrine”, containing seven paragraphs, began with “§1 – of peaceful traditional craftsmanship (Figs. VIII.30a,b). Prise en charge d’un art indigène en voie de disparition”, the However, ‘colonial’ France and its symbolic reality was colonial salvage paradigm which was, on a lower level cerconstructed at the same time within its national borders in tainly quite comparable in its nature with the colonial ‘Ang­ Europe and its domains overseas. When Géraud praised kor-forgotten-and-lost-in-the-jungle-to-be-saved’ narrative. “the empire”, in the official description of the Colonial Cen- With the danger of an “imminent disappearance [disparitre, for having “developed a vast economical circuit” as part tion] of the indigenous arts” in their accelerated “decadence” of “a beautiful civilising œuvre that connected France with and “already too many open wounds [plaies]”, “the Protecall five continents of the world” (Géraud 1937c, 89), crafts- torate had to intervene” to salvage something that, in fact, manship was one of the most powerful elements in this did not even exist anymore (compare Abbe 2015): “the origeconomic circuit. Its idealised rebirth was propagated as inal art” had been “denaturised [dénaturé] by fifty years of a crowning element of France’s self-proclaimed civilising Occidental influences”, and were at that point “unknown” œuvre overseas. And perhaps no other publication in the (GGI 1937a, 5). Using the typical regionalist undertone of colonial context of the 1937 Exhibition was more insightful the time (Charles-Brun could not have written with more than the report about the supposedly altruist salvage and empathy for the French scene), “the indigenous arts” had renaissance efforts for the indigenous art practice and arti- to be reinstalled without “Occidental influence”, “without sanat, which the Gouvernement général de l’Indochine (in any change in the indigenous habitudes, tools [outillage], and employed materials”. In the following section (§2), a the following GGI) published in three volumes containing almost two hundred pages: Les arts indigènes au Cambodge typical mechanism of the reinvention of a tradition rooted (1918–1936) (51 pages, GGI 1937a), L’artisanat dans la in antiquity, its institutionalisation, and control was ap­province de Hadong (Tonkin) (81 pages, GGI 1937b), and plied: “a museum and a school” had to be founded for “the Les Écoles d’art de l’Indochine (41 pages, GGI 1937c). If the complete handling [prise en charge complète] of Cambodian ephemeral Indochinese section of 1937 can be seen as a art” where the “psychology of the [Cambodian] artisan” temporarily staged microcosm of the French-colonial en- (§4) in his “codified traditions”, “immobility”, “uncreativeterprise in its ideal form, then the above-mentioned re- ness”, and lack of “critical spirit” had to find direct instrucports can be read as the theoretical background for the tion. The “reasons for decadence” (§5) resulting in the “genshift from representing Angkor through mere architectural eral decomposition” and the total lack of an appropriate hybrids to its representation as a symbolic centre of ‘living “clientèle” were “the import of objects, their techniques and heritage’, a term reinvented for Angkor Park after 1992 materials”, which brought the “indigenous forms into a sudden situation of [unpurifed, MF] mixing [métissage (compare ICC-Angkor 2013; see epilogue II). The publication Les arts indigènes au Cambodge (1918– brusque] without any regulatory work towards assimilation” 1936) was most probably written by George Groslier (1887– (GGI 1937a, 10). §6 (“The foundations of the doctrine”) of1945), the Parisian Beaux Arts-trained artist, painter, the fered a solution to the stated misery: the missing clientele founding director of the service des Arts cambodgiens. He was to be found in “the touristic movement to the monuwas also creator and first curator of the musée Albert Sar- ments of Angkor” where the international traveller would raut (today the National Museum in Phnom Penh) and buy “representative art products” of the visited country. In consultant to the colonial exhibitions in Marseille in 1922 order to “reconcile the advantages and inconveniences” of (chapter VI) and Paris in 1931 for which he published sim- an exploitation by the heritage industry, the link between 44  The fight for the right definition of the terms ethnography and folklore dominated the 1930s and peaked with the Folklore Congress in 1937, with Arnold van Gennep’s focus on folklore for rural, peasant societies, and Pierre Saintyves’s larger focus on all kinds of ‘evolved societies’ or ‘popular mentalities’ in a civilised nation (see Vallentin 1999). In 1937, when Albert Demangeon published his classification of rural houses in France (on the basis of human geography and folklore) as a proposal for a parcours through the upcoming musée Folklorique, the “stilted village houses of Indochina” were one proposed point of comparison (see Demangeon 1937, 20; or Huisman 1938, 44–47). Compare this scenario with the ‘Khmer Habitat Intepretation Center’ or the ‘Ecoville Run Ta-Ek’ in/around Angkor Park after 1992 (epilogue II).

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5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

Figures VIII.30a,b  French dentelières as depicted side by side with Vietnamese traditional handicraft in one and the same Livre d’or of the 1937 Exhibition (Source: Expo 1937 (1938), 176, 223)

the artisan and the customers had to be established by the “protectorate” through a “controlling organism to select the production of pure œuvres [œuvres saines] to guarantee indigenous art”. The controlling chain of “a museum, a school, an official office of sale and propaganda, selected production, and public disposition [supposedly, MF] created the equilibrium of demand and production in the form of a service des Arts cambodgiens” (GGI 1937a, 12). The published illustrations of the outside of Phnom Penh’s museum in regional style along with its archaeolog-

ical collections from Angkor and its attached sales office with original copies and Angkor-style artworks (Figs. VIII. 31a,b) established the very core of the colonially controlled ‘economic circle’ on the basis of a reinvented traditional handicraft deeply rooted in Angkor’s archaeological antiquity. And this combination of archaeological reference, showroom, and sale of ‘authentic’ handicraft was indeed at the very centre of the Indochinese section in 1937 on Swan Island. The reconstituted pavilion in the form of a high-rising totem pole of Angkor’s archaeological antiquity defined 385

VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figures VIII.31a,b  Depictions from the musée Albert Sarraut in Phnom Penh with its archaeological exhibition rooms, souvenir sales rooms and training workshops for traditional artisanat as shown in the publication Les arts indigènes au Cambodge (Source: GGI 1937a, plates II, VII; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

the eternal and obligatory stylistic reference, whereas its inner core exhibited ‘pure Khmer’ artworks in a museum showroom atmosphere. On both sides – in Cambodia in the long run and at the ephemeral utopia in Paris of 1937 – the French Protectorate took the Cambodian art practice under its “tutelage” [tutelle], according to “§7 – Justification de la doctrine”. According to the publication about the “functioning of the Cambodian arts service”, daily utensils such as teapots were covered, to differing degrees, with decorative patterns from Angkorian temples and labelled ‘authentically Khmer’ by the French authorities (Fig. VIII. 31c). Similar to what Charles-Brun discussed in his propagation of traditional French-regional (even reconstituted) costumes, the publication about Khmer handicraft explained: It will be indigenous, Cambodian, different to the Occidental arts. […] No French or English customer [acheteur]

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will ever ask for a fabric from a Khmer sewer made from European models. The goal is not to produce a workforce competing with the French one, but to utilise and develop what is inimitable, Cambodian, a personnel that is already historically and atavistically prepared. [italics MF] (GGI 1937a, 14)

From this perspective, the whole goal of the Indochinese section of 1937 was recently interpreted as a temporary scenario to “test the products of the colonial artisanat […] without any competition to the French handicraft and art production, […] on the basis of the French, even European clientele that visited the Parisian FOM section” (Hodeir 1987, 289). However similar the wish for a pure, traditional, indigenous, and altogether ‘regionalist’ handicraft production might have been on both the French side of Charles-Brun’s

5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

Figure VIII.31c  Traditional artisanat under authenticity “guarantee of the French protectorate” (Source: © National Museum of Cambodia, republished in Abbe 2015, 141)

efforts with the 1937 Centre régional and the colonial side with the Indochinese FOM section of 1937 and the concrete efforts in Cambodia, both visions were equally utopian. This was particularly true in relation to the reality of a handicraft and heritage production that was already enmeshed in a transcultural economic circle of colonial labour exploitation, mass production of copies and fakes of European and Asian original artworks and decorative pattern, and the import-export dynamics of so-called ‘authentic’ products for an international clientele. The second publication of the Gouvernement général de l’Indochine on the handicraft production of the Ha-Dong province near Hanoi proudly explained (and this was another version of the model that was temporarily staged as the 1937 Indochinese section and found its French equivalent in the Centre artisanal) that a “Society for the encouragement of the art industries of Ha-Dong” had been founded with its headquar-

ters “in regional style where [in the form of] a veritable museum the handicraft objects of the craftsmen of the province were on display. […] In directly attached working ateliers, visitors could assist the work of the craftsmen for sewn silk, carpets, and objects of horn and tortoise shell” (GGI 1937b, 8). What followed in the illustration section, however, was the total opposite. Here, domestic mosquito net productions were depicted next to the “fabrication of Thonet chairs”, originally an Austrian patent of the Viennese Thonet brothers and now mass-produced cheaply in French Indochina for the Asian and certainly European market (Fig. VIII.32a). Furthermore, what Charles-Brun had propagated as regional French costumes and what the exhibition makers of 1937 published in their Livre d’or as an original handicraft production in the French colonies was in fact totally perverted. The smiling French “dentelières” (compare Fig. VIII.30a), as much as the ‘indigenous’ hand387

VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figures VIII.32a,b  Depictions of Vietnamese handicraft shops producing Viennese ­Thonet chairs (above) and French lace (dentelle de Venise) as depicted in the 1937 publication ­L’artisanat de la province de Hadong (Tonkin) (Source: GGI 1937b, plates VI, III; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

icraft industries in the colonies, were marginalised by the lace producers from Indochina (Fig. VIII.32b) who were able to cheaply mass-produce under French logistics what the French clientele back home or in the colonies, and the rising Indochinese bourgeois circles, would buy as ‘regional’ artisanat. The third publication of the GGI finally provided the missing link between the concept of traditional handicraft and the commercialisation of the same in “The art schools of Indochina”, with a Beaux-Arts school in Hanoi, the École des arts cambodgiens in Phnom Penh, and three art schools in Cochinchina with a close link to Cambodian coopera-

tives. As regards the chapter on the ‘Cambodian arts school’ (founded by royal decree in 1917 and set up under French direction in 1918), the role of George Groslier as its first director was mentioned and his pragmatic terms of a “decadence, agony, and reconvalescence of the Cambodian arts”45 introduced (compare Abbe 2015). In the context of his programme to re-establish “gifted craftsmen working in the pure traditions of the builders of Angkor”, he launched the idea of (a) reconnecting the indigene with his art and opening lucrative markets for him, (b) saving the Cambodian craftsman from all foreign influences, (c) only making Cambodian art in the Cambodian way, (d) teaching stu-

45  See some of the publications of Groslier on this topic: “L’agonie de l’art cambodgien”, in: Revue indo-

chinoise, t. XXIX, n°6, June 1918, 547–60; “La prise en charge des arts cambodgiens”, in: Revue indochinoise, t. XXX, n°9, September 1918, 251–64; “La convalescence des arts cambodgiens”, in: Revue indochinoise, t. XXX, n°10, October 1918, 267–81; “La psychologie de l’artisan cambodgien”, in: Arts et Archéologie Khmers, 1.2 (1921–22), 125–37; “Enseignement et la mise en pratique des arts indigènes (1918–30)”, in: Bulletin de l’Académie des Sciences Coloniales, t. XVI (1931). Under Groslier’s pseudonym Nicoli: “Ce qui a été fait au Cambodge pour la pratique et la protection des arts indigenes” (in three parts), in: Arts et Archéologie Khmers, 1.1 (1921–

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5. The Colonial and Regional Centres in 1937 — and Indochina

Figures VIII.33a,c  Un élève sculpteur au travail in front of his instructor and an Angkorian statue of a Buddha, and the same “pierre d’Angkor reconstituée” through the Association corporative de Biên-hoa as shown in the 1937 publication Les écoles d’art de l‘Indochine (Source: GGI 1937c, plate IX, XI; © Bibliothèque nationale de France)

dents about the methods their ancestors used to make art during the flourishing Khmer epoch, and (e) installing drafting ateliers to study design patterns not from European sources but from the “Apsaras and bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat or the Bayon” (GGI 1937c, 22, 23). Just as this publication depicted “a student sculptor at work” using an ancient Naga-snake sculpture from Angkor as a direct decorative model for his work (Fig. VIII.33a), likewise the atelier ensemble for the Indochinese craftsmen on Swan Island of Paris 1937 could be read in its symbolic arrangement around the central architectural hybrid as a direct source of their (obligatory) eternal inspiration in the form of facade elements of the Angkor Wat and the Bayon temples (Fig. VIII.33b). Working À l’ombre d’Angkor, as Groslier had termed a publication in 1916 (after he had reinvented the Royal Khmer Ballet on the basis of bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat [Groslier 1913, Falser 2013f]), Cambodian craftsmen returned “as a miniature community” under French tutelage to ancient glory: “In the artistic performances, the urban craft shows, and the beautiful Khmer temple, the government officials displayed the Indochinese as the fils doué of the colonial empire” (Hale 2008, 150, 160).46 The 1937 publication series went on to introduce the “Provincial art schools of Cochinchina” (compare with

Charles-Brun’s idea of installing similar schools in the French provinces) and described the École d’art de Bien-Hoa in Cochinchina (and not in Angkor or even Cambodia) where Angkorian sculptures and architectural decorations were reproduced (and not creatively interpreted as was claimed by the regionalist discourse around the 1937 Paris Exhibition) for a rising commercialised heritage industry (Fig. VIII.33c): The activity of the Bien-Hoa art school and of the craftsmen within the Association corporative covers three domains: bronze, ceramic, and reconstituted stones of Angkor [la pierre d’Angkor reconstituée] […] On the demand of many amateurs, the school has lastly developed a new technique. The craftsmen are specialised to reproduce, in a material that follows the originals exactly, the best models of Khmer statuary. The friezes of Angkor Wat and the reliefs of the Bayon temple provided magnificent decorative panels [revêtements] for the interiors of habitations. Elephants and lions ornament the nicest manor pathways and gardens. These reproductions of universally admired motifs are of the most vivid interest as far as their subjects and their perfectly executed copies are concerned. [italics MF] (GGI 1937c, 33, 34)

22), 83–106; 1.2 (1921–22), 155–76; 1.4 (1921–23), 403–8. 46  As Hale indicated about the invention of the ‘colonial family’ for a French parental image; compare Bene­ dict 1991.

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VIII  The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Figure VIII.33b  A watercolour aerial view of the Indochinese section of the 1937 Exhibition by Paul Sabrié as badly reproduced in L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration, 29 May 1937, n.p.)

With the Indochinese installation during the Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris 1937, the seventy-year-long career of the multiform translation of Angkor for the French métropole came to an end. However, the truly globalised aesthetic reception, artistic reproduction, and commodified circulation of Angkor as a ‘label’ (a term that Charles-Brun had already quoted in his 1911 publication) had only just begun. And whereas the former site of Angkor during the 1937 Exhibition on Swan Island is today overgrown by trees and framed by skyscrapers to the rear with the Eiffel Tower in the far distance (Pl. VIII.4b, compare VIII.4a), the old colonial topos “to revive ancient Khmer Arts and Crafts”47 is still exploited today – under the label Artisans d’Angkor – and is stronger than ever on the

Internet and at ‘the real site’, where almost 2 million international visitors come every year to admire Angkor Wat. What happened during the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris to make archaeological heritage on dispay authenticated with all facets of cultural regionalism made a full circle and was ‘back-translated’ to Angkor in Cambodia: when Angkor Archaeological Park (decreed in the 1920 and 1930s, compare chapter IX) was pushed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992 with massive French support (see chapter XII), the concept of ‘local and regional culture’ was, through reinstalled local elites and incoming international experts with their heritage slogans of ‘living heritage’, again reinvented and commodified through dispays of traditional farming and regionalist housing schemes (see epilogue II of volume 2).

47  http://www.artisansdangkor.com/, accessed 9 July 2013.

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Findings and Conclusions for Volume 1

From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions: Angkor in Museums, World and Colonial Exhibitions in France (1867—1937) As explained in detail in the introduction to this book, a transcultural perspective aims to redefine the old-fashioned and rather static units of investigation within the disciplines of art and architectural history and cultural heritage studies (compare Fig. Intro.2a). It tries to overcome (a) the area studies with their narrow focus on territorially fixed entities such as nation-states and confined cultural zones, and (b) the methodological approach of a mere transfer of contents, concepts, and practices from one semantic-visual system to another. As a consequence, we constitute our object of in­vestigation – the temple of Angkor Wat – not as a god-­given architectural masterpiece of art historiography, but in reference to the agency involved in the dynamic and transcultural processes of the exchange, circulation, and relationality between the ‘original’ Cambodian site (volume 2) and its ‘second life’ representations in colonial France from 1867 until 1937 (volume 1). In order to bridge the large-scale and supposedly confined spheres of Asia and Europe and redefine them as a kind of aesthetic and political contact zone, we approached one specific cultural practice which seemed particularly useful in this first volume of our transcultural enquiry: translation. Enlarging this term’s original meaning as a linguistic practice and applying it more generally to the exchange processes between cultures allowed us to analyse how the temple site of Angkor Wat was systematically transformed in French-colonial times from a religious and living site of regional (Buddhist) veneration into a dead ‘archeologised’ icon of le patrimoine culturel of la plus grande France. In this dynamic and mutual relation to the – singular, immobile, and enduring – Cambodian site this first volume primarily focussed on the – multiform, mobile, and ephem­eral – representations in France. On the social level of this cultural practice of translation we addressed the processes on how the religious site in Asia was appropriated for institutionalised spaces of museums, exhibitions and scientific discourses in France, England and Germany while (see volume 2) the real site was being turned into a spectacular and protected heritage icon of Western curiosity. Concerning the material level of the transcultural practice (compare Fig. Intro.2b), we explained how the monumental (immobile) architecture of Angkor Wat was made mobile and physically transferable. The technical device for this operation was (besides a similar one called photography) primarily the one of plaster casts, which were used for the temple’s ever-changing representa-

tions and re-materialisations in the form of Angkor-styled pavilion structures in the French universal and colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Paris. At the same time (see volume 2) the ‘real’ site was being turned through in-depth restoration measures into the object of French (post)colonial archaeology and architectural conservation (chapter IX). Concerning the mental level, the chapters of this first volume contextualised how Angkor Wat was, through a process of code-switching after the alienating extraction from its locally embedded social use-value, slowly transformed into a declared architectural chef-d’œuvre within the Occidental canon of art and architectural history. The ‘real’ site (see volume 2) – named Parc archéologique d’Ang­kor and its most prestigious temple of Angkor Wat – mutated into an icon of cultural heritage for Cambodia’s French-colonial prestige, but was also appropriated for the country’s postcolonial nation-state (chapter X), taken ­hostage for Cold War politics (chapter XI) and made a star on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 1992 (chapter XII, epilogue II). The transcultural enquiry of this first volume with eight chapters, with their focus on the physical reproductions of Angkor Wat in France, also helped to critically question the modernist norms and elitist value structures within the discipline of art history (see Figs. Intro.2–3), including, above all, the concepts of originality and uniqueness (versus circulating copies and replicas); artistic authorship and authority (versus anonymous re-use); physical permanence (versus the ephemeral); monumentality (versus the mobile and transient); authenticity and purity (versus hybridity); etc. This has had serious consequences for the transcultural concept of cultural heritage (Juneja/Falser 2013a) as embedded in a global history of art. The results from our mapping of the developmental stages of Angkor Wat’s physical career in France from one political, aesthetic and scientific embedding to the next in a rather short period of a mere seven decades from 1867 to 1937 (see volume 2 for the extended period until today) also enable us to redefine its classical parameters, including place (from the national towards the transborder), materiality (from the solid towards the ephemeral), space (from the compact towards the in-between and the multi-sited), status (from the homogenous towards the hybrid), time (from the permanent and static towards the temporary and processual), and identity (from the collective and homogeneous towards the plural, shared and ambivalent). 391

Findings and Conclusions for Volume One

Chapter I: Lost in Translation? — The Mekong Mission of 1866 and the Plaster Casts from Angkor at the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1867 The physical career of Angkor in France began in 1867. However, the very first motivation to translate Angkor Wat occurred about one year earlier in 1866 and was, as we have seen, already embedded in a para-colonial power structure that (a) necessitated this temple’s instant mobility over long distances and (b) completely contradicted what cultural heritage practices and the developing disciplines of archaeology and art/architectural history would later formulate as its central value, namely ‘originality’. As a small footnote in a belated report from 1873 (Garnier 1873) wrongly had it – and this has been kept in official historiography until recently – the first casts from Angkor were made as the cultural by-product of a French scientific mission carried out between 1866 and 1868 to explore the commercial navigability of the Mekong River into Southern China. Investigated here for the first time in detail, these casts were in fact made a few months earlier, in April 1866, as part of a hasty attempt by the Saigon-based French-colonial negotiator and later mission leader Doudart de Lagrée to compensate for France’s inability to depict Angkor in the very first official photographs in Europe before her British rival. Only a few days before de Lagrée’s arrival, the Scotsman John Thomson had already taken the first photograph of Angkor for his upcoming 1867 publication (Thomson 1867). Using another ad-hoc recording (i.e., ‘translation’) technique to formulate the ‘physical claim’ over Angkor in colonial Europe, de Lagrée was unexpectedly forced to execute (unconventional sulphur and cement) casts of statues and bas-reliefs of especially Angkor Wat on the spot (Villemereuil 1883). They were sent from Saigon to Paris in time-consuming and logistically difficult conditions (the Suez Canal was only opened in 1869!). Only a few survived the journey. In the French capital the ­hastily done, low-quality on-site copies from Angkor were, along with later series of ‘ethnographica’ from the Mekong mission, rapidly converted into institutionalised exhibits in museum and exhibition displays; however, with a totally different dedication. Building on Henri Mouhot’s visit to Angkor in 1860 and his French and English travel reports of 1863 and 1864 (although he was a French naturalist, he had been supported by the British), the 1873 report on the Mekong mission provided the first massive pictorial translation of Angkor for the European public. However, the intentional concealment of the still intact Buddhist monastery of Angkor Wat helped to reinforce the picture of an abandoned and forgotten (waiting to be rediscovered), overgrown (waiting to be rescued), ruined (waiting to be reconstructed) temple site in the midst of a supposedly decadent present population (waiting to be instructed about their own past). This formed a typically colonial narrative and “salvage paradigm” (Clifford 1989, compare Falser 2015a, e) that was even reinforced by the picturesque hand drawings made by the naval captain Louis Delaporte. As the ‘artistic’ partici392

pant of the mission, he would in the following decades turn into an ardent amateur and crucial individual agent in the translation project of Angkor for the French métropole. The casts themselves were, without the controlling influence of their in situ executors, embedded into the Universal Exhibition’s rigid classifying system and architectural and symbolic overall model, which both aimed (like all exhibitions of this type) at defining and representing the civilising levels of all nations on the planet from the hege­ monic perspective of the exhibition makers. Because of the ambiguous status of the casts their affiliation was delicate: they were (a) conceptualised as specimens of a high and ‘extinct’ civilisation from a supposedly ‘degenerated’ country, but nonetheless from a desired colony of the progressive French grande nation; (b) displayed inside the central French section of the 1867 Exhibition but only at its colonial, therefore peripheral display; (c) representing the world’s most astonishing temple art but as mere copies or substitutes. Within the polysemy of objects inside the double entry system of both national/regional and thematic affiliation, the plaster casts from Angkor were partly “lost in translation” (Falser 2014), as they landed not in a section of high-level, original beaux-arts from the métropole or low-tech ethnographic art from the colonies, but instead in Group II/Class 8 for high-tech products of state-of-the-art mechanical reproduction (‘physical translation’) methods of art, including chromolithography, photosculpture, and galvanoplasty. Despite their later valuation as ‘authentic’ decorative elements attached to hybrid pavilion architectures à la Angkorienne, the Angkor casts were inserted in a truly elementary section of the 1867 Universal Exhibition that reflected the latest discussions. Besides being praised for their value as “artistic inspiration” (Taigny 1867), critics like the famous Beaux-Arts architect Victor Baltard played the casts’ mere ‘effectful’ character as secondary to the truthful ‘feeling’ of original works. Nonetheless, he judged them to be the most reliable reproductive medium “to transport the artistic original from one language to the other” (Bartard 1868), an expression that quite closely corresponds to our focus on the ‘translatability’ of Angkor for the French métropole. Advocates of ‘industrial art’ or industrially ‘applied arts’ underlined, with recurring reference to the educative mission of the London-based South Kensington Museum (the great reference for Delaporte’s later Khmer museum project), the role of low-cost replicas of renowned art works within the “social progress, egalitarian ideas and practices, and a radical reform of public taste” (Dognée 1869, Redgrave 1868). As had been signed by the leading European nation-states in the Convention of universal reproductions of artworks during the Paris event of 1867, plaster casts were a powerful medium to display and appropriate all cultural heritages from all times from all over the world (including the colonial one, in our case)

Chapter II: La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art

simultaneously in different free-access and permanent (Occidental) museum spaces. Just as the Mekong mission under Napoleon III triggered a veritable “Angkormania” in the decades to come (Demeulenaere-Douyère 2010), the Egypt mission of Napoleon I around 1800 had initiated the preceding ‘Egyptomania’ in France. As a result of this earlier, but very similar exotic trend, the reconstituted Temple d’Edfou inside the 1867 Exhibition not only helped to introduce outdoor and freestanding ‘national’ pavilion constructions to universal exhibitions (Normand 1870) but was also an important conceptual forerunner to the later reconstitutions of Angkor. Its hybrid assembling method of technically reproduced and serially multiplied plaster casts from the original Egyptian site and from originals in French museums (like the Louvre) as a decorative skin for an inner supporting structure of wood and (reinforced) concrete, along with the vocabulary used to describe the time-scale compressed ‘temple-as-museum’ construction as an “étude archéologique” (Mariette 1867) and “réproduction fidèle” (Marini 1867), are seminal developments for our study on the multiform Angkor pavilions in France between 1878 and 1937. As a “scale-reduced quintessence of civilisation” (Barth 2007), these pavilions of a re-imagined antiquity were embedded into a transcultural relationship. First, they helped to iconise, stereotype, and fossilise Oriental temple

sites as appropriated elements within the canon of a colonial patrimoine culturel. Second, they worked as Occidental exhibitionary test sites for an applied mission civilisatrice back in the colonies (compare Falser 2015a) where the ‘real’ archaeological sites of longue durée were aesthetically and physically ‘approximated’ to their ephemeral, but picture-perfect, twin sites in the colonial motherland. This chapter fleshed out important intermediate steps in the evaluation of the moulages from Cambodia’s famous temple site. They migrated before and after the 1867 Exhibition to the palais de l’Industrie, the main building of the 1855 Universal Exhibition. Here the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie organised exhibitions to (a) foster the appreciation of mechanically reproduced art like plaster casts as valuable objects sui generis (in fact a quality that has been rediscovered today), and (b) to extend their approach into the domains of cultural heritage in general and Oriental art in particular. Simultaneously, the Musée permanent des colonies now embedded the casts from Angkor – next to the commerce-oriented exhibition of ‘indigenous industries’ and lifelike imitations of the ­‘noble savage’ – into the new display mode of a rising discipline, which not only tried to represent and hierarchise the colonial world but was also seen as the conceptual forerunner for integrating Oriental artefacts into the Occidental canon of art history: ethnography.

Chapter II: La Porte d’Entrée from Ethnography to Art: Delaporte’s Missions to Angkor, his Musée Khmer and the Universal Exhibition of 1878 Although de Lagrée’s first casts from Angkor in Paris went unnoticed at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition, Louis Delaporte’s specific Angkor mission in 1873 counts as what we have termed the ‘first massive material translation of Angkor’ for the French motherland. However, his mission explorative du Tonkin (he only went to Angkor on Siamese territory) was still embedded in a rhetoric of colonial conquest: he aimed not only to salvage the archaeological marvels of the forgotten antiquity of Angkor in a land considered to be inhabited by an ‘ignorant population’, but also to re-establish, in the form of an ‘effectful’ public exhibition parcours in Paris, the history of what he had already termed by this time a ‘French country’, despite the fact that Angkor was still on Siamese territory. Unlike the academic discussion about the art historical value of original or copied artworks back home, Delaporte’s choice to transport either originals or their mere substitutions [échantillons] in plaster cast only depended on the artefacts’ ad-hoc logistically available ‘transferability’ or ‘translatability’, and totally bypassed effective Siamese property (and therefore cultural heritage) rights. His archaeological harvest comprised seventy original sculptures and architectural fragments, thirty mouldings from Angkor Wat’s bas-reliefs and forty-five

from other sites, plans and drawings, photographs, and copied inscriptions (Delaporte 1874). If Delaporte’s popular reports in the Revue des deux mondes (1877) as well as his monograph Voyage au Cambodge (1880) helped to stabilise the French-colonial heroic master narrative of ‘Lost and rediscovered Angkor’, they were counterbalanced by the intimate report of his collaborating moulage maker, Auguste Filoz. The report (a) described the tiring individual moulding (‘translation’) work at Angkor Wat, (b) noted the destructive effect of the moulding technique on the original stone surfaces, and (c) articulated the ‘subaltern’ voice of the monks from the ‘one-hundred-hut-monastery’ of Angkor Wat regarding Delaporte’s “disrespectful behaviour and pillaging of the country” (Filoz 1889). In light of our concept of a transcultural relationality between the Asian site and its European appropriation, combined, all remarks (d) insinuated what we have extrapolated as the earliest stage of a colonial strategy to ‘archaeologise’ the site (compare Falser/Juneja 2013b): as we shall see in further detail in chapter IX in the second volume of this book, the active Buddhist monastery of Ang­ kor Wat was converted into a dead re-Hinduicised ruin. Back ‘home in France’, it was turned into an object of colo393

Findings and Conclusions for Volume One

nial longing, Occidental science, and voyeuristic exploitation. However, when more than Delaporte’s expected one hundred (!) boxes from Angkor finally arrived in Paris, the Louvre Museum refused the Danaic gift. Delaporte had to install his objects in the palais national de Compiègne near Paris, which opened in 1874 as the first Musée khmer in Europe, without a differentiation between originals and moulages (Croizier 1875, Bosc 1879). Its Khmer exhibits were snobbishly repudiated as “primitive and decadent” art by the grand Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc 1875) who anticipated, quite rightly, in Delaporte’s ambitious plans for an Indochinese plaster cast museum in Paris a direct competitor to his own idea of a musée de Sculpture comparée. After its display in the section of mechanical art reproduction for the education of public taste during the 1867 Universal Exhibition, Delaporte’s ‘translation project’ of Angkor underwent a decisive turn in the late 1870s as far as its embeddedness within the scientific and culturo-political mind map of (colonial) France was concerned. This was primarily due to the emergence of the discipline of ethnography – in combination with archaeology and anthropology – which helped (a) to showcase in an uninterrupted and comparative series the gradual modification and cultural degrees of world civilisation from the primitive to the highly developed, from extinct antiquity to the living presence; (b) to embed this universal chronology into the modern concepts of decadence, race, progress, the nation-­ state and its cultural heritage; and finally (c) to underline the leading role of France’s civilising and scientific mission around the (colonial) planet. Right before the 1878 Universal Exhibition, Delaporte’s collection was inserted into the temporary Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques as organised in early 1878 in the palais de l’Industrie. Here the moulages of his mission aux ruines khmères were on display between diverse samples (échantillons and spécimens) of natural and human history (such as measured cranes of Cambodian ‘sauvages’ collected by the naturalist, navy doctor, and later diplomat Jules Harmand, a participant of Delaporte’s 1873 mission), along with the copied inscriptions [éstampes] and débris of extinct civilisations from other missions, including Bolivia and Central Asia (Watteville 1886). When the 1878 Universal Exhibition opened its gates shortly afterwards, the art and architecture of Angkor had its first real breakthrough on the European continent and was shown in three different sections: scientific missions, French colonies, and ethnography. When the above-mentioned test exhibition re-opened in the Industrial Palace on the Champs-de-Mars as Exposition spéciale du ministère de l’Instruction publique, Delaporte’s considerably enlarged display was now situated in the section entitled “methods of higher education” and explicitly embedded in French colonial-scientific propaganda. As we could reconstruct it

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from internal documents for the first time, Émile Soldi was also commissioned to execute a 1:10-scale plaster cast model of an entry gate to Angkor Thom with instructions from Louis Delaporte. As the first three-dimensional reconstitution of an Angkorian structure on the European continent, the model combined different pictorial sources from Garnier’s 1873 and Delaporte’s 1880 publications into a physical translation (Falser 2013b). Shortly after, Soldi also participated, with his book Les arts méconnus, in the efforts to give Angkorian antiquity a place in a world history of art (Soldi 1881). The display of the French-colonial section under the ministère de la Marine et des colonies most probably re-exhibited de Lagrée’s collection from the Permanent Colo­ nial Exhibition (see above) and was – with its “banal fetish-and-idol-based” display (Gautier/Desprez 1878) of art objects, indigenous mannequins, padded animals and rural industrial products – quite out-dated. Strategically situated on the other end of the visitor’s parcours through the palais de Champs-de-Mars, the section co-formulated the message of a ‘justified inheritance’ of Angkor through the French-colonial power. However, Angkor’s real coming-out in 1878 was staged elsewhere. Building on classificatory concepts of world culture, which we detected in earlier scientific debates between Edmé François Jomard (ingénieur-géographe and participant in the French expedition to Egypt), and the Bavarian physician and botanist Philipp-Franz von Siebold, the young discipline of ethnography played a significant role. It helped to incorporate non-European artefacts into a world-embracing order of (European) ideas and a narrative of the progressive civilising march of humanity in which extinct civilisations (like Angkor) were re-configured as “historic nationalities” (after Léon de Rosny, president of the Société d’ethnographie). Angkor was also present in the ethnographic section of the Exposition historique de l’art ancien de tous les pays et de l’ethnographie des peuples étrangers, which was staged in the crowning Trocadero Palace of the 1878 Exhibition. Even if (to this day) the disciplines of art history, archae­ ology, ethnography, and conservation apply their meth­ odology to purely ‘original’ objects, the intentional constructedness of their objects of scientific enquiry became particularly apparent in Dela­p orte’s display: his snake ­balustrade from the temple of Preah Khan (today in the musée Guimet) as the “largest sculptural specimen” of the whole exhibition (Liesville 1879, Delaporte 1880) was in fact a hybrid installation of different original fragments and professionally (but incorrectly) added plaster casts (Baptiste 2013). With this (hidden) strategy, Delaporte’s sculptural display anticipated the hybrid exhibition practices through which the polymorphic translation of Angkor’s architectural ‘heritage’ first developed in the interior spaces of architectural museums.

Chapter III: Staging Angkor in the Museum

Chapter III: Staging Angkor in the Museum This chapter attempted to bring to light the museological strategies (Delaporte 1900). By 1868 in his Dictionnaire devices, media, and practices of representation in the nine- raisonné Viollet-le-Duc had already developed, in referteenth and early twentieth centuries, which helped to con- ence to Georges Cuvier’s 1800 approach of a “comparative vert large-scale architectures into three-dimensional ex- anatomy”, his parcours through France’s eleventh- to sixhibits and cultural heritage icons inside institutionalised teenth-century architectural sculpture (compare Lenoir). museum spaces. Focusing on Angkor as staged in Dela­ He decided that it would be (a) based on a “dissective and porte’s musée Indo-chinois in the Parisian Trocadero Palace comparative display” of isolated facade elements in pati(1880s to 1920/30s), we analysed architectural museums in na-free plaster casts (Bergdoll 1990, Vinegar 1998), and (b) Paris and London, the capitals of European colonial power realised with a metonymic and photo-like wall-hanging on in South(east) Asia, as potential forerunners (compare Fal- a monochrome and neutralising background. In order to ser 2013e). “display the relation of sculptures between different epochs The musée des Monuments français in the former cou- and civilisations” (Viollet-le-Duc 1879), the introductory vent des Petits-Augustins in Paris materialised between hall was set around a ‘global’ formative period comprised 1793 and 1816 and triggered the emancipation from the of Late Romanesque French, Egyptian, Assyrian, and exhibition of single salvaged originals on old-fashioned Greek statuary, to which Delaporte’s Southeast-Asian dispedestals, shifting presentation styles towards three-dimen­ play indeed contributed a logical (although never officially sional montages (Besc-Bautier/Chancel-Bardelot 2016). propagated and even institutionally marginalised) extenContrary to his propagated reputation as a ‘re-active’ sav- sion at the other end of one and the same building. iour of only original art objects under direct threat of As we have brought to light for the first time, Delaporte’s French revolutionary vandalism – comparable to the colo- French-colonial vision of propagating Khmer-built antiqnial self-image of saving forgotten temples from menacing uity in the métropole was directly influenced by France’s jungles and ignorant inhabitants – the chief conservator, greatest imperial concurrent: Great Britain. In this context, Alexandre Lenoir, followed a quite ‘pro-active’ strategy (sale the former indigo merchant and later famous British archiand purchase, exchange and re-use, compare Delaporte) to tectural historian James Fergusson, and the former naval stage his threefold pedagogic parcours. First, and building captain, explorer and later ambitious Khmer art amateur on Winckelmann’s ground-breaking concept of the perio- Louis Delaporte engaged in a unique constellation of paydisation of art in cyclic formative, classic, and decadent ing mutual deference. Referencing each other, they became phases, he created a sequence of interior spaces as time- the two most fundamental individual agents for the earliest and-style capsules, period rooms, or “chronotopes” (Poulot positioning of Khmer architecture into a canon of world 2001). Here, he freely combined various specimens of orig- art, and this applied to scientific publications and museoinal sculpture, architectural fragments, and archétypes logical displays. While the former (Fergusson never visited (“moulded proofs of original artefacts”) in a metonymic Cambodia) cited the on-site studies in Angkor of the latter way so that the single parts would aesthetically merge into in the section on “Further India” in his History of architecthe intended “exact physiognomies of each represented ture in all countries (Fergusson 1876), the latter (Delaporte) century” (Lenoir 1800) from the Goths to Louis XIV. Sec- apparently needed the former’s recognised listing of Angond, he realised partly freestanding stage prop facades in kor within a universal ‘index of high civilisation’ next to the courtyards of the museum, where the transferred part Rome, Egypt, and (British-colonial!) India for the justificaof Gaillon castle from 1500 would still serve around 1880 tion of his undervalued museum project in the French capas a (however crippled) example for Delaporte’s project. ital (Delaporte 1880). With his remarks on the British in Third, and in a time-neutralising ‘Elysian garden’ setting, India and the Dutch-colonial research on the ruined JavaLenoir realised hybrid architectural collages or “fabriques” nese temple on Borobudur, and his argumentation line of (Poulot 1986) in which the combination of original ele- civilisation, epoch, nation, and power, Delaporte embedments, moulded copies, ‘in style’ repairs, and even free ad- ded his architectural history of Angkor in a self-imposed ditions became undistinguishable and themselves – com- French-colonial “duty to revive a marvellous past, and reparable to the installations inside the musée Indo-chinois constitute its admirable artworks to enrich an art history of eight decades later – valid interpretations and creative ex- humanity” (Delaporte 1880). pressions sui generis. Yet, London was also the leading example for Delaporte Certainly the most influential direct counterpart to the in the physical reconstitution and political ‘heritagisation’ musée Indo-chinois was the musée de Sculpture comparée of Oriental antiquity in the European centre of colonial (located in the same palais de Trocadéro) as it was original- power. Delaporte made numerous references to important ly conceived by the architect, theorist, and monument forerunners from the London Universal Exhibition of 1851, ­conserver Viollet-le-Duc. Delaporte himself would later the Crystal Palace’s Oriental courts at Sydenham, the Orirefer to his project as a ‘natural prolongation’ of this neigh- ental Repository, and the India Museum, and discussions bouring museum, especially in the use of similar display on a “national collection of architectural art” (Fergusson 395

Findings and Conclusions for Volume One

1857). In this study we have focused particularly on the in- Angkor’s architectural features and representative decorafluence of the ‘Architectural (Cast) Courts’ of the South tive patterns for the Angkor-styled pavilions in the univerKensington Museum, which opened in 1874. Their in-scale sal and colonial exhibitions in France, from Paris 1889 and architectural plaster cast displays certainly served Dela­ Marseille 1906/1922, to Paris 1931 and 1937. Its display fiporte as inspiration. The museum’s explicitly twinned and nally combined (a) exhibited single replicas of sculptures and decorative elements, (b) metonymic and newly comeven connected inner courtyard situation was used to bined ‘in style’ collages (compare Lenoir and Viollet-levisualise and hierarchise world architecture between the Occident and the Orient. In London the visitor could Duc), and (c) three-dimensional monuments d’architecture adopt a “monarch-of-all-I-survey” viewpoint (Pratt 1992) including a hybrid Bayon pavilion as “free or popular from an elevated gallery and admire a life-size “three-di- translation”, and an almost exact Angkor Wat pavilion as mensional imperial archive” (Barringer 1998) in which the “literal or scholarly translation” (Benjamin 1923, compare giant replica of Trajan’s Column in the European court Tymoczko 1995). To conclude, these installations in the symbolised Great Britain’s ‘inheritance’ of the Roman Em- translation medium of plaster casts helped to ‘re-present’ these immovable, exotic, and foreign architectures from pire in Europe, whereas on the other side – and Delaporte was deeply impressed with this during his London visit – the Orient to the European centres of colonial power and the “plaster cast facsimile” (Cole 1874, compare Watson to integrate them into the coloniser’s own normative art 1869) of the impressive gate of the Sanchi stupa in the ‘Ori- history and cultural heritage canon. Publications like Le ental court’ visualised the British-colonial claim to custo- musée Indo-chinois (Guérinet, undated), L’art khmer (La dianship and authority over India’s cultural heritage. How- Nave 1904), and Delaporte’s final œuvre Les monuments ever, this spatial and visual nexus was never conceived as d’architecture Khmère (1914–24) provided a “reproductive such inside the Trocadero Palace with Viollet-le-Duc’s pri- continuum” (Baker 2010) of sketches, architectural drawmarily French and Delaporte’s primarily Indochinese plas- ings, and photographs of the original site; and of postcards, ter cast parcours, even if both displays did in fact represent plaster casts, models, and full-scale replicas of Angkor in stone architectures from the same period of time with a France. These participated in the gradual visual fragmentafocus on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. tion, iconisation and commodification, fetishisation and As we have extracted from internal reports, Delaporte heritagisation of Angkor’s architectural masterpieces, and undertook (or coordinated) four more missions until 1900 fostered their gradual decontextualisation from their origfor a harvest of more than 1,000 plaster casts with a clear inally religious function back in Cambodia. focus on Angkor Wat and the Bayon temples (Fournereau However, France was not the only player in this game before Angkor’s ‘legal’ incorporation into French-colonial 1889, Philippe 2011). He constantly reworked the floor plan configurations of his Paris museum throughout the 1880s, Indochine in 1907. If Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois with its and the finalised museum was permanently opened to the hybrid displays and pavilions was more what we have public around 1900 and remained open until his death in termed a performative and picturesque parcours to initiate 1925. What finally materialised as the musée Indo-chinois the French visitor to the grandeur of Angkor that would be was a veritable ‘transfer or translation site’ and trading port inherited by the French mission civilisatrice, then the ‘scienof plaster casts and fewer original artefacts from Angkor tific’ and rather clinical and descriptive 1:1 scale (and by and the whole of Southeast Asia. As a unique response to 1900 Europe’s most complete) facsimile replica of the bas-rethe British-colonial scene, Delaporte’s museum provided liefs of Angkor Wat in Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum reprewhat we have called the ‘generic (translational) code’ of sented another valid variation (Falser 2012/14, 2016b, 2017b).

Chapter IV: The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris: Angkor Wat goes Pavilion When the 1889 Universal Exhibition commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, France had entered a new spatial and mental configuration, which also had considerable consequences for the representation of Angkor. Faster and ever more far-reaching transportation means, communication lines, and economic and political networks on the one side, and a forced programme of colonial expansion – guided by an enforced self-perception of universalist vocation, cultural supremacy and national(ist) grandeur (Constantini 2008) – on the other had turned France into a République coloniale (Bancel 396

2003). But the (real or imagined) colonial space (including Jules Ferry’s disputed colonial project in Indochina) had to be popularised and justified for the French public. New forms of representations were necessitated by the visualising of the “world as an enframed totality” (Mitchell 1989) mastered by French technology and sciences and ordered by the hierarchical relationship between the French metropolitan centre and its colonial peripheries. For this, the Universal Exhibition of 1889 was a perfect scenario. These forms included concrete 3D models, walk-through installations, and ensembles in different physical scales and con-

Chapter IV: The Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris

figurations (compare Stewart 1993): (a) A Globe terrestre in 1:1 Mio-scale depicted the planet in the form of a manageable ‘miniature’; (b) the newly erected, ‘gigantic’ Tour Eiffel made the temporarily staged world visible from above for “imperial eyes” (Pratt 1992), and (c) Charles Garnier’s installation Histoire des habitations humaines periodised human civilisation (including Angkor as a dead branch) within successive stages of its physical and intellectual progress in a popular ‘collection’ of art history, archaeology, world history, and philosophy (Garnier/Ammann 1892). The peripheral exhibition grounds on the esplanade des Invalides (d) hosted, for first time ever, a decidedly French-­ colonial section to visualise France’s mastered space overseas with life-size pavilion installations acting as timespace compressed colonial icons of cultural heritage. The section was turned into a veritable Foucauldian heterotopia (compare with the introduction to this volume), a kind of temporarily staged and indeed “enacted utopia” where the different French-colonial spheres around the globe could be simultaneously experienced by the visitor in one and the same kind of (colonial) theme park atmosphere. This section’s “discursive triangle of power, knowledge and spatiality” was first “flattened, geometricised and ordered” (Gregory 1994) in a symbolic-relational arrangement: the Ministry of War and the metropolitan sections of hygiene, instruction, social assistance, and modern communication technology on the one side, and the individual pavilions of the different colonies around the central palais des Colonies on the other. Turned into the third dimension, the spectator encountered a visually overlapping and uniting composition made up of the ephemeral towers of different pavilions and dominated by the crowning (and permanent) golden dôme des Invalides in the background. As we shall discuss in the second volume of this book, this geometricised, ordered and visualised arrangement of the French-­ colonial sphere with staged versions of cultural heritages would be ‘back-translated’ to Cambodia and developed into different directions: an artificially created Parc archéo­ logique d’Angkor with its new parcours to experience to-berestored temples sites was decreed in 1925 (Falser 2013d) and brought to near perfection until the early 1970s (see chapter IX), poured into Cambodia’s postcolonial and Cold War heritage politics of the 1950s to 1980s (see chapters X and XI) and finally reinvented and globalised in 1992 as the world’s largest archaeological reserve on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (see chapter XII, epilogue II). Although Angkor was in reality still on Siamese territory back in 1889, it was now already claimed as part of the French-colonial world by the very first open-air pavilion-­ like reconstitution on French soil. Called the pagode d’Ang­ kor, it was executed on a cross-shaped plan of roughly twenty-two by fourteen metres, and a total height of more than thirty metres. Acting as a kind of transcultural agent (or cultural broker) to quote Angkor on both sides of the French-colonial imaginaire, the pavilion’s executing archi-

tect, Daniel Fabre, was at the same time chef du service des travaux public in Phnom Penh and responsible for the urban refurbishment of the French quarter in Cambodia’s capital using an architectural language of very similar stylistic references to the ‘architectural affordance quality’ (as we termed it in the introduction to this book) of ancient Angkor Wat. As we have been able to reconstruct for the first time from internal correspondence and published ­reports (e.g., Fabre 1887, Farge 1892), Fabre’s translation strategy was two-fold: First, and referring to Angkor Wat’s central eastern tower section (the same section was used in Delaporte’s museum!), he neither built a 1:1 replica nor simply reduced an original section. Instead he interpreted the ancient Khmer architecture as an “architectural résumé” (spécimen, compare the Egyptian pavilion of 1867) by stretching and slimming the central tower, embellishing the structure with new picturesque elements, and adapting it with modern and functional elements like windows. Second, through an act of borrowing [emprunt] he authenticated his rather ‘free’ translation (compare Benjamin 1923) with the integration of ‘word-by-word’ quotations or exactly copied decorative elements. These he had obtained as plaster casts (he called them moulages types – compare Lenoir’s archétypes, Viollet-le-Duc’s types, and Delaporte’s moulages des types) from the 1888 Angkor mission (Fournereau 1889), which were at that time part of the cast collection in Delaporte’s recently opened musée Indo-chinois nearby. On the political side, however, Fabre’s Angkor pavilion of 1889 was – after the first casts from the site in sections of mechanical art reproduction (1867) and ethnography (1878) – now totally embedded in the French-colonial discourse with a two-sided transcultural narrative: comparable with the other pavilion installations from Algeria to Guadeloupe as ephemeral display objects within the Parisian “exhibitionary complex” (Bennet 1988), it (a) represent­ ed France’s “civilising task” (Leroy-Beaulieu 1889) and its patronising claim for the Cambodian site by (b) already incorporating Angkor as cultural icon into the canon of a patrimoine culturel of Greater France’s staged colonial section. Fabre’s symbolic substitute in 1889 of its picture-perfect, style-space-time-compressed Paris version also anticipated France’s use of “man power, know-how, science and art” (Lejensiel 1889) to restore the neglected ruins themselves (see volume 2), which stood as a firm proof of Cambodia’s present decayed status and of Siam’s inability to protect architectural masterpieces on its own territory. The topos of the civilised nations’ duty to care for its cultural patrimony in the name of humanity was also formulated for the first time during the same 1889 event (Ministère du commerce/Normand 1889). The Congrès international pour la protection des œuvres d’art et monuments prefigured what in 1972, more than seventy years later, would be called ‘UNESCO World Heritage of Humanity’ with Angkor on its hit list since 1992 (see chapter XII, epilogue II).

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Findings and Conclusions for Volume One

Chapter V: The Rise of Angkor in the French Peripheries 1894—1906: From Lyon, Bordeaux, and Rouen to Marseille When the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris opened its gates under the title bilan du siècle with the intention of recapitulating one hundred years of progress, the popu­ larity of this kind of mass spectacle had reached its inflationary peak – with at least one exhibition per year, from Chicago (1893) to Christchurch (1906–7), and from Guatemala City (1897) to London (1908). As a result, France found itself under an “exhibitional hypnosis” (Vogüé 1900) that manifested in a need to stage its national grandeur with ever more spectacular “Babylonian banquets” and ephemeral plaster cast palaces (da Cunha 1900). With Jules Charles-Roux, the Marseille-born industrialist and colonial politician, as commissaire the French-colonial section was now staged with a 50 metre high and 2000 square metre reconstitution of Phnom Penh’s entire monastery hill. As a valid Parisian version of two entangled kinds of ‘enacted utopias’ of cultural heritage the very same site at the same time became – in situ – the restored urban historic reference point within the newly built French quarter of the capital of French Cambodge. The architect of the Cambodian section in Paris, Alexandre Marcel, was not a practicing architect from Indochina, but an Orientalist architect who executed palaces, villas, and cinemas in India, Cairo, and Paris using a random borrowing of exotic style elements. The same was true of his monastery hill scenario in 1900 where he re-used the life-size plaster cast copy of the ‘Bayon-face feature’ from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois both for a picturesque ‘entangled-by-liana’ pavilion, located along the external path towards the hilltop of the section, and for a multiplied element along the internal spiral staircase leading towards a fantastic subterranean grotto imitating the northwest Indian (and not Cambodian!) rock-cut architectural site of Ellora. Although not present in the Cambodian section as such, the imagery of Angkor Wat was further popularised for a developing hit list of worldwide heritage theme parks of universal cultural (mass) tourism. Inside a Chinese-­ Khmer-Indian-styled panorama installation called Tour du monde, the spectator undertook a voyage imaginaire to the cultural heritage sites of the acropolis of Athens, passed through ancient Syria, Egypt, India, and Ceylon, and finally reached (before continuing to Japan) the spectacular vista along Angkor Wat’s central passageway. As a real-life component of what was criticised as a strange “bazaar of architecture without soul and atmosphere” (Talmeyr 1900), a populated stage set with living Javanese (and not Khmer!) dancers were added to the scene (Falser 2013f). These images in Paris were aesthetically pre-framed as global her­ itage icons that travellers would search for at the ‘real’ Oriental sites with their own eyes or camera lenses. As a transcultural mirror, these architectural installations at the 1900 Exhibition also reflected the purely voyeuristic gaze of their decadent consumers from the Occident. 398

And even if the master narrative of France’s national grandeur unfolded in the universal exhibitions in Paris until and after 1900, similar but smaller events in the French periphery also helped considerably to shape France’s colonial self-image. In 1906 it was not Paris but the colonial port of Marseille that turned Angkor Wat into the symbolic monument of the French-colonial mission civilisatrice. Leading up to this decisive event, the Exposition nationale et coloniale of Rouen in 1896 was also remarkable for two reasons: first, it depicted large-scale decorative surfaces of Angkorian temples with plaster casts from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois, and it used them to speak – as the dominating decoration for the pavillon des Colonies – for the entire French-colonial empire. And second, the Rouen Exhibition ‘colonised and exoticised’ France’s own cultural heritage in the form of a staged Vieux-Rouen village complete with costumed folk. What had been originally invented as the topos of decadence and salvage to justify a civilising mission in French-colonial overseas was now appropriated for a self-critical and anti-industrialist standpoint to (a) assert the “mutilated presence” (Essarts 1896) of cultural urban centres in the French métropole, and (b) to stage an utopian, ephemeral dream world of the ‘good old days’ on the other. This Janus-faced vision returned in the last French exhibition of 1937 with the addition of directly neighbouring and almost overlapping French regional and colonial sections (see chapter VII). When Marseille, France’s principle colonial harbour city, hosted France’s first Exposition coloniale nationale in 1906, Commissaire général Charles-Roux introduced a new exhibition concept: instead of a “picturesque and pleasant souvenir” for the visitor (like in 1900), in the foreground stood a “vast and useful lesson” about and the “instruction” of the mandatory combination of exploration, conquest, commerce and civilising action in and for the French colonies through “penetrating displays with large inscriptions, chiffres, and abbreviated formulas” (Charles-Roux 1907). This had particular consequences for the chosen stylistic grammar of the translated architectural language of the pavilion architecture. In the year of the highest political pressure from France to have Angkor ‘retroceded’ from Siam (today Thailand) back to (French) Cambodia in 1907, Ang­ kor-styled and endlessly multiplied decorations from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois virtually carpeted the exterior of the palais des Produits des colonies de l’Indochine of the Indochinese section (designed by the architect Henri Vildieu, also chef du Service des bâtiments civils from Hanoi). Its interior was, next to the central display of agricultural and artisanal products from the colony, used to demonstrate the already initiated archaeological – ‘civilising’ – mission of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) at Angkor (Falser 2015c). The strategy of an essentialist compression of architectural and stylistic stereo-

Chapter VI: Representing Angkor Wat as a French patrimoine

types of overseas cultural regions into ‘national pavilions’ was now augmented – the famous rue du Caire of the 1889 Universal Exhibition was a clear conceptual forerunner – with picturesque streetscapes from Indochina complete with altogether four hundred ‘indigenes’ as supposedly authentic performers. Forty-two plaster casts from the Paris-based Indochina museum as “authentic specimens” (Baille 1907) decorated a “faithful reproduction” (Charles-Roux 1907) called palais du Cambodge, which the collaborating Delaporte now praised for its ‘exceptional archaeological value’. With a lower gallery wing in the condensed style of Angkor Wat and a 26 metre high tower roughly quoting a Bayon face tower, this architectural and stylistic hybrid was fully in line with Charles-Roux’s overall strategy of “abbreviated but eye-catching formulas”. Finally, the Colonial National Exhibition of Marseille in 1906 triumphed with totally new ‘live-elements’ in the staging of Angkor: The Cambodian

king in person, Sisowath, was invited to the event, and the Royal Ballet of female danseuses Cambodgiennes from Phnom Penh, of which he was patron (in fact the ballet was partly French produced as a semi-private royal dance group with exoticised costumes and gestures), performed in front of the palais du Cambodge as living specimens of pure and unbroken Khmerness for the Occidental gaze. Indeed, the sculptor Auguste Rodin was so fascinated by this spectacle that he executed a large series of drawings of this heritage re-enactment. Soon after its colonial test run in Marseille of 1906, this hybrid combination of (a) Angkorian temples as source, architectural background, and culturo-­ political stage set, and (b) the reinvented Khmer dancers, was re-translated back to the ‘original’ site of Angkor Wat as a powerful heritage package for the rapidly developing cultural tourism industry that had been under French control since 1907 and mutated considerably in postcolonial times (see volume 2 of this book, especially chapter X).

Chapter VI: Representing Angkor Wat as a French patrimoine: The National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922 In this transcultural enquiry into the relationality between the French-colonial politics in Indochina and cultural strategies at Angkor proper on one side, and the multi-form representations of Angkor in France on the other, we have conceptualised 23 March 1907 as the decisive turning point. On this date a new Franco-Siamese Treaty was signed to retrocede Angkor to Cambodia (or better: to the French protectorate of Cambodge). Previously termed by colonial activists as an “inherited Alsace Lorraine of la France d’Extrême-Orient” (Beau 1903, compare Edwards 2005), the final restitution of Angkor (a) saved Siam’s independence from France’s imperial longing for a French “Greater Mekong Valley” (Chailley 1907); (b) upgraded and reformulated Cambodia’s cultural and national self-esteem as deeply rooted in Angkorian antiquity; (c) made the famous temple range a de jure patrimoine culturel of Greater France (Harmand 1907, Bernard 1933); (d) made a totally new, institutionalised, now direct archaeological French impact on the ‘real site’ of Angkor; and, most important for our study in volume 1, (e) totally changed the strategies of ‘translating’ Angkor for the ephemeral mass events of universal and colonial exhibitions ‘back’ in the French mother­ land. As far as this last point was concerned, the former, exotic and pastiche-like, rather freely interpreted, representations of Angkor in the relatively small-scale pavilions of 1889 and 1906 using a restricted selection of authenticating plaster casts of ‘original’ decorations and buildings parts, was now replaced with a totally new concept. With mapping geographers, measuring architects, intervening archaeologists, classifying (art) historians, and translating philologists on site under the institutionalised umbrella of the EFEO (see chapter IX in volume 2), the

flow towards France of precise stylistic data and structural knowledge about and of concrete (original and copied) architectural specimens from the Angkorian temples increased exponentially. This almost inevitably directed the executing Beaux-Arts architects of the ‘Angkor Wat in France’ projects towards a monumental 1:1-scale replication shored up by the same new claim of archaeological exactitude as applied to create and embellish, extend and commodify the established ‘Archaeological Park of Angkor’ from 1925 onwards to the present days. As a consequence, Angkor Wat would – after its first appearance as selective casts in 1867, a 1:10-scaled model in 1978, a freestanding museum exhibit in Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois after 1878, a pagode d’Angkor in 1889 and pavillon du Cambodge in 1906 – now rematerialise in the Marseille Exhibition (postponed from 1916 to 1922) as the palais de l’Indochine. Under this name it no longer represented neutral art reproductions (1867) and ethnographical specimens (1878), a cultural site (1889) or the cultural heritage of a country (1906), but symbolised the political and cultural unity of the Union Indochinoise as a whole. The transcultural connectivity between the ‘real’ Cambodian site of Angkor and its pavilion-like re-materialisation in the French métropole was secured – from a physical side – by a thus far unequalled exploitation of Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois as an authentic source of original plaster casts from Angkor. From an institutional side, this connectivity was fostered by nominating (a) Pierre Guesde, résident supérieur in Cambodia and former participant of the ­Franco-Siamese delimitation commission, as Commissaire général of the Indochinese section of Marseille; (b) Auguste Delaval, architecte des Bâtiments civils de l’Indochine, 399

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as executing architect of the pavilion; and (c) Jean Com- France’s exhibitions. With the retrocession of 1907 as a maille, since 1908 (until his death in 1916) EFEO’s Con- turning point, the 1922 1:1-scaled Angkor Wat substitute servateur général for Angkor, as artistic consultant. Re­ with 60 metres side length, 40 metre high cornet towers, presenting a precious and until today totally unknown and a 54 metre high central tower, stood for a new ‘transdocument for our research, the correspondence from 1915 lational practice’ through which this temple site was irrebetween Commaille and Delaval (via Guesde) proved that versibly made a masterpiece inside the canon of Greater the ‘translatability flow’ of Angkor was not even affected by France’s patrimoine culturel (see the discussion of ‘patri­ World War I, nor by an intercontinental direct distance of monial affordance’ in the introduction of this book). almost 10,000 kilometres (!) and so many more kilometres Alongside all possible quality features of the Occidental by steamship travel. From his wooden hut in “Angkor-Thom” disciplines called art history and archaeology, the ‘Angkor (as he signed it in his letter) Commaille sent his archaeo- complex’ was turned into an Oriental superlative of culturlogically informed vision for a picture-perfect silhouette of al grandeur, which also migrated as an essentialist topos the Angkor replica for Marseille to Delaval (who was at into the psyche of the postcolonial nation-state and the this moment a sergeant in the deeply provincial town of Cold War history of Cambodia, and continues so to this Lorient in north-western France). This happened at a time day (see chapters X to XII, epilogue II). Probably counting when the tower pinnacles of Angkor Wat proper were not as the largest ephemeral replica ever executed in architeceven fully visible due to their partly dilapidated condition tural history, about “400,000 working hours” were neces­sary (Commaille 1915). Delaval, on the other hand, executed to erect what Adrien Artaud, the Commissaire général for his plans for a monumental reconstitution of Angkor Wat’s the 1922 Exhibition, called the “materialised potency of La central enclosure on the basis of existing surveys from the France d’Asie”. Nine workshops and two hundred plasterers site, but fragmented and re-arranged (re-interpreted) the and staff decorators from the French firm Auberlet & Lautemple’s architectural features for the Occidental eye using rent produced the replica’s decorative lightweight skin of a well-balanced massing and spatial disposition in strict “50,000 m2 of external and internal cladding, and 35,000 symmetry. In a process of ‘back-translation’ this study ar- plaster casts” (Artaud 1923). gues that the French versions of Angkor Wat were first Indochina’s newly founded arts-and-crafts institutions tested and physically presented in French universal and participated with further decorative items, and more than colonial exhibitions and then – as picture-perfect visuals – three hundred “authentic” indigenes were shipped to Martravelled back to the ‘real spot’ to heavily influence archae- seille to populate the ephemeral site. Transcending what ologists and conservators in their work to bring (restore) the Colonial Minister Sarraut termed the “interpenetration the age-old temple sites ‘back’ to their supposed ‘original’ of the métropole and the colonies” (Artaud 1923), the real appearance. It is not by accident that almost all the archi- and the substituted Angkor Wat temples were merged into tects in charge of Angkor had a solid Beaux-Art formation. a transcultural heterotopia (after Foucault 1967, see introWas it not also the prevalent – affordance – qualities of the duction): at the same time both sites were used to stage original twelfth-century temple in Cambodia (symmetry, historicising pageants of Angkorian antiquity with hunspatial composition, culmination points; compare the dis- dreds of costumed staffage figures. And whereas Angkor cussion on ‘architectural, Beaux-Art-related, affordance’ of Wat proper had already been transformed by the EFEO at Angkor Wat in the introduction of this book) which con- this point in time from a living Buddhist site into a dead tributed so fundamentally to Angkor Wat’s ability to be re-Hinduicised ruin and tourist commodity inside an arread and appreciated – and therefore be translatable into chaeological park (established by decree in 1925), the inner the French architectural taste of a late nineteenth and early two-storied parcours through Marseille’s Angkor Wat of twentieth-century ‘Beaux-Arts Orientalism’? 1922 culminated in the “hall of the ancestors”. Here, it was As far as we could extract from hundreds of internal not Hindu, Buddhist, or local gods that were venerated by documents preserved in the French Archives nationales Cambodia’s inhabitants or religious pilgrims from all over d’outre-­mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, the Angkor Wat Asia; instead, (inter)national exhibition visitors paid their projects of Marseille 1922 and Paris 1931 topped all other homage to France’s supposedly altruistic mission to restore financial, logistic, technical, and artistic efforts to re-mate- and revive Angkor Wat as a secular site or para-religious rialise any iconic heritage site in the French colonies for and increasingly globalised icon of cultural heritage.

Chapter VII: Going Real Size: Angkor Wat at the 1931 Exposition ­Coloniale Internationale in Paris Only three years after the 1922 National Colonial Exhibition at Marseille, the Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925 opened its gates in the centre of 400

Paris and forbade any architectural copies, pastiches of old styles, stylistic references to the antique world, or retrospective sections. But whereas the modern pavilions of the

Chapter VII: Going Real Size

1925 Exhibition, like the pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau by Le Corbusier/Jeanneret, set vanguard internationalist standards, the directly neighbouring unity of the regionalist village français with its provincial pavilions and the French­colonial section alike fell back into old-fashioned design patterns. With the Exhibition’s focus on original art productions, it was exactly with the Indochinese (Annamite-­ styled) pavillon de l’Asie française-Indochine and its participating architects that the aesthetic limits were crossed. Its conceiving architect, Auguste Delaval, simply reproduced a copy of a very similar version that he had already executed in Saigon’s Botanical Garden. The 1925 pavilion’s executing architect, Charles Blanche, was already fighting a lawsuit over his own plans for the new Angkor Wat replica for the approaching 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, which would come very close to Delaval’s version of 1922. Ironically, the closer the structure was in design to the original source and the narrower the architect’s creative re-interpretation, the greater was the risk of an accusation of non-artistic plagiarism. Within these ephemeral exhibitionary complexes, the art-historical dichotomy between so-called ‘original’ and ‘copied’ masterpieces was blurred at the precise moment when museums in the Western early twentieth-century world devalued and deaccessioned their plaster cast collections. Six years after the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley 1924/5 and only one year after the Belgium Colonial Exhibition in Antwerp/Liège in 1930, the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris’ eastern suburb of the Parc de Vincennes gathered other colonial nations like the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, the United States, and Portugal. The event aimed to bring the “heroism of the sons of la plus grande France” (Deloncle 1926) closer to a decidedly international public. Unknown until today is the fact that the event’s foreseen musée permanent des Colonies was originally (and unsuccessfully) proposed in the form of a “faithful [and solid] reconstitution of the central massif of Angkor Wat”, a “noble” specimen of the cultural antiquity of the emerging “grand modern state” of Cambodia (Guesde 1926). Interestingly, Louis Finot – the director of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, the colonial institution with the greatest interest in researching, safeguarding and propagating Indochina’s archaeological heritage – argued against a permanent museum building à la Angkorienne because of its mere hypothetical character and marginal “documentary value” (Finot 1926). What was finally realised by the French architects Charles and Gabriel Blanche not as permanent museum but as the palais du Gouvernement général de l’Indo-Chine within the neutralising parklike setting of the 1931 Exhibition (compare Lenoir’s 1800 monument museum in its jardin Élysée) was the event’s most prominent ephemeral structure. It symbolised Indochina as an administrative unity and coherent sphere of French cultural heritage protection. It subordinated all other Indochinese country pavilions and subsidiary structures along a Khmer-styled, prospectively dramatised pas-

sageway of perpendicular orientation towards the grande avenue des Colonies françaises with the other French-colonial pavilion structures. From the outside, this ephemeral superstructure with its 70 metres side length, 14-metre-­ high foundation walls, four 43-metre-high corner towers, and a 55-metre-high central spire was even larger than in Marseille in 1922. The whole project for the Paris 1931 Exhibition was propagated (quite rightly, as the dimensions were very similar!) as an exact translation of the central massif of Angkor Wat. Besides the contrasting ‘French metropolitan section’ with its white-washed internationalist architecture expressing the highest degree of civilisation, the Angkor Wat replica took – next to the reconstituted mud structure in the section of Afrique occidentale française – the leading role in the colonial parcours to stage the imposed cultural taxonomies of the dominated world (compare Morton 2000, Deyasi 2015). Adding the foreign installations such as the Bali-Borobudur-styled Dutch East Indies pavilion or the reconstituted Roman-Libyan ruins in colonial Italy to the list, those enacted heritage utopias in 1931 aesthetically preconfigured the same – ‘real’ – sites’ postcolonial nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List (Leptis Magna/Libya in 1982, Djenné/Mali in 1988, Borobudur/Indonesia in 1991, Angkor/Cambodia in 1992). Half a century after the 1867 invention of national pavilions as highly exotic “fabrications” (Carbonell 1996) of the mostly unknown and presently decadent countries of the world, the colonial world was now perfectly mapped and catalogued, and the exact translation technique of plaster casting was – for the last time! – deemed a state-of-the-art strategy to bring archaeological authenticity into the colonial pavilion architectures of French motherland. However, architectural critics heavily excoriated these products as uncreative and lamentable “carton-pâte” monsters (Sizeranne, Courthion, 1931), “too strong [stylistic] drinks” (Cogniat 1931) or, at best, “hallucinating marvels” (Bayard 1931) with unpredictable side effects for the Occidental audience. If the 1931 Angkor Wat replica counts as the largest substitution of an Asian, if not worldwide, cultural heritage structure on the European continent, then our study is the first ever to analyse the detailed logistics of its construction in a transcultural nexus of comparable expectations and requirements with the parallel restoration process at the original Cambodian site. At both of these temporary connected, heterotopian twin sites called Angkor Wat – inside the Paris exposition and the Cambodian parc archéologique – a picture-perfect, un-ruined (however patinated) daytime look, in a surrounding gardening concept, and a sophisticated nightly illumination was produced for a mostly Occidental (visitor or tourist) clientele. Whereas the ‘real’ site in solid sandstone was meant to be documented, salvaged, and preserved (compare Falser 2013d), the site in Paris was (a) only a temporary and artificial, 12 million franc product; (b) only made of an inner wooden core with an external decorative skin of lightweight staff with 2.4 million kilogramm of plaster (Olivier 401

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1933); and (c) a structure of limited durability to be totally after 1992 to emergency salvage Angkor Park, chapter XII demolished after the half-year spectacle ended without any and epilogue II) and “France’s tutoring role in Asia and remaining traces on site. Louis Finot praised Angkor Wat ­Africa” as “an edifice which had been cemented by the blood on Cambodian soil in the EFEO’s three-volume monograph of the colonialists” (Olivier 1931/2 in Rapport officiel). In Le temple d’Angkor Vat (the first volume of 1929 served for particular and in the sense of a colonial “reciprocity of Asia the 1931 Exhibition), for its ‘universal celebrity’ in a grow- and Europe” (Mille 1931 in Revue des deux mondes), the ing global tourist industry (Finot 1929), and therefore “splendid reconstitution of Angkor Wat” in Paris was the helped in essentialising it as a ‘national sanctuary’ and pa- last and most spectacular “picturesque seduction” (Beau­ ra-religious pilgrimage site of global cultural heritage tour- plan 1931) staging “the French in Asia as the Occidental ism until today. On the other side of the world, the Paris pacifiers of the Far East and the legitimate inheritors and owners of the antique Khmer civilisation” (Farrère 1931, replica stood for the French-colonial mission overseas and was equipped with an inner three-story parcours in a in L’Illustration). However, the left-wing anticolonial milieu had a different impression and message: Ne visitez unique mix of Angkor-styled decoration and color schemes and a French-modern exhibition design with glass cases pas l’Exposition was the appeal in May 1931 launched by the and translucent ceilings. Besides the display of Indochina’s French Surrealist artists around Breton, Éluard, and Ara­ raw and secondary industries, indigenous art, French in- gon, d ­ enouncing the 1931 Exhibition as a giant “Luna park” struction, and medical assistance in the lower levels, the (Léon Blum quoted in Pierre 1980). La vérité sur les colouppermost floor was staged as a heritage walkabout and nies was the title of a small joint exhibition with the associ“veritable museum” (Goloubew 1931) containing original ated Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale art exhibits, secondary sources (plans and photographs), during the exhibition. With several articles in the commuand plaster cast replicas of Angkor’s glorious temples, cul- nist newspaper L’Humanité, the transcultural nexus beminating in the salle d’honneur to praise the EFEO’s firm tween Indochina and “Angkor Wat in Paris” was highlightcustodianship over Angkor. ed from another perspective: now, the thin plaster cast The Angkor Wat replica was ambivalently exploited in facade around the – non-solid – inner wooden core of the universalist, imperialistic, and anti-colonial discourse Angkor Wat replica in Paris was not praised for its imalike. Officially, it was termed the most enchanting element age-making of cultural heritage, but advanced as a metaphor for the hollow rhetorical framework of French-coloof the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition to promote both “the notion of human solidarity and world peace” nial politics in Indochina (Gaillard, Renoult, Blum 1931; (compare the some wordchoice by UNESCO around and compare Norindr 1996).

Chapter VIII: The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France: Angkor at the 1937 Exposition internationale in Paris Only six years after the pompous 1931 International Colo- in 1937 to “la plus grande France” when the section de la nial Exhibition, France’s last universal exhibition, the Ex- France d’outre-mer (in the following FOM) on a Seine island was propagated as a “natural prolongation” of and position internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris, 1937, introduced a dramatically different “happy emulation” with the neighbouring Regional Centre picture. The message in the foreground was no longer the to cover “la France totale” (Léon, Bérenger 1936). If the old Saint-Simonian blend of unlimited progress, industri- Commissaire général, Edmond Labbé, called his Centre réalism, scientific discovery, and global expansionism but gional of 1937 an ‘immense architectural, artistic and techthe polar opposite – regionalism. France’s politically defen- nical laboratory’, then it was its relationality to the Colonial sive and culturally reflexive, altogether ‘post-modern’, turn Centre through which the concept of the ‘exotic and picto redefine and stabilise its national identity mirrored turesque’ of the colonial other was now reworked and con­decentralist ideologies during the financial crises of the nected to the ‘French indigenous’ in the colonial self. The ­inter-war period and an aesthetic rediscovery of its own transcultural regime of colonial translation flows – includrural, provincial (‘indigenous’) and pre-modern (‘tradi- ing objects, ideas and practices – had made, with this last tional’) culture and craftsmanship traditions (artisanat). French exhibition, a full circle and had ‘come back home’ The 1911 publication Le régionalisme by political thinker to its metropolitan centre. Jean Charles-Brun was, as we have explored in detail, cruThe Colonial Centre underwent a crucial transformation process that we have termed ‘from pastiche to artisacial for the conceptualisation of the 1937 Exhibition. His focus on provincial arts-and-crafts and regional culture nat’ and indicates the process of change from the previous protection not only influenced the conception of a French focus on architectural representation to living heritage Centre régional. More important, his culturo-political 1911 performance. And it was precisely the Angkor-styled pavilconcept of “la plus grande régionalisme” was also applied ion that facilitated essential insights into how both archi402

Chapter VIII: The End of a Seventy-Year Career in France

tecture and craftsmanship were negotiated during the 1937 served as transcultural exchange platforms for the individExhibition and in the concerned colonies. The French Re- ual agents in the making of architecture and cultural heritgional Centre mutated in its planning phase from a “re- age when international congresses on building strategies in gionalist carton-pâte exotism” (Godbarge 1935) into a cre- France d’outre-mer (Royer 1932/35) brought colonial architects like Ernest Hébrard (the inventor of the style indochiatively interpreted “village de France” (Vaillat 1935) made up of twenty-seven pavilions of seventeen French provinc- nois) in direct contact with French-regionalist architects es in the style of an adapted modernism. More ambivalent, like Léandre Vaillat (Falser 2017a, compare Falser forthhowever, was the strategy for the French-colonial section coming2). where the pavilion-like representation of colonies with a Within the 1937 Exhibition’s regionalist tendency, the rich cultural past was still influenced (but no longer domi- architectural ensembles – formerly completely de-contextunated) by the claim of archaeological authenticity through alised from local culture in their antiquity-based appearance the ‘exact’ translation strategy of plaster casts. In the Indo- – were already embedded into a new conceptual umbrella of chinese section – for the last time on the European con­ what today’s heritage management industry would propatinent, and surprisingly similar in its execution to the gate as the new paradigm of ‘living heritage’. The imaginaire ­Paris-1889 and Marseille-1906 versions – a 24-metre-high of a veritable Cité artisanal de la plus grande France found plaster cast pavilion hybrid of an Angkor Wat-styled lower similar expression in the Centre régional and in its peripherand a Bayon face tower-styled upper section was erected. al extension of a Centre artisanal with twenty-two “habitaThe architect responsible, Hanoi-based architecte des Bâti- tions artisanales-types” (Favier 1937). In both colonial and ments civils Paul Sabrié, still quoted the “Trocadero muse- metropolitan cases the production of cultural heritage inum” (Sabrié 1936) as the pavilion’s principle decorative cluded reconstituted and live-performed practices (ranging source, despite the fact that Delaporte’s plaster cast muse- from gastronomy, costumes, music, dance, to folklore) as much as the regionalist building processes. Both strategies um no longer existed (Falser 2013e). However, Aristide le Fol, the planner of the entire Indochinese section, switched were supervised by specific commissions (Charles-Brun was his focus from picturesque stage props to the staging of a a member) concerning the “purity of craftsmanship” (Clou“rigorously authentic Indochinese community” (Le Fol zot 1937) and the “authenticity of their products” (Chadourne 1938) with artisanal ateliers in a decided modern-regional- 1937): a Paris-based centralist – but in its institutional set-up ist style around the Angkor pavilion. rather ‘colonial’ – control mechanism “appropriated periphNow the strict division in earlier exhibitions between a eral cultures by recontextualising them within a national metropolitan modernism and a colonial-picturesque exot- whole” (Peer 1998). As temporarily staged in the overlapicism to visually establish civilising taxonomies was con- ping Regional and Colonial Centres, this ‘national whole’ siderably remodelled. Both political ends of the 1937 Exhi- was constituted through a transcultural double vision of the bition – the dominant metropolitan and the dominated French motherland and its colonies. colonial sphere – dramatically approached each other: a And if the medium of architecture in the form of pasrediscovering of the regionalist architecture of the métro- tiche-like pavilion structures with ‘authentic’ plaster cast decorations had previously played a major role in visualpole (Vigato 1994) went along with the political fostering of ‘regionalist neo-trends’ in the colonies in a strategy of ising the French-colonial ability to salvage and represent the colonies’ archaeological heritage from a glorious past, re-invention and re-historicising. These new styles were meant to visualise a French-colonial policy change from then the 1937 Exhibition’s focus on artisanat also changed cultural assimilation to association with a stronger appre- the thematic embeddedness of the last Angkor-styled paciation of regional qualities. Consequently, the Indochi- vilion construction on French soil: it helped to visualise nese section of the 1937 Exhibition in Paris also mirrored the new colonial tutelage over Indochina’s living heritage of the new regionalist building styles from colonial Vietnam an awakened past (see the same term recooked for Angkor to Cambodia where new urban ensembles and habitation after 1992 in epilogue II), reactivated presence and promising future. Three leaflets issued by the Gouvernement districts were re-traditionalised for their intended “role as général de l’Indochine (GGI) for the 1937 Exhibition fora social corrector” (Pédelahore 1992). Drawing from these “colonial laboratories” (Hamadeh 1992, Le Brusq 1999, Tho- mulated a similar strategy concerning Indochinese applied mine-Berrada 2006), Sabrié’s 1937 artisanal huts around art and artisanal practices. In this context, we have identithe central Angkor-styled pavilion also combined regional­ fied a similar discourse of ‘lost-and-revived Khmer-built ist neo-styles from within Indochina – like Louis-Georges antiquity’ that was used to justify the translation practice of Pineau’s compartmental houses for Hanoi or George Gros- Angkorian temples through plaster casts for French muselier’s Cambodian-pagoda-styled Phnom Penh museum. um and exhibition spaces. Indochinese arts-and-crafts Sabrié was not the only ‘cultural broker’ to temporarily were declared (a) as decadent or almost dead in their past visualise these progressive architectural tendencies in the configuration; (b) to be purified in their present status colonies – so different from the old archaeological ‘plas- from external influences or re-invented; (c) as survived ter-cast Orientalism’ – back in French exhibition spaces. heritage to be placed under the tutelage of the colonial adGenerally, entire events like the 1931 and 1937 Exhibitions ministration; (d) to be instructed in art schools with the 403

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sole stylistic reference to the Angkorian past as exhibited in Phnom Penh’s archaeological museum of the EFEO; (e) to be propagated under strict control within the upcoming souvenir industry; and (f) finally to be commercialised for Occidental visitors within the growing cultural heritage industry of Angkor (GGI 1937 a–c). In the Colonial Centre in Paris 1937, this programme was temporarily staged in a time-space compressed version with “authentic craftsmen” from Indochina who supposedly produced “modernised replicas of the immortal stone sculptures and bas-reliefs by the great creators of the Angkorian epoch” (Géraud 1937) – while sitting in their reconstituted ‘ancestral houses’ around the Angkor pavilion, which served as an archaeological reference point of stylistic purity. At the same time and on the other side of the Seine River in the Regional Centre, Charles-Brun popularised revived French artisanat and folklore in French-regionalist pavilion architecture.

In fact, both enacted scenarios represented just two versions of one French utopian idea of cultural heritage in one and the same economic circle: as depicted in the 1937 publications of the GGI, the French-regional artisanal products were not necessarily ‘made in France’, nor were the Angkorian temples necessarily used as decorative patterns to produce creative new handicraft in Cambodia. Both French lace and Angkorian sculpture replicas were in fact already being mass-produced in cheap Vietnamese factories to feed the rapidly growing cultural heritage industry on both sides of the French world and beyond. At this point of a transcultural entanglement between the French métropole and its colonies, the canon of art history – with its emphasis on originality and purity of artefacts and ­architectures as physical elements of authentic cultural heritage – proved to be utopian in theory and absurd in practice.

1867—1937: Changing Translational Strategies and Modes of ­Embeddedness of Angkor Wat for the French Métropole In this first volume of the book, it has been our goal to dimensional, 1:10-scaled plaster model of a gate to Ang­ ­retrace the physical trajectories of Angkor Wat in French kor Thom; (b) the section of French-colonial expanexhibitions and museums from 1867 to 1937, which sucsionism, and (c) the ethnographical exhibition using cessively made the twelfth-century Cambodian temple a the original (however manipulated) snake balustrade of transcultural heritage construction. By conceptualising the the Preah Khan temple pilfered during Louis Delapor­ ever-changing translational strategies of the temple for the te’s first official Angkor mission in 1873; aiming to integrate artefacts of non-European antiquity into uninterFrench métropole in their dynamic relationship to French-­ colonial sciences and politics, we could situate Angkor rupted and comparative series of progressing world Wat’s seventy-year career in France – on its way to being civilisation under Europe’s normative taxonomies of a acknowledged as an architectural chef d’œuvre of art histoworld history of art ry and an icon of a patrimoine culturel still valid today – in six major disciplinary, political and aesthetic developmen- 3. The integration of the plaster casts from Delaporte’s tal stages: 1) mechanical art reproduction (1867), 2) ethfive Angkor missions (executed between 1873 and 1900 nography (1878), 3) museological parcours aesthetics with their goal to ‘crack the generic decorative code of (1878–1900), 4) colonial politics (1889–1906), 5) archaeolKhmer architecture’ into the museological scenography ogy (1922–31), and 6) living heritage policies (1937). Their of an instructive parcours inside Delaporte’s musée Inmost important aspects included: do-chinois in the Parisian Trocadero Palace (c. 1880– 1925), with its unique mix of metonymic montages, stylistic collages, and the first freestanding, indoor Ang­ kor-styled pavilions 1. The hasty French-led creation of the first casts from Ang­kor by Doudart de Lagrée in April 1866 (the eve of the Mekong Exploratory Mission) in the context of the 4. The first ‘freely’ translated Angkor-styled open-air pavilions incorporating authenticating plaster cast eleFranco-British colonial competition to ‘re-present’ Ang­ ments, as staged in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in kor (until 1907 in Siam) in Occidental media; and the casts’ display at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris – Paris and the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille for their ontological quality of a technique of physical 1906; with their walk-on real-scale exotic ensembles aiming at visualising the colonial claim of the rising replication – in the section on mechanical reproduction French République coloniale over Angkor, before the of artworks within a pan-European vision of the public education of art, architecture, and cultural heritage return of the site to (the French protectorate of) Cambodia in 1907 2. The embedding of Angkor during the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris in (a) the section to propagate 5. The representation of Angkor Wat (after 1907 a veritaFrench-scientific missions, in the form of the three-­ ble patrimoine culturel of Greater France) in the form 404

1867—1937: Changing Translational Strategies and Modes of ­Embeddedness of Angkor Wat…

of archaeologically exact 1:1-scale reconstitution in the National Colonial Exhibition of Marseille 1922 and the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris 1931, aiming to visualise France’s deserved tutelage, legal ownership, and moral inheritance of Angkor, at this time as a site itself under reconstruction following the picture-perfect test versions in Marseille and Paris; and 6. France’s last Universal Exhibition of 1937 during the decline of colonialism and a regionalist paradigm change from the former display of architectural pastiche pavilions to a ‘living heritage’ performance of revived artsand-crafts [artisanat], with an aesthetic rapproche­ment of the French Regional Centre with its provincial pavil-

ions and the neighbouring section of France d’outre-mer; this included the last, small-scale Angkor-styled pavilion, with both metropolitan and colonial sections being entangled in one and the same transcultural utopia called a patrimoine culturel of Angkor. How relevant this late-colonial term towards ‘living heritage’ still is for the ‘real’ site of Angkor will be discussed in epilogue II in the second volume of this book: in a process that we call ‘neo-colonial’ in relation to UNESCO’s recent grasp over Angkor Park, the very same terms of ‘living heritage’ (ICC-Angkor 2013) and ‘living museum’ (compare Pl. Intro.22) were celebrated as a supposedly new paradigm change in global heritage management schemes.

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Our main interest in the first volume of this book project build an enlarged replica of Angkor Wat on the shores has focused on Angkor Wat’s seventy-year-long career in of the Ganges River near the Indian city of Patna (Bihar French exhibitions and museum spaces from 1867 to 1937. province), were announced in the 2010s. Both the historic As a consequence it has been primarily based on a Euro-­ Cambodian-Siamese and the contemporary Indian case Asian, French-Cambodian relationality, avoiding the old-­ indicate how multifaceted Angkor Wat’s transcultural emfashioned dichotomy between the West and the non-West beddedness was and still is if the term ‘cultural heritage’ is as defined by a misleading analytical approach of a mere not confined to ‘Western’ museum spaces, exhibitions, and ‘transfer’ history. However, by cutting across the classical archaeological parks but also incorporates ‘Eastern’ forms coloniser–colony divide, this epilogue shall help to frame of heritagisation through what we call the enacting of, or our study by taking up cross-Asian (or pan-Asian) aesthet- the discourses about, religious inheritance, royal patronage, ic reception, culturo-political appropriation, and also the and applied pilgrimage. However, both cases should not be physical translation of Angkor Wat from the nineteenth essentialised as either ‘Occidental’ or ‘Oriental’, but should century to this day. This hints at the enormous influence be conceptualised, according to our transcultural methodthe temple had not only in Orientalist-colonial Europe but ology, as entangled or enmeshed with and influenced from also on Cambodia’s political and cultural neighbours: or motivated through each other. The different forms and namely, Siam and Vietnam, and, in a wider radius, India. scales of longing (which Susan Stewart has explored in her The first case of this epilogue will focus on the efforts of 1993 book On Longing) find perfect expression in these Cambodia’s last pre-French-colonial king Ang Duong to ­cases: the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir and the colcirculate Angkor-styled coins around 1850, and the Siamese lection. We may also consider them as strategies of differintention to translocate to and finally indeed ‘mini-repli- ent political, social and institutional regimes with their cate’ Angkor Wat in Bangkok (1860/1867). These case-stud- individual actors and cultural brokers who tried (and still ies will be read as translocal strategies to place inheritance try) to incorporate the world’s largest temple complex into claims at the very threshold of France’s colonial impact their own imagined and enacted heritage/inheritance in the 1850s and 1860s. With the second case, plans to claims.

1. Visualising cultural inheritance and royal patronage versus mapping a colonial protectorate: Angkor Wat on Ang Duong’s coins and for Mongkut’s royal monastery in Bangkok Officially granting the refugee Cambodian prince Eng in 1794 Bangkok the Cambodian throne (and sending him home to Cambodia’s capital Udong under tight surveillance) made the Siamese King Rama I feel entitled – as a kind of self-granted return gift – to annex Cambodia’s north-western provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, including Ang­ kor. This territorial and quasi ‘colonial’ configuration was still in place during the rule of King Ang Duong between 1848 and 1860, when Doung as the last Cambodian king before the French-imposed protectorate found himself confronted with ongoing rivalries between Vietnam and Siam over Cambodia. Since the fall of Angkor in the fifteenth century this constellation has developed into a complex system of dual control over and dual allegiance of Cambodia. As a “system of tributary diplomacy” (or, in other words, “overlap-

ping tributary networks”),1 this constellation caused established buffer zones from both neighbouring countries to collide. This had concrete effects for Cambodia’s cultural sector and also touched Angkor Wat. With our focus on the particular Cambodian-Siamese rivalry between the Cambodian king Ang Duong and the Siamese king Mongkut as the two formulated their competing inheritance or heritage claims over the site, it is interesting to identify two different but entangled translational strategies at play. As a matter of fact, both kings stood in direct relation to the earliest attempts of colonial France to enter the Cambodian scene and were not far removed from the French strategies in the years to come of a physical replication and visual multiplication, controlled circulation and transborder mobilisation of Angkor Wat in order to make it a patrimoine culturel.

1  Important early studies about the tributary state/status of Cambodia in the nineteenth century are provid-

ed by David Chandler (here Chandler 1972, 153; compare Chandler 1976a, 1979/1983a).

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Ang Duong’s “monetary reform” (Khim Sok 1991, 131) numbers among his efforts to revitalise his country’s institutions and stabilise its cultural identity. Comparable with the French plaster cast missions that followed shortly after, an even more obvious technique of “imprints” (compare Didi-Hubermann 1999 in the introduction to this book) was used to replicate, multiply, circulate and mobilise the temple site of Angkor: coinage. It was certainly not by accident that the Cambodian king Ang Duong – in his effort to visualise his and his predecessors’ long-standing cultural claim over a disputed territory with famous temples currently occupied by Siam – introduced four new series of coins, the most important of which pictured three-towered temple facades (Fig. EpI.1a). Within this fragile power game to secure political influence, a French press had most probably been organised by the missionary and later apostolic vicar for Cambodia, Jean-Claude Miche, maybe as part of a larger ‘return gift package’ to have religious freedom granted by the Cambodian king. It was also Miche who had sent Father Charles Bouillevaux in 1850 to Angkor (compare Bouillevaux 1858, 1879), an episode that was never integrated into the European master narrative of Angkor. Ironically, it was exactly the later-celebrated ‘discoverer of Angkor’, Henri Mouhot, who, after his travel to the area and visits to both kings around 1860 (see introduction, chapter IX), assumed – in his Voyage dans les royaumes de Siam, de Cambodge, de Laos of 1863 and 1868 – the temple of Angkor Wat behind these icons printed on Cambodia’s mobile currency:

presented the coins (Fig. EpI.1a), but he deplored that they, as “Cambodian piasters”, had already been displaced by circulating notes by the Banque de l’Indo-Chine (Marrot 1894, 29–32). These banknotes continued to depict, far into Cambodia’s independence of the 1950s, Angkor Wat (Pl. EpI.1a–l)3, and therefore established a tradition which still exists until today (compare Pl. Intro.9b). In the 1921 Recherches sur les Cambodgiens by George Groslier, the great art educator of Cambodia (compare chapters V, VII–XI), these earliest coins, named “Prak bat”, qualified as “Ang Duong’s last printed money before the establishment of the French protectorate” (dated 2390 Buddhist era as 1846 AD). The different versions of three tower facades with inscriptions like “Krong Kampuchéa” (Cambodia), and “Anthapat” (name of capital) were again not directly associated with Angkor Wat (Fig. EpI.1b). However, comparing Groslier’s inventory of pre-French Cambodian coins with series depicting animals and plants (which have been more common since the post-Angkorian period) reveals the unique choice of an iconic temple facade as a meaningful decision at a crucial transitory moment for a country on the threshold of modern colonialism. In any case, Ang Duong’s temple-picturing money seems to have impressed his more powerful Siamese rival Mongkut at a moment when he himself felt equally menaced by the same French to have their colonial Cambodia squeezed into a long-standing tributary balance (compare Lemire 1879, Mayniard 1891 to Osborne 1969). In a rather curious incident the Siamese king approached the French The actual king of Cambodia pretends to have found suf- negotiator Charles de Montigny on 2 August 1856 to help ficient evidence to establish the history of Angkor back to him with a similar “coining press” – during the same month an epoch which even predates the era of Christianity. when the French-Siamese Treaty of Friendship, Commerce Since some years he forbade the use of spherical money and Navigation was signed (compare Tully 1995, 263–73), by replacing it with flat coins, and used this occasion to and the diplomatic game of pondering technical advancerevive the memory and grandeur of Angkor Wat [prepé- ments (such as “coinage”) and moral standards (such as tuer le souvenir d’Ongkor-Wat et de sa grandeur] by pre- “polygamy”) between those Eastern and Western powers senting a view of the building on the coins. [italics MF] was in full swing: (Mouhot 1863, 303 and 1868, 204)2

After the French protectorate of Cambodia had been established in 1863, other French administrators, researchers and historians showed their interest in the coins. Jean Moura, in his 1883 monograph Le royaume du Cambodge, mentioned new silver coins (dating them to 1853) and referred to the “holy bird Gangsa, serving as emblem at modern pagodas” on the one side and “an antique temple with towers” on the other, but did not presume Angkor Wat behind the depiction (Moura 1883, vol. 2, 128). Shortly after, the Phnom Penh–based negotiator and Cambodian delegate for the 1894 Lyon Exhibition (see chapter V), Marrot,

Your letter of 31 July accompanied a bundle of some specimens of the French money beautifully coined, reached my hand last night at 7 p.m. I beg to return my sincere thanks for your gift. My desire however is to have a simple coining press which is suitable to coin gold, silver and copper here, according to our signal or standard. I shall feel greatly obliged if your attention reward me this desire and pleasure. It was informed me that the king of Cambodia […] has furnished the press of coining at his capital through the assistance of Right Reverend Doctor Miche, Bishop of Dansara, who obtained order from your native land France […] We wish to maintain our oriental

2  It is interesting to note that the issue of money recurs several times in Mouhot’s report, as he also depicted

Siamese round and flat money (however, with no temple facades, but with the Siamese symbol of the elephant and crowns) and told the reader he had received money from the young Siamese King Mongkut (Mouhot 1863, 230, 296). 3  I would like to thank Sema from [email protected] for providing the scans of those banknotes.

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Figure EpI.1a  Cambodian coins circulated since Ang Duong’s reign (1848–60) (Source: Marrot 1894, 31)

Figure EpI.1b  Cambodian coins as discussed and depicted in George Groslier’s Recherches sur les Cambodgiens in 1921 (Source: Groslier 1921, 35)

customs such as polygamy without adopting Occidental ones, even if they appear more useful […] We do not desire any Occidental advantages except coining. [italics MF] (Meyniard 1891, 235—37)

If those Cambodian coins would disappear when the French protectorate Cambodge was installed in 1863, then King Mongkut’s own project to bring Angkor Wat into his centre

of political power was more effective and is still visible until today in Thailand’s capital Bangkok. The following case covers the short time period between 1859 and 1867 CE (Buddhist Era BE 2402–2410) during the reign of Mongkut as Rama IV (1851–68). In 1859 he unsuccessfully initiated a veritable translocation of Angkorian temples to Bangkok and finally ordered from February to June 1867 the execution of a small-scale model of Angkor Wat for the Wat Phra 409

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Si Rattana Satsadaram temple (also known as Wat Phra egies towards, territorial claims over, and mapping operaKaew) within Bangkok’s Grand Palace compound. We shall tions on Siam’s constantly diminishing territory.8 The enargue that Mongkut’s decision to represent Angkor physi- tries of the mid- and late-1850s repeatedly reported on cally in the royal monastery inside Bangkok’s Grand Palace ‘negotiating treaties’ with Occidental powers, such as the reflected his intention to visualise or better represent royal British with Sir John Browning (1855), the Americans, the patronage over religious (Buddhist) and tributary space Hanseatic Republic, the Portuguese, the Danish and – fiwhen the Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem nally – the French envoy from Napoleon III under Charles Reap (with Angkor) were still on Siamese territory but al- de Montigny (see above). The comments on the “Hostilities ready on the ‘mapping radar’ of the French. In this context, between Vietnam and France” (Thipakorawong I.1965, Mongkut’s move also qualifies as a kind of “crypto-colonial” 193–95, 223) with the attack of Hué and Saigon by Admiral strategy of Siam, itself being “in a buffer zone between the Rigault de Genouilly between 1858 and 1860 insinuated the colonialised lands and those yet untamed” (Hertzfeld 2002, emerging disequilibrium over the century-long Vietnam900–901)4, that is between France and England.5 Therefore, ese-Siamese tributary patronage over Cambodia. But they Mongkut’s initiative was not only a “symbolic move coun- also framed as written texts, together with a remark on teracting French expansionist moves” (Peleggi 2007, 156)6. “The appointment of the Siamese envoys to France [...] for It was also – according to our methodological focus in this a friendship visit” (Thipakorawong I.1965, 235) – not accifirst volume – an alternative translational strategy to Cam- dentally, as we suggest – the first two entries about the bodia’s coining initiative and, more important, France’s Ang­korian temples for Bangkok. If the first decision in 1859 replication strategies of Angkor Wat since 1866. To sum it to “dismantle and re-erect” Angkorian temples was meant up, the following case study fell into the decisive “transfor- to “bring great glory for the future” of the Siamese king, mation, shift or confrontation” (Winichaukul 1994, 18)7 be­ then the mission reports of his legates about the “impossitween Siam’s traditional transborder conception of a tribu- bility to dismantle and remove these large-sized temples to tary, patronising religious space over and into Cambodia, Bangkok” confronted the king with the same infrastructurand the Occidental concept of technology-based mapping al (‘translational’) problem that the French encountered. and topographical surveying for precisely delimited na- After the 1866 Mekong Mission with its stop-over at Angtion-states or colonies (see chapter VI). kor (see chapter I) and during his first Angkor mission in No other historic source transcends this conceptual 1873 (chapter II), Delaporte’s reaction to this problem was collision, its negotiation, and the resulting strategies better not only to take some originals back to France “against the than Mongkut’s Dynastic Chronicles of the Fourth Reign of decided will of the Siamese mandarin” (Delaporte 1874, the Bangkok Era (BE 2394–2411/CE 1851–68). Here, three 2546–47), but also to execute larger series of ‘imprints’ concrete text passages about the intended translocation (compare with coinage), namely as plaster casts. This ‘transand the executed model-like replication of Angkorian tem- lation technique’ was considered or known neither by Ang ple architecture for Bangkok are superimposed with a large Duong nor by Mongkut. The latter’s order to ‘translocate’ a amount of chronological commentary about France and Buddhist temple from Angkor using two thousand labourGreat Britain’s expansionist politics and intimidating strat- ers was also reported by Henri Mouhot:

4  Hertzfeld also mentions, referring to Winichakul, the pressure that Siam felt to stand as an equal partner with Europe during “the great world fairs of colonialism” (Hertzfeld 2002, 921), with its own national pavilion, but he does not mention the comparable strategy of Siam to exercise a replication mode to exhibit Angkor in its own capital of Bangkok where the concept of museums and exhibitions also came up in the second half of the nineteenth century and gained speed after 1900 (Winichakul 2000). 5  For Mongkut’s moves to make Siam survive between France and England, see the unpublished PhD thesis by Snidwongs 1961; compare Peleggi 1997. 6  Maurizio Peleggi’s latest study Monastery, monument, museum: Sites and artefacts of Thai cultural memory (2017) continued to elaborate on the topic. 7 In Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation, Winichkul describes the transformation of Siam’s premodern, traditional, indigenous, religious, and cosmographical imaginaries of space. With King Mongkut as a crucial figure, it slowly superseded by new sciences like modern geography with the imported technique of mapping as a new “cognitive paradigm and practical means of a new administration” (120); our focus on the 1860s falls into this “collision” of different “conceptual frameworks of mutual patronage over Cambodia” (16–23, 92) when France mapped the same territory of Angkor with which Siam represented religious patronage (all Winichakul 1994). For the wider concept of Siam’s “civilisational thinking” during this East-West confrontation, see Winichakul 2000. 8  Interestingly it was a French epigraphist, George Coedès, director of the National Library of Thailand in 1918 and director of the École française d’Extrême-Orient until 1946 (see chapter IX) who edited Mongkut’s correspondence with the British for the Journal of the Royal Siamese Society in 1927/8.

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The King reflected on the fact that there were a great number of stone temples in Cambodia. If some of these temples, of small sizes, could be dismantled and re-erected, one at the Mahaasawan Hill, another at the Pathumwan Temple, it would constitute a great glory for the future. The King therefore sent phra suphanphisaan and khun chaadwichaa to go and look over the turreted temples at the cities of Angor Thom, Angor Wat and phudthajsawan. khun chaadwichaa returned to inform the King that they had looked at many places and over all the districts. They reported that at these Cambodian cities, there were only large-sized temples that would be quite impossible to dismantle and remove to Bangkok. He further said that there was a temple named Phathajtaaphrom at the city of Siem-­ reap. This temple, actually composed of two separate structures, each six waa in height, could be dismantled and brought to Bangkok. The King therefore sent out an order with the official seal that labour be conscripted from the people of the cities of Battambang, Siem-reap, and Phanomsog. Phra suphanphisaan was to be in charge of the project of dismantling the Phathajtaaphrom Temple. The men were to be divided into four groups of five hundred each that would work different shifts. [italics MF] (Thipakorawong I.1965, 222—23) The vice-king of the province of Battambang was at Angkor at the same moment of our visit. He just got to know the order by the Siamese government to dismantle one of the smallest, but also most beautiful monuments of Ang­kor, and to transport it to Bangkok. (Mouhot 1863, 298)

Unlike Delaporte, who as a French-colonial agent did not care about “looting the Angkorian temples and the whole country”, as the monks of Angkor Wat complained to Dela­ porte’s colleague Auguste Filoz (Filoz 1889, 72), Mongkut as a Buddhist ruler and Khmer-affiliated patron over Angkor was confronted with the question of “dishonour”. His order to dismantle the Buddhist Ta Prohm temple was ­halted after an attack by local inhabitants on 28 April 1860 and a memorandum about the age-old temples to honour the “ancient Cambodian kings”: The project was initiated with a sacrificial offering and worshipping, and then the actual dismantling of the temple commenced. However, on the ninth day of the waxing moon in the sixth month [28 April 1860], approximately three hundred Cambodians emerged from the forest and began firing on and slashing the group that was dis­ mantling the temple. They killed phra suphanphisaan and his son, Phra wan. [...] The ministers of state signed their

name to a memorial which they presented to the King. It said that the stone temples in Cambodia were made at the order of the Cambodian kings of ancient times, so that their honour would endure in the land forever. These temples had been standing for so long that it was impossible to know how many hundreds and thousands of years. The dismantling of these structures would be too difficult for the people of today, since each piece of stone was so huge. Even supposing that these temples could be dismantled and re-moved to the capital, the Siamese might be unable to reconstruct them, and as such would bring dishonour to the very name of the King himself. The ministers of state thus asked the King to reconsider. The King, after having studied the memorial, issued an order that the dismantling of the temple was to be halted. [italics MF] (Thipakorawong I.1965, 227)

This first attempt in 1859/60 CE (BE 2402/3) to translocate original temples to Bangkok might be read as a symbolic act of re-claiming Siam’s inheritance when France’s colonial ambitions came up. As an ‘alternative translational strategy’ at a moment when the French protectorate was already established since 1863, Mongkut ordered on 21 February 1867 that measurements be taken to execute an Angkor Wat model in Bangkok’s royal monastery in order to bring the temple ‘nearer home’ (compare with our following case study about a modern replica of Angkor Wat in India): On the thirteenth day of the waning moon in the third month, in the year of the Tiger, the eighth year of the ­decade [21 February 1867] the King commanded phra saamphobphaaj to go and copy the structure of the temple of Angkor Wat, so that a replica of it could be erected in the area of the Phrasiiradtanasaadsadaaraam Temple [Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram — Wat Phra Kaew]. This replica of the temple of Angkor Wat was intended for the general public to view as a marvellous wonder. It would be constructed only with stones without using any other materials. Phra saamphobphaaj returned to Bangkok on the ninth day of the waxing moon in the seventh month [11 June 1867] and told the King that he had copied the structure of the Temple of Angkor Wat and its terraces. [...] The King commanded the artisans to construct a replica of the temple of Angkor Wat according to the plan that had been copied. The replica was constructed within the area of the Phrasiiradtanasaadsadaamam Temple, and still exists to this day. [italics MF] (Thipakorawong II.1966, 376, 380)

With a series of comments in the Chronicles since the early 1860s in hand,9 Mongkut seems to have made a multi-lay-

9  In the Chronicles, Mongkut’s order of a replica of Angkor can be read as the climax in a series of entries

concerning the confrontation with the French since the early 1860s: (a) the “Notification concerning the [Oudong] treaty made between Cambodia and France” (11 August 1863, ratified in April 12 1864) in which

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ered decision towards the very end of his reign: first, it was a symbolic reflex against France’s rising interest over the Siem Reap province, and its violent “gunboat diplomacy” (Thipakorawong III.1967, 205) to diminish Siam’s influence over its brother state Cambodia (compare Duke 1962, Dhiravegin 1975); second, Mongkut’s recognition of Angkor Wat as “a marvellous wonder” (see above) inside his own territory and on display at Bangkok was certainly a direct reaction and even direct quote from the influential French and English publications between 1863 and 1868 by Mouhot (both knew each other personally) to celebrate the site as a universal “masterpiece [merveille] of some Oriental Michel Angelo” (Mouhot 1863, 299), being “grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome” (Mouhot 1864, vol.1, 279); third, a part of Mongkut’s move was obviously connected to his and his son Prince Damrong’s own emerging “royal antiquarianism”10 (Peleggi 2004) through which the notion of ‘cultural heritage/inheritance’ got its place within an older Siamese-Khmer concept of “Buddhological space” (Winichakul 1994, 22); and fourth, it counts as a political

statement intended to reinforce France’s official renouncement of any claim over Angkor in §4 of the 1867 Franco-­ Siamese Treaty (Tuck 1995, 287; compare Lemire 1879, 36).11 Interestingly, Mongkut’s order in early 1867 occurred in the same year as France’s second Universal Exhibition in Paris where Siam was present as an independent Asian nation (see chapter I), and the casts from Angkor from Doudart de Lagrée’s early 1866 political mission to the French Cambodian-Siamese border zone were exhibited. As we contextualised it in chapter I of this book, De Lagrée’s products were integrated in the Exhibition’s rather non-political section on mechanical art reproduction – a classification that was not intended by its original executor, who was an ardent colonialist who never conceded “that Siam had any title to Battambang and Angkor” (Thomson 1945, 33). On the other – Asian – side of the globe, Mongkut’s order to have a temple replica for public display was to some extent even compliant with religious Buddhist practice. Following the tradition of “image-casting and monument-building as forms of merit-making”, the execution of

the Cambodian King “Norodom was [supposedly] frightened and had to sign the treaty” of a French protectorate under heavy pressure from Admiral Lagrandière (Thipakorawong II.1966, 307), even though a secret Siamese-Cambodian Treaty was signed in December of the same year, which upset the French; (b) the 1864 entry of “The coronation of phra narodoom as King of Cambodia” in which “the French asked the authorities at Bangkok to send someone out to crown the Cambodian prince at the same time as the French” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 317), even though it was de Lagrée who had hindered Norodom with “reprisals and the occupation of royal palace at Oudong” (Thipakorawong III.1967, 186) from departing to be crowned in Mongkut’s Bangkok palace according to the old tributary custom towards Siam; (c) the April 1865 entry about “The appointment of a [Siamese] committee to negotiate the treaty concerning the Cambodian border” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 343–34) resulting in the 1867 Franco-Siamese Treaty in which Siam had, after the French Consul Aubaret had threatened the Bangkok Palace with the gunboat Mitraille (Thipakorawong III.1967, 205), to declare the 1863 treaty with Cambodia invalid, even though Auberet “would not agree to change the wording of §4 [to exactly define] the borderline [of the Siem Reap and Battambang provinces], the Siam’s suzerainty of which was recognized” by the French (Thipakorawong II.1966, 343–34); (d) the July 1866 entry “Concerning a treaty regarding Cambodia” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 362–3) when “King Rama IV agreed to eliminate [any patronising] reference for Laos in §4 and to limit it to the provinces of Battambang and Angkor” (Thipakorawong III.1967, 213); (e) the January 1867 entry about “The departure of the Siamese envoy for France” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 367) in a diplomatically repressive context when Mongkut even confessed in 1866 to the British Consul in Bangkok (Mr. Knox) “to personally agree to a British protectorate [over Siam] if necessary” (as quoted in Duke 1962, 55; compare Thipakorawong III.1967, 217); (f) the January 1867 entry about “The making of a map of the Mekong River Provinces”, when Mongkut had to engage with the game “by hiring an Englishman who had experience in mapping” at a time “when France was [already] surveying arid marking maps of the [Mekong] river area” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 368). The above-quoted passage for the replica in Bangkok was directly followed by the 1867 entries of “The French capture of three Vietnamese cities”; “The return of the Siamese envoys from France” in September with the agreement on the treaty; “The arrival of the French envoy to affix the seals on the treaty documents”; and, above others, the last 1867 entry “Concerning the fixing of the border with Cambodia” in a joint-commission in December 1867 and January 1868 (Thipakorawong II.1966, 380; 381; 382; 390). 10  As Peleggi describes, in 1833 Mongkut had already identified the stone throne and the stela of thirteenth-century King Ramkhamhaeng, which contained the oldest Thai script and was later transformed into a national icon. Both findings were transferred to Wat Phra Keo. Additionally, Mongkut’s idea to bring Angkor Wat to Bangkok might be placed in the context of his efforts to rediscover and restore the old Siamese temple sites of Ayutthaya and Lopburi (Peleggi 2017, 74). 11  Also Lemire in his 1879 chronology about the Cambodian-Siamese relations added that “it [was] most regrettable that the French had stipulated to leave the two provinces with the great lakes and the admirable temples of Angkor Watt [sic] to the Siamese” (Lemire 1879, 37, compare 38–46).

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Figure EpI.2  The Bodhgaya temple site in India, represented in miniature models as ­pilgrimage commodities (Source: Guy 1991, 363 and Fig.12—14; © Guy and Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

a model version of the originally Shivaist but later Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat followed to some extent. First, the “common practice of copying [Buddhist monuments] from already existing ‘reminders’ commanded special reverence within the transnational Buddhist ecumeme”; second, it referred to the intention to “extend [the buildings’] social life across time and space” and (compare Angkor in French-­ colonial exhibitions) to transfer the “iconic potency” of the original to the translocated model, to its religious site of implantation, and to its commissioner as the royal patron itself (Peleggi 2004, 137; referring to Griswold 1965, 1966; compare Denslagen/Gutschow 2005); and finally, the strategy of reproducing models of holy places was a common practice on the market of pilgrimage souvenirs. In this ritual sense, the Angkor Wat replica in Bangkok was not far removed from those pocket-size replicas (Fig. EpI.2) of the most holy Buddhist site of Bodhgaya in north-eastern India (compare Guy 1991, Charleux 2006) – a site which the British-colonial Archaeological Survey of India would restore (compare the French-colonial École française d’Extrême-Orient at Angkor) back to its iconic ‘original’ status (Leoshko 1988, Guha-Thakurta 2004/2014; compare the historic debate in chapter IX, Figs. IX.27a,b).

But how was the Angkor Wat replica imbedded into the architectural setting in Bangkok? The Grand Palace compound as a whole was founded by Rama I shortly after the 1782 declaration of Bangkok as the capital of the new Chakri dynasty. Annexed to the palace is the royal monastery (without resident monks) Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram, literally ‘the residence of the Holy Jewel Buddha and also called Wat Phra Kaew (Pl. EpI.2a,b; Fig. EpI.3) (in general Diskul 1986, Suksri 1999, Hongwiwat 2004). To this day its centrepiece is the ubosot (holy chapel), which since 1784 has displayed the so-called Emerald Buddha, today known as the “palladium of Thai society” (compare Roeder 1999). This object is a jade sculpture with a long travel history from Chiang Rai, Luang Prabang and Vientiane with one mythical, but for our context highly relevant ‘stopover’ at Angkor before finally landing in Bangkok.12 The gates of the ubosot are guarded by twelve Khmer-style bronze lions with one original from Angkor and additional Siamese copies. However, most relevant for our context is the neighbouring platform to the north, which, full of real and symbolic replications, had been considerably enlarged by King Mongkut in the 1850s for a better display. In one row from east to west, this arrangement comprises (a) the ‘Royal Pantheon’

12  Here it had previously been stored on the Thonburi side of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River inside the Wat Arun temple, itself a mandala-like arrangement with five towers using Angkor Wat’s inner enclosure as reference.

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Figure EpI.3  The Wat Phra Kaew monastery site within the Bangkok Royal Palace in a plan, the Angkor Wat replica ­indicated as number 13 (Source: Diskul 1986, 43)

Figure EpI.4  The Wat Phra Kaew monastery with the great golden stupa above the Angkor Wat model, ca. 1950 (Source: © National Archives Bangkok)

with two original Bayon-style stone lions at its entry; (b) the library with four ninth-century Buddha figures at its corners, which Mongkut brought home from the Javanese temple site of Borobudur; and (c) the golden stupa to house relics of Buddha as a replica of the Phra Si Sanpet stupa of Ayutthaya. Directly to the north of this row of buildings, Mongkut’s initiated scale-reduced replica of Angkor Wat as an approximate 6 by 6 metre model of the inner enclosure of Angkor Wat was finalised only for the centennial celebrations of Bangkok in 1882, under his son Chulalongkorn as acting Rama V (1868–1910). The real and metaphoric-symbolic placement of the Angkor Wat model was carefully chosen in relation to the other buildings. Seen from the elevated platform (Pl. EpI.2c–e), the Siamese-style guardian figures from the library watch, with a patronising gesture, over (and care for)

Angkor Wat in the form of a subordinated but prominently placed model. Seen from below towards the elevated ­platform (Fig. EpI.4), the ‘iconic potency’ of this largest Buddhist temple in the world, in a down-scaled, but astonishingly precise model of Angkor Wat,13 is situated dramatically ‘in the shadow’ of the dominating golden stupa that is copied to scale. The clear reference of the stupa to Siam’s capital of Ayutthaya (1351–1767) is important for our case because this city had instated its suzerainty over Angkor since the fourteenth century and carried out the sacking of the same in 1431. This Khmer-Siamese case study was embedded into the early colonial impact of France on Cambodia, as France sought to install a precisely mapped protectorate. What we have conceptualised as King Ang Duong’s and Mongkut’s efforts to visualise royal patronage and inheritance claims

13  The precision of the detailed execution raises the question of the model’s real executors. Mongkut simply

refers to “artisans” (Thipakorawong II.1966, 376, 380) at a time when in Siam the execution of precise architectural models was lesser known or practiced. It is possible that the project was supervised by a ‘Western’ consultant from France or England, since Mongkut employed them for other imported disciplines and techniques such as geography, surveying, Western law, and diplomacy. Thanks for helpful ideas and sources on this topic go to Prof. Sunait Chutintaranond, then director of the Asian Studies Institute at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. Thanks also to (his former student) Anan Krudphet for translation help during a visit in Bangkok, both in March 2011.

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Figure EpI.5  Thailand’s occupation of Preah Vihear as depicted in Cambodge aujourd’hui in January 1960 (Source: Cambodge aujourd’hui 2 (January 1960), 2)

over cultural, religious (Buddhist) and/or tributary space in Cambodia would quickly turn into a nationalist cultural heritage. Within Siam’s emerging modern historiography around and after 1900 and the adopted notion of a modern nation-state with precise territorial borders (Kasetsiri 1979), Mongkut “discovered the importance of Angkor as an antecedent to modern Siam [and laid] the foundations for modern Thai nationalism and the determination of what was to constitute the history of the Thai nation” (Keyes 2002, 216). With Mongkut’s sons, the later King Chulalongkorn and especially Prince Damrong as the leading figures,14 the Khmer-styled temples on Siam’s mapped national territory also became part of this transcultural heritage narrative. Interestingly, it was precisely the French cartographers and archaeologists themselves who fostered this conflicting ten­dency by creating art historical entities, such as the ‘Khmer style’ denomination with its clear cen-

tre of Angkor, whereas singular temples of those inventories were situated in the extreme periphery, and therefore politically contested territories. The best-known ‘purely Khmer’ but peripheral site was the early twelfth-century Preah Vihear temple (Thai: Phra Wihan). Its situation right on northern Cambodian-­Thai borderline was mapped and drawn after 1900 with a Siamese-French joint commission with reference to the watershed line of the Dangrek mountain range. However, the site was incorporated by French officers into Cambodian territory after the 1907 ‘retrocession’ of its north-western provinces from Siam without any protest until France withdrew its forces in 1954 after Cambodian independence. Thailand’s “campagne annexionniste” towards Cambodia and Laos (Prechez 1966, 334) commenced in 1939 and ­continued after 1945 (see chapter IX). Thailand’s ongoing claim over the Preah Vihear site continued to provoke heavy protest in the Cambodian

14  Damrong visited Angkor in 1924 and published about it from a still ‘patronising’ view (Damrong 1925, 1971).

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press of the Siha­nouk-Sangkum years (Fig. EpI.5) until the International Court of Justice declared the site Cambodian in 1962 (compare Figs. X.7c,d).15 Ironically, Thailand’s ongoing patronising claim over Angkor-styled archaeological temple sites was ‘useful’ in the 1980s. When a stolen lintel from Prasat Phanom Rung (a heritage theme park, Khmer in style but Thai as territorial property) was exhibited in 1988 in the Art Institute of Chicago, the successful Thai claim for its restitution turned “a Khmer shrine into a Thai national treasure” (Keyes 2002). The popularised perception of a Thai claim on the heritage of Angkor reached a strange level in January 2003 – 140 years after Mongkut’s order to bring Angkor Wat home to Bangkok – when the

local Cambodian newspaper Rasmei Angkor [Light of Ang­ kor] reported that the Thai soap-opera actress Suwanan Kongyinghad had supposedly demanded to ‘have Angkor Wat returned to Thailand’.16 This caused attacks on the Thai embassy and businesses in Phnom Penh and a bilateral crisis between the two countries. When the Cambodian site was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008 to further help a new tendency of “stone temple nationalism” (Charn­vit Kasetsiri), the employed but old-fashioned art historical and cultural-essentialist criteria of “outstanding masterpiece”, “Khmer” and “pure”17 clashed once more with seemingly older transborder sensibilities over wrongly delimited peripheries of modern nation-states.

2. Between philanthropy and marketing, a ‘greater Hindu nation’ and the Internet: A ‘glocalised’ mega translation of Angkor Wat for Bihar 2020 What was preserved around 1860 only in the internal royal Chronicles for posterity from King Mongkut’s initial idea for an Angkor Wat replica in Bangkok, was circulated around the whole globe within a few seconds in a comparable case 150 years later: on 4–8 March 2012 the Internet confronted the online reader of local, regional, national, and global newspapers alike with similar spectacular headlines: “Largest temple to come up in Bihar” (All Jammu and Kashmir News, 4 March), “India starts Angkor Wat replica in Bihar: We’ll make this temple an icon for Bihar and the world as well as for grandeur and splendour” (BBC News India, 5 March), “Angkor Wat in India? 20M replica to rise in Bihar: India has the Taj Mahal at Agra [...], but it does not have Angkor Wat – not yet at least” (International Business Times, 5 March), “Höchster Hindutemple der Welt: Indien kopiert Kambodschas Angkor Wat” (Spiegel Online, 6 March), “India building replica of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat” (San Luis Obispo County’s website, 6 March), “Angkor Wat temple replica to rise on banks of the Ganges. For Hindus who can’t visit Cambodian world heritage site, retired Indian cop is building a copy in Bihar dedicated to the deity Ram” (the Guardian, 7 March), “Angkor redux scepti-

cism” (the Phnom Penh Post, 7 March), and “Angkor’s away! India plans larger than life copy of Cambodia’s iconic temple. Cambodians protest as construction begins on copy that will be world’s tallest Hindu temple” (the Independent, 8 March, see Pl. EpI.7). Concluding the epilogue to volume 1, this second and contemporary case study will show how the most recent stage of the transcultural trajectory of Angkor Wat has been reached through its global circulation in form of a translocated heritage icon (‘image’) in the virtual worlds of the Internet. For now, Angkor Wat is – unlike all our preceding case studies from the 1860s onwards in all their physical forms from plaster casts to models, pavilions, or on-site interventions – for the moment only constituted as a mere virtual-discursive entity in global media. Within our analysis, the involved actors include (a) a non-state institution and religious sect in the Bihar province in Eastern India planning the replica; (b) official Phnom Penh–based spokesmen who represent the Cambodian nation-state claiming the exclusive ownership over the ‘real’, unique and irreproducible site; and (c) individual voices from journalists to individual bloggers. This also means that this private

15  Above other summaries, see Preschez 1966 and more recent discussions in St. John 1998, Silverman 2011,

and Hauser-­Schäublin 2011, 33–56 (Hauser-Schäublin) and 57–67 (Sven Mißling).

16 The Asian Tribune summarised it: “On January 18, the Rasmei Angkor published a story that Thai actress

Suwanan Kongying said in a Thai television interview that she would only accept an invitation to perform in Cambodia if the Angkor Wat temple, a Cambodian national symbol, is returned to Thailand, its neighbour and one-time ruler. The newspaper also quoted the Thai actress as saying, ‘I hate Cambodians because Cambodians stole my Angkor Wat. If I will be reincarnated in next life, I prefer to be a dog rather than to be a Cambodian national.’ Suwanan has denied ever making the remarks.” [italics MF] (Asian Tribune, 1 February 2003, online) 17  Criteria (i) for cultural nominations reads: “Preah Vihear is an outstanding masterpiece of Khmer architecture. It is very ‘pure’ both in plan and in the detail of its decoration.” See http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1224 (retrieved 19 December 2017).

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trust project outside (bypassing, even undercutting) direct nation-state control cannot be explained through a mere analysis of the scholarly and institutional authorities over art objects, monumental structures, and archaeological sites in the colonial and postcolonial settings in India (after Guha-Thakurta 2004, xvii). This seems at first glance to comply with Appadurai’s famous term of “mediascapes” as the electronic distribution of information and “images of the world being created by these media” in a complete world of “deterritorialisation” (Appadurai 1990, 299, 301) of nation-state frontiers through accelerated media connectivity and the transnational migrations of peoples, commodities, and cultural products. However, our different approach argues for what was called a more complex “dialectic between the dissolution of certain boundaries and the reaffirmation of other kinds of difference” (Juneja 2011, 276). In our case this is a multiform re-territorialisation of cultural heritage claims with new conflicting (real or imagined) local, national, and global spaces with often fuzzy and even overlapping borderlines. If the earliest thoughts discussed the fusion of the global and the local as a process of “glocalisation” (Robertson 1994), we can see in the following case the intermediate level of the national as refracted and not obsolete but even re-enforced in a defensive manner. The discussion about the ‘glocal’ brought the supposedly competing, but in fact equally overlapping, concepts of (global) ‘universalism’ and (local) ‘particularism’ into analytical focus. As we shall see in the following, Angkor Wat is alternatively called a religious (pan-national Hindu) universal to be freely relocated by its adherents, or an object of universal and humanist care, standing against the temple’s ethnocentric-essentialist instrumentalisation as a constitutive element of ‘particular Khmerness’. In this latter intermediate level stands the “political uses of archaeology” around the monument of Angkor Wat to “assert national sovereignty from a single political centre [...] by linking it to a real or imagined heroic past” (Glover 2006, 24; compare Anderson 1996, Reid/Marr 1979). Contrary to our previous case studies on the physical career of Angkor Wat in the French-colonial métropole with more homogeneous standpoints from different colonial individual agents, interest groups, and institutions, recent communication technologies like the Internet promote an extremely heterogeneous layering of stakeholders over the same cultural heritage called Angkor Wat. In the following, we will try to exemplify the above-mentioned using three constellations: (a) the universal in the local; (b) the authentic in the national; and (c) the iconic in the global. Angkor Wat as a (nationalist) Hindu universal: Making it ‘local’ The international Indian newspaper the Guardian summarised the story on 7 March 2012 with an online article by the Delhi-based journalist Maseeh Rahman using a series of quotes from a retired police officer called Kishore Kunal

as the mastermind behind the private Hindu sect called Bihar Mahavir Mandir Trust (BMMT). In the 1980s the Archaeological Survey of India had been rewarded with the in situ restoration campaign of Angkor Wat as a symbolic return gift for India’s diplomatic acknowledgement (as the only non-aligned non-Warsaw Pact-country) of the Soviet Union–backed puppet government of Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (see chapter XI in the second volume). Some thirty years later, Angkor Wat was now, at least in the rhetoric of a Hindu sect, to be repatriated ‘back home’ to Mother India as the source of radiating Hindu culture and religion. Though India is the homeland of Hindus, their grandest temple stands thousands of miles away in Cambodia. Now the trustee of a temple in Bihar has decided to do something about it — he is building a full-scale replica of the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat on the banks of the Ganges River, near the state capital Patna. “The Angkor Wat temple in Bihar will be as majestic as the original, and slightly larger — it will be 222 feet by 222 feet, and its five shikharas [towers] will also be 222 feet high,” said Kishore Kunal, who runs the Mahavir Mandir temple trust in Patna. “And when it’s ready in ten years time, it will be a functioning temple, employing at least a dozen priests.” The project, Kunal estimates, will cost at least 600 million rupees (£7.5 million) [Der Spiegel has mentioned 10 million USD/15 million EUR, MF] — half to create the basic structure, the rest for the embellishments, including sculptures of gods and goddesses. The replica, though, will not be ringed by a moat nor have a palace on its campus. But the main difference will be in the temple’s presiding deity. The original Khmer temple at Angkor, built in the twelfth century by a Hindu king from a dynasty linked to southern India and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, was dedicated to Vishnu. Bihar’s replica will be called the Virat Angkor Wat Ram Mandir, and will have Ram as the main deity, flanked by his consort Sita, who is said to have been a native of the state. Ram, though, is an avatar of Vishnu and, according to legend, the Hindu god once crossed the Ganges at the very spot where the temple dedicated to him will be constructed. Kunal, a sixty-one-year-old retired police officer, has never visited the original temple complex in Cambodia, which moved from Hindu to Buddhist use in the thirteenth century. He is planning his first visit soon but hopes that thousands of Indians who cannot afford to visit Angkor Wat will be able to experience its grandeur by visiting the replica nearer home. Under Kunal’s management, the Mahavir Mandir temple trust has built three hospitals in Patna, while as head of the state religious trust board, he has restored twelve historical temples in Bihar. [...] Kunal conducted the temple’s ground-breaking ceremony on Monday [5 March, MF]. Since the style of the original Angkor Wat was influenced by Dravidian ­architecture, with its typical storied towers, traditional

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South Indian temple builders are being hired for the project in Bihar. The basic structure will be in concrete clad in granite, since using stone, as in the original, will double the cost and take twice as long to complete. The towers will be fashioned from stone fragments using an ancient technique. “Someone told me the Cambodians are upset that I’m creating a replica of Angkor Wat,” he said. “But why should they? If the Taj Mahal is recreated in the UK, we won’t mind. We’ll feel happy.” [italics MF] (Rahman 2012)

How should one tackle this rather abstruse and multi-layered blend of fact and fiction, of Hindu devotionalism, cultural essentialism, heritage (inheritance) discourses, and architectural strategies? One element in this long quotation is particularly striking: the religious-physical nexus in the justification for the Indian replication of a Cambodian temple. Kajri Jain has argued in her article “Divine mass reproduction” about the “massification” of devotional images in India, the “imperative of replication must be [above others as Jain explains, MF] understood in relation to the kinds of multiplicity inherent in many South Asian – particularly Hindu – theologies, which allow for the idea of manifestations or incarnations (roop or avatar) of the divine. This is especially pronounced in the case of Vishnu worship or Vaishnavism: Vishnu has ten incarnations (including one yet to come), which he adopts when humanity is in crisis and needs salvation. These incarnations of Vishnu include Ram, Krishna, and the Buddha” (Jain 2011, 145). Transferring this general remark to our concrete situation, the temple of Angkor Wat, originally dedicated to Vishnu and later Buddhist, is, according to the newspaper text for a majority Indian online readership, quite justifiably re-incarnated (architecturally replicated) with its related dedication to Vishnu’s incarnation of Ram. As Jain discusses this in more detail in relation to mass-replicated devotionalia, this argumentation seems to contradict – from a rather religious-essentialist perspective very different from the modernist value structure of the discipline of art history – Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum of a loss of authenticity and aura of an original artwork in its moment of mass replication (Benjamin 1939). In our case, however, the “unique and not mass-reproduced replica” is embedded in a second aspect that conforms with an established canon of cultural heritage values: the Hindu-nationalist claim of a precise locality for the replica, be it a symbolic or real locality. ‘Re-Hinduicising’ the actual Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat – ironically, we have detected a similar strategy used by French-colonial archaeology for other scientific ends – converts (reterritorialises) it into the property of the universal, transnational Hindu community, just waiting to be “brought home” to its original religious locality, source, and origin: the Hindu motherland of India where, in fact, Buddhism also originated. With its dedication to Vishnu-incarnation Ram, the precise locality for Angkor Wat’s physical rebirth is indicated as 418

lying on the shores of the Ganges ‘where the god once crossed the river’. As Jain explores, “the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s” (the fundamentalist Hindu claim for Ram’s birthplace, which helped to destroy the Muslim Babri mosque in Ayodhya) had been fuelled by “neoliberal religiosity” after the 1990s to foster a “hegemonic version of Indian-ness” (evoking “Mother India”) and “pan-­ Indian culture industries” by non-state Hindu sects (Jain 2012, 191). These tendencies are fostered through the most recent, fastest and all-accessible new media to make the trajectory of the heritage icon of Angkor Wat a truly global one: the Internet. The Internet addresses a much larger and more global readership, including émigrés with no access to Indian print media, and rich sponsors within the universal Indian diaspora. This connects to a third observation, which brings us back to the formal quality of the desired replica: its sheer physical size surpassing the original. Again, Jain refers to the above-mentioned trends in India, which accompanied a tendency to materialise ‘mega statues’ at Shiva pilgrimage sites, new technology-based “gigantic malls, highways, temples, monumental icons and new spiritual complexes all over India”. In these mega projects, “identity-­ claims are expressed through the shifting, mobile domain of circulating images [and] reconverted into material claims on space and territory, [being] mapped not onto bourgeois notions of high art, but rather onto the symbolic and territorial significations of caste and feudal privilege in the visual domain of modern religion” (Jain 2012, 204). In our case the conversion of mobile images into physical mega projects leads to a mega translation, which rematerialises the globally circulating heritage icon called Angkor Wat as a physical evocation, enhanced even in size, at a specific Indian locality. But how are our observations and interpretations retraceable in the Bihar Mahavir Mandir Trust’s self-present­ ation on the Internet? With the globally accessible link to the Mahavir Mandir-Patna at Bihar at http://www.mahavirmandirpatna.org/index.htm (accessed 2013), its self-description is made extremely local. As introduction, the “location” of the Mahavir Mandir at Patna (constructed in the early 1980s) is indicated with a map and described as “one of the leading Hanuman temples in the country” with “thousands of devotees”. The homepage also lists “Mahavir Mandir’s many distinctions”, one of which is as a “pioneer in [the] association of philanthropy with religion”, as “from its funds it had established four charitable hospitals in Patna and two more under construction on North Bihar”. At the top of the page, beside the “News” about the “Establishment of a new sect [called] Ramavat Panth”, the icon of a seven-­ towered temple resembling Angkor Wat invites the reader to click on the link “Viraat Ramayan Mandir” (Pl. EpI.3). This headline is subtitled with the words “The largest Hindu temple in the world, larger than even Angkor Wat temple” and is illustrated with three computer renderings by the declared “Temple architect Piyush V. Sompura, Ahmedabad, Gujrat, India” with a front elevation and two

2. Between philanthropy and marketing, a ‘greater Hindu nation’ and the Internet

perspective views on the whole site that look like rough déHindu temple with the tallest spire in the world. Therefore, jà-vu illustrations of comparable hand drawings by the exethe competition is not with the Cambodian temple, but cuting architects of the Angkor Wat replicas of the French-­ with other Hindu temples in the country and abroad. [...] colonial exhibitions of Marseille 1922 and Paris 1931 When this project is contemplated, it will cement further (compare Fig. VI.7a and Fig. VII.5). Compared to the above-­ the strong bond between the two culturally rich countries cited newspaper article, the dimensions of the Angkor Wat India and Cambodia. This strong bond has existed bereplica had been considerably augmented, but the project’s tween the two countries for a period of two millennia. attempt to appropriate Cambodia’s premier icon of cultural [italics MF] (Viraat Ramayan Mandir 2012) grandeur is now diplomatically redirected towards a universal pan-Hindu competition for the largest temple site: If these above-mentioned renderings were made without any indication of a site, the unctuous text descriptions were Virat Ramayan Mandir will be 2268 feet [691 metres] in accompanied with photographs about the “Bhumi-pujan ceremony at Kathwalia-Bahuara, East Champaran on 21 length, 1296 feet [395 metres] in width and 440 feet [134 metres] in height. Its location is at Janaki Nagar near Kes- June” in 2012 to inaugurate the concrete locality for the aria in North Bihar at a distance of 120 kilometres from future construction. The same strategy was followed in the Patna and 60 kilometres from the historic town of ­Vaishali. PDF brochure with the site plan (like in the former French versions, the temple’s inner cruciform gallery was omitted) It is spread over a sprawling area of 200 acres on the main Kesaria Chakia road near traditional Kathwalia-­ and another rendering of the new version “under construcBahuara village. Like South-East Asian temples it has lay- tion” (Viraat Ramayan Mandir 2012) (Pl. EpI.4a–c). In a ers instead of floors and in the first layer one will have to quite defensive word choice, the homepage continued with its last point “Replica of important and magnificent monuwalk more than one km to see four temples with shikhars ments” to quote a list of replicas made in history from the (spires) in four corners and the marvels of the Ramayan Buddhist “Mahabodi temple, Bodh-gaya” (see above), which through electronic gadgets. In the last layer the main placed the Indian project in a kind of ‘applied Hindu pilRama temple consisting of Rama, Sita, Lava, Kusha and grimage to Angkor Wat’ by visiting its enlarged souvenir Valmiki will be at a height of 66 feet and will have a sitting translation near Patna, and justified its copy-paste intencapacity for 20,000 devotees at one time. In all there will be eighteen temples with high spires. The Shiva temple tions: “There is no copyright anywhere in the world for any will comprise the largest Shiva-Linga in the world and it monument even declared a world heritage site.” In the following years the size and shape of the project will be installed in such a fashion that devotees will have has, not surprisingly, even been augmented. On 13 Novemno difficulty in offering water, milk, etc. to the great deity. [...] The cost of the new project Virat Ramayan Mandir will ber 201318 the local Bihar Times (and, internationally, the be around Rs. 500 crore [60 million EUR]. [...] The name BBC) reported that the “Model of world’s largest Hindu has been changed from Viraat Angkor Wat Ram Mandir to temple [was] unveiled in Bihar”19 by Chief Minister Nitish Viraat Ramayan Mandir to respect the sentiments of the Kumar (Pl. EpI.5a–c): now, the Viraat Ramayan Mandir complex was already “almost double the height of the Cambodian people and to highlight the importance of the world-famous twelfth-century Angkor Wat complex in eternal epic Ramayan. [...] The architectural plan of the Cambodia” and comprised of “eighteen temples”. As preRamayan Mandir is finalised with the consultation of Shri sented on the new Internet site of http://viraatramayanPiyush Sompura of Ahmadabad who is the architect of the temple. Sompuras of Ahmadabad are traditional archi- mandir.net (accessed 19 November 2017), the model was 2,800 feet (853 metres) in length, 1,400 feet (427 metres) tects of temples since centuries. The proposed temple has taken the design of spires from the Angkor Wat, but it has in width and 405 feet (123 metres) in height (Pl. EpI.6).20 When the Times of India reported on 18 May 2015 that the thirteen shikhars whereas the original Angkor Wat temple has got only nine spires. [...] Despite the fact that the “Work on world’s largest Hindu temple [was] to begin by end-june”, the original Cambodian source temple had filength, width and height of the proposed Viraat Ramayan Mandir will be more than the present Angkor Wat temple, nally been merged with Indian sources: “The temple’s architectural design will bear resemblance to Angkor Wat the idea is not to supersede the grandeur of the present Angkor Wat temple. No structure in the present time can temple in Cambodia, Ramanath Swami temple at Rameshbeat the beauty of the most splendid monument created waram and Meenakshi temple in Madurai”, with “a height by the skill of mankind. Our idea is to construct the largest of 379 feet and 12 spires” (Kumar 2015).

18  “India unveils plan to build ‘world’s largest temple’” (13 November 2013), http://www.bbc.com/news/

world-asia-india-24923156 (retrieved 19 December 2017)

19  http://www.bihartimes.in/Newsbihar/2013/Nov/newsbihar13Nov15.html (retrieved 19 December 2017) 20  http://www.viraatramayanmandir.net/viraat-ramayan-mandir/(retrieved 19 December 2017)

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Epilogue to Volume One  Back to Asia: From Bangkok 1860 to Bihar 2020

Angkor Wat as an authentic past: ‘National’ claims However, in articles recording Cambodia’s response the tone is very different from the beginning. On 7 March 2012 the Phnom Penh Post published its online article “Angkor redux scepticism: Plans for a full-scale replica of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple were greeted with raised eyebrows by government officials yesterday”. The message “There’s only one Angkor Wat in the world, there’s not two” was clear, but historically imprecise. One day later the Independent added other statements made by Cambodian officials who had apparently heard of the Siamese, but not the French-colonial replicas of ‘their’ temple, and were primarily concerned about national property rights: Council of Minister’s Press and Quick Reaction Unit spokesman Ek Tha said such plans to build a “fake Angkor Wat” were trite. “There’s only one Angkor Wat in the world, there’s not two,” he said, stressing that the Indian government — which is not involved in the privately funded project — had helped Cambodia restore temples damaged by natural causes. Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts Secretary of State Thai Norak Satya said this was the first time he had heard of someone wanting to build a bigger Ang­ kor Wat. “In some cases, some other countries such as Thailand have built smaller models of Angkor Wat — but it is small, so it is okay,” Thai Norak Satya said. “If they want to build a smaller model of Angkor Wat to showcase Cambodia, that is okay, but if they want to build it bigger — they cannot,” he said. [italics MF] (Sen 2012) Having learned of the plan, officials in Cambodia yesterday said they believed the move was “a shameful act” that would undermine the value of the country’s best-known tourist attraction which has been a World Heritage Site since 1992. [...] “Angkor Wat is Angkor Wat — it is unique,” Cambodian government spokesman Phay Siphan said. “They are raising this to be confrontational and it is provocative of the World Heritage principle. We won’t let anyone confuse the world that there are two Angkor Wats.” [italics MF] (Buncombe 2012)

Making the attentive reader draw parallels to European nineteenth-century debates about the concept of a Kulturnation, other voices proposed – quite rightly in fact (see chapter XII) – that Cambodia as a nation, and Angkor Wat as “rich cultural heritage […] translated into a commercial asset”, should be conceptualised as one package. Or better said: that the two should be exclusively bound together by an intellectual property law against “domestic and international forgeries”, as the Phnom Penh Post reported on 29 August 2012 under the slogan “IP rights discussed for Ang­ kor Wat”:

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The ancient works of Cambodia’s King Suryavarman II could become a protected intellectual trademark if the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) finalises a treaty recognising cultural heritage, the organisation’s head said yesterday. Angkor Wat, a twelfth-century temple complex and the Kingdom’s number one tourist destination, became an area of contention with India earlier this year when an Indian organisation announced plans to produce a replica in the country’s state of Bihar. [...] WIPO director general Francis Gurry said “the exploits of the national treasure should belong to Cambodia [...] What intellectual property should try to do is enable that rich cultural heritage to be translated into a commercial asset. But not a commercial asset for all people. A commercial asset of Cambodia.” The challenge now, according to Gurry, was finding a mechanism for putting Cambodia in complete control of what he called the Kingdom’s “intellectual and cultural heritage”. The treaty under discussion, which could become international law within a year, would provide a comprehensive framework for protecting works such as Angkor against domestic and international forgeries, he added. Mavahir Mandir Trust has not abandoned its plans to build the temple, the Post reported this month. The Indian organisation said it will remove the word ‘Angkor’ from the name of the project and claims the structure will surpass the size of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, which is currently the largest Hindu complex in the world. The Hindu style of the temple could raise further questions on the ultimate origin of the structure’s intellectual concept. [italics MF] (Kun 2012)

The ambiguous strategy of ‘authenticating’ and ‘unique­making’ a Cambodian nation through its exclusive claim and hegemonic control over the archaeological heritage of Angkor Wat – wasn’t it made a ‘universal heritage list of all mankind’ in 1992? – was ironically questioned when, on 15 March 2013, the newspaper reported that “Temple-style mini golf comes to a fore”: Reapers bored of the usual temple experiences can now chase a ball around Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm and through Preah Vihear, not to mention try for a hole in one at Banteay Srei or Terrace of the Elephants. This is courtesy of Tee Tom’s Angkor Wat Putt, which opened last year, providing locals with Siem Reap’s very first miniature golf course. [...] Recognising that non-temple-related activities in Siem Reap were limited, Mr Tee saw a market for Angkor Wat Putt. [...] The idea for replicas of the temples came from his online research — he saw that some courses in other countries featured mini buildings. “So because Siem Reap is famous for its temples, I thought if I have Angkor Wat and other temples combined with the golf course it will make it unique,” he says. [italics MF] (Glasser 2013)

2. Between philanthropy and marketing, a ‘greater Hindu nation’ and the Internet

Angkor Wat as a cultural heritage icon: ­Negotiating ‘glocal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ self-presentations Besides Angkor Wat’s local appropriation in India and its elitist (‘top-down’) nationalist claim in Cambodian politics, the Internet produced a totally new, entirely global, and at the same time ‘bottom-up’ discussion among a new kind of stakeholder: now computer-connected individuals from India to the United States to Cambodia and the rest of the world negotiated the dos and don’ts of the physical translation of Angkor Wat and its status as shared heritage. All this was introduced via the new virtual platform of the Internet blog. The Internet homepage of the Independent from Friday 19 July 2013 serves as an example (Pl. EpI.7). From here, the completely globalised Internet surfer could now choose between links to Facebook and Twitter, topics like “iJobs and Dating”, ads for “Making international payments”, and news about the Pope and about tourists in Paris. In the spaces between the reader could find news like “Buddhist shrine in Indian state of Bihar hit by a series of bombs” or “Self-replicating alien space”. From here, the readers – with their partly overlapping and/or constantly changing cosmopolitan attitudes and mindsets “to be local at the global level” (Hannerz 1990, 249)21 – would enter the blog section. And they would eventually post their reactions to the above-quoted 2012 online article “Angkor’s away! India plans larger than life copy of Cambodia’s iconic temple” (see Pl. EpI.7) with an aerial photo of the ‘real’ temple site as a model-like version of its own. Writing his or her statements into the blog the reader would participate in the phenomenon of the globalisation of cultural heritage as a “notion of people constructing multiple authentic identities on a global scale”, or as a “diasporic-tourist-like [...] sense of an authentic relationship with the past in a number of different localities” (Hodder in Appadurai/Hodder 2008, 217; compare Salazar 2010). More precisely, the reader also could engage in a discussion in which seemingly 150 years of essentialist (art historical) topoi about origin, purity, and authenticity; centers and peripheries; cultural and religious stereotypes; localist, nationalist, and/or universalist claims on cultural heritage; and the iconic (non-)appropriation and physical (non-) translatability of the same were mixed up into a ‘transcultural hotchpotch’ called Angkor Wat. We will conclude this first volume with a comment about the following blog’s

very last statement: Wasn’t it exactly the modern-time ‘replicating’ – qua translation – process of Angkor Wat through which the famous ‘900 years of history of the original temple’ were produced for our mindset and formed into a veritable transcultural history of heritage? This blog on the ­internet homepage of the Independent from 19 July 2013 as a reaction to the article “Angkor’s away! India plans larger than life copy of Cambodia’s iconic temple” (by Andrew Buncombe, 8 March 2012) goes like this: Mohan Tiwari: Why Khmers are getting angry about it? We Hindus built Angkor and we also want to build the new Shiva temple. [...] Don’t worry: Old is gold!! Angkor will continue to rock ! Prince Moses: Please don’t degrade your own country by copying things from another country. If you think Angkor Wat was built by a Hindu king and Hinduism is originated in India, why didn’t your Hindu king build it in India? Why Cambodia? Don’t you think Hinduism was a universal religion of South Asia at that time and that India do [sic] not have an absolute right to that religion? Democracy is a universal system today, why don’t you copy the statue of Liberty and built it in New Delhi? What if we copy your Taj Mahal and built it in one of our poorest province in Cambodia? How would that make you feel? Guest: You can visit the Great Sphinx of Giza in Las Vegas, but no one goes there for that reason. I wouldn’t worry Cambodia, there’ll only ever be one Angkor Wat. [...] G: The reasons for having the temple built. 1. The Cambodian govt has made this exquisite sacred temple into blatant tourist trap full of touts, scamsters, naked tourists. For a few shiny US dollars, they have made this a Hindu/Buddhist pilgrimage centre into a commercial money spinning enterprise. 2. The temple is built in the South Indian architecture style. [...] 3. The temple is built by a private Hindu trust and Indian govt has no expenditure. So none of the funds meant for poor are diverted for the temple. In fact, it will generate lot of employment for the poor. 4. The temple reminds of the spread of Hindu culture and religion far and wide and is the largest of the Hindu temples when it was constructed by Hindu King Suryavarman. It is the opinion of the Hindu trust that building such a

21  What Ulf Hannerz stated in 1990 about “Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture”, even few years be-

fore the global internet culture was introduced, applies here: “It is no longer so easy to conform to the ideal type of the local. Some people, like exiles or migrant workers, are indeed taken away from the territorial bases of their local culture, but try to encapsulate themselves within some approximation of it. […] through the involvement with the one existing culture, everybody would be the same kind of local, at the global level” (Hannerz 1990, 249). In his 2005 paper, Roudometof describes a kind of “transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and glocalization”. We associate these qualities with typical online readers of international journals and their blogs – as he defines them in terms of varying “degrees of stated attachments to a locality, a state or country [or nation, MF], and the support of local culture, and economic, cultural and institutional protectionism” (Roudometof 2005, 128).

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Epilogue to Volume One  Back to Asia: From Bangkok 1860 to Bihar 2020

temple, not as a tourist attraction, but for the Hindu pilgrimage, is an extraordinary gift for the Hindus in India. 5. No one needs to worry that this temple will divert traffic from the original resulting in loss of revenue, as this is not built as a tourist attraction. In fact, no non-Hindu travellers might even be allowed inside the temple. [...] IAF101: [...] Angkor Wat is not a ‘Hindu’ symbol nor is it a ‘pilgrimage’ destination — it is merely the ruins of an old temple that is no longer in use. What they plan to build in India is a functioning temple, not ruins. They choose Ang­ kor because its design was special and to give Indians a change to see it if they can’t travel to Cambodia. Evol Nohcoc: [...] So not a ‘Hindu pilgrimage’ destination, but they want to turn it into one right at home. Then you want it the easy way don’t you? Bring the Kaaba to India. Bring Angkor Wat to India. Then try to build an exact replica of Angkor Wat then and see what happens. Angkor Wat’s design is special so it is justifiable to build a copy Angkor Wat? Create another ‘special’ building just for you at home? IAF101: Comparing the Kaaba to Angkor Wat is offensive to both Muslims and Hindus. It shows that you don’t have an understanding of either Islam or Hinduism. There are already dozens of replicas of Angkor Wat, what has happened? Nothing! [...] Evol Nohcoc: The Kaaba and Angkor Wat are sacred sites. There can only be one fully functional Kaaba and one fully functional Angkor Wat. The idea of a fully functional copy is not inviting to us. [...] Angkor Wat is on our flag. You can’t take our unique national icon and put a copy in your own soil in a size almost comparable to the original structure. This is aggression toward another nation’s sovereignty and people. [...] Angkor Wat is Hindu-related, but surely not Indian’s. [...] IAF101: Who cares what is on your flag? If you cared so much about Angkor Wat, you would have done something to take proper care of the structure. Till recently it was out of bounds because of rebels. Even today smaller temples like Preah Vihear are being bombed and shot at! You people clearly don’t appreciate what you have. You talk about heritage but Angkor Wat is just some tourist trap in the middle of the jungle where neither its sanctity nor its heritage is dignified. Your main concern is that you will loose tourists revenue, not culture or heritage! [...] Prince Moses: Hey rascal ...... don’t be a copycat fellow. Don’t you have your own mind and create your own thing? If Hindu was so popular in India, why didn’t they build Angkor Wat in India in the first place? Why in Cambodia? Anyway, I say let’s built a replica of Taj Mahal in Cambodia.

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IAF101: Hey retard... if anybody could build the Taj Mahal they would have already done so by now but you are free to fail! [...] You need to leave your ego aside before you start making claims. It’s not like you yourself built this temple with your own money! This was built by a king that didn’t even know what Cambodia was. It is a part of history and has nothing to do with modern day Cambodia. [...] Thol Theany: [...] The plan of building Angkor Wat in India has nothing to do with religion, value, heritage, humanity and culture but for only Money$. [...] IAF101: You talk about ‘Angkor Wat’ and heritage but Ang­kor Wat is a dirty tourist hell hole today with people walking around like as if it were in some bar. People smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, women wearing bikinis and hippies smoking cannabis! At least in India, the temple will function properly and its sanctity will be intact. How can you steal Khmer ‘heritage’ when this is a Hindu temple being built? Angkor Wat was chosen for its design and because Indians can’t go to Cambodia to see the original. [...] If Buddhism is ‘universal’ why isn’t ‘Hinduism’? You say Hinduism is Indian culture yet Buddhism is ‘universal’?? That’s a double standard. Plus, as for ‘copying’ Buddhist temples, the Thais, the Malays and many other nations in the region have copies or similar temples built in their countries. [...] How many copies of Angkor Wat are there in South-East Asia alone? If building smaller temples is okay what’s wrong with building larger temples? Plus, this is only a replica of the original temple, not the entire complex and not the palace. [...] Van Hanuman: [...] Angkor Wat is uniquely Khmer. I feel that if the Indians want to build the world’s largest religious Hindu temple then build in their own unique architectural style, why does it have to be a copy of Angkor Wat. Just an example, I wonder what the French would feel if a certain country decides to build a bigger Eiffel Tower..... IAF101: What’s the big deal really? There are pyramids, the Eiffel tower and all kinds of attractions in Las Vegas, nobody cares! I bet if some Casino in Las Vegas built a bigger Angkor Wat the Cambodians would be happy to see hookers, gamblers and the like visit its halls, yet India building a holy temple, would be an ‘affront’! Ridiculous ego trip! [...] We don’t need your ‘permission’ and you are not the ‘owners’. [...] Thol Theany: [...] if you want to make another temple, please don’t name if ‘Angkor Wat’. There is only one Angkor Wat in the world. And the world also knows there is only one Angkor Wat which is Cambodia. [...] So please use another name, so the world doesn’t get confused. [...] If you still want to put Angkor Wat on your temple, please reform it as ‘Angkor Wat of Cambodia’.

2. Between philanthropy and marketing, a ‘greater Hindu nation’ and the Internet

Evol Nohcoc: Isn’t Angkor Wat a world heritage? You’d leave it to rot and build a copy just to remind you of how great it was? Even though we are not the direct descendants of the great king, we are the caretakers, we are the descendants of the builders, having direct access to the site, therefore we own as much of the temple as anyone who had built the temple itself. [...] zochoten: I’m not all that worried about this enlarged semi copy given that it is only costing 13 million and being built in India by Indian workers I can’t see it staying up all that long. So a ruined concrete temple in, say, ten years time isn’t likely to be much of an attraction. I think the Cambodians should just sit back and have a quiet giggle about the stupidity of this and perhaps benefit a little from all the extra publicity they are getting. [...] Jon Yates: If the Indians can replicate Angkor Wat for £13m then perhaps we should be outsourcing UK public civil engineering projects to them. Evol Nohcoc: It is imperative that India [will] not build an Angkor Wat replica due to the arguments as follow: ▶ It is on our Flag!!! It represents who we are, where we are, what we have and what we live with and what we live for, with thousands of years of history and cultures embedded in the stones!!! — Simply put Angkor Wat is uniquely Khmer even though it is Khmerized from Indian culture. ▶ The to-be-built Angkor Wat in India will be GRANDEUR [sic] in size and the future-to-be largest Hindu temple in the world which contradicts the Buddhism-dedicated Angkor Wat in Cambodia. ▶ It will create religious resentments between Hindus and Buddhists in both countries. ▶ It will sour the relation between the people of the two coun-

tries. ▶ Angkor Wat is copy-righted — isn’t it? ▶ India is rich in culture and history, it is a shame that it cannot come up with something more original with regards to its people and the site of the building. [...] ▶ Surely, India will be held responsible for the escalation of tensions within the region. ▶ Many Indians are starving — rather than spending money on mega projects like these and be kleptocratic, why not find ways to feed the people. ▶ In certain aspects — Angkor Wat functions much like the Kaaba of Saudi Arabia, surely India wouldn’t replicate the Kaaba. ▶ Angkor Wat is the home of Devaraja — the king of gods — divine universal ruler, the manifestation of Śiva. Surely, India would be punished for such atrocity. IAF101: You are ridiculous. You don’t know Hinduism, you say Siva, then you say Devaraja! LOL Clearly you people have forgotten everything and it just a building and a ego boost to your people, not a place of significance. As already mentioned, this is a private enterprise — the Indian government doesn’t build temples and mosques and churches. You can’t provide even a single decent argument not to build this other than the fact that it is ‘your’ monument and on ‘your’ flag! If India decided to build a bigger statue of Liberty, the Americans wouldn’t care and might even support it. You need to grow up and let go of petty issues. Building a replica of Angkor Wat will not change the 900 years of history of the original and that cannot be duplicated. [italics MF] (Blog on the Internet homepage of the Independent from Friday 19 July 2013 about the article “Angkor’s away! India plans larger than life copy of Cambodia’s iconic temple” by Andrew Buncombe [Delhi 8 March 2012])

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Plates

Plate Intro.1  Cover of the 2013 publication ‘Archaeologizing’ heritage?, compare Pl. IX.5 (Source: Falser/Juneja 2013b, cover; © Falser and ENSBA Paris)

Plate Intro.2  Cover of the 2015 publication Cultural heritage as civilizing mission, compare Fig. Intro.1a (Source: Falser 2015a, cover; © Falser and Roger-Viollet, Paris)

Plate Intro.3 Schematic sketch in the 1996 publication Angkor: A manual for the past, present and future to explain the major river systems in the Angkor plain (Source: APSARA 1998, 8)

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Plate Intro.4a  The “archaeological map of ancient Cambodia” as published by Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière in his 1909 Inventaire déscriptif des monuments du Cambodge, just two years after the Siamese 1907 retrocession of northwestern Cambodia, including Angkor, to the French protectorate Le Cambodge (Source: Lajonquière 1909, carte 1; © EFEO Paris)

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Plate Intro.4b  The updated archaeological map of the Angkor region with pre-Angkorian Hariharalaya (today Roluos) to the southeast of Angkor (Source: Frings 2002, 84; © Greater Angkor Project with Pottier/EFEO, Evans/GAP and JICA)

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Plate Intro.5  Angkor Wat inside the ancient city plan, as published in the 1969 EFEO publi­ cation Angkor Vat: Description graphique (Source: Nafilyan/EFEO 1969, plan 1; © EFEO Paris)

Plate Intro.6  Plan of Angkor Wat as published in the 1969 EFEO publication Angkor Vat: ­Description graphique (Source: Nafilyan/EFEO 1969, plan 2; © EFEO Paris)

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Plate Intro.7a  View into the southern bas-relief gallery of Angkor Wat, compare Fig. III.43 (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

Plate Intro.7b  View towards the inner ­cruciform ­gallery staircase of Angkor Wat (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

Plate Intro.8a  View towards the second ­enclosure as seen from Angkor Wat’s eastern access system with a new staircase for visiting tourists (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

Plate Intro.8b  Photograph to show the play of sunlight and shadow through the wood-­ imitating window balusters of Angkor Wat (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plate Intro.9a  The central section of Angkor Wat as depicted in tourist propaganda material ­during Cambodia’s independence of the 1950s and 1960s, “with complements of Sokhar” (the Société Khmère des auberges royales) and a dancing Apsara, performed by King Sihanouk’s daughter Bopha Devi, compare chapter X (Source: Cambodia guide of the 1960s, undated, inner cover illustration; private archive Michael Falser)

Plate Intro.9b  500 Riels banknote of Cambodia in 2010 (Source: Private archive Michael Falser)

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Plate Intro.10a—c  King Suryavarman II (top and centre) as depicted in the bas-relief galleries of Angkor Wat; and the famous scene of the “Churning of the milk ocean” (in two parts) inside the temple’s eastern gallery (Source: © Michael Falser 2010 (above); © Jaroslav Poncar 1995)

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Plate Intro.11  A postcard from the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, with the light concept of “éclairage Jacopozzi” above the Angkor Wat replica by “Blanche architects” (Source: private collection Michael Falser)

Plate Intro.12  A section of the northern bas-relief gallery (eastern part), of the sixteenth century CE, as photographed by Jaroslav Poncar (Source: © Jaroslav Poncar)

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Plate Intro.13  Cover of the musée Guimet exhibition Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe — Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge in Paris 2013 (Source: Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, cover)

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Plate Intro.14a  The copies of the original plaster casts from Angkor Wat for the former Ethnographic Museum of Berlin, recently rediscovered and restored for the future Humboldt Forum (Source: © Michael Falser 2013)

Plate Intro.14b  The 2016 model of the Berlin Humboldt Forum with the intended walk through ethnographic world art; see the section of Southeast Asia in the central left wing with a new display of the Berlin casts of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Source: © Michael Falser 2016)

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Plates Intro.15a—c  The modern production process of plaster casts of/for decorative elements and of/for architectural surfaces (above left), surviving casts from Angkor Wat (above right, compare Pl.Intro.10b and 16a) and the storage of lightweight d ­ ecorative elements (French: staff) (below), photos taken at Maison Auberlet, successor of the original Auberlet & Laurent, which executed the decoration of the 1:1-scale version of Angkor Wat at the International ­Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931 (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plates Intro.16a—c  Cast copy versions from Angkor Wat’s bas-relief galleries surviving and ­being re-used/appropriated in Phnom Penh today; above: multiplied bas-relief in today’s National Library (compare Pl. Intro.10b and Fig. Intro.26, 27); below: contemporary office and bank buildings (compare Pl. Intro.10a) (Source: © Michael Falser 2010, 2011)

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Plates Intro.17a,b  Viollet-le-Duc’s original musée de Sculpture comparée today (renamed musée des Monuments français), which sought to canonise French architectural heritage of the ‘medieval’ times using the plaster cast technique (compare the historic photograph on Fig. III.11); below: the back side of the facade-like plaster cast montage of medieval architecture inside the musée des Monuments français in 2011 — a materialised metaphor for the ‘constructedness’ of cultural heritage, compare Pl. Intro.13 and Pl. III.17—18 (Source: © Michael Falser 2011)

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Plate Intro.18  Entangled heritage constructions? A 2010 exhibition of a model of Angkor Wat inside France’s icon of a patrimoine culturel: the cathedral of Saint-Denis near Paris (Source: courtesy Bernard Berger 2013)

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Plates Intro.19a—c  Norodom Sihanouk himself as actor in his 1969 film Crépuscule (compare Pl. X.25a—o), sitting in front of Angkor Wat, reading Bernard Philippe Groslier’s 1958 book Ang­ kor: Hommes et pierres and explaining the historical Indian-Khmer cultural connection to his guest, an Indian princess (his real wife) (Source: Bophana Film Archive, Phnom Penh; YouTube)

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Plates Intro.20a,b  Dy Proeung with King Norodom Sihanouk and his wife in the early 1990s to visit his large-scale model of Angkor Wat in Phnom Penh (above); and in 2010 sitting in front of his Angkor Wat model at his workshop at the Preah Ko temple, in Roluos to the southeast of Angkor (below, compare Pl. EpII.29c) (Source: courtesy Dy Proeung; © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plates Intro.21a,b  A Buddhist monk at Wat Bo near Siem Reap in 2010, presenting ‘his’ ­drawings of traditional design patterns (above) and his monastery’s mouldings workshop of Angkorian temple decoration, like the famous scene ‘Churning of the milk ocean’ (compare Pl. Intro.10c) on Angkor Wat’s eastern bas-relief gallery (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plate Intro.22  Cover of the May 2002 themed issue of Museum International, entitled Angkor, a living museum (Source: Museum International, 213/14 (May 2002), cover)

Plates Intro.23a,b  Indiana Jones’ Temple of the Forbidden Eye as today staged in Disneyland/ Anaheim (left), and a photomontage/film still of Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) walking through Ta Prohm temple in the 2000 film Tomb Raider (Source: Internet, Youtube)

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Plates Intro.24a—c  Temple site of Trowulan/West Java as replicated in the Taman Mini Cultural Theme Park in Jakarta (above left); a stylised Bayon face tower in the Cambodian ­Cultural Village at Siem Reap (above right), and a stylized new ‘gate of Angkor Thom’ in Battambang (Source: © Michael Falser 2015, 2010)

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Plates Intro.25a,b  2011 photo catalogue of the École française d’Extrême-Orient in 2011 (left), and 2001 booklet Angkor: Atlantis in the jungle as published by the German Apsara Conser­ vation Project (Source: EFEO/Cernuschi 2011, cover; Leisen/Plehwe-Leisen 2001, cover)

Plates Intro.26a,b  Angkor Wat as branded cultural heritage icon, as advertisement for ­Angkor Beer in the Royal Air Cambodge journal of 1997 (left); and on Cambodia’s official visa card of 2010 (right) (Source: Royal Air Cambodge, 10 December 1997, 17; personal archive Michael Falser)

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Plate I.1  The route of the Mekong mission of de Lagrée and Garnier from 1866 until 1868 (Source: Beauvais 1929, between 51 and 52)

Plate I.2  Map of the Mekong mission’s visit to the Angkor area, published in Garnier’s mission report of 1873 (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate 1, between 24 and 25; © Heidelberg University Library)

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Plate I.3  Photograph of Angkor Wat, taken by John Thomson in 1866, published in his 1867 account The antiquities of Cambodia — A series of photographs taken on the spot (Source: Thomson 1867, between 21 and 25; © St. Andrews Library, UK)

Plates I.4a—c  The French colonial section in the 1867 Universal Exhibition, here views into the different displays of Algeria (Source: © Archives nationales, France (above); Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, 184 and 185)

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Plates I.5a—c  Map of the parc of the Champs-de-Mars of the 1867 Universal Exhibition, and a close-up with the ensemble of Egypt in the upper left side (Source: Exposition 1867c, maps; © Heidelberg University Library)

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Plates II.1a,b  The ground floor and first floor plans of the palais de Compiègne by architect ­Lafollye, in red the foreseen space for the Musée khmer (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

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Plates II.2a,b  Ground floor sections of the palais de l’Industrie in the 1878 Exhibition (Source: Livret-Chaix 1878, map)

Plate II.3  Ground plan of the Trocadero Palace and the installations in the garden (Source: Livret-Chaix 1878, plan)

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Plate II.4  The famous Naga balustrade in its restored and purified form in the musée Guimet (2013) (Source: © Michael Falser 2013)

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Plate III.1  The interior of the Stallhofgebäude in Dresden where Mengs’ ­plaster cast collection was shown 1786 and 1794, and published in Matthäi’s Catalogue (Source: © Kupferstich-­Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, photo: Andreas ­Diesend)

Plates III.2a,b  The Assyrian and the Egyptian Courts in the Sydenham Crystal Palace of 1854, after Philip Delamotte (Source: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

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Plate III.3  Painting of the moulding operation at the Sanchi gate in 1870 (Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum)

Plate III.4  The South Kensington Museum with the Architectural Courts in a guide from 1881 (Source: V&A 1881, map)

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Plates III.5a,b  The Architectural Courts at the South Kensington Museum, today the Victoria & Albert Museum, revisited in 2012: to the left the Western (in 1874 the European, ‘­Ecclesiastic’) Court; to the right the Eastern (in 1874 the ‘Indian’) Court (Source: © Falser 2012; © Victoria & Albert Museum)

Plate III.6  The ground floor of the Trocadero Palace in 1903 with the handwriting of the acting director Camille Enlart indicating with the letter M in the left end of the Passy wing the location of the “Musée Cambodgien” (Source: © Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris)

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Plate III.7  Delaporte’s instructions for the plaster cast operations in situ at the “Pimanacas” terraces inside Angkor Thom, most probably for Fournereau during his 1888 mission (Source: © Private collection Louis Delaporte, Loches)

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Plate III.8  Sample of Delaporte’s instructions for the plaster cast operations in situ at Angkor Wat’s ­western entry gate, to be reconstituted shortly after in the musée Indo-chinois in Paris, compare Fig. III.36 (Source: © Private collection Louis Delaporte, Loches)

457

Plates

Plate III.9  Site plan of Angkor Wat in a watercolour of Fournereau 1889 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris)

458

Plates

Plates III.10a,b  Section and elevation plans of Angkor Wat by Fournereau in watercolour ­technique, 1889 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris)

459

Plates

Plate III.11 Section-elevation plan on Angkor Wat in 1:10 scale by Fournereau in 1889 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris)

Plate III.12  Profile and decoration studies of Angkor Wat in pencil and red colour by Fournereau in 1889 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris)

460

Plates

Plate III.13  Study on the ancient colour scheme in the Cruciform Gallery at Angkor Wat by Fournereau in 1889 (Source: © École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris)

461

Plates

Plate III.14a  The western main entry gate to Angkor Wat in a section-like installation in the musée Indo-chinois around 1900 (Source: Guérinet n.d., plate 3)

Plate III.14b—d  The same situation as in Pl. III.14a compared with the ‘real’ spot at Angkor Wat in 2010 (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

462

Plates

Plate III.15  Harry Thomann (alias A. Gillis) in Angkor Wat with the marked bas-reliefs to be ­copied, photograph of 1898 (Source: © Private collection Tamara von Rechenberg/Heidelberg)

463

Plates

Plates III.16a—e  The rediscovered plaster casts from Angkor in Saint-Riquier Abbey as documented by the curator of the Musée Guimet, Pierre Baptiste (above), and as featured in the journal Connaissance des Arts in 1992 (Source: © Pierre Baptiste, Musée Guimet (above); ­Connaissance des Arts, 481 (March 1992), inner front cover and LIV)

464

Plates

Plate III.17  The staging of original artefacts and restored plaster casts from Angkor during the exhibition Angkor, Naissance d’un mythe: Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge in 2013 in the Musée Guimet in Paris (Source: © Michael Falser 2013)

Plates III.18a,b  The plaster casts from Angkor (here the Bayon-tower face from the outside and the inside) as on display in the 2013 Musée Guimet exhibition, compare Pl. Intro.13 and Pl. III.17 (Source: © Michael Falser 2013)

465

Plates

Plate IV.1  The plan of the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Source: Picard 1891, II, map III)

Plate IV.2  A draft plan of the colonial section of the 1889 Universal ­Exhibition (Source: © Archives ­nationales, France)

466

Plates

Plate IV.3a  A draft plan of the colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

Plate IV.3b  A draft plan (around 1887/88) for the insertion of the colonial section into the esplanade des Invalides (Source: © Service historique de la défense, Paris)

467

Plates

Plate IV.4 Draft plan général (around 1888) for the colonial section within the esplanade des Invalides (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate IV.5  A draft plan (around 1888), detail about the pagode d‘Angkor within the colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

468

Plates

Plate IV.6  The final version of the colonial section within the 1889 Universal Exhibition (Source: Picard 1891, II, plan IV)

Plate IV.7 The pavillon du Cambodge of the 1889 Universal Exhibition in a series of iconized cultural heritage exhibits (Source: Huard 1889, II, between 424–25)

469

Plates

Plate V.1  The Indochinese section on Trocadero hill during the 1900 Universal ­Exhibition as depicted in a tropical setting (Source: Nicolas 1900, cover)

Plate V.2  The overall plan of the Exposition nationale et coloniale de Rouen of 1896 (Source: Revue de Rouen 1896, map)

470

Plates

Plate V.3  The map of the Exposition nationale coloniale of 1906 in Marseille in the Guide ­officiel de l’Exposition coloniale de Marseille (Source: Guide Exposition 1906, map; private collection Isabelle Aillaud, Marseillle)

471

Plates

Plates V.4a,b  A tourist brochure about the 1906 Exhibition, cover and interior information (Source: © Bibliothèque Alcazar Marseille)

472

Plates

Plates V.5a,b  Le palais du Cambodge of the 1906 Exhibition on postcards (Source: © Archives ­municipales de Marseille)

473

Plates

Pl. V.6  The cover page of Le Petit Journal (24 July 1906) with a scene in front of the Cambodian Pavilion with King Sisowath as guest at the 1906 Marseille Exhibition (Source: Personal archive Michael Falser)

474

Plates

Pl. V.7  A depiction in Dieulefils’ 1909 publication Ruines d’Angkor with a veritable visual ‘back-translation’ of the scene during the 1906 Marseille Exhibition, compare Pl. V.6 (Source: Dieulefils 1909, plate 2)

475

Plates

Plate VI.1a,b  Official tourist brochure and guidebook for the 1922 Marseille Exhibition (Source: © Chambre de Commerce Marseille, Collection CCI Marseille-Provence; private ­collection Michael Falser)

476

Plates

Plate VI.2  Official site plan of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition with the palais de l’Indo-Chine (Source: © Archives municipales de Marseille)

477

Plates

Plate VI.3  Depiction of the palais de l’Indo-Chine of 1922 in an exaggerated perspective as published in L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration, 6 May 1922, 402–03; private collection ­Michael Falser)

Plate VI.4a  Poster of the 1922 Exhibition (Source: © Chambre de Commerce Marseille, Collection CCI Marseille-Provence)

478

Plate VI.4b  The 1922 Exhibition on the title page of L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration, 21 October 1922, cover; private collection Michael Falser)

Plates

Plates VI.5a,b  Stamps of the 1922 Exhibition (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

479

Plates

Plates VI.6a,b  Watercolours by architect Auguste Delaval of the ­Angkor Wat replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: © Archives municipales d’Hennebont)

480

Plates

Plate VI.7a  The main staircase of the palais de l’Indo-Chine of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition as depicted on a postcard (Source: © Archives départmentales Bouches-du-Rhône)

481

Plates

Plate VI.7b  The nocturnal dance show in front of the Angkor Wat replica in Marseille 1922 (Source: Commissariat général de l’Exposition 1922a, between 280–81)

482

Plates

Plate VI.7c The palais de l’Indo-chine of the 1922 Marseille Exhibition as depicted on the cover of Le Petit Journal illustré, 16 April 1922 (Source: private collection Michael Falser)

483

Plates

Plate VII.1  The draft plan of the Indochinese section for the 1931 Paris Exhibition in Paris (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

484

Plates

Plate VII.2  The final plan for the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition (Source: © Archives ­nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.3a  The sketched bird’s-eye view of the 1931 Paris Exhibition in Paris (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

485

Plates

Plate VII.3b  The aerial plan of the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition (detail from 3a) (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.3c  Plan officiel of the 1931 I­nternational Colonial Exhibition in Paris, with the Angkor Wat replica taken from the inner plan (compare Plates VII.3a,b) (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.4  A watercolour by architects Charles and Gabriel Blanche of the 1931 replica of Angkor Wat (Source: Daufresne 2001, 27; photo J.P. Stercq)

486

Plates

Plate VII.5  The projector system for the illumination of the main facade of the ­Angkor Wat replica in Paris 1931 (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.6  The vitrines for the exhibition ­inside the 1931 replica, ­designed by Charles Blanche (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.7a  The colour scheme for the interior panels of the 1931 Angkor Wat replica (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

487

Plates

Plate VII.7b  The colour scheme for the interior staircases of the 1931 Angkor Wat ­replica (Source: © Archives nationales d’outre-mer ANOM, Aix-en-Provence)

Plate VII.8  Photograph by Frédéric Gadmer on 26 August 1931 of the daytime s­ cenario in front of the Angkor Wat replica for the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition (Source: republished in Chalet-Bailhache 2008, 48)

488

Plates

Plate VII.9  The architectural sketch by architect Blanche (the sepia version by André Maire) for the 1931 Angkor Wat replica in Paris (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, n.p.)

489

Plates

Plate VII.10  Decorated inner staircases and galleries of the Angkor Wat replica of 1931 in Paris, as depicted on a postcard (Source: private collection Michael Falser)

490

Plates

Plate VII.11a,b  Le grand temple d’Angkor-Vat avec les bains sacrés et les danseuses ­cambodgiennes as depicted in Tranchant’s 1931 publication Le tour du monde en 1 jour (Source: Tranchant 1931, cover, 11–12)

Plate VII.11c  The Cambodian dancers inside the glass brick-paved upper courts of the Angkor Wat replica of 1931 (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4616, 22 August 1931, n.p.)

491

Plates

Plate VII.12  Advertising for cars with the Angkor Wat and Bayon temples as background (Source: L’Illustration, no. 4603, 23 May 1931, Annonce S23)

492

Plates

Plate VII.13  The wall paintings inside the offices of the musée des Colonies, today Immigration History Museum, Paris (detail) (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

493

Plates

Plate VII.14  The Angkor Wat replica at the Paris 1931 Exhibition, as photographed by Frédéric Gadmer on 26 August 1931 (Source: Musée Albert Kahn 1992, 161)

494

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Plates VII.15a,b  Angkor Wat during the 1931 Paris Exhibition, exploited for political messaging in the journals Le Miroir du Monde (depicting the great opening by Maréchal Lyautey and ­President Doumergue, left) and Le Pèlerin (indicating the colonial treasures of Indochine and Afrique Occidentale Française, right) (Source: Le Miroir du Monde, no. 68, 20 June 1931; Le Pélerin, no. 2826, 24 May 1931; both republished in Grandsart 2010, 27, 5)

Plates VII.15c  Caricature about the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition (in the upper left corner the entry to the Angkor Wat replica) as depicted in the journal Le rire in 1931 (Source: Le rire, no. 642, 23 May 1931, n. p.)

495

Plates

Plate VII.16  The nocturnal illumination of the Angkor Wat replica during the 1931 Paris ­Exhibition as published in L’Illustration (Source: Autochrome by Léon Gimpel, as published in L’Illustration, no. 4616, 22 August 1931, n.p.)

Plate VII.17  The site of the giant 1931 Angkor Wat replica today (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plates

Plate VIII.1a  Centre des colonies next to the Cen­ tre régional of the 1937 Exhibition as published on a map (detail) in the Guide officiel, with Indochina at the far left end (Source: Guide officiel 1937, map)

Plate VIII.1b  Centre des colonies next to the ­Centre régional of the 1937 Exhibition as published on the cover of L’Illustration (detail) (Source: L’Illustration, 29 May 1937, cover detail)

Plate VIII.1c  The model of the colonial section on Swan Island with Indochina, the French Indies and Madagascar (compare Fig. VIII.6e), as transcribed and virtually animated for the Guide officiel of the 1937 ­Exhibition (Source: Guide officiel 1937, iv)

497

Plates

Plates VIII.2a,b  Study of the night and day appearance of 1937 Swan Island as presented in L’Illustration (Source: L’Illustration, 29 May 1937, n.p.)

Plates VIII.2c,d  Samples from the Guide officiel of the 1937 Exhibition, with “Our old France” and “Interplanetary travel” (left) next to the illuminated section of “Indochine” (compare Fig. VIII.18) and the “Hygiene pavillon” (right) (Source: Guide officiel de l’Exposition internationale de Paris 1937 (1937), 172, 184)

498

Plates

Plates VIII.3a,b  Illumination studies for the AOF and Indochinese sections on Swan Island (Source: © Archives nationales (France), F12/12522)

499

Plates

Plates VIII.4a,b  The former site of the Indochinese section on Swan Island during the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris during construction (above, compare Fig. VIII.11), and as existing today (below) (Source: © Archives nationales, France (above); © Michael Falser 2013)

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Plates

Plates EpI.1a—f  French-colonial bank notes with Angkor (Wat) depictions, 1928—30, 1936, 1945 (2×), 1947 (2×) (Source: © Sema, Hanoi)

501

Plates

Plates EpI.1g—l  French-colonial bank notes with Angkor (Wat) depictions, 1949 (2×), 1951 (2×), 1954 (2×) (Source: © Sema, Hanoi)

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Plates

Plates EpI.2a,b  The Wat Phra Kaew monastery site within the Bangkok Royal Palace with the model of Angkor Wat in the middle foreground, as shown in the lobby of the National Archives in Bangkok (Source: © Michael Falser 2011)

503

Plates

Plates EpI.2c—e  The Angkor Wat model inside Wat Phra Kaew monastery, overall view and details (Source: © Michael Falser 2011)

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Plates

Plate EpI.3  “Viraat Ramayan Mandir – The largest temple in the world, larger than even Angkor Wat temple”, as depicted on the homepage of Mahavir Mandir-Patna in 2013 (Source: screenshot from © Mahavir Mandir-Patna homepage in 2013)

505

Plates

Plates EpI.4a—d  The “Viraat Ramayan Mandir” project as depicted on the homepage of ­Mahavir Mandir-Patna in 2013 (Source: screenshot from © Mahavir Mandir-Patna homepage in 2013)

506

Plates

Plates EpI.5a—c  “Model of world’s largest Hindu temple [was] unveiled in Bihar” as reported on 13 November 2013 by the local Bihar Times (Source: screenshot from © Bihar Times, 13 November 2013)

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Plates

Plate EpI.6  The “Viraat Ramayan Mandir” project as presented on the homepage of Mahavir Mandir-Patna in 2017 (Source: screenshot from © Mahavir Mandir-Patna homepage in 2017)

Plate EpI.7  News about the Angkor Wat replica in India, as published online on the homepage of The Inde­ pendent, 8 March 2012 (Source: © The Independent online, 8 March 2012)

508

A N G KO R WAT

M I C H A E L FA L S E R

ANGKOR WAT A TR A NSCULTUR A L HIS TORY OF HE RITAGE VOLUME 2: A NGKOR IN C AMBODIA . FROM J U NGLE FIN D TO GLOBA L ICON

DE GRUYTER

This publication was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) within the Cluster of Excellence 270/1 “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University/Germany. This publication was printed with support by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf/Germany.

ISBN 978-3-11-033572-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033584-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941361 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Angkor Wat replica in the 1931 International Exhibition in Paris, detail from postcard (private collection Michael Falser, compare Fig. VII.22c) Typesetting: hawemannundmosch, Berlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betirebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Volume 2: Angkor in Cambodia. From Jungle Find to Global Icon IX. The French-colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor 1 Giving the Archaeological Park of Angkor a critical history 1 1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910) 9 2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks: The spatiotemporal making of Angkor as an archaeological heritage reserve (1900—1930) 19 3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of anastylosis (1930—1973) 48 3.1. The 1920s at Angkor, Henri Marchal and the issue of “conservation” 51 3.2. Knowledge transfer and heritage diplomacy between French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies 60 3.3. Nicolas Balanos, the Acropolis, anastylosis, and the Athens Conference of 1931 84 3.4. Late colonial and early postcolonial archaeology in Angkor: Maurice Glaize and again Henri Marchal (the 1940s and 1950s) 98 3.5. An unfinished ’enacted utopia of cultural heritage’: Bernard Philippe Groslier and his reprise totale of Angkor Wat (1960—1973) 123 X. Performing Grandeur — Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970 under Norodom Sihanouk 153 Three comments, working questions, and definitions 153 1. A short introduction: Samdech Upayuvareach or Sihanouk, ‘the prince who left the throne’ to become a state leader. Political benchmarks between 1941 and 1970 157 2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Buddhist socialism à la Angkorienne 164 3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire 173 4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor 184 5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor 204

V

Table of Contents

XI. Making Angkor Global (1970—1990): Hot and Cold War Politics, Competing Inheritance Claims and the Invention of Angkor as Heritage of Humanity  235 Regimes changes and inheritance claims: five general observations and findings  235 1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975), or: The invention of Angkor as a heritage icon for ‘all humanity’  237 1.1. The Hague Convention and Cambodia’s republican plans for Angkor  238 1.2. F.U.N.K., G.R.U.N.C. and Sihanouk’s ongoing royalist claim on Angkor  254 2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor  258 2.1. Framing Khmer Rouge ideology with the cultural heritage of Angkor  259 2.2. The hydraulic empire of Angkor as a reference for DK’s hydraulic utopia?  262 2.3. Cultural diplomacy reloaded: Learning from the French and Sihanouk  267 3. People’s Republic of Kampuchea  273 3.1. India recognises the PRK: Cultural ties and the diplomatic gift called Angkor Wat  279 3.2. Asian neighbours — Buddhist traditions? Japan’s interest in Angkor  290 3.3. Too many Friends of Angkor (Wat), or: A Socialist brotherhood with Poland  294 3.4. France: Re-claiming its position between “russification” and internationalisation … 297 3.5. Cambodian refugees: The forgotten voices of the (trans)cultural memory of Angkor  299 4. Claiming heritage without territory: The exiled Khmer Rouge regime and its political strategy for Angkor at UNESCO in Paris during the 1980s  304 4.1. Searching for inner-political consolidation and an international cultural-political strategy (1979—82)  306 4.2. The Coalition Government and its propagandistic mission (1982—85)  313 4.3. The end of the Cold War: Perestroika for the missions for Angkor (1985—1989)  318 VI

Table of Contents

XII. Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993  323 Introduction  323 1. 1987—1988: UNESCO’s campaign strategies, the blocked entry to Angkor and the return of the substitute called “plaster cast”  328 2. 1989: Appeals for Angkor and UNESCO’s first action  331 3. 1990: The international rush to Save Angkor gains momentum  336 4. 1991: Making Angkor global. Vann Molyvann  340 5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’  353 6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised  370 Findings and Conclusions to Volume 2  387 From Jungle Find to Global Icon: Angkor as Archeological Reserve and World Heritage (1860s to 2010s)  387 Epilogue to Volume 2 Angkor post-1992: From World Heritage to World’s (Af-)Fair and Theme Park  405 1. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)Fair institutionalised and ritualised  407 2. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)fair spatialised  416 3. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)fair materialised  421 3.1 EFEO’s Baphuon: A late colonial task completed  422 3.2 ASI’s Ta Prohm: A ‘manufactured jungle’ sanitised  424 3.3 A world’s (af)fair called Angkor Wat: Coping with a late colonial legacy?  425

3.4 APSARA’s Khmer Habitat Interpretation Center  436

4. Greater Angkor Park post-1992: From archaeological reserve to theme park  437 4.1 The Ecovillage of Run Ta-Ek: archaeological ethnography re-enacted?  438 4.2 The Gates-to-Angkor Hotel Zone: An archaeologically themed space being super-commercialised?  444 4.3 The Cambodian Cultural Village: The theme of Angkor as amusement zone?  447

4.4 Angkor Wat and its “Age of Prosperity” revisited — North Korea’s Angkor (Wat) Panorama  448



4.5 From a Thai museum to a tiny backyard of Siem Reap: Angkor Wat’s eternal replication  449

Plates of Volume 2  455 Bibliography  577 Index  Names and Institutions  623  Places  633 VII

IX



The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Giving the Archaeological Park of Angkor a critical history: Introductory thoughts, challenges, conceptual approaches and an operational checklist The Archaeological Park of Angkor is a cultural, social and political product with a complex formation history. Considering the cartographic, archaeological, architectural and conservational processes related to the site, it is astonishing that the Park’s modern history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not been written until today. The formative years of Angkor Park are inscribed into the larger political context of French colonialism in Indochina, which itself spanned from the installation of the Protectorat français du Cambodge (between 1867 and 1949) to Cambodia’s independence in 1953. However, a closer look reveals that French involvement at Angkor extended well beyond this time frame. And we have already seen in chapter I, that explorative endeavours into the region of Ang­ kor took place well before 1867. Additionally, the northwestern provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap (including Angkor) belonged, at that time, to Siam (today Thailand) and were only retroceded back to Cambodia in 1907. That meant that the leading agency to care for the antiquities of Indochina, the École française d’Extrême-Orient (initially founded in 1898 under the name Mission archéologique d’Indo-Chine, in the following EFEO), installed its first conservateur du groupe d’Angkor, the militia man Jean Commaille, only in 1908. This was the moment when ­Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière (originally a military officer and only later an explorer-archaeologist) turned in his proposal of a “domaine archéologique réservé” under the name of “Parc d’Angkor” (Lajonquière 1909, 163–64). In fact, it took another twenty years to officially institutionalise Angkor Park by decree in 1925/30. But there is another unique case to consider at the other end of the time line of this chapter: to the great contrary to the other ex-French territories of today Vietnam and Laos, where the Frenchcolonial project was brutally interrupted in the mid-1950s, the direct French heritage regime over Angkor Park did not at all end with Cambodia’s independence in 1953. It continued and was even expanded during the first decades after World War II. As a result, Angkor Park in the 1960s became the world’s largest and most developed archaeo-

logical reserve, with more than one thousand workers. Bernard Philippe Groslier, the last Conservateur des monuments d’Angkor since 1960 and a boyhood friend of Norodom Sihanouk, the Francophile king and chef d’État of independent Cambodia, was the perfect intermediary or ‘cultural broker’ between political (colonial to postcolonial) thresholds and cultural (French and Cambodian) spheres to prolong the French monopolistic grasp over Angkor. And this French regime even survived the first Republican years until the early 1970s, before it collapsed forever when the Khmer Rouge finally took over the country in 1975. Five challenges As regards the chapter’s aim to engage, for the first time, with a critical enquiry of the precolonial, French-colonial and early postcolonial formation history of Angkor Park between 1860 and 1975, five challenges have to be dealt with when it comes to primary and secondary material: First, the first comprehensive summaries of as much as touristic guidebooks for Angkor Park were, rather logically, all written by the Angkor protagonists of the EFEO themselves (for the guides see Commaille 1912, Marchal 1928­– 64, Glaize 1944–63, Parmentier 1950/60). And like the official guidebooks that continue to predefine the readers’ and incoming tourists’ aesthetic reception and spatiotemporal behaviour within Angkor Park (compare Falser 2013d), the scientific summaries from right before and after the forced departure of the French perpetuate scholarly bias: They all tell a heroic master narrative of a supposedly disinterested mission to salvage the ‘forgotten Angkorian temples in the jungle’ and to restore them back to ancient glory. Important sources in this context are for example the various summaries by Louis Malleret, the EFEO’s director from 1949 until 1956 (above others Malleret 1959, 1969). A milestone of compressed expertise is certainly Le Cambodge: Manuel d’archéologie d’Extrême-Orient, published in 1966 by Jean Boisselier, the scientific director of the Conservation d’Angkor of the mid-1950s (Boisselier 1966). 1 Ten

1  In the 1969 L’archéologie découverte des civilisations disparues (Charles-Picard 1969), translated into the

English 1972/1977 version of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Boisselier did, in his entry on “SouthEast Asia”, however judge “the progress and results of Khmer archaeology spectacular, but still in their infancy” (Boisselier 1977, 399–419, here 410).

1

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

years later, Bernard Philippe Groslier himself summarised popular reference works until today. Nicely illustrated the EFEO’s “archaeological work” in the Far East and par- books like Angkor: Mémoire d’une passion française (Verticularly at Angkor in the commemorative volume Travaux non 2003) speak for the common standard of the unbroken et perspectives de l’EFEO en son 75e anniversaire. It present- Orientalist myth over Angkor Park, whereas the historio­ ed a proud view of the work accomplished but also had a graphies about the other great areas of ex-colonial archaeo­ bitter undertone about the present (he had just been forced logy in Asia have already gone through a scientific review. to abandon his life achievement at Angkor) and predicted For the case of British India (the former colony concurrent an uncertain future for the French (Groslier 1976). One to French Indochina), research into the practices and instiyear before his death in 1986, Groslier’s last entry about tutions (like the Archaeological Survey of India) and sites “L’Asie du Sud-Est” and the “Cité hydraulique angkorienne” and actors of colonial archaeology (like Alexander Cunin Le grand atlas de l’archéologie even closed without any ningham or John Marshall) is plentiful and oscillates beword about the institutional history of the EFEO itself tween comparable continuities to perpetuate institutional (Groslier 1985, 256). founding myths (Sengupta/Gangopaghyay 2009, Sengupta/ The second challenge is that, after being silenced for Lambah 2012) and more critical approaches (just to name twenty years during France’s forced absence from the spot, a few, Chakrabarti 2003, 2012, Cohn 1996, Guha-Thakurta the French master narrative of past successes at Angkor set 2004, Guha 2010). For the Dutch East Indies (back in the instantly back in when Cambodia opened up again after 1930s a tight ‘partner’ for archaeological work at French-co1990. After first historical summaries in Bruno Dagens’ lonial Angkor, see in this chapter), critical enquiries recent­ly 1989 book Angkor: La forêt de pierre and Claude Jacques’ gained momentum (Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2013, 2015a,b, Angkor in 1990 (see below), the EFEO again produced forthcoming), besides other myth-consolidating publicaa series of nostalgic retrospections around its one hun- tions of the postcolonial period (Bernet-Kempers 1954, dredth anniversary in 2000. Titles like Un siècle pour l’Asie: 1958, 1976). For the French-colonial formation history of L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1898–2000 (Clémen- Angkor Park, as this book argues, a critical history still tin-Ojha/Manguin 2001), Chercheurs d’Asie (EFEO 2003) needs to be written. and L’École française d’Extrême-Orient et le Cambodge The fourth challenge is that, as any in-depth research (EFEO/Drège 2003) reconfigured Angkor Park – now a cel- about the concrete archaeological, architectural and conebrated UNESCO World Heritage site after 1992 (see chap- servation impact on Angkor Park is missing, useful inforter XII) – as an originally French-made archaeological re- mation needs to be extracted from ‘between the lines’ of serve. International travelling exhibitions depicted the new publications being produced by neighbouring disciplines. on-site reality of the international preservation efforts for Three precious sources with historical, political and soAngkor Park after 1990. The most important ones were cial-institutional viewpoints are of particular interest here: Angkor et dix siècles d’art khmer in Paris and Washington DC The 1989 Angkor, la forêt de pierres (see Pl. XII.3b) by (Jessup 1997) and Angkor: Göttliches Erbe Kambod­schas in Bruno Dagens, the EFEO-related archaeologist and SanBonn and Zurich (Kunsthalle Bonn 2007). P ­ arisian institu- skritist, counts as the first publication to sum up the ‘scientions in close association with the history of French orien- tific’ story of French-made Angkor Park (Dagens 1989; talist activities at Angkor, like the musée Guimet and the compare Dagens 2002, 2005). With its small-scale format musée Cernuschi, helped to underline the French-colonial of two hundred heavily illustrated pages with inserted text founding myth of Angkor Park with impressive exhibitions: blocs, the booklet was published in the Gallimard “DecouAngkor – Naissance d’un mythe. Louis Delaporte et le Cam- verte” series. Therefore, its story of ‘Angkor-lost-in-thejungle’ is primarily catered to an orientalist taste of the bodge (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, com­pare Pl. III.17, 18a,b), the photographic show Archaeologists in Angkor (EFEO 2010) French grand public. After chapters on the lurid topics of or Angkor. Exploring Cambodia’s sacred city in Singapore “exploration” and “discovery”, the story line switches into 2018 (McCullough 2018). And themed issues on Angkor the post-1907 history of “Angkor dans le royaume” (Dagens like in Le Monde in 2018 stand in this tradition. All those 1989, 83–114), the making of Angkor Park for global toursources must be read against the grain if one wants to avoid ism, and provides a chronological side-by-side montage perpetuating an old French-colonial narrative structure. about individual chief archaeologists such as Henri Marchal. A third challenge lies in the fact that Angkor was closed Formulating a supposedly linear and almost ‘natural’ transto any systematic international research between 1970 and fer process of the French-colonial Angkor narrative into 1990: without a link to connect the concurrent rise of post- the psyche of the postcolonial nation-state of Cambodia, colonial studies with a critical engagement about past co- the chapter “Angkor, la gloire d’un peuple” (Dagens 1989, lonial, present and future practices of archaeology in Ang- 115–28) concludes with fragmentary insights up to Camkor Park, the above-quoted historic sources were hardly bodia’s early 1980s history. The book’s annex provides an important but jumbled collection of document excerpts ‘decolonised’2 nor critically scrutinised in their function as 2  For an interesting exception in form of a short article, see Rageau 1989.

2

Giving the Archaeoloal Park of Angkor a critical history

from picturesque travel descriptions, technical restoration notes, Khmer art entries, and, particularly interesting, a special entry on the technique of ‘anastylosis’ as a supposedly French-colonial achievement for Angkor Park (a narrative which will be refuted in this chapter). As the great conceptual counterpart to the above-quoted publication, Pierre Singaravélou’s 400-page, unillustrated and densely written sociological study L’École française d’Extrême-Orient ou l’institution des marges presented a social history of archaeology (as a colonial science) to “construct the Orient through the Occident” (Singaravélou 1999, 18) and discussed the role of the EFEO as the leading cultural-political institution in this process. Here, the conservation of the historic monuments of Indochina is pictured as part of a larger colonial machinery (compare Cohn 1996), and the 1930s link to colleagues from the Dutch East Indies is brought in as part of a larger network of cross-colonial knowledge production and exchange. The concrete physical making of Angkor Park does not stand in the focus, however “the reign of the École-des-BeauxArts architects” over Angkor is mentioned as an important factor of the Park’s rather architectural and less archaeological formation history (Singaravélou 1999, 115). This is what we discussed under Angkor (Wat)’s “architectural affordance quality” (see introduction to this book). A full historical time line of the EFEO, of all its Angkor architects and directors, and of important decrees are listed in the annex. Additionally, insights are provided into some of the daily archaeological ‘business’ (such as the practice, since the 1930s, of selling original sculptures to international museums), the political-diplomatic manoeuvring of the EFEO in the 1940s to keep Angkor Park as a property, and the transition phase of the 1950s with an emerging critical voice from the Cambodian side.3 The third publication of greater interest is Penny Edwards’ 2007 study Cambodge: The cultivation of a nation, 1860–1945. It is conceived as a history of the French-colonial role within the modern nation-state-building process of Cambodia. The chapter “The temple complex: Angkor and the archaeology of colonial fantasy, 1860–1906” (Edwards 2007 19–39, compare Edwards 2005) covers themes like “Holy patrimony: Museums, expositions, and national heritage in Europe and empire”; “Antiquarianizing Angkor”; and “Excavating Angkor” as elements which gradually helped to transform the site into a cultural heritage formation even before the 1907 retrocession of the territory.

With the French-colonial process of “desacralizing Angkor Wat”, Edwards conceives Angkor Park (after Bennett 1988) as a “colonial exhibitionary complex” (Edwards 2007, 124, 127) and themed landscape for European tourism. Being a historical study, her writing about the first physical interventions since 1908, however, did not use primary archival material of the daily on-site archaeological and architectural practice. Useful for our methodological approach is the chapter on “Copy rites: Angkor and the art of authenticity” (Edwards 2007, 144–65; compare Muan 2001) with short descriptions about the synchronous “Rebuilding Ang­ kor in Siem Reap, Marseille and Paris”, before the conclusion on the “Past colonial” tracks the ambivalent, psychological and physical “Angkor complex” (a term first used, to our knowledge, in Vien 1981, 11) into the nationalist period until the Khmer Rouge. Finally, three edited volumes in French add important individual elements to our topic: Disciplines croisées: Hommage à Bernard Philippe Groslier, with a special section ‘in memoriam’ of the French archaeologist at Angkor (Condo­ minas 1992, 15–62); Angkor: Chronique d’une renaissance (Prodromides 1997), with chapters on individual actors like the various Angkor conservators Commaille, Marchal, Glaize and Groslier; and Angkor VIIIe–XXIe siècle: Mémoire et identité khmères (Tertrais 2008), with contributions about post-Angkorian history, the French discovery of Ang­kor, and new research about the temples and collection history, all the way up to UNESCO-related national heritage politics after 1992. Also in the 1990s, a useful document and plan collection (Pottier 1993), A comprehensive bibliography of the publications about Angkor and the Siem Reap Region (Ragavan 1998) and a Bibliographie du Cambodge ancien (Bruguier/Nady 1998) were published. While not a single coherent study about Angkor Park exists yet from the viewpoint of the applied disciplines of archaeology, architecture and conservation, the final and most important challenge for this study was to tackle the major obstacle: in order to contextualise and historicise the complex configuration of Angkor Park, hundreds of individual documents in French language, as they are today stored in the Paris archive of the EFEO, were studied for this chapter for the first time in a systematic manner.4 Those documents were primarily left by the EFEO directors and, even more important, by the Angkor conservators themselves between 1907 and 1974. Today stored in boxes in the basement of the EFEO in Paris, these docu-

3  In a similar sense, Gwendolyn Wright engages in an article with the French-colonial collection and

museum politics (Wright 1996).

4  I would like to thank the former directors of the EFEO, Jean-Pierre Drège and Franciscus Verellen, Olivier

de Bernon, the former librarian Rachel Guidoni, the conservator of the archive, Cristina Cramerotti, and the chief expert for the photographical database, Isabelle Poujol, for their valuable help. Additional thanks go to Bruno Dagens, Claude Jacques (†), Pascal Royère (†), Pierre-Yves Manguin, Pierre Pichard, Christophe Pottier and Bertrand Porte, as well as to Brigitte Groslier-Lequeux for her permission to study the Fonds Bernard Philippe Groslier.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

ments range from daily, often handwritten accounts of digging and restoration activities (journaux des fouilles, today partly reprinted on microfiches) to monthly and annual reports (Rapports de la Conservation d‘Angkor, in the following RCA, only partly transcribed in an officially circulated “censured version” with missing parts) and commentaries. The immense photographic material about Angkor was recently put online, whereas the various individual Fonds of the main players on the spot are still unexplored. Those Fonds include, above others, unpublished historical treasures such as Henri Marchal’s autobiographical 171page typescript Souvenirs d’un conservateur of 1951, or Bernard Philippe Groslier’s 66-page typescript Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor of 1958. Last but not least, hundreds of project articles and “chroniques” entries were published in the Bulletin of the EFEO, the Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (in the following CRAI) and the Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine (CBAI ). To sum up, scientific research about the French (post) colonial formation of Angkor Park remained fragmentary because a) French documents were so far not accessible or were neglected for a comprehensive study, b) the EFEO itself did not yet engage in decolonising its own institutional history and agency at Angkor, and c) only a combination of a romantic Orientalist image about ‘Angkor in the jungle’ and old-fashioned art and architectural history books about ‘ancient Angkor as it always was’ became big sellers internationally. The ironic flip side of this is no surprise: since its premature 1992 nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List as the world’s largest archaeological reserve (see chapter XII), super-globalised Angkor Park is today included in virtually all cultural heritage readers, with astonishingly similar story lines: these normally start with some stereotyped formulations about the French-colonial project and give no or only little data about the Sihanouk years (see chapter X) or the in-between-decades of the 1970s and 1980s (see chapter XI) before jumping right into the actual Angkor Park as a supposed ‘success story’ of an international salvage campaign (see the discussion of this problem in the chapters XII and epilogue two). Supposed knowledge about Angkor Park is today primarily filtered from virtually hundreds of English work reports from the various international teams at work, and from UNESCO’s censored and rather self-congratulating conference proceedings of the so-called International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the History Site of Angkor (ICC-Angkor), in close association with today’s local-national Angkor Conservation Agency called APSARA. The great majority of all Anglo-Saxon, and surprisingly few French, global readers about cultural heritage, cultural management, cultural tourism, cultural legislation or UNESCO’s regime of universal cultural heritage cover the Archaeological Park of Angkor, with rather repetitive remarks about its French-colonial history. Some of the ambivalent 30-page ‘summaries’ that discuss French4

colonial elements of Angkor Park, often with no references to primary archival sources, are found in: The heritagescape (Di Giovine 2009, 341–66); Heritage tourism in South­ east Asia (Hitchcock/King/Parnwell 2010, 103–129); Winter/Daly’s edited 2012 Routledge handbook of heritage in Asia; William Chapman’s entries “Angkor on the world stage: Conservation in the colonial and postcolonial eras” and “Cambodia: Angkor, the city that is a temple” in Asian heritage management: Contexts, concerns, and prospects (Silva/Chapagain 2013, 215–35) and A heritage of ruins: The ancient sites of Southeast Asia and their conservation (Chapman 2013, 59–97); King’s 2015 edited volume UNESCO in Southeast Asia; the edited volume Architectural conservation in Asia: National experiences and practice (Stubbs/ Thomson 2016, 201–230), and, finally, the entry “Angkor, entre universalité et identité: Un oxymore patrimonial” in La fabrique du patrimoine de l’humanité (Anatole-Gabriel 2016, 275–310). As a result of these stereotyped summaries, which globalise and flatten the narrative, the Archaeological Park of Angkor stands today as another cultural and national heritage icon in the universal family of world’s wonders and as a UNESCO-listed archaeological site – alongside Macchu Picchu in Peru, the Forum Romanum in Rome, Borobudur in Indonesia and Pagan in Myanmar (compare Anderson 1998, 4). But the loss of historical knowledge about its tortured, multi-layered and above all transcultural formation history across various regime changes causes the historiographical status of Angkor Park to be bound up in three dangerous narratives: a) today’s neo-colonial heritage expert cultures in the guise of a globalized heritage-of-humanity discourse; b) new forms of ‘stone-temple nationalism’ (after Charnvit Kasetsiri), especially at play between Cambodia and Thailand (and their UNESCO World Heritage-related prestige politics); and c) recooked essentialist stereotypes of one coherent and glorious Angkorian an­ tiquity, without any frictions and fault lines into the present, but as an overexploited commodity for a highly destructive global heritage tourism to the site. Towards new conceptual approaches Besides the above-formulated desiderata in the context of the French-colonial formation history of Angkor Park, general scholarship to ‘read’ colonial practices of archaeology and conservation as ambivalent forms of cultural heritage production has grown to a vast amount of literature. As a consequence, only a selection of useful references can be quoted here in order to define some new conceptual approaches for the following enquiry. Bruce Trigger’s 1984 article “Alternative archaeologies” counts as one of the earliest statements to contextualise archaeology. He was maybe the first to advocate for situating the individual practices of archaeological research and interpretations in their specific “social milieu” (Trigger 1984, compare Trigger/Glover 1982), – or their “intellectual mi-

Giving the Archaeological Park of Angkor a critical history

lieu” as he called it in his more recent entry on “Historio­ graphy” in Murray’s Encyclopaedia of archaeology (Trigger 2001, 630–39); Trigger’s differentiating this social and intellectual milieu into “colonialist, imperialist/world-oriented and nationalist” nuances is particularly helpful for our topic. The individual French-colonial actors for Angkor Park will be tracked down here for the first time through their daily, monthly or annual, sketched or officially transcribed, internal or published, scientific or propagandistic annotations or work reports, articles or monographs, pamphlets or discourses. The agendas, work ethics and disciplinary paradigms behind their daily actions on the spot will be set in relation to the larger political, cultural and social regime changes: be they ‘colonialist’ in the sense of an aggressive expansionist attitude before Siam’s retrocession of Angkor in 1907; be they ‘imperialist’ from the viewpoint of a subsequent, stabilising agenda of a French-colonial institution called the École française d’Extrême-Orient to survey and safeguard, supervise and control, commodify and exploit (compare Cohn 1996, 6–14)5 the archaeological heritage of Angkor; and be they ‘nationalist’ in the unique case of Cambodia’s independence, during which the essentialist, French-made narrative of a glorious ‘Angkorian antiquity’ and its physical and spatial distillate – Angkor Archaeological Park – were not at all decolonised. To the contrary, it was transcribed – in a mutual win-win situation for both sides – from the ex-colonial regime to the postcolonial nation-state. The narrative and its enacted heritage reserve were further instrumentalised – with the complicit help of French archaeologists like Bernard Philippe Groslier – as ‘symbolic capital’ (after Pierre Bourdieu) for the old French regime as well as for the new Cambodian nation (compare Anderson 1983, 1998; Glover 2006), or more precisely, for King Sihanouk’s monocratic, past-colonial imaginaire of retrieved ancestral grandeur (see chapter X, compare Pl. X.3a,b, 25a–c). As we will see in chapter XII about the post-1990 years of the site, those enquiries into the multiple facets of French-colonial formation and postcolonial appropriation processes of Angkor Park will also help us to better contextualise the “role of archaeology in globalized heritage strategies of neo-colonialist institutions” (Liebmann/Rivzi 2008, 2–19; compare Schmidt/Patterson 1995). In our case, that is UNESCO’s imposed and time-rushed ‘salvage-and-emergency-help’ paradigm (after Clifford 1989) over Angkor Park. The following findings will therefore also contribute to the understanding of the astonish-

ing parallels of how, one more time around and after 1990, a non-Cambodian heritage regime over Angkor went hand in hand with ambivalently complicit national and local agency. In her study A world history of nineteenth-century ­archaeology: Nationalism, colonialism, and the past Marga­ rita Diaz-Andreu investigated the role of archaeology as a social science that configured “monumental antiquities” at the crucial moment when “the very idea of the colony as an entity made inevitable the elaboration of a past[,] a historical narrative for it” (Diaz-Andreu 2007, 11, 240).6 In our case, French archaeological investigations and interpretations precisely helped to “constitute [this] form of narrative” (Kohl/Fawcett 1995, 5), or better “archaeological narrative” (Silverman 1995) for Cambodia’s colonial present. What Johannes Fabian called “the denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983) in the context of (colonial) anthropology can be transcribed into our context of the applied disciplines of archaeology and conservation: The strategy of an “archaeologized heritage” formation of grandiose but dead ruins of the past (Falser/Juneja 2013b) left little interest in the active Buddhist practices at Angkor as a living site in the present. But how were, does the present chapter ask, these French-colonial “politics of archaeology” (Kane 2003) and the archaeological narrative of Angkor gradually respatialized, visually redesigned and structurally rearranged as an ‘exhibitionary complex’ (compare Bennett 1988, Edwards 2007) in the form of a veritable heritage reserve called the ‘Archaeological Park of Angkor’? Which concrete on-site agency was involved in this process? Who were the concrete actors? And how did their daily practice to produce and interpret ‘archaeological records’ and the value statement of ‘ruined and decaying temples’ make them initiate concrete measures of architectural conservation, restoration and reconstruction, which, in the long run, produced Angkor Park? Which techniques did they apply and how were these techniques gradually perfected in relation to changing aesthetic and scientific paradigms within the applied disciplines? As we shall see in this chapter, to create the progressively picture-perfect scenario of Angkor Park, the involved actors would finally define themselves not only as conservators and restorers of existing temples, but – with their primary background formation as Beaux-Art architects – as creators and constructeurs d’Angkor. From our transcul-

5  Bernard Cohn’s seminal 1996 study explained “colonialism” through its packaged “forms of knowledge”:

historiographic, observational, surveying, enumerative and museological “modalities” would always come with those of hidden or explicit surveillance and control. Certainly, the discussion of colonial and Orientalist knowledge configurations has to lead every scholar back to Foucault’s thoughts about knowledge and power (compare Gordon 1980) and Edward Said’s 1978 study on Orientalism – however reconsidered through the lens of today’s global challenges. 6  With the chosen time frame of her study about the nineteenth century, her entire section on “Understanding French Indochina through Khmer and Cham antiquities” did, unfortunately, not cover the creation process of Angkor Park after 1907 (Diaz-Andreu 2007, 230–37).

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

tural perspective, those architect-archaeologists’ practice of reproducing perfect temples for a touristic set of picturesque views along a prescribed parcours through an archae­ ologically themed and landscaped ‘park’ had important forerunners: they were indeed not far removed from – and even inspired by – the ephemeral twin scenarios of replicated temple pavilions à la Angkor Wat in universal and colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Paris (see chapters I to VIII). In the introduction to this book we asked how far an Archaeological Park of Angkor – at the abrupt end of Bernard Philippe Groslier’s reinforced-concrete perfectionism after 1970 to produce overrestored and anti-aging ‘original’ temple structures (compare Figs. IX.44a–g, 46a–d, 67a–d, 72–73, 75–77, 80–82) – is from completely artificial theme parks. Often quoted examples are those of the US-American Disney World, Europa Park in Germany, Lost City in South Africa and other Asian examples from India, China or Japan. Are both heterotopian settings not similar twin versions of those ‘enacted heritage utopias’ whose ‘imagineered’ stage sets were fabricated with comparable “Arcadian tricks” to visualise an archaeological “past as a theme park” (Lowenthal 2002, 11; see the final discussion in epilogue two)? Does the issue of authenticity make the difference? Is the restoration of the ‘original’ always based of the real archaeological records? Yannis Hamilakis reminds us that “the ‘archaeological record’ does not exist as such” and that “archaeology produces the entity which we call archaeological entity out of the material fragments of the past” and that we have to read the discipline of archaeology “as a set of principles, devices, methods, and practices, [which] creates its object of study, out of existing and real, past material traces” (Hamilakis 2007, 14; compare Patrik 1985, Hodder 1999). And nationalism, as he argues in his book The nation and its ruins: Antiquity, archaeology, and the ­national imagination in Greece – much as colonialism, as we argue for our case – produced the entity that gave meaning and purpose to each archaeological entity. With a similar time frame between the nineteenth century, the 1930s/40s and the globalised present, and equally referring to a “materiality of heterotopia” at play through museums, exhibitions and enacted sites, Hamilakis engages with the concrete “structures of the archaeological production” of what he calls a veritably archaeologised “nation of ruins” (Hamilakis 2007, 17, 25, 30, 287f; compare Hamilakis/Yalouri 2000). The archaeological and political production of “one singular antiquity” for Greece (Damaskos/Plantzos 2008) seems not far removed from Cambodia’s actual and self-promoted status as the inheriting nation of one fossilised narrative of Angkor. Hamilakis’ further analysis of the concrete agency (such as the State Archaeological Service, the Athens Archaeological Society, foreign archaeological school and missions, museums and past legal frameworks) is similar to our approach to understand colonial-time institutions like the EFEO or Angkor Archaeological Society, with their normative agendas of action and individual ac6

tors. As a matter of fact, Greece will even feature prominently in this chapter (with the Parthenon discussion around Nicolas Balanos in 1930) as a useful connection. This is all the more relevant when we compare the “crypto-­ colonial” nature of Greece (Herzfeld 2002) – as a non-colonialized and marginal nation that is highly dependent on imperialist buffer zones – with Siam/Thailand as the legal ‘owner’ of Angkor until 1907 and its own rising nationalism in relation to cultural heritage, monuments and sites (Peleggi 2017). As already mentioned in the general introduction, this book is based on the initial research project Heritage as a Transcultural Concept, conceived and carried out by myself between 2009 and 2013 at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at Heidelberg University. With the focus on Angkor Wat between 1860 and 2010, the overall aim of this project was to conceptualise the transformation processes of archaeological sites into cultural heritage sites through politics and on-site practices within a globally connected sphere of (post)colonialism between Europe and Asia. With its title Archaeologizing heritage: Transcultural entanglements between local social practices and global virtual realities (Falser/Juneja 2013), a first set of conference proceedings in this larger project compared (and set in direct relation to its other) institutional actions and picturesque strategies for archaeological sites in British India (Sengupta 2013 and Weiler 2013) with French-colonial museum displays in Paris (Baptiste 2013b; compare Falser 2013e) and the “spatiotemporal making of the Archaeological Park of Angkor” (Falser 2013d; compare Falser 2013f). A second edited volume, entitled Cultural heritage as civilizing mission: From decay to recovery, situated the French-colonial making and postcolonial appropriation of the Archaeological Park of Angkor (Falser 2015a,b,c; Ross 2015, Locard 2015, Miura 2015) in a global network of cultural heritage politics, ranging from the Habsburg Empire and the German Empire to British India (Menon 2015), the Dutch East Indies (Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2015b), and China. Engaging in these two volumes with keywords such as “multi-sited archaeology [at the age of] global information flows”, Ian Hodder’s 1999 book The archaeological process had rightly called for an agenda of “Mapping global heritage – Mapping global archaeology” (Hodder 1999, 197–207). Here, the rather new field of global history studies additionally helps to overcome the old-fashioned thought pattern of one-directional knowledge flows between metropolitan centres (in Europe) and their colonial peripheries in Africa and Asia (compare Stuchney 2005, Bennett/Hodge 2011, Leonhard/Hirschhausen 2011, Barth/ Cvet­kovski 2015): from this viewpoint, imperial knowledge (in our case in the field of a 1930s archaeological exchange programme between the Dutch-colonial Java and French-colonial Angkor) was rather formed by cross-colonial networks of institutional collaboration, transfer and social exchange which finally bypassed ‘their’ European reference points of Amsterdam and Paris altogether (com-

Giving the Archaeological Park of Angkor a critical history

pare Pey­cam 2011). Including the concept of ‘cultural brokerage’ (between the coloniser and the colonised, West and East, compare Connell Szasz 2001) facilitates to shed new light onto the continuities between the colonial and the post­colonial worlds over Angkor Park in the 1950s and 1960s (this and the next chapter). Finally, adding this colonial-time connectivity of Angkor Park with the archaeological sites of Borobudur and Prambanan on Java (see later in this chapter) to the long list of simultaneous and multi-sited (after Foucault: heterotopian) reference points in French museums and universal/colonial exhibitions (see the chapters in the first volume) turns our central case study, the temple of Angkor Wat, into a truly transcultural icon of cultural heritage. An operational checklist As a structural basis for the following analysis, we chose a chronological approach. While a rather conventional starting point, such an approach has the advantage of helping to divide the French-colonial and early postcolonial formation history of Angkor Park into its major developmental stages between 1860 and 1975. This means that our chronological story line will be thematically structured in three sub-chapters of different length and depth into: 1) Cartographic strategies (1860–1910) that aimed to give the ‘site’ of Angkor a basic, two-dimensional structure on a map: ‘setting the stage’ 2) The spatiotemporal – three-dimensional – making of Angkor as a ‘themed space’ in the form of an archaeological ‘park’ (1900–1930): through a series of governmental decrees of its delimitation and protection, first environmental clearing interventions and external stabilisation measures for selected temples as standing markers ‘on this stage’, and the in-house production of a set of norms in published guidebooks for a touristic behaviour to move through this institutionalised, patrimonial(ised) space 3) The re-making of the temples within Angkor Park (1930–1973): with ever more immersive interventions ‘into’ the built structures of the individual temples (hence a fourth dimension). This meant employing changing aesthetic con­ cepts and technical approaches, ranging from conservation, reconstruction, the technique of anastylosis and finally the complete rebuilding through reinforced concrete infills and artificial stone inlays; and all this action was carried out within a gradually globalised network of archaeological knowledge exchange and circulation and was finally leading towards the collapse of a hubristic set-up of the Conservation d’Angkor in 1973/74, as the world’s largest archaeological site. Contextualising the Archaeological Park of Angkor as a complex cultural product of more than a one-hundredyear formation history between 1860 and 1973 (see the concrete summary of the findings in the Conclusions section at the end of this second volume) will, for the first

time, highlight a full set of interrelated – social (institutional, actor- and network-related), mental (conceptual, intellectual, moral and value-based) and material (physical) – characteristics. By cutting across the above-explained chronological time line of the main analysis, a kind of conceptual checklist will bring up recurring elements throughout all three sub-chapters: The social level This chapter will highlight the relationship between the various archaeological, architectural and conservationist on-site actions at Angkor, the processes of regime change in Cambodia (from a proto-colonial environment to the direct French-colonial impact, the difficult diplomatic moment in World War II history with the Japanese occupation and postcolonial independent Cambodia), and the changing ideological background motivations involved: altogether the focus is on the socio-political milieu in which the actions at Angkor were practiced. It will bring to the forefront the various individual actors in relation to their dynamic cultural-political environments and institutional regime changes (from scientific missions and commissions to established institutions and their legal frameworks). It will contextualise the different disciplinary self-understandings and professional, political and cultural backgrounds of the various actors, ranging from adventurers and amateurs, military men and geographers, engineers to (Beaux-Arts) architects, museum directors, ethnographers and archaeologists, politicians and diplomats, local in­ habitants, monks to French-colonial governor generals to state-leading Cambodian kings and their entourage. It will profile the main involved actors at Angkor (personalities within the EFEO, primarily the general conservators of Angkor Park from Jean Commaille, Henri Marchal to Maurice Glaize to Bernard Philippe Groslier), Dutch colonial archaeologists (like Frederick David Ken Bosch, Nicolaas Johannes Krom and Pieter Vincent van Stein Callenfels) as visitors to the spot, or the Greek engineer-archaeologist Nicolas Balanos as an implicit reference point for the reconstruction debate over Angkor; and their project and research missions, related internal reports, photographic material and circulated publications. It will investigate the multi-sited, -centred and -peripheral, colonial and international processes of the generation, transfer and exchange of archaeological knowledge in theory and practice. It will map global information flows and transnational or cross-colonial institutional networks of archaeological cooperation and heritage diplomacy (with a focus French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies), with archaeological institutions like the École française d’Extrême-Orient or the Netherlands Indies Archaeological Service; the role of the metropolitan and colonial capitals of Paris, London and Amsterdam, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Batavia and New Delhi, other cities of reference like Bang7

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

kok, Athens and Berlin; and the relevant archaeological sites like Angkor, Borobudur, Prambanan, Bodhgaya and the Acropolis. It will discuss the various institutionalised publication series, such as the Bulletin of the EFEO since 1900, ­journals like Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (CRAI) or the Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine (CBAI ), and other scientific or more popular publications about Angkor. It will contextualise the gradual institutionalisation process of Angkor Park as a legal and social reality, with a focus on the discussion of delimitations and protection perimeters, governmental decrees, on the establishment of tourist infrastructure (hotels, personnel, travel facilities) and on guidebooks

The material level

This chapter will provide a concentrated reading of the physical-technical making of Angkor Park, with a view on the concrete actions at the different sites, the workflow logistics, and technical-technological strategies: from the initial stabilisation-conservation-preservation measures to reassembling (anastylosis), progressively ‘sanitised’ reconstruction and new ‘constructions’. It will contextualise the above-quoted ‘great’ concepts and applied salvage paradigms with the de facto, often small-scale, day-to-day technologies and mixed sets of applied strategies: from reinvention of architectural forms, borrowing (translocation of building material), to the extensive use of reinforced concrete, chemical analysis and cleaning, all the way to the (behind the scenes) selling of original sculptures and setting up a whole new site of the The mental level Conservation d’Angkor with laboratories, storage, and exhiThe chapter will try to map and periodise the dynamic set bition spaces. of applied cultural values, aesthetic paradigms, operational It will show the crossed borderlines and failures of terms (e.g., the exotic and the picturesque, the classical those concepts and applications: e.g., the partial collapses and the decadent, the vernacular and the high art, the ar- of the Baphuon (1943) and Angkor Wat temples (1947), the brutal structural interventions at the brick temple of chaeological and the living) that (in)directly informed the daily, monthly, annual and decades-long archaeological, Prasath Kravanh (1961), and the finally abandoned reprise architectural, conservative ‘practice’ inside Angkor Park. totale (after Bernard Philippe Groslier in 1966) of Angkor It will investigate the changing conceptual and theoret- Wat in 1973. ical backgrounds within the supposedly ‘neutral’ technical In a transcultural perspective, both (re)construction standards, technological approaches of, and aesthetical ex- histories of the temples in Angkor Park and of the ephempectations behind those practices: from ‘conservation’ to eral Angkor pavilions in French museums, universal and colonial exhibitions will be paralleled, as two twinned ar‘restoration’, from ‘reconstruction’ to ‘anastylosis’, etc. It will flesh out the imbricated value judgements be- chaeological versions of Angkor (Wat) in the sense of Fouhind those visual and structural strategies and technical/ cault’s ‘enacted utopias’, in our case of cultural heritage. technological choices, ranging from arguments about truth This chapter will, for the first time, present a concenor fake, original or derivate, etc. trated analysis of the collected archaeological-architectural It will confront the challenge posed by the fact that data of the daily, monthly, annual and decades-long arFrench-colonial cultural heritage policies and applied chaeological, architectural, conservative practice within strategies for Angkor Park were – until today! – never fully Angkor Park: This data was documented (written, sketched, ‘decolonised’, never filtered through the emerging postcolo- mapped and photographed) on thousands of pages inside nial and recent global studies: Writing a transcultural his- the daily Journaux des fouilles of the individual actors on tory of heritage as a critical enquiry into the intellectual the spot, in progressively condensed monthly and annual history and knowledge figuration called Archaeological reports (rapports mensuels/annuels), and sometimes pubPark of Angkor means going beyond a mere postcolonial lished as short work reports and research papers within a critique with its often homogenising either-or tendency to long-term aesthetic and physical transformation process of talk about ‘one’ static mind-set of the ‘coloniser’ and the the individual temple into one ‘archaeological park’. ‘colonised’ in the case of Angkor Park, but instead to develTo conclude, this chapter serves to connect the results op a pluralised and processual approach towards multi-­ with the following chapters in volume two: the Sihanouk era of the 1960s in chapter X, the troubled years of the centred resp. multi-layered histories of Angkor Park. It will set in relation the various discourses and strate- 1970s and 1980s in chapter XI, the UNESCO politics over gies of declared civilising missions in the medium of the Angkor around 1990 in chapter XII, and the rather pessicultural heritage of Angkor (compare Falser 2015) with the mistic perspective of the current situation around and after hubris of scientific illimitability and limitless feasibility to 2000 in the epilogue II. As a result, the various visual, ‘archaeologise’ Angkor (compare Falser/Juneja 2013b) into ­spatial, physical and cultural-political strategies for the Ara picture-perfect ‘park’ of colonial Orientalism and past-­ chaeological Park of Angkor will be, for the first time, laid out as a 150-year-long trajectory between 1860 and 2010. colonial auto-Orientalism.

8

1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910) As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism. Insofar as maps were used in colonial promotion, and lands claimed on paper before they were effectively ­occupied, maps anticipated empire. Surveyors marched alongside soldiers, initially mapping for reconnaissance, then for general information, and eventually as a tool of pacification, civilisation, and exploration in the defined colonies. [italics MF] (Harley 1988, 282) —Brian J. Harley (1988) Maps, knowledge and power

In Harvey’s 1994 book History of cartography, Joseph E. d’Amitié et du Commerce] was signed on 11 August 1863 at Schwartzberg’s Introduction to Southeast Asian cartography the actual Cambodian capital of “Odúng” (as Mouhot stated that “no surviving maps (two cosmographies ex- termed it), it would not be ratified until 1864. As a consequence, Mouhot’s indication for “Ongcor la Grande” was cepted)” of Angkor made by the indigenous communities were known. He explained this absence as the result of situated in an undefined space between the Great Lake “Cambodia’s state of marked decline during the seventeenth [Tonlé Sap] and the mountain range to the north of it. This and nineteenth century” (Schwartzberg 1994, 699) and its cartographic information was augmented with more dependence on Siam. 7 Historiography suggests that al- names on Mouhot’s 1868 map, which had been, as indicatthough inscriptions and texts about Angkor existed in ed in the legend, “rectified by the French expedition of Cambodia’s royal chronicles (Vickery 1977), visualised car- 1866–67” (Mouhot 1868, 332). Interestingly, the English tography as such only came to Southeast Asia through 1864 version of Mouhot’s Travels in the central parts of Western science; the earliest maps of “Canboja” were ­Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos during the years traced back to the Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth 1858, 1859, and 1860 did not offer any maps depicting and early seventeenth century (Groslier 1958a). The first French colonial ambitions. Therefore it did not contribute map-related depiction of Angkor Wat (probably executed to any “cartographic discourse” (Harley 1988, 279), which on the basis of earlier descriptions and on-site notes) was in this case might have commented upon the French-colonot a European product but a Japanese one from the early nial longing for the territory on Siamese grounds. There seventeenth century (Peri 1923, 119–26, pl. V; compare were good reasons for this: At the time, Mouhot was travMus 1962, Dagens 1989, 28–29, 191) (Pl. IX.1).8 elling as a naturalist at his own expense and in the name of Chapter I of this book was introduced by evoking Henri the British, not as an official cartographer commissioned Mouhot’s vision from Angkor Wat’s central passageway in by the French to map, name, and therefore also anticipate January 1860 along with his published floor plan of the site, a territorial expansion along a colonial frontier (compare elevations of the standing structure and an explanatory text Harley’s quote cited above). Nor did he provide anything praising the ancient temple complex as an artwork made useful towards the “construction of the discursive triangle by a “Michel-Ange de l’Orient” (Mouhot 1868, 194–95). between power, knowledge and spatiality” (Gregory 1994, Contrary to his statements on Angkor Wat’s architecture, 63), which would become so central to the later French imhowever, the larger area of Angkor itself was only vaguely perialist appetite for Angkor. In Christopher Pym’s 1966 described, since the Cambodian provinces of Battambang abridged and edited version of Mouhot’s diary of 1860/61, and Siem Reap (with Angkor) were until 1907 on Siamese Mouhot simply informed the reader about his travels (Pym territory (Pl. IX.2). An unpublished map by Henri Mouhot, 1966, xi–xxii): He approached Angkor from Bangkok and preserved to this day in the archive of the Royal Geograph- Battambang over the Great Lake, used a high dam from the ic Society in London, indicates how blank this spot was lake to reach “an insignificant little town, the capital of the from Mouhot’s point of view in 1860 (Pl. IX.3). When his province [Siem Reap], fifteen miles to the N.N.W of the travel account was first published in Le Tour du Monde in shores of the lake”, continued “a couple of hours [along] a 1863, a map of the region between Bangkok and Saigon was dusty sandy path through a dense forest and stunted trees”, before finally reaching the esplanade of Angkor Wat (comadded (Mouhot 1863, 220). The French-colonial influence in the lower right side was indicated as “Cochinchine pare Mouhot 1863, 298, with Mouhot 1864, 285); after Française”, but the borderlines between “Cambodge” and climbing the Phnom Bakheng temple a few hundred me“Siam” were not specified. The reason for this was that al- tres to the north, he looked over a region which he called though a Franco-Cambodian Protectoral Treaty [Traité “lonely and deserted as formerly it must have been full of

7  The nineteenth-century Siam-Angkor connection is discussed in epilogue I in the first volume of this book. 8  However, since this plan was only discovered rather late in 1911, it is not a source for the following inquiry

into how Angkor was put on the map and subsequently appropriated as an archaeological site for nineteenthto twenty-first century heritage making.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

life and cheerfulness”. And he lamented, in words echoed by future French geographers and archaeologists alike, the loss of an imaginary world: Sad fragility of human things! How many centuries and thousands of generations have passed away, of which history, probably, will never tell us anything: what riches and treasures of art will remain forever buried beneath these ruins; how many distinguished men-artists, sovereigns, and warriors whose names were worthy of im­ mortality are now forgotten, laid to rest under the thick dust which covers these tombs! (Mouhot, quoted in Pym 1966, 84)

Passing the southern entry gate to “Ongcor Thom”, he approached “the Pagoda where they hide and seek” (the Bayon). He later entered the central square with its surrounding buildings (the Royal Palace), moved east to an ancient bridge (Spean Thma), and finally headed to the Ta Keo, Ta Prom and “Ponteay Kedey” temples. After “three weeks within the walls of Angkor”, he returned to Battambang and Bangkok, finally reaching Luang Prabang in Laos in May 1861; there he contracted malarial fever and died in November of the same year. It is important to mention that Mouhot’s trip to Angkor was a mere detour in his travels through Siam and Laos and was only later appropriated by French historiography in order to make a compatriot the first official discoverer of Angkor, despite the fact that even Mouhot had mentioned the earlier visit to Angkor by Father Charles-Émile Bouillevaux in 1850 (Bouillevaux 1858, 1874, 1879). Mouhot’s self-identification as a naturalist whose job was to collect, catalogue, and draw non-historical nature in a supposedly disinterested fashion may have been the reason why his rather sketchy map of the Angkor region, dated 25 February 1860, never became part of his official publications (Fig. IX.1). Comparable to the blank spots in the larger map of the frontier zone between French Cambodge and Siam, the temple sites given on this site map were lined up along Mouhot’s itinerary through dense “forests”, which he indicated all over the plan. Conceptualising the concrete site depictions of Angkor proper and the parallel representations of Angkor in universal exhibitions in France as elements of the twin versions of Foucauldian heterotopias of heritage production (compare the discussion of this term in the introduction to this publication), the blank spots in Mouhot’s 1860 maps correspond neatly with the still undefined art historical and aesthetic values that were attributed to the first casts from Angkor during the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris (see chapter I). Hastily executed in “sulphur” and concrete by de Lagrée in March 1866 after the French had lost the race against the British to produce the first photograph of Angkor Wat, they were not, as one might have expected, staged as physical proofs of a glorious but forgotten Khmer Empire. Also, detailed information by de Lagrée was ­missing here; the casts were incorporated into the section 10

dedicated to mechanical reproduction techniques and passed – hence the subtitle of chapter I as “lost in translation” – unnoticed by the grand public. This undefined cartographic discourse became more pronounced when France’s psyche was – after the loss of European territories in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 – in strong need of stabilisation through expansionist expressions, at least in overseas colonies. The Voyage d’éxploration en Indo-Chine under Doudart de Lagrée between 1866 and 1868 was finally published by Francis Garnier in 1873: On plate II within the publication’s first volume (first part) the course of the exploratory mission from Phnom Penh deep into China was indicated with a thin red line. Additionally, the “Limites du Cambodge et de Siam” were mapped out. In terms of tracking down the processes of how the greater Angkor region slowly became a mapped reality, plate VI is of particular interest (compare with chapter I, Pl. I.2). Here, the “Limits of the Siamese and Cambodian possessions” were more precisely depicted and the Angkorian temple site is clearly recognisable as located just a few kilometres west, outside of France’s direct influence. Although Garnier briefly mentioned that the “Siamese government had made some effort to restore this temple [of Angkor Wat] since the province of Angkor had fallen into its power” (Garnier 1873, vol. 1, 57), his summary “French politics in Indochina and China” called for a revision of the “exasperating treaty” of 1867 with its humiliating line of demarcation (Garnier 1873, vol. 1, 548; see chapter I). Plate I in the “Descriptive section” of Garnier’s 1873 publication provided the reader with a “Carte des environs d’Angcor” (Fig. IX.2). Quite comparable with Mouhot’s depiction of 1860, the various temple sites still floated loosely on the map’s mostly white background to indicate unexplored territory. However, a few urban elements of ancient Angkor, such as avenues and water tanks, as well as more temple sites, were now placed in a more precise spatial and topographical relation to one another. At this point the former naval captain Louis Delaporte, already participant of the Mekong mission, entered the scene (see chapter II). His own 1873 mission was officially financed by the state to collect further archaeological data, transport selected original sculptures back to France, and to execute plaster casts for a future musée Indo-chinois. As his reports Le Cambodge et les régions inexplorées de l’Indo-Chine centrale and Mission archéologique aux ruines khmères (Delaporte 1875, 1877) did not provide more information on the site itself, it is no wonder that the 1878 Universal Exhibition back in Paris focused on an original fragment (see Fig. II.21) and on a 1:10-scale model (see Fig. II.12). When Delaporte published his book Voyage au Cambodge: L’architecture khmer in 1880 he introduced a new pragmatic undertone to bringing Angkor into a Western system of exact data collection, patronising law and visual order, and claimed for the French the role of “masters of […] Indochina with its magnificent souvenirs [of Angkor, MF]. This was the same scientific role that the

1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910)

Figure IX.1  Mouhot’s unpublished map of the Angkor region, dated 25 February 1860 (Source: © Royal Geographic Society, London)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.2  Map of Angkor as published in Garnier’s 1873 publication Voyage d’éxploration en Indo-Chine (Source: Garnier 1873, vol. 1, plate 1, between pages 24 and 25)

Dutch had in Java and the British in India” (Delaporte 1880, 251). Offering the reader his own scientific visions of Angkor’s great past, Delaporte published the first (completely invented) aerial view over (Fig. IX.3) and “vue restituée” towards Angkor Wat (compare Fig. VI.6). These “restitutions […] as an expression of genuine truth [expression de la vérité]” (Delaporte 1880, 199) stood in clear contrast to the Buddhist monks who – supposedly without any real impetus to salvage their own site from progressing decay – populated the inner temple for their “pious activities” and built up the sanctuary itself with a whole “village and several monasteries” (Delaporte 1880, 230). As we shall see later in this chapter, these habitations were removed (or better, relocated) by the French both from the maps and, from 1907 onwards, from the real site in order to turn the living environment (the term ‘living heritage’ was introduced at Angkor only after 1992) into a dead, archaeological ruin9 – or as Delaporte summarised it at the end of his book: “Is it not up to us to bring about the revival of the

marvellous past of this people, to reconstitute these admirable œuvres which had been created by its genius; in a word, to open a new page of art history, to enrich the annales de l’humanité ?” (Delaporte 1880, 378). More than one hundred years later the same connection between Ang­ kor as an archaeological heritage site and the universalist concept of ‘humanity’ was evoked when it was made an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 (see chapter XII). A few years after Jean Moura’s two-volume publication Le Cambodge in 1883, containing more than two hundred pages on Angkor’s temple architecture (Moura 1883, II, 187–400), the transcultural entanglement between ‘Angkor in Cambodia’ and ‘Angkor in Paris’ became more evident when the École-des-Beaux-Arts-trained architect Lucien Fournereau presented the results of his 1887/88 missions to the site. On the one hand, his fantastic but also pain­ stakingly measured elevations and details (compare Pl. III.9–13), plaster casts (compare Figs. III.35a,b), and blackand-white-photographs of Angkor Wat (compare Figs.

9  We have termed this colonial strategy as an “archaeologising” of built heritage (Falser/Juneja 2013b).

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1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910)

III.31a,b) – later catalogued in his 1890 publications Les ruines khmères and Les ruines d’Angkor – helped to “reconstitute” the temple into a style- and scale-compressed version for the pagode d’Angkor in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (compare Fig. IV.9). On the other hand, Fournereau’s more detailed map of “Les ruines d’Angkor, Siem-réap, Cambodge Siamois” (Pl. IX.4) helped to improve on-site archaeological knowledge about the temples’ concrete positioning. Exhibited during the 1889 Universal Exhibition, a giant watercolour painting by Fournereau (Pl. IX.5) visualised what he described within his 1890 publication as rather helpless local inhabitants inside a “park”-like setting: Monks stay on-site and live in a corner of the park [parc]. They watch over the temple and the idols, and take care of the ruins [entretien des ruines]. But the actual state of the monument shows that they have not taken care for quite a while. They have only made some attempts at restoration [restauration] in the galleries of the central tower: without any taste. […] They have let the facades and porticos fall down […] The ancient Brahmanic sanctuary is now a hopeless case [irrémédiablement condamné]. The centuries slowly accomplish their work of destruction, and the apathy of the indigenous people will soon allow the last vestiges of these masterpieces [chefs-d’œuvre] built by their glorious ancestors to disappear. (Fournereau/Pocher 1890, 108—109)

Called “Ruines khmères du Cambodge” and stored to this day in the archive of the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this painting of Angkor merged archaeological fragments and architectural motifs from various sites. Picturesque elements and Buddhist monks as miniaturised and static staffage figures were brought together to create a hybrid Piranesi-esque collage of an eternal, ruined landscape. In its underlying message of support for a French civilising mission through colonial archaeology, Fournereau’s painting of 1889 was somewhat similar to the commemoration of Napoleon’s crusade to the Nile one hundred years earlier in the famous Description de l’Egypte of 1809 (Fig. IX.4). However, it was much more than an archaeological collage staging Europe’s supposedly superior view towards an ancient and rediscovered monumental past. In prescient anticipation of the archaeological Parc d’Angkor created after 1907, Fournereau’s painting was not far removed in its aesthetic, albeit in the form of an Oriental forum romanum or jardin Elysée, from Alexandre Lenoir’s post-French Revolution vision of salvaging France’s own glorious artworks from iconoclasm and neglect. In 1806, the latter described his museum garden at the musée des Monuments français in Paris (compare Fig. III.6) as an – keeping in mind Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia as a site of limited and controlled access, illusion, deviation and compensation – “august enclosure, and enclosed landscape [auguste enceinte, auguste paysage]” and a “venerable site” [lieu vénérable]

Figure IX.3  The ‘aerial’ view over Angkor Wat in Dela­porte’s 1880 publication Voyage au ­Cambodge (Delaporte 1880, 206)

where visitors should develop a “holy respect” towards “virtuous men” and their “monuments” in a peaceful atmosphere (Lenoir 1806, here 195 and 204). In Fournereau’s case, the supposedly ignorant and phlegmatic local stakeholders of Angkor had yet to be instructed about their own magnificent past, and the park-like setting was yet to be confined and designed as an august cultural and state-protected landscape. The last publication in a long series of manuscripts ­written until around 1900 on Cambodia’s history and built heritage was Le Cambodge. It was released in three volumes between 1900 and 1904. It was authored by Étienne Aymonier, another “orientaliste amateur” from the Collège des administrateurs stagiaires, like de Lagrée and Garnier before him (Singaravélou 1999, 54). He was also the creator of the first Khmer-French dictionary and acted as the director of the Parisian École coloniale, being founded in 1889 (compare Coedès 1929). The declared focus of what Aymonier called his “mission épigraphiste” (Aymonier 1900b, xix; compare Aymonier 1892, 1893, 1897, 1900a), to translate all kinds of old and modern temple inscriptions, was ancient Cambodia. However, his map of the region of Angkor was a silent acknowledgement of Siam’s continuing and valid ownership of Angkor (Pl. IX.6), be13

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.4  Engraving of the interior of the Egyptian temple of “Edfou”, as published on Jomard’s ­Description de l’Égypte of 1809 (Source: Jomard 1809, Planches/Antiquités vol.I, plate 55)

fore his 1904 volume Le groupe d’Angkor et l’histoire celebrated Angkor Wat.10 The efforts of Delaporte, Fournereau, and Aymonier at Angkor were still rather idealistic, illusionary, and – practically speaking – restricted on-site by virtue of Siam’s ownership of the region. However, the years around 1900 saw not only increasing numbers of French researchers on the spot but also a gradual institutionalisation of archaeological research in Indochina. The first step in this direction was the foundation of the Mission archéologique d’Indo-­ Chine. With a governmental order [arrêté] issued on 5 December 1898 in Hanoi by the Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine (GGI), Paul Doumer (in office from 1897 until 1902), the mission was placed under his patronage and under the scientific control of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of the Parisian Institut de France (§1).

It was charged to “work for the archaeological and philological exploration of the Indochinese Peninsula to foster the connaissance of its history, monuments and idioms” (§2a) and to incorporate the “neighbouring regions and civilisations (India, China, Malaysia, etc.)” into their studies (§2b) (BEFEO 1901, 67–68; compare Finot 1933, in general Lorin 2004/2008).11 Generally, this founding act can be understood as an early expression of the gradual institutionalisation of colonial France, which was also occurring back home in the motherland. This included the foundation of the École coloniale in 1889 and the first explicit colonial section at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in the same year (see chapter IV). There, the pagode d’Angkor ­materialised symbolically, in the direct vicinity of the War Ministry and the pavilions of colonial hygiene and public assistance; France’s other colonies and protectorates were

10  Within the text, one hundred pages alone were attributed to King Suryavarman’s twelfth-century Angkor

Wat, “Nokor Vat” or “Nagaravata”, as he called the temple in the local or old Sanskrit idiom (Aymonier 1904, 182–281, here 183). 11  After a similar project in 1886 by the former GGI Paul Bert to form a Comité d’études archéologiques had been abandoned, Charles Lemire (an old fonctionnaire des télégraphes) and Pierre Lefèvre-Pontalis (a military doctor and old member of the survey mission of Auguste Pavie in Laos) had again proposed, during the

14

1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910)

likewise grouped accordingly (compare Pl. IV.6). A few years later, back in Indochina, other scientific establishments were created for geology and geography (1898), meteorology (1899), bacteriology and medicine (1902), and a Mission permanente d’exploration scientifique en Indo-Chine was also founded. France’s mission civilisatrice had now found the central institution with which to identify and manage Indochina’s cultural heritage (Falser 2015c). The journal Le Temps, in its issue of 28 December 1898, celebrated the mission’s aim to “build up the human spirit [esprit humain] through science”, by considering “the three great foyers of civilisation – our Occident, India, and China” (Le Temps 1898). Only after Doumer’s order on 20 January 1900, and two further decrees [décret] dated to 20 December 1900 and 26 February 1901 by the French president, Émile Loubet, was the Mission definitely named the École française d’Extrême-Orient (hereafter EFEO) and its permanent status as a scientific institution established (EFEO 1909).12 Louis Finot, directeur d’études adjoint at the Parisian École pratique des Hautes-Études and the EFEO’s first director (Goloubew 1935a; Dussaud 1938; EFEO 2002, 105–107), published his ten-page Note sur l’École française d’Extrême-Orient as an appendix to Doumer’s 1902 report Situation de l’Indo-Chine (1897–1901). In it, he self-confidently situated the role of the EFEO as lying somewhere between the existing Orientalist schools in Germany and England (Finot 1902).13 By 9 March 1900 in Hanoi, Doumer signed his Order concerning the conservation of monuments and objects of historic or artistic interest in Indochina in four titles [titres] and twenty-three paragraphs. It gave the ruling French re-

gime, under the GGI and the directorate of the EFEO, exclusive authority to list (and also ‘de-list’) single temples and whole archaeological areas [immeubles], or movable objects [objets mobiliers] all over Indochina as protected objects, historic monuments, and sites of a public domain; to restrict their alteration; and to control their archaeological excavation, conservation, architectural restoration, and commodification (e.g., through the selling of objects).14 Doumer’s 6 February 1901 Order for the listing and conservation of historic monuments of Indochina already tabled some 240 entries, with about 180 alone in Cambodge (like Beng Malea, Phnom Kulen and Koh Ker), some fifty in Annam (like the brick temple site of Po-Nagar), and the rest in Cochinchine and Laos (like the Vat Sisakhet in Vientiane).15 In orders dated to September 1901, April 1905, and November 1906, more sites were added for Tonkin, Annam, Cambodia, and in particular for Hanoi. Of course, the Angkor region located on the Siamese side was not yet listed. Nevertheless, the institutionalising of Indochina’s cultural heritage continued. An order from 17 August 1905 created an archaeological “section of Khmer antiquities in the Indochinese Museum at Phnom Penh”, under the authority of the Résident supérieur and the scientific control of the EFEO with the aim of “centralis[ing] detached sculptures or old objects found in archaeological diggings” for their conservation, restoration, and display.16 And an order from 3 October 1905 finally created the Commission of the Antiquities of Cambodia [Commission des antiquités du Cambodge] in Phnom Penh (under the honorary presidency of the director of the EFEO) whose aim was “to inventory monuments and objects of historical or artistic interest,

Congress of Orientalists in Paris of 1897, an institution for the “preservation, conservation and protection of the monuments and ruins [of Indochina]” (§3, Lefèvre-Pontalis 1897; compare Lemire 1909). Unanimously adopted, their proposal was transferred by the Ministry of Public Instruction to the GGI (Singaravélou 1999, 62–63). 12  The historiography about the EFEO is vast, some of the more important publications include Finot 1921/1925; Hommage 1951; Malleret 1951a,b, 1956, 1969; compare Tan 1963; EFEO 1976; Solange 1985; Dagens 1989, 2005, 2008; Prodromidès 1997; Bruguier/Phann 1998; Ragavan 1998; Singaravélou 1999; Clémentin-Ojha/Manguin 2001; EFEO 2002; Pasquetti 2001; Drège 2003; Vernon 2003; Foley 2006; Laurin 2008; Tertrais 2008; EFEO 2010. The latest contribution was published in the 2018 themed volume on “Angkor” in Le Monde. 13  In his 1902 comment, Foucher mentioned James Darmesteter’s 1895 article Politique et colonisation (Darmesteter 1895) where the latter commented that the British and Germans were – contrary to the EFEO’s focus on the whole Far East – either too empirical or too theoretical and abstract (Finot 1902, 467). Doumer’s own summaries on Indochina, see Doumer 1902 and 1905. 14  Arrêté du 9 Mars 1900 relatif à la conservation en Indochine des monuments et objets ayant un intérêt historique ou artistique as published in the Journal officiel de l’Indochine, 1900, 502; reprinted in BCAI 1909, 102–107. In 1900, Finot also helped in the homogenising of future research when he published his short Instruction pour les collaborateurs de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient. It was a “short memento, some practical rules and simple methods” for the School’s main fields of research, namely “archaeology, philology and ethnography”. As regards archaeology, he listed his approach of sketching, description and photography (Finot 1900, n.p.). 15  Arrêté du 6 Février 1901 relatif au classement et à la conservation des monuments historiques de l’Indochine as republished in BCAI 1909, 108–119. 16  Arrêté du 17 Août 1905 créant à Phnom-Penh la section des antiquités khmères du Musée de l’Indochine as published in the Journal officiel de l’Indochine in 31 August 1905, 1165, and reprinted in BCAI 1909, 122–25.

15

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

to propose conservation measures, supervise their unearthing, to report discoveries, and to contribute to mak[ing] the history, archaeology, and ethnography of Cambodia better known”.17 A next step followed in the 1920s when the French law of monument protection was transplanted into Indochina (see below). It is an often-repeated myth that the EFEO was founded on a purely academic basis by university-based armchair scholars and that its institutional source of inspiration was the Société de Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, the École française d’Athènes (founded in 1846) and the École française de Rome (founded in 1875). However, Orientalist ama­teurism in the colonial sciences (Singaravélou 1999, 15) and disciplinary “collaboration from outside” (as the Sanskritist Auguste Barth mentioned in 1900,18 see below) formed the constituting features of the early years of the EFEO. From this point of view and in the specific context of Angkor, it seems rather consistent – in line with Brian Harley’s general indication of a strong connection between imperialism, military conquest, and cartography (see quote above) – that it was a member of the Third Regiment of the Tonkin Infantry, Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière (Parmentier 1933a), who was charged on 31 March 1899 with establishing a series of precise maps to localise – now applying uniform and homogenised standards – Indochina’s temples and to devise written inventories with corresponding numbers, names, and short descriptions for each site. In fact, Lajonquière argued along these lines in the preface and in the additional note to his 1901 Atlas archéologique de l’Indochine: Monuments du Champa et du Cambodge: For obvious reasons, archaeology could not follow the pace of epigraphy. The EFEO focused on the history of Indochina and Indian civilisation. But to continue in a fruitful way, the research on the details has to be grounded on an overall view [une vue nette de l’ensemble]: to analyse and compare certain monuments, one has to know at least the appearance and the situation of them all, and this means to have an inventory and a map [of the whole ensemble] in hand. […] The limits of this work are the actual Indo-Chine française. But I am more con­

vinced than any other person that the actual frontiers of Cambodia have no historical value and that an archaeological map has to comprise all the ancient provinces of this state which are today incorporated into the Kingdom of Siam. […] This system cannot pretend a perfect scientific exactitude; but it can, with simple and uniform annotations, give an approximate pronunciation of all the names of the sites by eliminating irritating anomalies […] and finally establish order and regularity in Indochinese cartography where individual fantasies risk bringing incoherence and confusion. [italics MF] (Lajonquière 1901, preface, avertissement)

Lajonquière published his Atlas in 1901 with five maps in 1:500,000 scale. Sheet D covered “Cambodge, partie nord” (Pl. IX.7a), where the borderline between the French and the Siamese areas was clearly indicated. Despite the fact that Lajonquière’s detailed mapping only covered the French side, including the temples of the Phnom Kulen range and Beng Malea, his depiction of the ‘other side’ already included red squares indicating the locations of Ang­ kor Thom, Angkor Wat, Bakong, and other temple sites. When his first volume of the Inventaire descriptif des monuments du Cambodge was published one year later in 1902, Lajonquière’s list already contained “290 entries and 111 inscriptions” (Lajonquière 1902, viii). In 1904 and 1905 he continued his travels (extending his inventory to 470) to Laos (with the famous temple of Vat Phu) and to the Siamese territories and the temple of “Prah Vihear” (Lajonquière 1907, 173–98).19 Returning to Foucault’s heterotopias of illusion, deviation and compensation and to our transculturally entangled perspective, the above-mentioned mapping and administrative strategies formed a supposedly ‘peaceful’ aspect of France’s gunboat diplomacy towards Siam after 1900. At this point the integration of the famous temple site of Ang­ kor into French Indochina was more firmly on the agenda and was mirrored ‘back home’ in French universal and colonial exhibitions (see chapter V). Putting on display what France already owned in Cambodia, the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1900 materialised not just Angkor as a pa-

17  The composition of the Commission des antiquités du Cambodge comprised a French administrator as

president, two French notables, the director of the Archaeological Service of the EFEO and conservator of the Musée khmer (Henri Parmentier), an architect or inspector of the public works, the ministre du Palais of the Cambodian king, and, last but not least, the Chef of the Buddhist Mohanikay monastery (published in Journal officiel de l’Indochine in 9 October 1905, 1328, and reprinted in BCAI 1909, 126–27). The first president was Mr. Jeannerat, the “chief administrator of the Kandel province”. See INDO GGI 16916 (Commission des antiquités au Cambodge). 18  Barth called for a “collaboration de dehors” to help amateurs of “officers, functionaries and missionaries” (he called them “auxiliaires” with Lajonquière as one example) as “an important capital […] and the future of the School” (Barth 1901, 3, 4). 19  The latter became a highly contested territory between Siam and Cambodia and remains so to this day due to an imprudently drawn demarcation by the French-Siamese delimitation commission. The commission was already at work when Lajonquière finalised his introduction to this second volume of the Inventaire of 1907, which created a dividing property line that ran straight through the site (compare epilogue I).

16

1. Flattening the ground, mapping Angkor: Cartographic strategies (1860—1910)

vilion, but the entire sacred hill monastery of Wat Phnom in French Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. Along with decorative elements from Angkorian temples, which were used to embellish the exterior and interior of this scenario, the main aim was to visualise – through photo projections and maps – France’s territorial appetite for more. Six years later, the 1906 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille staged a pavillon du Cambodge, and the palais de l’Indo-­ Chine formed to a large extent an homage to EFEO’s ambitions for Angkor (see Fig. V.14c). When the Franco-Siamese Treaty was finally signed on 23 March 1907 (see the details in chapter VI.1), the temples of Angkor were finally incorporated into le Cambodge (Bernard 1933) and thus celebrated as the most precious stone in the French c­ olonial crown and the centrepiece of the civilising mission of the EFEO. This was expressed by two politicians in their articles in the same year of 1907 who combined the terms ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘humanity’ under a typically Western ‘salvage paradigm’ (after Clifford 1989) long before UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention in 1972 and its “heritage-in-­danger” politics to add Angkor Park to its “World Heritage List” in 1992 (see chapter XII). On the one hand, this was Jules Harmand (the participant of Delaporte’s plaster Angkor mission in 1873, see chapter II) in “Le Traité franco-sia­mois et le Cambodge” in Revue des Deux Mondes, and on the other, Joseph Chailley with “La rénovation de l’Asie: Le récent arrangement avec le Siam” in La Quanizaine Coloniale:

of the nicest, if not the nicest monument of Khmer art. They will provide a new victual [nouvel aliment] for our already famous École française d’Extrême-Orient, which will be, for the interested international public, the vigilant and discrete conservator of this jewel. [italics MF] (Chailley 1907, 245)

By 6 November 1907, Lajonquière was already tasked with another “mission archéologique” that would stretch until 15 April 1908 with the following aims: “(1) to finalise the inventory of the Khmer monuments within the recently retroceded provinces; and (2) to study the organisation of a service for the conservation and protection [conservation et entretien] of the Khmer monuments and in particular the Group of Angkor”.20 As Lajonquière explained in his 1910 article “Une nouvelle carte archéologique du Cambodge” (Lajonquière 1910a), for more comprehensive readability of the growing number of site names and the overall topographical features he had to change the scale of the map for his 1908 version from 1:500,000 (used in his Atlas of 1901; see above) to 1:750,000 (Pl. IX.7b). A comparison of these two maps of Angkor clearly indicates how modern cartography “flattens, geometrises and orders the world” – or deliberatley “lies” on its maps (after Monmonier 1991) –, and how archaeological surveying brings the physical vestiges of a long-past empire, by mere “naming”, back onto “the horizon of European intelligibility”. Derek Gregory has termed this general process a “time-space colonisation” […] the most magnificent temple site of ancient Cambo- (Gregory 1994, 54, 171, 401); in other words, what had been an almost blank and empty spot located on the Siadia, Great and Holy Angkor [Angkor la Grande et Angkor la Sainte], came under our effective supervision. Redis- mese side in 1901, now, just a few years later, comprised perhaps the most precisely surveyed, mapped, and decovered, explored, and studied by the French, these scribed site in the whole of French Indochina. By means of temples are now to a certain extent the heritage of our countless red-coloured entries and a red rectangle over the Orientalist research [ils font en quelque sorte partie du area of Angkor, this new map was already anticipating the patrimoine de notre orientalisme] […]. But we owe them next step in France’s colonial culture mission: to institumore than just artistic and scientific attention: we have a tionalise Angkor as an archaeological reserve. duty to conserve them and we have the responsibility to When Lajonquière’s third volume of the Inventaire desdo so for all humanity [nous sommes préposés à leur criptif des monuments du Cambodge was finally published conservation, et nous en devenons responsables devant in 1911, his list of Cambodian temple sites increased to 910 l’humanité intelligent]. And we shall not fail in this task. and incorporated all sites in the newly acquired territory. All our experts, united within the institution called École Its first chapter covered the Siem Reap province [Khet française d’Extrême-Orient, are busy finding the best Siemreap], including Angkor, with 270 entries alone (Lameans for an efficient and permanent examination of this grand archive in stone. It has already been threat- jonquière 1911, 7–358). Between entries 471 and 740, Angkor Wat, the “chef-d’œuvre of Cambodian architecture”, ened by many enemies and has succumbed to a large extent to the attacks of climate and its edacious vegeta- was given the unspectacular entry number of “497” and tion, or later to the carelessness and brutality of men. was rather technically described over twenty-five pages. Basically overnight, after its 1907 retrocession from Siam [italics MF] (Harmand 1907, 102) to French Cambodge, this site of colonial longing seemed to have lost its magic in the applied logic of rational invenFor Cambodia […] the 1907 retrocession of the three tories. Less than half a century after Mouhot’s celebration provinces […] is certainly an immense moral satisfaction. […] And we are not indifferent to now being the proprie- of Angkor Wat as the work of an Oriental Michel-Ange, Lajonquière published his own travels through Southeast tors [propriétaires] of these famous ruins of Angkor, one 20  Journal officiel, 18 November 1907, 1703.

17

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.5  Mission of Lajonquière to map the Plan d’ensemble des Monuments du groupe d’Angkor, as published in the 1908 edition of the Bulletin de la Commission archéologique de l’Indochine (Source: BCAI 1908, 97)

Asia in 1910 in Le Tour du Monde. Reporting on his visit to offers interesting insight into the “visual hierarchy of signs” Angkor in late 1907, he officially claimed the original idea (after Harley 1988). Lajonquière’s 1908 plan d’ensemble des of calling the entire archaeological site a “parc d’Angkor monuments du groupe d’Angkor positioned the following [which would] become one of the most wonderful archae- indications in a black-and-white map against the neutral ological domains on the planet” (Lajonquière 1910b, 397). white background of the journal’s pages: (a) indigenous, Or, as the EFEO’s chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier meandering paths and more ‘official’ straight roads; (b) accalled it in his obituary for Lajonquière, a “purely scientific tual indigenous villages (indicated with small black squares enclave” (Parmentier 1933a, 1149). But how did the new and labelled using non-boldface, lowercased names) and ‘owners’ of Angkor pre-frame what would become in 1925 temple sites (accentuated in capital boldface letters or with by official order an archaeologically “themed space” (after numbers in different font sizes according to their archaeoLucas 2007, see introduction and epilogue II) called Parc logical importance); and (c) topographical/geographical d’Angkor? features such as rivers, dams and water tanks. This resulted Lajonquière’s 1909 Rapport sommaire sur une mission in the fuzzy overall appearance of the map, which at least archéologique (Cambodge, Siam, Presqu’île malaise, Inde, mentioned all surveyed information though prioritising archaeological findings. The 1909 map, published by La1907–1908) (Lajonquière 1909) constitutes an early step in this direction. The EFEO’s directeur par interim Claude-­ jonquière in 1911 and drawn by the lieutenant and geodeEugène Maitre (who replaced Alfred Foucher after 1907) sist Buat of the colonial artillery, and the lieutenant and had in fact pushed Lajonquière to draft the first plan, topographer Ducret of the colonial infantry, continued this which had already circulated as an attachment in the Bulle- ‘archaeologising’ trend: in the surveyed area labelled Carte tin de la Commission archéologique de l’Indochine of 1908 du groupe d’Angkor, archaeological elements were high(Fig. IX.5). This plan was based on an unofficial draft of lighted in red; existing historic water canals, dykes, and the forthcoming official map (dated June 1909) (Pl. IX.8a), tanks were in blue; and the whole historic network of sites which also served as the basis of Lajonquière’s republished and connecting paths were situated in a neutralising pattranscription in 1910 (Pl. IX.8b). Comparing the three tern of green dots, indicating impenetrable forest that furmaps with their slightly different cartographic languages ther isolated and obscured existing villages. When Lajon18

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

quière reused this 1909 map in 1:50,000 scale a second time in 1910 (“d’après les travaux des Lieutenants Buat et Ducret” in 1:80,000 scale) to comment on his archaeological topographies for the old Khmer Empire, the cartographic strategy of “dispossession through naming” was taken one step further: now, almost all “aboriginal spatiality was effaced” (Gregory 1994, 171, 173) and a new colonial spatiality was imposed. All earlier-mentioned pathways as well as

many village names were now simply left out (the remaining few seemed to float in an abstract, disconnected space, and its inhabitants were therefore further marginalised). Additionally, a new and straight street was shown connecting Siem Reap, via the “nouveau bungalow” in front of Angkor Wat, with Angkor Thom. The French-colonial map had finally turned Angkor into an archaeological (and arguably dead) heritage reserve.

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks: The spatiotemporal making of Angkor as an archaeological heritage reserve (1900—1930)21 [Now we have to follow] the goal of making the ancient temples of Cambodia known to our readers who have not yet seen them, and to increase their desire to visit them. On site, the ­access and conditions of a stay at the ruins is improving very quickly […] Now we hope that the numbers of visitors will increase in proportion to the sacrifices made by the administration to make an excursion interesting. What we need now is that everyone who takes his journey to Angkor has a certain notion what he is supposed to see and that he is not abandoned in an unknown world… [The visitor has to have] a general impression about the ruins of Cambodia […] we need to publish popular notes on Angkor. [… we have to develop] a method to gradually constitute a homogeneous ensemble and to adopt a rational programme […] a chronological order. [italics MF] (Commaille 1910a, 1—2) —Jean Commaille, the first Conservateur d’Angkor, in 1910

The German art theorist Hartmut Böhme defined topographies (topos = location; graphein = inscribe/describe) as power- and control-related operations through which spaces are marked, prefigured, or prescribed as places where time-dependent action, movement, performance, and routine occur. According to Böhme, as a result of cultural learning processes cultural topographies – focusing on literary works with spatial descriptions (and this is how we will in the following conceptualise governmental decrees and tourist guides for the Archaeological Park of Angkor) – generate mental orders, cognitive maps, and spatiotemporal patterns of perception (Böhme 2005, xi–xxii). Following on the heels of what is being called a “spatial turn” in cultural studies (in general, see Bachmann-Medick 2009, 284–328), space is not only a physical-territorial construct itself, but it can also be seen in relation to (in this case French-colonial) politics and territorial power. As we have discussed above, two-dimensional cartography and mapping procedures were the first step in the colonisation of Angkor into a Western spatial and visual regime. The second step involved verbal commentaries in governmental decrees (on the legal side), concrete physical interventions (on the infrastructural side), and guidebooks (for touristic use). This not only helped to delimit and convert the mapped surface into a legally, aesthetically, and spatiotemporally confined archaeo-

logical heritage reserve called Parc archéologique d’Angkor (a similar process would be worked through one more time for the nomination of the site to the UNESCO World Heritage List, see chapter XII), but also preconfigured and prescribed social (inter)action within this marked entity. This shift had consequences (to varying degrees) for local inhabitants and international visitors alike: practices of confinement and deviation – important elements of Foucault’s heterotopias that were tested in the universal exhibitions ‘back home’ – went hand in hand. In this sense, the emergence of a French colonial modernity after 1900 not only fostered modern mass leisure activity within Indochine and all over the world, it also provided the region with an increasingly sophisticated, museum-like tourist district of controlled and rhetorically pre-framed sightseeing in Angkor as a picture-perfect archaeological theme park (compare the introduction and epilogue II). Angkor’s staged authenticity was delimitated on a map, aesthetically fabricated, and the selected “historical monuments” were protected, controlled, and systematically enhanced (restored, reconstructed) by a state-owned institution (after MacCannell 1976, 1–29, 41–48). Legal texts and early travel guidebooks to Angkor (compare the introductory quotation of this sub-chapter) were crucial in this process. Through a process of “enframing” (compare Duro 199622), graphical maps, and spatial descriptions – with all their pa-

21  Elements of this further study have been published in Falser 2013d. 22  As we shall explore in chapter XI, the strategy of rhetorical framing was essential to underline the con-

crete heritage claims over Angkor.

19

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

ratextual devices such as titles, legends, scales and added annotations – were not only the basis for the archaeologists and architects working on-site. Guidebooks made the alien and unordered site of temples – supposedly lost in the tropical jungle – intelligible to the primarily Western tourists. They helped them to create, during their preparations back home or during their week-long boat travel to the site, the geographical imagining of an imperial entity between the European metropolitan centre and its Asian colonial margin. And they were useful, moreover, as a means of envisaging the aesthetic and geometricised entity called the Archaeological Park of Angkor as a colonial possession. This ‘imaginary museum site without walls’ was to be filled with proclaimed cultural heritage objects in the form of singular temple sites. And those needed to be (see the final and largest section of this chapter) presented as a conserved picturesque or, better yet, restored and reconstructed into picture-perfect three-dimensional elements situated along a prescribed parcours. Applying Lefebvre’s important 1974 theoretical study The production of space to our concrete case study, the making of Angkor as a colonial space was three-fold: Angkor Park was (a) symbolically perceived as a “space of representation” of colonial power; (b) it was physically conceived as the “representation of space” in the form of a protected zone by the colonial administration through concrete boundary-making; and (c) it lived by the “spatial practice” of its aesthetic users (after Lefebvre 1991, 33). The latter consisted primarily of colonial visitors, providing a sharp contrast with the local inhabitants who continued to follow their own notions of religious space and spatial circulation. Their network of local temples, monasteries, and paths through the area were initially indicated on the earliest French map of the region but gradually disappeared from touristic maps (compare Monmonier 1991). The inhabitants were increasingly forced to adapt their behaviour to the new regulations: this began right after 1907 with the first French-colonial sacrilège on site – the relocation of the monks at Angkor Wat. It continued well into the 1960s when whole villages in front of the main entry to Angkor Wat were relocated and turned into picturesque model villages (see below). This practice would reach a new climax after 1992 when Angkor was declared an archaeological UNESCO World Heritage site and the inhabitants within the perimeters were again confronted with severe restrictions by the national Cambodian administration and by the incoming global ‘ad hoc-­experts’ with their ever-new slogans of heritage management. These restrictions included the denial of electricity and test series of relocation programmes (compare Pl. EpII.19b). In the recent ‘eco-tour-

ism’ trend and with new policies for ‘living heritage’23, the local actors have now been integrated into the global heritage industry (compare, above others, Miura 2015). In a new version of what Johannes Fabian has called the “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983), their role is limited, however, to playing the ‘traditional inhabitant’ living in a neo-vernacular eco-village and providing low-tech oxcart tours (see epilogue II, Pl. EpII.19a, 20c–f). On the other side of the social spectrum, the Western visitor’s spatial practice (his action through ‘navigable space’) was equally predetermined and therefore controllable as far as movement, time management, and the visual regime (arrangement of views) were concerned. In the tradition of Foucault’s analysis of space as an exercise of power and of the relationship between procedures in space (Foucault 1984b), Michel de Certeau’s 1980 study L’Invention du quotidien discussed the transmission of a carto­ graphic “a-perspectivity” into a performative action from “space” [espace] to “place” [lieu]. He also talked about the relations of a map (“a plane projection totalising observations”), the graphic trails on a map as circuits and itineraries (“a discursive series of operations, chains of spatialising operations”), and the pathways and parcours (as a “spatial acting-out of the place”). De Certeau’s spatial actions of “going” with the organisation of movements in relation to borders and barriers (compare Borsò 2004) were combined with speed indications (“velocities and time variables”), the calculation of distances, and pre-selected views (the “know­ledge of an order of places by tableau-like seeing”) (de Certeau 1988, 117–27). Guidebooks about Angkor Park (like travel guidebooks to this day) predefined the visitor’s highly selective reading competence of culture heritage, and therefore his on-site practice (from “route” to “routine”). Together with administrative decrees and concrete structural interventions on site, they were particularly effectual as powerful tools of colonial hegemony: they decontextualised the delimited park area from its larger sociocultural environment and eliminated the perception of Angkor as a site of ‘living heritage’ (compare Pl. Intro.22). Maps and descriptions in the early guidebooks – almost all of them were written by the so-called Conservateurs des monuments d’Angkor – consciously ignored the existing sociocultural fabric and spatial practices of Khmer villages in the temples’ surroundings, which had never ceased to be local and regional sites of veneration and pilgrimage. In other words, internal, administrative legal prescriptions, and the subsequent concrete structural interventions on the one side, and public guidebooks on the other helped to “archaeologise” Angkor (Falser/Juneja 2013b; compare with Falser 2013d) – that is, to produce and perpetuate its image,

23  The concept of ‘living heritage’ (compare chapter VIII) was re-introduced rather recently by Western

cultural heritage specialists as a response to earlier, quite restrictive practices of cultural heritage management (compare Miura 2004, 2008). Angkor is to this day one of the best sites through which to better understand these paradigm changes (see chapter XII and epilogue II).

20

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

which survives to this day, as a dead site of forgotten ruins in the jungle that were rediscovered and had to be salvaged by colonial (later national and today international/global) power regimes. Interestingly, the image of Angkor Wat as a decadent and decaying place was officially re-enforced only after 1907 when France became the legal owner of the site. Only a few years before this decisive moment, the first useful French Guide du voyageur to include Angkor, then still on the Siamese side (Pl. IX.9a,b), into global travel routes was published in Paris in 1902. The guidebook was edited by Claudius Madrolle and financed by the Comité de l’Asie française,24 and it promulgated another story altogether. Commenting on a prearranged one-hundred-day journey from Marseille to northwest Africa, India, and Indochina before finally reaching Canton, the guide accompanied “the traveller under time pressure” (tight boat schedules between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap limited a visit to two days) and reused the rather imprecise map from the 1873 Garnier publication (compare Fig. IX.2) to depict “Ang-kor et les environs” (Fig. IX.6). However, it described Angkor Wat as “the best preserved of all Khmer monuments” and as a lively pilgrimage place that contained a Buddhist sanctuary with resident monks in charge of the care of the temple and its idols (Madrolle 1902, 54–55). The guidebook’s word choice, intended to lead the eyes of the potential tourist through a series of scenes of Angkor Wat, is an excellent example of the instant ‘back-translation’ to the real site of what, just two years earlier, had been presented to (perhaps even the very same) visitors in a Tour du Monde panorama at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris as a picture-perfect tableau of Angkor Wat’s live-enacted vista (compare Figs. V.6a,b, 7a with Pl. EpII.26a,b): […] the group of five préasat (pyramids) of the temple, almost lost in the middle of the innumerable crowns of palm trees. This is the imposing spectacle [spectacle imposant] which comes up suddenly in front of your eyes, as if through the wave of a magic wand [comme par un coup de baguette magique] […] Go over the eighty-metre-long bridge and pass through the entry gate. Here will appear in front of your eyes the second fairy-tale view [tableau de féerie]. […] take this axial parcours to the third level [and] your eye will glance over a marvellous panorama [l’œil embrasse un panorama merveilleux]. (Madrolle 1902, 55, 57)

In 1901/2 and again in 1904, the EFEO had already commissioned Charles Carpeaux (attached to Delaporte’s ­Indochina Museum in Paris and the son of the famous

Figure IX.6  Guide Madrolle of 1902 and the map of the greater Angkor region (Source: Guide Madrolle 1902, map, between 50 and 51)

sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux) and his colleague Henri Dufour to undertake a crossing of the Siamese border to execute a kind of “militant archaeology” in the then politically foreign territory of Angkor (Carpeaux 1908, 247). The touching diary written by the young Carpeaux (he tragically died from dysentery in Saigon in 1904 after working to liberate the Bayon temple from vegetation) reveals the first French trials of serious hands-on work in Angkor and resulted in the creation of some “500 photographs and 150 casts” (Carpeaux/Dufour 1904, 79; compare Carpeaux/Dufour 1910/14). Carpeaux’s premature death helped to initiate the enduring “hagiography” of the EFEO (EFEO 2002, 110–111), which centres around a topos of French-colonial pioneers who sacrificed themselves to an altruistic mission to salvage Angkor (Fig. IX.7a).25

24  This committee published its first bulletin in 1901 and tried to cover all sorts of economical, diplomatic,

ethnic, social, and religious information about the French world overseas (Zimmermann 1901).

25  The ethnographer Prosper Odend’hal (killed in 1904) and Jean Commaille (supposedly ‘assassinated’ 29

April 1916 at Angkor) would soon be added to this list (compare Fig. VI.22a).

21

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

but as a living site that still allowed respectful interaction between local monks and French interlopers (Figs. IX.7b,c). Carpeaux’s personal report is therefore as precious as the one about the friendly monks on site written by Auguste Filoz (Filoz 1889) about Delaporte’s plaster cast mission in 1873 (see chapter II). However, after 1907 the monthly and annual Rapports de la Conservation d’Angkor (in the following RCA26) only rarely mentioned this positive aspect, as, for example, Commaille’s brief remark about “several thousand visitors to the site” during the festivities of the Cambodian New Year (RCA 1.1909). Unfortunately, his accepting tone in describing the local owners of the site seemed to worsen, for he exclaimed only few months later: “If Egypt had its seven plagues, Angkor suffers from two: the monks and the bats, both of which we will never get rid of on site” (RCA 5.1909). It was probably the trilingual (English, French, and Figures IX.7a—c  Photographs by Charles Carpeaux in German) publication of 1909 Indochine pittoresque et his 1908 book Les ruines d’Angkor: “last self-portrait” at ­monumentale: Ruines d’Angkor by the Hanoi-based photo the Bayon temple, Cambodian pilgrims “at festivities at editor Dieulefils (the preface was by Aymonier and the inthe ­Angkor ruins” and the French “mission d’Angkor at troduction by Finot) that provided the most explicit phothe ­pontiff of the monks”, most probably of Angkor Wat tographic insight into Angkor Wat’s lively microlevel bemonastery (Source: Carpeaux 1908, 234, 227, 36) fore the big boom of tourist literature set in. Two figures in this book depicted the monks’ houses within Angkor Wat (Fig. IX.8a), recalling the shots by Émile Gsell and ThomAdditionally, Carpeaux’s black-and-white photographs of son in 1866 (see Figs. I.5a, 6a, 8), and the engravings from daily scenes on site recorded the lively festivities with Garnier 1873 (see Figs. I.5b, 7, 9). Other photographs bedances, chants, and hundreds of guests at Angkor Wat dur- fore 1900 (Fig. IX.8b), most probably during Fourneau’s ing his visit in 1904 (Carpeaux 1908, 222–30). They help us plaster cast mission of 1888 (compare Fig. III.29), and even to perceive the site around 1900 in fact not as a dead ruin early postcards prove the lively presence of Buddhist monks

26  Stored in the archive of the EFEO in Paris, they comprise many boxes of handwritten papers, sketches,

and related photographic material. The monthly and annual reports were unfortunately not completely transcribed, but they cover about 3,000 text pages alone. The following quotations from the reports of the Angkor Conservation Office will be abbreviated with “RCA” (Reports of the Conservation of Angkor) with the corresponding month. The author would like to thank Cristina Cramerotti, then the curator of the library, and Isabelle Poujol, the director of the photo library, for their valuable help in sifting through this vast amount of archival material.

22

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figure IX.8a  Monks’ houses in front of Angkor Wat as depicted in Dieulefils’ publication Ruines d’Angkor of 1909 (Source: Dieulefils 1909, Fig. 12)

Figure IX.8b  A photograph around 1890 at Angkor Wat (Source: © Musée Guimet, Photographic Archive, Paris)

Figures IX.8c,d  Photographs of the inner courts and the cruciform gallery of Angkor Wat in the 1890 publication Ruines d’Angkor by Fournereau/Porcher (Source: Fourne­ reau/Porcher 1890, 5, 4)

at Angkor Wat (compare Fig. I.6b). Certainly, even Fournereau’s 1890 publication Ruines d’Angkor showed slightly overgrown inner courts of the temple, but its inner, cruciform gallery was still full of venerated Buddha figures (Figs. IX.8c,d). However, another image published just after 1900 documented a highly crucial novelty: the arrival of Jean Commaille and his first “permanent” hut adjacent

to the central causeway of Angkor Wat (compare Malleret 1965). This image records what Paul Doumer’s collaborator Louis Salaun in his 1903 publication L’Indochine had termed – and depicted (Fig. IX.9) – as a benevolent “encounter of the protector and the protégé” (Salaun 1903, xvii). Their contact zone was now ever since established inside the compound of Cambodia’s most important temple. 23

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.9  Commaille’s hut on Angkor Wat’s central passageway, depicted in Salaun’s 1903 report L’Indochine (Source: Salaun 1903, between 321—22)

On the other end of the scale, a small publication from the same year, Les ruines d’Angkor: Notice illustrée de 16 gravures by General Léon de Beylié, is worth mentioning as (after Delaporte in 1880, compare Fig. IX.3) another attempt to visualise Angkor Wat from the sky at a time when aerial photography was not yet available (Figs. IX.10a,b). In this example, the axial orientations of the site were monumentalised ad infinitum and no traces of human settlements (such as the active Buddhist monastery in front of Angkor Wat) were indicated (Beylié 1909, 32–35, compare Beylié 1904). By an order dated 5 October 1904, the position of a Chef du Service archéologique had been filled by the Paris École-des-Beaux-Arts-trained architect Henri Parmentier (Parmentier 1944, 1949, 1952; Marchal 1949) who had already been at Angkor with Dufour and Carpeaux. Commaille, however, counts as the first on-site actor to be officially charged with concrete physical interventions after the legal March 1907 retrocession of Angkor (Parmentier 1916; EFEO 2002, 107–110). Similar to de Lagrée, Garnier,

Delaporte, and Lajonquière before him, Commaille was also an amateur of architecture and archaeology with a military background. Born in Marseille in 1868, he was a son of a soldier and was raised in a French military school. Commaille became principal guardian of the Cambodian militia in 1896 and accountant of the civil service of the protectorate in 1898. Visiting Angkor for the first time in 1899, he entered the EFEO in 1900 as secretary-paymaster and was charged with establishing the EFEO museums in Saigon and Hanoi. By order dated 4 December 1907, Commaille accepted control of the first official actions in Angkor, which was then still under the disposition of AndréJules Lorin, the commissaire délégué du Résident supérieur of Battambang. By January 1908, Commaille was already sending a monthly rapport mensuel d’activité to Hanoi. An order from 5 March 1908 officially created the position of a “conservateur du groupe d’Angkor”,27 which would be nominated by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris and work under the orders of Indochina’s Chef du

27  Arrêté créant à l’École française d’Extrême-Orient une poste de conservateur du groupe d’Angkor (Saigon, 5 March 1908). In: Journal officiel, 23 March 1908, 538. In §1, the acting GGI, Louis Alphonse Bonhoure, defined the general task of the Conservateur: “Il sera chargé de la garde, de la conservation et du gros entretien des monuments de groupe d’Angkor et exercera par délégation les pouvoirs conférés au Directeur de l’EFEO par l’article 22 de l’arrêté du 9 mars 1900 relatif aux monuments historiques.” See ANOM GGI 16926, also BEFEO 1908, 284 and 328.

24

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figures IX.10a,b  Imagined views over Angkor Wat, from Beylié’s book Les ruines d’Angkor of 1909 (Source: Beylié 1909, 34—35, 32—33)

25

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Service archéologique (Parmentier) and with its residence no other sources provide more intimate insight into the in Siem Reap. By an order from 14 July 1908, Commaille ‘making process of Angkor’ as an archaeological reserve officially became the EFEO’s first Conservateur des Monu- than the individual digging diaries [Journaux des fouilles] ments du groupe d’Angkor. In the first issue of the Bulletin and monthly/annual reports [Rapports mensuels/annuels] of the EFEO (hereafter BEFEO) after the 1907 retrocession of the acting “Conservators of Angkor” between 1908 and of Angkor, Commaille declared that his first action was to 1972/3. When Commaille began in late 1907 to send his clear [débroussaillement] the major temple sites of over- first monthly reports to the director of the EFEO, his exgrown vegetation: the most important concerned – no sur- planations primarily concerned the transformation of Ang­ prise – Angkor Wat, “the different levels [of which] were kor Wat into a picture-perfect site. A selection of three of made accessible for visitors”. BEFEO’s Chroniques on Cam- his first sketches indicated the direction his approach bodge reported in the same issue that “two hundred tour- would take. In his report from February 1908, Commaille ists had already visited Angkor in the last three months of already conceptualised his archaeological work through 1907” (this number would multiply by ten thousand, with the eyes of potential tourists and envisioned how they some 2 million visitors in 2015!), and the site – “neither would enjoy the picturesque vista towards Angkor Wat Java nor India had an equally sized and perfect archaeolog- from a “bungalow”, which was planned south of the entry ical ensemble” – was being “tried by travel agencies to be- to the bridge at the banks of the temple’s main moat. In his come a fixed stopover excursion on trips around the world” “sketch indicating on ground plan the perspective view (Commaille 1907, 421–22). A few months later, Parmentier which the visitors will have from the bungalow at the ruins deplored the poor touristic infrastructure at Angkor as be- of Angkor Wat” (RCA 2.1908), he indicated the viewing ing for “globetrotters” (Parmentier 1908, 68). lines towards the site’s various rising towers from a hotel The first actions at Angkor Wat under Commaille and that had not even been built (Fig. IX.11a). Interestingly, the Parmentier will be discussed here, since they were an essen- whole space between the western gate of the outermost ential element of the earliest touristic exploitation schemes: closure (the main entry to the whole temple site) and the “Tons of sandstones [were] moved through an installed De- inner mountain temple itself seemed to be empty in his sketch, and he anticipated the filling of this empty space in cauville toy train, […] missing elements in the cruciform gallery added in reinforced concrete, [and] the local monks’ his December 1908 report: “Everyday Angkor Wat comes practice of demolishing neighbouring ruins for their pago- clearer to my eyes [as] the purest marvel. As a consequence, das [was deplored].” In order to re-establish the ‘spectacu- we should not leave Angkor Wat before its complete clearance.” It was only in his January and February 1909 report, lar’ vista towards the central mountain temple – which was aesthetically prefigured in Delaporte’s famous “vue recon- when commenting on other topics (such as the water tanks stituée” in 1880 (compare Fig. VI.6) and later propagated of Angkor Wat’s cruciform gallery), that Commaille indicatin colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Paris in 1922 and ed again the various (“disturbing”) habitations of the active 1931 respectively (see chapters VI and VII), altogether Buddhist monastery (Fig. IX.11b,c) which were to be relocatforming the iconic materialisation of the French colonial ed shortly thereafter. Only at another point in time (in the mission civilisatrice (Falser 2015a,c)28 – Commaille com- 1920s?) was a site chosen for a new monastery to the northmented that “[i]n order to bring the ensemble of the mon- west of the main inner causeway of Angkor Wat (Fig. IX.12). ument back to its original appearance [aspect primitif], A task that ran parallel to that of making the visual con[he] need[ed] to reconstitute the unique paved causeway” sumption of the temple picture-perfect was the reconstituand that “[w]e should also consider it a necessity to drive tion of the elevated inner causeway, which was partly decayed and had become overgrown by lateral bushes and the monks [from the site] whose habitations obstruct the view on the eastern side of the first, the so-called ‘historic trees. In his July/August 1908 report Commaille called for gallery’, and therefore make a general perspective on the the re-establishment of the central, 475 metre chaussée dalwhole ensemble impossible. We hope that we will persuade lée, which would involve “colossal work […] to remove them to have their houses north and south [of the cause- about 80,000 cubic metres”. To facilitate this project, he way] transported outside the [inner] perimeter”.29 sketched (and, indeed, later used) a simple lifting jack, the Although Coedès made a considerable effort to sum up construction of which may have been the result of his enall scientific literature about Angkor in 1908 (Coedès 1908), gineering and military background (Figs. IX. 13a,b). From

28  It is exactly this process of iconising the central perspective towards Angkor Wat as pars pro toto of France’s civilising mission in the medium of cultural heritage which I have explored in the epilogue, “Clearing the path towards civilisation: 150 Years of ‘Saving Angkor’” (Falser 2015c). 29  In original: “Il fallait aussi envisager la nécessité de déloger les bonzes dont les habitations masquent toute la face Ouest de la première galerie, dite ‘galerie historique’, et interdisant une vue générale. Nous espérons qu’il sera possible de les décider à transporter leurs démeures au Nord ou au Sud, en dehors de la terrasse de pourtour” (Commaille 1908, here 593).

26

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figures IX.11a—c  Commaille’s sketches in his monthly reports RCA 1908.2, 1909.1 and 1909.2 to deal with the Buddhist monks’ houses which “blocked the view” from the newly installed tourist bungalow (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.12  The relocated monastery in an aerial photograph (undated, probably 1920s) (Source: © Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac)

the beginning, the self-appointed task of the EFEO to “clear and re-establish the famous Group of Angkor” [débroussailler et aménager le célèbre groupe d’Angkor] was a hugely expensive project that needed external funding. At this point, EFEO’s directeur par intérim, Claude Eugène Maitre, had already reported to the Commission des Antiquités du Cambodge that a Société d’Angkor pour la conservation des monuments anciens de l’Indochine had been established in Paris. It should “find pecuniary subventions, […] help expand knowledge of the archaeological treasures of Cambodia in France, and seek a touristic movement to Angkor as analogue societies had created for ­Luxor or Timgad” (BEFEO 1907, 419, 422; compare Maitre 1908). As the Société mentioned in its statutes, it was found­ ed in the spirit of Doumer’s 1900 order to foster the study and conservation of the monuments of French Indochina (§1,2). Indeed, the list of its founding members reads like a

who’s who of the protagonists working to incorporate Indochina’s heritage into France’s extended patrimoine culturel: Aymonier, Barth, Beylié, Chailley, Delaporte, Doumer, Dufour, Finot, Foucher, Guimet, Harmand, Lajonquière, Lanessan, Lévi, Maitre, Mauss, Parmentier, Pavie, Pelliot, and Senart, among others. In addition, the Cambodian king Sisowath was made Président d’honneur (Société d’Angkor 1908, 3, 5). Shortly afterwards, the BEFEO reported on the Society’s financial impact at Angkor Wat. Using ambiguous rhetoric, the report began with an imaginary success story: “[W]ith the help of the Cambodian king, the résident supérieur and the head of the monks [chef des bonzes], the idea to protect the abandoned ruins of Angkor had become a [veritable] movement to encompass all Cambodians of whatever religious and racial distinction.”30 The report went on to declare that the Society had not only supported the clearing and restoration of Ang­

30  The internal debate about a “direct participation” of Khmer stakeholders in French restoration activities

sounded different. GGI Klobukowski wrote in March 1909 to the résident supérieur in Cambodia that a “Cambodian element […] in our work to reconstitute ancient Cambodia” in form of a “committee with two indigenous mandarins” would help “assure a benevolent collaboration” of the same to “make the [local] recruiting of necessary manpower easier”. Additionally, this would guarantee EFEO’s “complete liberty in its

28

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figures IX.13a,b  Commaille’s sketch in his RCA 9.1908 to install a lifting jack in order to clear the central passageway of Angkor Wat; a photograph from 1909 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

kor Wat’s causeway and the connecting path to the temple’s gate to the north, south, and east (Figs. IX.14) but also had spent 1,600 piasters to recompense the monks for the relocation of their houses (“déguerpissement des bonzes”, according to Commaille in his November 1908 report), which had hidden the main façade.31 Later rebuilt to the north and south right after the western entrance to the site (compare Figs. IX.12 and 23a), 32 the new installations could be grouped around two old pagodas and a magnificent, shady mango tree so that they became “almost invisible” and stood “outside of the main vista” [dehors de la ligne de visée] for the tourists to enter the site through the western gate (RCA 11./12.1909). The overall shape of the

temple’s five towers was cleaned in May 1909 “by two courageous men free from giddiness” (RCA May 1909). Additionally, galleries, water tanks, flanking library buildings, etc. were cleared and repaired here and there with small inlays of cement and re-enforced iron [béton armé]. If all these hasty interventions by Commaille to prepare Angkor Wat’s main vista counted as the earliest steps of his working programme until mid-1909, they were of far more political relevance than a mere ‘archaeological’ diary might pretend at first glance. As GGI Antony Klobukoswki explained in a 13 August 1909 letter from Saigon to Bouché-­ Leclercq, the Secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, he planned great festivities at Angkor

behaviour [conserver une complète liberté d’allures] while bypassing the administration of the protectorate” (Saigon, 21 March 1909). Petillot, the president of the Cambodian Committee of the Angkor Society, doubted the usefulness of participation by the locals in a letter to the résident supérieur: “We could state quite often that their natural apathy, laxness and their shortage of money left even the most interesting projects in their initiative without progress and action” (Phnom Penh, 15 April 1909). For both, see ANOM INDO GGI 16926. 31  In original: “Tout ce travail n’eût pas produit l’effet utile attendu si les bonzeries installées devant le monument avaient continué à en masquer la façade. Une somme de 1,600 piastres fut reconnue nécessaire pour indemniser les bonzes de leur déplacement.” See BEFEO 1910, 267–68. 32  In his December 1908 report Commaille talked again about the relocation of the monks and of their installations along the northern and southern sides of the temple’s main facade, outside the terraces and along the inner passageways. As he found the requested compensation to be outrageous, he proposed that they convince the monks to quit the area voluntarily. He also raised the issue of the “Luc-Kru d’Angkor Vat”, where “1,500 families from Samrès, totalling about 5,000 slaves [esclavages], were used for the main d’œuvre to move the houses 200 metres”. Removing inhabitants in Angkor Park ‘voluntarily’ came up again as a rhetoric trick after 1992, see epilogue II in the context of the ‘ecovillage’ of Run Ta-Ek.

29

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.14  Undated photographs to show the dégagement of Angkor Wat’s other entry ­sections (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Wat. Those were to be “as historically authentic as possible” to celebrate the site’s political retrocession from Siam and to merge ancient Angkorian grandeur, the cultural pride of the new Cambodian king Sisowath, and France’s self-understanding of political leadership over the territory and its archaeological action programme (compare Klein 2013): The programme is not yet finalised, but it may take about eight days. First, great religious ceremonies will take place: offerings to the celestial spirits and dances in presence of the king. In the following days after official visits, which I will exchange with H. M. Sisowath for public entertainment [réjouissances publiques], a great religious festivity will be celebrated in honour of the kings who reigned at Angkor, succeeded by a solemn meal of the monks and royal dances in the courtyard of the temple. Daily visits to the ruins of the area and the inauguration of the School of Pali will occupy the rest of the time. The festivities of Angkor will be as exact as possible a reproduction of those from the past [Les fêtes d’Angkor seront la reproduction aussi exacte que possible de celles du passé]. They will bring to light all of what the actual Cambodian civilisation has conserved from the ancient traditions and rituals. [italics MF] (Klobukowski 1909)

Édouard Chavannes reported at the Academy’s session of 10 December 1909 that the “Fêtes d’Angkor” from 24 September to 4 October had been a success (see Pl. V.7). And indeed such spectacles would recur in the Angkor visits of Maréchal Joffre in 1922 (see Fig. VI.13b), Charles de Gaulle in 1966 (see chapter X, Pl. X.23) or Federico Mayor in 1991 (see Pl. XII.10)33 as ‘back-translated’ counterparts to earlier events in the colonial and universal exhibitions of Marseille 1906 (see Pl. V.6) and 1922 (see Pl. VI.7b), and Paris 1931 (see Fig. VII.44): The goal of these festivities has been to demonstrate to the population that the recent retrocession of the provinces from Siam and their incorporation into Cambodia are definitive, and that all this only meant to reattach the present to a long and glorious past. […] Additionally, all the publicity for the ceremonies at Angkor helped to attract the attention of tourists and archaeologists to these marvellous ruins of Khmer art, which can now be visited without great difficulty. (Chavannes 1909)

The Chronique section of the BEFEO contextualised the whole official event, and the several meetings of King Sisowath, GGI Klobukowski, General de Beylié, Parmentier,

33  Indeed the last in a row of those official visits to Angkor will be discussed in the case of Federico Mayor,

the director general of UNESCO, standing on the very same iconic passageway to formulate his “Save Angkor” appeal in 1991 (see chapter XII; compare Falser 2015c).

30

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

and Commaille, along with other politicians, mirrored the As regards the first point, a decree from 18 May 1908 had considerable backstage efforts to revive Angkor Wat from expanded the law of 9 March 1900 to protect historic monan archaeological point of view (BEFEO 1909, 822–23). uments in Indochina “with the totality of buildings, inscriptions, and old objects of Cambodian origin, being Commaille also made note, after his efforts to dislocate the monks from the temple were finished, of the “brilliant fes- situated in the provinces of Siemréap, Sisophon, and Battivities and thousands of indigenous spectators” (RCA tambang”.35 On 18 November 1908, the acting French min11./12.1909). ister of public instruction and fine arts, Gaston Doumergue, contacted the Bureau de l’Asie through the ministre At the same time, the administrative and legal efforts to make Angkor a proper ‘site’ of heritage tourism continued des Colonies, Raphaël Milliès-Lacroix, with the favourable to advance. Only a few months after the so-called retroces- response of the new GGI, Antony Klobukowski, to the recsion of Angkor from Siam to French Cambodge, Lajonquière ommendation of the Commission archéologique de l’Indosent his 28 December 1907 draft version for Angkor Park chine [decreed in January 1908].36 It should establish a (actually even signed “at Angkor”) to the GGI.34 Months lat- “protection zone around the principle monuments of Anger in his Rapport sommaire sur une mission archéologique, kor [un périmètre réservé englobant les principaux monuLajonquière revised the “project for the organi­sation and ments d’Angkor], under the EFEO’s full management auprogramme for the arrangement work” [travaux d’aménage- thority with the exclusive interests of archaeology and ment] for Angkor (signed in Bordeaux, 8 February 1909) tourism” – a discussion which would come back again and defined six elements for the administrative, spatiotem- around 1990 (see chapter XII).37 On 25 March 1909, Claude poral, visual, and touristic scenario of Angkor Park: Eugène Maitre, the director of the EFEO between 1908 and 1920, tried to convince Klobukowski that the whole 1) The constitution of a confined archaeological reserve region of Angkor was “more or less deserted and only little cultivated” and that the protection of one coherent zone of [domaine archéologique réservé] under the name “Parc d’Angkor” in the parameter of which all work can only “just few square kilometres” would be more effective than one of “single buildings”.38 Klobukowski forwarded this be undertaken with the approbation of the director of open question on 4 May 1909 to the deciding authority, the the EFEO (this parameter will comprise of approximately thirty kilometres in diameter as mapped by topogra- ­Résident supérieur of Cambodia, Louis Paul Luce. 39 On phers). 2) The nomination of a conservator for this do- 30 May of the same year, Luce voted for the smaller version, since, accord­ing to him, a “protection zone of several main. 3) The establishing of trenches of forty metres of square kilometres” would “be an unjust measure to the width through the great interior forest of Angkor Thom, from the southern to the northern gate, and the parti­ population for the sake of few archaeologists” and would cular gate of the Bayon temple to the temple [of Phi­ “drive away forever the few villages near the ruins [and with them] the already limited manpower”. Furthermore, he set, meanakas, MF]. 4) The reconstitution of the southern rather curiously, the aims of archaeological preservation gate (one of the former five monumental entries with against efforts to develop the area: their projecting lines of sculptured giants [chaussées aux géants]) as the one to be reached coming from Siem Reap on the way to Angkor Thom. 5) The construction of a bungalow, outside but close to the principle entry to Angkor Wat. 6) The reinstallation and prolongation of the route Angkor-Siemreap to be usable by cars and reaching as far as to the debarkation point at the lake. A network of roads from Angkor Thom onwards should be studied later to link the city with the different points of interest in the “Parc d’Angkor”. [italics MF] (Lajonquière 1909, 163—64)

Everyone who has lived a long time in Cambodia knows that the inhabitants, with both pitifulness and superstition, respect the ancient monuments and, even if they did not prevent time from destroying the buildings, they have — to my knowledge — never committed any of the acts of vandalism which we see quite often committed by tourists visiting the Group of Angkor. Also, it seems that right at the moment when the French government aims to give back to the ancient capital of the Khmer

34  Rapport du Commandant Lunet de Lajonquière à Monsieur le Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine (signed Angkor, 28 December 1907): I) Mesures provisoires à prendre concernant le Groupe d’Angkor (10 pages); and II) Organisation d’un Service des Antiquités Cambodgiennes (7 pages), see ANOM GGI 16926. 35  See BEFEO 1908, 328 and Journal officiel, 1 July 1908, 977. 36  For the larger context, see ANOM INDO GGI 16919 (Commission archéologique des monuments de l’Indo-Chine auprès du ministre de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts). 37  A letter from Doumergue to Milliès-Lacroix “concerning the wish to preserve the Indochinese antiquities” (Paris, 18 November 1908), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923 (Création des périmètres de protection autour des monuments d’Angkor). The Commission was decreed on January 1908, see BEFEO 1908, 326–27. 38  Maitre to Klobukowski (Hanoi, 25 March 1909), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 39  Klobukowski to Luce (Hanoi, 4 May 1909), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

kings its old life by building roads, improving communication lines, and repopulating these abandoned fertile areas, the wish of the Conseil d’Archéologie would precisely undermine the development of this undertaking, and, as a consequence, be contrary to this project.40

On 30 July 1909, Luce made his more precise proposal for individual protection perimeters around each building, since “both the lack of manpower and funding made a total restoration and clearing of the monuments of the whole territory of Angkor impossible”.41 Again on 23 March 1910 Luce was still fighting his opinion through, this time in a letter to the new GGI, Albert Picquié. Even a royal ordinance to explain the meaning of this “conservative measure [would] annoy the population […] of all the thirty villages […] in this virtually drawn perimeter of 25 to 26 by 15 to 15 kilometres, […] deprive the EFEO of its future work force, and make the monitoring of this administrative act simply impossible”. To his knowledge, “no such protective zone around listed buildings existed in France itself where conservators did nothing but simply maintain, restore, and facilitate respect for the monuments they were in charge of ”.42 At this point, Henri Parmentier, the chief archaeologist and EFEO’s director p.i. in 1910, issued a fierce response to Picquié. Not only was the rumour spread by Luce that the EFEO intended the “reconstruction of Angkor” [réédification d’Angkor] simply wrong, it also “went against all modern scientific mentality”. Parmentier went on to argue that an all-comprising archaeological protection zone would favour “an integral conservation of the ruins” (compare the same term in the UNESCO discussion around and after 1990 in chapter XII). With more paying visitors to the park, the expanding city of Siem Reap with its numerous constructions and roads began to threaten the ruins (a problem which would intensify after 1992). Additionally, un­ foreseen new discoveries would be automatically protected without any further administrative expenditure. Forestalling the above-mentioned cartographic strategy of “dispossess[ing] by naming” the indigenous inhabitants, Parmen­ tier propagated, by comparing the situation with the Dutch East Indies, a misleading fantasy of an empty and fully archaeologised Angkor zone: We have the luck to find the land uninhabited [sic] and the monuments united in a more or less abandoned ensemble, which is rather unsuitable for the indigenous population. Therefore, it would be regrettable if we forced ourselves into these costly expropriations to

which our neighbours in Java are condemned for not having taken the necessary measures right at the beginning.43 [italics MF]

However, these efforts were all in vain. On 15 May 1910, GGI Picquié “decided against an all-comprising perimeter [un périmètre global de protection] which had been proposed by the EFEO. Only protected zones [zones réservées] were to be created around each monument for the care of the local administration and sanctioned by royal ordinance”.44 On 7 September 1910, Luce was able to send – based on the detailed 1909 map by Buat/Ducret in 1:25,000 scale (Pl. IX.10a) – a draft map of the individually protected temple sites (Pl. IX.10b) and a draft of a royal ordinance to create a series of individual protection zones. The latter comprised of six paragraphs. Two sets of zones were identified in §1: “A. The right side of the Siem Reap River: I. a zone of one hundred metres on both sides of the road from Siem Reap to Angkor Thom starting from the second lodging [sala]; II. The Phnom Bakheng; III: A zone of two hundred metres around the monuments of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Preah Khan and Banteay Prei; B. The left side of the Siem Reap River: I. A zone of two hundred metres around the temples of Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdey and Sras Srang; II: A zone of one hundred metres around Krol Ko, Neak Pean, Ta Som, Ta Mean, Ta Keo, Mebon, Pre Rup, and Bat Chum”.45 Finally, this proposal became an ordonnance royale issued on 31 March 1911 by King Sisowath (Sisowath 1911), which defined the above-listed “périmètres réservés dans le groupe des ruines d’Angkor” (§1) and handed their “control” over to the EFEO. (§2). This ordinance was transformed into an arrêté by Luce on 7 April 1911 (see also BEFEO 1921, 85–87). A closer look at the specific situation in Angkor Wat reveals that this archaeological protection perimeter was expanding right along the outer edge of the site’s moat and therefore excluded, on its western side, the active villages of Taprohm Kel and Trapeang Sè. However, this discussion continued far into the 1920s and was revived again in the 1960s when both villages were finally relocated (see below). It is rather astonishing how close the above-quoted post-1907 debate about the protections perimeters of Angkor Park – so far totally ignored by scientific research – was to the post-1990 approaches to establish different “core and buffer zones” for the UNESCO World Heritage Park of Angkor (see chapter XII; compare Pl. XII.6, 8, 15–17). During the first years after the 1907 retrocession of Angkor, the internal and official reports on Angkor were filled with many details about

40  Luce to GGI Klobukowski (Phnom Penh, 30 May 1909), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 41  Luce to GGI Klobukowski (Phnom Penh, 30 July 1909), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 42  Luce to GGI Picquié (Phnom Penh, 23 March 1910), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 43  Parmentier to GGI Picquié (Hanoi, 12 January 1910), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 44  GGI Picquié to Parmentier (Hanoi, 15 May 1910), see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923. 45  Projet d’ordonnance royale constituant un périmètre réservé à Angkor (no date, around September 1910),

see: ANOM INDO GGI 16923.

32

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figure IX.15  The Tourist Inn at Angkor Wat, as depicted in Quaintenne’s 1909 French travel report Fifteen days in the country of the Khmer kings (Source: Quaintenne 1909, 110)

the enormous efforts to clear [nettoyer] the temples and to free the main vistas and old roads from overgrown vegetation. This work would necessitate a Decauville toy-train system with up to 1,500 metres of track and up to one hundred “coolies” (wageworkers) at Angkor Wat alone. With the growing number of tourists clamouring to see the ruins, even the highest officials in Indochina complained about the poor tourist infrastructure at Angkor. In his report of 1908 to the minister of the colonies in Paris, Louis Alphonse Bonhoure, GGI per interim [p.i.] for a few months in 1907, painted – again, similar to remarks made after 1990 – a grim picture of the travel and visiting conditions to/at Angkor. In his opinion, it desperately needed improved access roads and a bungalow.46 Commaille also mentioned the necessity of a “Guide des ruines” or a “guide pratique” in 1908, as he judged the 1902 Madrolle edition (see above) as “archi-mauvais” (not useful to describe architecture), and stated: “Lajonquière promised the much desired guidebook. [… However] nobody knows the mon-

uments of the Angkor Group better than me; however, I have no time to vulgarise my knowledge in a brochure or a leaflet. That said, a good guide would sell here like bread, and the money gained from it would help our work” (RCA 5.1908). In 1909, the guide-like diary Quinze jours au pays des rois khmers by Rose Quaintenne was published in Saigon (with a preface by le Général de Beylié) and included a small sketch of the projected “maison des passagers (Angkor-Wat)” or a “bungalow des Indes, en pleine brousse avec tout le confort moderne” (Quaintenne 1909, 110–11) (Fig. IX.15). In his July 1910 report, Commaille mentioned that the Pt de la Sté d’enseignement mutuel au Cambodge had asked him to prepare what he called a one-hundred-page French/ Cambodian booklet Notions sur les arts anciens: Les monuments d’Angkor comparés aux autres monuments de l’antiquité. In his first official statement on Les monuments d’Angkor for the popular Revue Indochinoise in 1910,47 Commaille not only furthered the French-colonial narrative of Angkor

46  Between February and July, oxcarts were an option for travel from the neighbouring town of Kampong Thom, and between August and February the riverboats (messageries fluviales) used to reach Siem Reap ran only twice a week. This gave the visitor only sixty hours of time on-site, with fifteen hours alone needed for the round trip to the temples (Bonhoure 1908, 41). 47  Interestingly (ironically or even tragically), Commaille’s lurid title Le crépuscule des dieux in the same journal of 1910 (Commaille 19010b) represents the first in a series of popular essays about the “twilight of the [Angkorian] gods”. This saw a tragic end in King Sihanouk’s last film Crépuscule of 1969, which anticipated – after the Siamese invasion of the fifteenth century AD – the second disaster over Angkor and Cambodia (see next chapter, Pl. X.25o).

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.16a,b  Drawings in Commaille’s 1912 Guide aux ruines d’Angkor: plan and aerial view (Source: Commaille 1912, 29, inner front cover)

as a decayed, overgrown, and rather bucolic site. Again he voted for a tourist guide to popularise the site as a “homogenous ensemble [in] chronological order” and to form part of a “rational programme” of on-site restoration (Commaille 1910a, 2; see introductory quote of this sub-chapter). Indeed, the first comprehensive Guide aux ruines d’Angkor was published in 1912 by Commaille himself. It comprised 243 pages, 154 engravings, and 3 plans in 7 chapters. Information was provided on travel access from Saigon via Phnom Penh by boat, and on the history and architecture of Angkor; 76 pages of this were devoted to Angkor Wat, and 90 pages to Angkor Thom. Besides an old-fashioned map with a clearly pronounced, but chaotic, road network between the temples (Fig. IX.16a) and a newly imagined aerial perspective (Fig. IX.16b, compare Figs. IX.3 and 10a,b), Commaille could finally, in a photograph, offer the tourist world the already iconised view from Angkor Wat’s western entry gate towards the inner enclosure (Fig. IX.17a). Now the temple was well and truly a French-colonial jewel, totally cleared from vegetation (the rituals and preserving actions of the caring monks were now criticised), which, according to Commaille, easily surpassed all “architectural treasures of British-India and the Dutch Indies” (Commaille 1912, 32). Interestingly, this aesthetic creation of a 34

civilised and tamed Angkor Wat was incorporated into the French tourist industry even before his own guide came out. In the publication L’Indo-Chine: Guide-Album à l’usage des touristes by the French Committee of Colonial Tourism of 1911 (Touring-Club 1911), Commaille’s recently purified 350-metre grande axe du monument was set in direct relation to the modern axial urban refurbishment plans in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh (Fig. IX.17b). Although Commaille had just restored the original, lateral snake- and lion-head railings along the temple’s central causeway, the same elements were used in concrete casts by Phnom Penh’s chef du Service des travaux publics, Daniel Fabre, to embellish a new Khmer-style bridge connecting the new French quarter to the city’s old Wat Phnom (Sta­ pathi 1913, 566; compare Figs. V.3a-c), a site which was replicated for the Paris 1900 Universal Exhibition (see chapter V, Figs. V.2a,b). In a moment of transcultural simultaneity, the same duplicated casts were used to authenticate the pagode d’Angkor at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889, for which Fabre was responsible (see chapter IV). Later, Fabre’s urban design for Phnom Penh was also reused for the 1906 Marseille National Colonial Exhibition (see chapter V), where a similar Khmer-style bridge led the visitor into the Indochinese section (compare Fig. V.14b).

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figures IX.17a,b  Commaille’s photographs of Angkor Wat in his 1912 guide (above), and those of the 1911 Guide-Album to Indochina, here with Phnom Penh’s central monastery hill (below) and along Angkor Wat’s central passageway (Source: Commaille 1912, plate 2; Touring-Club 1911, 11)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.18a,b  Commaille’s sketches to guide the visitor through Angkor Wat (Source: Commaille 1912, 35, 59)

In his 1912 guidebook, Commaille introduced new ways to guide the visitors’ movements and visual attention through the ensemble using floor plan sketches that correlated to the guidebook’s text passages in the ‘now we follow, now we ascend, turn left, now look here’ style (compare with de Certeau’s theory of parcours above). Approaching from the western entry gate, the visitor finally reached the very top of the central tower to enjoy a spectacular view over the entire civilised ensemble in the middle of a dense tropical forest. Additionally, Commaille combined expla-

nations of the mythological bas-reliefs with photos and perspective sketches that even guided the gaze of the visitor towards the smallest detail (Figs. IX.18a,b). Besides his love of archaeological details, Commaille’s guidebook criticised any social (inter)action on site by/with the monks of the temples as unscientific and harmful.48 This marked a significant contrast to earlier publications in which the monks were appreciated as guardians for and preservers of the temples. After 1900, more French guides and travel literature were published.49 An early German guide was pro-

48  It is interesting to note Commaille’s judgement that the identified reused pillars taken from other parts of the

temple were a harmful intervention by the actual monks. This issue was also hotly debated by Finot, Parmentier, Delaporte and others, who voted to revise “these ridiculous reparations by the monks of Angkor Wat during an unknown epoch”, as Parmentier called it in the séance of 29 June 1911 of the Commission archéologique de l’Indochine (BCAI 1911, 238). In reality, this reuse had already occurred in the sixteenth century AD when Angkor experienced a Buddhist revival under Ang Chan, and had therefore become itself an integral part of the historical monument. See this fact in the discussion of ‘patrimonial affordance’ in the introduction (see Fig.Intro.19). 49  Travel reports and guides include Mélé 1889, Miramon-Fargues 1905, Lafitte 1908, Laumonier 1909, Quaintenne 1909, Montpensier 1910, Cachois 1910, Gourdon 1912, Pierre Loti’s famous Un pèlerin d’Angkor in 1912, Bréaudat 1913, later Groslier 1916 and 1924, Lechesne 1921, Crespin 1922, Robin 1928, Naudin 1928, Foulon 1931; compare Malleret 1934 and Roger 1936.

36

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

duced in 1912 (Suter 1912), and National Geographic published an English photo-essay on “The forgotten ruins of Indo-China” (Connor 1912), which combined illustrations from the site with those of plaster casts from Fournereau’s 1890 publication.50 Commaille also popularised his work through public lectures in France (Commaille 1912b, compare Coedès 1911) and in the German Ostasiatische Zeitung in 1913 (Commaille 1913a). Finally – and this marked the endpoint of the first phase of popularising Angkor in the tourist sector – Madrolle issued an updated version of its Indochina guidebook in 1913 as Guide aux ruines khmères. Vers Angkor. Saigon – Phnom Penh (Madrolle 1913). Now, Angkor was touted as the final goal of travel, and the journey from Saigon had shrunk to two days: roads for automobiles had been established, and a comfortable hotel had been built in front of Angkor Wat. The aller-retour trip could now be undertaken in one week (in 1902 it was eleven days), but the stay at Angkor itself was still advertised as a hurried two-day visit. In 1912, the same year that Commaille praised his first results at Angkor in his guidebook, work was stopped due to missing subventions, and his hasty efforts to clear Angkor Wat from (in some cases even protective) vegetation started to reveal their first negative effects (RCA 3.1912): stone elements were already falling from the cleared towers and roofs, columns were unstable and necessitated temporary re-enforcements, and a preserved tree at the temple’s entry fell and destroyed surrounding freestanding sculptures. In the last years leading up to his sudden death in April 1916 – ­ and unmentioned to this day in all information about him – Jean Commaille, Angkor’s first conservateur, also became an important protagonist in our transcultural history of heritage: his efforts to clear and stabilise Angkor Wat and to adequately present it to a growing numbers of visitors went hand in hand with his involvement in staging (or better, ‘translating’) Angkor Wat as an almost full-scale replica, ten thousand kilometres away, in France’s second centre of colonial politics: Marseille. Initially, it was Henri Vildieu – formerly responsible for building an Angkor-­ styled pavilion for the 1906 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille (see chapter V) and now chef du Service des bâtiments civils in Hanoi – who, in the same March 1912 report by Commaille, suggested that Angkor Wat was rather unstable and therefore dangerous for potential visitors.

In response, Commaille began, for the first time in Angkor Wat’s conservation history, to bring cement, concrete, iron clamps, and beton armé into the structure. Shortly afterwards (see chapter VI), he became the artistic commissaire-­ adjoint for the Indochinese section of Marseille’s second National Colonial Exhibition of 1922 (originally planned for 1916). In a 1915 letter from Angkor Thom, Commaille provided archaeologically grounded sketches of the not yet reconstructed pinnacles of Angkor Wat’s central towers (see Figs. VI.4a,b). Commaille’s hypothetical drawings were then used in France by the architect Delaval to reconstitute the temple’s replicated silhouette in Marseille (see Figs. VI.12a,b and 18a,b). This materialised, but ephemeral, test version would later migrate back (now be ‘re-translated’) into the discussion about the picture-perfect reconstruction of the ‘real’ site itself. Within a unique transcultural constellation brought forward in the two-volume structure of this book, the final version of the completely restored temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia (this goal was only reached and propagated in around 1930, see below) was in fact first materialised in the early 1920s as an almost full-scale and indeed immaculate test version in southern France! However, the connectivity between the twin versions of Angkor Wat in Angkor and Marseille was even more complex: When Delaval sought – via Delaporte mediating through his musée Indo-chinois in Paris – to attach thousands of lightweight casts (in French staff) of Angkor Wat onto the replica’s wooden inner skeleton at the Marseille Exhibition, Commaille foresaw a “salle de vente pour les moulages” next to his own “habitation du Conservateur à Angkor Vat” (RCA 4.1914). Furthermore, while Delaval was making watercolours of his Angkor Wat replica in Marseille (see Pl. VI.6a,b), Commaille was doing the same at Angkor proper. From his first stay at Angkor in 1899 up to his death in 1916, Commaille produced sketches, watercolours, and oil paintings of the temples, thereby training his own ‘picturesque eye’ towards the site51. He also qualifies as what Nadine André(-Pallois) in her studies on French artists in colonial Indochina has termed a typical autodidact or “Sunday painter” of his time – however talented (André 1992; compare André-Pallois 1997, 78–83, Lombard 1994, Lemire 1900) (Pl. IX.11a–f). Commaille was reportedly “assassinated by bandits” on his way to the temples in April 1916.52 Later, three of the six bandits were condemned to death and executed in Phnom

50  Compare with other English publications on Angkor, like Candee 1925, as a summary André 1990/1997, Busy 1992, Rooney 2001. 51  Under the same title, I organised an international conference in December 2015 in Vienna/Austria to analyse the different artistic and scientific approaches to map, inventory, hierarchise and popularise regional art in the late-colonial period (1900–50), see www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/the-picturesque-eye (accessed 20 February 2016). 52  Henri Parmentier wrote the obituary for Commaille in the BEFEO of 1916. Calling him “the right man in the right place”, he helped establish the EFEO’s official narrative to sacrifice its personnel for a higher (here archaeological) mission civilisatrice (Parmentier 1916). In reality, and at the time when Commaille numbered

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.19  Funeral of Jean Commaille near the Bayon temple on 4 January 1921 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Penh. Even his commemoration was a transcultural affair: the construction of his tomb, embellished with cement mouldings à la Angkorienne, was supervised by his successor, Henri Marchal, and installed at the southeastern vicinity of the Bayon temple. It was inaugurated with an official ceremony on 4 January 1921 (Fig. IX.19). In his speech only a few years after the First World War, Louis Finot contrasted the concept of preserving ruins with an approch to

restore/reconstruct their completeness. More precisely, Finot juxtaposed the “belated Germanic romanticism in favour of the pittoresque effect of dilapidated and overgrown ruins”53 with the (French) “Latin tradition to bring ruins [with the help of Commaille at Angkor, MF] back to their true and readable beauty, back to a grandeur as the spectacle of the human esprit” (BEFEO 1920, 221–22, here 221).54 When the fully ‘restored’ Angkor Wat was finally re-

the annual budget for the work at Angkor with astonishing “20,000 piastres/54,000 francs”, his murder occurred in the midst of a difficult conflictive situation that he himself explained in his very last handwritten notes (RCA 3./4. 1916). He called it a culminating “movement of protesting Cambodians” to negotiate the EFEO’s employment strategy for Angkor (“520 coolies” came to register at Commaille in April 1916) in relation to the underpaid native work plans of the French administration. Cambodia’s enforced labour system [corvée] and the rural population’s obligatory daily work in the rice fields formed the nation’s primary agricultural resource. It is important to mention here the unknown fact that, following Finot’s report of 1921, “after the attentat [against Commaille], the agglomeration of the indigenous houses around the access to the grande chaussée of Angkor Wat was limited [supprimée] and the small village moved [rejeté plus loin en arrière]” (Finot 1921b, 92). 53  Compare the perception of ruins in the German-speaking context around 1900 later in this chapter (compare Falser 2005). 54  In original French: “Le résultat de ce grand effort [of Commaille’s work, MF], il est sous vos yeux. Pour en mesurer l’étendue, il faut pouvoir comparer le lumineux Angkor Thom d’aujourd’hui au chaos qu’il était il y a treize ans. Sans doute le chaos a ses admirateurs, et il n’est pas impossible que quelques tenants attardés du romantisme germanique regrettent l’effet pittoresque que font les éboulis parmi les broussailles. Pour nous, fidèles à notre tradition latine, nous croyons que la beauté vraie, c’est la beauté intelligible et qu’aucun des prestiges de la matière aveugle n’égale en grandeur le spectacle de l’esprit humain s’évertuant à réaliser dans les choses l’idéal qu’il porte en lui. Or c’est là précisément ce que Commaille nous a montré. En dégageant ces antiques ruines de leur gangue, il nous a permis de comprendre la pensée des vieux âges, ses desseins, ses procédés, ses repentirs et les déconvenues de sa touchante inexpérience technique.” [italics MF]

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2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

alised in 1922 Marseille, with the help of Commaille’s sketches from 1915, the replica’s artificial, newly invented interior comprised a salle de l’EFEO in which Angkor’s first conservator was commemorated as a hero of France’s mission overseas (see Fig. VI.22a). After Commaille’s death and his replacement with Marchal in 1916 (see next sub-­chapter), Angkor Park in the 1920s and 1930s saw a legal transformation from a patchwork of single temple sites into one coherent archaeological reserve, a great ‘spectacle’ in the best sense of the word, and, finally, into a complete touristic commodification as a kind of archaeological theme park with improving infrastructure and ever more detailed guidebooks. This process was briefly discussed in the introduction to this book with the aim of creating a conceptual – transcultural – bridge between both heterotopian sites of universal/colonial exhibitions (covered in the whole first volume of this book) to ‘time-space-compress the world’, and theme parks to open up archaeological heritage for a global clientele of tourists (see in epilogue II). In the context of Angkor this second tendency would accelerate in the lead-up to the Second World War and far into Cambodia’s independence in the 1950s and 1960s. The EFEO skilfully managed to remain the sole actor on-site until 1975. Just a couple of years after the 1922 Marseille event where the physical ‘mobility’ of Angkor Wat from Cambodia to France was staged with the temple’s first full-scale, ephemeral replica, the legal concept of cultural heritage [patrimoine culturel] was exported in the other direction: Édouard Daladier, then minister of the colonies, wrote an official letter on 23 December 1924 to the French president, Gaston Doumergue, with a proposal to apply the French 1913 Law to Protect Historic Monuments (defined as immobile [immeubles]) onto the French-colonial legislation for Indochina (this debate would also recur after 1990, see chapter XII and Fraoua 1992). His argument was the classical trope of a colonial self-inflicted burden: “Indochina possesses a unique heritage in art and archaeology which is constantly increasing due to ever-new discoveries. The protection of this rich legacy ­[richesses] is a duty which is imposed irrefutably on the French authority, not only in territories of its direct sovereignty, but also in its protectorates.” Daladier also pointed to the fact that the EFEO had been declared, by decree of 3 April 1920, an “établissement de la personnalité civile” whose official duty included the “conservation, listing and de-listing of the historic monuments of Indochina”.55 In the face of increasing heritage tourism in the region, he suggested “a mere adaptation of the French law […] with its commission des Monuments historiques in the métropole onto the local intitutions” (GGI

1925, 1–3). And, in fact, Dou­mergue decreed on 23 December 1924 (GGI 1925, 4–11) that “the Law of 31 December 1913 was, almost word by word, extended to French Indochina” with the EFEO in the central position of setting up, controlling, and applying the registers of the listed monuments under French-colonial safeguard. At this point, Parmentier’s second volume, the Listes générales des inscriptions et des monuments du Champa et du Cambodge (Parmentier 1923a), was used as a basis to establish, by decree of 16 May 1925, Indochina’s “list of protected monuments” [liste des monuments classés]: totalling 1,048 temple sites, with 670 of them in Cambodia alone (Finot 1928, 60). It may have been this elementary shift in cultural her­ itage laws over French Indochina that made the acting ­director of the EFEO, Louis Finot, raise concerns about Ang­kor Park: during the Conseil de Gouvernement de l’Indochine on 24 May 1925 he complained about the “alarming fact that Angkor was virtually flooded by antique dealers”, claiming the need for “three European and a much larger number of indigenous guardians” for an archaeological area of thirty-six square kilometres, and thus relaunching the debate over the creation of an all-comprising protection zone of Angkor.56 Asked by Cambodia’s résident supérieur, François Marius Baudoin, about the planned “arrêté de Parc d’Angkor” and the consequences for the local inhabitants, Henri Marchal, the acting conservator at Angkor, had a decidedly Orientalist opinion (see chapter XII): It seems to me that the exclusion of the indigenous population towards the outside the limits of this Park would result in a fatal kind of public incapacitation, and would be rather unfortunate for various reasons: first of all for the recruitment of workmen, and also from a picturesque point of view. The numerous painters and artists inside the Park are pleased to see circulating indigenous groups. And they find with them and their herds and chariots motifs which correspond well with the silhouettes of the monuments themselves. The indigenous inside the ruins are certainly much less displeasing to the eye than certain caravans of tourists, and I dare to say, much less dangerous for the monuments. [italics MF] (RCA 12.1924)

On 30 October 1925 – only ten months after Doumergue’s decree – the acting GGI, Maurice Antoine François Mon­ guillot, finally signed the decisive ‘Order to create the Archaeological Park of Angkor’.57 It was certainly the most important document to convert this centuries-old Asian, then Buddhist temple site of Angkor into an Occidental reserve of colonial prestige, archaeological manipulation,

55  For a larger context of the (de)listing of Khmer monuments, see ANOM INDO GGI 16917 (Classement

et déclassement de monuments historiques).

56  Extrait du procès-verbal de la séance du 24 mai 1925 du Conseil de Gouvernement de l’Indochine, see

ANOM INDO GGI 60089. 57  Arrêté créant le parc archéologique d’Angkor (Hanoi, 30 October 1925), in: Journal officiel 1925, 2347; reprinted in BEFEO 26 (1926), 677–78.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

and touristic exploitation. In the space of nine paragraphs, highly specialised parameters had turned Angkor Park into a kind of “exhibitionary complex” (compare Bennet 1988) and (after Foucault’s criteria, see introduction) “enacted utopia” of/for cultural heritage: In §1a, a “zone réservée” was called for, which would “comprise the principle monuments of the archaeological Group of Angkor [and] “ensure (a) the conservation and maintenance of these monuments, (b) their safeguard by a special personnel, and (c) the improvement of the park’s access and circulation conditions”. Its “limits” now defined a clear inside and outside of (non)protection, (non)manipulation, and (non)commodification and were delegated to the résident supérieur au Cambodge in conformity with the director of the EFEO. In §2, “European agents” were placed in charge of the surveillance service [personnel de gardiennage], with local staff effectively serving as “urban police, security service [sûrété], indigenous guards and a police station [gendarmerie]”. Both the “guardians” to control, and the individual “guides” (§3) to explain the park to potential visitors were to be nominated by the résident supérieur. “All persons not living or officially working in the park” were obliged to obtain a “visiting permission [permis de visiter] from the local administration, with a validity of five, ten, fifteen or thirty days. […] All persons, except the European personnel of the EFEO, with an interest in painting, drawing, photographing or filming inside the park needed a special permission”, since “operations to make mouldings or rubbings” [opérations de moulage ou d’estampage] necessitated a “special authorisation of the director of EFEO” (§4). The admission fee [taxe de visite] and the “tax for filmmakers [were] a concerted act” on various administrative levels (§5). They helped to expand the budget of the EFEO (§6), which had, on an annual basis and in agreement with both its director and the résident supérieur, to set up the “working programme for the drainage [assainissement], access, and organisation [aménagement] of the forest inside the park” (§7). Additionally, and this extended French control from land and temples to the living conditions of human beings, the résident supérieur had the last word on the use of the pasture land, and the rights of fishing and hunting, ­circulation, and housing of the indigenous people inside

the park (§8). Consequently, Baudoin’s additional order of 16 December 192658 defined for the first time ever, in §1, the concrete limits of the Angkor Park. The detailed verbal description and an annexed plan (Pl. IX.12) were based on the above-mentioned official map by Buat/Ducret of 1909. The line went around the southwestern part of Ang­kor Wat’s moat, continued around Phnom Bakheng and the western side of the moat of Angkor Thom, included temple complexes such as Prah Khan, Neak Pean, and Ta Som in the northern and eastern section, went south in the eastern section through the Western Baray with the West Mebon temple to Pre Rup, headed back west to Srah Srang, covered Bat Chum and Prasat Kravanh in the southeast, and finally went back to the southern edge of the moat of Angkor Wat. In addition, a whole system of signalisation was initiated: §2 limited the speed of cars inside the park to thirty kilometres per hour and also limited their parking to designated areas; §3 prohibited hunting in the park, except of “harmful animals”; whereas §4 permitted the inhabitants inside the park to “continue their habitual cultures”, fishing and cattle grazing in close observance, but “formally prohibited” any animals near the monuments and “causeways and terraces of Angkor”. As a strict order to freeze the newly created Angkor Park to its status quo – and this remains a highly questionable issue also after Angkor’s nomination as UNESCO World Heritage in 1992 and the foundation of the national protection agency APSARA (see chapter XII) – §5 forbade “any new and the extension of old cultivations, constructions of buildings and routes, or any modification of access roads, clearing or transformation of the forest without authorisation of the résident supérieur and the director of the EFEO” (BEFEO 1926, 681). §6 placed the system of guarding and guiding inside the Park under the control of the Angkor Conservator. After additional modifications one week later,59 a new order on 30 September 192960 by the new GGI, Pierre Pasquier, modified all the above-mentioned decisions with an intensification of the control of entrance fee collection through a strict registering system within the growing hotel business (§9–17), above all the Hôtel d’Angkor-les-ruines close to Angkor Wat. §19 added the expression “embellissement du Parc d’Angkor” to the duties of the fee-col-

58  Arrêté délimitant le parc d’Angkor (Phnom Penh, 16 December 1926), in: BEFEO 1926, 680–81. 59  Just a week later, the machine of French colonial administration added another order by the GGI to fix the

admission fees for Angkor Park, by differentiating in §1 between 1–5, 6–10, 11–15 and 16–30 days of admission and (a) between visitors from Cambodia, Indochina or from outside, altogether ranging from one to twenty piasters (“indigenous servants” went for 30 centimes); and (b) between amateur painters to professional photographers and cinematographers, ranging from one to two hundred piasters. §2 listed persons to be excluded from the entrance fee, ranging from members of the Cambodian royal family and its ministers and dignitaries, to European, Asian and indigenous inhabitants of Siem Reap, and members or personnel of the EFEO to monks and the disabled. See Arrêté fixant la quotité des taxes applicables à la délivrances des permis de visite dans les limites du parc d’Angkor (Hanoi, 21 December 1926), in: Journal Officiel 1926, 3490, reprinted in BEFEO 1926, 681–83). Compare a similar discussion in chapter II and epilogue II. 60  Arrêté replaçant par des nouvelles dispositions […] (Hanoi, 30 September 1929), in: Journal officiel 1929, 3779, reprinted in BEFEO 1929, 552–6.

40

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

lecting EFEO (BEFEO 1929, 556). Finally, Pasquier’s new order on 21 May 193061 changed the limits of the Angkor Park considerably: it added not only the whole Western Baray but also a thirty-metre enlarged area along the access road of Angkor Wat’s protection line to the reserve (Pl. IX.13). The latter had small-scale, though considerable, effects for the local inhabitants situated close to the temple since “the immediate vicinities of Angkor Wat could now be cleared from huts which had been built in recent years and annoyingly disfigured the access to the temple”, as the Chroniques of the BEFEO in 1930 commented (BEFEO 1930, 215; compare epilogue II with Pl. EpII.19b). Between the arrêtés of 1925 and 1930, a major modifica­ tion of the Park’s access system was in fact already integrated into the legal map of 1930: whereas the tourist’s circulation radius in Commaille’s guide from 1912 was intended for the age of oxcarts, horses, and elephant riding, Marchal’s new concept was based on a new means of transportation – the car. Additionally, aerial photography was introduced as the third dimension for archaeological research via war-related reconnaissance flights (compare, much later, Groslier 1952a). If previous aerial depictions, from Delaporte’s 1880 publications up to those of Commaille and Beylié in 1909, had been based on pure fantasy, now orthogonal aerial shots were for the first time turned into a coherent and absolutely precise depiction of Angkor. This also helped to develop a better understanding of the area’s ancient settlement and water system (Fig. IX.20, compare Fig. X.13a). On this topographical basis, Marchal was finally able to introduce a completely new visitor’s ­circulation system – the so-called Petit Circuit and Grand Circuit. An implemented rectangular grid of access roads through the main archaeological area perfectly catered (and still does) to time-pressed tourists rushing from one temple to another. In comparison to the first detailed Angkor map in 1908/9 (see Pl. IX.8a), which contained at least partial recognition of the existing road and path system of the local inhabitants, Marchal’s road system produced – in combination with the already delimited perimeter of protection – what in general may be termed a “geometricised colonial space” (Dünne 2009, 57). Right away, a map of this circulation system became an essential element of Marchal’s 1928 Guide archéologique aux temples d’Angkor: Angkor Vat, Angkor Thom et les monuments du petit et du grand circuit (Fig. IX.21; compare with Fig. EpII.2). It was also published in English a few years later and reprinted in both languages well into Cambodia’s era of independence (Marchal 1930, 1933, 1955, 1961, 1964). Inside the park and along the prescribed parcours (com­ pare de Certeau 1988), picturesque landscaping around the restored temples was initiated (see next sub-chapter), and

Figure IX.20  Undated collage of aerial photographs to get a precise ‘image’ of Angkor Park (c. 1925) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

these changes produced picture-­perfect vistas towards the archaeological monument for another technical innovation on the tourist market – the camera. In this context, the iconic repertoire of Angkor Wat comprising Commaille’s propagation of the temple’s central axis was now enriched with a new feature – the off-central pathway motif mirroring the five-tower silhouette and the branches of carefully preserved, or newly planted, individual trees in the northern or southern water basins (Fig. IX.22a). Both camera-ready vistas were, however, transcultural products. To a certain extent they were ‘back-translated’ versions of similar visual solutions aesthetically invented and tested for an Occidental public in the 1922 and 1931 Colonial Exhibitions in Marseille and Paris (compare Figs. VI.16–18, 21, 22; Figs. VII.17; Pl. VII.14). Furthermore, in the best sense of the term ‘picturesque’, colonial archaeology and archaeological landscape design – now catering to popular tourist photography – had come full circle in the visual trajectories that were (a) aesthetically prefigured by the Roman antiquarian scenes created by early landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain (1600–82); that (b) landscape theorists around 1800, such as the British vicar William Gil-

61  Arrêté fixant la limite du Parc d’Angkor (Dalat, 21 May 1930), in: Journal officiel 1930, 2040, reprinted in BEFEO 1930, 242–43.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.21  Plan of the Petit and Grand Circuit as depicted in Marchal’s 1928 Guide archéologique aux temples d’Angkor (Source: Marchal 1928, 220)

42

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figure IX.22a  The picturesque view towards the central section of Angkor Wat, as photographed and published in Marchal’s guide to Angkor in 1928 (Source: Marchal 1928, 49)

Figure IX.22b  William Gilpin’s oval, Claude glass-like illustration of a picturesque view of a ruin in Great Britain, as depicted in his Observations on the River Wye (1770) and published in 1782 (Source: Gilpin 1782, 17)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

pin, had turned into a methodological and popularised approach to “picturesque beauty” and “picturesque travel”62 (Fig.IX.22b); and that (c) painters such as William Hodges or the Daniell brothers and nineteenth-century photographers like Felice Beato or Samuel Bourne had applied to exotic ruins in colonial contexts in Asia. From the late 1920s onwards, however, the automobile was introduced as a new means of transport, and Marchal’s guidebook indicated the distance between each temple and the realised bungalow near Angkor Wat.63 By 1930 the French colonial tourist industry connected Angkor to a dense sightseeing transportation network by boat, train, road, and airplane, which stretched through Cambodia and the rest of Indochina. Publications like Nores’ Itinéraires automobiles en Indochine (Nores 1930) (Pl. IX.14a,b) or Gauthier’s Le tourisme en Indochine (Gauthier 1935, compare Gourdon 1920) exemplify this mode of highly individualised tour suggestions with detailed individual maps and information about hotels, restaurants, scenic spots, and even gas stations (Pl. IX.14c). In order to extend the actual visiting time during a two-day Angkor tour, Marchal suggested visits to the hill temple of Phnom Bakheng for sunset views and Angkor Wat or Bayon during a full moon. Nevertheless, he regretted the never-ending tourist rush and proposed for the first time in a guidebook on Ang­kor – as an antidote and vernacular side stop, comparable to colonial exhibitions back in France and similar to heritagisation strategies after 1990 inside and around Angkor Park (epilogue II) – a visit to the “indigenous villages with their stilted houses necessary for inundation in the season of high water […] a tableau rustique and amusing for the lovers of exotic spectacles” (Marchal 1928, 203). However, the enforced speed of this early kind of mass tourism also produced a certain indifference and disrespect towards the temples (vandalism, graffiti, and theft). Even the advent of faster boats from Saigon and two paved circuit roads for automobiles in Angkor Park did not seem to be enough to satiate the demands of the growing tourist industry. In order to “satisfy the universal desire to visit the famous ruins” (Bontoux 1929, 3) and to overcome the time-consuming boat travel, the Saigon head office of Tourism Indochina launched aerial tourism in 1929. In a bilingual public relations brochure, The opening of aerial

tourism in Indochina: From Saigon river to Angkor-Vat on a straight wing, the third dimension – until now only accessible by military reconnaissance flights – was for the first time available to tourists. After a one hour and forty-five-minute flight from Phnom Penh, the act of landing with a hydrofoil airplane in the moat of Angkor Wat reduced this and other temples, which only twenty years earlier had been seen as inaccessible for Westerners due to the impenetrable forest, to mere toy miniatures (Figs. IX.23a–c): To arrive over Angkor in full flight, at a thousand metres of height, to see below in striking miniature and like a precise synopsis, the stately ruins developed in the folds of the millenary forest […] An infinity of sensations of which nothing else can give an idea […] There is perhaps nothing more splendid than to take in at a glance the whole spectacle. [italics MF] (Bontoux 1929, 11)

Once more, Susan Stewart’s analysis On Longing and its constitutive elements “of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection” (Stewart 1993, as discussed in chapter IV) can be applied to this specific, heterotopian connection between universal exhibitions and archaeological reserves. However, other transcultural examples also fit into this paradigm: a high-rising structure such as the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Universal Exhibition, for instance, enabled the visitor to perceive the world, as seen from the tower’s top-most viewing platform, into a temporarily appropriated, timeand-space-compressed “miniature” and toy-world spectacle (including the pagode d’Angkor, for the first time represented as a pavilion). Forty years later, aerial tourism, colonial reconnaissance airplanes, and tourist guides on one hand, and the spectacle of the temple’s replica inside the 1931 Paris exhibition along the avenue des colonies on the other, dwarfed the actual ‘gigantic’ temple of Angkor Wat, turning it into a ‘miniature’ (compare Fig. VII.22b), picture-ready tourist ‘souvenir’ and merely another masterpiece in the French overseas ‘collection’ of a colonial patrimoine culturel. With Marchal’s tourist publication of 1928 (and later editions) as the standard for many decades to come, in addi­ tion to George Coedès’ more academic introduction Pour mieux comprende Angkor in 1943 (Coedès 1943a; compare Coedès 1963), guidebooks during the 1940s and 1950s

62  Gilpin’s short essays from around 1792 have been republished in Andrews 1994, vol. 2, 7–25 and are

extensively commented on. They were used in many other publications about the picturesque concept and can be understood in our wider context of ‘archaeologised heritage’ (Falser/Juneja 2013b), see Weiler 2013. 63  Or as Marchal himself put it: “I just give some special indications, how to get there, distinguishable characteristics of the individual temples, and details of special attention. […] The tourist under time pressure who cannot visit all temples, can focus on every temple’s speciality and make his choice according to his taste.” And furthermore, he stated: “Fifteen years ago one could not imagine finding his way – then only with a lot of time and with the only transport of a bull carriage or a horse – through the meandering pathways which led through the diverse monuments of Angkor. Today, a network of roads navigable by automobiles link all the principle monuments of the Angkor Group and allow the visitor to reach even the furthest temples in a minimum of time: they are inscribed in the so-called ‘Large and Small Circuit’. That means one can see much more in the same limited time” (Marchal 1928, v–vi).

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2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

Figures IX.23a—c  Aerial photographs of Angkor Wat from the late 1920s, showing a hydrofoil airplane landing on the temple’s moat (Source: Bontoux 1929, 6, 11; Véron 2003, 64)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.24  Tourist guiding system along dotted lines as first introduced in Glaize’s 1944/48 guidebook Les monuments du groupe d’Angkor (Source: Glaize 1944/48, 108)

brought only a few important innovations. However, these guidebooks standardised the visiting behaviour of the growing, now internationalised, tourist masses in the postwar period. Maurice Glaize, the Conservateur d’Angkor between 1937 and 1947 (see next sub-chapter) published his guidebook Les monuments du groupe d’Angkor in 1944 and included an already canonised choice of illustrated viewpoints (Glaize 1944, 1948, 1963). As a novelty, Glaize’s guide completely reframed the tourist’s time management plan and visiting behaviour. By this time, the menu of temple sites had become too long for the individual visitor to choose from. To quote Glaize: “Do not demand to see them all” (Glaize 1948, v). As a consequence, he introduced eight so-called “itinerary-types” [itinéraire-types], which included indications of the circulation distances in kilometres for the time-pressed tourist (Glaize 1948, vi–viii). The itineraries – all of them included Angkor Wat, of course, as the central highlight (Glaize 1948, 74–93) – ranged from a morning or afternoon stay, to a five-day and a more than five-day programme with an incredible average radius of thirty kilometres per day (the maximum was seventy kilometres!). This included (like today) sunrise and sunset spots, full-moon watching, Apsara dances inside Angkor

Wat, and elephant rides up the hill temple of Phnom Bakheng. Interestingly, even the one-week tour plan to out-ofcircuit [hors-circuit] temples did not make a single comment about the local population, its villages, and pagoda activities. Based on what Marchal had initiated with his preliminary studies intended to sketch future touristic paths through yet-to-be-cleared archaeological terrain (Pl. 15a,b), Glaize now introduced a new guiding system for the temples, which helped the visitor to find his/her way through larger archaeological sites by following a dotted line indicated in the folding plans of the temple. Because everything was mapped out by the guidebook, individual discoveries were not included in viewing the specific charms of each temple (Fig. IX.24). Much later, the idea of prescribed walking paths was taken up for Angkor Wat (Pl. IX.16) by Jean Laur, the technician of the Conservation in the late 1950s, when he published his Angkor: An illustrated guide to the monuments in 2002 (Laur 2002). Following up on the long-established colonial tradition of appropriative cataloguing and comparative listing of cultural heritage, Glaize’s illustrative charts covered topics ranging from the development of lintel decoration styles to a – at that point hotly debated64 – chronology of the kings

64  This comparative styling system had been introduced in the late 1920s by an art historian from the Parisian

musée Guimet, Philippe Stern and his student, Gilberte de Coral-Remusat (Stern 1927, Coral-Remusat 1940).

46

2. Governmental decrees, first interventions, and the guidebooks

of Angkor. The last real guide in the pre-independence era of the EFEO was published in Saigon by its chief archaeologist, Henri Parmentier, in 1950 (Parmentier 1950, 1960). It focused more on building and ornamentation styles and was less useful as a practical guidebook; nevertheless, the folkloristic touch of the cover of his book left no doubt about its purpose for use in the fast-growing tourist industry (Pl. IX.17a), and a new Carte archéologique d’Angkor now covered an area of forty by twenty-five kilometres (Pl. IX.17b). In the period of Cambodia’s independence when several other information guides by the National Tourism Agency were issued, and shortly after Royal Air Cambodge (compare Figs. Intro.8 and X.38) as much as the Société khmère des distilleries began to use Angkor Wat in its marketing scheme (Fig. IX.25; compare Pl. Intro.26b), Marchal’s re-edited book Nouveau guide d’Angkor of 1964 finally expanded the scale of a visit to Ang­kor with a “Carte touristique” of the whole “Royaume du Cambodge” (Marchal 1964, 248) (Fig. IX.26).

Figure IX.25  Angkor Wat’s iconised view for the advertisement of Cambodia’s national brewery, published in Cambodian French journals of Kambuja and Cambodge d’au­ jourd’hui (Source: Kambuja 4.1969, 4)

Figure IX.26  Marchal’s 1964 guidebook to Angkor with a touristic map to cover the archaeological site of Angkor along with the major animal viewing sites all over Cambodia, including all transportation facilities of roads, airports and harbours (Source: ­Marchal 1964, 248)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of anastylosis (1930—1973) […] Indo-China will conserve its resources. And our collections which, on the basis of original artefacts, will only hold those objects which otherwise would be destined to perish, and they will not be obtained through pillaging and by devastation of the monuments: we will not only not demolish them, but preserve and conserve them. We will not restore them which is, of all forms of vandalism, the worst. Let us hope that our vigilance, in this context, can be extended to those monuments on a territory which does not belong to us, but where we have, if I am not wrong, policing rights: in this way, the temples of Angkor will no longer be exploited like quarries by so-called archaeologists, despite that this still occurred rather recently, to the great outrage of the indigenous people. [italics MF] (Barth 1901, 2) —Auguste Barth in his preface to the first volume of the Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient in 1901

When the famous French Sanskritist Auguste Barth prefaced the very first volume of the bulletin of the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in 1901 (Barth 1901; see quote above), the school had only just been founded in Saigon a few years earlier, in 1898. Its task was not only to collect and translate written sources from the Indochinese Peninsula into French, but also to document and map, conserve and protect, exhibit and make accessible in situ all archaeological evidence of this French-colonial sphere. Barth’s six-page letter, addressed to EFEO’s acting director, Louis Finot, lamented the “humiliating” fact that the French had been one of the last European powers to establish a scientific institution for their colonial civilising missions overseas. Although Barth praised the new French undertaking, he set it at once in direct scientific and diplomatic context with other colonial empires in Asia. He cited “nos savants confrères de Java” with their Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (Dutch: Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen) – founded in 1778 in the capital Batavia of the Dutch East Indies as the oldest of its kind in colonial Asia – as a model for the French school. However, Barth did not hesitate to mention – now quoting the famous Dutch Indianist Hendrik Kern – that it was precisely the new French institution of the EFEO which served as the major reference for the Dutch when in 1901 they instituted an archaeological mission for the Dutch East Indies and its rich archaeological heritage, especially on Java, including the temple sites of Hinduist Prambanan and Buddhist Borobudur. Setting up this scientific, cultural, and altogether – as suggested in the introduction to this chapter – diplomatic network of knowledge exchange and collaboration within Southeast Asia, Barth ostensibly neglected another obvious reference: he did not mention British India in expressis verbis as the most powerful colonial entity in Asia, nor its Archaeological Survey of India, which – with the army engineer Alexander Cunningham and the archae-

ologist John Marshall as its first directors65 – was founded in 1861 on the basis of the famous Calcutta-based (Royal) Asiatic Society, created in 1784. There may have been good reasons for this glaring omission: Barth had tried, rather unsuccessfully, in the 1890s, together with his Indianist colleagues of the Académie des Inscriptions and BellesLettres, Michel Bréal et Émile Senart, to create a so-called Société de Chandernagor (Finot 1921, 1; Singaravélou 1999, 37–38, 81–83). The plan was for this society to be named after a town that was part of the French possessions in India, including the trading port of Pondicherry. Its aim was to rival the British-colonial centre of Orientalist learning located some thousand kilometres to the north in Calcutta. How­ever, the French influence in India had already been lost around 1800 to the British, and this loss was later often framed as ‘another Alsace-Lorraine’ in the French psyche after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. It is no coincidence that Barth’s letter was written in a period when the French-­ English rivalry had just been reactivated (in 1900) over the open question of Siam (today Thailand), and when the final so-called ‘retrocession’ of the territory of Angkor back to French Cambodge was within reach (see chapter VI.1). In this fragile geopolitical constellation with the British as far as Burma and Malaysia to the west, the Dutch to the south in the East Indies, the French in eastern Indochina, and Siam as an independent buffer-zone in between, the colonial claims of safeguarding prestigious archaeological heritages formed a powerful tool with which to underline each colonial power’s raison d’être as a protective force. Digging deeper into this general observation, it can be argued that the various projects aiming to re-establish ancient temple sites in the colonies must be read as the physical equivalents of the applied, on-site civilising missions of various European motherlands (Falser 2015a,c). In this context, their programmatic methods and technical imple-

65  Marshall published his important Conservation manual: A handbook for the use of archaeological officers

and others entrusted with the care of ancient monuments in Calcutta in 1923 (see Parmentier’s short and rather neutral review in the BEFEO of 1923, in Parmentier 1923b; compare Sengupta 2013).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

mentations – termed conservation, restoration, and reconstruction (or anastylosis, see below) – were presented and discussed in European journals within the progressively internationalised scientific community. These approaches were either negotiated in a kind of diplomatic network of technical knowledge exchange (in the case of the FrenchDutch colonial constellation), or they were subjects of heavy criticism between concurring powers.66 Thus it was no accident that Barth mixed his 1901 comments about a scientific collaboration between France and Holland in their Southeast Asian colonies with a critique of the British-colonial full-scale “restoration” – initiated by the British engineer J. D. Belgar since 1881 – of the Indian temple site of Bodh-Gaya (literally: the birthplace of Lord Buddha) “as the worst form of vandalism” (Barth 1901, 2) (Figs. IX.27a,b).67 As an aesthetic and moral counterposition, he called for a French “preservation and conservation” of Indochinese temples. Into this statement he enmeshed the French claim to protect the – politically, still Siamese – temples of Angkor against exploitation by pirate archaeologists or from being used as a quarry for the local population. In what we conceptionalised at the beginning of this chapter as a transnational knowledge flow between Europe

Figures IX.27a,b  The Buddhist temple of Bodhgaya/India, before and after restoration (Source: Leoshko 1988, 22; Cunningham 1892, plate16)

66  See the debate about cross-colonial networks of knowledge exchanges in 2.3 in this chapter. 67  See also the reference to the iconic quality of Bodhgaya in epilogue I of this book (see Fig. EpI.2). For the

Bodhgaya context, compare Cunningham 1892 with Leoshko 1988, Guy 1991, Guha-Thakurta 2004.

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and Asia, Barth’s 1901 statements were no exception. They (post)colonial intellectual history (see the short introduction in this chapter), several questions emerge: Where in were indirectly hinting at the British-colonial context in India and explicitly pointing to those upcoming tasks in the Eurasian “contact zone” (Pratt 1992, 4–7)68 as a space of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies referred to an intercolonial encounter was the term anastylosis used for actual methodological debate that was occurring within the first time? How did it contrast with the terms and conthe European scientific com­munity of cultural heritage cepts of conservation, restoration, and reconstruction that protection. In this debate – during the same period as were used earlier or in parallel? When, how, and by whom Barth’s short letter for the EFEO in 1901 – distinguished was the term anastylosis transcribed in the French version scholars and practitioners of historic preservation in the of anastylose for French-colonial archaeology at Angkor German-speaking world, such as the German Georg Dehio Park, and to what initial and final aesthetic and structural and his colleague and first Habs­burgian conservator gener- effect for the temples between 1930 and 1970? As we shall al, Alois Riegl, considered how “to conserve and not re- see, the old-fashioned narrative of a direct knowledge ‘transfer’ from a European metropolitan centre (Paris in France, store” historic sites (as Dehio called it in 1901), such as the ruined castle of Heidelberg, leaving their inherited or Amsterdam in Holland) to its colonial peripheries (Indo­ “age-value” [Alterswert] intact (summarised in Falser 2005, china or the Dutch East Indies) does not apply in all as2008a,b). However, Barth’s declaration that “you will pre- pects for the twentieth-century history of Angkor. Bypassserve and conserve, but not restore, as this is a practice of ing the European metropole – interestingly via Athens – a the worst form of vandalism” certainly had French conno- delicate process of scientific and diplomatic exchange tations. The expression “vandalisme restaurateurs” had al- along Asia’s colonial peripheries (Cambodia and Java) took ready been used more than six decades earlier in an 1833 place. The trajectories of an applied knowledge to bring letter from Charles de Montalembert to Victor Hugo, crit- Angkorian temples back to their former glory passed icising the French (and later pan-European) trend for full- through a completely new and at first highly creative and scale and often purely hypothetical rebuilding of dilapidat- innovative but later rather exaggerated and dubious stage, ed ruins as ‘picture-perfect’ prospects (Mon­talembert 1833, to its final, and even tragic, point. In order to address these questions and to map out the 485). Indeed, this practice brought the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (also the inventor of the Parisian various contexts, this sub-chapter will discuss: musée de Sculpture comparée next to Dela­porte’s musée In(3.1.) the “conservation” efforts at Angkor after Comdo-chinois, see chapter III) considerable fame in the second maille, including his successor Henri Marchal up to 1930; half of the nineteenth century. In Angkor in the late 1930s, (3.2.) the circumstances of how the concept of “anastyPierre Dupont, another member of the EFEO, would criti- losis” became an issue within the scientific exchange netcise the “arbitrary and inexact architectural reconstruction” work between the specialists from the Dutch East Indies with which Viollet-le-­Duc had brought “blame and global and Cambodia in French Indochina; discredit” to France. As a solution, this former trend was set (3.3.) the restoration efforts for and the discussion of in stark contrast to “another method of reconstruction “anastylosis” within an international debate at Athens in [called] anastylosis […] which had been brought to perfec- 1931, and French connections herein; (3.4.) the late colonial and early postcolonial strategies tion by [the Director of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies, MF] Frede­rick David Kan Bosch – and at Angkor, including a critical post-Second World War and was immediately used in Indochina – to give monuments flourishing period in the early Sihanouk period (1940s and back their old silhouette, and archaeology a new and rather 1950s); unique source of instruction” (Dupont 1938). (3.5.) the climax of a French engagement in Angkor Taking as our goal the reading of practices of archaeol- with Bernard Philippe Groslier and his vision of a reprise ogy and conservation/restoration as applied elements of totale of Angkor Wat (1960–73).

68  In her 1992 book Imperial eyes, which analysed different aspects of Euro-imperialism and the bilateral

process of “transculturation” between metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries, Marie Louise Pratt defined the term contact zone as “a space of colonial encounters, […], in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6; compare Pratt 1991). However, the term will be modified here to perceive multiple colonial peripheries themselves as potential spaces of ‘inter- and cross-colonial’ encounters.

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

3.1. The 1920s at Angkor, Henri Marchal and the issue of “conservation” My first contact with Cambodia took place in 1889, in Paris, in the colonial section of the Universal Exhibition: a restitution, moreover rather inexact, of Angkor had vividly struck my eyes and triggered my imagination as a child back then. This event decided that my career would be a colonial one. The readings of travels fostered my desire to visit those far-away and sunny countries which shone through the description of Jules Verne and Pierre Loti. (Marchal 1956, 4) —Henri Marchal in his unpublished Souvenirs d’un ancien conservateur of 1956

As we have seen, Jean Commaille was already inscribed into the early transcultural process of heritage making in Angkor Wat: on the one hand, he was responsible for the first clearing, conservation, and presentation of Angkor (Wat) on the spot; on the other hand, with his preliminary knowledge about the ‘original’ temple, in 1915 he was an official advisor to architect Auguste Delaval, back in the métropole, and helped to stage the same temple as a first close-to-full-scale replica in France’s second National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille (planned for 1916 and opened in 1922). In relation to what we have called Angkor Wat’s “architectural, performative and patrimonial affordance qualities and actionable capacities” in the introduction to this book, the temple was, in Cambodia as much as in France, aesthetically appreciated and appropriated by École des Beaux-Arts-trained architects and archaeologists in the decades to come. Interestingly, Commaille’s successor, Henri Marchal (Paris 1876–Siem Reap 1970), made this transcultural entanglement part of the founding myth of his own career as Angkor’s second conservateur. As he recalled in his unpublished Souvenirs d’un ancien conservateur (see full quote above), his initiation for Angkor in French Cambodge happened during his visit to its representation as pagode d’Angkor at the colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (compare chapter IV). As a Parisian architect trained at the École des BeauxArts, he embarked for Indochina in 1905 to work as inspecteur des Bâtiments civils en Cochinchine, became conservateur adjoint du Musée de l’Indochine in 1910, and was bibliothécaire-achiviste of the Société des Études Indochinoises between 1914 and 1916 (BEFEO 1916, 100). Marchal arrived at Angkor in July 1916 as the designated successor to Commaille as conservateur du groupe d’Angkor. He would fill this position from 1916 to 1920, 69 1922 to 1936, and from 1948 to 1953 (Marchal 1956, Boisselier 1972, EFEO 2002, 117–20). Under Commaille, who was onsite for the first decade of the French archaeological impact on Angkor (1907–1916), the initial phase of rough clearing the temples of vegetation and getting the overall area under control was more or less finished. With the EFEO free to focus on more specific tasks, the decade of the 1920s were the first real heyday of conservation work at Angkor. The approach at that point in time sought to bring the dilapi-

dated stone layers of the temples back into place through tedious, but simple, hands-on manipulation, and to enforce stabilising measures ‘from outside’. However, Marchal, who was first and foremost a modern architect, from his very first days on site, relied heavily on using re-enforced concrete [béton armé] and iron clamps [chaînage en fer] between and around stone layers to save the temples from collapse (Figs. IX.28a–g). As Marchal had already explained in his 1922 article “La construction des temples khmèrs étudiés dans le groupe d’Angkor”, published in George Groslier’s newly edited journal Arts et archéologie Khmers, the construction of the Khmer temples was seen as rather unskilful, from a tectonic point of view. According to Marchal and his successors, the Angkorian temples had a built-in “cause de déstruction” (Marchal 1922, 52–57). It was this interpretation that was later instrumentalised when parts of Angkor Wat’s galleries collapsed in 1947 (see below). What this meant in the 1920s was the initiation of a rather desperate undertaking: given the enormous and growing quantity of discovered and cleared sites, their sheer size and, most importantly, their ongoing, dynamic reaction in a tropical climate to their manipulation through French measures, a dramatic paradigm change for Angkor Park became necessary around 1930: from a more passive conservation from outside to the restoration and reconstruction of the temples by their structural repair from within. In order to flesh out these overall developmental stages, concentrated analyses of the unpublished work reports on the different (but certainly not all) construction sites at Angkor is necessary. So how was the approach of ‘conservation’ applied in the early days at Angkor Park? One logical consequence of the declared unstable status of Angkor Wat, as stated by architect Henri Vildieu to Commaille in 1912 (see above), was Marchal’s enlisting of the blacksmith of Indochina’s Public Works Department [Travaux publics] in Hanoi (where Vildieu worked) to integrate “fourteen ring armatures [chaînages] and nineteen clamps [colliers] into Angkor Wat’s “historic galleries” (RCA 2.–4.1917). In a sketch from December 1917 (Fig. IX.29), Marchal justified – on the basis of observed “movements and cracks” – his “newly invented system” to integrate patinated flat irons into the reinforcing frameworks under the collapsing lintels. In the same month, during an on-site

69  It was only by decree on 28 November 1919 that Marchal was “reconfirmed in his functions as conservateur

d’Angkor” (Finot 1921, 40).

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Figures IX.28a—g  Sketches from Marchal’s archaeological diaries between 1916 and 1922, depicting his plans to fix dilapidated temple sites of Angkor Wat, ­Phimeanakas, Leper King Terrace, Neak Pean, Baphuon and the Bayon with ­nonintrusive stabilising measures (Source: © EFEO Archive Paris)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.29  Marchal’s sketch concerning his new system of reinforced frameworks, here for Angkor Wat (RCA 12.1917) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

visit at Angkor, the acting GGI, Albert Sarraut, and George Groslier, acting director of the musée Sarraut in Phnom Penh, formulated a severe critique of Marchal’s exaggerated use of reinforced concrete and of his cutting too many trees, which were “jeopardising the solidity of the stone layers still in place” (RCA 12.1917). Marchal’s own constant effort in the 1920s to mediate between these two extremes – reinforcement measures for and a nature-bound presentation mode of the temples – is clearly retraceable through these notes. At this decisive moment, the EFEO published in its Bulletin in 1921 a first comprehensive review of its own raison d’être in Indochina. After Finot’s introduction, entitled “L’École française d’Extrême-Orient depuis son origine jusqu’en 1920: Historique général”, an impressive 120-page contribution about “Archéologie indochinoise” (perhaps written or at least pre-formulated by Marchal himself) summarised the School’s archaeological interventions all over Indochina, and its two-fold methodological programme, “étude [and] conservation” (Finot 1921b, 43): The common character of all the building arts [of the Far East] was their complete negligence of construction. The technical side has always been the weakest [faibles] in all the architecture of the Far East [and] the edification of the monuments always concerned the overall appearance [aspect] in the first place and never solidity per se: they were never the result of logical observation. In reality, only the forms [of the buildings] were transmitted and not the methods of construction. [italics MF] (Finot 1921b, 45—46)

And the article continued: With no written sources from the past to hand and a “destructive climate” working continually against the buildings, “their study was already ­difficult, but the conservation of the same was not much easier”:

Once liberated from the destructive effect of vegetation, the monuments demand a mise en état which was no less difficult to obtain. The indispensable repair work became very delicate to carry out, as the ancient methods and the employed craftsmen [artisans] were lost and any intervention into the procedures of an alien civilisation would lead to desperate failings [infaillibles disparates]. Most often, the monuments were built in stone, and any real consolidation work would only be possible by taking down the endangered masonry. However, the defectiveness of the construction and the instable sections still in place made this operation impossible [and] any rebuilding [réfection] of the deteriorated section in the same old materials [matériaux analogues aux anciens] would therefore only accentuate the difficulties. [italics MF] (Finot 1921b, 48)

Continuing with a description of the “Khmer classical art of Angkor” and a list of all the previous interventions at Angkor Wat (Finot 1921b, 85–158, esp. 94–109), Finot formulated two phases for a concrete work plan: first, a dégagement for a better knowledge of the structure, identifying the most dangerous points and carrying out most urgent consolidations; second, the aménagement of harmless vegetation and the remise en place of fallen elements. Altogether “the work aimed at a mise en valeur of the building to give the public the chance to taste, without too much imagination, all its beauty” (Finot 1921b, 90). From 1916 into the 1920s Marchal continued Commaille’s uprooting work [débroussaillement] and initiated the reassembling of an enormous number of temple sites along his above-mentioned touristic grand and petit circuit of Angkor Park: Angkor Thom’s Bayon, Baphuon, Royal Palace (with Phimeanakas, the Terraces of the Leper King and of the Elephants, Prah Pithu), the Khleang (south and north), the city’s Porte de la victoire; in the north and east of Angkor Thom the sites of Prah Khan, Neak Pean, Ta 53

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restructured along four work tasks: studies [études], such as drawings, photographs, archaeological research); clearing the site [dégagement]; consolidation and reassembling [con­ solidation et de remise en place]; and maintenance [entretien]. New technical innovations since the early 1920s influenced the process of reporting: photographs became an obligatory element of archaeological study and conservation, and a tachéomètre was brought from the Public Works Department in Saigon as a drawing device. Remarking on how ancient sculptures simply “pulverised” in temple niches, Marchal initiated in 1923 the first investigations into the “chemical composition of the sandstones of Angkor”70 for which he sent stone samples to Camille Enlart – ironically the director of the musée de Sculpture comparée in the same Trocadero building where Louis Delaporte used his rather desolate musée Indo-­chinois until his death in 1925 to propagate Angkor’s glory among the urban public (see chapter III). In Marchal’s reports, the entries “Travaux de béton armé” became a constant feature, and several “équipes de béton armé” of up to thirty workers migrated from one site to the next. In virtually hundreds of entries, his never-­end­ing (and finally rather hopeless) attempts to conserve – an increasing number of unearthed and reassembled – temples through thousands of minor stabilising interventions became a vicious circle, as one comment on his work at the Prah Khan temple indicates:

Figure IX.30  Marchal’s sketch of the water circulation ­system around Angkor Wat (RCA 12.1923) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Som, East Mebon, Pre Rup, Ta Nei, Thommanon, Chao Say, Ta Keo, Ta Prohm, and Bantay Kdei; the Western water tank [baray]; and to the south Baksei Chamkrong, Phnom Bakheng and certainly, Angkor Wat. For this project, Marchal’s focus was two-fold: (a) rebuilding the chaussée centrale to underline (the Beaux-Arts-like) “idée de la noble allure et du style que présenterait Angkor Vat” (RCA 7.1918); and (b) completing the repair of and cleaning the floating plants (called luc-binh) from the temple’s concentric water-filled moat in addition to facilitating its reconnection to an active water circulation system with the nearby Siem Reap River (Fig. IX.30). Initial campaigns to Bantay Srei to the far north of Angkor and to the pre-Angkorian Roluos temple group to the southeast (including Bakong, Lolei and Preah Ko) took place. Since 1922 (RCA 2.1922) Marchal’s monthly and annual reports on each temple site were

The équipe béton armé has come to consolidate the different reassembled floor slabs with a cement filling so that we can also replace the provisional wooden pillars […]. I utilised the presence of the équipe béton armé to reinforce with cement girders [poutrelles en ciment] three architraves in the southern aisle of Gallery II East, which had broken and risked falling down. (RCA 7.1928)

What this patchwork of non-immersive (or rather less intrusive) interventions – such as punctual stabilising, reassembling, reinforcing – meant to the final, overall external appearance of a temple is exemplified in a published 1917 photo inside the BEFEO of the less prominent Thommanon temple located to the east of Angkor Thom (Fig. IX.31). Consequently, his attempts to ‘conserve’ the fragile temples began to impinge on the hasty efforts of the EFEO to make all sites present and accessible to the growing number of visitors. In this context, Marchal complained in 1927 that his superior, the Chef du Service Archéologique, Henri Parmentier, had ordered reinforced concrete staircases with iron railings for Angkor Wat’s central tower. Marchal not only “refrained from any responsibility in this undertaking”, but doubted – “from his viewpoint as a conservator” – whether this approach would conform with the “instruc-

70  In 1925, Marchal also reported on his trials with “impregnat[ing] stone samples of Angkor Wat with sel

de magnésia”, which led, as he stated, to a “palpable hardening” of the same (RCA March 1925).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.31  Photo of the Thommanon temple in the BEFEO of 1927 (Source: BEFEO 1927, plate 46)

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Figure IX.32a  Marchal’s theoretical “reconstitution” drawing of the inner core elevation of the Neak Pean temple, as published in the 1926 volume of the BEFEO (Source: BEFEO 1926, plate IV)

Figures IX.32b,c  Analytical drawings from Marchal’s transcribed field notes of June 1922 as he studied the picturesque on-site quality of the Neak Pean temple (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

tions of the Académie [des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres] against all restoration [restauration] and retouching [retouches] just aiming at a facilitation for the visitors’ circulation” (RCA 6.1927). In the context of this debate about Angkor Wat in 1927, he formulated a clear conflict of interest between scientific recovery and touristic exploitation within Angkor Park:71 With the ever-growing number of tourists, the EFEO will have to increasingly defend the integrity of the monuments of Angkor, which are considered mere attractions with which to attract the public to the site. To my understanding, we are entering a dangerous path, the first steps of which can be seen in this precedent-setting change in the order of our principles. (RCA 7.1927)

At the other end of the scale in Marchal’s conservation efforts of the 1920s – that is, keeping a the natural, mysterious appearance while discovering, clearing, documenting and reassembling the temples – was the rather small site of Neak Pean, a twelfth-century water sanctuary located to the northeast of Angkor Thom. The dégagement of the site with one central and four lateral water tanks began in 1922, and the first scientific inquiries were published by Finot and Goloubew shortly afterwards (BEFEO 1922, 383–84; BEFEO 1923, 401–405). Marchal’s Notes sur l’architecture de Nak Pan followed only in 1926. First, his analysis covered a series of plans and elevations in order to provide the reader with an idea of the site’s original elevation (Fig. IX.32a). Marchal had cleared the site of its vegetation and reconstituted (he called it a remise en état) its sculptural and architectural features in order to “get back the overall vue d’ensemble and the disposition de ce monument” at the real spot. Second, Marchal described the site’s central island with its crowning temple as having had its “original appearance [aspect primitif] demolished and overturned by an enormous ficus tree, which now attracts all attraction by hiding the architecture”. On the basis of his 1922 analysis about the landscaping effects of his future action Figs. IX.32b,c), Marchal’s physical intervention was a fine-tuned compromise between clearing and conserving the ancient site (Fig. IX.32d), and a clever picturesque staging of its spectacular, overgrown status (Marchal 1926, 4, 8) (Fig. IX.32e). His successor, Maurice Glaize, would return to the site around 1940 with rather different aesthetic vision (see below, Figs. IX.58a–b). Figures IX.32d,e  Small-scale interventions at Neak Pean temple by Henri Marchal (Source: BEFEO 1926, plates IX, XII)

71  This was a conflict that resurfaced again in full violence when Angkor was inscribed on UNESCO’s World

Heritage List in 1992 (Miura 2004, 2015; compare Falser 2015c), and the initial ‘safeguarding’ strategy was abandoned in 2003 in favour of a ‘sustainable development of tourism’ (see chapter XII and epilogue II).

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Figures IX.33a—d  Two general vistas as published in the 1929 publication Le temple d’Angkor Vat. L’architecture du monuments; a map of the photographic shots taken inside Angkor Wat and one rare photograph of the restored site with Buddhist monks for the 1930 volume Le temple d’Angkor Vat. La sculpture du temple (Source: EFEO 1929, 29, 116; EFEO 1930, 220, 268)

However, the overall strategy for Angkor Park before 1930 – between the poles of conservation and a mise en valeur – was far more rigid, and here again the temple of Ang­ kor Wat provided the most prominent example. In 1927 Marchal was able to proudly declare a definite milestone in the temple’s modern history: “At this moment, we have given a more proper appearance [un aspect plus propre] back to the temple, one which harmonises better with its well-­ maintained architecture [son architecture soignée]” (RCA 58

10.1927). And in its now rather sanitised condition, Angkor Wat was featured in the EFEO series Mémoires archéologiques, under the title Le temple d’Angkor Vat in three impressive volumes (compare with the introduction to this book): L’architecture du monument (1929), La sculpture ornementale du temple I & II (1930) and La galérie des bas-relief I–III (1932). In the introductory passage, the site was described in words that were in line with Angkor Wat’s Beaux-Arts-related ‘architectural affordance’:

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Angkor Wat today possesses a universal celebrity which attracts a constantly rising number of visitors. With the classic simplicity of its layout, the force and harmony of its mass, and the richness of its ornamental and iconographic sculpture, this temple unites, with unique success, the grandeur of the ensemble with a concern for detail. Only the extent of its indefinite scenes, sculptures, and decorative composition has discouraged, until today, all [previous] attempts to reproduce it in its entirety. [italics MF] (EFEO 1929, 5)

Only a few months before the last volume appeared in 1932, Angkor Wat had been completely reproduced (we called it

‘translated’) temporarily in a lightweight skin of plaster casts at 1:1 scale during the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris (see chapter VII). And its counterpart or twin version – the so-called ‘original’ – was now equally ‘re-presented’ through another modern ‘reproduction’ technique: photography (Figs. IX.33a–d). But in addition to the two strategies (i.e., photographic and physical) used to tackle an ‘artwork [such as Angkor Wat] in the age of its mechanical reproduction’ (after Walter Benjamin’s seminal treatise in 1936), the ‘original’ was called into question: despite internal scientific debates still fighting for the term conservation, Finot’s thirty-two-page introduction to the first 1929 volume spoke about the “Restauration d’Angkor Vat” as a 59

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new stage in the temple’s modern history (EFEO 1929, 5–35, here 33 and 35). Rather strangely, the last words of Finot’s introduction could have been read as a description for both twin versions of Angkor Wat, namely the re-established original and its Parisian replica (for this comparison see Figs. VII.5 and 6):

Today, the jungle [futaie] has been cleared, lawns spread in front of the substructure. And two holy basins to the right and left of the central passageway, progressively reduced into formless waterholes, have taken back their originally clear contours. The marvel called Angkor Wat presents itself to the spectator in a setting which it deserves. (Finot in EFEO 1929, 35)

3.2. The methodological earthquake in 1929 and its afterlife: Knowledge transfer and heritage diplomacy between French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies In 1929, the same year the restored Angkor Wat was introduced as a “universal celebrity” by the director of the EFEO (see above), the Angkor conservator Marchal was visited on the site by Pieter Vincent van Stein Callenfels, who since 1913 had served as inspector and then director of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies. Although this visit was hardly mentioned in the EFEO’s official chronicles,72 it was documented by Marchal in his daily, handwritten “archaeological diaries” (Journaux des fouilles), which are today stored and partly digitalised at the EFEO in Paris. This visit can be interpreted as a veritable earthquake in the intellectual history of the Parc d’Angkor in the first half of the twentieth century, as it triggered a paradigm shift in the practice of French-colonial archaeology at and the conservation of Angkor. Therefore, this entry in Henri Marchal’s handwritten archaeological diary about Stein-­ Callenfels’ visit to Angkor on 27 January 1929 needs to be quoted in full: In the morning, I guided Dr. Van Stein Callenfels, Director of the Archaeological Service of Java (Dutch East Indies) to visit the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, in the afternoon to the Neak Pean temple and the Grand Circuit. Our working methods to clear the temples without bringing the crumbled elements back to place are very violently [emphasis by Marchal] criticised by him [Nos méthodes de travaux de dégagements sans remise en place des parties écroulés des édifices sont très violemment critiquées par lui]. He does not sufficiently understand the difference between the little temples, such as Prambanan, Pa-

nataran or other temples, and those great ensembles with which we have to deal here at Angkor: the crumbled sections of the galleries or towers are considerable and do not allow us to even think of searching all of these stones in order to retrieve their original location to be reconstructed. Utilising debris stones by chance to reconstruct the collapsed sections of a temple would require the considerable work of re-cutting, to which we would also have to fit the sections into unstable equilibrium with the walls that are still standing. We would certainly need to use cement and iron clamps: additionally, because of the fact that the great majority of the temples have mouldings and are sculpted, the newly added stones would have to be rough-hewn, for which in turn detailed drawings of the profiles would be necessary, so that the difference between the new and the old sections would be not too recognisable. However, even if I do have some reservations about applying the methods used at the Dutch Archaeological Service of Java, I suppose nevertheless that it would be a good thing to at least be inspired by the practices that could profitably ­replace ours, which are “extinct and dating from 1880” (according to Dr. Van Stein Callenfels) [Toutefois, la part faite aux objections que pourraient soulever pour Angkor les méthodes en usage chez les Hollandais du Service archéologique de Java, il y aurait bien néanmoins de s’inspirer de quelques’uns de leur procédés qui pourraient avantageusement remplacer les nôtres “périmés et datant de 1880” (dixit M. le Dr. Van Stein Callenfels)]. The exchange of inspectors of the archaeological services

72  One of the few remarks is found in the nécrologie on Callenfels by Paul Lévy in the BEFEO of 1938, where

he mentioned that Callenfels visited Indochina (and Angkor) twice, “in 1929 and 1932” (Lévy 1938, 484). The second visit of “1932” actually began in December 1931, when Marchal guided his colleague once again through Angkor (BEFEO 1931, 565). The date of 1929 for Callenfels’ visit is not part of the official hagiography of Marchal’s work with anastylosis (Boisselier 1972, 20; Dagens 1989, 174–77; Clémentin-Ojha/Manguin 2001, 49–54; EFEO 2002, 117–120; Drège 2003, 125–39). In a two-page section on “Henri Marchal (1876– 1970) and the preservation of the splendour of Banteay Srei” within the impressive publication Archaeologists in Angkor: Photographic archives of the EFEO in the Parisian musée Cernuschi in 2010/11, Éric Bourdonneau mentioned that the “change in the approach [from conservation to restoration, MF] was sparked by 1929 visit to Angkor of Dr. Stein-Callenfels, who used methods developed in Java” (EFEO 2010, 100).

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between Indochina and Java, as promised by Dr. Van Stein, will certainly bring the best results by confronting the different methods employed in both countries.73 [italics MF]

his reception of the French undertakings at Angkor triggered the later exchange project. During and after the “IVe Congrès des Sciences du Pacifique” at Bandung/Java in May 1929 a first “entente” had already been established (BEFEO 1929, 466). It was reached between Van Stein CallenVan Stein Callenfels’ severe critique in January 1929, which fels, at this point director p.i. of the Archaeological Service, most probably took place in front of Neak Pean (see above), and Victor Goloubew, at the time the librarian-secretary of must have struck quite a blow to Marchal. However, his the EFEO, presenter at the above-mentioned conference, formulated idea of exchanging views about existing con- and guest of the Dutch-colonial administrative centre of servation methods was not an entirely new one. As we shall Weltevreden, who was invited to visit the archaeological see below, it first materialised in the EFEO’s earliest days, and ethnological museum of the Batavia Society. On the around 1900, and gained momentum in the late 1920s. A French side the bilateral collaboration was approved on scientific, even institutionalised exchange between both August 1929 by GGI Pasquier (see his photo below) as the colonial regimes of the Dutch East Indies and French In- Projet d’échange de personnel scientifique et technique de dochina (bypassing their metropolitan centres in Amster- l’École française d’Extrême-Orient et du Service archéolodam and Paris altogether) may have been brought up for gique des Indes néerlandaises (BEFEO 1929, 533–34). Conthe first time in the context of the 150th anniversary cele- ducted with the aim of improving infrastructural and adbrations of the Royal Batavia Society of Arts and Sciences ministrative conditions, the exchange programme between [Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Weten­ Hanoi and Weltevreden included three- to six-month trips schappen] in April 1928. Two members of the EFEO were to visit museums, libraries, and archaeological sites and present at this event: Paul Mus, who transmitted a congrat- covered four categories of personnel: “the director and ulatory letter from Louis Finot and visited the archaeolog- chefs de service; savants specialised in Oriental languages, ical museum with the director of the Archaeological Ser- literature, history, and ethnology; architects and agents vice, Frederik David Kan Bosch (BEFEO 1928, 332–33; techniques; and prehistorians”. By 20 February 1930, compare Kuiper 1968); and the Sanskritist George Coedès George Coedès, now acting officially as the new director of (1886–1969), who attended this event as a representative of the EFEO until 1947 (Filliozat 1970; EFEO 2002, 113–17), the Siamese National Library. After the conference, Coedès wrote an enthusiastic letter to the acting GGI to explain went on an unofficial tour of Java’s ancient temples of Boro- the next, urgent step.74 As Parmentier, the chef du Service budur, Mendut, Kalasan, Sevu, and Prambanan. There, in archéologique, was currently occupied, he suggested that the presence of Schrieke, the director of the Department of Marchal was the most natural choice “to inaugurate the exPublic Instruction of the Dutch East Indies, and Van Stein change programme and to take the best profit from an arCallenfels, he felt fairly challenged by the latest Dutch-­ chaeological mission to Java”. Significantly, Coedès justicolonial “purely scientific” methods of “reconstruction” fied his proposal by stating that in his opinion – and this (BEFEO 1928, 644–47), as he called them in an unpub- was certainly the result of his own observations from Java lished typescript of 1943 (see later in this chapter): in 1928, and of Van Stein Callenfels’ comment during his Angkor visit in 1929 – the conservation efforts at Angkor During my journey in Java in 1928 (as a representative of urgently needed to be brought up-to-date: the Royal Institute of Thailand during the 150-year anniversary of the Batavian Society), I was deeply struck by the perfection of the employed methods of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies, then under direction of Dr. Bosch. This was a method which — strictly scientific and leaving no space for fantasies — allowed for the reconstruction [reconstruire] of the greatest parts of a dilapidated structure with the material that had fallen down right in front of it. (Coedès 1943b, 1)

We may assume that Van Stein Callenfels’ unofficial visit to Angkor shortly thereafter was the result of an informal return invitation extended after Coedès’ Java trip, and that

You yourself, Monsieur le Gouverneur Général, have experienced the excellent results which our Dutch colleagues [confrères Hollandais] achieved in the conservation of ancient monuments during your recent trip to the Dutch East Indies. As there are many reasons to judge our current methods in Indochina and especially in Angkor as being rather outdated [méthodes arrivérées], I am convinced that it is in the greatest interests of our Archaeological Service to study the working procedures of the Dutch and to gain inspiration from them. […] Before definitively renouncing such an important project and losing face in front of the Gouvernement des Indes Néer-

73  Journaux des fouilles, Henri Marchal, tome VII (7.1928-1.1930), handwritten pagination 106 and 107 (EFEO Archive Paris). 74  George Coedès to the GGI, Pierre Pasquier (Service des affaires extérieures), Hanoi (20 February 1930). See ANOM INDO GGI 38615 (Missions et voyages).

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dandaises, which will in this year inaugurate the exchange programme by sending F. D. K Bosch, director of the Archaeological Service, I see it as my duty to present this urgent matter to you. To finance this mission with the general budget would result in a veritable amelioration of our methods in the conservation et aménagement of the ruins of Angkor. All this is an issue, which will have the best effect on tourism and also surpasses the purely scientific preoccupations of the EFEO. [italics MF]

And indeed, on 29 April 1930 the Arrêté chargeant M. H. Marchal, conservateur d’Angkor, d’une mission d’études aux Indes Néerlandaises was issued (BEFEO 1930, 187, 282). Marchal left for Java and Bali a few weeks later, and his observations would – as we shall see – have a lasting impact on Angkor Park. However, the decision in favour of his trip did not come out of the blue. It was on the one hand the late result of a process of mutual friendship between researchers from Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, which had in fact been in place since 1900 as a kind of ‘heritage diplomacy’ (in a general context, compare Winter 2015). On the other hand, Marchal’s insight into the archaeological practices in Java was a mere snapshot of the applied methods and aesthetics that resulted from a long and hot debate between experts in Holland and in its colony in Southeast Asia. Additionally, the debate was much more international than today’s official historiography of the ‘Angkor-Java connection’ leads us to believe: the fact that the EFEO ­introduced the French term anastylose only after 1932 at Angkor to supposedly adapt the Dutch term and approach of reconstructie on Java can only be explained by taking into account a third – European, but surprisingly neither purely Dutch, nor French – element in the discussion. As we shall see, only the parallel Greek efforts to restore the Athenian Parthenon and the international conference held in the same city in 1931 (its proceedings and formulated charter included) helped to popularise the Greek term “anastylosis” in the French intellectual hemisphere. Its use was almost immediately mediated through official reports back in Paris by the EFEO’s prestigious sister institution, which was under the same administrative umbrella organisation of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: the École d’Athènes. These contexts need to be investigated in more detail: In the first BEFEO of 1901, which Barth had introduced with his above-quoted preface, the director of the EFEO, Louis Finot, reported to the Gouverneur général de l’Indo-Chine about his “voyage d’études dans l’île de Java” and Bali (Finot 1901a, 72; compare BEFEO 1901, 44). The journey had taken place in 1900 with his colleagues Cabaton and Lajonquière, just a short time after the EFEO – the

region of the official archaeological mission and research was defined as the “whole area of the Far East” including insular Southeast Asia – was founded. Finot justified his choice of Java, where he was received by chief archaeologist Jan Laurens Andries Brandes (see below, compare Barth 1900, 101), as two-fold: The first justification was a historical one, since Java and Indochina had supposedly experienced both peaceful and antagonistic relations since ancient times. The second consideration was a link of a “more practical” and contemporary nature, since “Java was a great centre of philological studies” and therefore a source of great inspiration in the EFEO’s methodological setup. Finot visited the monuments of Central Java, including those on Dieng Plateau, and – in the area around Yogya­ karta – the great temple sites of Prambanan to the east and Borobudur to the north with the neighbouring site of the temple site Tjandi Mendoet.75 The latter was praised for its “restoration after the understanding initiation of the résident éclairé M. de Bruyn Prince, and the admirable artistic awareness of the talented architect M. van de Kamer”. By that time, the archaeological zones of the area had already been mapped and published by the Dutch in a cartographic approach (Pl. IX.18) very similar to that used a few years later by the French for the Angkor region (compare Pl. IX.7b). The ninth-century Buddhist site of Borobudur had been ‘discovered’ (popularised) for the West in 1814 by Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles during Great Britain’s short occupation of Java 1811–16; it was further explored before 1900 by the civil engineer and selftaught archaeologist Ijzerman. Later it was made – together with the ninth-century Hindu temple of Prambanan – into a site of action for the Archaeological Society of Yogyakarta (founded in 1885 by Ijzerman and its chairman, the physician and amateur archaeologist Isaac Groneman; compare Groneman 1893, 1897). When Finot’s remarks were published in 1901, these Javanese temples were still enmeshed in a rather indistinct ‘ownership’ structure that was negotiated between local interests and the above-mentioned amateur, and regional Dutch institutions. Their appropriation in service of an official colonial narrative of cultural ‘heritage’ (inheritance, control, promotion) was, again, similar to Angkor. For instance, during the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1900 (see chapter V.1), a plaster cast replica of the Tjandi Sari (near Prambanan) was mounted in the Tour du Monde panorama (compare Fig. V.7b) together with other real and copied elements from the Borobudur (twenty-four relief panels with Buddha scenes) and Prambanan temples (Bloembergen 2006, 164–219). This operation was intended – comparable to the case of Angkor in the universal and colonial Exhibitions from 1867 until 1937; and Borobudur played an important role in the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (see chapter VII) – to add the discipline and ‘salvaging practice’ of archaeology to the Dutch colo-

75  “Tjandi” or “Candi” as the equivalents to the Khmer/Sanskrit term “prasat”, meaning “tower”.

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nial Ethische Politiek (or ‘civilising mission’, compare Falser 2015a) for the Southeast Asian archipelago.76 While Finot later called these Dutch-colonial restoration efforts a “veritable initiation to the functioning of a grand scientific institution in the Far East” (Finot 1921, 8), his collaborator at the time, Lunet de Lajonquière, gave a more detailed insight into the French visit to Java in 1900. In his small publication En Insulinde of 1914, Lajonquière included a whole chapter titled “Le Mendoet, un puzzle gigantesque”. In this chapter, his description of what the three French protagonists could see on 24 August 1900 while standing atop an enormous wooden scaffolding around the temple (Fig. IX.34a) may easily count as the first French report on the practice of architectural reconstructie in the Dutch East Indies. The French text included various specific observations, and therefore must be quoted in its original wording and explained in the following in English:

their numbering and positioning in their mortar-less configuration; the decomposition of the whole structure layer by layer, and stone by stone; the classification of the same by cleaning and rearranging them on the ground; reconstructing [reconstruire] the structure by reassembling the layers and adding missing parts through new stone blocs with a “special and indestructible mark”, altogether a “happy and scrupulously scientific restitution [restitution] whose finalisation can only be admired” (Lajonquière 1914, 163). What Lajonquière published in 1914 was summarised in the same year in the article “De Tjandi Mendoet” by L. D. Petit (Petit 1914). This article was published in the Dutch-­ colonial journal Het Nederlandsch-Indie Huis Oud en Nieuw, edited by the architectural office Ed. Cuypers-Hulswit in Batavia. It used the well-known ‘before-and-after rhetoric’ (Figs. IX.34b,c; compare Pl. IX.19a,b) which in fact continued far into the decolonising era of Indonesia by A. J. Bernet Kempers (compare Kempers 1949, 1954, 1958, Village, Tjandj Mendoet, entouré actuellement par une in this context 1976, 212–23). Additionally, Lajonquière’s 1914 report called the neighbouring (in fact Buddhist) barrière des planches, afin de soustraire les ouvriers à Borobudur temple “a brother to Angkor Wat as far its repdes curiosités gênantes. Le travail entrepris par M. V… de K… [sic], et, en effet, excessivement méticuleux et de- utation and stylistic similarities to Hindu art in the Far East was concerned”. This was a topos that would be intenmande beaucoup d’ordre comme de surveillance. Le sified in the postcolonial era in both Cambodia and Indotemple qu’il se propose de reconstruire et du même style nesia (compare chapter XII) and is one that is still used que ceux du Dieng, autant, toutefois, qu’on en peut juger today. However, he also judged the Javanese counterpart as à travers l’échafaudage compliqué que l’enveloppe jusqu’au faîte. Celui-ci nous permet, en revanche, d’exa- “being convincing only by dint of its sheer, but rather confusing mass”, and Angkor Wat was deemed the more veriminer en détail et de suivre de très près le très curieux table work of art. Concluding this chapter, Lajonquière travail que dirige notre compagnon d’aujourd’hui et dont il expose ma méthode à pied d’œuvre. Il joue avec le mo- admired the new artificial landscaping efforts that were being made at the neighbouring Prambanan temple which numents comme avec un gigantesque puzzle. Il l’a sondé placed the old, patinated monuments in a “jardin anglaisde la base au sommet, en à comptés et vérifié, examiné, repéré toutes les pierres; puis il les a numérotées et mar- like setting” (Lajonquière 1914, 167, 195). This aesthetic interventions were similar to those employed at Ang­kor quées une à une de points de repère. Comme tous les édifices semblables, celui-ci est fit de blocs de grès soi- Park from the Marchal years of the 1920s onwards (compare Fig. IX.22a). gneusement appareillés, mais posés les uns sur les autres, With Finot’s first visit to Java in 1900 and Barth’s 1901 sans liens ni soudures, se maintenant mutuellement par appraisal for the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and leur propre poids. Ces précautions prises, on s’est mis à Sciences in relation to the young EFEO, the Dutch (now démolir, à descendre les divers étages pierre par pierre, with the chief archaeologist Brandes as the “corresponding classant celles-ci avec soin sous les hangars, où elles member” of the EFEO) published an Homage to the EFEO étaient minutieusement nettoyées. Maintenant, on a commencé à reconstruire, en remplaçant les parties man- in the context of the First International Congress of Far quantes par des blocs de grès marqués d’un signe spé- Eastern Studies in Hanoi 1902 (Fig. IX.35). This ‘colonial-­ cial indélébile. Cette restitution, aussi heureuse que scru- peripheral’ and mutual knowledge exchange between Ba­ tavia/Java and Hanoi/Angkor bypassed the metropolitan puleusement scientifique, est d’ailleurs en bonne voie, le centers of Paris and Amsterdam altogether, and the EFEO’s travail est aux deux tiers terminé et nous n’avons pu que setup stimulated in a reverse effect the Dutch-colonial efl’admirer. [italics MF] (Lajonquière 1914, 163) forts in Java: the Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-­ Fascinated by the giant wooden scaffolding around the Indie [Netherlands Indies Archaeological Service] came into being and was modelled as an institutional structure whole temple structure, Lajonquière described here the meticulous step-by-step process of “reconstruction”: meas- similar to the French Archaeological Commission. In 1904, uring the whole complex; identifying all stone elements; the same year of his nomination as Chef du Service archéo76  For this civilising mission in context compare Locher-Scholten 1981, Gouda 1995, Bloembergen 2006,

Bloembergen and Raben 2009, Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2013 and 2015a,b.

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure 34a  Wooden scaffolding around the Tjandi Mendut, taken in 1898 (Source: © Collection KITLV, Leiden University)

Figures 34b,c  Tjandi Mendut ‘before and after restoration’ around 1900, as argued by Petit in 1914 and republished by Kempers in 1976 (Source: Kempers 1976, 130, 129)

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Brandes, the other is [currently] under restoration. However hostile we may generally be towards any work on a historic monument that goes further than pure consolidation, one must nonetheless acknowledge this very interesting attempt which, through the rigour of the applied method, presents the most comprehensive guarantee of exactitude [italics MF] (Parmentier 1904, 786).

Figure IX.35  Homage by the Dutch East Indies’ Archaeological Service to the EFEO during the 1902 Hanoi Congress, title page with a collage of Borobudur elements (Source: Hommage 1902, cover)

logique de l’EFEO, Henri Parmentier undertook another mission to study the architecture and the decoration of ­Javanese temples (Parmentier 1907). In the BEFEO of the same year, Parmentier reported in his Rapport sur une mission archéologique à Java, like Lajonquière before him, about the impressive “restoration” work done at the Dieng Plateau, Prambanan with Candi Plaosan, Candi Singosari near Malang, and especially of those small temples near Borobudur, Candi Pawon, and Mendut: I have also studied the Candi Pavan and Mendut: the first was just completely restored under the direction of M.

At this point, shortly after 1900, Groneman had already published his guides to Borobudur (Groneman 1902, 1907a), and further publications on Candi Mendut were available (Brandes 1902, Kersjes/Hamer 1903) and even reviewed in the BEFEO of 1904 and 1905 (see footnote below). In 1907 and in the context of the retrocession of Ang­ kor from Siam to French-colonial Cambodia, the director of the EFEO, Alfred Foucher, was in France to found “a private Société d’Angkor” (mentioned above). In addition, he prepared the first real “archaeological campaign at Ang­ kor”, for which he also spent one month at Java “in order to study the system of the conservation of historic monuments by the Dutch” (BEFEO 1907, 150 and 463; compare the entry on “Insulinde” in the BEFEO 1921, 327–29). As a side product of this French-Dutch-colonial scientific entanglement, the French inspired Groneman to vote for a similar “Angkor Society” [En Angkor-vereenigung] for Java (Gronemann 1907b). Foucher used his colleague’s new Dutch guide to the Borobudur (Groneman 1907a) for his lengthy paper “Notes d’archéologie bouddhique”, by which he judged the architectural and stylistic features of the Buddhist mountain temple of Borobudur in relation to Ang­kor Wat (Foucher 1909).77 In a footnote, he also mentioned the first restoration efforts made under “le capitaine du génie Van Erp” (Foucher 1909, 1, 2). By this point, the Archaeological Commission in Java had made Borobudur the colonial state’s first prestigious project of archaeological heritage politics, and the Dutch engineer Theodoor van Erp, under the auspices of the Dutch East Indies’ government, became responsible for the first comprehensive, but rather trial-and-error, restoration of the temple from 1907 to 1911 (Fig. IX.36a). In his 1914 publication En Insulinde, Lajonquière circulated the result of these first interventions at Borobudur within French academia (Fig. IX.36b). From the earliest issues of the BEFEO, the back-matter sections on “bibliographie” covered short summaries of scientific publications in “Insulinde” and “Indes néerlandaises”; and the “chronique” sections listed all the reciprocated visits, invited keynotes, donations of scientific material, and general archaeological activities in the Dutch East

77  Comparing the Javanese temple of the ninth century AD with its square basement of 111 metres against Angkor Wat’s central structure of 187 by 215 metres in plan, Foucher judged Borobudur to be “another jewel of Far Eastern archaeology” and “as far as the beauty of the site was concerned, close to Angkor Wat, its wonderful rival in Cambodia”, however “less impressive as an ensemble” than the French-colonial counterpart (Foucher 1909, 1).

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.36a,b  Borobudur temple during Van Erp’s trial and error restoration around 1907; and as published in Lajonquière’s 1914 report En Insulinde (below) (Source: © Collection KITLV, Leiden University; Lajonquière 1914, 147)

Indies.78 Additionally, the continuing art historical interest in Java’s ancient architecture brought new photographic material of these temples into the network (from Tissandier 1896 to Verneil 1927, later Marchal 1942 and 1949, Goor

1952). All this meant that the French experts in Angkor were – since the mid-1910s – well aware of all the constructions sites, publications, and applied methods of conservation, restoration, and reconstruction of their colleagues in

78  Earliest reviews include the above-mentioned Homage for the EFEO, and Brandes’ work on “Tjandi

Mendoet” (BEFEO 1903, 133–35); Groneman’s 1902 guide De Tjandi Baraboedoer, or a comment by J. Ph. Vogel on “Candi Mendut […] le temple bouddhique nouvellement restauré sous la savante direction du Dr. Brandes” (BEFEO 1904, 476; 727–30, mentioning the restoration report on Mendut by Kersjes/Hamer 1903), and a nécrologie on Brandes by Ed. Huber (EFEO 1905, 249–50). A review by Parmentier was published in 1909 about the Service archéologique de Java and its “étude de restauration” of the “Tjandi Singasari” in Panataran (BEFEO 1909, 811–12). In 1922, Parmentier and Lulius van Goor (see below) wrote a conjoint review about publications of the Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië (BEFEO 1922, 252–76).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.37a,b  The temples of Prambanan, during reconstruction (dated “c. 1890”) and as published in Goor’s 1919 publication (Source: © Collection KITLV, Leiden University; Goor 1919, between 14 and 15)

the Dutch East Indies. This became especially relevant when the Dutch approached a systematic “reconstruction” of Candi Panataram after 1917, and of the larger Prambanan group which already had started before 1900 (Fig. IX.37a). In this context, Lulius van Goor of the Dutch-Colonial Archaeological Service published A short guide to the ruined temples in the Prambanan Plain, the Diëng Plateau, and Gedung Sanga, first in Dutch in 1919 (Fig. IX.37b) with a more detailed map of the area (Goor 1919), and three years later in English (Goor 1922). Surprisingly, no word about the reconstruction work was lost (Verslag 1926). However, for the occasion of the EFEO’s twenty-fifth anniversary publication in Études Asiatiques, “Mlle M. E. Lulius van

Goor, ancienne attachée à l’EFEO” published her Notice sur les ruines de Panataran et les récents travaux de restauration in French. This work mirrored the comments that B. de Haan and Bosch had made on another brick temple, the reconstructed Candi Kidal near Malang, in the first volume of the Publicaties van den Oudheidkundigen Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië in 1925 (Oudheidkundigen Dienst 1925; compare Damais 1963). In contrast to the earlier examples of Javanese temples in stone (mentioned above), Goor’s publication discussed the brick temple remains of the thirteenth-century Eastern Java kingdoms of Singhosari and Majapahit near present-day Blitar. These Dutch efforts “to reconstruct the dilapidated [brick, MF] sanctuary 67

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

back to the last arch stone without any incertitude” (Finot 1928, 70) were certainly important reference points for later French efforts to apply the anastylosis of stone to brick temples in Vietnam and Angkor (see below Groslier’s project with Prasat Kravanh in the 1960s). Goor gave an overview of “the considerable restoration and reconstruction works of the Service archéologique des Indes néerlandaises” which supposedly replaced earlier misleading undertakings. However, comparing her depictions of the “temple ‘au millésime’ after the reconstruction” (Goor 1925, 377) with Bosch’s similar photographic argumentative pairs of photographs published in 1922 proved the highly hypothetical character of the Dutch-colonial approach of reconstruction (Figs. IX.38a,b): with only the base and middle part still standing, the work of (a) “totally rediscovering the [dilapidated] superstructure”; (b) “reconstructing the authentic fragments […] layer by layer on the ground […] with absolute certitude”; and (c) re-erecting the whole structure (“new additions were left undecorated”), in fact

Figures IX.38a,b  Depictions of the Panataran temple as published in Bosch’s 1922 article “Restoration” in the journal Djawa, and later in Goor’s publication of 1925; compare its replicated version in the theme park in today’s Jakarta, Pl. Intro.24a (Source: Bosch 1922, plates 1—3; Goor 1925, plate 50)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

re-created a rather new building. In any case, Goor’s de- consultation with Vogelsang and the historicist architect fence of the reconstruction as being “of a high importance Joseph Th. Cuypers; indeed, some of his arguments sounded similar to the future, though far less theoretical, French-­ for the architect, archaeologist and artist alike to study an Indo-Javanese monument with all its details still in place” colonial debate over Angkor: must have sounded very tempting to the EFEO. After all, hadn’t its director, Finot, only a short time earlier during XIV: Rebuilding disappeared elements of a structure is a the funeral service of Commaille in 1921 (see quote above), lie against history. It is only allowed to ensure conservaplayed the supposedly “Germanic romanticism for pittion, to put the building back to proper use, or to retoresque ruins” against the “Latin tradition of bringing move an apparent incorrect situation [misstand]. Such ­ruins back to old grandeur” (BEFEO 1920, 221–22)? As it restoration is only permitted when it is completely corseems from the above-quoted publications, this proclaimed rect and completely possible. In all other cases a new “Latin tradition” may have in reality been influenced by the solution should be sought. XVII: A basic principle: conDutch in their Southeast Asian colony. servation precedes renovation. Renovation is only allowed However, the acceptance of “reconstruction” in the when it is necessary for the conservation of a building. In Dutch East Indies was by no means a given fact from the case of ornamentation it is only allowed if it prevents furbeginning, but rather the final result of Dutch debates that ther decay that is not possible through conservation had played out in the late 1910s and early 1920s about the measures and postponement would render renewal in “colonial conservation ethics [which had switched] from the same shape impossible. XVIII: Sturdiness [hechtheid] preservation to reconstruction” (Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2011, often demands drastic renewals [vernieuwing], history 415–18, compare Bernet Kempers 1954; 1976, 188–211; and picturesqueness demand that the ‘skin’ [huid] be as 1978, 107–112). Within the Oudheidkundige Dienst, Nicolittle infringed upon as possible. This can be accommolaas Johannes Krom (1883–1945), the archaeological officer dated by the choice of raw materials. The rule is that in in Batavia from 1911 to 1915, founder of the Archaeologirenewals in old shapes the same raw material is used in cal Service in 1913, and professor of archaeology and anwhich the original was executed. (Bosch 1922, 2—3) cient history of the Dutch East Indies at Leiden University (compare Bernet Kempers 1949), was one of the earliest In his opinion, these were successful operations, and Bosch and most significant voices in this regard. Most important quoted ‘before, during, and after’ illustrations of the reconwas his 1911 paper “The restoration of old buildings” [Res- struction procedures at Panataran (see above) and Pramtaureeren van oude bouwerken] in the Tijdschrift van het banan (Figs. IX.39a,b), playing the “cold abstract image” of Bataviaasch Genootschaft (Krom 1911), in which he tran- a reconstructive drawing and a “formless ruin” against the scribed the actual restoration ethics of the metropolitan “full beauty” of an in-situ, re-established temple site: “Dutch Archaeological Service” [Nederlandschen Oudheid­ kundigen Bond] in the Netherlands to “keep buildings and From the rebuilding [wederopbouw] of the Panataran ruins as found” back to the colony of the Far East. In fact, temple also appears the contentiousness of the proposithis had already been described a few years earlier in 1909 tion that reconstruction does not have a scientific value by the Dutch art historian Willlem Vogelsang (Vogelsang [wetenschappelijk belang]. If one only demands a cold 1909). The case for reconstruction – not only “theoretically abstract image, which an architectural drawing of a buildon paper” as Krom put it, but also on the site with real ing can deliver, then one can be satisfied with such a temples – was advocated most prominently by Krom’s sucdrawing. But no one will claim that it is sufficient to poscessor, Bosch (in service 1916–37). Above all, viewpoints sess and study drawings/images of Hindu-Javanese mon­ circulated about the interest and utility of the building uments and that is unnecessary from a scientific point of within contemporary society: the reconstructed beauty view to conserve the constructions themselves. The origiand form of an ancient temple as an instructive source nals are and remain a hundred times more instructive (compare Finot) against the supposedly negative connotaand suggestive than all drawings together. Nobody will tion of the image of a ruin in decay, and also the hidden maintain that the scientist remains indifferent when an danger of restored buildings of Java’s past being instrumenold construction has been restored to its original state talised by the country’s rising nationalist (anti-colonial) [oorspronkelijken toestand] from the old pieces instead voices. In his 1922 paper “The restoration of Hindo-Javaof a formless ruin that has been guarded from further denese temples” [Het restaureen van Hindoe-Javaansche bouw­ cay, while there is a charming reconstructive drawing werken] published in the Java Institute’s journal Djawa, turning yellow in the archive. Furthermore, we should not Bosch once again summarised different viewpoints on the separate aesthetics from archaeology and set them up concepts of “Conservation” [Het conserveeren], “Restoraagainst each other. Even for the driest ‘art accountant’ tion” [Het restaureeren], and “Reconstruction” [Het reconand the archaeologist who is most insensitive to beauty, strueeren] (Bosch 1922). He summarised some of the propthe jewel of Javanese architecture, risen again in full ositions for the colonies that were formulated between beauty, must have more to say than the most excellently 1910 and 1915 by the Dutch Archaeological Society after executed graphics. [italics MF] (Bosch 1922, 9) 69

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In the mid-1920s, the continuing debate included restoration experts in the Netherlands, those in the Indies, and also practicing architects between both lines. It became known as the restauratiekwestie or “restoration problem”, which was summarised in detail by Martha Muusses in her 1924 paper in the Djawa journal (Muusses 1924, compare Verslag 1926). In this context, H. P. Berlage, one of the most influential modernist Dutch architects of his time, spoke up for the Dutch metropolitan viewpoint. In 1923, he undertook a journey to study ancient, old, and new architecture in the Dutch East Indies, which was published in 1931 as Mijn Indische reis, gedachten over cultuuren kunst (Berlage 1931, 1991; compare Bergeijk 2011). Some of his sketches – so different to Commaille’s studies at Angkor between 1899 and 1914 (compare Pl. 11a–f) – also covered the above-mentioned temple sites on Java and Bali (Pl. IX.20a–c). It has been recently extracted from archival material that Berlage was asked by influential architects and archaeologists in the Netherlands to give his opinion on the restoration politics in the Indies. In the same year, when the director of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall, published his Conservation Manual with a com-

Figures IX.39a,b  Depictions of the Prambanan ­temple reconstruction/restoration work as published in Bosch’s 1922 “Restoration” in the journal Djawa (Source: Bosch 1922, plates 10—11, 14—16)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

parable approach for British India (Marshall 1923; compare Sengupta 2013 in Falser/Juneja 2013b), Berlage’s report came out in December 1923. He suggested approaching Hindu and Buddhist temples in Java “as historical monuments” with a need not for reconstruction but for “reverent conservation” as they “no longer carry meaning of the spir­ itual life of the Javanese people” (Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2011, 416). Questioning this argument, Bosch requested that the government create a special committee that would finally include – acting as “restoration commission” [Restauratiecommissie] – researchers, archaeologists, and architects, in addition to members of the Javanese aristocracy.79 In Yogyakarta in 1924, the Java Institute dedicated its second conference to exploring the question “Which value do the old Javanese monuments have for the present and future Javanese culture?” Bringing together Dutch colonial heritage policy, a Eurocentric civilising mis­sion, and archaeological questions, Bosch again stressed the spiritual, cultural, even educational values of archaeological monuments for Java’s cultural elite (Bosch 1924). “Propositions” [Prae-adviezen] on the topic were published (Djawa 1924, 121); at this point the issue of archaeological reconstruction had also reached circles of Dutch architects who were practicing in Java. These architects included Henri Maclain­e Pont, an enthusiastic defender of local culture, both vernacular and archaeological (he also worked at Majapahit/ Panataran and had built the first on-site museum in a vernacular style), who voted for reconstruction (Djawa 1924, 199–238). However, his great professional antipode, C. P. Wolff Schoemaker, doubted the value of contemporary Javanese culture, emphasised the Indian authorship of Javanese Hindu monuments, and even introduced racist argumentations regarding Indian origins and Javanese decadence into the discussion (Schoemaker 1924). Following Bosch’s arguments, the committee decided in 1926 that the recon-

struction of Java’s historic monuments (and therefore their cultural as much as their religious-­philosophical values) was in line with the overall Dutch-colonial policy.80 All this meant that the Dutch Archaeological Service could now, after the official decision of 1926, foster the development of its reconstruction techniques in the late 1920s and early 1930s.81 Other projects, such as Tjandi Kalasan, Tjandi Merak (Oudheidkundige Dienst 1928), and Tjandi Sewoe (Haan 1929), were circulated (Figs. IX.40a,b). W. F. Stut­ terheim’s 1929 publication Tjandi Bara-­Boedoer presented a Borobudur temple in picture-perfect silhouette and in a picturesque park-like setting which was republished in the 1932-issue of BEFEO (Figs. IX.41a,b). Rather similar to Angkor Wat’s presentation at the same time (vgl. Fig. IX.22a) it was this temple of Borobudur that became the most prestigious site of Dutch-colonial archaeology (see Stutterheim 1929, Krom 1920, 1930, van Erp 1931; compare Bernet Kempers 1976, 190–203). In 1930, Krom published about the site in well-known ‘before-­and-after rhetoric’ which would also influence the debates at Angkor (Fig. IX.42). All these discussions paved the way towards concrete reconstruction work in the Dutch East Indies and culminated in the precise moment when Henri Marchal, on the last Sunday of January 1929 and in front of Angkor’s Neak Pean temple, was confronted with Van Stein Callenfels’ harsh critique of the EFEO’s “outdated conservation politics’ à la 1880” (see quotation above). The first traceable action of this freshly approved Projet d’échange de personnel scientifique et technique de l’École française d’Extrême-­ Orient et du Service archéologique des Indes néerlandaises of August 1929 was the visit of B. Schrieke,82 then director of public instruction of the Dutch East Indies, to Indochina. His mission was to “study the organisation and the functioning of the services of public instruction and archaeolo-

79  L. C. Westenenk (member of the Raad van Indië [Indies Council]) was the chairman, later replaced by

B. Schrieke (Royal Batavian Society). Members of the commission included, among others, the philologist Hoesein Djajadiningrat (Royal Batavian Society), engineer Th. van Erp (responsible for the first restoration of Borobudur, 1907–1911), architects Thomas Karsten (also representing the Java Institute in Yogyakarta), and C. P. Wolff Schoemaker (also chair of the Bond voor Indische Kunstkringen [Confederation of Indies’ Art Circles] in Bandung). The secretary was the archaeologist Stutterheim, later replaced by philologist R. Goris (Verslag 1926, 4). 80  As Bloembergen has surfaced from archival material, the final report entitled Vertrouwelijk verslag van de commissie van advies inzake de restauratie der Hindoe-Javaansche Monumenten, nopens reconstructie van de Çiwa-tempel te Prambanan was circulated in December 1926 (Bloembergen 2011, 417). See Hindoe-Javaan­ sche monumenten 1926; Verslag 1926, for internal reports see Verzameling 1925. 81  A few years later, in the context of the Monument Act of 1931, the Service was restructured again to become a section under the Department of Education and Religion, and it collaborated closely with the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences and its museum in Batavia. With the foundation of the Oudheidkundig Verslag, an impressive series of archaeological publications were issued that certainly made (especially the twenty-fifth jubilee issue in 1938) an impression on French colleagues in Indochina. See: Oudheidkundigen dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië/ODNI 1937, 1938a–d, 1941. 82  While a member of the Royal Batavian Society, he replaced Westenenk in 1926 as chairman of the Restauratiecommissie, and guided George Coedès, together with Van Stein Callenfels, through Java’s ruins in 1928.

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Figures IX.40a,b The Oudheidkundige Dienst Niederlandsch-Indie publishing its success story in temple reconstructions in a 1928 volume of its Rapporten, here with Tjandi Kalasan and Tjandi Merak (Source: Oudheidkundige Dienst 1928, plates 21 and 34)

gy […] in order to strengthen the already existing connec- its employed methods for the exploration, conservation, tions between the institutions savants” of both countries maintenance, and restoration of historic mon­uments”; and (BEFEO 1929, 533–34).83 After diplomatic stays in Saigon, (b) “to study the monuments of the principle epochs of the Hanoi, and Phnom Penh, and before leaving for Siam, Hindoo-Javanese art” (Marchal 1930b, 585). Bosch accomSchrieke finally visited Angkor under Marchal’s guidance. panied him during his first week in Batavia/Weltevreden, After Coedès’ suggestion to GGI Pasquier on February which included a visit to the museum. Because de Haan, 1930 that the French should send an archaeologist as soon the inspector of the Archaeological Service and the archias possible to Java (Pasquier himself was pictured during a tect responsible for the conservation and restoration of the visit to the Dutch-colonial temple sites, see below), an Ar- Hindu-Javanese temples, was ill, Marchal visited Java with rêté chargeant M. H. Marchal, conservateur d’Angkor, d’une Van Stein Callenfels (no mention was made of Van Stein mission d’études aux Indes Néerlandaises was issued on Callenfels’ visit to Angkor just five months earlier!), and 29 April 1930 (BEFEO 1930, 187, 282).84 As Marchal report- Bali with Dr. R. Goris. In his report, Marchal analysed the ed in a forty-page report in the BEFEO of the same year, he “characteristics” of the visited temples – and their “differarrived in Batavia on June 29 for a four-month journey ences” from the Khmer temples as regards layout, construction, decoration: Java’s Dieng Plateau; the ninth-cenwith two distinct aims: (a) “to investigate the functioning of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies and tury sites of Borobudur, including Candi Pawon and 83  See also ANOM INDO GGI 38612 (Voyage en Indochine de M. de Dr. Schrieke, Directeur de

l’Enseignement des Indes Néerlandaises, 1929). Schrieke’s visit anticipated a study tour of Ullmer, statisticienadjoint au service de la Statistique Générale de France, Chef du service de Statistique Générale de l’Indochine that was made in September 1929 to Java (ANOM INDO GGI 38624). 84  Internal correspondence between Coedès, GGI Pasquier, Graffeuil at the Service des Affaires Extérieures in Hanoi, and the French Consulate in Singapore and Batavia, proves that Marchal used his trip to give a series of lectures with about one hundred colour slides of Angkor (ANOM INDO GGI 38657).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.41a,b  Stutterheim’s 1929 publication on the Borobudur temple; and depicted in the BEFEO of 1932 (Sources:  Stutterheim 1929, Fig. 2; BEFEO 1932, plate XV)

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Figures IX.42  Krom’s publication about Borobudur in 1930 (Source: Krom 1930, illustrations 10—13; collage Falser 2018)

Mendut, and Prambanan, including Candi Sari, Sewu, and Plaosan; East Java with Panataran, Singasari, Kidal, Badut and others; and temple sites on Bali. More important for our purposes was Marchal’s section on “Methods of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies to reconstruct and maintain ancient monuments” (Marchal 1930b, 622–25; my emphasis) with a selection of twelve photographs. As an important matter of fact, the later French term anastylose was not mentioned a single time. Instead, the Dutch term “reconstructie” and the French term “reconstitution” was introduced to the French reader in the text and Marchal documented and photographed the reconstruction site of Prambanan with a soccer field-size grouping of decomposed stones on the ground (Figs. IX.43a–d). The described work 74

steps included the following: a preparatory work of cleaning and clearing the overgrown site, safeguarding the crumbled stones, and unearthing sunken wall layers; the drawing in 1:10-scale plans, sections, and elevations of all intact facades; an attentive observation of all profiles, layers, etc.; uniting stones of the same profiles, decorations, and placement; “reconstituting on the ground” [reconstituer sur le sol] all fragments in correct and newly oriented layers; replacing deteriorated or completely missing elements with artificial, though untreated and recognisable, stones with the original and added layers being indicated on elevation drawings; and finally, re-composing the different on-ground reconstitutions into one coherent and standing structure. These procedures – mortar [mortier] and iron clamps were only used inside the structure and were invisible from outside – had been, according to Marchal, applied to the Candi Badut, Mendut, and Kalasan. However, as previously mentioned, the highly hypothetical character of the completely reconstructed Candi Pawon had recently attracted criticism, and all structures were fenced and guarded by local indigenous people but controlled by an “Inspector of the Archaeological Service”. Finally, and most importantly, Marchal summarised: “The procedures of reconstruction, which I have summed up above, cannot at the present moment be transported to Indochina, let alone to the Group of Angkor, without modification” (Marchal 1930b, 625; my emphasis). The reasons he identified for this were, first, because Java had far better trained and more competent indigenous personnel to assist in an unhurried reconstruction process, and, second, because of the three main differences between the Javanese and Khmer temples: (a) the Khmer monuments were far more complex in composition; (b) Angkor’s more fragile, deteriorated, and irreplaceable stone structure necessitated a more selective manipulation; and (c) the Ang­ kor temples were more imperfect, clumsy, and faulty in their execution. These factors combined with a lack of sufficient tooling [outillage] at the Conservation d’Angkor meant, as Marchal concluded, that […] at present these methods cannot be generally used [généraliser] at the Angkor Group […]. However, these practiced methods at Java could be transposed and modified, and most likely applied […] for partial reconstruction [on pourrait prévoir des travaux de reconstructions partielles] at structures of the early classical period with a rather simple layout and a well-executed construction, […] such as at Bantay Srei [sic], Bantay Samre, Chau Say and Thommanon, and, outside of Angkor, for many towers of early Khmer art [l’art khmèr primitif] (Marchal 1930b, 626).

However sceptical Marchal might have been about the Dutch-colonial technique of “reconstruction” after his return to Angkor, he nevertheless “appl[ied] the method of Java” – as he called it in his Journal des fouilles on Friday, 28 November 1930 – to the “the building with round col-

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.43a,b  Marchal’s mission report to the Dutch East Indies on the 1930 volume of the BEFEO (Source: Marchal 1930, plates 74 and 75)

Figures IX.43c,d  Marchal’s black-and-white film negatives of his journey through Java, as they survived in the Paris archive of the EFEO, labelled (most probably after 1932) with “anastylose” (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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Figures IX.44a—g  Marchal’s very first trials of what he would soon after term anastylose at the “round-columned building” on the temple site of Preah Khan from 28 November 1930 onwards: work-in-progress photographs as they survived in the EFEO archive in Paris (with ­Marchal himself standing in front of the completed project in Fig. IX.44g) and as they were partly published in the BEFEO in 1930 and 1931 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

umns [édicule à colonnes rondes]” at Preah Khan temple (Figs. IX.44a–g). Collecting the upper stone layers, cleaning, and reuniting them on the ground proved that the highly decayed condition of the fragments could not create an “impression de neuf like that seen in the same operation in Java, [but gave Marchal] confidence in the planned reconstruction of Banteay Srei”.85 When he reported officially about his “mise en pratique des méthodes à Java” in the BEFEO of 1930, Marchal confessed to the limited success of the operation (BEFEO 1930, 579) but nonetheless began this process for the first time in Angkor (BEFEO 1931, 325– 28, 612). Indeed, the French term anastylose would be used for the first time only in September 1932 in the monthly and annual Rapport de la Conservation d’Angkor in reference to this specific building inside Preah Khan.86 Though not ex-

plicitly mentioned, this was a reference to the very Greek (or rather graecised) term “anastylosis” (literally meaning the “redressing of toppled columns”; compare Dimacopoulos 1985) and to a contemporaneous discussion about this very term that was not taking place in the Dutch East Indies but in Athens (see below). In questioning the continuing official narrative of Marchal as “the enthusiastic architect who brought the technique of anastylose from Java to Angkor” (Dumarçay 1997a; EFEO 2001, 95; EFEO 2010, 100), it becomes clear from all kinds of internal and official documents that he was rather forced into this paradigm change ‘from conservation to reconstruction’ by the new director of the EFEO, George Coedès (compare his comment to GGI Pasquier in February 1930, quoted above). Another influential factor in this

85  Journaux des fouilles, Marchal/Parmentier, tome VIII (1.1930–8.1931), handwritten pagination 119 (EFEO Archive, Paris) 86  “PRAH KHAN – Bâtiment Q – Le dégagement de ce bâtiment se poursuit par l’enlèvement des décombres qui obstruent encore les courettes et galeries et, dans les endroits où cela est possible, par l’anastylose qui désormais est entrée en pratique sur les chantiers de la Conservation” [italics MF] (RCA September 1932).

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direction was certainly Henri Parmentier. As the chief archaeologist of the EFEO, Parmentier had just toured Indochina’s archaeological sites with Bosch, the leading person for the practices of reconstruction back in Java. Quite tellingly, the Chronique section of the first BEFEO of 1931 on “Service archéologique et conservation des monuments ­historiques” (most probably written by Parmentier) characterised “the first twenty-five years of work at Angkor” as rather old-fashioned in its (Marchal’s!) exaggerated respect for ruins, and reported on Marchal’s methodological conversion as follows: As regards the Khmer monuments — and without the intention of being too critical about the remarkable work which had been accomplished at Angkor during the last twenty-five years — we must acknowledge the fact that an often exaggerated respect for the “ruin” has resulted, most noticeably at the temples of the Bayon or at Angkor Thom, in an abusive use of reinforced concrete to stabilise pillars or wall surfaces (which could have easily been re-erected [redressés]), or to consolidate doors or windows (which could have been remade). […]. During his mission to the Dutch East Indies, Mr. Marchal was able to convince himself, after a series of venturesome restorations and hypothetical restitutions, that it will be useful to take as a model the example of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies, which could ­establish a strictly scientific method of the restoration [restauration] of temples like those of Kalasan, Prambanan, and Sewu to achieve the best results. [italics MF] (BEFEO 1931, 312)

Bosch, who was nominated membre d’honneur of the EFEO shortly after, was welcomed by Parmentier in Saigon in December 1930. He studied the French-colonial system of heritage protection and gave – under the joint auspices of the EFEO and the Société de Géographie de Hanoi – “a remarkable conference with projections about Indo-Javanese art and the méthodes du Service archéologique des Indes Néerlandaises” in Hanoi. Later, Parmentier and Bosch travelled onwards to Phnom Penh and stayed at Siem Reap to inspect Angkor from 21 January to 3 February 1931 ­(BEFEO 1931, 286, 317–18, 485–87). At this point, as Marchal noted in his Journal des fouilles, his visit to Angkor Park along with Bosch and Parmentier included “la visite du chantier de Prah Khan” (23 January) and the “inspection du travail de restitution assez délicat” of Banteay Srei (on 25 January), and later the sites of Neak Pean, Bayon,

Kravanh, Banteay Kdei, Phnom Kulen, and finally the depot of the Conservation d’Angkor (by 3 February). Both Bosch and Parmentier left Angkor for Siam on that day.87 Just as his colleague Krom had written a series of articles on Angkor in the Dutch journal Nederlandsch-Indië Oud en Nieuw in 1924 and 1925 (Krom 1924/25, 25, 1926/27), Bosch published an architectural study on Angkor Wat for the French BEFEO in 1932. Paul Mus, in his turn, wrote a contribution for the Borobudur temple (BEFEO 1932, 7–21; 267–439): likewise, the established scientific exchange between both countries’ iconic heritage sites was mirrored by the exchange of honorary written comments in an act of heritage diplomacy. By the end of 1931, and this time on an official visit after Pasquier’s visit to Dutch-colonial temple sites on Java (Fig. IX.45a), Van Stein Callenfels – also made a “membre correspondant à l’EFEO” (BEFEO 1933, 563) shortly after – visited Indochina: now the visit was conducted together with Parmentier and Jean-Yves Claeys, an EFEO member and appointed inspecteur du Service archéologique et con­ servateur des monuments historiques de l’Annam-Champa.88 On his tour through Angkor Park in December 1931 (Fig. IX.45b), Van Stein Callenfels was again accompanied by Marchal (BEFEO 1931, 564–65). This time Marchal was able to show for the first time how Dutch-colonial reconstructië had mutated, after initial trials at other sites such Preah Khan (see above), into its very first French-colonial, full-scale application at the larger Angkor. The chosen site was Banteay Srei, a small sandstone sanctuary from the ninth century CE that was situated some thirty kilometres to the north of Angkor Park and had already been described as a temple site in 1926 by Henri Parmentier and Victor Goloubew in the EFEO’s first Mémoires archéologiques (Parmentier/Goloubew 1926). When Marchal reported on his work at Banteay Srei for the first time in the BEFEO of 1931 from a viewpoint of historic preservation, the French term anastylose was still not used! Outside of the Angkor Group, the temple of Bantāy Srĕi [sic] has seen the inauguration of the new work methods of the conservator of Angkor. This temple, with its small dimensions, clear profiles and rich decoration, was considered particularly suitable for the trial of the procedures in use in the Dutch East Indies. (BEFEO 1931, 327)

The report continued in a kind of déjà-vu of Marchal’s earlier summary about his observations in the Dutch East Indies. However, the extensive use of cement was a constant

87  Journaux des fouilles, Marchal/Parmentier, tome VIII (1.1930–8.1931), handwritten pagination 147–52 (Archive EFEO Paris). Later Bosch reported on his insights into the architectural history of Angkor (Bosch 1931, 1932). 88  As a sad end of the exchange programme between 1929 and 1931, the application for Claeys to visit Java in 1931 was extensively negotiated but ultimately not financed by the GGI (see ANOM GGI 38701, also EFEO Archive Paris, dossier Claeys).

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Figures IX.45a,b  Van Stein Callenfels hosting the French Gouverneur de l’Indochine, Pierre Pasquier, on Java’s archaeological sites during a visit in April 1929 (above); and during his own official return visit to Angkor (seen behind the statue), with Marchal and J.-Yves Claeys to his right (below) (Source: © Collection KITLV, Leiden University; © EFEO Archive, Paris)

feature in the French approach to the new method: the inner sanctuary with its three main towers was cleared; the fallen stone sections were identified and collected; all standing levels of the three towers [beginning with the southern tower] were deconstructed and reassembled in their correct position on the floor; plans and elevations

were executed; the elements photographed before and after; the terrain was levelled and the foundations stabilised with a new concrete bed of cement mortar [on a coulé un béton en mortier de ciment]; subsequently, the two old wall layers of stones were re-erected by replacing their old in-between filling made of rubble with newly cut laterite 79

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.46a—d  Marchal’s intervention at Banteay Srei in the early 1930s (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris; BEFEO 1931, plates XXIX and XXX)

blocs (Figs. IX.46a–d); and, finally “the decorated stone elements, which had been stolen by André Malraux in December 1923 and since their return stored at the musée de Phnom Penh, were re-inserted”89 (BEFEO 1931, 327). The overall result was rather unanimously declared a success (Fig. IX.47). While the section on “Service archéologique”

in the BEFEO of 1932 still used the term “reconstruction” for Marchal’s new project (BEFEO 1932, 413), it was up to Coedès – the real person pushing for the application of the Dutch-colonial technique to present the temples of Ang­kor in, as he called it, their complete and picture-perfect “splendour of the past” (compare Finot’s 1920 state-

89  This final comment referred to a very special incident when André Malraux (later, ironically, the French minister of cultural affairs!) came, together with his colleague Chevasson, to Cambodia in 1923 – they met EFEO’s director Aurousseau in Saigon, and Parmentier in Siem Reap – to break off some of the decorative stone elements of Banteay Srei. They were later stopped by the police and questioned by George Groslier, director of the Phnom Penh Museum, and sentenced to three years in prison after a spectacular trial at Phnom Penh in July 1924 (during which he claimed that the temple had not been listed as a protected monument, and that Marchal supported their actions). Malraux was finally released much earlier after a petition and a new trial in 1925. Many newspapers reported on this, for example L’Impartial under the title “Vandales et pilleurs de ruines” and “Le vol des bas-reliefs d’Angkor: Malraux et Chevasson devant le tribunal correctionnel de Pnompenh” (8 January and 22 July 1924, cover page). The file on the Affaire Malraux is stored at the ANOM. Malraux himself told the story in his famous novel La voie royale of 1930 (Malraux 1930), and his wife Clara in Nos vingt ans of 1966 (Malraux 1966). Compare with the chapter “L’affaire Malraux (1923–1930)” in Singaravélou 1999, 233–45; compare Longlois 1966, Lacouture 1975.

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Figure IX.47  Banteay Srei finalised and propagated by Marchal as great success, here in the Bulletin de la Société des Études Indochinoises of 1965 (Source: Marchal 1965, Fig. 12)

ment of the temples’ to-be-reconstructed “grandeur”) – to introduce the French term of anastylose in conjunction with the term “reconstruction”. The following quotation appeared for the first time in the context of Angkor in the first volume of the BEFEO in 1932 in the section called “Études cambodgiennes/XXIX: Un nouveau tympan de Bantay Srei”: The work of reconstruction and anastylose, directed by Henri Marchal, inspired by the employed methods of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies, are ongoing and will give the temple of Banteay Srei back a bit of its past splendour (BEFEO 1.1932, 81)

By the end of 1932, Marchal retired (for the first but not last time) and was replaced by the École-des-Beaux-Artstrained architect Georges Alexandre Trouvé (BEFEO 1932, 575). During his short ­career, right up to his tragic suicide in July 1935 (Coedès 1935b; EFEO 2002, 124–25), Trouvé restored, above all, the important pre-Angkorian brick

temples of Roluos, such as Preah Ko, with large portions of reinforced concrete but without any dismantling anastylosis (Falser 2006, 163–66; compare Falser 2007). Although already initiated by Marchal in July 1934, no other Conservateur before him finalised a structurally more invasive intervention at Angkor Wat: as he published it in the BEFEO in 1935 (Trouvé 1935), Trouvé opened the central vertical axis under the central tower down to an overall depth of twenty-three metres (!) (Figs. IX.48a,b), only to find a torso of a Buddha statue and a kind of dépôt sacré of two laterite blocks with two golden sheets. Before he died, Trouvé prepared a new map of Angkor. His initial map was presumably taken up by Marchal after him, finalised (as the legend has it) only in “September 1957” (most probably by Bernard Philippe Gros­lier already on the spot, see below) with an unforeseen topo­graphical precision of ongoing projects and archaeological and religious sites (Fig. IX.49), and published in the impor­tant publication Documents topographiques de la conservation des monuments d’Angkor by the EFEO-archaeologist Christophe Pottier (Pottier 1993). 81

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.48a,b  Georges Trouvé’s intervention at Angkor Wat’s central tower, as published in a section plan in the BEFEO of 1935 (Source: BEFEO 1935, plates LXIX, LXX)

After 1932 until today, Marchal’s anastylose of Banteay Srei was quoted hundreds of times as the prestigious new project of Angkor. Marchal himself, seemingly forgetting his own previous prejudice in the 1920s and 1930s against an exaggerated use of reinforced concrete,90 helped considera-

bly in this myth-making process. He even made this newly introduced technique the central element in his own 1945 booklet Angkor: La résurrection de l’art Khmer et l’œuvre de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, and he now played down a nostalgia for the image of “temple ruins in the jungle” (Mar­

90  In the context of setting up a new shed for “the Bayon Buddha”, Marchal commented in his 1935 diary en-

try dated 13 December 1935 about the use of reinforced concrete pillars in wood-like colour: “The béton armé in Angkor Thom had been imposed on me, but I stay bitterly [farouchement] hostile against the use of this material inside the perimeter of Khmer temples (except for consolidation work).” See Journaux des fouilles, Marchal/Trouvé/Lagisquet, tome XII (5.1935–5.1936), handwritten pagination 137 (EFEO Archive, Paris).

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Figure IX.49  A plan of the Angkor area, prepared by Trouvé in 1934, reworked by Marchal in 1935, finalised in 1957 and published in 1993 (Source: Pottier 1993, plan 1)

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chal 1945, 2791). In his unpublished Souvenirs d’un ancien conservateur, Marchal defended these “nouvelles formules de travail for the Conservation d’Angkor” with which “a ruin [would become] a totally new building”, against “the nineteenth-century tradition of rather fantastic reconstructions back in metropolitan France […] under Viollet-le-Duc” (Marchal 1956, 61; compare the above-quoted statements of Barth 1901 and Dupont 1938). We will only quote one of his last articles as published in the 1965 issue of Bulletin de la Société des Études Indochinoises. It was here, and only here (compare Fig. IX.47), that Marchal – in a retrospective view on a term which he did not originally use when he started his work at Banteay Srei in 1930/early 1931 – remarked on what had been, in fact, alongside Java and Ang­ kor, the third and decisive cornerstone in a transnational and even transcontinental network of scientific knowledge used to negotiate the concepts of conservation, reconstruction, and finally, anastylosis: the debate around the Acropolis of Athens. Indeed, what he quoted as the definition of the term had already become the standard reference by that time to the Greek archaeologist Nicolas Balanos: This temple [Banteay Srei, MF] also merits public attention for another reason [than for its architectural quality, MF]: it was here where of all the construction sites of the Conservation d’Angkor the procedure of anastylosis was inaugurated, [though] already practiced on several areas in the world. It was in Java, where, thanks to the extremely obliging Dr. Bosch, Chef of the Oudheidkundige Dienst, I was able to initiate myself in these new methods in use for the reconstruction of the small southern temple of Prambanan. “Anastylosis consists in the re-establishing

or re-erecting [rétablissement ou relèvement] of a monument with its proper material and only with the original methods of construction of each building. Anastylosis allows the discrete and justifiable use of new materials to replace missing stones without which the replacing of the ancient elements cannot be achieved.” This was said by M. Balanos, Ingénieur-Conservateur des Monuments de l’Acropole d’Athènes during a conference in Athens, at the Institut International de Coopération intellectuelle in October 1931. […] We can conclude the following: we have seen too often authors writing about the eternal cliché of a ruin being mastered by a forest, of the work of man conquered by nature, or of the triumph of vegetation over architecture. However, now we live in an epoch where nature itself has to give way to the progress of ­science. [italics MF] (Marchal 1965, 288, 290)

This statement in particular introduces us to a number of important questions: If the EFEO had imported from the Dutch-Colonial Archaeological Service in Java the technique of bringing ancient stone and brick temples back to their previous grandeur, why would they (a) abruptly, around 1931/32, change from the Dutch term reconstructie to the French anastylose; and (b) why would Marchal in the above-quoted citation (and with him the whole EFEO after 1932) identify a Greek architect called Nicolas Balanos (whom none of the EFEO’s specialists at Angkor mentioned a single time during its first thirty years of existence) as the inventor of the given technique for Angkor? Furthermore, what could French conservators in the Far East have actually known about the Greek situation within their own network of knowledge exchange?

3.3. Nicolas Balanos, the Acropolis, anastylosis, and the Athens Conference of 1931 Only a selection of sources can be mentioned here in a brief introduction to the long history of modern-day interventions in the fifth-century BC Acropolis in Athens. These cover the first stage of about one hundred years between the 1830s and the 1940s (Balanos 1938, 7–10; Mallouchou-Tufano 1994, 1998, 2007, Hellmann 2001/2).92 After the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22), the first systematic investigations of the ruined temple hill were initiated dur-

ing the reign of King Otto of Bavaria (1832–63). With the German architect Leo von Klenze voting for the reconstruction of the Acropolis, the first larger efforts carried out by Ludwig Ross, Eduard Schaubert, and Hans Christian Hansen in 1835–36 came quite close to what would later be negotiated as anastylosis. After the foundation of the Greek Archaeological Service in 1837 with the archaeologist Kyriakos Pittakis, the “Question of the Parthenon res-

91  By defining his use of anastylosis and reinforced concrete at Angkor, he reassured his visitors: “C’est au

tour de la nature de reculer devant le travail de l’homme qui a rendu vains ses efforts de destructions. Toutefois je voudrais rassurer les personnes amies du mystère du pittoresque que charme le spectacle des architectures écroulés au milieu de la forêt. Les temples du Cambodge sont si nombreux qu’on ne peut songer à les reconstruire tous; d’ailleurs les ressources budgétaires n’y suffiraient pas. Les visiteurs de temples khmers auront donc desormais l’agrément de passer d’un temple quasi neuf et reconstitué entièrement à d’autres qui seront encore à l’état de ruine au milieu de la jungle.” [italics MF] (Marchal 1945, 31) 92  The author would like to thank Mrs. Mallouchou-Tufano and Mrs. Hellmann for precious information provided on the topic over several conversations in 2014.

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toration” in the late nineteenth century oscillated between conservation of the romantic and picturesque ruin and indepth restoration efforts. Responding to the crisis of Greek national identity before 1900, the growing desire to re-establish Greece’s greatest national symbol – the monumental complex of the Athenian Acropolis – brought Panayiotis Kavvadia (general ephor of antiquities after 1885 and general secretary of the archaeological service after 1895) and his engineering architect, Nikolaos Balanos (1860–1942), who obtained his diploma in civil engineering at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris in 1887, to excavate, survey, and secure the existing ruined temple hill. An earthquake in 1894 finally brought the ruin to more international attention, and in 1895 the Committee for the Conservation of the Parthenon invited three experts – Fran­cis Penrose, Josef Durm, and the French architect and member of the Commission de conservation des Monuments historiques de France Lucien Magne. They voted against far-­reaching reconstruction work, but were in favour of simple interventions like strengthening damaged parts, selected substitutions for, completions of, and additions to ancient members.93 Later, free from any external supervision, Niko­laos [or ‘Nicolas’ in French] Balanos, the engineer of public works and the head of the department of architecture in the Ministry of Education from 1911–39, would oversee the interventions after 1898. In collaborations with the General Ephorate of Antiquities and the Archaeological Society, these interventions included consolidation/replacement Figure IX.50  Balanos’ plan of the re-establishing of the work at the Parthenon, as well as the restoration of the Ere- “colonnade north of the Acropolis”, as published in his chtheion (1902–09) and the Propylaea (1909–17). 1938 French publication Les monuments de l’Acropole. But what about the French reception and involvement Relèvement et conservation (Source: Balanos 1938, detail in this process? In 1904 the Parisian art review Le Musée of folding plan) published the “Protestation des écrivains et des artistes contre la restauration du Parthenon” (La Protestation 1904/05). Initiated by the director of the École française d’Athènes, Théophile Homolle, this was presented and discussed at the First International Archaeological Congress vation of 1938, with 147 plates and twenty folding plans in Athens in 1905. The “Question of the restoration of the (Fig. IX.50, Pl. 21a–c), codified his global fame until today. The critique concentrated on the criteria and the intenParthenon” was revived a third time in 1922. This was just after the catastrophic outcome of the Hellenic invasion tions of the intervention as far as scientific accuracy, interinto Turkish Asia Minor in 1921/22, which dashed the na- vening methods, available techniques, and materials were tion’s dream of a ‘Greater Greece’ after many decades of concerned.95 An obituary for Balanos (he died in 1942) repolitical, para-colonial influence from outside94. Balanos ferred to the ambivalent switch from his initial efforts to now declared his intention of restoring the northern peri- “restore in the material (Pentelic marble) and technique of style colonnade of the monument, an act which initially the ancient structure” to the “possibilities of reinforced con­ attracted criticism. However, his famous French (!) publi- crete [as] substitution” (Luce 1943). A rather recent sumcation Les monuments de l’Acropole. Relèvement et conser- mary by the Greek expert Fani Mallouchou-Tufano, judg-

93  How far the French involvement in the French capital went is examplified by Magne’s own speech at the

Sorbonne in Paris on 31 March 1905 (Magne 1905).

94  Compare Hamilakis 2007, Damaskos 2008, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter. 95  Otto Walter, head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, formulated in 1922 the first critique against

Balanos as regards the question of the reversibility of the in-depth interventions (quoted in MallouchouTufano 1998, 312–14, 365). In 1927, William Bell Dinsmoor questioned the positioning of the redressed columns and the overall aesthetic appearance; the German Wilhelm Dörpfeld defended the solutions.

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ing Balanos’ work for the Acropolis in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, is rather harsh, but it brings us to the centre of our discussion with astonishing parallels with the debate about Angkor: [Balanos] continued the work of nineteenth-century classicist architects and archaeologists [with] the primary goal of upgrading the artistic, aesthetic, and environmental values of the monumental building, while his methods continued to be in large degree empirical and improvised. Wishing to “give a more complete impression of the monuments as if these had suffered smaller damages [and elevate them] through the restoration of a part of their magnificence”, Balanos exceeded the limit of simple strengthening interventions which had been stipulated by the first committees formed to oversee the works, and proceeded with more comprehensive restorations of parts of the monuments with the relocation of scattered fragments, without, however, carefully studying and documenting his work, which often saw material being positioned haphazardly. Equally haphazard was the ultimate limit of intervention, which now depended on the number of ancient members which were recognised and identified, a process which remained incomplete and fragmentary as Balanos lacked specialised archaeological knowledge and ignored the method of recognition and interpretation of marble traces which had begun to be applied by his contemporary architects and archaeologists. Balanos gave special attention to the aesthetic upgrading of the monuments, using Pentelic marble for the completion and replacement of ancient parts, the sole exception being the intervention on the two colonnades and the lintel of the western door of the Parthenon, where in order to achieve a better, in his view, chromatic consistency between the new pieces and the ancient members he chose to use reinforced concrete. (Mallouchiu-Tufano 1994, 82)

Balanos had published regularly in Greek after 1900 on the concept of what had been transcribed as anastēlōsin (1907, 1909) and anastēlōseōs (1910), but the very term anastylosis was (and this is highly relevant for our context) only introduced for an international public in the French language. In the preface of his above-quoted French monograph Les monuments de l’Acropole: Relèvement et conservation of 1938 (in Greek 1930), Balanos claimed to have “introduced the ‘neologism’ of the word anastylose (in French) already in 1925 in a presentation at the Réunion des Académies” (Balanos 1938, 7). And he continued: “Properly speaking, the Greek word anastylosis indicates the bringing back to place [crumbled] tambours of a column, and it is by the extension of this approach to indicate all efforts to re-establish of architectural elements [relèvement des éléments architectoniques]” (Balanos 1938, 7). However, Balanos’ fame (and the criticisms against him) grew instantly when he introduced his concept of anastylosis during the inter86

national Conférence internationale d’experts pour la protection et la conservation des monuments d’art et d’histoire of the Office International des Musées (based in Paris as a sub-section of the Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle) held in Athens from 21 to 30 October 1931. The conclusions drawn from the conference would later be known as the 1931 Charter of Athens. As a doctrinal text, it became an important basis for the 1964 Charter of Venice in which the prohibition of “reconstruction” and the recommendation of archaeological anastylosis was once more formulated (Dimacopoulos 1985, see below). After Balanos, the protection of the Acropolis went to the Restoration Service of the Ministry of Culture, which was headed by Balanos’ lifelong rival Anastasios Orlandos. How then did the knowledge of the Athens context reach the French specialists at Angkor? The ‘scientific contact zone’ – where global knowledge about conservation activities from Angkor, Java, Athens (and Rome) among others was spread and exchanged between the different French actors from all international centres of advanced archaeology and heritage preservation – was diverse. Knowledge circulated in the publications which all three Écoles françaises shared; in the more specific French journals in the Greek context; in French art journals in Paris; and finally, at the famous Athens conference in 1931. As far as the first element was concerned, the Paris-­ based Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres was and still is the uniting umbrella institution for the École française d’Athènes (EFA, founded in 1846), the École française de Rome (founded in 1873–75), and the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO, founded in 1898/1900). Its journal Comptes rendus des séances served as the official point of knowledge exchange, and the directors or representatives of each of these “French Schools” had to deliver reports of their activities. As a consequence, all three Schools, with their libraries in Hanoi, Saigon, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap (for the EFEO), Rome, and Athens received copies of the Comptes rendus, and their collaborators were very well aware of the activities of each of their sister organisations in Europe and Asia. The EFEO’s presence in this journal was first established in 1900 with Auguste Barth’s appraisal of the École d’archéologie en Indo-Chine. In the report, he made the connection with the Dutch experts in Leiden and (with Finot’s visit to Java in 1900) to the Dutch-colonial Société de Batavia (Barth 1900, compare Barth 1901). Finot also reported on this in the same year, only three issues later (Finot 1900b). In his 1917 report, Édouard Chavannes compared Marchal’s work at Angkor of “étaiement, déblaiement, dégagement [and] consolidation” with the archaeological activities of the “Écoles d’Athènes et de Rome” (Chavannes 1917, 383, 380). Henri Cordier’s report for the EFEO (Cor­dier 1920) appeared in 1920, the same year that Louis Chatelain submitted his account on “the work of the Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome”. The archaeological investigations in Thessaloniki by Ernest Hébrard (compare Yia­koumis 2001), shortly there-

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

after the architect of the EFEO’s musée Finot in Hanoi (see however, was neither used by Balanos nor in the subseVIII.24a), were also mentioned (Chatelain 1920, 90). How- quent CRAI reports by the EFEO commenting on the sciever, the closest link within the Comptes rendus des séances entific exchange with the Dutch East Indies (Foucher 1931, de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (CRAI) be- Coedès 1933a).97 tween archaeological conservation activities in Athens and As regards French scientific journals about the concrete Angkor was established in the mid-1920s. In 1925 (the discussions in Athens, the École française d’Athènes (EFA) death of Théophile Homolle, director of the École française published its Bulletin de correspondance hellénique (BCH) d’Athènes, was announced in the same issue) the school’s with sections on “Chroniques des fouilles et découvertes alumnus Nicolas Balanos was invited to report about his archéologiques dans l’Orient hellénique”. In fact, Balanos’ work in Athens in the séance of 12 June, the operational “travaux de restauration” for the Northern colonnade of the terms of which were still rather difficult to translate. The Parthenon with “restituted” originals and new stone eleentire work of “Le redressement de la collonade Nord du ments with coloured cement fluting (compare his 1925 arParthénon” [The re-establishing/recovery/redress of the ticle in the CRAI quoted above) had already been brought Northern collonade of the Parthenon] was aligned with the up in the 1921 issue of the BCH (BCH 1921, 497–500). It previous “strengthening/reinforcement” [consolidation] of placed – and this was rather new – a photomontage of the the temple’s Western péristasis and the “lifting” [relève- projected outcome next to illustrations of the works in proments] of the Erechteion and the Propylaea. Following his gress (Figs. IX.51a–c). The BCH of 1922 reported on the argumentation for giving the Parthenon back its original upcoming “controversy and protest of the foreign ‘schools’ shape, “new polemics” focused on his strategy of adding in Athens against the use of vulgar materials [matériaux the missing column drums in a newly cut “pierre du Pirée” vulgaires] such as cement and pierre du Pirée”, but a “prudent rebuilding” [réédification] with preparatory studies with an exterior, simulated flute made of cement and small marble pieces and in the colour tone of antique marble. As was welcomed by the Greek Ministry (BCH 1922, 484–86; he explained: “With this procedure, the eye from a certain compare BCH 1923, 507). The “restoration” work itself distance is not shocked by the contrast between new ele- was judged to be either “questionable” or “in favourable ments and antique pieces. Seen from a near distance, how- progress” (BCH 1924, 453–55; BCH 1925, 440; BCH 1926, ever, nobody would confuse the two sections due to the 538). However, when Yves Béquignon, the secretary generdifference in their material” (Balanos 1925, 172; see be- al of the EFA, reported on the official “ceremony [to inaulow). Interestingly, this dawning paradigm change in the gurate the final result] on 17 May 1930, which united Greek 1920s, which sought to correct historical traces of loss and and foreign archaeologists, in the presence of Venizelos, decay or even to camouflage later additions of a ruin in the président du conseil”, leader of the Liberal Party, and order to bring it back to its ‘original appearance’ and great opponent of King Constantine in the late 1920s, Baltherefore to satisfy the aesthetic expectations of the spec- anos’ work of “relèvement [and] reconstruction” was welcomed (BCH 1930, 459). One year earlier than Coedès’ tator, was discussed not only in the Dutch East Indies (see above) but was also intoned in Finot’s EFEO reports to the 1932 description in the BEFEO of Marchal’s work of “anaAcadémie in 1926.96 In 1930, the Comptes rendus reported stylose” at Banteay Srei (see above), the EFA mentioned in their “Livres offerts” section on a twelve-­page, “richly the same term. In its BCH of 1931, Béquignon reported on illustrated” brochure in French and Greek that Balanos the Athens Conférence d’experts pour l’étude des problèmes had entitled Relèvement des Monuments de l’Acropole: relatifs à la protection et à la conservation des monuments 1834–1930 (Balanos 1930). The journal praised Balanos’ d’art et d’histoire, which took place in October 1931 (see below). He listed all responsible organisers and the “150 “prudent and ­patient skills” and his results as “admirable experts from twenty-one countries” (BCH 1931, 450–51). and striking” (CRAI 74/3 (1930), 233). This entry, at the latest, established Balanos’ work within the EFEO via the In a separate section on “Fouilles, découvertes et travaux”, publishing medium of the CRAI. The term anastylosis, he mentioned the following:

96  His examples of the EFEO’s work of “conservation, dégagement, exploration [and] déblaiement” (Finot

mentioned Neak Pean as examples) were linked with Marchal’s latest decision to destroy the later addition of a “gigantesque Buddha” at the mountain temple of Phnom Bakheng “in order to offer now to the spectator one of the [purified, MF] marvels of ninth-century architecture” at Angkor (Finot 1926, 135; compare BEFEO 1923, Fig. XXV, and Marchal 1928, Pl. XVIa). 97  In 1931, Foucher reported on EFEO’s activities, including the strengthened links to the Service archéo­ logique des Indes néerlandaises and the approaching Colonial Exhibition in 1931 in Paris (Foucher 1931). The last word at the end of our chosen time frame had Coedès in 1933, when he reported on the “work of reconstruction [italics in original source] by the Conservation d’Angkor after the example of the Service néerlandais des Antiquités de Java”, only to add that “this procedure was naturally strictly limited to those monuments where enough elements were left to reconstitute the old layers” (Coedès 1933a).

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.51a—c  The Acropolis project by Balanos as published in the 1921 issue of the Bulletin des Correspondences Helléniques of the Athens-based École française d’Athènes (Source: Balanos 1921/BCH 1921, 497—99)

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

During the conference of the Office des Musées, a reunion had taken place on Sunday, 25 October 1931, at the Acropolis, when Mr. N. Balanos, under the presidency of G. Karo (director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens), explained how he had used the procedure of ‘anastylose’ — meaning the relèvement of the principle monuments of the Acropolis (the temple of the Nikè Aptère, Propylées, Érechtheion and Parthénon) through the discrete and justified use of new pieces to replace these missing marbles. Without those additions the antique elements could have not been placed back; in specific cases, he had to use new materials which fit better with the general aesthetics of the building. The discussion covered: the relèvement of the Northern colonnade which was unanimously approbated; the use of ciment to cover the replaced tambours: Professor Giovannoni protested against the béton and would have preferred Balanos to have substituted with another stone of any kind […]; the choice of metal for the clamps [crampons]: instead of iron which he had used with great precautions, it was agreed to recommend bronze which Balanos had already used; and finally, concerning the Eastern frieze, Balanos explained that it had been impossible to transport it to a museum and that therefore he had approved his in situ protection project. ­During the year of 1931, Balanos continued at the ­southeastern angle of the eastern fronton. [italics MF] (Béquignon 1931, 456—57)

Although the EFA was earlier than the EFEO in mentioning the term anastylose in its reports, it was also much later in making it operational in its own official project descriptions. Only in the BCH of 1938 did Robert Demangel and Henri Ducoux report on “L’anastylose de la Tholos de ­Marmaria”, the second fourth-century structure in Delphi besides the Temple of Apollon to be judged feasible for a “partial restoration” [restauration partielle] (Demangel/ Ducoux 1938, 370). This project was defined as the “inauguration of the programme of anastylosis” within the first one hundred years of the EFA’s history (BCH 1948, 163) (Figs. IX.52a,b). Interestingly, public journals in France were eager to report on the same issue, and Balanos’ French term of anastylose was actually brought to the attention of the French readership shortly before the famous Athens conference of 1931. The leading protagonist in this was the Parisian art critic André Charbonnier. His article “Les travaux de relèvement des monuments de l’Acropole” had already appeared in December 1929 in the famous L’Illustration. With reference to the earliest decisions made by Balanos after 1900 and to a French counterexample, the author emphasised that “the Greek anastylosis [anastylose grecque] never envisaged a complete reconstruction of the monument on the basis of existing sections (like Avignon, Saint-­ Germain), but only the lifting [relèvement] of the section on the ground [and that] the Greek service considered it-

self only authorised to employ new elements for the support of the ancient ones” (Charbonnier 1929, 816). However, the illustration of the soon-to-be-lifted crumbled tambour of the columns of the Parthenon (hence the very term anastylosis, compare with Marchal’s first attempts to “apply the method of Java” at the édicule à colonnes rondes at Preah Khan in November 1930 (see Figs. IX.44a-d) could not be more different from the illustrations of the inserted (and later concealed) iron girders above the caryatids of the Erech­theion, which foretold a new technological era in the treatment of ancient monuments (Figs. IX.53a,b). Charbonnier’s contributions in the popular Paris-based journal Revue de l’art ancient et moderne between 1930 and 1931 were more detailed. In his article “La frise du Parthénon est-elle menacée?”, published in the journal’s January–May 1930 issue, Charbonnier reported on the famous frieze from the Parthenon’s southern facade. Its precarious state of conservation was highlighted by simple comparison with an actual photograph of the original, which was still in place, and its plaster cast from Lord Elgin’s mission in 1802, currently exhibited in the British Museum in London and the Acropolis Museum in Athens. It was within the context of the discussion about eventually dismantling the original frieze for the museum or “restoring” this section of the Parthenon that Charbonnier, after 1929, once again interpreted Balanos’ nuanced approach: As the anastylose grecque tackles in no case a reconstitution or a restauration but only the lifting [relèvement] of the antique monuments, it is therefore rather improbable that this last element of the programme will ever be executed. (Charbonnier 1930, 264, 266)

Quoting the corresponding letters between the French author and Balanos (the latter gave his approbation on 8 November 1929 for the report to be published), Charbonnier made this issue more explicit in his article “Le relèvement des temples de l’Acropole: Anastylose de l’Érechtheïon (1902–1909)” published in the journal’s January–May 1931 issue (Charbonnier 1931a). After the Archaeological Commission approved his 1902 report, Balanos entered his complicated project of a “redressement” of the northern portico and of another wall section by inserting new marble and stone elements in the foundations, as well as cemented iron clamps [agrafes et des tenons en fers cimentés] and vertical and horizontal iron bars [poutrelles en fer] to support the newly reassembled plafond and architrave. Just “some days before the opening of the Athens Conference” (as the journal editors prefaced the article) Charbonnier presented his third contribution to the topic entitled “Anastylose des Propylées: Le portique Est (1909–1917)”. This contribution included a similar report on Balanos’ work programme, which involved a “relèvement partielle” of the Propylaea’s walls and roof structure and included a whole new system with iron beams and girders of reinforced concrete [poutrelles encastrées; poutre en ciment armé] (Char89

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.52a,b  The French archaeological projects in Delphi/Greece, as reported in the BCH in 1938 (Source: Demangel 1938, 384, 376)

bonnier 1931b). In 1932, his observations were summarised in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the impressively illustrated article “Les monuments de l’Acropole et leur anastylose (1898–1932)”, where he also added a short critique of the Athens Conference of 1931 and of the definitions of anastylose: “[I]t totally rejects the idea of an entire reconstitution on the basis of its existing elements and […] has its focus only on the rétablissement of the monuments with its proper parts, […] and only follows the construction methods of the monument itself ” (Charbonnier 1932, 206). 90

When Charbonnier published a photograph of the finalised anastylosis of “Les Propylées, Façade Ouest” on the last page of his second 1931 article, the Revue de l’art ancient et moderne became a unique contact zone for the ongoing archaeological projects in Athens and for those ten thousand kilometres east in Cambodia (Fig. IX.54). In fact, the following page in the journal depicted the (equally restored) Bayon temple of 1931 as an introductory illustration to the article “À propos d’art Khmer” by Jeannine Auboyer (at that moment chargée de mission for Delaporte’s

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.53a,b  Charbonnier’s article “Les travaux de relèvement des monuments de l’Acropole” in the popular journal L’Illustration in 1929, where the Angkor Wat replicas in the French universal and colonial exhibitions were also published (Source: Charbonnier 1929, 815, 816)

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musée Indo-chinois under Philippe Stern’s direction, compare Jarrige 1991). In it Auboyer listed the continuing discussion, which stretched from Delaporte, Aymonier, and Lunet de Lajonquière to Finot, G. Groslier, Parmentier, Stern, Coedès and Marchal, to define a coherent chronology of the temples of Angkor as “ruines merveilleuses” comparable to those of the Greeks and Romans (Auboyer 1931). The rather curious additional point here is that the transcultural entanglement which had brought European and Southeast Asian icons of cultural heritage back to life was enriched by the related practice of temporarily simulating the same sites in picture-perfect and complete conditions for European audiences. In the same issue as Charbon­ nier’s contribution about Balanos’ efforts at the Acropolis, the French art historian Gilberte de Coral-Rémusat published her article “À propos de l’Exposition Coloniale. Le temple d’Angkor Vat et sa position dans l’art khmer”. In a gesture comparable to Charbonnier’s last illustration of the Propylea, she placed a photograph, entitled “Angkor Vat, vue générale du temple” on her first page (Fig. IX.55a). Thus, both sites, built at different times and situated in very different parts of the world, were being manipulated in a heterotopian setting by an overlapping set of Western strategies for heritage sites, be it conservation, restoration, reconstruction, or anastylosis. Additionally, Coral-Rémusat guided the reader down a simultaneous path through both the ‘original’ site of restored Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and its temporary replica at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris of 1931 (Fig. IX.55b; compare chapter VII): the two complementary twin versions of Angkor Wat, the “veritable Angkor” on the one side and the “Angkor Vat laïcisé” on the other. Just a few years, as the author continued in her article, after the de-sacralising and “disappointing opening of Angkor Wat’s central sanctuary through the modern archaeologists” of the Conservation d’Angkor (com­ pare Figs. IX.48a,b), visitors to the 1931 Exhibition entered the ‘same’ central cella once again, this time reimagined as a room not to venerate Hindu and/or Buddhist gods but the makers of the French-colonial project of Indochina (compare Figs. Intro.1a–c): The second level is made of corridors and vestibules with little light, which opens to a paved courtyard as the central crowning element of a central massif, reproduced at Vincennes. The sanctuary, originally open on all four sides, had been walled in by the monks; the modern archaeologists, curious to know its secret, had opened one gate. Their expectation fell short: the tower explored by them under light of torches, contained nothing but the debris of some Hindu or Buddhist statues […] Angkor Wat as it is presented to us in the [Parisian] Vincennes Park, is not missing a certain grandeur. Those who know the real Angkor [véritable Angkor] are impressed by the majesty of the five domes as they stand out against the sky. […] some more steps and we stand at the threshold of the central tower, the Holy of Holies, which, in the present

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reconstitution, houses the portraits of General Governors of Indochina: laicized Angkor. How­ever, in the blue sky of June, the sun shines in an oblique way through the colonnades, and it is this spot where this copy, realised at Vincennes, comes most closely to its lavish model. [italics MF] (Coral-Remusat 1931, 68, 66)

To the Western strategies of cultural heritage making, conservation, and exhibition, we would like to add Balanos’ and the EFEO’s scientific on-site re-presentation of the Parthenon and of Angkor Wat, during the Athens International Conference and the Paris International Colonial Exhibition respectively (both in 1931). All of these heterotopian strategies followed the same logic: a scientifically justified de-sacralisation of once religious and pre-national sites; and the gradual appropriation and iconisation of the same as cultural heritage for a modern time in the name of secularised self-legitimation, both national and colonial (respective to the Greek Parthenon at Athens, or the French-­colonial Ang­ kor in Cambodia or Paris, or the Dutch-colonial scene in Java) or transnational and global (during the negotiation of the same sites during international conferences, or for today’s world heritage lists for sites such as, again, the Parthe­ non, Angkor or Borobudur/Prambanan). The above-mentioned sources clearly demonstrate that both the discussion around the Athens Parthenon and ­Balanos’ approach of anastylosis were circulated in French scientific and popular journals even before the Athens Conference in October 1931 and had therefore most probably come to the attention of the EFEO before that time. Certainly, the Athens Conference with its series of international presentations (discussed shortly afterwards in various journals, but published in extenso only in 1933) was the important trigger making the concrete use of anastylosis (or at least of the term proper) the highest priority at Angkor in the years to come. However, it is important to note that high-ranking EFEO members did not participate officially at the Athens conference (they were not mentioned in the list of attendees), most probably due to their full concentration on the 1:1-scale replica of Angkor Wat that was built in Paris a few months earlier in the same year of 1931. In 1931, in its third issue, the French journal Mouseion discussed future topics for the conference and even published an article called “Texte de l’orde du jour provisoire de la future conference” (Mouseion III/1931, 94–98). In the following issue, selected papers of the conference were published, including Balanos’ contribution “Le relèvement des monuments de l’Acropole” (Balanos 1932). We shall argue in the following that it was most likely these published “Conclusions” of the Athens Conference that in 1932 effected the sudden change in Coedès’ word choice from “reconstruction” to “anastylose”. For possibly the first time in a French journal those different approaches were summarised (but not published as terms in expressis verbis, see below) in Le Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne (the supplément hebdomadaire of the Revue de l’art ancien et

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.54  Restoration projects in Athens (left) and Angkor (right) in one and the same 1931 issue of Revue de l’art ancient et moderne (Source: Revue de l’art ancient et moderne 1931, 104—105)

Figures IX.55a,b  Coral-Rémusat’s article “Le temple d’Angkor Vat”, as the original in Cambodia (left) and as full-scale replica in 1931 Paris (right) (Source: Coral-Rémusat 1931, 63, 74)

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moderne) in its issue of December 1931.98 Louis Hautecoeur, himself a participant at the conference, conservateur des Musée nationaux, and professor at the École des BeauxArts in Paris, commented on the conference in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the first-semester issue of 1932 (Hautecoeur 1932). He added a list of the high-ranking French delegation led by Paul Léon, Directeur général des BeauxArts, with specialists from the fields of art, architecture, archaeology, conservation, and museums, but no notable or official participation from the EFEO. The International Conference of the Experts for the Protection and Conservation of Monuments of Art and History was under the auspices of the Office international des Musées [in the following OIM] of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle (in place 1926–46 as a division of the Société des Nations and considered the institutional predecessor to UNESCO). It was the second meeting after an initial expert conference was held in Rome in 1930 with its focus on the scientific methods of the examination and conservation of artworks. With its 118 participants (archaeologists, architects, museum conservators, art historians, personnel of historic monument care, etc.), it was a European gathering, as even most of the representatives of areas outside the core of Europe from Turkey, Cairo, Fez, Tripolitania, and Bali were clearly connected to French, Italian, British, and Dutch colonial projects. Within the conference’s final declaration of eight chapters99 (see below), this connection became especially clear in the paragraph “VII.a. Technical and moral co-operation”: The Conference, convinced that the question of the conservation of the artistic and archaeological property of mankind is one that interests the community of the States, which are wardens of civilisation […] hopes that the States, acting in the spirit of the Covenant of the League of Nations, will collaborate with each other on an everlasting scale and in a more concrete manner with a view to furthering the preservation of artistic and historic monuments. [italics MF] (OIM 1933, 450—51)

Later, historians rightly stated that “the conference of Athens brought to an end the era of a museum-like conservation of the great monuments of art and history for a European and elitist public [and] announced at the same time the opening of the field of conservation to the preoccupa-

tions and agendas which became those of the digital age and globalisation” (Choay 2002, 8). However, a clear connection to European elitism and even French colonialism was overseen in this judgment: the above wish was, in fact, merely a cut-and-paste version of a rather similar event held some forty years earlier. In 1889 and during the Paris Universal Exhibition (when Angkor was staged for the first time as a freestanding pavilion) the International Congress for the Protection of Artworks and Monuments on the one hand, and the International Colonial Congress on the other, had already made cultural heritage a kind of civilising mission for the leading Western European – and back in time this also meant colonial – nations (compare chapter IV, Ministère du commerce 1889a, 13, 14; 1889b, 8). Some forty years after 1931, the UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 returned to this wording, and again two decades later in 1992 Angkor Park was nominated to its World Heritage List under the internationalist slogan “Save Angkor” (see chapter XII; compare Falser 2015c). The initial hypothesis of this sub-chapter was that (a) French-colonial conservation doctrine at Angkor bypassed its own metropolitan counterpart in France by linking up with the colonial periphery of the Dutch East Indies, and (b) that the term reconstruction was only changed to anastylose superficially after Athens 1931 without really adopting its technical approach. No comments were heard regarding the colonial domain during the Athens Conference on French Indochina (case studies covered Italian-colonial practices in Libya and the restoration of the monument of Zoser in Saqqarah/Egypt). However, in this regard and in light of our first hypothesis, it is useful to compare the French-metropolitan contribution “La restauration des monuments en France” by Paul Léon in Section I, with F. A. J. Moojen’s rather curious paper “La conservation des monuments aux Indes Néerlandaises”. In October of 1931, when the French-colonial experts at far-away Angkor were still using the terms “reconstruction” and “restoration” in their adherence to the Dutch-colonial practice in Java, during the Athens Conference in his periodisation of the history of architectural preservation, Paul Léon assigned these precise terms already to a destructive past. As he had himself not yet fully absorbed the intended paradigm change within the conference’s actual discussion on Balanos’ anastylosis,100 Léon defended the concept of “conservation” as the central element of the latest valid solution after 1900:

98  The conclusions were published in the section “La vie artistique à l’étranger” under the entry “Grèce– Athènes: Conférence internationale d’experts pour la protection et la conservation des monuments d’art et d’histoire” (Le Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, 783 (December 1931), 484–86). At the end, Balanos’ intro­ duction of his concept of anastylosis was announced for the following issue. 99  I: Doctrines and general principles; II: Administrative and legislative measures regarding historical monu­ ments; III: Aesthetic enhancement of ancient monuments; IV: Restoration materials; V: The deterioration of ancient monuments; VI: The technique of conservation; VII: The conservation of monuments and inter­ national collaboration; and VIII: Conclusions. 100  Jules Destrée, president of the OIM, spoke in his summary of “veritable innovations of an international scale”. See OIM 1933, 408.

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Since the turn of the century the architects have renounced the reconstruction [reconstruire] of buildings back to their [original, MF] appearance and have limited themselves to keeping them [maintenir] as they have come to us from the past. Restoration [restauration] has given way to conservation [conservation]. […] More favourable to the works of strict conservation than to those of great restoration projects, the actual epoch seems to have brought for our French monuments a period of survival [survie] rather than of resurrection [résurrection, compare Marchal 1945, MF]; this may […] better conform with the truth [vérité] and be more faithful to history [fidèle à l’histoire]. (OIM 1933, 51—59, here 56 and 58—59)

F. A. J. Moojen, signing in at the conference as “architecte, ancien conseiller technique du Gouvernement des Indes Néerlandaises”, introduced his paper on the “conservation of the monuments in the Dutch East Indies” with a hint at the dramatically different conditions for the ruins of the Orient due to proliferating vegetation, great variations in temperature and tropical rains and earthquakes. He also characterised the colonial task of the Dutch-Colonial Archaeological Service as caring for Hindu-Javanese monuments in “deplorable condition neglected by the indigenous population” (Moojen 1933, 298). In contrast to Léon’s French-metropolitan viewpoint of prioritising the concept of “conservation”, Moojen defended the practice of “reconstruction” to re-establish the monuments’ “distinct silhouette, [as] a chaos of stone [of a ruin, which] would not bring back their emotion and beauty” (compare Bosch 1922, 9 and Finot 1914; 1921b, 90; 1931): As in Europe, we have also in the Dutch East Indies numerous polemics on the question of whether conservation, reconstruction or restoration of these ancient monuments is admissible. The principle that a reconstruction was only possible on paper [compare Krom 1911, MF] without touching the ruins was abandoned a long time ago. Today, we feel authorised to reconstruct with authentic materials the previous condition that is scientifically established and in harmony with the aesthetic exigencies. […] With reconstruction, the aesthetic principles have the same value as the archaeological ones, and it is rather difficult to draw a clear demarcation line between a licit or illicit reconstruction. However, great attention is important and conservation should have more value than renovation [renouvellement]. [italics MF] (Moojen 1933, 298, 299)

Throughout the five-hundred-page proceedings of the 1931 Athens Conference (published only in 1933), most of the accompanying illustrations belonged to the contributions of Balanos (five) and Moojen (eight) and were placed together within the most important section (the sixth, on conservation). However, next to the ‘before and after restoration’ didactics commenting on the concrete practices of Balanos’

anastylosis on the Acropolis (Fig. IX.56), the inattentive reader of Moojen’s illustrations again entered the simultaneous, heterotopian world stage of cultural heritage icons. Whereas one pair of illustrations did, in fact, comment on the reconstruction campaign of the Prambanan temple (Fig. IX.57a), plate XXXI was misleading (Fig. IX.57b). Although Prambanan’s neighbouring Tjandi Sari in the upper depiction was correctly labelled “before its reconstruction”, the lower one did not depict the temple “after its reconstruction” as indicated, but rather the picture-perfect plaster cast replication for the Dutch-colonial section during the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris (compare Fig. V.7b). Once again, as in the case of Coral-Remusat’s paper on Ang­kor Wat in Paris and Cambodia, the Western strategies of cultural heritage making, conservation, and exhibition (re-presentation) formed a problematic overlap. This time the effect was more serious due to the scientific nature of the conference proceedings of the 1931 Athens Conference: here, no critical comment from the Dutch-colonial author was heard, nor did the legends of the illustrations distinguish between conserved, reconstructed, and simulated worlds. The “Conclusions of the Conference” in French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian (the English version was published in OIM 1933, 448–54) comprised two parts. A. General conclusions (later transformed into the 1931 Charter of Athens) followed the seven above-quoted thematic groups and brought to light three important elements for our discussion: (a) the explicit “in toto abandoning of [the concept of] restoration” in favour of “conservation” (section I); (b) the acceptance of “modern techniques and more especially of reinforced concrete […], to be concealed [in any] consolidation work, [so] that the aspect and character of the restored monument would be preserved” (section IV); and (c) “the technique of conservation” (section VI) brought the issue of anastylosis to the point (compare the French version above): In the case of ruins, scrupulous conservation is necessary, and steps should be taken to reinstate any original fragments that may be recovered (anastylosis), whenever this is possible; the new materials used for this purpose should in all cases be recognisable. [italics MF] (OIM 1933, 450)

Part B. Proceedings of the Conference on the anastylosis of the Acropolitan monuments summarised what Balanos had discussed in his paper at the conference “Le relèvelement des monument de l’Acropole” (Balanos 1933, 274–79; compare Béquignon 1931, 456–57). The outcome was international recognition of his technique – a fact that the old specialist of Angkor, Henri Marchal, had to acknowledge at the end of his life (compare Marchal 1965). We argue here that it was exactly these internationally and even globally accepted “Conclusions” from the Athens Conference of 1931 which – with help from the prominent participants and from media coverage within metropolitan France – radical95

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Figure IX.56  Before-and-after illustrations of the Acropolis as published in the Athens 1931 conference proceedings La conservation des monuments d’art & d’histoire by the Office International des Musées (Source: OIM 1933, plate XXIV)

Figures IX.57a,b  The Prambanan site in Java (left) and the Tjandi Sari site in Java (right, above) and during the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris (right, below) (Source: OIM 1933, plates XXXIII, XXXI)

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ly devalued the terms of “restoration and reconstruction” and rather instantly upgraded Balanos’ newly introduced concept of anastylosis. As a consequence, the French members of the EFEO in Indochina also may have had to switch hastily to the new (French) term of anastylose before their latest success story at Banteay Srei became known to the outside world under a term of reconstruction that had been contested since Athens 1931. In reality, they used a method imported not from Athens but straight from their savants confrères in the Dutch East Indies, who used the much more radical approach of “reconstruction”. Up to this very point in 1932, the concrete programme for the Acropolis had never been discussed within the BEFEO, nor, to our knowledge, in any other journal in Indochina.101 Henri Marchal, who assisted the EFEO after Trouvé’s suicide in 1935, left Angkor in October 1937 with plans to quit Indochina forever. Together with his wife Mary, he embarked on a long journey the starting and end point of which brought him, as he described it in his unpublished memoir, to Java and – ironically in our transcultural context – to Athens. On arrival in the Dutch East Indies after his first study trip in 1930 “to initiate himself at Panataran” (Marchal 1956, 86), Marchal gave his presentation “L’évolution de l’art khmer et les travaux d’anastylose sur les chantiers d’Ankor” on 10 February 1938 to the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap (BEFEO 1938, 470). Continuing on to Burma, British India, Ceylon, and Egypt (Marchal 1944), Marchal finally reached the Greek capital. Commenting on his visit to Robert Demangel, the director of the École française d’Athènes, Marchal declared: “Naturally, he has no idea about Angkor. This is outside his radius” [Naturellement, il ignore tout à fait Angkor; ce n’est pas son rayon]. Before leaving for Naples (Pompeii) to reach Mar-

seille on 17 April 1938, he deplored the “pitiable impression” of the Parthenon, which was “without any grandeur”. In his private notes from 1956, neither Balanos nor the term anastylosis were mentioned a single time. Wrongly made ‘Mr. Anastylosis of Angkor’ through the official hagiography which continues to this day, Marchal concluded the epilogue of his private memoir Souvenirs d’un ancien conservateur with the contrasting image of a person who defended the fragile appearance of temples in the jungle – la féerie d’Angkor as he had already called it in 1947 (Marchal 1947) – and the vision of low-key ‘conservation’ (and neither high-tech ‘reconstruction’ nor ‘anastylosis’!): Every time has its specific pleasures; I belong to an outdated century and do not regret anything from my past life. The relentless flow of tourists which airplanes, liners and cars shed over Angkor accentuates more and more a utilitarian modern look which deforms and banalises the aspect of these old temples. […] I have known a different Angkor with a mysterious touch which has disappeared; I had my unforgettable impressions: Of a longgone epoch, once entering the southern gate of Angkor Thom, by oxcart, by horse or elephant, one was immersed in the extricable clutter of vegetation, only to reach the Bayon temple, itself totally buried by trees and liana: this impression was deeply moving. The evocation of these visions, lost forever, will be the consolation of my old days. […] The modern life, called civilsed, is, despite all its worldly advantages, hardly assimilable for those who have lived a different kind of existence of fresh air and independence, amid a kind of nature less sophisticated through the inventions of science and industry. [italics MF] (Marchal 1956, 169)

101  Interestingly, the 1934 manual La technique des fouilles archéologiques: Les principes généraux by Count

Mesnil du Buisson (director of French archaeological programmes in Syria) also mentioned Balanos’ and French works at the Acropolis (Mesnil du Buisson 1934, 194), but the new term was not introduced. Coedès tried to globally circulate the narrative of a one-dimensional transfer of the “nouvelles méthodes d’anastylose” from Java to Angkor, as for example in a simple 1936 summary about the EFEO in the Journal of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle (the organiser of the 1931 Athens Conference) (Coedès 1936, 27). When Pierre Dupont, member of the EFEO and secrétaire-bibiothécaire of EFEO’s newly founded musée Louis Finot in Hanoi, summarised, in the BEFEO of 1938, the published achievements of the Oudheidkundige dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië (see above), it was once more to “the considerable credit of F. D. K. Bosch to have developed and realised the new method of reconstruction, of anastylose […] to bring temples literally back from nothing [littéralement ressortis du néant] […] which was then utilised in Indochina” (Dupont 1938, 339).

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3.4. Late colonial and early postcolonial archaeology in Angkor: ­Maurice Glaize and again Henri Marchal (the 1940s and 1950s) As indicated in the chapter “Conservation and reproduc- On 1 December 1941, Coedès made a conférence-promenade tion of monuments” in the important 1934 publication La inside the pavilion of the EFEO at the Foire-Exposition in technique des fouilles archéologiques: Les principes généraux Hanoi (Coedès 1942; compare EFEO 1943). Ten years earliby the Count Mesnil du Buisson (director of French archae- er Angkor Wat had been replicated in full-scale during the ological projects in Syria at the time), the paradigm change 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris and its cenfrom archaeological site conservation to full-scale architec- tral cella recreated in plaster cast design to demonstrate the tural reconstruction had already been spread through tech- applied mission civilisatrice of the EFEO (see Fig. VII.32 and nical manuals (Mesnil du Buisson 1934, 193–95), and a 34, compare VI.23a); in a reverse effect or ‘back-translation’ new coalition of archaeologists, architects, and engineers (see introduction to this book), the same institution now was announced. Angkor would not be spared from this in propagated its work in the colonial centre of Hanoi through the decades to come. a series of large photographic panels (Figs. IX.59a,b). One of these panels was entitled “The EFEO revives the monuMaurice Glaize, another Paris architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts (1886–1964), became conservateur ments of Cambodia through anastylosis and epigraphy” d’Angkor in December 1937 (BEFEO 1937, 554 and 713; [L’EFEO réssuscite les monuments du Cambodge par l’anastyMalleret 1967; EFEO 2002, 133–35). And once again the lose et par l’épigraphie]. However, Coedès’ expression “resmall temple of Neak Pean became the model for the con- construction par anastylose” to explain the concrete work tinuing paradigm and generational change that was occur- on site was a surprisingly imprecise way to distinguish bering at Angkor. Marchal’s approach in the 1920s of sensi- tween the two different methodological and aesthetical aptive conservation to retain the temple’s aged setting (see proaches (BEFEO 1942, 202–209, here 208). Most probably Figs. IX.28a–g, 31), came into question after a heavy storm in the same context (signed “Siemréap, décembre 1941”), in 1935 depleted the picturesque tree on top of the central Glaize produced his paper “L’anastylose: Méthode de reconwater sanctuary. As Marchal reported in his Journal des struction des monuments anciens. Son application à l’art fouilles on 22 September 1936, he had, against his own bet- Khmèr”, which was published shortly afterwards in the speter judgement (“the branches would grow back”) to follow cial issue on the Hanoi exhibition in the Cahier de l’EFEO of “the will of the Directeur to cut the surviving branches and 1942. This article may easily count as a small-scale manifesto some roots”. However, he “was still opposed to a project of for the new paradigm of French-colonial cultural heritage anastylosis [as] too many stones were missing or too dete- preservation at Angkor; or, as Louis Malleret, the EFEO’s riorated”. In a notice written in the margins of the page of director between 1950 and 1956, called it in his later obituhis diary, he wrote “Glaize had given me a démenti formi- ary for Glaize, it was an “étude magistrale” and a “véritable dable”. Altogether, Marchal judged the temple’s recon- doctrine de la reconstruction des anciens édifices” (Malleret struction a rather “far-out piece of work for which [he did] 1967, 326). Introducing his paper with the simple question not want to take the responsibility.”102 However, when “Qu’est-ce que l’anastylose?”, Glaize immediately – the first Glaize took over the site, he simply restored the temple explicit reference in all French-colonial treatises on the top(Figs. IX.58a,b). The “Essai sur la connaissance de Nak Pan ic after Marchal! – referred to the term’s etymologic derivaaprès anastylose” in the BEFEO of 1940 was his first larger tion from Greek, meaning “redress of columns”, to Balanos’ statement as regards a new activism that conceptualised famous definition during the Athens Conference defending the processes of time, nature, and decay not as part of the “a discrete use of new materials to reintegrate antique elehistoricity of a monument historique but as the enemy of ments” and to the essential difference of Hindu-­inspired arthe picture-perfect (and not so much picturesque) condi- chitecture in Cambodia and Java which were without columns. Most important was that, reading between the lines, tion of a piece of art: Glaize devalued Balanos’ too literal approach of anastylosis Facing the deficiency of nature [carence de la nature], and his predecessor’s (Marchal’s) work by comparison with the EFEO can simply not leave the things as they are. It “medical surgery”: has to find options to save the lifeless, moribund stones, choked by vegetation, eroded through time. The vision of romanticism does not exist anymore, and archaeology has taken back its rights, and restoration was demanded [La vision de romantisme n’étant, l’archéologie reprenait ses droits et la restauration s’imposait]. (Glaize 1940, 352)

Here we find ourselves in the medical domain in which [introducing another Greek term, MF] [we see] an aspired anabiosis, or “bring[ing] back to life after a death-like interruption of the patient’s vital functions”. The healer acts in the same way as for a monumental surgery [chirurgie

102  Journaux des fouilles, Marchal/Trouvé/Lagisquet, tome XIII (5.1936-5.1937), handwritten pagination 84

(EFEO Archive, Paris)

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Figures IX.58a,b  Glaize’s report about the ‘before and after’ conditions of the “Nak Pan” temple in the 1940 issue of the BEFEO (Source: Glaize 1940, plates XVI, XVII) monumentale] […] and has to limit himself to bringing back the shattered parts in order to wait for the final intervention: ring anchors and iron clamps, reinforced concrete beams and post; altogether ugly and precarious preservation and stabilising measures. But at least suitable to save for a certain time the endangered elements of a ruin. Keeping each monument strictly in its revealed status after clearing from vegetation and abstaining from a general recovery of the overall structure other than invisible consolidation […] has been the directives of the responsible masters of Indochinese archaeology. A prudent measure, perfectly justifiable if we remember the audacious initiatives during the French nineteenth century in the domain of building restoration [with] great architects like Viollet-le-Duc […]. [italics MF] (Glaize 1942, 25)

In the following, Glaize played down the picturesque nineteenth-century romanticism of Mouhot’s 1860 discovery of

Angkor Wat in the overgrown jungle: an image (or fantasy) for which the French-colonial “Conservator of the monuments of Angkor [since 1908, MF] had been no more than the metteur en scène de cette orgie végétale” (Glaize 1942, 26). And he formulated the supposedly new approach à la française in favour of the “interpretation” and “truth of the monument”: We believe [we are] staying completely loyal to the French tradition by adopting a less lazy solution: the search for the “truth” [vérité] of the monument, not only through the recognition of its architectural corpus, but — with the design [par son plan] — of its vital function, its spiritual affinities in its decor and scenes on its bas-reliefs and pediments, of its esoteric meaning on its statuary and epigraphy; altogether of its scheme of implantation. This truth of a building, actually quite specific to the French mind, is often rather difficult to discern in Khmer

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Figures IX.59a,b  Illustrations about the presentation of the EFEO during the 1941 Hanoi Fair, with a panel on “anastylose” (see above right) (Source: BEFEO 1942, plates VIII and IX)

art in which the constructeur rarely overstepped the stadium of aesthetics [stade de l’apparence]; this requires in any case a study to cover the monument in its totality and not only in its truncated remnants. […] the archaeologist cannot limit himself to practicing a mere autopsy as on a dead object, or to establishing inventories of buildings in a kind of martyrology. […] [Our] approach is not only the reconstruction of a building, but its interpretation, and this approach is not compatible with the chaos, the confusion, and decay of the ruin prohibiting the researcher to go beyond an emotion felt in his heart of an artist or poet. […] To reconstitute an ensemble with all its dispersed vestiges, but strictly to its antique form and only with the historical technical methods: Isn’t this the highest expression of respect [to the building]? Isn’t this the veritable resurrection […]? [italics MF] (Glaize 1942, 26, 27)

stones, coloured concrete coverings, and all kinds of iron anchoring systems. But wasn’t this approach similar to that of Balanos at the Acropolis in Athens? The attachment to Glaize’s article had thirteen double illustrations using the popular dialectic of ‘before-and-after anastylosis’. New entries in this success story included the re-erected temples of Preah Phalilai (inside Angkor Thom), East Mebon, and Banteay Samre (Figs. IX.60a,b) (Eastern Baray area), and, most spectacular, the pre-Angkorian ninth-century mountain temple of Bakong (to the southeast of Angkor) for which the central tower on the upmost terrace had been re­ constructed from scratch (Figs. IX.61a,b). After 1940, Glaize added the section “Chantiers d’anastylose” to the Chronique section of the BEFEO (BEFEO 1940, 485–88). Additionally, he circulated the method as a ‘French success story’ in his own guide Les monuments du groupe d’Angkor (Glaize 1948, 71–72) and in many different French journals, ranging from the Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences Like Marchal before him, Glaize declared this kind of ana- coloniales to more public ones like Devenir or Tropiques: Restylosis “impossible” for brick temples (a hypothesis later vue des troupes coloniales (Glaize 1946, 1947, 1948b, 1950; strongly contested by B. P. Groslier, see below) and ex- compare Malleret 1959). plored the options of an “adaptation” as seen in the Dutch-­ Interestingly, George Coedès – the de facto cultural colonial approach in Java with the insertion of newly cut broker to bring reconstruction (Coedès 1938; only later 100

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.60a,b  Banteay Samre temple in a hypothetical work drawing by Glaize in his monthly Rapport du Conservation d’Angkor in March 1939 (above) and in “before-and-after-reconstitution” aesthetic as published in the Cahiers de l’EFEO of 1941 (Source: RCA 3.1939; CEFEO 29/1941, plate 6)

Figures IX.61a,b  The Bakong temple site in a hypothetical work drawing by Glaize in his Rapport du Conservation d’Angkor in June 1938 (above), and in the Cahiers de l’EFEO of 1941 (Source: RCA 6.1938; CEFEO 1941, plate 11)

termed anastylosis) from Java to Angkor – never published officially on the topic. Only his twenty-six-page typescript from 1943 (with a letterhead from Paris) has survived in the archive of the EFEO in Paris. With its title “L’anastylose: Une méthode moderne de reconstruction des monuments historiques en Indochine”, it is an important source for this

analysis. In it he called EFEO’s method of anastylosis “a veritable revolution in 1931”, and he (a) openly summarised his critique against the supposedly conservative Institut de France back home (where “the respect for the ruin had become a kind of superstition”); (b) reconfirmed his own initiative for the new Dutch-colonial method after his jour101

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ney to Java in 1928; and (c) voted for an “adaptation” of its original application in the context of Indochina and the Khmer monuments where “anastylosis had been applied to the method of reconstruction” (Coedès 1943b, 1). The darkest years of the EFEO at Angkor The period between the late 1930s to the late 1940s brought a host of new problems: the Second World War, in addition to the early period of decolonisation and its specific consequences for Indochina and Cambodia, had serious effects on the Angkor Park in general, and the temple of Angkor Wat in particular. The detailed political and historical implications of this period cannot be explained here in detail.103 However, we will try to explain the overall events in the context of Angkor and therefore through the lens of the unpublished monthly and annual Rapports du Conservation d’Angkor (RCA). Those precious internal documents served as an institutional back-up system documenting all interventions by the acting conservator at Angkor that were finally approved and rubber-stamped by the archaeological director of the EFEO. Again: Our transcultural approach situates the Archaeological Park in Cambodia (in volume two) and its ‘re-presentation’ within museums and the universal and colonial exhibitions in France (in volume one) in a dynamic relationship between two Foucauldian twin or entangled versions of ‘enacted utopias’ of cultural heritage. This brings us to the observation that the sharp decline of the popularity of the colonial endeavour in Indochina also had concrete consequences for metropolitan ‘translations’ of Angkor Wat, and vice versa: in a mere seven years it shrank from a dominantly placed, 1:1-scale replica in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (see chapter VII) to a small and rather strange little pavilion on the peripheral “Swan Island” in France’s last Exposition Internationale of 1937 (see chapter VIII). And when France was approaching and finally entering the Second World War in mainland Europe, the monetary support for the conservation of Cambodia’s built ­heritage was progressively reduced to 25,000 piasters in 1938 until the Général d’armée, Georges Catroux, became ­Gouverneur-Général de l’Indochine (GGI) in 1939. Along with the dramatic decrease of European tourists to Angkor (from 4,000 in 1938 to 674 in 1941, see RCA 12.1938/12.1941) this reduction of funds also had an effect on the EFEO’s survival strategies as an operational institution at Angkor. Within its increasing efforts to inscribe the rather recently

created Parc d’Angkor (ex lege since 1925) into collective memory as a French-colonial lieu de mémoire,104 a new “signalisation” of the temples’ names at each site using “indicating panels” was embedded into the park’s overall circulation system; its roads were named, moreover, after the temple’s rebuilders: Route Henri Marchal, Commaille, Carpeaux, Dufour, Batteur, Trouvé, etc. (RCA 3./5.1939). Far more dubious, the Commission de déclassement (with Coedès, Glaize, Claeys, G. Groslier and others) regularly met in the years directly before the war to ‘de-list’ more and more – ex lege protected – Angkorian sculptures “for public sale”.105 When mainland France was occupied by Germany and governed by Marshal Pétain’s Vichy Regime (1940–45), its newly installed GGI, Admiral Jean Decoux, increased – rather surprisingly in times of war – support for the EFEO to 100,000 piasters: more archaeological sites could be opened with up to four hundred coolies [coulis] (Malleret 1967, 314; compare Société 1946), and Glaize’s temple projects between ‘reconstruction’ and ‘anastylosis’ flourished. Now the use of delisted sculptures for sale changed their function to diplomatic gifts for high-ranking players in the fast-changing political game within which the EFEO had become a rather helpless pawn. In October 1940, Cambodia’s national troops were installed, without notice to the park authority, in Angkor Wat’s bas-relief galleries, and only Glaize’s fierce protests made them leave in order to avoid any “risk from degradation or provoked bombing campaign” by the approaching enemy (Glaize in RCA 10.1940). As tensions in Indochina and with Cambodia’s neighbour Siam (renamed Thailand since 1939) increased and more troops turned up in Siem Reap, “Angkor was temporarily closed for tourism by military order” (RCA 11./12.1940). According to Glaize’s report in January 1941, “written from Dalat”, the administrative summer retreat of the French-colonial government in Indochina, “Siem Reap was shelled on 8 January 1941 by Thailand, […] French civilians and the EFEO staff were evacuated [when] terrestrial operations started […], archives were sent to Saigon and the photograph collection secured, [but] hostilities were paused in the same months with an offer of conflict mediation by Japan”. Japan was allied with Germany, Thai friendly and present also in French Indochina as the new imperialist force in Asia. Different from colonial France, Japan justified its mission with the propaganda slogan Asia for the Asians to free the entire region from Western colonialism. This policy was in line with what Japanese strategists termed the Greater East

103  See among many others the publication Mus 1954; Pedrazzani 1972; Chandler 1983a and 1991; Martin 1994; Singaravélou 1999; Tully 2005; Brocheux/Hémery 2009. 104  We recall Nora’s publication project of the 1980s for continental France within which the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris of 1931 played a prominent part for Ageron’s article (Ageron 1984) and the photograph of the Angkor Wat replica, as quoted in our introduction (Fig. Intro 1a). 105  For example, they delisted seventy-seven “stones” in February 1938, and another thirty-five and thirtyfour in July and August 1939 respectively (RCA 2.1938, 7./8.1939).

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Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.106 Interestingly, the slogan of this ideology would resurface in critical debates about Japan’s new interest in Cambodia and Angkor in the 1980s and beyond (see chapters XI, XII, epilogue II). Already by September 1940, Japanese troops were stationed in the north of French Indochina, and others followed until July 1941. Major battle operations took place in the province of Battambang during this time. On 22 January the Gouvernement général de l’Indochine accepted the end of the hostilities, and after thirty-three days of peace negotiations a new Franco-Thai Treaty was signed on 11 March 1941. As an exception to the rest of Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia, the French were allowed to stay in Indochina for most of World War II (compare St. John 1998, 21). However, Cambodia lost about 60,000 square kilometres and 300,000 inhabitants, including the Battambang and the Siem Reap provinces to Thailand, but – astonishingly – not Angkor (see Preschez 1966, 334; compare with epilogue I of volume one). As in the previous French-colonial decades, Angkor Park served once more as a political stage: Vichy-affiliate Vice Admiral Decoux visited Angkor in February 1941; the French Commandant supérieur des troupes de l’Indochine, Général Mordant, and Prince Sisowath Monireth (passed over by Norodom Sihanouk to be the new king in April 1941, see next chapter X) arrived one month later. Glaize prophetically reported in March 1941 that “the Parc d’Angkor was saved in its entirety” for the French within the ongoing territorial reshaping of the region (RCA 3.1941). The Tokyo Peace Convention of 9 May 1941 reconfirmed this status. In 1941, the diplomatic game over Angkor changed for Glaize and the EFEO as the Japanese presence increased. Glaize’s archaeological reports kept track of this trend, and he noted that “Comte Kiyoshi Kroda [Kiyoshi Kuroda, MF], Directeur de la Société Japonaise pour le développement des relations internationales, came to visit Angkor” (RCA 5.1941). Japan’s imperialist appetite had to be fed with Angkor’s cultural heritage: “forty-two sculptures were chosen by Coedès for Japanese museums” at a time when “1,400 Japanese troops occupied Siem Reap and [partly] resided in the Hotel des ruines in front of Angkor Wat” (they would give way to the Thais in December 1941) (RCA 8./ 9./12.1941); furthermore, a precious Khmer sculpture head

Figure IX.62  Norodom Sihanouk visiting Angkor in ­November 1941, together with Léon Thibaudeau and ­Maurice Glaize (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

was delisted for “His Excellency Makoto Yano” who presided over the Franco-Thai Delimitation Commission for the area including Angkor (RCA 10.1941). In this political game, the national Cambodian voice became stronger, but anti-­ colonial tendencies were treated rather ambiguously by the new Francophile king of Cambodia. Glaize described in detail that “as his first official visit”, Norodom Sihanouk, together with résident supérieur, Léon Thibaudeau, visited Angkor in November 1941 (Fig. IX.62) to “become informed about the different services and ongoing works at Banteay Samré, Bakong, and Neak Pean” (RCA 11.1941). In

106  However, Japan’s interest in Southeast Asia was formulated much earlier as “Meishuron Pan-Asianism”

and was affiliated with what had resurfaced during the Meiji period under the term “Southern Expansion Doctrine” [Nanshin-ron] and was formalised in the 1920s and 1930s. In the context of the Second World War, it was integrated into a new ideology: “A major pronouncement of the Japanese during their war against the western colonial powers was that they were endeavouring to create a new order in East Asia. The culmination of this new order was to be the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As expounded by its creators, once the war had been won, the sphere was to become self-sufficient, be freed from the suppression of the White race, and form a realm where all the countries and peoples within would co-exist in co-prosperity under the aegis of Japan” (Swan 1996, 139; compare Hotta 2007, 199–223; and the various claims on “Pan-Asianism” in Saaler and Szpilman 2011). I would like to thank Takuma Melber, a Heidelberg-based specialist in Japanese modern war history, for his information about this specific moment in Japan’s expansive politics into French Indochina (compare Melber 2016, 16, 35–39). For Japan’s global cultural heritage politics, see Tsuboi 1986, Akagawa 2015 (compare chapter XII and epilogue II).

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this short instance, Glaize’s side remarks in a rather technical, archaeological diary indicated the full range of transcultural entanglements at Angkor: in the shadow of the rising Asian imperialists from Thailand and Japan, the late-colonial power of France was still in place and seeking to fulfil its self-appointed civilising mission of heritage preservation, while the self-conscious new king of a soon-to-be-independent Cambodia was seeking the symbolic reappropriation of archaeological ruins as living sites to serve a reawakening national and religious identity (see next chapter): His Majesty was strongly interested in our activities of monument reconstruction, and he congratulated us for the obtained results. In a little book on this province we depicted the most interesting photographs “before and after work”, including a notice of anastylosis. At Angkor Wat, in the course of a religious ceremony with more than five hundred monks, a silver urn with the earth from the lost provinces was handed over to His Majesty who additionally illuminated a symbolic flame to be carried by couriers to Hanoi through all the countries of the ­[Indochinese] Union. (RCA 11.1941)

When a comparable “patriotic ceremony” took place once more in August 1942, Glaize was happy to report that a visit to “the tomb of Commaille at the Bayon temple” was added to the event (RCA 8.1942). On the other end of the political spectrum, and just a few months later, “Coedès instructed the sending of thirty-one sculptures, twenty-five pieces of pottery and thirteen bronzes, in twenty-three boxes of ten square metres and with a weight of seven to eight tons […] to the Museum of Tokyo” (RCA 12.1942).107 With more representatives from Japanese and Cambodian interest groups coming to Angkor in 1943 and 1944 (other visits of Sihanouk were registered in RCA 3./4.1944 and again 2.1945), France and the EFEO finally lost the tactical manoeuvring game in Indochina. As Glaize wrote in January 1946 for the Rapport annuel 1945, he was “interned in Siem Reap” after the “coup de force” realised by Japan on 9 March 1945 and the subsequent occupation of the whole of Indochina. “Two days later Cambodia’s twenty-twoyear-old king, Norodom Sihanouk, proclaimed – despite his outspoken Francophilia – that the French protectorate established in 1863 had ended [see next chapter, MF]. Siha-

nouk expressed his support for the Japanese and added that his kingdom would now be known as Kampuchea rather than [French] Cambodge – a decision repeated thirty years later when the Cambodian Communists [the Khmer Rouge, MF; see chapter XI] came to power” (Chandler 1991, 14). Glaize was, as he wrote, “transferred until December to a concentration camp in Phnom Penh”. He refused to collaborate with the Japanese, as did the director of the Phnom Penh Museum, George Groslier, who was most likely tortured to death by the Japan’s secret police, the Kempeitai. In the meantime, “His Highness Kethana, an old Cambodian fonctionnaire in the Ministère des Cultes, was nominated Conservateur [of Angkor] by the government of Sa Majesté, and later maintained the French conservators in order to strengthen the existing ties between France and Cambodia” (RCA Annual Report 1945). When Japan officially surrendered in Indochina in August 1945, the northwestern provinces, including the Preah Vihear site, were delimited once more through a French-Cambodian commission and finally returned by Thailand (itself eager to enter the UN) to Cambodia after the Washington Accord of 17 November 1946. However, the threat to Angkor was not at all eliminated; on the contrary, with activist Son Ngoc Thanh108 and Sihanouk’s uncle Prince Monireth (Cambodia’s prime minister for two months in fall 1945) establishing tight connections to the anti-colonial Thai government, a guerrilla war of the Independent Khmer (or Khmer Issarak) broke out at Cambodia’s northwestern borders.109 It escalated after 1945 when France attempted, rather successfully, to re-establish its pre-war influence in the country. In this precarious situation, the new Cambodian king was useful as regards Ang­kor: “By royal decree no. 45 from 8 November 1945, Norodom Sihanouk granted the EFEO its personnalité civile after Cambodian law. With this acknowledgment, the King received the homage of the EFEO by becoming its membre d’honneur in September 1947” (Drège 2003, 26). As though nothing had happened, Glaize was put back on duty in Angkor by late December 1945, and he toured the archaeological park “with [Alphonse] Juin, Chef d’État-Major général de l’Armée, and Leclerc, Commandant suprême des T.F.E.O. [Troupes françaises en Extrême-Orient]”. The “cinéaste Sylvain, accredited by the Cambodian Ministère de l’Information, produced a film about the temples of Ang­kor

107  Additionally, “the EFEO offered the king of Cambodia on 3 November 1942 a ten metre sculptured lat-

erite wall from Preah Khan for the private park of the Palais Royal in Phnom Penh” (Singaravélou 1999, 263).

108  He entered Cambodian politics and founded the moderately nationalist first Khmer-language newspaper

Nagara Vatta [Angkor Wat] in the early 1940s but was later exiled by the French.

109  The historian David Chandler explains how the Khmer Issarak in the northwestern provinces joined

resistance groups from the eastern frontier zones between Vietnam and Cambodia, and “a joint Khmer Issarak-Viet Minh command, largely ceremonial in nature, was established in Bangkok in February 1947. Its commander was a former member of the Cambodian militia, Dap (Sergeant) Chhuon, who had deserted in 1943 and with Thai support had organised anti-French guerrilla bands in the ceded provinces. Chhuon was thought to possess magical powers and had built up a following in the Kulen Mountains, north of Siem Reap […]” (Chandler 1991, 33).

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and the technique of anastylosis” (RCA 2nd trimester 1946). But this appearance was deceiving. Between 8 and 10 August 1946, “a strong rebel gang, supported by Siamese officers and replenished from the Siamese side, tried to seize the military camp and the Grand Hôtel d’Ang­kor, [with] six French being killed and two heavily injured, and thirty-seven enemies killed, among them four Siamese” (Preschez 1966, 334). Probably also due to his traumatising experiences during Japanese occupation and the increasing dangers on the site, Glaize finally quit his job at Angkor and returned to La Rochelle/France where he helped with the reconstruction of the city. Back in France, one of his last officially published presentations was held on 4 March 1947 at the Académie des Sciences coloniales in Paris. Under the title Temples d’Angkor: Dix années de reconstruction par la méthodes d’anastylose, Glaize returned to his colonial task “to save, bring back, revive, interpret, and reanimate” the temples of Angkor, not in the sense of “aesthetic surgery […] to make them anew, or to act like an ‘engineer of the past’, for restoration, [but] to use anastylosis for a faithful reconstruction to re-establish an ‘ancient relic’ [rétablir la ‘survivance antique’]”. All this happened at a moment “when the virus of independence had already penetrated into the heart of the peaceable Khmer kingdom, the hiatus had been too extended between the loss of our [French] protective power and the arrival of the French Resistance. [All this] reduced France’s new role to a France conseillère” (Glaize 1947, 159, 162, 197; compare Glaize 1942, 1948, 1950). Nominated Conservateur par interim du Musée Sarraut et des monuments du Cambodge Jacques Lagisquet, Glaize’s successor after October 1946, was yet another Beaux-Arts architect to respond to Angkor (Wat)’s particular ‘architectural affordance’ (see introduction). He had previously worked for the Service des bâtiments civils in Annam and the EFEO’s Cham Museum in Tourane (EFEO 2002, 127– 28). He noted in his first report in 1946 that “all works have been stopped since 7 August after the Khmer Issarak attacked Siem Reap [and] set the Conservation d’Angkor on fire” three days later with some French casualties. Furthermore, “acts of piracy threatened the region” and “legionnaires continued to occupy the southern section of Angkor Wat and servicemen ranged the ruins” (RCA 9./10.–11.1946). The conflict escalated towards the end of 1946: “The Khmer Issarak attacked Angkor Wat on 22 December [and again on 28 December, MF], driving the Cambodian soldiers of the National Guard out of the site; gunshots and cannon-shots were sprayed over the temple’s western entry gate and the northern part of the western bas-relief galleries (fifteen apsaras were destroyed) when Angkor Wat was reconquered on 23 December 1946” (RCA 12.1946–1.1947). This liberation of Angkor Wat was carried out by “parachutists and commando operations”, as Louis Malleret, the EFEO’s director between 1949 and 1956, remembered (or rather dramatised) the event two decades later (Malleret 1967, 316). As Marchal later mentioned, after the military intervention “to drive out the Issarak, heavily deteriorated

parts of [the] Western entry section [and] bulletholes were still visible” years later (RCA 3.1949). However, this was not enough: “Sites at Angkor Thom, along the Grand Circuit [inside Angkor Park], at Roluos, and the Western Baray, and the road to Kompong Thom were savaged on 13 January 1947; the Khmer Issarak infiltrated into the whole of Siem Reap, [and] the single accessible site was Angkor Wat, but only with armed guards on the road and two permanent military stations inside the sanctuary.” In the same report, Lagisquet mentioned that “one could be quite reassured that the Issaraks would not cause any deterioration to the monuments”. At this point one might well ask why resistance fighters against French-colonial domination would attack a temple site rather than concentrating their operations only on structures of infrastructural importance. If the fully restored Angkor Wat had been the central iconic element used to visualise the French-colonial civilising mission in Indochina in the context of an appropriated patrimoine culturel (an ‘inherited’ culture in the imperial sense), then it stands to reason that the very same site also served as a symbolic and ideological, anti- or postcolonial reference point of authentic, indigenous (and therefore pre-colonial) ‘Khmerness’. As the historian David Chandler reconfirmed it in the context of the resistant movement: [S]ome Issarak literature […] stressed grandiose ideas about Cambodia’s past. A tract captured along the Vietnamese border, for example, declared that “the Cambodian race, Cambodian blood, and Cambodian ­nationality are all the children of his majesty Jayavarman, the builder of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat. Rise up, open your eyes, get back onto the proper path!” Another leaflet urged its readers to “come to the aid of the Khmer Issarak because the Buddha has need of you”, adding, “Long live the pirates of religion, the modern Cambodians, descendants of Angkor Wat!” [However:] Khmer revolutionaries have faced two problems in trying to integrate such perceptions of Cambodian history into twentieth-century behaviour. One was the difficulty of separating the grandeur of the kings of Angkor from the feudalism and Francophilia of the royal family [mixing Angkor with the French term “grandeur” was the crucial element in Sihanouk’s nation building campaign, see next chapter, MF]. In the 1940s, in any case, most Cambodians were not ready to relinquish kingship as a component of their culture. Revolutionaries faced the additional difficulty, later on, of meshing the autonomy of Cambodia’s past and Cambodia’s national interests with the internationalist orientation of Marxism-Leninism, embodied in the guidance proffered to Cambodians by the Viet Minh. [italics MF] (Chandler 1991, 34)

In the meantime, Lagisquet’s guided tours through Angkor and diplomatic gifts in the form of original Khmer sculptures were now adjusted to a new political situation in 105

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.63  The collapsed ‘Heaven and Hell’-gallery of Angkor, as published by B. P. Groslier in the third volume of the Cambodian journal Nokor Khmer in 1970 (Source: Groslier 1970, 40)

which the United States was the conqueror of the Japanese. After visits by the new French Ministre des colonies, Marius Moutet, in December 1946, and the Briton Sir Allen, director of the Asia Department of the Foreign Office in January, “two stones were prepared, by order of the director, for Mr. [Abbot Low] Moffat, Director of the Asian Department at Washington, and Mr. Reed, General Consul of the United States” (RCA 12.1946–1.1947). And although the de-listing of Khmer artefacts had already been decreed in 1923 and peaked in the context of the Second World War (Singaravélou 1999, 247–67), larger protest surfaced when the local inhabitants of Siem Reap supposedly sent a petition, signed “The inhabitants of Siem Reap” on 6 September 1949 to ­Sihanouk calling the EFEO’s ongoing practice of illicit trading not “conservation” but “destruction of Angkor”. Many decades after Delaporte’s theft of original sculptures during his visits to Angkor between the 1870s and 1900 (however, he also produced architectural casts, see chapter III), this reproach against the EFEO did not sound at all far-fetched: Your Excellency has rather recently come to Angkor Wat. The temple’s greyish towers under the tropical rains of our country seemed to complain to Your Majesty their own suffering and painful torture so similar to your peo-

ple […]. But what is even more cruel than those histories is the Conservation d’Angkor and the École française d’Extrême-Orient. To do them justice, the true name of this organisation should be the “destroyer of Angkor”. Yes, they conserved our heritage, but only the largest stones the transport of which was judged difficult or impossible. All what is precious and utile to our civilisation is now, in reality, in the Louvre or is sold elsewhere.110

What followed in 1947 were easily the EFEO’s darkest moments at Angkor before its final expulsion from the site in 1975. In the first months of 1947, the Issaraks blocked the roads around Siem Reap, decapitated local (supposedly collaborating) inhabitants, and committed another arson attack on the Conservation on 17 March 1947. Guardians for the temples resigned or were kidnapped, gold seekers ranged the progressively deforested park, vandalism and theft was reported all over the reserve, and Angkor Wat could only be visited with armed soldiers (RCA 2./3.– 4.1947 and Annual Report 1947). During this helpless situation, Lagisquet resigned in mid-May 1947. François Martini, a Vietnam-born French linguist and post-war consultant of the Cambodian Fine Arts Ministry (EFEO 2002, 136–38), was designated to direct the Conservation des monuments historique de l’Indochine/secteur Cambodge

110  Singarevélou quotes from an unpublished letter found in the archives of the EFEO in Paris. However, the

context and authenticity of this letter could not be confirmed for this book.

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.64a,b  Marchal’s analytical section drawings in his monthly Rapport de la Conservation d’Angkor of December 1947 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

(including Angkor) but was, again par interim – substituted by René Brunet, Ingénieur Chef de subdivision des travaux publics. However, it was up to the Cambodian HokTourn, secretary to Brunet at the Conservation d’Angkor, to sign the 31 July 1947 report, which must mark the lowest point in the EFEO’s then fifty-year-old mandate to protect, conserve, and reconstruct Angkor (Fig. IX.63): A very heavy collapse [très grave éboulement] happened on Saturday, 14 June 1947, towards 6:00 a.m., and damaged the southern gallery and its bas-relief walls of ­Angkor Wat’s eastern section with thirty-two hells and thirty-seven heavens. The total length of the hard-hit segment comprises about forty-five metres. Guardians [service de gardiennage] were organised to assure the protection against theft of the fragments of sculptures and bas-reliefs. The collapsed section is now closed by a fence, and two signs were placed to prohibit any trespassing by the visitors to the site. (RCA 5.—7.1947) The starting point of the catastrophe may have been a slim crack in the wall of the bas-reliefs, in the eastern third of the panel.

At this moment of total despair, the return of a good old(-fashioned) expert must have seemed the only solution; indeed, the signature of the November/December 1947 Rapport du Conservateur d’Angkor already contained the familar name of Henri Marchal as the hastily designated “Conservateur par interim”. In fact, Marchal had just

returned from the French enclave of Pondicherry in India where he had applied his archaeological experience on the Indian temple site of Virampatnam/Arikamedu (BEFEO 1943, 168–71). He would remain Conservateur d’Angkor until May 1953, afterwards continuing to work as consultant for the Kingdom of Laos, and retiring in 1957 in Siem Reap, where he remained until his death in 1970 with his second, now Cambodian, wife. Addressing the urgent case of Angkor Wat’s collapsed gallery, Marchal’s analytical sketches in his Journal des fouilles of 1947 (Pl. IX.22a–f) referred to those techniques in emergency consolidation which he had already used during the 1910s and 1920s (compare Figs. IX.28, 29) and for which he had been criticised at the time by Coedès and Glaize. Now he stated the irreversible loss of the coherent surface of the collapsed bas-reliefs and explained, in the monthy report of December 1947, the static background to the dramatic incident in two sketches (Figs. IX.64a,b). Referring to his own 1922 article “La construction des temples khmèrs étudiés dans le groupe d’Angkor” (Marchal 1922), Marchal reduced the collapse of the building to the inability of the ancient Khmer constructors (from eight hundred years ago!) and therefore downplayed the much more relevant negligence of French-colonial monuments conservators over the preceding years. He decided to depose the stone layers of the vaults and inner wall sections by securing the open intrados through a wooden scaffolding (RCA 11./12.1947). Over a complete length of ninety-four metres and with the assistance of Lagisquet, a rather com107

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.65a—k  Re-erecting the collapsed part of Angkor Wat’s ‘Heaven and Hell’-gallery between 1947 and 1951 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

plex operation – we may call it ‘emergency anastylosis’ – took place over the next months from October 1947 to January 1951 (Figs. IX.65a–k). This included the following steps: (a) the removed stones were placed on the soil, numbered and recombined with the collapsed and partially ­restored elements (the complete vaults were sealed with bitumen); (b) the pillars of the outer half-gallery were re108

inforced through concrete frames and iron clamps; (c) the broken elements of the inner wall of bas-reliefs were reassembled and their missing cavities filled with concrete; (d) the rear sides of the bas-reliefs walls were secured with a series of concrete buttresses [contreforts], which were pigmented and camouflaged in stone colour; and (e) the vaults were closed with original elements and added concrete.

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Returning to a discussion that started with Commaille, Lagisquet proposed a “projet de reconstitution” of the wooden ceiling [plafond] that was missing in all galleries of Angkor Wat (RCA 3.1948). A similar surviving wooden ceiling plate in rosette design had already been identified by Commaille in Angkor Wat’s western entry gate (Fig. IX.66a). On 11 November 1909 (and again in 1911, when

Delaporte brought the issue up again during the séance of 29 June), the Commission archéologique de l’Indochine voted (Parmentier included) against any hypothetical reconstruction (BCAI 1911, 239; Commaille 1913b, Pl. XIX). The Commission feared that this unique exception would “open a path towards other ‘restorations’”, but the same questions were discussed again in 1929 (BEFEO 1921, 99). Now, the 109

IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.66a—e  Identification of the old ceiling decoration for Angkor Wat and the reinvention of a new one: old wooden fragment rediscovered by Commaille and published in the 1913 BEFEO (above left); two photos from 1938/48 with other wooden ceiling elements from Angkor Wat (above right, centre); a test version photographed in August 1948 (below left), and the final result as photographed in March 1950 (Source: BEFEO 1913, plate XIX; © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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paradigm change ‘from conservation to reconstruction’ after 1930, and the EFEO’s infamous malfeasances with the collapsing Baphuon (see discussion below, compare IX.74)111 and Angkor Wat temples, paved the way for the first fullscale, hypothetical reconstruction in a non-original material. Originally an idea introduced by Lagisquet, a scale-reduced decorative version after the ancient wooden samples (from another place of Angkor Wat) was chosen for the rosette design (Fig. IX.66b,c), finally tested and photographed in August 1948 (Fig. IX.66d), multiplied ad infinitum in more than five hundred moulded cement plates, and integrated into the newly rebuilt ceiling structure of the Southern Gallery of Angkor Wat (Fig. IX.66e), “in order to mask the ruin” as Jean Boisselier explained in a publication of 1972 (Boisselier 1972, 25). Indeed, the search for new aesthetic directions in the Angor Park accelerated in these early post-war years, as seen in various reports between 1947 and December 1950 (the completion date of this project at Angkor Wat). Marchal felt, on the one hand, the need to justify his decisions for this specific case in light of another, highly criticised, project in Crete, once facilitated by his British colleague Arthur Evans (see quotation below). On the other hand, he voted (against his old principle of preserving archaeological imperfections) for a remade impression of the stylistic completeness of yesteryear, while rather inconsistently critiquing the exaggerated use of non-historic materials in other parts of the report. ‘Conservation’ was, at this point, superseded by a new and rather indistinct combination of ‘anastylosis and reconstruction’: The daring restitutions of the Palace of Knossos on Crete [by Evans, MF] formed a precedent: here we can invoke for the present case the motifs that serve to justify this reconstitution which I would, in other circumstances, have barred myself from doing (RCA 7./10.1948) […] For the eye of the visitor, this ceiling should continue to make the impression that it has been there since the twelfth century. […] Otherwise it would be like having an elegant Louis XV-style salon without a ceiling and a view into the open roof structure towards the undersides of the tiles (RCA 8.1948) […] The quantity of béton to be poured in this reconstruction is prodigious. One claim is that Maréchal Joffre [standing] before the Angkor temples [in 1922, MF] is said to have declared: Only stone, so many stones! In our case we may say: Only concrete, so much cement! (RCA 1.1949) […] a long, delicate, and

costly work with tons of cement (RCA 9.1949). […] The gallery, with all its regained elegance, will be appreciated unanimously by all visitors. Once the exterior of the temples has reclaimed their appearance of yesteryear [aspect d’antan] through anastylosis there [will be] an example of reconstitution to give the idea of [what] an original interior of a Khmer monument [looked like] [italics MF] (RCA 3.1950).

Marchal’s exclamation “Que de béton, que de ciment!” described above was in fact the very approach he had himself silently taken on site for quite a while, and would continue to take in the future. As regards our transcultural approach conceptualising the French exhibitions and the archaeological reserve in Cambodia as two versions of an applied heterotopia (an ‘enacted utopia of the cultural heritage’) known as Angkor, the ‘real’ Angkor Wat and its materialised twin version in Paris progressively converged through on-site conservation and reconstruction as both focused on surface-oriented artificiality. Like the architects of the Angkor Wat replica with its hollow facades during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition and politicians framing a French-colonial civilising mission as a patrimoine culturel (compare the original quotes in chapter VII with Falser 2015a,c), the French protagonists at Angkor progressively recast themselves as the ‘constructors of Angkor’, as opposed to their previous role as conservateurs d’Angkor. The almost industrialised procedure of dismantling the existing temple, reinforcing its old structure by strengthening and replacing its interior and exterior elements with new material, and finally re-erecting the whole above a new substructure was increasingly similar to contemporary construction sites (see below Marchal’s last orders for the Thommanon temple in 1953). After 1947, numerous entries in the rapports mensuels testify the excess of (reinforced) concrete and cement needed for the temples to a degree that the national Phnom Penh-based suppliers of iron and cement required additional deliveries from French firms in the neighbouring Tonkin province (RCA 3.1952, compare Fig. X.41). This development from conservation to reconstruction – and now construction – was related intrinsically to Marchal’s central statement about the temples’ impending collapse in his May 1949 report: “My impression, since my resumption of the work at Angkor, is increasingly confirmed that the Khmer temples have reached critical status [sont arrivés à un état critique], which they had not before my departure in 1937” (RCA 5.1949). Marchal asked for

111  Also, in this case, Marchal explained the dramatic and unforeseen collapse of the temple’s northeastern

section in 1947 and in the following months the supposed incompetence of the ancient Khmer, with no hint of a self-critical evaluation of the deficiencies of French-colonial archaeology on-site: “[…] there are many spots where an intervention seems necessary to save this nice piece of architecture. The construction of this temple, under our observation, reveals a series of weak points and a lack of comprehension to the technical aspects of the stones [malfaçons et incompréhensions] which even surpass even all those errors of the ancient Khmer which we could state elsewhere” (Marchal in RCA 9.1949).

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“fifteen coolies” at Angkor Wat to form a “permanent team of experimental maintenance, including cementing experts [une équipe d’entretien expérimentée, avec cimentiers], in order to instantly replace falling elements to counter further accidents. […] With the [Cambodian] Chef de chantier, Suon, [Marchal] worked out an emergency work plan, [as] a complete sauvegarde du monument was at this point outside the actual budget” (RCA 9./10.1949). For the Baphuon temple (which had collapsed in 1943) he proposed an “armature of reinforced concrete” under the ongoing supervision of a “technician”. Along with his statement on the general “instability of a certain number of monuments in Angkor Park” and the risk of their impending collapse [risques d’écroulement possibles […] l’état de nombreux monuments de plus en plus inquiétant], Marchal even suggested a photographic campaign of all elements and surfaces of artistic interest (RCA 10.1952, Marchal 1953, 84; compare Malleret 1959a,b). His statement about “too much concrete!” in 1949 became the central issue of the 1950s, and he himself relativised the ongoing story of anastylosis onsite: “This work has nothing to do with what one understands under anastylosis, a term which is rather distorted today. One uses it all over the place and already talks about anastylosis when three or four stone blocs have been readjusted” (RCA 3.1950). Interestingly, this observation went hand-in-hand with the strategy quoted above, which was so different from that of the Dutch East Indies. Marchal continued in the same report: In my opinion — and this has shocked me since I returned to the worksites at Angkor — we use too much cement. This emphasis is now unmistakably established [le pli est pris], but since the first days at the archaeological sites of Java the order has been: the largest discretion possible when introducing cement in an ancient temple. It is, however, evident that whenever an endangered section needs to be consolidated against collapse, this question is obsolete. [italics MF] (RCA 3.1950)

Although Marchal’s overrated fame as ‘Mr. Anastylosis’ of Angkor began with Prea Khan in 1930 and his first full-

scale test site at Banteay Srei in 1931 after his return from Java, we now know that the Dutch term ‘reconstruction’ is a more appropriate description of the work on the site. And it was probably no accident that his last actions as General Conservator of Angkor were – twenty years later – devoted to a seemingly similar approach; an approach, however, that resulted in an ambiguous chain reaction: after he oversaw a first consolidation (compare Fig. IX.31), which was carried out on the site in 1927, the rather small-scale, Angkor Wat-style, early twelfth-century Thommanon temple site along the Petit Circuit of Angkor Park became an archaeological playground once more. Starting in May 1950, Marchal initiated what he called “the anastylosis of this very nice sample of Khmer architecture” (RCA 5.1950): 1,205 stone blocs of the western entry building [gopura] were deposed, cleaned, numbered, and arranged in a series on the ground (RCA 10.1950).112 Having completed this portion only a month later, Marchal admitted impatiently that a pure anastylosis of the central tower “would take too long and cost too much” and that he would only carry out partial repairs (RCA 11.1951). Once again, as in the 1920s and 1930s, he was criticised and requested “by the director of the EFEO [Louis Malleret] to carry out a full recreation of the site through anastylosis [réfection complète par anastylose]”. He gave in and argued rather helplessly that his earlier measures (Fig. IX.67a) to stabilise the central tower’s near-to-collapsing eastern pavilion entry [mandapa] were “disgraceful for those ancient temples, as they would too openly convey the missing stability of the Khmer masonry to visitors” (RCA 5.1952). When Marchal wrote his last monthly report in December 1953, he ordered “the clearing of this spot for the pouring of concrete” (RCA 12.1953) and therefore gave the next generation of high-tech (re)constructeurs d’Angkor additional verve: Only two months later, his successor, Jean Boisselier took over the work. He was a specialist of Khmer art, again trained at the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts and supposedly initiated for Angkor, like Marchal before him (in 1889), during a French colonial exhibition (in 1922) through an Angkor Wat replica.113 Together with his adjoint for the “Technical section” [Technique], Jean Laur, Boisselier “finalised the

112  In the same report from October 1950, Marchal strictly excluded the option of a “consolidation through

anastylosis” for the nearby brick temple of Prasat Kravanh; however, Angkor’s last French Conservator General, Bernard Philippe Groslier, would take exactly this approach at the site in the early 1960s (see discussion below). 113  Here we have another indication of Angkor Wat’s explicit Beaux-Arts-related, architectural and patrimonial affordance quality (compare with the introduction to this book). Boisselier was supposedly introduced to ‘original’ Angkor through a photo of the Angkor Wat replica in the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille 1922 that was published in the journal L’Illustration (EFEO 2002, 140–42, here 140). Interestingly, a similar story is told by Henri Marchal concerning the pagode d’Angkor in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (see his own statement quoted above)! Jean Boisselier studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was in contact with Philippe Stern, the conservator of the musée Guimet (who cleared Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois after 1925, see chapter III) after 1945, joined Marchal at Angkor in 1949, became conservator of the Phnom Penh Museum in 1950, was made responsible for the scientific direction of the Conservation d’Angkor during

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Figures IX.67a—d  Marchal’s reconstruction of the Thommanon temple between 1950 and 1954; compare Fig. IX.31 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

calculations for reinforced concrete to re-establish the mandapa” (RCA 2.1954). However, the exaggerated use of cement throughout Angkor Park in those years created a bottleneck in the workflow. In March 1954 (RCA 3.1954), Boisselier reported that EFEO’s “stock of cement was exhausted due to the parallel worksite at Angkor Wat” (see below). Nevertheless, the original Thommanon building was completely dismantled, and a “bed of fluid concrete, reinforced with a core iron grid [ferraillage de la semelle de béton armé]” was carried out a few weeks later by the en­ gineers and the “blacksmith’s shop of the Conservation d’Angkor” (RCA 4./5.1954) (Fig. IX.67b). The foundation was completely rebuilt in (non-Khmer-like) mortared stone walls (Fig. IX.67c), the exterior was re-erected by filling the cavities with cement, and new artificial stones were added to missing parts (Fig. IX.67d). Altogether, this ap-

proach mirrored the new paradigm of virtually flooding the historic stone structures of Angkor – visible binder agents were historically never used due to the use of a sophisticated ‘rubbing-in’ technique of the finely adjusted stone layers – with non-historic, Western construction material: “The blocks are sewn from cement, the important infills realised in concrete: like this, a substantial economisation of the use of cement could be realised” (RCA 9.1954). Glaize and Marchal were among the initiators of its massive and widespread use, which continued well into the 1950s and beyond. The same high-tech rebuilding procedure was continued at Thommanon under Laur (RCA 3.1956/ 12.1959) after a monetary donation from the visiting first President of India (Rajandra Prasad). This was criticised in 1960 by the new and last conservateur [qua (re)constructeur] of Angkor, Bernard Philippe Groslier (RCA 1960), as

its transfer to the Cambodian authorities around 1953, and, finally, authored the influential publication Le Cambodge: Manuel d’archéologie d’Extrême-Orient in 1966 (Boisselier 1966). To make Boisselier’s French-­ Cambodian connection complete, he converted to Buddhism and supposedly prayed regularly in the monasteries next to Angkor Wat (Giteau 1996, 139).

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Figure IX.68  Filming Angkor Wat’s iconic passageway in 1952 for the film Angkor: The Lost City, produced by Roger Blais for The National Film Board of Canada (published only in 1961), with the photographers Don Wilder, Roger Moride and Roy Nolan (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

an incomplete, overly ambitious, and, above all, futile (they were already crumbling) series of interventions. In the meantime, this trend towards ‘picture-perfect temples’ did attract photographers and film teams from all over the planet to come to Angkor (Fig. IX.68)114. In the final months of 1953, Marchal’s second engagement as general conservator of Angkor ended. Without a doubt he counts as one of the most important architects to have worked at Angkor Park (Fig. IX.69). His last monthly reports already reflected the period of great political transformation that was occurring on-site (Pl. IX.23). In fact, his last statements about the instability and impending collapse of the temples of Angkor seemed to mirror the political situation of the EFEO as a whole: Following the Vietnamese Accords de la baie d’Along in June 1948 and during France’s step-by-step acknowledgement of the independence of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the system of quadripartite, which began in 1948 and continued until the end of the Indochinese War in 1954, turned the EFEO

(along with its archive and collections) into an “organisme franco-vietnamo-lao-cambodgien” (EFEO 2002, 13). The budgetary share of 51 per cent gave the French side a little advantage (Vandermeersch 1992a, 731). With Louis Malleret as its director from 1949 until 1956 (BEFEO 1971, 4–15; ­BESEI 1971, 11–20; EFEO 2002, 188f; Filliozat 1971), the EFEO progressively evacuated its administrative centre from Hanoi to Saigon’s musée Blanchard de la Brosse (Vandermeersch 1972), but it continued to function along a similar administrative basis. Surprisingly, it survived as an entity through these “transformative years” in ex-colonial Indochina with “full efficiency” (Malleret 1956, 10, 13–16; compare Coedès 1958, Malleret 1959). In this context, the EFEO was even able to enlarge its scientific network all over Asia, including in India (Rageau 1989, 12–13). The most favourable situation of the EFEO existed in Francophile Cambodia, when it was subordinated under the newly installed Fine Arts section within its Ministry of National Education. Through bilateral and local agreements in 1951,

114  The author would like to thank Christophe Pottier for this information provided during this research.

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Figure IX.69  Henri Marchal towards the end of his career as general conservator of Angkor in 1953 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

the musée Albert Sarraut, later called musée national with Madeleine Giteau as conservator after 1954 (for her book on Angkor, see Giteau 1971a, 1974). Angkor Park remained “under the technical management of the EFEO and budgetary credits from Cambodia”. In Laos and Cambodia, the EFEO even obtained “an exclusive privilege of thirty years for all archaeological diggings” (Malleret 1951a, 334). During festivities to celebrate the EFEO’s fiftieth ­anniversary the French mission to ‘save Angkor’ was once more celebrated (Malleret 1951b, 1953; compare a short analysis of this event in the following chapter). When the Paris-based Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres celebrated this event during its 21 March session with speeches from Paul Deschamps, Alfred Foucher, and Louis Malleret (CRAI 1/1952, 124–145), F. D. K. Bosch, an old colleague from the former Dutch East Indies (now officially Indonesia) once more evoked the glory days when a “similar method [of] reconstruction (as it was called in Java)” was exported to French-colonial Angkor as “anastylosis (as it is called in Cambodia)” (Bosch 1952, 157). Following France’s disastrous defeat on the North Vietnamese battlefield of Dien Bien Phu against the Viet Minh

(proclaiming the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam), and the parallel Geneva Conference in 1954 to decide the division of Vietnam along the 17th Parallel, the situation of the EFEO (a solely French institution again) also worsened progressively in Saigon. With the failure of an attempted Union française of the former Indochinese countries, the seat of the EFEO was finally repatriated to Paris in 1956, and Jean Filliozat became its new director, serving from 1956 until 1977. When Cambodia became independent, the overall authority changed sides to the Fine Arts Ministry of the Royal Government of Cambodia: “The position of a Conservateur d’Angkor, previously entrusted to an EFEO architect, had been disestablished. The Direction des Arts, to which the conservation of the Angkor monuments and the National Museum belonged, now had a Inspection générale des monuments historiques that was delegated to a young Cambodian architect, an old student of the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris” (Coedès 1962, 252–53). This was, of course, Vann Molyvann who would make a great career as politician and state architect under his patron Norodom Sihanouk (see next chapter). The “decolonisation in matters of cultural property” in the case of Cam115

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bodia and Angkor was not as abrupt an undertaking as in other ex-Indochinese countries (Jakubowski 2015, 121–23): the whole mission to salvage Angkor was officially delegated back to the EFEO with the Accords bilatéraux du 23 Octobre 1956 entre le Gouvernement Royal du Cambodge et l’EFEO (EFEO 1956), according to the previous agreements of 1951/1954, and signed by Louis Malleret and Huot Sambath. Within this overall agreement, the Accord bilatéral concernant l’exercice des attributions scientifiques et techniques de Conservation des Monuments Historiques du territoire du Cambodge et spécialement celle du Groupe d’Angkor was essential. The Accord bilatéral concernant le régime des fouilles archéologiques sur le territoire du Cambodge had it in Titre I, §1: The Royal Government of Cambodia gives the EFEO the full authorisation to carry out methodological and stratigraphic diggings in all the Cambodian territory (EFEO 1956, 4).

The Accord bilatéral concernant l’exercice des attributions scientifique et technique de Conservation des Monuments Historiques du territoire du Cambodge et spécialement celle du Groupe d’Angkor had it in Titre II, §5: The Royal Government of Cambodia delegates the EFEO as its mandatory to exercise the technical authority for the conservation of historic and prehistoric monuments in all its territory and especially for the monuments of the Group of Angkor (EFEO 1956, 17)

If one considers the violent post-1945 period within the overall (post)colonial context of Southeast Asia – for instance, the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia as the scientific reference point for the EFEO – the effect of Cambodia’s independence since 1954 has had a relatively positive effect on Angkor, or as Malleret had it: “The School has adapted itself to the circumstances and so it has been able not only to survive, but even to extend its activities in certain fields” (Malleret 1958, LIX). With Jean Laur,115 the first Conservateur d’Angkor under the new Cambodian nation-state, the effort to achieve a picture-perfect heritage reserve in Angkor Park gained considerable momentum. Two developments that occurred during his four years at Angkor between 1955 and 1959 need to be highlighted: (a) the remarkable improvement of the infrastructural and technological basis of the Conservation d’Angkor, and (b) a progressive touristic commodification of the site. Both elements reached unforeseen heights in the 1960s, only to come to a dramatic end shortly after 1970.

As regards the infrastructural and technical upgrade, photographic reconnaissance flights with the help of the Service aérien de Liaison du Haut-Commissariat de France helped to investigate new potential archaeological areas such as the West Baray (diving operations were tested as well), the ancient Ko Ker capital, and the Kulen mountains around Angkor, as far as Preah Vihear at the Thai border. Helicopter flights to the Cardamon Mountains in Cambodia’s southwest and over Angkor in 1958 were carried out with help of the Count de Beaumont. Archaeological survey inspections by Laur, Lucien (technician of the Conservation d’Angkor), and Bernard Philippe Groslier (see below) were made to Beng Malea, Ko Ker, Kompong Svai, and Sambor. After 1956, the addition of new hangars updated the EFEO’s storage facilities. Offices, a library, and villas were planned and established for the new site of the larger Angkor Conservation laboratories from the late 1950s ­onwards, and a Centre Culturel des Monuments du Groupe d’Angkor was envisioned to open in 1958 as a combined “hall-musée” and “salle de conférence-bibliothèque” (Figs. IX.70a–e). Additionally, new technical devices, such as rolling cranes and other lifting devices, were introduced on the construction sites. As regards the structural treatment of the temples at Angkor in the mid-1950s, Angkor Wat was once again – after the collapse of one of its galleries few years earlier – at the centre of emergency actions. Already by late 1952 under Marchal’s direction, the northern section of the western bridge over the encircling moat had collapsed “over a length of about sixty metres” (RCA 10.1952). In fact, this section had already been repaired using Commaille’s structural infills around 1909/10 (compare Figs. IX.13, 14). As a result, the entire staff on the Angkor Wat site had focused on the spot. Marchal oversaw the lowering of the water level in the moat, the installation of a “wooden rolling bridge” [pont roulant] along the narrow construction site to lift the crumbled stone blocks, and initiated the filling in of the removed foundation with large portions of concrete (RCA 2./3.1953). But heavy rainfall further complicated the precarious situation in late 1953, and the heavy cement machines could not be employed on the fragile bridge. Marchal handed over this rather helpless situation at the end of his career (Fig. IX.71a) to his successor. Boisselier replaced Marchal’s layers of concrete (“the dimensions were considered insufficient”, RCA 2.1954) and rapidly invented a new consolidation system with a difficult wall layering. Miscalculations meant that cement supplies ran out and slowed down the repair work. An additional working team of twenty-five “coulis” had to be installed at night and supported with an electric lightning system from the Service

115  Introduced as technicien in the monthly and annual reports for Angkor, it is telling that Jean Laur was

never officially introduced in the BEFEO, as he himself rarely published any of his archaeological and scientific works on Angkor. His bilingual guide Angkor: Temples and monuments was published only in 2002 (Laur 2002).

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Fig. IX.70a—e  The new Centre Culturel des ­Monuments du Groupe d’Angkor (1958), facilities and a new storage inside the Conservation in 1961, additional storage in 1963, new housing in 1964 and an epigraphic studies centre in 1968 (all photographed for the Rapports de la Conservation d’Angkor) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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Figures IX.71a,b  Marchal’s and Jean Boisselier’s work at the western entry bridge of Angkor Wat between 1953 and 1954 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

de l’Aéronautique Civile. Marchal’s introduction of sandstones within the historic laterite wall were seen as “defiguring” [dénaturant] and were removed, but original building material for the bridge was difficult to find, and – arguably, for the first time in the conservation history of Angkor – other temple sites were pillaged in order to repair this ‘mother’ of all Angkorian temples: the temple of Ta Prohm, which had been deliberately left ‘as a ruin in the jungle’ 118

(compare Pl. EpII.9b), served as a quarry. Its “out-of-use laterite blocs” (four hundred of them were needed during three weeks in March 1954 alone!) were brought to Angkor Wat by lorries and were manually reworked with hatchets to fit elements on the spot, integrated into the existing wall, and secured with one another through “a bath of cement”. Missing stone blocks were brought from an ancient quarry near the Phnom Krom temple site (RCA 3.1954). At the

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

same time, the historic landing stage on the central southern side of the bridge was sealed at its foundation level against impending collapse (Fig. IX.71b). However, as soon as the northern side of the bridge was stablised, the southern side began to crumble again (RCA 7.1954). This time laterite blocks from the Phimeanakas temple site inside Ang­kor Thom were brought over to Angkor Wat and were “re-used immediately” (RCA 9.1954). The whole bridge re­ opened for circulation in November 1954. In his annual conservation report of 1954, Laur summarised this tragic and ­scientifically dubious emergency operation as “Chaussée Ouest, brèche Nord”. In three months alone, “1,700 [laterite] blocks with an average weight of 300 kilograms [this totalled 510 tons alone!] had been reinstalled, cemented, and anchored to the sandstone rear wall with iron clamps”. In addition, the paving of the bridge was repositioned; “an uneasy task […] as the majority of the blocks had a weight of several tons” (RCA Annual Report 1954). However, these late-colonial strategies to make Angkor Park a picture-perfect archaeological heritage reserve can be seen as a kind of ‘back-translation’ of the ‘theme park’-like setting around the Angkor Wat replica in the Paris 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (compare chapter VII). Back ‘on the real spot’, those efforts were subsequently overseen by Marchal, Boisselier and the “technician” Jean Laur between 1953 and 1959, and now amplified and co-sponsored by the new Cambodian nation-state – in order to trigger a new style of in-depth structural interventions. Its scale and pragmatic nature would only be outstripped by Bernard Philippe Groslier after 1960 (see below). This paradigm change after 1953 is easily illustrated through one small but highly photogenic site in Angkor: the southern entry into Angkor Thom. In October 1952, it was again Henri Marchal who encouraged the campaign for this conservation project, which would enhance the touristic ‘spectacle’ of Angkor. Nevertheless, he tried once more to respect the dividing line between conservation on one side, and hypothetical collage or full reconstruction on the other: I put my team to the remontage of the parts of the giant carriers of the naga [snake] along the western section. These fragments were hastily reassembled by Lagisquet, but only with many missing elements. It was difficult for me to adopt a constant niveau, because some of the bodies were more complete than others, and I did not want to insert too many new stones. Our interest here is to conserve for the eye an approximative alignment, which could — though incomplete in detail — provide a sufficient overall picture [aperçu suffisant] of this nice decorative motif. The visitor entering [Angkor Thom] through this gate will thus be prepared for the virtuous aspect of the magnificent ensemble which he will find in a complete manner at the northern and eastern gates: like in a symphony starting with a thematic fragment, only to bring it back in its full extent at the finale. [italics MF] (RCA 8.1952)

When Jean Laur tackled the same site from 1955 onwards, his team did not waste time with similar cosmetic interventions but instead disassembled the entire eastern section of the entry bridge with the help of a lifting machine on wheels [grue sur pneus] (RCA 9.1955). Afterwards, they reconstructed the laterite blocks of the whole substructure with the help of another crane (Figs. IX.72a–d). However, an old problem was developing in parallel to the task of restoring the ancient, dried-out and fully overgrown moat surrounding the whole city of Angkor Thom: the challenge of how to ‘re-present’ the partly lost ensemble of the maleand beneficent snake carriers (deva and asura) in its full entity. This problem was first reflected in Delaporte’s earliest presentation (of a similar section from Preah Khan temple) during the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition and later in his musée Indo-chinois (see chapters II and III; compare Figs. II.15, 21–24). Delaporte’s solution was simply to replace a missing head with a plaster cast from another sculpture. Laur now continued this collage technique in Angkor Wat: the recovery of “altogether forty-eight” of fifty-four heads (RCA 10.1955, 2.1956) was added by taking similar heads from other gates. Laur described his actions with rather ‘pseudo-scientific’ prevarications in his 1959 report: Gate South, Eastern Wall — The remontage of the eastern wall is completed, but the first attempts to reconstitute the asuras indicated that elements were missing. Given the importance of this gate through which all visitors to Angkor pass, it was decided to extract [prélever] a certain number of asuars from the [Eastern] Gate of the Dead [porte des Morts] in order to constitute a complete line at the southern gate [constituer un cordon complet à la Porte Sud]. From a scientific viewpoint, all precautions are taken to publish all necessary information in order to avoid all ambiguity. […] The missing elements have been restituted only where absolutely necessary for the stability of the ensemble. Afterwards, every asura was reassembled, secured with concrete [remonté avec scellements et bétonnage]. At the end of December, fifty asuras were reinstalled in this manner. A rolling bridge facilitated a convenient and rapid realisation of theses assemblages. (RCA 8.—12.1959)

Furthermore, the new era in favour of perfectly aligned and presented temple sites also entailed the overwriting of Marchal’s final undertakings of site ‘conservation’. When Bernard Philippe Groslier became Directeur des Recherches Archéologiques in 1959/60 (he had most probably already developed a new archaeological/topgraphical map for Ang­ kor Park in 1957, see Fig. IX.49), Angkor Thom’s southern gate ensemble became the first iconic site in this new aesthetic agenda of picture-perfect, full-scale, and complete reconstructions. In this case, his technical procedures until 1962 comprised of (a) the dismantling of his predecessors ‘conservation’ efforts along the western side of the bridge by replacing the old interventions with new concrete foun119

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Figures IX.72a—d  Repair work at Angkor Thom’s southern entry gate under Jean Laur between 1955, 1957 and 1959, as photographed for the RCA (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.73a—d  The resurrection of the balustrade of Angkor Thom’s southern entry gate (eastern and western sides) between 1960 and 1962 by B. P. Groslier, as photographed for the RCA (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

dations (Figs. IX.73a–c), (b) re-establishing water in the feature of the giant Naga snake heads had only survived in moat, and (c) the repair of the lateral staircases leading fragments. Groslier simply “restituted the missing volume down from the gate to the moat itself (Fig. IX.73d). Alto- through a moulage of an existing identical element by castgether this formed the result of what Groslier called a ing it in raw cement [ciment brut]”. In fact, Groslier’s rhet“more flexible formula for the reconstruction of the lost el- oric of 1960 mirrored his knowledge of the purist attitude ements” (RCA 1.–3.1960). As another element within our of post-war conservation and restoration ethics in Europe transcultural enquiry to understand the parallel fabrica- (we will return to this subject later). Indeed, in the very tion processes of ‘Angkor in Paris’ and ‘Angkor in Angkor’, local context of faraway, post-colonial Angkor, his strategy Groslier also used a technique of ‘physical translation’ that sounded like an ambivalent acknowledgement of the prewas central to the Angkor replicas in Paris and Marseille – viously mentioned section of the 1931 Athens Charter: plaster casts. When he recreated the full substructure of “VI. The technique of conservation”. During his work at Ang­ the entry bridge and reassembled its flanking figural en- kor, this approach was codified in the famous 1964 Venice sembles [he confessed that “twenty had come from Angkor Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of MonuThom’s eastern gate” (RCA Annual report 1960)], the main ments and Sites,116 more specifically in §15, “Excavations”:

116  This charter was the result of what in French would read as the IIe Congrès international des architectes et

des techniciens des monuments historiques at Venice 1964. Now, “technicians of historic monuments” were added to architects, as part of the team of experts needed to tackle building conservation. This aspect was introduced to Angkor when Laur was termed a “technicien” when he entered the site in the early 1950s. The

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Excavations should be carried out in accordance with scientific standards and the recommendation defining international principles to be applied in the case of archaeological excavation adopted by UNESCO in 1956. Ruins must be maintained and measures necessary for the permanent conservation and protection of architectural features and of objects discovered must be taken. Furthermore, every means must be taken to facilitate the

understanding of the monument and to reveal it without ever distorting its meaning. All reconstruction work should however be ruled out ‘a priori’. Only anastylosis, that is to say, the reassembling of existing but dismembered parts can be permitted. The material used for integration should always be recognisable and its use should be the least that will ensure the conservation of a monument and the reinstatement of its form. [italics MF]

3.5. An unfinished ’enacted utopia of cultural heritage’: Bernard Philippe Groslier and his reprise totale of Angkor Wat (1960—1973) Bernard Philippe Groslier was born in 1926 in Phnom sisted by two French architects, Guy Nafilyan and Piérard Penh and died in 1986 in Paris. He studied classical litera- de Maujouy, he became Conservateur des Monuments ture, history, the Cambodian language, and ethnology in d’Angkor from 1960 to 1975. Towards the end of his AngkoParis. Additionally, he participated in archaeological cam- rian career he was badly injured in Siem Reap during an paigns in France, England, Italy, and also in Greece. As attack by a burglar. Due to the worsening military confronregards the latter, Groslier “collaborated for stratigraphic tation between the post-Sihanouk troops of Lon Nol’s studies on Argos” in 1955 (Vallois 1956, 350) with EFEO’s newly declared Khmer Republic and the Viet Cong/Khmer sister institution, the École française d’Athènes (EFA). Dur- Rouge (see later and chapters X and XI), which ran right ing this time, he certainly witnessed the controversial re- through Angkor Park, he (and shortly after the whole EFEO) construction of the Stoa of Attalos in Athens and the EFA’s had to leave Cambodia between 1973 and 1975. In 1976 continuing work of the anastylosis of the temples of Aphaia Groslier became director of the Centre de Recherches Archéoon Aegina and of Poseidon at Cape Sounion (Chronique logiques in France (Groslier 1980). In a very general sense, 1956, 361, 239, 252–55). In a transregional process of “his goal was both the revival [résurrection] of the landscape knowledge exchange, these discussions about and projects [and temples] of Angkor, and the study of the longue durée of anastylosis in Greece during the 1950s were – once more of the Angkorian civilisation” (Condominas 1992, 32; comafter the 1930s, but this time more explicitly – set in rela- pare Groslier 1956 and see next chapter). As the Phnom tion to France’s late-colonial and early post-colonial claims Penh-born son of George Groslier,117 the painter and influfor archaeological work in former French Indochina. At ential museum and arts school director, B. P. Groslier acted this moment, Groslier went to Saigon under the auspices of as the last French g­ eneral conservator of Ang­kor and was the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), completely embedded in the EFEO’s rather unbroken ‘coloentered the EFEO in 1950 to become its general secretary nial’ (hegemonic and rather Orientalist) mission to ‘save between 1952 and 1954, worked at the musée Blanchard de Angkor’ (Groslier 1951a118,b). However, as a close friend of la Brosse, and edited the Bulletin de la Société des Études Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s first prime minister and Indochinoises. In 1952, Groslier started archaeological in- later head of state (see Fig. X.2) as well as a firm Francophile, vestigations in Angkor’s Royal Palace and in the Roluos we may conceive B. P. Groslier as a typical cultural broker: he area and became (after his experiences in Greece) the did not intervene between different colonial regimes like EFEO’s Directeur de Recherches Archéologiques in 1959. As- Marchal before him (between French-colonial Angkor and same “technical” aspect was also proposed by Groslier in his 1958 report (see below). For the UNESCO r­ ecommendation of 1956 and post-war archaeological excavation methods in general, see Stanley Price 1984, 145–52. For the changing ethics of reconstruction and authenticity in the international charters from Athens 1931 to Venice 1964 and beyond, see Falser 2010a,c, 2015f, 2017c. 117  See his involvement in the Colonial and Universal Exhibitions of 1922, 1931 and 1937 in Marseille and Paris in chapters VI, VII and VIII; for his major works on Angkor see Groslier 1916, 1924. 118  In the themed 1951 volume of the journal France-Asie about the “Hommage à l’EFEO” (Hommage 1951), Groslier employed all colonial topoi to describe the civilising mission of the EFEO in his contribution “Le sens d’une œuvre: l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient”: not only did he repeat the story of its supposedly disinterested, “very hard task of safeguarding” Angkor, he also praised French “Orientalism [through which] the Occident, through its research, had given back the Orient a consciousness of its own. […] The EFEO has been like special envoy of French orientalism to the sources of Oriental wisdom” (Groslier 1951a, 61, 67, 69; compare Dupont 1953 with Finot 1908, 1925).

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Dutch-colonial Java), but rather did he bridge the French legacy over Angkor with the new status of Angkor as the jewel in the crown of the new, postcolonial identity of Cambodia. Acting between the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Cambodia, B. P. Groslier successfully secured, under director Louis Malleret, the EFEO’s exclusive rights to work at Angkor, which stretched far into the years of the country’s independence. According to Coedès’ description in 1965 at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, Groslier’s work fell into Southeast Asia’s post-independence period – a period when Cam­bodia’s attitude was “particularly favourable for France [as] it was the only country [in former Indochine française, MF] to entrust, at its own expense, its national heritage to France” (Coedès 1965, 348). Posthumous acknowledgements of Groslier’s vast œuvre (Condominas 1992, 17–57; Caquot 1986; Moore 1986; Lombard 1987; Cour­ bin 1992; Prodromides 1997; EFEO 2002, 142–45) have focused much more on his theories of Khmer civilisation (see next chapter) than on his work at Angkor. Although a large amount of his typewritten archaeological reports and studies survived in the archives of the EFEO in Paris, only little has been done so far to (a) judge Groslier’s overall aesthetic vision for the Parc d’Angkor itself, or (b) to set it within the larger context of his concrete archaeological work in situ. This is all the more surprising when one notes that Groslier would more deeply penetrate into the historic structural integrity of the temples of Angkor – and especially Angkor Wat – than any other Conservateur d’Angkor in the half-century preceding him. As regards the transcultural approach used in this book, Groslier’s interventions not only represent the most impactful and even tragic ends of the French (post)colonial enterprise to bring Angkor structurally back to its past grandeur. These rather ‘re-constructing’ than ‘conserving’ interventions can also be conceptualised as the late climax of a giant project of ‘back-translation’ (see the introduction to this book): from the creation of Angkor (Wat) as the imaginaire of an extended French-colonial patrimoine culturel, through to the temple’s ephemeral replica representation in French universal and colonial exhibitions (1867–1937) and the framing of its ‘original setting’ as a photogenic icon in an archaeological heritage reserve in Cambodia. With Groslier’s efforts up to 1973 focusing on a “reprise totale”, the ‘real’ and eternal but now spotless image of Angkor Wat formed a complete aesthetic overlap with its twin version during the 1931 International Exhibition in Paris. And finally, the simultaneous, postcolonial context of the European (French) and non-European (ex-French) 1960s served as a backdrop and foil: while the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) produced – most probably written in ex-French Tunisia and presented in Paris in March 1967 (see the introduction to this book) – his seminal text about heterotopias, Des espaces autres, his contemporary Bernard Philippe Groslier (1926–86) was attempting to make Angkor Wat his life achievement as an archaeological Conservateur in ex-French Cambodia. 124

Following our formulated goal to historicise archaeological, often technoid interventions as elements of intellectual, social and cultural-political history, we will filter, for the first time ever in such detail, Groslier’s overall vision for Angkor from virtually hundreds of on-site archaeological interventions and written explanations in monthly and annual reports. We shall take as our starting point in this regard Groslier’s Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor (Groslier 1958b), which was circulated in 1958 and therefore right before his promotion in 1960 to the mastermind of Angkor Park. Because it is a unique source through which to understand Groslier’s (post)colonial mind-set for Angkor, it is well worth analysing this document with its sixty-six typewritten pages, including an introduction, “The role of conservation”, and six chapters (I: Personnel; II: Documentation; III: Conservation work; IV: Restoration work; V: Object conservation; VI: Presentation of monuments), a conclusion, and two appendices (I: Budgetary questions; II: The forest of Angkor). Judged as a whole, Groslier’s study oscillated between three points: (a) his perpetuated colonial attitude of a French civilising mission; (b) his uneasy attempt to adapt the EFEO’s exclusive work at Angkor to Cambodia’s new national self-image and controlling grasp on the heritage reserve; and (c) his vision to “internationalise the conservation of Angkor” using new scientific methods and a Western network of cultural heritage expertise (UNESCO, ICOM, etc.). In his introductory “note liminaire”, Groslier related his study to the glorious “fiftieth anniversary of the Conservation d’Angkor”, but called its last years “between 1946 and 1953 [an] extremely difficult period” in which “the most regrettable errors at Angkor” had occurred. Nevertheless, he stuck to the old-fashioned rhetoric of the “mandatory tasks” [tâches impérieuses] and the self-imposed “mission de la Conservation [d’Angkor]” (Groslier 1958b, 1; compare Groslier 1951a with Falser 2015a,c). The institutional role of the Conservation was defined in §1 as the “study [of] the monuments of Angkor in order to take all suitable measures to assure their conservation and protection; to facilitate their access in order to enable their study; and to contribute, in a feasible manner, to their restoration and embellishment” (Groslier 1958b, 2). In this “formula” the following principle objectives for the temple site were “automatically deduced”: besides (a) documentation, and (b) conservation and protection, point (c) indicated Groslier’s rather explicit vision to “make the site as accessible and exploitable as possible, both for specialists and the ‘grand public’ (the Conservation as a Service public)”. And after (d) “fostering the cognisance of Angkor”, point (e) already hinted at Groslier’s new paradigmatic approach: even if “restoration and embellishment” principally applies to “indirectly threatened monuments only”, he subtly added – contrary to Marchal and the verdicts in the Athens and Venice Charters of 1931 and 1964 respectively – “that evidently reconstruction would enter the system of conservation measures as a more effective and cost-efficient solu-

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

tion [la solution la plus efficace et la plus rentable] to save a making plaster casts for display in his Indochinese musemonument against ruination [sauver un monument mena- ums around and in Paris (compare chapters II and III). çant ruine]”. In chapter “I: Personnel”, Groslier severely Now, Groslier called for a “programme to refurbish the criticised the presently underqualified and understaffed ruins [programme de repeuplement des ruines]” by bringing Conservation with its mandate “to reconstitute the closest concrete casts of original temple sculptures (safely stored possible image of the ancient reality of the same”. He in the dépôt de la Conservation) back to their original locadeemed that “qualified technicians [techniciens]” – not tions for better public instruction. His idea to “diffuse Beaux-Arts architects like before him! – were the only ex- Khmer art under multiple governmental organisations, patronised by UNESCO”, to sell copies to tourists, and to perts qualified to “diagnose the troubles [diagnostiquer les maux]” of the crumbling temples, to “know the eligible “exchange collections of reproductions with museums and remedies [remèdes susceptibles]”, to “establish an emergen- other international scientific institutions” (Groslier 1958b, cy plan [établir un ordre d’urgence]”, and to study and final- 17) sounded like a subconscious renewal of the famous ly apply the appropriate measures to “palliate [pallier]” 1867 Convention for promoting universally reproductions of them against ruination (Groslier 1958b, 4). This typically works of art for the benefit of museums of all countries, colonial rhetoric aligning a ‘salvage paradigm’ (after Clif- which was signed during the same period as the Universal ford 1989) with medical terms was rather similar to the Exhibition of Paris 1867 where the first (“sulphur”) casts of word choice used by his father, George Groslier, to describe Angkor had reached France (see chapter I of this book). the supposed near-extinct status of Cambodia’s royal ballet With chapter III, “Conservation work”, Groslier entered some twenty to thirty years earlier.119 In chapter “II. Docu- on the thematic core of his study. To begin with, he favoured mentation”, Groslier complained about the missing scientif- a “well-informed consolidation” against “approximative ic updates of applied cartography for the temple range in reconstruction [and] past errors of reconstitution”, only to toto: “[I]n the past, the EFEO collaborated with the Service return to his introductory statement of prioritising a “reGéographique de l’Indochine; now the geographical service prise totale”. Concerning a “working programme”, he voted of the Royal Khmer Army and the Service of Hydraulic for a monitoring “inventory of the ruins” [inventaire de Agriculture should help.” And in the Annual Report of l’état de ruine] so that something like “the collapse of the 1961, he proudly announced a French-Cambodian collabo- Heaven and Hell Gallery of Angkor Wat would never haprative project to establish a 1:10,000-scale map of Angkor.120 pen again!” (Groslier 1958b, 25). However, comparing the He also bemoaned the lack of detailed measured drawings passages on “conservation” with those on “restoration” and of the temples: “Actually, the Conservation has no detailed “total anastylosis” indicated the ambiguity of Groslier’s archaeological map [and] is in fact incapable of delivering work vision for Angkor as a whole. In the chapter on “cona detailed plan of Angkor Wat!” (Groslier 1958b, 14, 15) servation”, for instance, Groslier introduced a typically However, this problem too would be solved in 1969 (see post-war discussion about “physical, chemical, and biologbelow). In his search for another means of establishing a ical agents”. He proposed “a collaboration with the Museum complete transfer of pictures of the temples, Groslier called d’Histoire Naturelle (Giselle Hyvert and Pierre Fusey, compare chapter XII) and the Laboratoire de Tropicalisation in for implementation of colonial methods that had once been practiced to establish Khmer art collections in French Paris” to analyse the “maladie noire” on Angkor’s sandexhibitions and museums; that is, “embossing surveys [re- stones, and called for silicone treatments as stone proteclevés estampés] for all the reliefs of Angkor Wat” and using tion and “water repellent cement [ciment hydrofuge]”. Fi“systematic study collections with plaster casts [collections nally, historic temple materials other than sandstone came d’étude de moulages]”. What followed was a strange reversal into his pragmatic vision, namely the very rare stucco surof Delaporte’s activities between 1870 and 1900 which in- faces on temples, which he declared could simply be “revolved either removing original Angkorian sculptures or moved [déposer] and reapplied [remontage] above a new 119  Both the temples and the performative traditions from Angkorian times were, with help of George Gros-

lier, staged, in universal and colonial exhibitions of 1922, 1931 and 1937 in France (see chapters VI–VIII) as a completely reinvented version (compare chapter X, see Figs. X.48a–c). ‘Translated back to the real spot,’ these sanitised scenarios from the French metropole returned to Angkor proper after the 1920s; at a time when conservators like Marchal, Glaize, and B. P. Groslier were reproducing the temples of Angkor through anastylosis and reconstruction, King Sihanouk of late-colonial and finally independent Cambodia, not only used the Angkor Park but also the “Royal Khmer Ballet” as a picture-perfect and performative device within his international programme of cultural diplomacy (see next chapter; compare Falser 2013f, 2016c). 120  In this Annual Report of 1961 on the work at Angkor, he mentioned the “generous subvention of the Délégation générale à la Recherche scientifique” and a convention between the Institut Géographique National de France and a working group of Service Géographique des Forces Armées royales khmères. In the report of 1962, Groslier mentioned the existence of “twenty-four maps [matrices des feuilles] covering the whole area of Angkor”. Compare with chapter XII and epilogue II about the massive return of French firms after Cambodia’s rebirth after 1990.

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coating”; Angkor’s ninth-century brick temples, such as Pre Rup and Prasat Kravanh, however, were (contrary to Marchal’s veto in 1950 and referring to international reference projects121) now openly proposed as test toys for complete reconstruction “without great risk” (Groslier 1958b, 32). In chapter IV, “Restoration work”, Groslier once again underlined “restoration as embellishing work” and proposed “reconstruction only when conservation was assured”, downplaying the idea of “creat[ing] a special service unit for reconstruction at Angkor”. And he quoted – a late outcome of the work of “Balanos, the father of anastylosis” – the newly installed “Service particulier des anastyloses” in Greece as a good example of an institution “work[ing] alongside a Service National des Antiquités”. In comparison to Groslier’s above-quoted paragraph on conservation, now his real interest was in taking Balanos’ initial definition of anastylosis a “radical” step further with his own term of a “reprise totale”: §50 […] engaging to further the appeal of Angkor [attrait d’Angkor], anastylosis remains highly desirable because it is, in the first place, very visible for the public [sensible pour le public], as it allows a deepened study of the structure of the monument, and, finally it makes the monument more appreciated as a whole. §51 — As doctrine, we simply recall the definition of Balanos, the “father” of anastylosis: “Anastylosis is the reconstruction of a monument with its own proper materials and only as far as these materials allow it. Nothing should be added except being indispensable for the solidity of the building and clearly to be seen as such.” No comment is needed as regards this definition. […] §52 — We want to add that, in certain cases, one can consider even more radical renewals [envisager des reprises plus radicales encore]. If it proves technically more cost-efficient [rentable], we should not hesitate to re-erect a monument in a totally new way [sur un principe entièrement nouveau]: for example, a concrete structure [ossature en béton] replacing the foundations, or even a concrete frame [charpente de béton] for the upper parts, etc… What counts is to work on the exterior appearance and only if possible on the interior. But we should not repeat the construction errors of the Khmer; this would make no sense as it would

only perpetuate the risks of degradation [les risques de ruine]. In this sense, the interior component counts less, and we will not renounce a necessary concrete frame only because it would be visible from the inside of the monument. [italics, bolding MF] (Groslier 1958, 34, 35)

In chapter V, “Conservation of objects”, Groslier distanced himself from the EFEO’s once applied, but now “detestable practice of the delisting of objects [déclassement] for sale,122 which had deprived the patrimoine from often very interesting samples, and resulted in irritating psychological repercussions” (Groslier 1958b, 39). In chapter VI, “Presentation of monuments”, Groslier complained about “the little work which had been done to make the monuments of Angkor comprehensible to the simple visitor”, as it was “the duty of the Conservation as a Service public to make the monuments as accessible as possible to the public” (Groslier 1958b, 45). This rhetoric of public education back on the ‘real’ spot of Angkor recalled Louis Delaporte’s claim eighty years earlier that his aim in establishing his Indochinese museum in Paris full of plaster casts from Angkor (see chapter III) was to make it “Accessible au public” (Dela­ porte 1880, 248).123 In order “to make the monuments of Ang­kor as eloquent as possible, and to partially restitute their ancient splendour”, Groslier envisioned not only fully rebuilt temples but also “the arrangement of the space and the perspectives” between and towards the temples in Ang­ kor Park. For this, he included “The forest of Angkor” (see below), and he reminded the reader of his programme to refurbish the Angkor temples with “patinated and labelled casts” of their deprived freestanding original sculptures: practiced “politics” on heritage sites “from Pompeii to the Athens Parthenon”. And he suggested an additional ‘spectacular’ element for Angkor Park, which once again seems to have been a technique borrowed from French universal and colonial exhibitions – that of illumination. §70. One of the greatest discoveries in the arts of monumental arrangements has been nocturnal illumination [éclairage nocturne]. It is not a question here of illuminating the whole of Angkor! Even if this would be one of the decisive factors for its greater diffusion [son plus grand rayonnement]. At this point we could perhaps study a re-

121  Here, Groslier referred to “certain Byzantine monuments” and quoted the Sta. Sophie D’Orchrida church

in Yugoslavia which was rebuilt in a supposedly similar way by an international team under Forlati, Brandi and Froidevaux and published in an ICOM/UNESCO publication. 122  As Phnom Penh’s museum director, Groslier’s father had been part of this commission in the 1930s. 123  Interestingly, the exclamation “Accessible au public!” had also been a slogan used in Delaporte’s 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Delaporte 1880, 248) to establish his Khmer museum in Paris. In both extremes of French (post)colonial engagement in Angkor, an ostensibly well-intentioned approach “to make cultural heritage accessible” was formulated through non-Cambodian representatives using concrete colonial agendas of institutional prestige and touristic site commodification to address a mainly European public: though, a ‘simple’ Cambodian visitor would ‘read Angkor’ still through religious (Buddhist) eyes and not as a ‘cultural heritage reserve’ through the explanations provided by the French or English guidebooks in his hands (see earlier in this chapter).

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duced programme for Angkor Wat: the lightning of its principle bas-reliefs […] and of the temple’s silhouette […] financed by French economical aid. [italics MF] (Groslier 1958, 45)

Strangely, Groslier did not mention the spectacular illu­ mination of the 1:1-scale Angkor Wat replica in the same Paris 1931 Exhibition (compare Pl. VII.16) where his father was responsible for the execution of a 1:10-scale version of ‘his’ musée Albert Sarraut in Phnom Penh (compare Figs. VII.23a,b). Thirty-five years later, and after Sihanouk’s great Cérémonie nocturne at Angkor Wat in 1959 (see next chapter, Fig. X.51), Groslier’s son would write the text for the giant son-et-lumière show held at Angkor Wat in 1966 for Norodom Sihanouk and his guest Charles de Gaulle (see Pl. X.23). Additionally, Groslier proposed that the new Cambodian “Office National du Tourisme” be tasked with making a better “didactical presentation”, with a new guidebook (he himself never wrote one) and “a veritable service didactique, as is in use in the great museums and archaeological ensembles of the world”. He voted for “museographical installations [such as] the newly constructed Centre d’information as a test version of a ‘musée d’Angkor’” and for a more professional “exploitation of Angkor [with] postcards and photographs, plaster casts and rubbings from the temples” for sale (Groslier 1958b, 47–49; compare his father’s strategy, Figs. VIII.31a,b). His “conclusion”, once more and perhaps for the last time, was a French version of the selfimposed ‘white man’s burden’ to protect the cultural heritage of small countries like Cambodia. The same ‘mission’-­ rhetoric would resurface after 1990, compare chapter XII: We know that the efforts to deploy are considerable; and it may be impossible to realise all the expressed expectations […] and finally, we know that such a task in a [small, MF] country like Cambodia is a bit like pushing the stone of Sisyphus, as every day one has to start work at about the same level again. […] In any case, once the mission had been accepted [mission acceptée] it must be followed. And this task needs our full devotion”. (Groslier 1958b, 47—49)

In a similar attitude, Groslier summarised in “Appendix I: Budgetary questions” fifteen elements to effect “reform” in the work at Angkor. The idea was to place it under the “French Economical Aid” programme by underlining the “essential qualities” of the proven “French methods” on the spot, and finally by “internationalising the problem of Ang­ kor” with respect to the national claims on Angkor through the Cambodian authorities: In fact, one would normally admit that Cambodia should, structo sensu, alone come up with the expenditures for conservation as Angkor is its own national heritage [son patrimoine national] and there is a duty to protect it. But it is clear that it is not able to envisage the expenses for

the embellishment of Angkor, given these heavy obligations within its reduced resources. And here the Aide française could usefully step in, with a double advantage not only to develop Angkor, but also to discreetly underline the effects of the French donations towards a harmonious order and consolidation [ordre harmonieux et la synthèse]. However, a collaboration with the service of technical aid of UNESCO under the International Commission of Museums and its vast network of information and of the experiences of world-wide specialists […] would partly lift the financial burden from the Conservation. In a good sense of the term, the problem of Angkor would be internationalised; however, by retaining the earnings of the [French] initiative and the ongoing management of the activities. This would also favour the Cambodian Government […] and we could cut off the frequent critiques against a certain “chauvinism” of our governance. (Groslier 1958b, 56)

As a final element of the internal report, in “Appendix II” Groslier expanded his vision for the site of Angkor from individual temples to their entire spatial embedding in “The forest of Angkor”. Its actual state of preservation was judged, quoting a French advisor to the Cambodian Service des Eaux et Forêtes du Cambodge, as “absolutely desolate”. The forest was conceived as a “living organism” and “ecological unity” which had shrunk since 1939 to “75 per cent of its surface inside the Park and to only 50 per cent in its peripheries”. The message was clear: “If the forest of Angkor was not methodologically reconstituted now and in the future, it will entirely disappear in thirty years maximum!” (Groslier 1958b, 57). These reasons would in fact resurface with even more dramatic consequences when the former French Parc archéologique d’Angkor became UNESCO World Heritage in 1992 and was later administered by strict Cambodian authorities (see chapter XII and epilogue II): “loss of control, repopulation [repeuplement], the demographic increase of inhabitants, the regrouping of villages [and this comprised the expanding “village d’Angkor” near the temples western entry] and uncontrolled/illegal logging”. Possible recovery solutions [remèdes possibles/ mésures conservatoires] were easily formulated in a mix of rather authoritarian approaches, without any opportunity for local voices: In fact, there would be only one remedy [remède] to this catastrophic situation: the pure and simple evacuation of all inhabitants within the area of the park. Alas, there is no question of applying this. Certainly, one can double the efforts of surveillance and repression, but even if [prescriptive, MF] texts existed and the whole world knew them, nobody would apply them, neither the inhabitants nor the local authorities… All we can do is to prohibit any sawmill cutting, certainly in a delimited zone within the Grand Circuit and a strip of one hundred metres (to be optimistic) along the route. [italics MF] (Groslier 1958, 59)

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Figures IX.74  Consolidating the inner core of Baphuon temple with reinforced concrete, here in 1959 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

As “recreative measures”, Groslier proposed the new position of a “Conservateur du Parc”, a concrete “reforestation programme”, the support for sustainable vegetable and fruit tree plantations for the inhabitants, and control of tree-felling in favour of a better “presentation of Angkor”. However, as he concluded, even the forest was “a rather recent phenomenon of the past five hundred years and therefore perfectly foreign to the temples”, which, in ancient times of the Khmer Empire, had dominated “a vast urban ensemble”. The “Forêt d’Angkor”, seemingly less important for Groslier as a source of life for the local inhabitants, could now be used as a “plastic” tool to frame the archaeological aspect of the area à la française: Adequately treated, the forest itself could serve magnificently to restitute the ancient layout, as it could replace as a living mass [masse vivante] the once built volumes [of the disappeared habitations, MF]. We do not want to

make Angkor a French Garden [a Parc à la française]! But we adhere to a logical layout of the forest, in order to restitute en grande partie the outlines [tracés] of the ancient city, and to considerably enhance the presentation of the monuments. All this is completely compatible with any restoration work. Likewise, it would be illogical to restore Versailles on the one hand but on the other let the forest grow up to the tiers of the Neptune Basin. [italics MF] (Groslier 1958, 61)

In addition to Groslier’s continuation of the sites of the southern gate Angkor Thom and of the Thommanon temple site, two other sites attracted a large part of his attention: The first was the giant mountain temple of Baphuon inside Angkor Thom, which, throughout the 1960s, continued to collapse124 and therefore needed to be dismantled on its northeastern section and consolidated in its core with an enormous amount of reinforced concrete (Fig. IX.74).

124  Coedès spoke of an “architectural mass of 100 to 120 metres length and 36 metres height” that had slid

apart from an interior core of sand (Coedès 1962, 253). However, as a never-ending emergency consolidation project, the Baphuon site is not considered representative in this chapter to characterise the work of the EFEO at Angkor. See the ongoing project after 1990 in epilogue II, compare with Pl. EpII.10a–d.

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Figures IX.75a—d  B. P. Groslier’s reconstruction work at Angkor Wat’s tiers of the surrounding water tank, as illustrated in his reports of 1960 to 1961 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

His second focal point was, of course, Angkor Wat. Here, Groslier applied a similar approach to that used at the southern gate of Angkor Thom: revising his predecessors’ conservation efforts through the scratch and full-scale reconstruction under reinforced concrete foundations to re-establish and enhance of the great (touristic) vistas of the temple’s picturesque waterscape fortifications. The latter would now, for the first time, have severe consequences for the inhabitants of Angkor Park. Unlike the ephemeral Angkor Wat replicas back in France, the real and historic spot with its other parameters of time (alterations, patina, and decay) and its living environment (nature and human beings) necessitated other in-depth interventions. In order to improve the aspect of a picture-perfect surrounding of Angkor Wat, Marchal had already worked in the late 1940s on the western section of the moat, clearing the water surface from overgrowing water plants but encouraging the blooming lotus flowers on the spot as a “picturesque note to the view” (RCA 7.1950) and starting to restore the tiers (RCA 10.1952). In 1954, Laur, for the supposed preservation of the fragile historic moat constructions, contacted the local authorities to have nearby inhabitants banned from bringing their cattle to the moats during the dry season (“a practice totally against the spirit of the

Conservation du Site d’Angkor”, RCA 6.1954; compare the same discussion after 1992, e.g. in Miura 2015). How­ever, it was Groslier who established a mechanised, much faster and, one might say, serial system with the help of a wooden crane construction on two rail tracks, which was used to “reconstitute” the stepped tiers on both sides of the western section of the moat. This project was a response to the special request from the highest Cambodian officials in Phnom Penh, the province and the nation’s new Office du Tourisme: Groslier worked on a more representative mise-en-­valeur of Angkor Wat’s main vista from the western side where only the temple’s main access was situated, but, more important, the Auberge royale des Temples and its “important esplanade” were planned (see next chapter Pl. X.17a,b). As a matter of fact, all these measures had been preconceived in Commaille’s 1908 sketch (Fig. IX.11a). Now, as Groslier had it, “the reconstitutions of the perrons and tiers along 120 meters with reinforced concrete completed in a masterful manner the marvellous perspective towards Angkor Wat” (RCA 4–6.1960). This helped “to manage the unquestionably exceptional spectacle of Angkor Wat during sunset” (RCA Annual Report 1961) (Figs. IX.75a–d). His repair work collapsed in the 1990s (compare epilogue II, Pl. EpII.12e,f). Within the same effort to bring Angkor’s hydraulic system into the sights of 129

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Figure IX.76  Re-establishing the water tank of Srah Srang, photograph of January 1963 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

archaeological research, as well as to tourists and Sihanouk’s probably ever before (Figs. IX.77a–c). Later, he confessed to political guests, the artificial water basin of Srah Srang in the having been “inspired by the principles of anastylosis in eastern section of the park was restored from 1961 onwards Greece” (RCA Annual report 1965). (Fig. IX.76).125 As regards the fortifications of the moat of Now another point on Groslier’s wish list from his 1958 Angkor Wat, Groslier decided to dismantle and entirely re- report would become a reality: the illumination of Angkor build the southern section of its western bridge, as he con- Wat. In the context of an official visit of the “Cultural Delsidered Marchal’s earlier repair work insufficient. He thus egation of Federal Republic of [West] Germany” to Camproposed “a radical solution” (RCA Annual report 1962), bodia in 1963, Groslier guided Herbert Härtel, the director which though similar to his approach at Angkor Thom’s of the newly created Museum of Indian Art in Dahlem/ southern bridge, was indeed much more dramatic: a total West-Berlin, through the ruins of Angkor (Falser 2014, 48).126 disassembly of this section, a completely new foundation in Groslier’s entry in the Annual Report of 1964 reads like the re-enforced concrete and with a new interior drainage sys- explanation of an exchange of gift as cultural diplomacy: tem, and, with help of a rolling metallic bridge, the re-erec- “[T]he Federal Republic of Germany donated the necessary tion of the whole structure more perfectly aligned than equipment to illuminate the western facades of Angkor 125  It was here where Sihanouk would install a spot to take afternoon tea along the sightseeing parcours

with his distinguished guests, such as Jacqueline Kennedy in 1967 (see next chapter, Figs. X.56a,b). In this short phase of Cambodia’s independence, the EFEO’s archaeological and Sihanouk’s diplomatic and performative mise-en-valeur of the site went hand in hand. 126  Härtel extended his stay at Angkor for private “Studies of the ruined city of Angkor” with a series of colour slides which would help, more than twenty years later, in 1986, when the so-called “Härtel-Gallery” in the “Schausammlung hinterindischer und indonesischer Bildwerke” of the Berlin Museum opened, to artificially patinate the newly reproduced plaster casts of the galleries of Angkor Wat. The original moulds of this had been made around 1900 by the adventurer Harry Thomann for the Berlin Ethnographic Museum (Falser 2012/14, 2016b). See this discussion in chapter III (compare Figs. III.41–44).

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Figures IX.77a+c  Reinforcing the western bridge of Angkor Wat with a new drainage system, as shown in a section plan of May 1963 and as photographed in B. P. Groslier’s monthly report in 1965 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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Figure IX.77b  Reinforcing the western bridge of Angkor Wat with a new drainage system, as photographed in B. P. Groslier’s monthly report in 1965 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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Figures IX.78a,b  Illumination schemes for Angkor Wat, photographs from 1963 and 1964 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Wat, as projectors and the cable system were installed by the firm of Siemens/Germany” (Figs. IX.78a–c). Again, creating a kind of technical and aesthetic déjà-vu-­effect, the temporary test version of the illumination of the Angkor Wat replica in the 1922 and 1931 exhibitions in Mar-

seille and Paris (compare Pl. VI.7b; Figs. VII.45b, 46, Pl. VII.16) was now ‘back-translated’ to the real spot through a high-tech system with a “cabine de commande” for the keyboards to conduct the different light rays (Fig. IX.78d), and a “cabine du transformateur” for the electrical system 133

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some of the inhabitants around Ta Prohm Kel [the village north to it, MF] and to the south of the southern moat of Angkor Wat, have started to leave. All these villagers are regrouped in a model village [village modèle] implanted to the south of the airport area. The Conservation has immediately cleared, levelled, and cleaned the entire area in front of the entry to the western bridge to Angkor Wat, to the south and east of Trapean Ses. This zone should now become a park, as this is the principle access to the most important of all Temples of Angkor [sic]. [italics MF] (RCA Annual report 1963)

Figures IX.78c,d  Illumination schemes and infrastructure (Cabine de commande de l’éclairage) for Angkor Wat, ­photographs from 1963 and 1964 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

(RCA Annual report 1964). However, Groslier voted for a “more discreet” installation of the transformator, although the solution used in Paris in 1931 – to cover it with Bayon-styled plaster casts (compare Figs. VII.25a,b) – was certainly never considered. Parallel to the repair work of the western bridge of Ang­kor Wat, the wider space of its main entry section, outside the moat and near the tourist hotel, came to Groslier’s attention. Returning to his 1958 report with its reservations against the increasing population around archaeological sites, Groslier summarised the ongoing relocation strategy – now inside the section entitled “Aménagement et entretien du Parc” in the annual report of 1963. The relocation strategy to veritable “model villages” was again executed after 1990 when the Cambodian authorities proposed the “eco­v illage Run Ta-Ek” just outside Angkor Park (see epilogue II, see Pl. EpII.20c–f). Thanks to the firm and subtle action of the Chief Governor of the Province, His Eminence Hou Hong, the inhabitants who had created a veritable shantytown in front of the western access to Angkor Wat, have left. Likewise,

134

In his 1968 report, Groslier reconfirmed that the site was further designed with a parking lot and a kiosk, since the crossroads in front of Angkor Wat were to become “a major focal point of the Park” supported by the older Auberge des Temples to the south, the enlarged road to the airport to the west, and a new “Hotel d’Air France” (see Fig. X.39 and Pl. X.17a,b) and the ancient road to Angkor Thom towards the north. Now the last “eviction of certain people [déguerpissement de certains habitants] to the west and south of Angkor” had been executed and – keeping in mind Groslier’s words about Versailles in his 1958 report – “some five hectares were now transformed into an ‘English garden’ [parc à l’anglaise]” (RCA Annual report 1968). Additionally, Groslier successfully intervened against the plans of the active monastery of Ang­kor Wat to build new structures, which he judged as “most hideous, modern constructions [and] cement monstrosities”. On the other hand, he convinced the “[v]enerable chief of the monastery” of Angkor Wat to provide two unused wooden structures from their monastery, which would serve as a “little folkloric museum, precious for the tourists and a picturesque element in the best Khmer tradition for the new park area”. In the meantime, this new space helped, according to Groslier, “to give back to this zone in front of the main facade of Angkor Wat its scale, the views, and the noblesse which it deserved, and more particularly, to transform it, now recently cleared of its inhabitants, into a forested park as the new western edge of the Archaeological Park”. He continued in a neo-colonial, almost sarcastic tone: Considering that the Khmer — without a doubt installed here incorrectly since the war for more than twenty years — had to leave with only a little indemnity amount and to resettle on rather miserable parcels […], we have at least to prove to them that this sacrifice was not in vain and would be for the collective benefit. I want to add that I made a particular effort to compensate them generously on the spot, for the few fruit trees that we had to fell. […] For the relocation [déménagement] of the inhabitants inside the Archaeological Park, the Minister of Agriculture has now taken the affair in his hands. He obtained appreciable results, such as that seen in Trapean Ses and along the northern and southern sections of the moat of Angkor Wat. Although one might rejoice for the park, humanely speaking,

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.79  Chemical weeding of the great moat of Angkor Wat, 1966 (Source: © EFEO ­Archive, Paris) it would have been preferable to see the re-implanted village profit from some of the efforts that have been so generously consecrated to tourism only. [italics MF] (RCA 1969)

As a matter of sad irony, Groslier reported on the finalised relocation of the village just before the clash between royal troops and the Republican army of Lon Nol which once again severely affected the lives of the people inside and around Angkor. After the reconstruction of the ancient structural elements of the temple and the clearing of the entire area around it of local inhabitants, Groslier tackled the natural space in between. Returning once again to Ang­ ­kor Wat’s giant moat, Marchal’s previous low-tech, purely manual work to keep the water’s surface free of uncontrolled growth of weeds, which “totally destroyed the mirror effect” – namely the reflected silhouette of Angkor Wat – was now replaced by a new strategy: the use of a chemical herbicide, in this case “Gramoxone from SONEXIM in Singapore”. As Groslier proudly reported in 1966, “workers from

the Conservation spread the pulverised product from boats on the moat, killing all plants in a mere forty-eight hours [désherbage]: a remarkable effect from an aesthetic point of view” (Fig. IX.79). This also meant they had to chemically “purify the water from the Auberge des Temples which pumped its water into the southern moat” (RCA Annual report 1966). In the same context, the biological attacks against the surface of Angkor Wat’s sandstone became the focus of in-depth research, and chemical analyses of the alteration processes of the stones [Altération des grès] were hotly debated from the early 1960s onwards. In the mid-1980s this strategy resurfaced through the Archaeological Survey of India working at Angkor Wat (see Figs. XI.27, 28). Marchal’s studies, initiated from the 1920s onwards,127 were followed by surveys by Edmond Saurin and Jean Delvert (Saurin 1954, Delvert 1963; compare André 2008). Now with financial support from the French Centre national de la Recherche scientifique, specialists from the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle in Paris made several

127  In his June 1923 report, Marchal reported on his tests of the “procédé de fluation Kessler” and his

consultation with Camille Enlart, director of the musée du Trocadéro (RCA 6.1923; compare 3.1933 with his tests at Angkor Wat). In 1929, Fernand Blondel presented some studies on eroding stones in the Indochinese region.

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Figures IX.80a—c  Prasat Kravanh temple, as Georges Trouvé manipulated and photographed it in 1935 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

missions to Angkor, investigated the stones’ inner crystalline porosity, and tested several products (like “the product Peter Cox”) on selected “healthy” and heavily eroded stone surfaces inside Angkor Wat. Additionally, a “completely automatic meteorological and solargraphic station”, to136

gether with an apparatus to measure temperature, humidity, and the suspected “choc thermique”, were set up inside the temple. All of this was celebrated by Groslier as “the first of their type to be installed inside an ancient monument” (RCA Annual reports 1964 and 1966).

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.81  Prasat Kravanh temple, manipulated and photographed by Henri Marchal in 1951 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

What came next would ultimately become Groslier’s that Georges Trouvé in the 1930s (Figs. IX.80a–c), and most challenging, even hubristic, and indeed back-break- Marchal between 1946 and 1951 (Fig. IX.81) had un­ dertaken clearing and stabilising measures, the temple’s ing task: in the annual report of 1966 he announced “the “disintegration continued slowly but inexorably”, and, acreprise totale of Ang­kor Wat”. In order to better understand Groslier’s last major in- cording to Groslier, it became clear that “all had to be untervention at Angkor Wat in the form of a total démontage dertaken to save one of the most beautiful and characterisof Angkor Wat’s decorative bas-relief galleries, another pio­ tic ensembles of Angkor”. As a consequence, Groslier neering and at the same time highly questionable project argued for methodological revisions as anastylose was conneeds to be mentioned: the first trial of the partial anasty- cerned: losis of a brick temple. Of all the structural interventions undertaken during his thirteen years as the mastermind At some point the doctrine was established that anastylobehind the world’s largest and best-equipped archaeologisis of brick structures was impossible [Marchal’s opinion cal site (1960–72), it was the changes made to an extremely of 1950, MF]: a rather surprising proposition as, since the fragile little brick temple where Groslier definitely crossed beginning of this century, strengthening works [travaux the aesthetic, technical, as well as moral line between the de confortation] had been carried out at the Po Nagar conservation, restoration and reconstruction of ancient temple at Nhatrang [central Vietnam, MF]. Since then M. buildings. Here, he entered the zone of complete ‘asset Claeys, notably, has re-established in a very efficient way stripping’ for physical trophies inside an overcommodified the same building, the tour of Bangan, and several sanccultural heritage reserve. In 1961, he highlighted the imtuaries of Mi-Son [to the north of Nhatrang, MF]. As a portance of Prasat Kravanh, a temple complex from 921 consequence, it seems to me indispensable and particuCE with five brick towers and a brick platform next to the larly significant to rebuild [reprendre] Kravan. It is the ocSrah Srang basin: “It was not only one of the best decorated casion of now or never for research on the best methods and most characteristic of its epoch, but it also contained, to save a Khmer brick monument, and even more so bein its central and northern tour, admirable and, unique in cause other brick temples, such as Preah Ko, Lolei, Pre Cambodia, bas-reliefs in carved bricks.” Despite the fact Rup, and Sambor Prei Kuk, are also threatening to be137

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a

b

c

d Figures IX.82a—i  Prasat Kravanh, manipulated and photographed by B. P. Groslier between 1961 and 1966 for his Rapports de la Conservation d’Angkor (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris) come full ruins. Prasat Kravan is not too imposing a building for our means and resources, [and will allow us] to wait to tackle larger ensembles afterwards. [italics MF] (RCA Annual report 1961)

What followed was a complete dégagement of the heavily overgrown site and the removal of Marchal’s stabilisation measures in the form of concrete buttresses. However, there was a “double problem” that had to be solved: “saving the brick structures with their original facades and their inner bas-reliefs; and re-establishing and completing them in order to restitute their essential character for a safe future, but without overinterpretation and false interpretation [sans surinterpréter et tomber dans le faux]” (RCA Annual report 1961). With respect to the surviving bas-reliefs, the walls of the northern tower were not decomposed brick by brick, but entirely wrapped up [coffrage], taken apart in sections along existing cracks, brought to the Conservation, restored and recompressed, and finally reassembled on the spot (Figs. IX.82a–e). “Decayed bricks were exchanged with newly baked, but ‘nude’ and un-sculpted bricks” (RCA Annual report 1962) and were re-stabilised with a new system of reinforced concrete slabs, which were integrated 138

into the split brick walls and tied to cemented foundations. A similar approach was taken with the lower walls of the central and southern towers, which were re-erected as whole brick slabs with inserted, but hidden, “bandages” of iron grids [frette dissimulée]. “After systematic archaeological investigations around the sanctuary to recover the general outline of the ensemble” (RCA Annual Report 1963), the whole access alley, terrace, and the temples’ brick platform were totally reconstructed using an aesthetically rather arbitrary layering and rigid moulding of new bricks (Figs. IX.82f,g). The upper storeys of the central and south­ ern towers were reconstructed with a mix of mostly new, rough, and rather sharp-edged brick layers and intermediate rings of reinforced concrete, whereas the other prasats were artificially cut along a sharp line after their lower masonry. All mural crowns with their different heights were sealed and waterproofed using a mix of concrete, bitumen, and coloured cement (Fig. IX.82h). In a short comment, Groslier commented on the massive amount of new and rough brick layers: “their patina and thousands of small scrapes will come back rapidly to soften a certain rigour” (RCA Annual Report 1964) – or “a little cold appearance” (Fig. IX.82i), as his colleague Jacques Dumarçay called it

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

e

f

g

h

i

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Figure IX.83  UNESCO Courier (1.965)  Angkor, before & after and B. P. Groslier’s success story in already quoted photographs (Source: UNESCO Courier 1.1965, 28—29)

diplomatically many years later (Dumarçay 1988, 5). Self-­ confident as he certainly was, Groslier concluded: “Like this, the reconstruction [sic] of Prasat Kravan comes to an end, as the first brick temple ever to be rebuilt through anastylosis in Asia, and therefore the most advanced work [le travail le plus poussé effectué] of the Conservation d’Angkor” [RCA Annual Report 1966]. At this moment, the warning words of Auguste Barth in the preface to the first volume of the BEFEO were all too far away: his ‘no’ in 1901 to any “vandalic restoration [à la] vieux-neuf” (Barth 1901, 2) was finally negated in 1965. After Jayavarman VII had already made it in the cover of the UNESCO Courier of June 1956 (Pl. XI.24a) to introduce the special issue on Buddhist art and architecture (no word yet about ‘Angkor in danger’ by the writing author Jeannine Auboyer, curator of the musée Guimet in Paris), Groslier’s success story “Ang­kor – before and after” (Fig. IX.83) made it into the UNESCO Courier of 1965. The Cambodian site was now inserted into the ongoing and over-dramatised cover story “Monuments in peril” (Pl. IX.24b). Relevant for this chap-

ter, the Parthenon and Borobudur were included in the June 1968 issue. Bridging the Cambodian and the Javanese site one more time since 1900, the Angkor site conservator Bernard Philippe Groslier now contributed the ‘heritage-in-danger’ story “Borobudur – Is the great Javanese sanctuary doomed?” (Groslier 1968, compare chapter XI). It must have been Groslier’s overstretched self-confidence and faith in the seemingly unlimited potential of technical feasibility – didn’t the French after all succeed in replicating the temple in various scales and version back in French colonial and universal exhibitions? – that made him proclaim in 1966 the reprise totale of Angkor Wat, the largest religious stone monument on the planet. In the same year, he also tried to circulate a master narrative about French sacrifices to preserve Angkor amongst the postcolonial Cambodian upper class through two articles on “The work of the ‘Conservation d’Angkor’ – Lessons from the past: Forming a system” published in Sihanouk’s French-English journal Kambuja – Monthly Illustrated Review (Groslier 1966a, see next chapter).128 However, this

128  This also included an important contribution by the independent Cambodian government itself: “a

credit of 3 million Riel in 1959 to 14 million in 1965, an increased labour force from 250 to 750 workmen, and a personal gift by Sihanouk of 2 million” (Groslier 1966a, 85). However, Groslier was merely perpetuating the view of French conservators, a view that continued up to the very last days of France’s colonial influence in Cambodia. This included, for example, Jean Yves Claeys, chef du service archéologique de l’EFEO in 1933 and after 1937, who proudly stated in his 1948 Angkor book: “As well, it is through France that Cambodia, surprised by the world’s ecstasy, became conscious of its ancestor’s heights, genial founders of amazing works equal to the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon or the Pyramids” (Claeys 1948, n.p.).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figure IX.84  Groslier’s “Work Programme 1967—69” with an illustration of Angkor Wat’s ­decorative surfaces under threat: “alteration of the reliefs by osmosis”; compare similar studies after 1990 in chapter XII and epilogue II (Source: Groslier 1967b, appendix plate C)

project was not founded on aesthetic, moral, or political considerations, but rather – a typical, international and even global UNESCO trend in the late 1960s to salvage cultural heritage (compare Falser 2015a,c) – on the basis of a mere technical feasibility study. Completely financed by the Bureau de la Recherche géologique et minière in Paris and with help of the Public Works Laboratory in Phnom Penh, Groslier’s engineer J. Launay carried out “test series of the pressure resistance of the sandstones of the Angkor Wat, Baphuon, and Bayon temples [and] studied the weight and efforts on play in the bas-relief gallery” of Angkor Wat (RCA Annual Report 1966). As a result, “a complete dossier conceived the mix of water infiltration and the reduced pressure resistance under such conditions” as the “epiphenomenon” of the temple’s structural threat. Back in Paris, the EFEO’s “travail d’archéologie militante […] under Bernard Philippe Groslier” was praised by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and exceptional credits were deemed necessary from France for the “dismantling and

reconstruction [dépose et réfection] of the near to collapsing galleries of Angkor Wat [effondrement imminent] (De­ miéville 1966, 573, 574). Shortly after, the “Agreements ­between Cambodia and the EFEO” were renewed in 1967 to continue their collaboration.129 With Groslier’s internal report about the “Work Programme 1967–1969” (Groslier 1967b) with its appendix “Reconstruction du premier niveau d’Angkor Vat” and a section on the alteration of the reliefs by osmosis (Fig. IX.84), Filliozat reported that “all these credits [were] still not enough for the degree of workload necessary to fight the impending partial collapse of Angkor Wat, deservedly judged the most famous jewel of all the arts of Southeast Asia” (Filliozat 1968, 497). Thus, Groslier also became involved in a restoration project for the Khmer temple of Phimai in Thailand (compare Groslier 1962)130 and in the UNESCO emergency project for Borobudur where the French had found their archaeological counterpart during their collaboration with the Dutch-colonial regime (see above and chapter XI). Not

129  The Accords entre le Gouvernement du Cambodge et l’EFEO relatif à la recondition des accords bilatéraux

de 1956 sur la Conservation d’Angkor et sur la régime des fouilles archéologiques (16 March 1967) were signed, on the Cambodian side, by Vann Molyvann as rector of the Université Royale des Beaux-Arts in Phnom Penh (see his role in chapter X and XII), and the Minister of National Education, Diep Dinar; on the French side, by Jean Filliozat, the director of the EFEO, and Hubert Argod, French ambassador in Cambodia (Royaume de Cambodge 1967). 130  In this context, the techniques of anastylosis were applied on Khmer-style temples in Thai territory (compare Vasu 1997 and Crocker 2006).

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Figures IX.85a,b  Groslier’s initiated drainage systems around the Bayon and Angkor Wat ­temples in his work reports in 1969 and 1970 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

even suprisingly, the Angkor-Borobudur connection continued when both sites made it on the UNESCO World Heritage List in the early 1990s (in chapter XII). The “programme d’action” that was developed to save Angkor Wat did not sound like the preparation for a temple restoration, but rather for the construction of a modern high-rise building: “Creating a sufficient circuit road and an action base; assuring drainage of the site; the demand for turning cranes, stone saws, jackhammers, power generators, storage room and sufficient space to work, and to depose, evacuate, store and finally return thousands of stones, without impeding the touristic circulation or being hindered by rainfall” (RCA Annual report 1966). Starting in November 1966, the northeastern section of the inner sanctuary of Angkor Wat was cleared. All material was brought to the site over the tracks that had been made just a few months earlier for Sihanouk’s sound-andlight show during Charles de Gaulle’ state visit (see chapter X). From a telescopic platform over the southeastern section of the temple’s bas-relief galleries, galvanised pipes were introduced into the vaults in order to collect and deviate infiltrating water. As had been done around the Bayon and Baphuon temples (Fig. IX.85a), a new drainage system was laid round the whole “mountain temple” of Angkor Wat (Fig. IX.85b), and a four kilometre road system was constructed inside the outermost (fourth) enclosure. As a next step, the temple terrasse [terre-plain du temple montagne] was deposed and consolidated at the 142

eastern section, and the adjacent “Gallery of the Churning of the Milk Ocean” [galerie du barattage] together with its neighbouring south­eastern and south-central pavilions were judged most threatened and elected for priority repair (RCA Annual report 1968). With an overall staff of 912 people within the Conservation in 1969 (161 alone worked at Angkor Wat), and in order to prevent further unforeseen catastrophes – “the collapse of Angkor Wat’s ‘Heaven and Hell Gallery’ in 1947 had been premonitory” – Gros­ lier exposed his preparatory work plan in the annual report of 1969: further stone analysis to explain alteration processes through penetrating water (protection from the surface was judged insufficient); detailed measurements and plans; the mathematical calculation of the movements of the bas-relief galleries; identification of the weak sections; and the establishing of checkpoints through attached glass plates over cracks to measure the ongoing movement inside the structure. As the too fragile bas-reliefs of the barattage gallery could not be removed, they were protected with a phalanx of wooden planks (Fig. IX.86a) before the vaulting system and the columns of the southeastern pavilion and the gallery were taken apart (Fig. IX.86b). The pro­ ject was again propagated by Sihanouk’s state media, this time with the article “La reconstruction des galeries des bas-reliefs d’Ang­kor Vat” (Groslier 1970), published in the Khmer art journal Nokor khmer (Fig. IX.87a–c). Also, for the first time, two Khmer graduates (Darn Choeurn and Lan Sunary) from the faculty of archaeology in Phnom

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.86a,b  Groslier’s work report in mid-1969 about the dismantling of Angkor Wat’s Churning of the Milk Ocean gallery (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Penh’s newly established École des Beaux-Arts under rector Vann Molyvann were welcomed at the Con­servation with France-financed fellowships.131 Never before since the historic construction of Angkor Wat in the twelfth century AD had such an enormous amount of the temple’s ancient stone structure been in motion: if Groslier’s repair of the temple’s western bridge fifteen years earlier in 1954 had moved 510 tons of stones (see above), now “about 1,700 blocks of about one ton each” were deposed, numbered, and laid out in systematic rows

on the southeastern grounds in front of the galleries. As a consequence and “for the first time in 820 years, the sculptured bas-reliefs saw [Cambodian] sunlight” (they had only ever been executed after the whole architectural setting was finished) and were systematically photographed. Additionally, the whole interior space between the outermost enclosure and the mountain temple itself was completely remodelled: “by the end of the year, three-fifths of the interior perimeter of Angkor Wat – that is about twenty-five hectares – were cleared and drained, filled, flattened,

131  From the same year (1970), a Mémoire de fin d’Étude from Phnom Penh’s Université des Beaux-Arts

(Faculté d’Archéologie) by the student Sem Sara has survived, entitled Le concept de l’aménagement des villes d’Angkor (Phnom Penh 1969–70). In the jury were, among others, Hang Thun Hak (recteur de l’UBA), Nop Chhom, and Proum Nuon Thol on the Cambodian side; and B. P. Groslier, Bruno Dagens, and Jacques Dumarçay on the French side (Sem Sara 1970).

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Figures IX.87a—c  Groslier’s project as featured in Cambodia’s journal Nokor Khmer in its third issue of 1970 (Source: Groslier 1970, 28—29, 42)

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and replanted [with special trees, MF] en chhoeuteal” (RCA Annual report 1969). At this moment in 1969 the French aesthetic appropriation, touristic commodification, and now structural (re)construction of the ‘real’ Angkor Wat reached its peak, only to be compared with the temple’s replicated scenario in Paris 1931 (compare the site plans Figs. VII.3, 12, 17). After the publication of the multi-volume Mémoire archéologique II between 1929 and 1932, which covered the monument, its sculptures, and bas-reliefs in photographs (EFEO 1929, 1930, 1932), the site’s complete scientification made a great leap forward: published by architect Guy Nafilyan in collaboration with Alex Turletti, Mey Than, Dy Proeung (see him on Pl. EpII.29c),132 and Vong Van, the Mémoire archéologique IV under the name Angkor Vat: Description graphique du temple was published in Paris in 1969. Containing an astonishing fifty drawings, the selection ranged from an overall map of Ang­ kor [plan de situation] in 1:40,000 scale, a site plan of Angkor Wat as a whole [plan de masse] in 1:5,000, and a plan of the mountain temple [plan de l’ensemble du temple] in 1:500 (see Pl. Intro.5, 6; Fig. Intro.9c), to a isometric, partly ‘cut-away’ drawing of the inner sanctuary [massif central – vue cavalière du IIIe étage] in 1:200 (Fig. IX.88c), a series of elevations and sections of different buildings between 1:250 and 1:100 (see Figs. Intro.9a,b), a plan of the inner sanctuary [sanctuaire central] in 1:50, down to detailed sections and studies of decorations [moulurations] in 1:20 and 1:10 (Figs. IX.88a,b). At this moment, after a one-hundred-year-old transcultural trajectory and unbroken French engagement with Angkor Wat, all the efforts to sketch and draw the world’s largest religious stone monument in situ and for French exhibitions reached a new climax and were summed up in one single publication: the ‘real spot’ from Mouhot’ Voyage in 1863 (Figs. I.1a–c, 4a), to the Mekong Mission in 1866 and Garnier’s Voyage d’exploration en Indo-­ Chine in 1873 (Figs. I.3a, 4b, 9a,b; III.38; IV.10a); Lucien Fournereau’s pencil drawings and watercolours for the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Figs. III.33, Pl. III.9–13) and his Les ruines d’Angkor and Les ruines khmères in 1890 (Fig. VI.5b, 9), Louis Delaporte’s Voyage au Cambodge of 1880 (Figs. VI.6; IX.3) and Les monuments du Cambodge in 1914–24 (Figs. III.39, 47), and Jean Commaille’s drawings around 1900 (Pl. IX.11a–e) and sketches for his 1912 guidebook (Figs. IX.18a,b). The ‘European versions’ of the temple had ranged from all the preparatory sketches and technical execution drawings from Daniel Fabre’s pagode d’Angkor for the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Figs. IV.11a–c; Pl. IV.5), and Henri Vildieu’s pavillon du Cam-

bodge for the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille in 1906 (Fig. V.18b) to Auguste Delaval’s Grand Palais de l’Indochine in Marseille 1922 (Figs. VI.5a, 8, 20; Pl. VI.6a–b), the 1:1 replica called Palais du Gouvernement général de l’Indochine of Charles and Gabriel Blanche for the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931 (Figs. VII.5, 7–8, 14a–c, 19c, 20b; Pl. VII.1, 4–7, 9), and the final Angkor caricature as Pavillon de l’Indochine by Paul Sabrié for France’s last International Exhibition in Paris of 1937 (Figs. VIII.8– 10, 12–13, 33b; Pl. VIII.3b); and last, but not least, the lately rediscovered plaster casts from the site in the Parisian musée Guimet (Pl. III.16–18) and the Asia Museum in Berlin-Dahlem (Figs. III.44a–d; Pl. IIII.15). If this process of Angkor’s appropriation, commodification (direct flights from Europe were announced to Siem Reap, and the new Hotel d’Air France was finished), reconstruction, and scientification reached an unforeseen peak by the end of 1969, then the year 1970 represented a dramatic turning point. Just at the moment when a new programme d’aide française was decided and a considerable donation of technical material for Angkor was agreed, on 18 March 1970 the right-wing and pro-US general Lon Nol launched what historiography would later questionably call a coup d’état against Sihanouk (see chapter X). During this period of internal Cambodian political precariousness, the Vietnamese conflict also reached the northwest of Cambodia and – according to Groslier’s slight information in his working reports – Siem Reap was attacked by the invading North-Vietnamese/Viet Cong on 7 June 1970 and the region was occupied.133 Skirmishes also occurred throughout the Parc d’Angkor, and all construction sites of the Conservation had to be closed hastily while “about ten thousand refugees clustered around the monuments” (RCA Annual report 1970). The fleeing inhabitants of the area hid themselves with provisional installations along the great axes of the park and “several thousand [were] inside Angkor Wat” (RCA 6-8.1970), preferably in its covered galleries. The human geographer Jean Boulbet, Groslier’s collaborator for the forest of Angkor Park, discoverer of Kbal Spean as the “river of the thousand lingas” in the nearby Kulen Mountains and in charge of Khmer ceramics inside the Conservation (EFEO 2002, 151–53; Bizot 2006, 19–20), photographed this tragic situation (Figs. IX.89a,b). The home base of the Conservation was heavily affected by nearby bombings and turned, with little electricity available, into a “no man’s land” in contrast to the nearby town of Siem Reap. Khmer staff and their families took shelter inside the compound. Non-transportable collections of the

132  Dy Proeung remained at Siem Reap into old age and continued to tell tourists and researchers about his

former involvement with the EFEO. During the Sihanouk era he executed an Angkor Wat model in Phnom Penh, where it still stands (see Pl. Intro.20a). Additionally, he opened a little garden in the back of his house and exhibited a small-scale model of Angkor Wat there, and in a similar setting in front of Preah Ko in Roluos (see Pl. EpII.29c). The author would like to thank Dy Proeung for many interesting conversations and insights (see epilogue II). 133  See his own comments in chapter XI about the period of the Khmer Republic.

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Figures IX.88a,b  The final and until today most comprehensive series of architectural drawings about Angkor Wat, as published in EFEO’s 1969 volume Angkor Vat. Description graphique du temple, here decorative studies (Source: Nafilyan 1969, plans CXI, CXII)

depots were secured (Figs. IX.90a,b) and the rest were evacuated to Phnom Penh’s National Museum. In this context, evacuation measures were also enacted with the financial support of UNESCO’s emergency protection agenda (Filliozat 1971b, 494). Groslier – with ongoing help from the “courageous and self-sacrificing Khmer staff ” and his colleagues, including Bruno Dagens, Marcel Lucien, Jacques Dumarçay, and François Bizot – also enforced the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict for the case of the temples of Angkor and was backed by Cambodia’s COPROBIC (Comité national pour la Protection des Biens culturels, see chapter XI). And indeed, the temples were affected relatively little (RCA 6.–8.1970). Diplomatic manoeuvres by 146

the French government and its ambassador in Cambodia, together “with an unselfish and courageous approval by the Khmer government with help of S. E. Sirik Matak, [Lon Nol’s newly appointed, MF] Minister of National Education” (RCA Intermediate report 9.1970) gave the Conservation access to the archaeological park. Groslier with his team and site manager Mok Tourn were allowed to return to Angkor Wat after June 24 – on bikes only, as the story has it (see Fig.XI.1). For 1971 Groslier’s staff list contained its highest number ever, with 1,150 “in total”, 372 as “Effectif France” and 776 at the Conservation itself (with 165 at the Baphuon and 111 at Angkor Wat). Back on the spot, the temple’s exposed bas-reliefs galleries were covered with palm leaves to protect them against heavy rain. The sup-

3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.88c  Isometric drawing of Angkor Wat’s central massif, as published in EFEO’s 1969 volume Angkor Vat. Description graphique du temple, compare Fig. EpII.14 (Source: Nafilyan 1969, plan XIII)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figures IX.89a,b  Refugees inside of Angkor Wat after 1970 as photographed by Jean Boulbet (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

porting walls in front of them were hastily reassembled (Fig. IX.91), and the galleries’ socle was secured with a base of reinforced concrete (RCA Annual Report 1971). By the end of 1971 Jean Boulbet was dispatched to Battambang to guarantee an uninterrupted exchange of news between EFEO’s offices in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh (Filliozat 1972). Due to the intensifying conflict, 20 January 1972 was the definite last day of Groslier’s work within Ang­kor Park, and sixty-five years of direct French engagement in Angkor came to a sudden end:

where he basically followed a similar procedure of clearing, measuring, deposing, and reassembling the stone structures. However, it is a sad but meaningful irony that Bernard Philippe Groslier, the last and by far the most ambitious protagonist in a row of courageous Conservateurs d’Angkor, had to leave the reprise totale of Angkor Wat, the largest endeavour of France’s (post)colonial archaeology, open and unfinished. At the end of his career at Angkor and only weeks before he was seriously injured at the EFEO’s Phnom Penh office after an attack by a burglar (staff members were killed and others hurt; compare FillioOn this day all our efforts had been interrupted. We can- zat 1973a,b), his last archaeological action was the opposite not epilogue here on the unwinding incidents that over- of his megalomaniac project to bring the world’s largest religious stone monument (Angkor Wat) to picture-­perfect take us. All we can do is to express our sadness about the rebirth. In his January 1973 report, he mentioned his refate of Angkor and all our discouragement in facing all cent discovery of some blocks of sculptured sandstone at the unsuccessful efforts to save it. […] The problem since the active monastery of Vat Chok, two kilometres southFebruary 1972 is essentially a human one. Almost all of our workers (some six hundred) and their families, refu- west of Siem Reap. There, he also found a strange abode gees in Angkor Park since June 1970, have come to Siem “made from a number of ancient blocks: lintels, pedestals” that was called Nak Ta Veang by the neighbouring Khmers Reap as they have not only lost all their homes, but also and in this form ‘belonged’ to a local spirit (Nak Ta)134. The all their belongings. Before anything else, we had to stones themselves had once belonged, as Groslier believed, bring them together, assure their simple survival and, if to an archaeological ensemble from the tenth and eleventh possible, to give them work as a team which had not only proven its competence, but also its “fidélité au ser- centuries (Fig. IX.92a). With the typically Western attitude of an archaeological technocrat, Groslier automatically vice d’Angkor” [italics MF] (RCA 1972—3). sought to search, identify, and re-establish the first – and In the last months of his stay at Siem Reap, Groslier direct- therefore supposedly the most ‘original’ – configuration of ed all his efforts to smaller sites in the nearer vicinity, par- this rather irrelevant spot. Even during these troubled times, he launched a topographical survey and destroyed ticularly the temples of Vat Athvear and Preah Einkosei 134  For local spirits at commemorative places and ruins compare, however with a different historical context,

Guillou 2013 in the edited volume Archaeologizing heritage by Falser/Juneja 2013b.

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.90a,b  Emergency measures inside the Conservation d’Angkor, as documented in Groslier’s 1970 report (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

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IX  The French-Colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor

Figure IX.91  Emergency protection measures at Angkor Wat’s open (re)construction site, as illustrated in Groslier’s Rapport du Conservation d’Angkor of 1971 (the photograph however dated “19 January 1972”) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

the powerful place of a locally venerated god by “dismantling the actual shape in hopes of being able to reconstitute the initial sanctuary”. “In fact”, he continued, “a certain number of stones might be reassembled to show both the general physiognomy of the monument and to attest its sculptural quality”; however, the project’s conclusion might have been clear from the start: “Unfortunately, we could not bring enough stones together to undertake a reconstruction” (RCA 1972/73). Despite his adherence to the never-ending ‘salvage paradigm’ to “bring the ancient fragments to the depot of the EFEO”, Groslier had at least performed the very basic operation of another technique so

different to his last, certainly superlative, but also rather hypothetical reconstructions full of reinforced concrete: that of a simple anastylosis (Fig. IX.92b). Only after Groslier left Angkor for the last time was a Cambodian, for the first time in the EFEO’s h ­ istory at Angkor, designated Conservateur d’Angkor – Pich Keo. His letter dated to 30 December 1974 – only few months before the Khmer Rouge took over not only Phnom Penh but also Angkor and sent the last staff of the Conservation d’Angkor to forced labour champs in the ­Roluos region135 (see chapter XI) – was addressed to his “Dear Patron” Groslier in Paris, informing him about the latest work (Pl. IX.25a,b).

135  The author would like to address a heartfelt thank-you to Mr. Pich Keo for granting an interview in

March 2010 in Phnom Penh. During our conversation, he provided much detailed information about the internment of the Conservation d’Angkor staff, including himself (compare his role as responsible curator of Angkor during the years of Vietnamese occupation in chapter XI, see him on Pl. XI.33d).

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3. Re-making the temples of Angkor and the myth of Anastylosis (1930—1973)

Figures IX.92a,b  The last intervention at Angkor around Groslier’s final departure: the trial and error, small-scale anastylosis (?) at the Neak Ta Veang site, as described in his last 1972—73 report (15 January to 2 July 1973) (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

After the official activities during the short Khmer Republic from 1970 to 1975 (see chapter X), the sad duty of reporting on the catastrophic final end of the EFEO’s engagement in Cambodia (after the occupation of the country and the start of the forced depopulation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975) was assigned to Jean Filliozat (Filliozat 1975); only one year before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the EFEO was to be celebrated (Filliozat 1976, EFEO 1976, Groslier 1976). At this point, Groslier was ­al­ready engaged with Khmer temple sites in Thailand together with Pierre Pichard. And his colleague Dumarçay continued archaeological and reconstruction work at Boro­ budur within an international setup after former Dutch colleagues lost their monopoly over the site after Indonesia’s independence (Filliozat 1973a,b; compare Bernet Kempers 1976, 203–211; Dumarçay 1977 and 1990). As long as possible into early 1975, Lucien stayed at Siem Reap, Bizot at Phnom Penh, and Boulbet at Battambang (Filliozat 1974), but after the last Conseil scientifique of the EFEO met on 21

March 1975, all staff was finally evacuated. The Phnom Penh office was pillaged by the Khmer Rouge shortly after, and its partly evacuated library was set on fire (Filliozat 1975). One decade later, when Khmer Rouge terror was supplanted by Vietnamese occupation, the National Geographic published its 1982 cover story The temples of Angkor: Will they survive? In a lateral aerial shot over Ang­kor Wat, Gros­lier’s giant puzzle of the dismantled southeastern gallery still lay strewn out and decaying in the grass in front of it (see Pl. XI.26a). The final sad irony for the EFEO was that despite the decade-long marginalisation of its great scientific competitor in British India, it was exactly the Archaeological Survey of India that, in the late 1980s, would finalise Groslier’s abandoned reconstruction site (see chapter XI). It was this unfinished reconstruction project at Ang­ kor Wat with which Groslier had helped, as he had it in one of his last articles in 1986 (the year of his death), to re-establish the “image of Angkor in the Khmer consciousness” (Groslier 1985/6). 151

X

Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970 Right now, the kingdom of Cambodia is a theatre of profound transformation. Having gained its independence after the 1953 Agreements with France, this country, under the energetic impulse of its Head of State, His Royal Highness the Prince Norodom Sihanouk, sees an extraordinary revival [renouveau] in all domains: agriculture, irrigation, industry, public instruction and public health, communication lines. […] It seems to us that Cambodia tries to reconnect itself, after a long period of decadence and renouncement which started with the loss of Angkor under the reign of Ponhea-Yat in 1434, with the tradition of powerful rois bâtisseurs, especially Suryavarman II [of Angkor Wat, MF] and Jayavarman VII [of the Bayon temple, MF], who brought the Khmer Empire to its apogee. […] What we see is a veritable renaissance. The Prince Siha­ nouk makes it all right; he brings the Khmer nation back to a living entity whose sensual cover may have disappeared but whose soul was born to new life. […] In all possible occasions during activities as chef de gouvernement, he evokes the past as he seems to catch up with the lineage of the great kings of Angkor. To young people, he constantly highlights the grandeur of the ancient Khmer Empire [la grandeur de l’ancien empire khmer]. […] He glorifies the Khmer Empire as reborn through independence, a veritable liberation which constitutes for Cambodia a new existence. […] the continuity within the old historic tradition that characterises the actual dynasty. By making his motherland a strong country, always avant-garde, Prince Sihanouk shows the whole world in an astonishing way that the Cambodians are trustworthy custodians of their prestigious past, their grand ancestors, and the magnificent heritage that has come to them [les Cambodgiens sont dignes de leur passé prestigieux, de leurs grands ancêtres et du magnifique héritage qu’ils leur ont laissé]. [italics MF] (Garry 1964, 1, 9, 10, 13) —Robert Garry, La renaissance du Cambodge de Jayavarman VII roi d’Angkor à Norodom Sihanouk Varman (1964) The underlying theme of the [French, MF] agony of decolonisation [is] grandeur. The French sought to retain their empire because they felt it was an essential aspect of the otherwise waning power and prestige of their nation. […] the popularity of de Gaulle suggests that the theme of grandeur continued to be important. A crucial task of the advocates of decolonisation, therefore, was to convince the French that decolonisation was not a sign of and contribution to the decadence of France, but rather a means to a renewed greatness. [italics MF] (Sorum 1977, 204) —Paul Clay Sorum on “Decolonisation and grandeur” in the French context (1977)

Three comments, working questions, and definitions When the Départment de l’Information in Phnom Penh re- touched upon all the infrastructural aspects of the country, printed the 1964 eulogy on Norodom Sihanouk’s political including “agriculture, irrigation, industry, public instrucand cultural action programme, which Robert Garry, a Ca- tion and public health and lines of communication and nadian professor of Far Eastern geography, had given as a circulation”. He pointed out that Indochina’s postcolonial talk during the Sixteenth International Congress of Orien- ‘awakening’ and Cambodia’s “renaissance from decadence” talists in New Delhi (see quote above), Cambodia had just towards an independent kingdom and modern “Khmer completed its first decade of national independence. As nation” was now completely embedded in and justified by mentioned in chapter IX, Sihanouk became king in 1941. the cultural-political rhetoric of the collective “inheritance” He served in this position until his abdication in 1955 [héritage] of cultural “grandeur” and the built œuvre of the when he made himself prime minister and leader of his “great royal builders [rois bâtisseurs] of Angkor” (Garry 1964, own political movement of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (the 9, 10, 1). While the topos of ‘inheriting Angkor’ had formed ‘People’s Socialist Community’, 1955–60) and later head of a vital element within the French mission civilisatrice in the state (1960–70). What Garry described as the “thea­tre of preceding decades (Falser 2015a; compare for example profound transformation” in Cambodia (Garry 1964, 1) Claude Farrère’s quote during the 1931 International Colo153

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

the West this framework is easily and frequently obscured, nial Exhibition when Angkor Wat was staged in Paris as a although its presence can be readily demonstrated. For 1:1 replica, see chapter VII), the same claim now gained a new ideological substructure. The salvage paradigm of a those nations which have, until recently, been controlled distant European colonial power was replaced with the noby one or other of the European powers, however, the tion of the direct “continuity of the actual [ruling] dynasty past provides a framework to which national appeal is ofwithin [my emphasis] the historic tradition” of Angkor’s ten made in a particularly explicit way. These general obancient kings, above all with “Suryavarman II”, the patron servations have a particular relevance to the Kingdom of of Angkor Wat. What made Garry’s article, with its telling Cambodia […] After nearly one hundred years as a French title “La renaissance du Cambodge de Jayavarman VII roi Protectorate, this glorious past has become an important d’Angkor à Norodom Sihanouk Varman”, a unique Hobs­ rallying point for national political and economic efforts. bawmian, Occidental acknowledgment of an Oriental […] Less well known outside Cambodia are the appeals re-“invention of tradition” (after Hobsbawm/Ranger 1983) to history made to the Cambodian people which extol was the author’s uncritical readiness to celebrate the seemthe virtues of the Angkorian age as a guide for modern ingly unbroken link between Angkor’s twelfth-century actions, and little attention has been given to the extent Buddhist king Jayavarman VII, located at the “apogee of to which the Angkorian ideal permeates much of life in the Khmer Empire”, and Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Cambodia. [italics MF] (Osborne 1966, 1) princely state leader in the mid-twentieth century. Contrary to more sceptical observers (Devillers 1963; compare Osborne cited the most “striking achievements during the Kershew 2001, 56–58), Garry even praised some of Siha­ Angkorian period [as a] reference point for contemporary nouk’s philosophies in order to underline the continuity Cambodian political and economic life”. Besides “the talents between Angkor’s glorious past and Cambodia’s postcolo- of hydraulic engineers”, this included “building endeavours under the rule of powerful kings[:] Architecturally nial present and promising future. The following elements of Sihanouk’s argumentation will form a focal point for Angkorian, and even pre-Angkorian, motifs found in conthis chapter: (a) the notion of ancient kingship and Bud- temporary state architecture”. For example, Angkor Wat, dhist religion in relation to a modern-day interpretation of “the largest religious building ever constructed”, supposedly “Buddhist socialism” characterised by “political neutrality provided the architectural and stylistic inspiration for “the and peaceful coexistence” (Garry 1964, 5, 7); and (b) the Independence Memorial in Phnom Penh” (Osborne 1968, “creative genius of the ancient Khmer” (Garry 1964, 11) – ­ 2, 3) but was also honoured, since colonial times, on Cambodia’s flag, banknotes (compare Pl. Intro.9b; Pl. EpI.1a–l) demonstrated through the construction of irrigation works and in the country’s n ­ ational anthem. However, in relation and public structures, including schools and hospitals – as a guide and model for the enormous building programme to the problem of Cambodia’s memory of Angkor’s granof independent Cambodia in the twentieth century.1 deur, the constant menace posed by its direct neighbours Two years later, in 1966, the Australian historian Mil- Vietnam and Thailand, and its final decline respective to ton Osborne published his article “History and kingship in countries like Indonesia, India, and China (quoting Pelliot contemporary Cambodia”. It contained a more critical per- 1951), Osborne highlighted an ambiguous situation: “Paraspective: doxically, to the extent that knowledge had been lost of the Angkorian period”, French-colonial scholars and their research institutions such as the École française d’Extrême-­ Human nature is inevitably concerned with the past Orient helped “contemporary Cambodia to rediscover much which, for nations no less than for individuals, forms a framework for present attitudes and sometimes a justifi- of its past glory and to treasure it as a symbol of national capabilities” (Osborne 1966, 3).2 For example, French epigcation for present actions. In the developed countries of

1  A condensed version of this discussion was published in the 2016 volume Cultures of decolonisation; see

Falser 2016c. The Sihanouk biographer Philippe Devillers anticipated: “The new Cambodian regime presents the original feature of being the only one in Asia where the King himself took direction of the Democratic movement. […] did he modify the traditional image of the monarchy in the minds of the Cambodians? No longer king but at the same time head of state, government and Sangkum, Sihanouk showed to what extent power in present-day Cambodia is personalised. Indeed there was something like a revision to ancient forms of power in that country. […] However attractive it may appear, the Khmer experiment, nevertheless, leaves observers with an impression of fragility. […] It is impossible to avoid the thought that the reality in its success or failure depends on the fate of one man, Samdech Prince Sihanouk. Would the machine operate without him?” (Devillers 1963, 162, 163). 2  More recent scientific enquiries into the dynamic relationship between the colonial production of the archaeological data of glorious pasts and the appropriation of the same during the formation process of postcolonial nation states unearthed similar “archaeological narratives” (Silverman 1995), compare cases for Central America (as “mayanisation”; see Joyce 2003, 86) or within Europe itself, e.g. Greece (Hamilakis 2007).

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Three comments, working questions, and definitions

raphists had made Angkor’s royal inscriptions on temples newly furnished capital of Phnom Penh and the Archaeoand steles accessible and had therefore helped to create and logical Park of Angkor. During Charles de Gaulle’s visit in instrumentalise the myth of Jayavarman VII’s charitable 1966 this parcours culminated “with processions, sacred character as well as to facilitate a countrywide building dances, the illumination of Angkor [Wat] and the king’s programme for contemporary politics. On the other hand, self-composed symphonic overture”. Lacouture asked neither “the royal family” nor “the less educated section of whether this theatre was actually a “comedy” and concludthe population” had ever completely “lost the awareness of ed: the heritage contained in the Angkorian monuments”, since Angkor Wat had always remained a pilgrimage site The word is too strong. The origins, the personality, the and “national shrine”.3 In 1964 Garry (positively) described talent, the vitality of Norodom Sihanouk are enough inCambodia’s process of postcolonial transformation using centive to show respect. The leader is worthy — is he not the word “theatre”. The term underscored the topos of a glothe son of the builders of Angkor? What appears to be rious Ang­korian past, which not only constituted a discurunhealthy in the residual character of these rites d’abais­ sive as well as performative space, but also provided an sement, is the discrepancy between and the amalgamaendless series of fascinating images to be projected onto a tion of two different types of homage: for the personifistage set. This ‘theatre’s’ sole protagonist was, of course, Sication of an innovating power [for a new Cambodia, MF] hanouk, and in 1966 Osborne raised concerns about his on the one side, and for the power of a personification of increasingly monopolistic interpretation in a “contempo[a reinvented Angkorian, MF] tradition on the other. (Larary role […] echo[ing] the traditional conception of kingcouture 1969, 211) ship” (Osborne 1966, 12). Towards the end of Cambodia’s short period of inde- In 1968 Cambodia celebrated its fifteenth year of national pendence, a third contribution in 1969 by the French Le independence, and the newly built ‘National Sports ComMonde journalist Jean Lacouture openly criticised the ego- plex’ by state architect Vann Molyvann served as a giant centric self-staging of “Norodom Sihanouk or the efferves- stage for what a French commentator called “the experience cent prince” (the title of the article) who, “like many leaders of a total theatre” (Daniel 1968). Along with the symbolic of the new Asian Third World states [adding the Indone- staging of the infrastructural realisations of Sihanouk’s sian president Sukarno to the list, MF] had difficulties in postcolonial regime through the public mass formations on assuring broad public participation, or allowing an inter- the stadium’s lawn and the coloured cardboards held by mediate corpus of political cadres to emerge […] to link the attending spectators, the students of Phnom Penh’s the base and the summit” (Lacouture 1969, 190). Employ- École des Beaux-Arts evoked the grandeur of Angkor with ing an “authoritative tradition” through endless reference a re-enacted King Jayavarman VII who rode through the to Jayavarman VII and his building programme, Sihanouk stadium accompanied by papier mâché representations was accused of amalgamating the “theme of incarnation, of the Bayon temple (see Fig. X.58). This was all part of a the resurrection to the head of state, the transmissibility of “grandiose spectacle from Angkor to Cambodia’s Sangkum”, merits by establishing Buddhism as state religion [with] the according to Sihanouk’s retrospective Photo-­S ouvenirs personification of power” (Lacouture 1969, 191). If Lacou- (Photo-souvenirs 1993b, vol. 3, 349–50). The spectacle was ture interpreted the Angkorian temples as the materialisa- made up of various recycled pieces of historical imagination of ancient royal law (quoting Mus 1959) and of former tions of past grandeur, the revived topoi of cultural purity and originality, the exploited taxonomies of political generoyal control over the hydraulic system of the Angkorian alogies, and the architectural styles of ancient Angkor. The civilisation as a guarantor of “Oriental despotism” (quoting Wittfogel 1957; see later in this chapter), then – as we shall vast majority of these had been – as we shall see – painsexplore in the following discussion – what role did the takingly established by French-colonial research on Khmer modern building programme à la Angkorienne play within art and architectural history and were now re-assembled Cambodia’s new “tacit monopoly of power and an immedi- via a multilayered process to construct Cambodia’s new ate monocracy” (Lacouture 1969, 208)? Lacouture likewise identity as an independent nation-state.4 returned to the metaphor of a ‘theatre’ as a liminoid space If “history is not about [a passive] past as such, but rather about our [active] ways of creating meaning from for projection and cultural performance: not only did he summarise Sihanouk’s numerous film productions as a the scattered, and profoundly meaningless debris we find around us” (Kellner 1997, 136–37), and if heritage is “his“cinema­tographic reincarnation” strategy, he also mentioned the impressively staged state guest parcours through the tory processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism,

3  As discussed in the epilogue of volume one, we remember King Ang Duong’s reign right before the French-

colonial impact around 1850 when he already made coins being circulated “which bore the facade of Angkor Wat” (quoting Moura 1883.II, 128; compare Figs. Ep1.1a,b). 4  Parts of the following definitions and facts have been discussed in Falser 2013f.

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local pride, romantic ideas or just plain marketing, into a commodity” (Schouten 1995, 21) and “the use of the past for contemporary purposes” (Tivers 2002, 188), then both history and heritage are made by concrete agency. We shall call this process ‘heritagisation’ from a performative point of view.5 In the following analysis of the short two decades of Cambodia’s national independence (1953–70), we include what Schechner defined as “not only supposedly ‘pure’ performances or idealised versions of traditional genres but also tourist shows, hybrids, and genres in the midst of [these] profound disturbances and/or transformations” (Schechner 1990, 2). More specifically, we will analyse a type of heritage performance that is, from a conceptual perspective, characterised by a site-specific “unity of kinaesthetic imagination and the affirmation of cultural memory” (Carlson 2000, 247) and that materialises and spatialises in so-called historical re-enactments6. With the goal of restoring ancient history or “socially relevant events”, or both, using the latest multimedia instruments (Arns 2007), historical re-enactment aims to make “living history” something that is directly experienced. It employs supposedly “authentic” actors equipped with historical apparatus and often takes place – in Angkor, in this case – on original cultural heritage sites (Agnew 2004, 2007; Cook 2004). By blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, both heritage performances and historical re-enactments contributed in the past, and continue to do so to this day, to an ever-growing global heritage tourist industry. They were, in our case, most often ‘invented’ by French-colonial agency on the basis of scientific research and were tested in France at events like universal and colonial exhibitions (see chapters I–VIII), which were inherited, ‘back-translated’ and further developed by an independent Cambodia in the 1960s that then applied them again to a globalised tourist industry after Cambodia’s rebirth in the 1990s (see chapter XII). In order to dissect or unlace this complex heritage package, which was produced during Cambodia’s independence, this chapter will focus on four themes: (a) the political reincarnation of the Khmer king Jayavarman VII in the new princely leader Norodom Sihanouk; (b) the evocation of Angkor’s civilisational (cultural, infrastructural, and agricultural) achievements in a modern guise; (c) the revival of the built Angkorian legacy of the ancient kings in a modern architectural interpretation; and (d) the cultural performances and historical re-enactments à la Angkorienne within Sihanouk’s cultural diplomacy both inside and outside his country. The following parameters will

be considered: the source material, which was most often provided by French-colonial research and used to reconstitute cultural performances and re-enactments, the media used to develop them, the events of representation and their audiences, the specific sites and spatial components, the temporalities employed, and, most importantly, the concrete agency behind these scenarios. It ranged from individual cultural brokers to national decision makers, elites, and whole institutions. From an overall perspective, Cambodia’s postcolonial heritage formation turned into a heterotopian setup (after Foucault) where Angkor as a narrative and the French-­ made (and still French-managed!) Archaeological Park of Angkor as a concrete site provided ‘performative affordance’ (see introduction) for Sihanouk’s Sangkum agenda. In other words, Cambodia’s pasts themselves were merged with the country’s present and its imagined future into a veritable theme park (also see the introduction to this book) which followed a logic similar to the great Angkorian scenarios in French universal and colonial exhibitions from 1867 to 1937 (chapters I–VIII): whereas now new infrastructural realisations from irrigation to transportation and Sihanouk’s new state architecture were propagated in terms of re-enacted Angkorian grandeur, diplomatic state visits to Sihanouk’s majestic ­féerie du Cambodge were almost standardised along a prescribed and space-time-compressed heritage parcours (compare chapter IX for the touristic parcours through Ang­kor Park since the French-colonial 1930s). Like the Angkor-styled pavilions functioned in Paris and Marseille during colonial times as a pars-pro-toto for French Cambodge as a whole, the parcours through Cambodia’s postcolonial world again included ephemeral mass spectacles, dance performances and sound-and-light shows, now in the country’s new-old capital of Phnom Penh as well as at Ang­kor Wat. Finally, Sihanouk’s enacted heritage utopia of an independent Cambodia of precolonial splendour turned into a heritage dystopia between 1970 and 1990 – as he himself, intentionally or not, anticipated in his last films right before the coup d’état in 1970. Like the spectator of his films Crépuscule and Cortège Royal, who travelled in time through Cambodia’s heritage pasts and presents, would Sihanouk himself shortly after see his playful re-enactments of the Angkorian past transformed into a real-life nightmare by the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal and Hyper-Maoist experiment (see next chapter) to re-transport (‘back-translate’) Cambodia into a pre-modern, pre-industrial and pseudo-agricultural society.

5  “To study performance is not to focus on completed forms, but to become aware of performance as itself a

contested space, where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and of course multiply interpreted” (Diamond 1989, 69). 6  In 2013/4 Mads Daugbjerg, Rivka Syd Eisner and Britta Timm Knudsen published a themed volume on “Re-enacting the past” in the International Journal of Heritage Studies and investigated the strategies of “vivifying heritage” (Daugbjerg/Eisner/Knuden 2014). Case-studies also included Angkor and the Royal Khmer Ballet (Falser 2013f).

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1. A short introduction: Samdech Upayuvareach or Sihanouk, ‘the prince who left the throne’ to become a state leader. Political benchmarks between 1941 and 1970. At the moment when France established its protectorate over the Khmer country, the latter had no more ancient history and had lost all memory of its own ancient grandeur [perdu tout souve­ nir de son antique grandeur]. The inhabitants believed that gods had built Angkor and all the architectural marvels of their ancestors. Therefore, they believed that they had outgrown their present abilities. There are only few comparable examples of such a complete oblivion of the past. […] It is not my goal here to list all those who, patiently, doggedly and with their pure love for disinterested research and for historic veracity [par pur amour de la recherche désintéressée et de la vérité historique], have put all their energy to decipher the inscriptions engraved on monuments and to reconstruct the royal genealogies, […] a research about forgotten times [re­ cherche du temps perdu] […]. We have read in the last years too much unjust and even calumnious critique of the œuvre of France in Indochina. […] The hopeless dispraiser of the colonising action [action colonisatrice] will say that all this academic work has contributed nothing to the prosperity and welfare of Cambodia. But it is not a minor achievement to give back to a whole people the consciousness of its continuity in time, to reconnect with its ancestors. […] It is a lot to have given Angkor back to the Cambodians [Mais est-ce que peu de chose de rendre à tout un peuple la conscience de sa continuité dans le temps, de le rattacher à des ancêtres […] N’est-ce rien que d’avoir rendu Angkor aux Cambodgiens?] [italics MF] (Coedès 1948, 117, 118) —George Coedès in La science historique française et la conscience nationale khmère (1948)

When Norodom Sihanouk was born on 31 October 1922, Cambodia was fully embedded in what Milton Osborne in his 1994 biography Sihanouk, Prince of light, Prince of darkness later called “a paradox with long-term political consequences” – that is, total French-colonial political control over Cambodia, and the simultaneous creation and systematic fostering of the notion of Cambodia’s ruling king as an absolute, near-divine monarch, or “the embodied splendour of kingship” in the tradition of his royal Angkorian ancestors (Osborne 1994, 16; compare Osborne 1973, 12–23). Osborne was more or less correct in his observation that “for Sihanouk, as for the others, [the Angkorian] past was a recently discovered talisman which offered an assurance that Cambodia and its population might have a more glorious future than seemed possible in the uncertain and troubled present” (Osborne 1994, 43). The 1971 analysis by Sihanouk’s long-time advisor Charles Meyer, Derrière le sourire Khmer, elaborated (in a Franco-centric way) on the question of how this recent reinvention – and self-inflicted heavy burden – of a ‘national’ tradition had been prepared: “With their mania for scientific research, the Occidentals awoke the demons of history and helped impose on Cambodia a heritage [héritage] which was much too heavy for this [newly independent, MF] nation-state. The pre-Angkorian and Angkorian history had been revealed to the cultivated milieux of the Occidental world by the remark­ able work by the École française d’Extrême-Orient” (Meyer 1971, 44). The French-colonial scientific and aesthetic entity called Angkor was produced, as we shall explore, by mainly French epigraphists, art historians, conservation architects, and archaeologists, and it had migrated easily into the new Cambodian movement of national independ-

ence. Already in 1936 the first Khmer Buddhist-­nationalist newspaper was named Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat). However, the veritable “temple complex” – a term used by Penny Edwards in her 2007 monograph Cambodge: The cultivation of a nation, after the Vietnamese author Nguyen Khac Vien had introduced the term in his 1981 study on Cambodia, Problems of convalescence (Vien 1981, 11) – had already become the central reference point for the Cambodian psyche. As we shall see, it would remain so during the rule of the new king, especially between 1941 and 1970: By inserting Angkor into a sliding scale of time, grooming, landscaping, restoring, and depicting the ruins in ways that privileged European aesthetic standards, and authenticating it as a ledger of national history, the protectorate would first assert, and then sublimate, Angkor’s status as a national monument. This totalising, secular frame of reference would radically alter Cambodian relations to, and perceptions of, the temple complex. Paradoxically, this rupture with past practice was brought about by French attempts to establish a continuity be­ tween Cambodge and its Angkorian past through historio­ graphy, archaeology, and museology. […] A dominant notion of Khmer nationhood had developed under colo­ nial rule through synthesis, graft, and borrowing, as a bri­ colage of ideas and influences that crystallised around the monuments of Angkor. The splintered nature of nationalisms and the multiplicity of identity choices available to Cambodians problematised the notion of a single national psyche or monolithic national culture. […] One way in which we can understand this legacy and its rami­ fications is as a ‘temple complex,’ where ‘complex’ refers

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at once to the physical constellation of Angkor and to a group of associated ideas or impressions. On one level we can read colonialism’s legacy not as the recovery of memory but as the creation of ‘false’ or induced memo­ ries. [italics MF] (Edwards 2007, 26, 242)

When Norodom Sihanouk’s maternal grandfather King Sisowath Monivong died on 23 April 1941, metropolitan France had not only surrendered to Nazi Germany and installed the Petainist regime in Vichy, but the French-colonial authority in Indochina had also been considerably weakened by Japanese occupiers (effects on French work in Ang­kor were discussed in chapter IX). In order to secure French interests in Cambodia, the acting governor-general of Indochina, Jean Decoux, recommended that the younger Norodom Sihanouk (at that time a student at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon) be crowned king instead of Prince Monireth, Monivong’s oldest, but seemingly less controllable, son. However, after 9 March 1945, when Japanese military forces took total control over Indochina, the twenty­-two year-old King Sihanouk showed himself to be far less aligned than expected. He not only declared the end of the French protectorate but also abrogated two recently passed French laws on the romanisation of the Khmer alphabet and the replacement of the Buddhist with the Gregorian calendar. When France returned to Indochina after the end of World War II and the Indochina War began in Vietnam, the Fourth French Republic was forced to grant more self-rule to Cambodia: the National Assembly in Phnom Penh was established together with the constitution of 1947 – §1 defining the country as a “monarchy” (Jennar 1994, 33–47, here 35). The protectorate status was abolished in 1949 with a de jure French acknowledgement of Cambodia’s independence, which was, however, still ­restricted within the framework of the Union française (Royaume du Cambodge 1953). The Democratic Party moved from strength to strength in one election after the other (1946, 1947, 1951) with the nationalist and leading anti-monarchy figure Son Ngoc Thanh at its helm, and Norodom Sihanouk saw his role progressively reduced to a mere spiritual head of state. In June 1952, Sihanouk dismissed his cabinet, suspended the constitution, dissolved the national assembly, systematically marginalised the Democratic Party, and declared the aim of gaining total independence for Cambodia within three years under his leadership. What Sihanouk theatrically staged as a ‘Royal Crusade for Independence’ with himself as the self-declare­d “father of independence” and “national hero” (Ministère de l’Education nationale 1954, 80–87, here 87) began with his travels to France (and a short visit to President Auriol), Canada, the United States (reported in an article in the New York Times), and Japan. It continued with his self-imposed exile in Thailand, his retreat at Siem Reap near the temples of Angkor, and the symbolic mobilisation of popular forces throughout Cambodia “to defend the country against insecurity, the Viet Minh, and eventually against all 158

Figure X.1  “The last gesture of France  General de Langlade attaches the cross of war to the Khmer flag. The rain adds some more tristesse to this epilogue”. Legend to the photograph from Paris Match (no. 244, 21—28 November 1953), re-published in the Cambodian 1953 leaflet Le retour de l’indépendance nationale (9 November 1953) (Source: Royaume du Cambodge 1953, back cover)

foreign aggression” (quoted in Chandler 1991, 71). His campaign gained momentum in the first negotiations by the Cambodian ministers Penn Nouth and Sam Sary in Paris and ended with the gradual French abdication of control over justice, the police, and the military by General de Langlade and French High Com­missioner Risterucci, as well as the final French acknowledgement of full sovereignty on 9 November 1953 (known as the Day of Independence in the years to come; compare Governement Royal 1953). Ninety years of a French protectorate over Cambodia had finally come to an end (Fig. X.1). However, there was one specific and crucial exception – the continued construction of ‘colonial’ knowledge about the legacy of ancient Angkor for the new cultural (heritage) identity of independent Cambodia. As mentioned in chapter IX, the concrete archaeological investigation, protection, and presentation of all temple sites on Cambodian territory with its clear focus on Angkor remained in the hands of the École française d’Extrême-Orient. It helped to transpose,

1. A short introduction: Samdech Upayuvareach or Sihanouk…

as George Coedès (EFEO’s director from 1929 until 1946; see Zigmund-Cerbu/Boisselier 1961) had it in 1947, the topos of an “antique grandeur” from colonial science into the “Khmer national conscience” (see quote above, compare the same term used by Groslier 1986). During this period of decolonisation, the concept of colonial grandeur was converted into a post-colonial feeling of “renewed greatness” (as Paul Sorum called it in the quote above) in the French psyche. In a mirroring effect comparable to similar “decolonising cultures” in the Asian and African arena (Craggs/Wintle 2016; compare Tonnesson in Duara 2004),7 the French (here imperialist) concept of civilisation and a mission civilisatrice was now ‘back-translated’ into and creatively appropriated within the postcolonial mindset of Asia’s smallest and youngest nation-state. It was exactly the notion of cultural greatness which – in a unique transcultural, even highly ambivalent and hybrid formation between independent Cambodia and postcolonial France, in which both the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizer needed each other again to (re-)constitute themselves (compare Bhabha 1994) – was stabilised in a mutual win-win situation for both sides in the cultural and civilisational superlatives: with the world’s largest archaeological site of Angkor Park (where the French continued to work as if nothing had changed after 1953/4), with the world’s largest single religious stone building, Angkor Wat. In the final years of the First Indochinese War, which was to culminate in France’s humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Cambodia’s independence was inescapably at hand. Right at that moment, the intellectuals of the EFEO had one last opportunity to officially commemorate its fiftieth anniversary as an œuvre civilisatrice, which critics have since called a mere “alibi for French colonisation” (Singaravélou 1999, 283). In the 1951 Saigon publication Hommage à l’École française d’Extrême-Orient and in the 1953 edition of the EFEO’s Cérémonie commémorative du cinquantenaire, which was held at the Sorbonne in 1952, the congratulatory addresses were given by high political officials and distinguished researchers, which included members such as Bernard Philippe Groslier as well as various artists and journalists. Most used well-known discursive figures from the 1930s and 1940s in their talks. For example, Sylvain Lévi’s 1931 invocation of “the caring mother France” and the EFEO’s “gigantic task [and] heroic and martyred researchers” of which “Angkor was the exact symbol” (Lévi 1931, preface), were echoed in George Coedès’ word choice in 1948. In an address to the Acadé-

mie des sciences coloniales (published only three years later), he declared that the “EFEO had given back the Cambodian people […] – suffering from a minority complex […] – the feeling of their continuity in time; had re-attached them to their ancestors of forgotten grandeur; and had restituted Angkor to them […] against France’s own colonialist interest […] following her [altruistic] politics of association” (Coedès in Malleret 1951, 31).8 However, the most striking contribution made around 1950 came from the Général de l’Armée, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the Haut Commissaire de France, who honoured the institution’s protective “programme of universality […] to revive dead civilisations” (Lattre de Tassigny 1951, compare 1987). Tassigny’s words essentially changed the role of the EFEO to that of the “path clearer” towards independence, and furthermore, not just the “re-discoverer” but “the inventor and almost the builder of Angkor”: Fifty years of the EFEO, fifty years of effort in the service of the countries of Indochina helping them to raise their profile in the world, and to know themselves. The science of the EFEO has magnified, like a poem, the glory of these countries. If — to give only one example — the name of Cambodia is henceforward associated universally with the grandeur of Angkor, than it is the EFEO that has made this connection. And if Angkor itself is liberated today from the shackles of the forest and the spirit of the stones has prevailed, then it is by the exertion of these savants who, under the humble name of “conservators”, knew how to be, in reality, the inventors and even the builders [en réalité des inventeurs et presque des bâtisseurs]. Placed within the forgotten kingdoms, which owe their reconstitution in memory [leur reconstitution dans la mémoire] to the EFEO, the countries of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, now well and alive, have found in these studies their oldest references of nobility [leurs quartiers de noblesse les plus anciens]. They have rediscovered these treasures of ancestral glory, which allow the new generation to look confidently into the future and which obliges them to regard this future within the grandeur of the past. […] What these countries found in their cultural heritage [patrimoine] is the sense of a ­nation [sens de l’État], the sense of a people [sens du peuple]. In reviving this heritage [re­ vivre cet héritage] and by enriching the same with its own example of genuine truth [sens de la Vérité], the EFEO has anticipated the recognition of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. [italics MF] (Malleret 1951, 7)

7  As Duara stated in general: “Debates around postcolonialism have questioned the extent or thoroughness

of ‘decolonisation’ when independence from colonial powers meant the establishment of nation-states closely modelled upon the very states that undertook imperialism” (Duara 2004, 2). 8  In his 1948 address, republished in Malleret 1953, Coedès made an important reference to an article where he had discussed the switch from French science on Angkor to Khmer heritage nationalism: “La science historique française et la conscience nationale khmère”, in: Chemin du Monde 5 (July 23–31, 1948), 117.

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X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figure X.2  Bernard Philippe Groslier, Conservateur des Monuments d’Angkor between 1960 and 1973, here in the 1960s with Norodom Sihanouk, his daughter Bopha Devi and his generals (Source: Prodromides 1997, n.p.)

Albert Sarraut, speaking as the president of the recently installed Assemblée de l’Union française, opened the ceremony at the Sorbonne University on 19 March 1952. He declared that around 1900 France had revealed an ideal of human civilisation to the colonised people. In 1952 this march towards the civilising of the colonised was seen as having been realised, but France and the EFEO were still playing the “rôle d’éclarateur” for the young Oriental nations (Sarraut in 1952; quoted in Singaravélou 1999, 286– 87, compare Falser 2015c). However, times had changed and the hegemonic colonial discourse around France’s claim to have rediscovered Cambodia’s cultural heritage was decisively corrected: just a few months before complete independence, the ‘subaltern Oriental other’ was, for the first time, allowed to speak for itself in the voice of Princess Yukanthor, Cambodia’s then minister of national education. By invoking France’s claim to have brought an appreciation for the ancient Khmer civilisation not only to the Cambodians but also to the world, a path was opened for what would later be called Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage of Humanity (see chapter XII): The Khmer, dear gentlemen, have always kept a souvenir of their glorious past in their memory; there are too many traces remaining on our land for us to have ever forgot­ ten it. […] but the savants of the EFEO […] have shown all

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the grandeur of our past to the modern civilised world and they have enforced our national pride […] thanks to them, our past revives; thanks to their work, our art became known to the whole world. [italics MF] (Princess Yukanthor, quoted in Singaravélou 1999, 288—89)

Despite the fact that authority had formally been handed over to the Fine Arts Ministry of the Royal Government of Cambodia, the whole task was delegated back to the EFEO in 1956 according to the agreements of 1951/1954 (see this discussion in the previous chapter). Unique in the history of postcolonial nation-states was the fact that the “salvage paradigm” (after Clifford 1989) used to describe the colonised’s archaeological past was entirely perpetuated in the French discourse after Cambodian independence. Certainly the most important cultural broker between the lines of the ex-colonial power of France in Indochina and Asia’s smallest postcolonial nation-state of Cambodia was Bernard Philippe Groslier. As we explored in chapter IX, he worked as the Conservateur des Monuments d’Angkor between 1960 and 1973 (compare Groslier 1956, 199; 1966, 85; Groslier 1985). More important for this present chapter, he was also a close friend of Sihanouk (Fig. X.2). In this role, Groslier took a crucial position between the formation of Cambodia’s glorious past and the function of Ang­kor as a re-‘enacted utopia’ (after Foucault, see intro-

1. A short introduction: Samdech Upayuvareach or Sihanouk…

duction) in form of an archaeological and cultural-political ‘theme park’ (see epilogue II). As the 1962 publication Cambodge literally had it, the French-made notion of cultural grandeur was transferred, seemingly “without interruption”9, into Cambodia’s postcolonial self-understanding. What happened after the formal Treaty of Independence is what Osborne has called the “entering to official folklore” (Osborne 1994, 87). In December 1953, Sihanouk tried – in public propaganda material (Fig. X.3a, Pl.X.1) – to merge his kingly aura, and the inherited imaginaire of Angkor (Wat), with his direct political action programme where he acted as commander of the military Operation Samakki (Solidarity) against a Viet Minh base towards the Vietnamese border. Cambodia’s territorial integrity remained intact when the Geneva Conference, in May 1954 – the moment when France lost its last battle in the North-Vietnamese site of Dien Bien Phu – negotiated the end of colonial rule over Indochina. In the same year, the Conférence quadripartite de Paris between France and Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia settled the details (Royaume du Cambodge 1955). In February 1955 Sihanouk emerged from a national referendum over his ‘crusade’ with overwhelming public support. One month later he unexpectedly abdicated the throne in favour of his parents, King Suramarit and Queen Kossamak. In so doing the former King Sihanouk reinvented himself as a prince of Angkorian descent and a full-time politician (prime minister after the 1955 elections) for his people – or “his children” as he liked to call them, a self-declared “papa prince”. In what Charles Meyer has called a great “recyclage” (Meyer 1971, 132), Sihanouk merged the Angkorian concept of a god-king (devaraja; see Mabbett 1969) into his modern vision of ruling Cambodia: he adopted the title Samdech Upayuvareach (‘the prince who left the throne’ or ‘the prince who has been king’) and benefited from all the services that the palace could provide. His word was a command to the Cambodian military. So far as status and respect were concerned, he remained a king in all but name. Politically, his abdication was a masterstroke, for while retaining all these advantages, Sihanouk now had a freedom of action that had eluded him before. […] In brief, Sihanouk could never forget he had been king and could neither forgo royal prerogatives nor believe that his country would accept an alternative leader or policies other than those he advocated (Osborne 1994, 89; compare Vickery 1976).

In the same months of 1955, he founded the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (the ‘People’s Socialist Community’), in which all diverse political strands – including opposing, democratic ones – were to be merged to create one new national political mass movement (and not a party as such) under Sihanouk’s leadership. He published statutes §3 and 4, which made the contemporary hereditary title over the Angkorian past and the claim on collective “grandeur” in strict loyalty to the king explicit: §3 — Its organisation aims to the formation of a cadre of volunteers being constituted for common, solidary and disinterested action, towards the realisation of a union of the children of the Khmer motherland, a union by the proliferation of [all] political parties, towards the birth in Cambodia of a veritable socialist and egalitarian democ­ racy, and, finally, for the return of the fatherland to its past grandeur. For this return, the Community will try to assure it by giving sense to the Trinity: Nation — Religion — King […] §4 — The practical definitions of the Community and the Action programme of its members are the following: […] Our Community defends the National Unity through the return to the good traditions which made the grandeur of the Country in its glorious past. These traditions are em­ bedded in the Communion of the People with its two nat­ ural protectors: the religion and the throne. […] [italics MF] (Sihanouk 1955, 1,2)

Shortly thereafter, in April 1955, he participated in the Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung (Indonesia), where his belief in Cambodia’s future was reinforced by the attention he received from President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Nehru from India, and Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China. Additionally, Sihanouk’s silent distrust of US influence in Southeast Asia was commonly shared and, together with his anti-communist (but pro-socialist) position, the idea of political neutralism for his country in the face of the escalating war in Viet­ nam emerged. Shortly thereafter, and with the continuing oppression and even dissolution of political parties in Cam­ bodia, his Sangkum won 83 per cent of the votes in the 1955 elections (Fig. X.3b). In an ambiguous combination of the monarchical tradition à la Angkorienne, Buddhism as state religion, and a socialist and neutralist approach, Sihanouk embarked on a programme of Khmer (or later

9 The Ministère de l’Information proudly commented in its 1962 publication Cambodge on the “reorganisation

of the research” on Angkor: “With a series of special agreements, Cambodia asked the EFEO to assure the scientific and technical management of Angkor and the National Museum. In this way, the safeguarding of its artistic heritage was guaranteed without interruption – which would have been fatal – by the best specialists in the fields while waiting for the formation of Cambodian technicians. The EFEO continued its mission with an even stronger focus on its fundamental research. All this happened in a uniquely harmonious agreement: it is to honour Cambodia’s prudence as regards the French vocation of altruistic research” (Ministère de l’Information 1962, 301–2).

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Figure X.3a  Poster of a national movement that translates the stylised “three”-tower elevation of Angkor Wat into a hand gesture:  “The sign of the beating of the heart” (above) and “The reality:  The number three expressed with three fingers, like the three towers of the Khmer ­temple” (below) (Source: © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

Buddhist) socialism through which he emphasised the glorious Cambodian past as a moral foundation of the national present and future. However, Sihanouk had not yet reached the peak of his popularity, nor of his hybrid – royal, semi-divine, and political – power. When his father, King Suramarit, died in April 1960, he pushed a constitutional crisis towards a public referendum which finally made him Chef de l’État on 17 June 1960. The throne of Cambodia’s king was left vacant, bringing the thousandyear-old monarchical tradition in Cambodia to an end and transferring its symbolic power towards the secular stage of an “enlightened dictator” (Ross 2015). Although all historic analyses to this day agree that Sihanouk’s monocratic, anti-democratic power structure around 1960 marked the turning point in Cambodia’s golden age of national independence (Chandler 1991, 89), it is also seen as the apogee of an astonishing cultural and infrastructural renovation programme for Cambodia in 162

Figure X.3b  Poster from around the 1958 elections (“Cambodia: Solidarity — Peace — Evolution”), symbolising the peace-maintaining union of the military, the Buddhist clergy and the (male and female) populace, holding hands around the pole of the Cambodian flag with the iconic three-tower elevation, as circulated in Sihanouk’s journal Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (February 1958), 26)

the name of Angkorian grandeur. In no other section of public life was this trend more visible than in the architectural projects. As David Chandler put it (Chandler 1991; compare Richer 2009 with Prechez 1961, Leifer 1962, 1968, Gordon 1965): Sihanouk did little serious thinking about long-range eco­ nomic planning, particularly about improving agricultural yields, reducing rural indebtedness, or making use of an increasingly educated work force. Another problem, shrugged off by many at the time, was the monopoly on information and public opinion held by Sihanouk. The absence of debate was probably the most pernicious aspect of Sihanouk’s Cambodia. The National Assembly had nothing significant to do, and the national congress, with Sihanouk setting the agenda, soon ceased dealing with issues like poverty and corruption. (Chandler 1991, 118)

1. A short introduction: Samdech Upayuvareach or Sihanouk…

While Sihanouk’s public relations machinery propagated Cambodia as a “land of work and oasis of peace” (Ministère de l’Information 1963), demonstrations broke out against a “return to feudal practices” in the Sihanouk clan (Martin 1994, 85–87, in general 61–117; compare Martin 1989); furthermore, his economic and diplomatic break with the United States in 1963/1965 had far-reaching consequences. Apart from the pro-American voices amongst the urban elites, a gradual consolidation of the leftist opposition under the guidance of the Communist Party of Kampuchea encouraged politicians, and later Khmer Rouge leaders like Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and, most important Saloth Sar, later Pol Pot, to leave the capital for the guerrilla in the maquis (see chapter XI). Sihanouk approached the left after the onset of American military intervention in Vietnam in 1964. In 1966, while Sihanouk was busy planning the state visit of General de Gaulle and was increasingly preoccupied with his private hobby of film-making (discussed in more depth later in this chapter), the General Assembly voted for anti-Sihanouk candidates, and the elections made Lon Nol prime minister. Jacqueline Kennedy’s private visit to Angkor in October 1967 marked the beginning of Cambodia’s diplomatic rapprochement with the United States, which began heavy bombings against the Viet Cong on Cambodian territory in early 1969 under President Richard Nixon (Smith 1967, 1968). The gaps between the city and the countryside widened, and the political back and forth of supporting North Vietnam while accepting US economic aid, diminished Sihanouk’s claim of neutrality and lost him the support of urban elites. In July 1969, at the National Congress, he resigned as head of state and proposed an interim salvation government with Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak at its head, whose goal was, as they explained in Études Cambodgiennes in the same month, to “fight dissipation of money, unproductive expenses of pure prestige, and abandon a politics of nationalisation the rentability of which is to be re-assessed”.10 Due to his poor health and political helplessness, Sihanouk left for France in January 1970 and was unanimously deposed on 18 March 1970 by the National Assembly and the Conseil du royaume after almost twenty-­nine years in power (Sihanouk 1981, 373–80). A few weeks later, President Nixon’s troops entered Cambodian territory and Lon Nol’s military regime slid into civil war. Sihanouk announced

the formation of the Gouvernement royal d’union nationale du Kampuchéa (GRUNK) with Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn as acting ministers of defence and internal affairs. As he himself affirmed: “I give all to the Khmer Rouge, these are the pure ones [Je donne tout aux Khmers rouges, ce sont des purs]. They will do what the people will need. They are patriots, they will keep Cambodia independent […] I had been for a Buddhist socialism. This experience has failed. Now there can only be a Marxist socialism, for there is no question that I will come back to power” (Meyer 1971, 378). Charles Meyer, Sihanouk’s personal advisor, became disenchanted with his patron of many years, declaring that he had “inherit[ed] the megalomania of the Kings of Angkor [with] his rêve de grandeur et de magnificence” (Meyer 1971, 217), and painted, like Osborne and Lacouture, a rather pessimistic picture of him. However, Meyer’s typically French interpretation was ambivalent: he was correct in establishing that the French-colonial research intelligentsia had, to a large part, recovered a half-buried Angkorian past as an identificatory source for independent Cambodia (Meyer 1971, 56). However, it is too reductive to conclude that Cambodia’s new identity construction was a simple copying of the French-colonial topoi of Angkor’s past grandeur. Although there have been a number of historical analyses on Cambodia’s modern history, art historical research in particular has focused very little scientific attention on the wide range of creative adaptation, appropriation, and artistic reinterpretation processes through which the “permeation of the Angkorian ideal” (Osborne 1966, 6) served the “theatre of profound transformation” (Garry 1964, 1) in the independent Cambodian nation-state. Taking the metaphor of ‘theatre’ as our cue here, the following analysis will focus on four elements: (a) the modern god-king politician embodied in Norodom Siha­ nouk, the main patron and actor in the “systematic personification” (Lacouture 1969, 200) of the ancient Angkorian king, Jayavarman VII; (b) the politique d’eau with its large irrigation projects forming the founding myth of a newold Kam­buja; (c) Phnom Penh’s urban-architectural programme as a stage set and parcours masterminded by Cambodia’s state architect Vann Molyvann; and (d) Siha­nouk’s strategy of cultural heritage diplomacy as performed during state visits, historical re-enactments, dance events, and film productions.

10  “Nouveau gouvernement royal”, in: Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July–September 1969), 5, 6.

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2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Buddhist socialism à la Angkorienne This king [Jayavarman VII, MF], whose name was barely known around 1900, is now considered the greatest sovereign of Cambodia. As one who extended his country to its extreme limits, by incorporating the temples of the Champa kingdom, and who embellished his capital and his states with the most prodigious ensembles of monuments that the monarch has ever conceived. (Coedès 1935a, 3) —George Coedès: Un grand roi du Cambodge, Jayavarman VII (1935) Our Socialism […] We have chosen to orient the destiny of our State towards socialism because this path continues the one followed by our Kings since more than a thousand years, it corresponds to our Buddhist morality, and only this one will allow us to make our Country progress and give prosperity to our People. (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 2) —Ministère de l’Information: Considerations sur le socialisme khmer (1961)

In 1961, when the Cambodian Ministère de l’Information published the twenty-page booklet Considérations sur le socialisme khmer, the Non-Aligned Movement was founded in Belgrade by some of Sihanouk’s most important political friends: India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno; Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser; and Yugoslavia’s president, Josip Broz Tito. Although Cambodia had joined this global movement of internationalist, partly secular, Marxist socialist and anti-colonialist cohorts, Sihanouk tried to provincialise (i.e., nationalise) its contemporary concepts by tying them to ancient Angkor.11 In doing so he emphasised the “morale of Buddhism […] as a precious [socialist] guide [in] fighting the bad and social injustice”, and positioned the tradition of Angkorian kingship as the cornerstone of socialism for “Khmer society which, as a rare example, has never seen class struggles of a feudal regime or colonialist exploitation system (except from the outside)” (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 7, 3). As a result, he characterised the Khmer kings “not only as great temple builders” but also as “realisers of great works of economic and social interest” in their attempts to “protect the soil by enhancing it with gigantic irrigation works” (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 4, 5; compare original quotation above). In particular, Sihanouk underlined the benevolence of Jayavarman VII and his promotion of “unity and cohesion” by quoting from one of the king’s twelfth-century steles at Say-Fong, being translated by the French in the 1930s (see below). Furthermore, by mentioning the king’s “creation of 102 hospitals all over the kingdom”, the booklet asked: “Can one find in this abbreviated evocation not as much real socialism as in many contemporary Socialist countries?” (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 5) When the author of the booklet turned to the topic of “socialisation in agriculture”, he equated the present “necessity of state intervention [my

emphasis] for the mastering of water [maîtrise d’eau]” in Cambodia’s rice farming tradition with old autocratic governance: “We have seen that already in Angkorian Cambodia the large agricultural hydraulic works [grands travaux d’hydraulique agricole] went back to the initiative of the Kings of Angkor, and to this day the State is the guarantor of an equitable repartition of water” (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 10, 11). As a final step, the text subtly merged state control and collectivism in the name of “Khmer socialism”, and the above-mentioned Buddhist principles: The action taken by the Sangkum under the directives of its chief Samdech Norodom Sihanouk is an example for the application of the principles of Khmer socialism. The great rural works show the ideals of mutual help and solidarity of all social classes of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum as the motor that motivates the people to provide a voluntary effort to the service of the Khmer community and the nation. The State is the master [maître d’œuvre] who coordinates and harmonises these constructive efforts, [including] collective voluntary work as one characteristic principle of [our] Khmer socialism. (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 12)

Taking this elementary text as our starting point, two questions arise which are pertinent to art historical inquiry from a transcultural perspective: First, which sources were used in the great bricolage of historical facts, Angkorian cultural myths, and kingly rulers that was produced by Sihan­ouk, his Cambodian Ministry of Information in the 1961 text Considérations sur le socialisme khmer, and by ‘Occidental’ historians like the Canadian Robert Garry in his 1964 article “La renaissance du Cambodge de Jayavarman VII roi d’Angkor à Norodom Sihanouk Varman”? Second, how was this reinvention of Angkorian royal-religious

11  Chandler quotes Sihanouk in the Khmer journal Neak cheat niyum (The Nationalist) as early as April 1956 along similar lines: “Our socialism is national. We Cambodians will never accept the tearing down of the barrier which preserves the originality of our race, of our traditions, of our religious faith, and which safe­ guards our independence vis-à-vis some of our neighbours (particularly Vietnamese)”. In: Chandler 1991, 87.

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2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Khmer socialism à la Angkorienne

Figures X.4a,b  Coedès’ 1935 publication Un grand roi du Cambodge: Jayavarman VII, cover and text page inside (Source: Coedès 1935a, cover, 15)

leadership applied, made visible, and staged through the corporating for once the Champa kingdom, and had covmedium of art and cultural heritage during Sihanouk’s ered the capital [Angkor] with the most prestigious monuments a monarch had ever planned” (Coedès 1935a, 3; see contemporary governance of independent Cambodia? In answer to the first question, one might quote the original quotation above). By equating Jayavarman VII with ­essential French-colonial figure behind this modern myth- “the French kings Louis VII and Philippe-Auguste […] mak­ing process – the Parisian, archaeology-focused epi­ during the second Muslim invasion into Europe”, Coedès graphist and EFEO director, George Coedès. With his for- continued with what must have sounded to Sihanouk like ty-two-page booklet Un grand roi du Cambodge, Jaya­var­ an action plan for Cam­bodia’s independence after ninety man VII, published in 1935 in French and Cambodian by years of oppressive colonialism and during the actual infilthe Phnom Penh-based Éditions de la Bibliothèque Royale, tration of Vietnamese resistance fighters on Cambodian he introduced for the first time (and therefore helped pop- territory: “Across the bibliographical notes appears a figure ularise) the image of the glorious Angkorian king Jayavar- of an energetic and ambitious man, one with a certain polit­ man VII (Figs. X.4a,b). The eloquent, but intentionally ical sense which saved his country from ruin and brought low-key scientific word choice and glorifying topoi used in it to the apogee of its power. [He was] a fervent Buddhist” this publication to characterise Jayavarman VII made it a (Coedès 1935a, 5, 18). Coedès continued with a description unique source for almost all following trea­tises and quota- that, as we will see later, was echoed in Sihanouk’s selftions on his historic and contemporary relevance, and for staged appearance as a half-divine ruler of Buddhist socialNorodom Sihanouk’s self-identification with the political, ism: Jayavarman VII in his “love for prestige” had followed cultural, and artistic agenda of this historic Angkorian “the secular cult of a god-king by adapting Buddhism” toking. Curiously, Coedès confessed at the very beginning of wards “the notion of a Buddha-king” (Coedès 1935a, 25, 27, the booklet that “almost nothing had been known” about 28). Next, Coedès listed – and here Sihanouk’s enormous Jayavarman VII around 1900 but claimed that by 1935 he building programme in the new-old capital Phnom Penh was already “considered the greatest Cambodian sovereign and the provinces is almost anticipated – Jayavarman VII’s who had pushed his country to the extreme limits by in- architectural and urban “œuvre extraordinaire”. It ranged 165

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

from (a) single temple sites like the Bayon, Ta Prohm, Ban- trême-Orient in 1941, the year of Sihanouk’s coronation teay Kdei, Prah Khan, and Nak Pan in the region of Ang- (Coedès 1941c). kor and sites like Banteay Chmar at the periphery, to (b) Although one might argue that the specialist literature the planning of the whole city of Angkor Thom as “the re- of the Bulletin of the EFEO, the small 1935 publication of duced image of the universe”, 12 and (c) “to pilgrim’s rest Coedès, and the specific tourist guide literature on Angkor places and 102 hospitals in all four corners of his kingdom: Park by Commaille 1912, Marchal 1928, and Glaize 1944 Which pharaoh, which Caesar can pride himself on having (see chapter IX, compare Falser 2013d) were not easily acmoved so many stones!” (Coedès 1935a, 19, 20) Astonish- cessible, this was not true of Coedès’ book Pour mieux ingly, these paragraphs were quoted almost thirty years comprendre Angkor. First published in Saigon in 1943 and later in Sihanouk’s programme of socialisme khmer, with a again in Paris 1947, this publication was the first popular focus on Coedès’ characterisation of these hospitals as summary of French knowledge on Angkor’s history and art “utilitarian as well as religious and ritual work”. Additional- intended for the greater public in both Cambodia and the ly, Coedès quoted the famous Say-Fong stele, which the French métropole. Besides the established topos of hydrauformer acting director of the EFEO, Louis Finot, translated lic Angkor (a topic we shall return to in the next sub-chapin 1903 in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient ter), Jayavarman VII was also at the indisputable centre of (BEFEO)] in order to term Jayavarman VII’s charitable Coedès’ 1943/47 publication. In the chapter “Cultes perplans a “veritable system of public assistance” (Finot 1903, sonnels: L’apothéose des princes et le dieu-roi”, the terms 21): “He suffered the diseases of his subjects more than his “ordre monarchique” and “fondement de l’autorité royale”, own; because it is the public pain which makes the pain of and the concept of the Buddha-king as “intermédiaire en the kings, and not their own”.13 Interestingly, Coedès even relation avec le monde divin” was further essentialised helped to translate the historic Angkorian context into one (Coedès 1947, 44–67, here 56, 64). Over forty pages alone, that was amenable to Buddhist ethics and could accommo- the chapter “Le dernier grand roi d’Angkor – Jayavarman date Sihanouk’s understanding of so-called top-down pol- VII” inflated Coedès’ findings in 1935 to “restitute for the itics: “All this is a characteristic idea of a certain type of descendents of the ancient Khmer the sentiment of a past civilisation and government [civilisation et de gouverne- grandeur”. This time he not only re-evoked Jayavarman ment]. The king, highest expression of the state [État], is VII’s “veritable sanitarian crusade [and] medical and social responsible for the well-being of his subjects by feeling preoccupation” (Coedès 1947, 176–210, here 56, 64) but their suffering directly. By extending the benefactions added – almost in anticipation of Sihanouk’s fall in 1970 [bienfaits] of medical assistance for his subjects, Jaya­ after the political damage inflicted by an excessive building varman accomplished, from the Buddhist point of view, programme, internal corruption, and his pro/anti-Amerian œuvre of merit-making [œuvre génératice de mérite]” can wavering during the Vietnam War – the other side of (Coedès 1935a, 34).14 Similar steles from other temples the coin: “Jayavarman VII urged the realisation of a [buildbuilt by Jayavarman VII were translated by Coedès himself ing] programme, which could have been enough for sever(Coedès 1906, 1941a, 1951), and Jayavarman’s hospitals and al reigns, […] it is sure that he left his country exhausted pilgrims’ inns were covered separately in two articles pub- by his megalomania and now open to the attacks of his lished in 1940 (Coedès 1940). Interestingly, the topic of the young and turbulent neighbour to the West” [i.e., Siam]. religiously motivated “medical assistance in the Cambodia In this sense, the present country was indeed moving toof the late twelfth century” (Coedès 1941b) was secularised wards its final “crépuscule” (Coedès 1947, 207, 66; compare with his contribution in the Revue médicale française d’Ex- Sihanouk’s last film in 1969 with the same title).

12  Compare the analyses of the Buddhist symbolism of the Bayon temple and the city of Angkor Thom by

Coedès’ colleague, the sociologist Paul Mus (Mus 1936), which were further developed around 1960 with new contributions and the title Le sourire d’Angkor: Art, foi et politique bouddhiques sous Jayavarman VII (Mus 1961; compare Mus 1959, Meyer 1971, 1985). 13  In 1968 Claude Jacques published a slightly different version in which the “physical suffering of the people became the much more sorrowful suffering of the king’s soul [Le mal du corps des hommes devenait pour Lui mal de l’âme, bien plus affligeant: car c’est la douleur de leurs sujets qui fait la douleur des rois, et non pas leur propre douleur]” (Jacques 1968, 17). 14  In his analysis, Finot was the first to establish the image of Jayavarman VII as a “sovereign founding establishments of charity” through the whole kingdom. The stele itself comprised of forty-eight stanzas, the most often quoted being stanza XIII, whereas stanzas XLVI and XLVII helped to bring the king’s charitable attitude into the context of Buddhist ethics: “Full of extreme sympathy of the common good of the world, the king delivered his wish: All the beings who entered the ocean of existences, may I bring them out of it by the virtue of this good work” (XLVI); “May all the kings of Cambodia in their will for the common good and by protecting my foundation […] reach the state of deliverance where there is no suffering” (XLVII), in: Finot 1903, 33; re-quoted in Coedès 1935a, 34.

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2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Khmer socialism à la Angkorienne

Figures X.5a,b  Boisselier’s 1952 publication about The art of Jayavarman VII, with a statue of the ancient king from Phnom Penh’s National Museum and a photographed section from the bas-reliefs of the Bayon temple inside of Angkor Thom (Source: Boisselier 1952, plates 24a and 26a)

Interestingly, the depiction of Jayavarman VII as a powerful, even megalomaniac and decadent, god-king with a down-to-earth, humanist affection for his ruled subjects was essentially influenced by French-colonial art historical research. As late as 1927 Philippe Stern, the successor to Louis Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois in 1925 (see chapter III), adjoint-conservator of the musée Guimet, and professor at the École du Louvre until 1965 (Auboyer 1981), reassigned the date of the Bayon temple, the architectural masterpiece of Jayavarman VII’s rule, from an initially early period (wrongly argued by Louis Finot) towards the end of the stylistic development of the Angkorian temples (Stern 1927/1965; compare Coral Remusat 1940/51). This chronological correction in the genealogy of the Khmer kings placed Jayavarman VII at its glorious apogee and made the king instantly relevant for the personification of Angkor’s cultural heights in the decades after Angkor Wat. One of the last French-colonial contributions, which paved the road towards Jayavarman VII’s ‘reincarnation process’ during Cambodia’s era of independence, was the article “Réflexions sur l’art de Jayavarman VII” by the art historian, EFEO member, and conservator of the Conservation d’Angkor, Jean Boisselier. It will come as no surprise that the paper praised the king as “the veritable restorer of royal power and authority with a new cult to express his grandeur

and the excellence of his faith”, which was best materialised in the “l’art du Bayon” (Boisselier 1952, 263; compare Boisselier 1956). Again referring to the stele of Say-Fong, to sculptures of Jayavarman VII, and to the bas-reliefs of the Bayon (Figs. X.5a,b), Boisselier identified the “Khmer smile” [sourire Khmer] of the face towers as “the purest expression of the Buddhist ideal. [Consequently] a human sentiment was penetrated in the statuary to consciously show this great Buddhist king’s suffering […] which also let the sculptors of the bas reliefs [of the Bayon] naturally turn for the first time ever towards the ordinary people [petit peuple] with their daily life, and even humble occupations” (Boisselier 1952, 269). Descriptions like these explain why Sihanouk, while acting as the royal tour guide to Angkor, would always stop to explain these scenes to distinguished diplomatic guests from all over the world (see discussion below, compare Fig. X.55b). The most inspiring book on Angkor for Sihanouk’s was the 1956 book Angkor, hommes et pierres (see Pl. Intro.19a–c, Pl. X.25a–o) by the historian Bernard Philippe Groslier (1926–1986), Conservateur des Monuments d’Angkor between 1960 and 1973 (see his role at Angkor in chapter IX). Not only was he a close friend of the king, he is also credited with making “archaeology a branch of history”.15 Unctuously phrased, the book merged scientific knowledge

15  As Condominas quotes Groslier in reference to Paul Courbin, the chair of Archéologie historique et de

Civilisation matérielle at the Parisian École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales: “L’archéologie est une branche de l’histoire” (Condominas 1992, 24).

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and, sadly, the last. This king was also a maniac for construction, […] he built more than the last five kings together before him. […] this is the last face of Khmer art at the threshold towards the total ruin, if not the most perfect, human and most touching. […] Being in touch with the most humble, far from the arrogant domination of his predecessors, this king knew how to bring together all forces of the country. Certainly, the Khmer had to give all his work and fortune to build up this forest of stones. But it seems they did it with a fervency and with unanimity nev­ er seen before, in a last and admirable outbreak. [italics MF] (Groslier 1956, 153—58)

Figure X.5c  “Supposedly the head of Jayavarnan VII” as mentioned and photographed in the monthly and annual report of the Conservation d’Angkor of 1957 (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

and hypothetical fantasies about Angkor’s formative, glorious, and declining past with impressive black and white illustrations of temple sites and sculptures. The forty-page section on “L’apothéose d’Angkor” built on Coedès’ 1935 image of Jayavarman VII as Angkor’s greatest charitable – in modern words ‘socialist’ – king (compare Sam Sary 1955). The ‘human touch’ of his patronised “art de Jayavarman VII” formed the perfect script for Sihanouk’s vision of himself as the old/new Angkorian king of ancient/revived cultural and political glory: Jayavarman VII is the most fascinating personality in Khmer history, who left an ineffaceable imprint […] unique with his compassion. Above the order and prosperity of the kingdom, he seems to have taken to heart the welfare of his subjects […], a moving charity. […] In the flowering period of the Khmer, the art of Jayavarman VII is unique, maybe the most extraordinary, certainly touching

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By this time, the Bayon temple and its Buddhist king patron had been validated by the ascent of of Buddhism to the status of state religion and by a down-to-earth royal leadership, whereas Angkor Wat still retained – as visualised most spectacularly during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931 (see chapter VII) – its significance as an image of power and dominance, law and order. As Groslier put it in his 1956 book: “Angkor Wat had marked the summit of Hinduism and royal order. The Bayon made the heyday [épanouissement] of all Buddhist benignity radiating from an extraordinary king. And even if he may have exhausted the country, Jayavarman VII projected his colossal shadow on the grandiose dawn [crépuscule] of the city of grey stone” (Groslier 1956, 158). After the head of Jayavarman VII was found in 1957/8 at the Prah Khan temple at Kampong-Svay by Jean Filliozat, director of the EFEO, and Jean Laur, conservator of Angkor (Fig. X.5c) (Coedès 1958; compare Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 238–39), the enigmatic “smile of Angkor” [sourire d’Angkor] on the face of the historic king – a “Buddha in the world, as Jayavarman for his kingdom” – became “human, amicable, and natural”. According to the sociologist and colleague of Bernard Philippe Groslier, Paul Mus, in 1961 (the year when Sihanouk’s vision of a socialisme khmer was in full swing) this was combined with new/old Cambodia’s trinity of religious “faith, art and Buddhist politics” (Mus 1961, 380, 381; compare Mus 1936, 1959). In 1962, Sihanouk’s Ministry of Information published a three-hundred-page book called Cambodge where the above-mentioned French-colonial epigraphic, archaeological, and art historical findings about Angkor’s cultural and political past were merged with the first large-scale master narrative of Cambodia’s postcolonial efforts. Suryavarman II’s Angkor Wat complex was reconverted from the French-­ colonial construct as a dead Hinduist archaeological ruin (Falser 2013d) back into what it had always been: a living Buddhist monastery (compare Fig. X.51). Additionally, Jaya­ varman VII’s “glory and compassion” was cited once more in the historical section (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 19); however, the largest part of the book transcribed the achievements of the Angkorian past directly onto the new infrastructural advancements of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum: hydrography, public health, water management (see be-

2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Khmer socialism à la Angkorienne

Figures X.6a—c  The 1962 publication Cambodge by Cambodia’s new Ministry of Information, with Bayon reliefs and contemporary nurses, agriculture and industry, old and new transportation (Source: Ministère de l’Information 1962, 79, 126, 137—38)

low), electricity, and rice-growing agriculture. In addition, Bayon’s twelfth-century bas-reliefs depicting parturient women were now equated with the modern midwives on bicycles in the Siem Reap region (Fig. X.6a), and the transport with rural oxcarts was juxtaposed with the new harbour of Sihanoukville (Fig. X.6b) and a modern bus stop in Phnom Penh (Fig. X.6c). When Sihanouk’s “monthly organ of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum”, Kambuja, was introduced in French and English versions on 15 April 1965, the “notion of continuity […] since the Angkorian epoch […] of one and the same country, people and nation” and Jayavar-

man VII’s “magnificent œuvre of nation building [édification nationale]” was underlined by the journal’s co-editor Chea San. The same bridge between colonial knowledge production and postcolonial nation building was built into the medium of art history when Sihanouk opened the very first issue of the newly founded Sangkum: Revue politique illustrée (with himself as the director) in August 1965. His twenty-page contribution called Pour mieux comprende le Cambodge actuel (Sihanouk 1965a, see further discussion below) was a direct reference to Coedès’ Pour mieux comprendre Angkor, published twenty years earlier (Coedès 169

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

1943/47). In the October 1965-issues of the journals Sangkum and Réalités Cambodgiennes, the old king’s meditative statue – today one of the masterpieces in Phnom Penh’s National Museum (the musée Albert Sarraut in colonial times) and at this point of Cambodia’s independence called Jayavarman VII Museum after its renovation by the architect Vann Molyvann – was used by the new king, Sihanouk, as illustrations to substantiate his new political action programme and the “Khmer monarchy” with himself as its endpoint in particular (Pl. X.2a,b).16 The ministerial 1961 publication Considérations sur le socialisme khmer was the first to introduce the rhetoric of the ancient and the actual king as “protector of the soil” [Souverain ‘protecteur de la terre’] (Ministère de l’Information 1961, 4; compare Sihanouk 1965a, 17). Sihanouk took this role seriously, as a Buddhist monk (Fig. X.7a), as a symbolic pilgrim to Khmer-related Buddhist sites abroad and as a defender of Khmer-built heritage at home. During his visit to President Sukarno’s Indonesia in February 1959, he made his “pilgrimage to [the Buddhist temple of] Borobudur”,17 often called Angkor Wat’s twin temple of Southeast Asia (Fig. X.7b). His “national pilgrimage” in January 1962 to the “national sanctuary”18 of Preah Vihear, a disputed object with Thailand (Fig. X.7c,d), seemed to have been symbolically rewarded when the International Court of Justice in The Hague finally confirmed Cambodia’s sovereignty over the temple in August 1962 (compare epilogue of volume one and Fig. EpI.5). In this context, Sihanouk in a thanksgiving gesture befitting a humble monk sacrificed his hair to Lord Buddha (Meyer 1970, 52). However, protecting the soil had an even deeper significance for Cambodia’s cultural heritage politics. In its popular section entitled “The month’s event #13” in the English issue of May 1967, the journal Kambuja published an eleven-page, richly illustrated article “At the Royal Square of Angkor, a millenary rite ‘Chrat Preah Nongkol’”, translated as ‘Ploughing of the Sacred Furrow’ (Fig. X.8a; Pl. X.3a,b). Surprisingly, when one accepts the ‘Khmerness’ of this old rite – though logical if we follow our hypothesis of a creative mutation process from colonial written knowledge19 on Angkor into postcolonial performed heritage of Angkor – the article

used a French-colonial voice to justify the correctness of the staged scenes: Mr. Bernard Groslier, the eminent Angkor Conservator, explains that “only the King, master of the earth, who, through his ancestors, is the sole owner of the soil, can pay due homage to the earth’s spirits and thus assure the success of the first tillage”. […] When the rite is performed by the King himself, he inaugurates at the same time the new productive year. He thus appears as the centre of space and time, which he dominates and commands. (Kambuja, 15 May 1967, 61)

Later in the article, the reader is told that the former king, Ang Duong (1796–1860, Sihanouk’s great-great grandfather; compare his role discussed in the epilogue to volume one), finished the “‘manual labour’ of executing the rite by transferring it to the ‘king for a day’ in the person of the minister of agriculture or the head of the royal granaries”. Norodom Sihanouk decided to personally reintroduce (re-enact) the rite at different places in Cambodia: at Battambang (1963), Takhmau near Phnom Penh (1964),20 Kampong Cham (1965),21 Svar Rieng (1966), and “on the royal square at Angkor Thom, Angkor the Great, in front of the king’s ancient palace square, today called ‘the Elephants’ Terrace’, […] on Thursday, the fourth day of the declining Pisak moon, in the year of the Goat, 2510 in the Buddhist calendar (27 April 1967)” (Kambuja, 15 May 1967, 61).22 From an ‘archaeological’ point of view, the site had just been restored by the EFEO, and it was now appropriated to re-enact the old splendour of Angkor: The sacred rice field was symbolically delimited by four small canvas pavilions placed in the corners to protect the four Brahman main divinities. The fifth pavilion stood in the centre with a Buddhist statuette and was dominated by a “traditionally roofed pavilion” for high officials and the diplomatic corps and by temporary exhibition architecture along the top of the ancient Angkorian palace walls. The article described “King Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State”, clad in his old brocade garments as a king, “listen[ing] to the invocations made to the supernatural pow-

16  In the English version of Kambuja’s issue from 15 November 1965, Sihanouk summed up his programme

for “Our Buddhist socialism” (13–20).

17  “Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Indonesia, 8–14 February 1959”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (February

1959), 3–11, here 9. 18  “Pèlerinage national à Preah Vihear”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 5th year, 48–51 (September–December 1962), 34–43. Also: “Preah Vihear belongs to Cambodia”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 45 (May–June 1962), 2–6. 19  Bernard Philippe Groslier also mentioned the eminent role of the “fête du sillon sacré” in his influential 1956 book Angkor, hommes et pierres (Groslier 1956, 163). 20  See the one-page report “Fêtes réligieuses et traditionnelles: L’ouverture du Sillon Sacré” with its almost interchangeable images in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 66 (April 1964), 22. 21  Compare with “Les événements du mois: La fête du sillon sacré”, in: Kambuja, 3 (15 June 1965), 22–25. 22  Unfortunately, Prodromidès’ remark about a similar festivity in 1968 in front of Angkor Wat could not be reconfirmed in our research (Prodromidès 1997, 255).

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2. Norodom Sihanouk as the new Jayavarman VII: Khmer socialism à la Angkorienne

Figures X.7a—d  Norodom Sihanouk as Buddhist monk (7a)  “King’s photo — My lord is the country of Cambodia. He became a monk on 14 July 2490” [Buddhist Era, 1946 in Christian Era]); on his diplomatic pilgrimage to Borobudur in 1959 (7b); during his political pilgrimage to Preah Vihear in 1962 as published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (7c); publishing a cartoon on the Thai-Cambodian dispute about Preah Vihear in his journal Le Sangkum in 1966 (7d) (Source: © Archive Charles Meyer; Cambodge aujourd’hui, February 1959, 8; Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, September—December 1962, 34; Le Sangkum, 14 (May 1966), 58)

ers by a monk, which asked for peace and prosperity for the Kingdom. The Victory verses, called ‘Chayanto’, were then recited by a group of thirty-eight monks” on the upper palace grounds. The king was carried in a palanquin to the sacred paddy where he crossed the field three times with the sacred plough drawn by two decorated grey oxen, accompanied by high officials and a traditional orchestra, and followed by his daughter “Princess Norodom Bophani” who acted as “the sower”. After ‘bathing’ in the enthusiastic crowd, Sihanouk entered the Elephants’ Terrace to guide his guests through the exhibition on local handicraft (Fig. X.8b), agricultural products, tourism, and “state industries”. Finally, he watched “the procession of mechanical harvesters (tractors)” (Fig. X.8c) and “sports teams demonstrating ancient

games and exercises” from above the square (Kambuja, 15 May 1967, 60–70). In his 1966 article “History and kingship in contemporary Cambodia”, Milton Osborne quoted Sihanouk’s own motivation for reintroducing the “original version” of the rite as the latter had published it in the 17 May 1963 issue of ‘his’ journal Réalités Cambodgiennes: This thousand-year-old tradition has little by little changed over time to be invested in our own times with only symbolic and representative character since it is no longer the Sovereign who guides the plough himself and he no longer concerns himself with work, truly speaking. The ceremony has thus lost its effect and its worth. I thus believe it necessary to return to the original

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X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figures X.8a—c  Sihanouk’s ritual reinvention of old Angkor during a 1967 event at the Royal Square of Angkor Thom, recently restored by the EFEO: procession; handicraft exhibition and mechanical harvesters on display at the archaeological site (Source: Kambuja, 26 (15 May 1967), 60—61, 68, 69)

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3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire

version […] even at the risk of making certain of our young intellectuals […] who detest our traditions […] smile. (Osborne 1966, 12)

independence as it is to Jayavarman VII, whose position in Angkorian history as well as his political, religious, symbolic, artistic and architectural intentions are still somewhat mysterious. The description of “[t]he sovereign […] ‘physically’ present When Bernard Philippe Groslier and Jacques Durmar­ all over his kingdom by the intermediary of his human im- çay published their extensive remarks on the Bayon temple age, reproduced in multiple versions [multiples examplaires]” of Jayavarman VII in 1973 (Groslier/Dumarçay 1973), the (Hawixbrock 1998, 78) is as applicable to Norodom Siha­ French-made legacy of an ancient benevolent king must nouk and his multiform and often overlapping roles as god-­ have sounded quite outdated to Lon Nol, given his project of a Khmer Republic (see chapter XI). king-politician during Cambodia’s short period of national

3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire On 2 February 1958, the second issue of Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, a journal edited by Sihanouk’s Ministry of Information, declared in bold letters over a double page: “After six centuries of neglect, the paddy fields of Angkor flourish again” [Après 6 siècles d’abondon les rizières d’Angkor réfleurissent]. This reference to Angkor’s past ‘miraculous’ irrigation system would become one of the most important topoi in Cambodia’s campaign of national rebirth. The anonymous author used an aerial picture (Fig. X.9a) of Angkor’s giant western reservoir of “65 million cubic metres of water which would [again] be distributed on more than 13,000 hectares during the dry season”: From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, during the apogee of the Khmer Empire, the province of Siem Reap had been rich and prosperous as it was totally covered with cultivated fields. The aerial photos clearly indicate the irrigation network which covered the region and the plain of the paddy fields. This is because the Kings of Ang­kor were not only great builders of the monuments that the whole world can still admire to the present day. They were also great administrators and constructors who made Cambodia an economically powerful and firm state. […] Today, Cambodia arises from the ruins which the foreign invasions left behind. Above these grand works to be undertaken the redevelopment [la re­ mise en valeur] of the rice fields of Siem Reap is maybe the most moving. The ensemble, called “Project of the Western Baray”, gets its name from a reservoir that was built 900 years ago and is today renovated to serve Cam­ bodia once again. The modern system uses what remains from the ancient reservoir after its reconstruction. The constructors of the Ancient Khmer Kings built an ensem­ ble which comprised of a barrage on the river of Siem Reap, of canals to bring the water from around the tem­ ples of Angkor Thom until the reservoir itself, and a distri­ bution system to deliver the water to the lands situated to

the south of the system. […] A new distribution system was studied by the Cambodian Government and constructed under the direction of the Ingénieur en Chef du Service d’Irrigation, Mr Srim Samy […]. The reconstruction of the irrigation system was based on a conjoint plan of the Governments of Cambodia and the United States, with 35 million Riels from the Mission d’Aide Américaine. […] The complicated distribution network comprises of 50 km of canals, 100 small bridges, 50 dams, and numerous water flow control points and pipes.23 [italics MF]

Interestingly, French-colonial knowledge on ancient Angkor directly served the modern Cambodian nation-state: the map used to indicate the progress of the modern irrigation system was based, as the legend itself indicated, on the “carte archéologique de le région d’Angkor after the works of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, the Aviation Militaire and the Service Géographique” of June 1930 (Fig. X.9b).24 Just a few months later in its July 1958 issue, the topic was taken up again in the same journal under the title “Pour une ‘politique d’eau’”. The villagers and Sihanouk himself were depicted as working “voluntarily and in collectivity on the construction of barrages and dams” (Cambodge ­aujourd’hui, 7 (July 1958), 18–21). In February 1960, Cambodge d’aujourd’hui reported on the “Inauguration of the Barai Tuk Thla”. On 4 February, “Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in presence of the US Ambassador Willam C. Trimble and American personalities” from the US development aid programme, opened the irrigation system of “eight canals of 65 kilometres length and 80 secondary canals, totalling altogether 155 kilometres” (Figs. X.10a,b). Besides many technical details about the project, Sihanouk’s inauguration speech again directly connected the Angkorian past with Cambodia’s new national presence in the twentieth century, leaping over a time gap of seven hundred years and bypassing the French-colonial period which had scientifically recovered the former and politically facilitated the latter:

23  Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 February 1958, 20, 21. 24  Compare with the development of the colonial maps of Angkor between 1860 and the 1930s in chapter IX.

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X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figures X.9a,b  Article about the “re-flourishing of Angkor’s water system” as published in Cam­ bodge d’aujourd’hui in February 1958 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 February 1958, 20, 21)

Figures X.10a,b  The great new irrigation channel to the south of the Angkorian Western Baray (water tank), as published in photographs in Le Cambodge (here in a smaller reprint of the original publication of 1962) and in the journal Études Cambodgiennes of 1967 (Source: Le Cambodge 1962, 179; Études Cambodgiennes, 11 (July—September 1967), 30)

[…] the conception and realisation of these ancient projects, and the creative genius of our ancestors, made us inheritors of an incomparable lesson. Now, after centuries, we re-open the same cycle, as we see the sons tak­ ing again the path left open by their fathers, and as we patiently recover, from the great builders of Angkor up to the actual Royal Government, a united view towards the grandeur of our country with politics conforming to our traditions and to the qualities of our race. The water problem was the great preoccupation of our glorious kings, and it still remains our constant concern. Without innovating anything, I have always taken great efforts, as you know, to remind our people of this essential truth, which is inscribed into our soil and written on the steles of our old monuments, and to promote, along with our capabilities, these realisations which, like this one today, can be considered vital for our nation. [italics MF]25

According to the official collection of his public speeches in 1960, Sihanouk’s inauguration of other dam projects in Chhouk Sar and Tuol Lolork (both Takeo province) restated the same lines of argumentation (Royaume du Cambodge 1960, 35–36, 70–71, 72–74). Inside the 1961 publication Considérations sur le socialisme khmer, the section on socialisation in agriculture exemplified how the current stately power regime was justified from a historic perspective: “Cambodian agriculture is essentially dominated by rice culture and implicates the intervention by the state [considering] the capital problem of irrigation, or more exactly the mastering of water [maîtrise d’eau]. We can see that already in Angkorian Cambodia the large works of hydraulic agriculture [les grands travaux d’hydraulique agricole] were based on the initiative of the Kings of Angkor and that, to this day, the State guarantees the partition of water” (Ministère de l’Information 1961,

25  Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (February 1960), 9.

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3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire

Figures X.11a,b  Sihanouk’s “politics of water” as a veritable mass participation programme, as published in the monograph Le Cambodge in 1962 and the journal Le Sangkum in 1965, here under the title “Our Socialism: The army participates in the construction of a water dam” (Source: Ministère de l’Information 1962, 179, 181; Le Sangkum, 1 (August 1965), 20—21)

11). One year later, the 1962 publication Cambodge, and in 1965 an issue of Le Sangkum on “Our Socialism”, added to this description the participation of the masses who followed Sihanouk’s example and lent a hand in his “great campaign of water politics” [une grande campagne pour une politique d’eau] (Figs. X.11a,b). Lifting the vision of Angkor as a hydraulic city to a national level, “technicians of the Génie rural with financial help from the Royal Government, together with the voluntary help of public servants, military forces, students, the Royal Khmer Socialist Youth [founded by Sihanouk in 1957], and the rural population itself ” helped “to re-arrange [ré-aménager] a hydraulic infrastructure on the whole territory of the country” (Minis­ tère de l’Information 1962, 178). Tragically, the topoi of a hydraulic Cambodia and of state-controlled collective labour would (in a completely perverted version) return during the terror regime of the Khmer Rouge (compare Figs. XI.12–14): Public relations images that were circulated in the late 1970s depict the uniform and deindividualised masses who were forced to labour on gigantic irriga-

tion projects, appearing to merge with the surrounding fields to create inhuman large-scale landscape patterns (see chapter XI). As far as the concrete adaptive re-use project of the ancient Western water basin at Angkor was concerned, Pech Bun Ret, Ingenieur du génie rural, made clear in his 1964 article “Étude rurale: Le réseau du barai occidental” in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, that (again) French-colonial efforts had provided the initial basis: “In order to restore the value of the great surface of this once flourishing plain and to revive a bit of this splendour of the past, a conservateur d’Angkor [he meant Georges Trouvé, MF] proposed around 1932–33 the irrigation project of the West Baray to the Service de l’Hydraulique and to the Office Indochinois du Riz”(Pech 1964, 28). Concrete works were initiated in 1937 and again from 1939–45, and they continued after 1953 until 1959. Additionally, he added maps of the new irrigation projects in which the theme of a re-imagined hydraulic Angkor in general and the area around the Western Baray in particular was illustrated (Pl. X.4a,b). Only a few months later, in August 1965, the minister of 175

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

agriculture, Choan Soadi, published his article “La politique de l’eau au Cambodge” in the journal Kambuja.26 Together with double-page illustrations on water dam projects, the text of the article established a seemingly ‘natural’ link between the new era of independence and Angkor’s built legacy and water system: The water problem is certainly as old as the Khmer country itself. […] In Angkorian times, the Khmer power was, above all, based on a prosperous rice culture. Vast irrigation complexes were built. Even the temple constructions themselves were part of these water politics since the dykes around the pious buildings served as reservoirs for the benefit of the inhabitants. Therefore, it is totally natural that Cambodia, now independent in the Sangkum era, will catch up with this politique d’eau […]. The water problem during the time of the Kings of Angkor is still a concern. Considerable progress has been made to this day by the government of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum under the direction of Samdech Norodom Sihanouk who institutionalised a veritable water politics over Cambodia. (Chuon 1965, 77, 86)

One double-page of Angkor proper offered a map of the water networks which now covered all of ‘hydraulic Cambodia’ (Pl. X.5). From this perspective it seemed logical that new reservoir projects, like that in the town of Takeo (Fig. X.12), were similarly equipped à la Angkorienne with a central island temple as in the Angkorian West Baray, which was dominated by the West Mebon temple. Keeping the above-mentioned references to French-colonial initiatives in mind, one might well ask when and how the highly problematic topoi of royal-divine top-down governance with collective participation from below, the imagination of cultural-political power combined with agricultural-hydraulic networks, and the ancient hydraulic Angkor in combination with its built architectural legacy, emerged as a suggestive foundation for independent Cambodia. We may count two main scholars, amongst others, as the principle promoters of this view: the Russian-French philologist, Orientalist art historian, and archaeologist Victor Goloubew (1878–1945) (Malleret 1967; Prodromidès 1997, 185–96)27 and, again, Bernard Philippe Groslier. An “intellectual ambassador of the EFEO” (Malleret 1967, 343) at various conferences worldwide and during PR events such as the Colonial Exhibitions of Marseille in 1922 and Paris in 1931 (see the chapters VI and VII on these con­ crete events), Victor Goloubew became involved in Angkor after 1920 and helped to establish (along with Van Stein Callenfels) the EFEO’s research exchange network with the Dutch East Indies (see chapter IX); he also co-edited the Mémoires archéologiques on Angkor Wat (EFEO 1929–32).

By the 1930s, he was influenced by the discussions about the building chronology of the Bayon and the city of Angkor Thom by Philippe Stern, the Angkor conservator Henri Marchal, and the architect Georges Trouvé, and helped in the topographical “nivellement of Angkor”, particuarly by the chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier (Parmentier 1933b). Goloubew initiated aerial (photography) reconnaissance campaigns over the Angkorian region using hydroplanes belonging to Indochina’s aeronautical and naval military (Goloubew 1936a,b). Creating the first coherent photographic map from almost two hundred aerial shots of the Angkor Thom-Angkor Wat area in order to get a better understanding of its spatial configuration (compare Fig. IX.20 and Falser 2013d), his primary concern was to research the mountain temple of Phnom Bakheng and the “connaissance of the hydraulic regime of the ancient capital” (Goloubew 1934, 592; compare Goloubew 1933, 1935b) in order to delimit the first city of King Yaçovarman. After Stern’s 1938 article on the chronology of ancient city planning and the structures around the Western Baray – where he indicated a “water outlet” [exutoire] in its southern dam (Stern 1938, Fig. 20) – Goloubew brought scientific knowledge about Angkor into the arena of contemporary applied engineering. His 1941 article “L’hydraulique urbaine et agricole à l’époque des rois d’Angkor” in the Bulletin économique de l’Indochine underlined the continuing collaboration with the École spéciale d’agriculture et de sylviculture, the Aéronautique militaire de l’Indochine, and the In­ specteur général des travaux publics, and emphasised the “considerable role which basins, water canals, dykes, water enclosures, hydraulic works of all kinds, played in this worldwide unique architectural ensemble of Angkor [where] the sovereigns of Angkor had pushed their love and cult of water to extreme limits” (Goloubew 1941, 10). In his interpretation, “the hydraulic system of Angkor followed the double aspect of the material evocation of a vast religious and cosmological concept, [and] the inundation system, managed by architects and engineers of Angkor [formed] a half-urban, half-aquatic city quite comparable to Venice or Bangkok” (Goloubew 1941, 10, 13). According to Goloubew, Georges Trouvé had initiated “topographical research on the rice fields to the south of the Western Baray [and had] contacted the technicians of the Service de l’Hydraulique agricole and of the Office Indochinois du riz to investigate an irrigation project of fifteen thousand hectares [with which] the inhabitants of Siem Reap and the neighbouring villages would regain a prosperity the memory of which they had lost from one day to the next” (Goloubew 1941, 14). Referring to the French-colonial efforts for an “agricultural economy for Indochina” (Henry 1932), Goloubew motivated the ingénieurs des Travaux publics to consider the important role played by archaeology in Indochina to solve

26  Compare with his reprinted paper “L’évolution de l’agriculture” in the section “Agriculture – Irrigation et

réservoirs d’eau (Politique de l’eau), Mécanisation – coopératives”, in: Sihanouk 1991, 204–237, here 205–211.

27  For a short biography: http://www.efeo.fr/biographies/notices/goloubew.htm (accessed 29 December 2013).

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3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire

Figure X.12  Takeo town with its water tank “as in Angkorian times”, as depicted in Kambuja in 1965 (Source: Kambuja 5 (15. August 1965), 87)

the economic and social problems that had since ancient times always concerned the autochthones; he invited the techniciens de l’Hydraulique agricole to take advantage of the surviving traces of the irrigation network of the old kings of Angkor for new projects; and he published a series of aerial photographs of new-old water systems (Fig. X.13a) and two maps of the past and future irrigation systems of Angkor and the Western Baray (Fig. X.13b, Pl. X.6). Combined with the re-translation in 1951 of a thirteenth-century report by the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan describing Angkor’s temples, urban life, customs, and irrigation system with “three or four harvests a year […] on the cultivated space after the annual inundation”,28 all three aspects of interest during the French-colonial 1930s migrated directly to the mindset of independent Cambodge in the 1950s and 1960s (compare epilogue II about post-1990 Cambodia). As quoted above, Cambodian engineers appropriated these ideas (not necessarily by quoting the original sources) and reused the provided maps (compare Pl. X.4b). Colonial-scientific facts, often highly hypothetical interpretations and even unproven fiction about past Angkorian glory were then turned into a hybrid faction to form an unquestioned and essentialised narrative of past grandeur for the new and self-confident Cambodian nation-state.

In the years directly before and after Cambodia’s in­ dependence in 1953 several very important publications helped to pre-frame and stabilise the civilisational self-conception of Sihanouk’s cultural-political action programme. In 1951, Philippe Stern published his extremely influential paper, the “Diversity and rhythm of the royal khmer foun­ dations”, in which he formulated the hypothesis that each new Khmer king (Jayavarman VII was the most prominent example for Stern as an art historian, and later Sihanouk as acting politician) left an urban planning or architectural imprint with new temples and “foundations of religious and social interest with water basins and hydraulic works of public utility and symbolic-cosmologic value, hospitals and pilgrims’ inns” (Stern 1951, 654). Although the value of Angkor as a ‘lost-and-re-found world civilisation’ had been visualised since the 1880s for the French universal and colonial exhibitions in the métropole to justify France’s applied mission civilisatrice in the Far East, the question of Angkor’s rise, apogee, and decline as one of the world’s greatest civilisations had not yet been reflected upon. Influenced by remarks made by his father (the Phnom Penhbased artist and museum and art school director George Groslier),29 Bernard Philippe Groslier had enormous impact on Sihanouk’s vision for Cambodia’s cultural rebirth and political survival. He formed a new perspective on the symbiosis of man and nature – that is, on the relation between typography, geography, climate, and natural resources, and culture, politics and style of governance. Referring to ‘his master’ René Grousset, the Orientalist historian famous for his great works on Asian empires and civilisations,30 Groslier made an early historiographic attempt to “realise a totally new history of Cambodia” in his forty-page article “Milieu et évolution en Asie” in the Bulletin de la Société des Études Indochinoises of 1952. It followed the approach of a “histoire événementielle”, as was introduced by the École des Annales with Fernand Braudel, and at which Groslier was “adept” (Prodromidès 1997, 254, 255). Including the latest insights on “aerial archaeology”, Groslier defined civilisation in general as “the mastery of the milieu [with] man being the instrument and the physical milieu as the material”; he praised “the Oriental civilisations for their highest achievement in the mastery of water with sophisticated rice culture techniques”.31 And, significantly, he defined the “life of Angkorian Cambodia as resting on the existence of a strong central power to

28  This remark in his section “De la culte des terres” (Abel-Rémusat 1819, 71–73; compare with Pelliot 1961),

formed the basis for myth-making not just during the French-colonial era, but also, even more strongly, during Sihanouk’s regime throughout Cambodia’s independence. 29 In his Promenades artistiques et archéologiques au Cambodge of 1924, George Groslier noticed “the implementation of the temples and the utilisation of the water in the region of Angkor” (Groslier 1924a, 113), and he returned to this topic again in his book Eaux et lumières of 1929 (Groslier 1929). 30  Compare his publications Les civilisations de l’Orient (1929–30), La Chine et son art (1951), later L’Homme et son histoire (1954), on Angkor see Grousset 1952. 31  It was in this context that Groslier mentioned Pierre Gourou’s 1947 publication La terre et l’homme en Extrême-Orient as a reference.

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Figure X.13a,b  Goloubew’s 1941 study about ancient hydraulic Angkor on the basis of aerial photographs, and his “project of hydraulic works to be executed in the Angkor region” (Source: Goloubew 1941, Figs. 11, plan 2)

condition the hydraulic system”; on the divide in Asian nations […] “between an emperor at the top of the hierarchical pyramid and the collective life of the classless masses below”; and on the supposedly Asian “notion of timelessness […], immobility in the past, [and] the ignorance of any form of progress before European contact” (Groslier 1952b, 295, 321, 325, 327). Groslier’s hypothesis about Angkor’s “absence of classes” and the “simplicity of the political structures” in static “societies” formed a colonial counterposition to Marxist (and therefore anti-colonial) theorists who discussed the dynamics between the means of productions, centralised power regulation, class struggle, and the emancipation of the masses (compare Locard 2015). In response to Max Weber’s 1922 identification of a “hydraulic bureaucracy in old China, India and Egypt” (Weber 1922, 117) and Willcocks’ 1930 publication Ancient systems of irrigation in Bengal, Karl August Wittfogel introduced the concept of Asian “hydraulic societies” in Julian Steward’s edited book Irrigation civilisations: A comparative study (Wittfogel 1955). Shortly thereafter, in William L. Thomas’ essay collection Man’s role in changing the face of the earth, Witt­ fogel also advanced the notion that “agrohydraulic civili­ sations as large-scale enterprises [were] operated by the government [over] mass labour” (Wittfogel 1956, 153–54). Although it mainly referred to contemporary Russia and China in relation to the ancient civilisations of pre-conquest America and Mesopotamia, India, and China (not mentioning Angkor at all), Wittfogel’s groundbreaking

1957 work Oriental despotism: A comparative study of total power sounds like a blueprint of Sihanouk’s political regime in an independent Cambodia. In it, he combined phrases like “hydraulic leadership”, “absence of effective constitutional checks”, great “works of defence and communication, edifices serving public and personal needs”, and “monumental architectural style” (Wittfogel 1957, 27, 101, 43, 42). His introductory comment declared: […] at the end of the era of Western colonialism and despite the introduction of parliamentary governments of various kinds, the political leaders of the Orient are still greatly attracted by a bureaucratic-managerial policy which keeps the state supremely strong, and the non-bureaucratic and private sector of society supremely weak. (Wittfogel 1957, 9)

Furthermore, Wittfogel’s identification of the “terror of hydraulic despotism” combined with “violence, total obedience and submission, and disciplinary education” (Wittfogel 1958, 137, 140, 151) anticipated the hydraulic fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 (see chapter XI). After making general remarks about Angkor’s hydraulic agriculture in his publications Angkor, hommes et pierres (1956; compare Finot 1956),32 Angkor, art and civilisation (1957), and Indochine (1961, 1966), Groslier criticised Witt­ fogel’s “materialistic viewpoint as too narrow” in his 1958 book Angkor et le Cambodge au XVIe siècle d’après les sources portugaises et espagnoles. As a starting point and with ref-

32  Here he published Goloubew’s plan of the Angkorian water systems from 1941 with an increased “system

of canals and hydraulic works which made a luxurious garden” (Groslier 1956, 28–29, 30).

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3. The Politique d’Eau: Remaking Cambodia as a hydraulic empire

erence to Charles Boxer’s discovery of original Portuguese overexploitation of the soil” (Groslier 1967, 31; compare sources and a presentation during the Twenty-Third Inter- Sedov 1967, Groslier 1979,34 in general Groslier 1973, 1974, national Congress of Orientalists in Oxford in 1954 (Boxer 1985), Groslier’s increasingly baroque narrative of the gran1957; compare Boxer 1969), Groslier set the issue of “the deur of ancient Angkor concluded with a call for its revival: hydraulic network of Angkor Thom” in relation to the first European observations made by the Portuguese Diogo do The modern techniques may without a doubt remedy Couto in 1580 (Groslier 1958, 101–07). He himself reinthis kind of error. If the prudence of the nation and of its forced the idea of Angkor “as an island in a flooded plain” leader know how to avoid these cliffs of passion [écueils and – highly influential for independent Cambodia – as a des passions], then without a doubt the Khmer country “whole country literally riddled by reservoirs […] being might find its way back to these immense and opulent made by common collective work under an exceptionally paddy fields around its great, resplendent lotus temples. centralised, […] unique power [of a benevolent, MF] god(Groslier 1967, 31). king […] as owner of the ancestral soil and intermediary between man and the divine powers” (Groslier 1958, 109, After Cambodian independence, the rising Khmer elites 112–14; compare Groslier 1960,33 Condominas 1992, 24–26). wrote articles that translated the mélange of French-coloRevising the myth of the abrupt eclipse of Angkor after the nial scientific facts and interpretative fiction on Angkor’s Siamese invasion, Groslier identified the complex, gradu- past into a vision for applied political action. Those contrially ossifying and finally paralysing organism of Angkor in butions included “Après 6 siècles d’abondon les rizières d’Angkor réfleurissent”, “Pour une ‘politique d’eau’”, and general, and the gradual “laterisation” of the vulnerable water system in particular, as the reasons for the decline of “Étude rurale: Le réseau du barai occidental” in Cambodge Angkor. His hypothetical plans of Angkor Thom’s hydrau- d’aujourd’hui of 1958 and “La politique de l’eau au Cambodge” in Kambuja 1965. Goloubew’s 1941 plans of the lic system and the whole plain of Angkor (Pl. X.7), and the combined images of the new dam project and old Angkor paddy fields to the south of the Western Baray and his viWat in reflecting interior water basins – designed as such sion of a hydraulic Cambodia led by its new princely leadonly by the French EFEO (compare Fig. IX.22a) – were later er would become a reality. In what might have appeared to reprinted in Groslier’s 1967 paper “La civilisation angkori- the attending peasants in Baray/Kompong Thom as a dienne et la maîtrise de l’eau”, in the French journal Études vine-celestial appearance à la Jayavarman VII,35 Sihanouk Cambodgiennes and in the Khmer periodical Neak Cheat arrived by helicopter to inaugurate two new water canals Niyum [The Nationalist] (Fig. X.14). There he defined “the (Fig. X.15a), greet the “enthusiastic masses”, and study the unity and agricultural power” of the historic “Khmer na- technical plans of the project with local politicians before tion” as “the essential factors to dwarf the other kingdoms flying away again (Fig. X.15b). Only a few months before of Southeast Asia”, when “a literally artificial country was the coup d’état in March 1970, the Études Cambodgiennes equally developed as the rich centres of antique civilisa- published, in their issue of July–September 1969, a visiontions along the Nile, in Mesopotamia, and the valleys of ary double-page plan in which vast areas of Cambodia the Yellow River and the Yang-tse-Kiang” (Groslier 1967, around the Tonlé Sap and along the major rivers were ear22, 23, 26; compare Delvert 1961). With a warning hint that marked for irrigation projects à la Angkorienne (Pl. X.8). ancient Angkor’s major fault was a final “deforestation and The text “Les perspectives d’aménagements hydrauliques”

33  It is rather telling that Groslier discussed the topic of an ancient Khmer civilisation with its hydraulic

network in what we may conceive as his ‘inaugural lecture’ of 1959 in front of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris as the designated new Conservateur d’Angkor (Groslier 1959). 34  Between 1963 and 1978, the Marxist Leonid Sedov approached the problem from an anti-feudal perspec­ tive. He mentioned the “direct exploitation of the peasants by the bureaucratic apparatus” of the Angkorian god-kingdom (Sedov 1967, 82; compare Sedov 1963, 1969, 1978). As may be expected, the ex-colonial Groslier and the Marxist Sedov did not quote each other. On the issue of overexploitation, compare with Groslier’s paper “La cité hydraulique angkorienne: exploitation ou surexploitation du sol?” in the BEFEO of 1979 where he summarised all of his findings and hypotheses once again (Groslier 1979, also 1985). The myth of Angkor as a hydraulic empire is, to this day, a topic that is hotly debated by scholars; compare Van Liere 1980, 1982; Moore 1989, 1995; Stott 1992, Bernon 1997, Dumarçay 1997b, Fukui 1999, Pottier 2000, Pillot 2007, Kammu 2009, and, for a wider Southeast Asian context, Boomgard 2007 (with Wolters 2007). Interestingly, the link to the Marxist Sedov and Groslier’s 1967 contribution in Études Cambodgiennes and the 1969 study about “the great water dams as project” published in the same journal was never established. However, these sources were exactly the inspirations for the Khmer Rouge few years later (see chapter XI). The whole discussion reemerged after 1990, see epilogue II. 35  This was equally reported in the journals Neak Cheat Niyum and Réalités cambodgiennes on 20 September 1968 in the ongoing series Le Cambodge s’aide lui-même: Les réalisations du Sangkum par l’image.

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X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figure X.14  B. P.Groslier’s 1967 publication merged the French-colonial making of the ­picturesque appearance of Angkor Wat into his fostered narrative of an ancient hydraulic city of Angkor (Source: Études Cambodgiennes, 11 (July—September 1967), 27)

declared once again, and for the last time in Cambodia’s short era of independence, that “the maîtrise de l’eau [was] the national number one problem since the Angkorian ­epoch”. It even surpassed previous French-colonial visions by announcing a “comité du Mékong”, which would plan the flooding of the whole Mekong River Valley in order to

create a hydraulic utopia.36 Groslier’s articles on “Pour une géographie historique du Cambodge” (Groslier 1973) and “Agriculture et religion dans l’Empire angkorien”, together with Spencer’s “La maîtrise de l’eau en Asie du Sud-Est” in a themed volume Agriculture et sociétés en Asie du Sud-Est in the French journal Études rurales in 1974 (Groslier 1974),

36  Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July–August 1969, 20–25). In 1993, when Sihanouk published his PhotosSouvenirs du Cambodge, Sangkum Reastr Niyum 1955–1969, the second volume on ‘agriculture’ summarised the progress in Cambodia’s water management in relation to what French Indochina had (not) achieved: “283 Mio m3 of retained irrigation water (1955: 140 mio m3), 438 km of dams and dykes (1955: negligible), 1,077 km of irrigation canals (1955: negligible), 9 important dams (1955: 0), and 63 grand reservoirs (1955: 10)” (Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 2, 10). In the large chapter “Politique de l’eau au Cambodge”, the results of the Siem Reap province including Angkor were listed: “171,121 m of dams [barrages], 1 mio m3 of storage water, 110,527 m irrigation canals, 54,000 hectares of irrigated rice fields, 208 reservoirs and almost 4000 wells” (32–71, here 68). In his 1972 book L’Indochine vue de Pékin: entretiens avec Jean Lacouture, Sihanouk spoke of “552 km of dykes, 1,510 km of small canals, 11,000 km of new roads and about 1,000 bridges” (Sihanouk 1972, 76).

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4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figures X.15a,b  Sihanouk’s mission to convert Cambodia into a hydraulic country, as depicted in a series of photographs during his visit to Kompong Thom’s new canal system (Source: ­Réalités Cambodgiennes, 616 (20 September 1968), supplements A and B)

must have, mixed with Sedov’s earlier Marxist contributions (Sedov 1963, 1968, 1969), resounded well with the later extremist ideology of the so-called Khmer Rouge (see chapter XI). One year before his death, Groslier came back

to his favorite topic in the one-page summary on Southeast Asia, entitled “Archéologie d’un empire agricole: La cité hydraulique angkorienne” and published in Le Grand Atlas de l’Archéologie (Groslier 1985).

4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor All Khmer artistic creation is a prayer, of mystic expression. […] Every sculpture, every Khmer building is above all of symbolic value, even above its plastic value, whereas in Occidental aesthetics beauty may be expressed through the search of the pure plastic quality outside all symbolic ideas. […] If one considers the actual status [in the arts in Cambodia, MF] then the deca­ dence began in the XIVth century and it seems to have continued to this day. Efforts have been made to recover [these arts, MF] by bringing dispersed artists together. Their goal is to connect with tradition. These artists want to continue to work with the same instruments and in the same spirit as the old Khmers. They absolutely reject what is outside of tradition. The final result is hardly satisfactory because they start from the earliest basics [données primitives] and they are already happy with minor variations. But these efforts suffer from a shortness of breath and of vitality that characterises an old and non-degenerated art. Here is the misunderstanding. It is not the question here to be satisfied with the imitation of existing forms through their progressively rough stylisation. And should the Khmer continue to live its proper life by voluntarily ignoring all the conditions of progress and modern civilisation? A non-adaptation signi­ fies, on the contrary, a certain death of culture. We need a will for adaptation and predominantly for creation; only creation is the essential condition to develop art. […] The Khmer culture can reform itself by combining existing with Occidental culture in all its vitality. [italics MF] (Vann 1949, 10—12) —Vann Molyvann, Essai sur la culture Khmère (1949)

When Vann Molyvann (born in 1926 in Ream, Kampot Province; died in 2017) wrote these above-quoted lines in 1949, he was a twenty-three-year-old architecture student at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and his

homeland, Cambodia, was still (or again, after the withdrawal of the Japanese in 1945) occupied by the French. Before his return to independent Cambodia in 1956, with his diploma in hand, he had married the daughter of the 181

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Angkor conservator Henri Marchal.37 During those years, he had also been briefly associated with the radical Khmer Student Association (which would form the future Khmer Rouge) in the Maison des Étudiants de l’Indochine at the Cité Universitaire in Paris (see Fig. X.21a). This 1949 text reveals his early anti-colonial or nationalist sympathies and a deep, almost essentialist, though creative, reverence for the Angkorian masters which he kept throughout his life.38 Certainly, French-colonial research had already prepared the reputation of the ancient Khmer kings like Surya­ varman II and Jayavarman VII for Cambodia’s postcolonial mindset, and it still labelled principle temples like Angkor Wat or the Bayon as “masterpieces of Khmer purity” [chef d’œuvre purement khmer] that had been emancipated from ‘Western’, in this case early Indian, influences (Filliozat 1960). Norodom Sihanouk, found in Vann a state and star architect for Cambodia’s era of independence. But contrary

to the French-colonial paradigm of cultural purity Vann sought to fuse Western, in this case, US-European, architectural and technological trends with a modern interpretation of Angkor’s built legacy.39 Generally speaking, his vision of an architectural “will for an adaptation and creation” – called La nouvelle architecture khmère in the Nokor Khmer journal of 1969 (Vann 1969) – drew from (a) the Angkorian spiritual, symbolic, and monumental legacy; (b) the new inspiration of wooden pagoda and vernacular-traditional house architecture; and (c) the fruits of “modern, Occidental civilisation” (Vann 1949, 11) in the International Style – that is, in streamlined, rationalist buildings using the building technology of reinforced concrete. Articles like “Nouvelles constructions, nouvelles styles” published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 195840 attempted to play the French-colonial column-and-stucco “1900 style” of Phnom Penh’s Central Post Office (Fig. X.16a) against the 1956

37  Marchal reflected on the question of “The modern Khmer art” in relation to the legacy of ancient Angkor. In an article from 1913 he criticised the fact that “the art of Cambodia is represented for the whole world by Angkor and the present is totally neglected or ignored”. And he concluded: “Turning towards the past, restoring the ruins, admiring dead artists is fine, but wouldn’t it be much better to search for what still persists in the actual race [of the Khmer] and to occupy oneself with aiding in their renaissance?” (Marchal 1913, 75). In 1960, during Cambodia’s independence, he concluded on the same topic in a similar manner to his son-inlaw, Vann Molyvann, who was producing iconic Cambodian architecture at the same time: “One can say that a modern art in Cambodia knows how to conserve a certain number of elements and formulas which made the glory of the ornamentation during the epoch of Angkor. […] The past of the Khmer people, the patrimoine of a unique art of beauty, is still alive for the modern Cambodian” (Marchal 1960, 19; compare with Giteau 1971b on traditional Khmer housing in modern times). 38  Interestingly, Vann’s approach defended a quite static concept of Khmer handicraft à la Angkorienne, which was echoed in French-colonial times during George Groslier’s role as director of the Service des Arts cambodgiens (compare with his presentation of Khmer handicraft during the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, chapter VIII): “Whatever may be the form, Khmer handicraft is nonetheless linked closely with Angkorian traditions, and displays the identical fertility of invention, manual dexterity, and a tendency to systematic stylisation. As a hallmark of the period, the motifs employed on monuments built in ancient times appear today in modern bas-reliefs. And it is this rare tendency to perpetuate aesthetic conventions, which stood the test of time and invests Khmer art with its peculiar cachet and profound originality. […] Cambodia’s artistic inheritance is hedged around, therefore, with formulae and technical restrictions, which are absolutely unalterable, and the rôle [sic] of the artist, or artisan is merely to apply, or to observe them. Furthermore, there must be no suspicions of any concession in the fashion in which this is done, and innovations of any sort must be based in impeccable antecedents” [italics MF] (Vann 1967, 96, 97; compare Roy 1965, Ministère de l’Information 1962, 200–203). 39  Vann was chief architect for state buildings and head of the Urban Planning and Housing Department of the Ministry of Public Works in Phnom Penh (1956–62), Secretary of State at the Ministry of Public Works (1962–64), founding rector of the Royal University of Fine Arts (1965–67), inspector of ancient Khmer monuments (1965–67), minister for national education and fine arts (1967–1969), minister of state to the head of state for youth, students and teaching staff (1969–70), and finally, senior expert to the Ministry of Public Works (1970–71) when he left Cambodia in 1971. Until 1979 he worked as a graduate lecturer at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and as consultant for international agencies; and later as advisor for the UN Centre for Human Settlements worldwide (1979–93), as well as senior advisor to the Cambodian government (1991–93). Upon his return to Cambodia in 1993, he was appointed, again by Norodom Sihan­ouk, the re-elected king (see chapter XII and epilogue II), as minister of state for culture and fine arts, territorial management, urban planning and construction (1993–98), president and executive director of the APSARA Authority at Angkor/Siem Reap (1995–2001) and supreme privy counsellor to Sihanouk in 2002 (Sangkum, 19 (February 1967), 33; compare with Ross/Collins 2006, 200–33, here 230–31; and Ross 2015, also Ly/Muan 2001, 3–29, Knox 2013). The author would like to thank posthumously Vann Molyvann and his wife Trudy for permitting the author to conduct a long interview in their house in Phnom Penh in March 2010. 40  The article without explicit author was published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 6 (June 1958), 7–13.

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4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figures X.16a—c  Old (French-colonial) architecture against new (postcolonial) architecture (above), and Vann Molyvann’s ephemeral wooden structure for the 2,500-year anniversary of the Buddhist Era (below), as published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 1958 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, June 1958, 8, 9)

­ ational Bank of Cambodia,41 which was identified as “the N first building in new Cambodia of a certain importance [with] a facade recalling the grand classical Khmer decorative themes” (Fig. X.16b). In addition, the rationalist Royal Faculty of Medicine (designed by the French architects Leroy-Mondet) was confronted with an (ephemeral) “traditional-style wood construction” by Vann Molyvann for the International Festival of the 2,500th birthday of Lord Buddha in 1957 (Fig. X.16c). At this festival, Sihanouk propagated his “politics of neutrality in conformity with Buddhism as a religion of solidarity, fraternity and equality” (Sihanouk 1957, 7). Reflecting on the “profound transformations […] after Cambodia’s entry in a new epoch af-

ter 1953”, the 1958 article “Transformation du mode de vie traditionnel” published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui voted against an attested “superposition of the traditional by the modern” and for a “synthèse Orient-Occident” (Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, December 1958; as quoted on Ly/Muan 2001, xiii–xvii, here xiii, xvii). Perhaps a postcolonial reflex, it seemed that the first non-ephemeral architectural comments in Cambodia’s new/ old capital had a decidedly Angkorian decorative attitude and were deliberately placed to act as foils for the massive French-colonial city landmarks. This was done in a manner similar to the former visual confrontation between the enormous French-colonial cathedral designed by Maurice Mas-

41  Ironically, this building had been planned as the French-colonial Institut national des missions by Henri Chastel and Maurice Masson.

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Figures X.17a—c  New-old versus old-new in Phnom Penh Cambodia’s postcolonial Angko­ rian revivalism in architecture in relation to French-colonial legacy (Source: © Charles Meyer ­archive, Paris; Sihanouk 1991, 620)

son (1952/55, later destroyed by the Khmer Rouge), and the historic Wat Phnom (Fig. X.17a, above left).42 The “Cakya Muni Chetiya”, a stupa for Buddhist relics and a religious reference point, broke the monumental vista which stretched towards the secular landmark of the French-colo-

nial train station (Fig. X.17b, below). However, also French-colonial interventions à la Angkorienne were continued after their transcultural representations between France and the Cambodian capital.43 More than fifty years later, Vann Molyvann’s first permanent construction in Phnom

42  It was itself replicated at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 (compare chapter V, Fig. V.4a). 43  Before 1900 the urban extension (see Fig. V.3c, made by Daniel Fabre who was also responsible for the

Angkor pavilion during the Paris 1889 Universal Exhibition, see chapter IV) radiated from Wat Phnom (compare Fig. V.3a, itself represented in the Paris 1900 Universal Exhibition, see Fig. V.2b) over the new canal in the form of an Angkor-style bridge complete with concrete lions and naga snakes (compare Fig. V.3b). This version was itself replicated during the 1906 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille (compare Fig. V.14b).

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4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figure X.18  Plan of the Phnom Penh International Exhibition of 1955 (Source: © National ­Archive of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

Penh of 1957 was a high-rising naga snake sculpture in a modernised version that now dominated the traffic circle in front of the Monivong Bridge (Fig. X.17c, above right).44 At the other end of the spectrum, the divide between the old-fashioned Orientalist-colonial style, in the vein of the Angkor pavilions, and a modernist (self-)representation of Cambodia’s new status as an independent country was also echoed in the international exhibitions that continued to be popular. As one of the first cultural manifestations of an independent Cambodia, the Exposition Internationale de Phnom Penh opened its gates in November 1955 along Avenue Maréchal Joffre to the west of and around Wat Phnom. Under its commissaire général, Hem Chiam Reun, and its director of the managing consortium, Hem Khanh, it was strategically scheduled to open shortly after the Water Festival and the coronation ceremony of Queen Kossamak (after Sihanouk’s abdication). According to the internal report written in order to justify its disastrous costs by the conseiller of the event, Pierre Jean Laspeyres, the private (supposedly state-sponsored) exhibition was

conceived “to show to the whole world and the Khmer themselves the grandeur of the Kingdom” (Numéro spécial 1956, 27–67, here 35; compare Muan 1998). His pamphlet for the 1955 Exhibition echoed the state mandate to “offer the entire world a demonstration of the national patrimony” (Laspeyres 1955; discussed in Muan 2001, 141–48, here 143). The event’s architecte en chef, Seng Suntheng, fresh from the Parisian École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs (Ross/ Collins 2006, 39), planned a general layout (Fig. X.18) where the Asian nations Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, China and Japan, and – in a ‘back-translated’ version from universal exhibitions in Europe – now the Occidental nations, including France, Holland, and the United States, placed their installations. Seng also placed Cambodia’s four pavilions devoted to natural, technological, social, and cultural resources45, around the hill slope of the monastery hill (including a temporary zoo) in buildings that used the modernist-internationalist architectural vocabulary (Figs. X.19a–c). In its first issue of 1955 the journal Free World (compare Muan

44  Different sources name Sung Suntheng as the author. 45  Compare the similar thematical representation of Cambodge inside the 1922 and 1931 replicas of Angkor

Wat in Marseille and Paris, see chapters VI and VII.

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X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figures X.19a—c  The Cambodian exhibition pavilions of the Phnom Penh International Exhibition of 1955 (Source: © National Archive of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

Figures X.20a—c  Screenshots of a French documentary about the Phnom Penh International Exhibition of 1955 (Source: © Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris/YouTube 2015)

Figures X.21a,b The Maison des Étudiants de l’Indochine from 1930 at the Parisian Cité Universitaire and the Pavillon du Cambodge from 1957 (Source: Pouvourville 1932, 389; Michael Falser 2012)

2001, 146) as well as French television (Figs. X.20a–c) reported on Cambodia’s main pavilion. It still reflected a certain French-colonial representation mode from universal and colonial exhibitions between 1878 to 1937, including cast Naga snake sculptures to ‘authentic artisans’ on dis186

play (compare, above others, with Figs. VII.46 or VIII.33a). This trend to embellish modernist architecture with cast Angkor-styled decor continued, when the old Maison des Étudiants de l’Indochine at the Parisian Cité Universitaire (built around 1930 by the architects Pierre Martin and

4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figure X.22  The Cambodian stand at the 1958 Osaka Fair/Japan, as depicted in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui of 1959 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 4—5 (April-May 1959), 9)

Maurice Vieu; see Cité universitaire 1928) was complement­ ed with the new Pavillon du Cambodge (donated by the Cambodian government in 1950, built by the French architect Alfred Audoul and inaugurated in 1957 after the country’s independence), with casts of the guardian monkeys of Banteay Srei (Figs. X.21a,b). Contrary to Vann’s modern stands for Cambodia, which were erected during the 1958 Osaka Fair (Fig. X.22), at the Brussels Universal Exhibition held in the same year the pavilion followed the French-colonial archaeological representation mode à la Angkorienne. With Poc Thien, chargé d’Affaires at the Cambodian Embassy in Paris acting as com­ missaire général du Cambodge, his country represented itself, as presaged by the model photography in the publication Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in February 1958 (Fig. X.23a), with “a faithful reproduction of the Prasat Preah Damrei, a jewel of tenth-century Khmer art”, and with a cultural side programme of dance and folklore. However, the interior exhibition space presented not only “artisanal productions and a panorama of economic and agricultural activities” but also “plans and photos of the latest great projects [including harbours and airports, MF], which showed Cambodia’s resolute will to look into the future while at the same time remaining attached to its essential ancestral traditions” (Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (February 1958), 6). The pavilion itself was isolated at the northeastern edge of

the exhibition area next to Japan, the Philippines, and Iran (Pl. X.9a), and was built by the French (!) architects A. Bou­ dart and W. Sefton (Commissariat général 1960, vol. 4, 138; Commissariat général 1958, vol. 9, 1, 90). In the general report of the 1958 Exhibition this “pre-Angkorian library” was mentioned: “The Cambodian participation is distinguishable from other countries – except Thailand and the Philippines – through a kind of silent dispraise [mépris tranquille] of [modern] technology which the Cambodians use as much as the others but which they seem not to have yet deified” (Commissariat général 1961, vol. 3, 171–72, here 172). Interestingly, the folder from the Commissariat général du Cambodge told a different story. Here, the anony­ mous author – no architect was mentioned – admitted that the given structure was “not an archaeological reconstitution, but an artistic creation, […] not a pastiche or a copy,46 but a synthesis of the Angkorian classical style […] evoking a small princely abode or pilgrim’s inn” which showed the major principles of Khmer monuments (Pl. X.9b; Figs. X.23b,c). Additionally, it aimed “to incite the tourist to go to the real site in order to better appreciate an œuvre as important as Chartres, Aix-la-Chapelle, or Seville”. Together with the glass display boxes inside the pavilion which contained “handicraft of a millennia-old experience”, the pavilion’s “significance for the contemporary world” was praised – one might even say frozen to immobility in an old-­

46  Compare with the similar discussion about the first Angkor-Wat-like pagoda for the Universal Exhibition

of 1889 in Paris (chapter IV, compare Fig. IV.9).

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Figures X.23a—c The Pavillon du Cambodge at the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1958; a photograph of the model published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 1958; photographs of the original as published in the little brochure Le Cambodge à l’Exposition universelle de Bruxelles 1958 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (February 1958), 6; Commissariat général du Cambodge 1958, n.p.)

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Figures X.24a,b  Tan Veut’s funerary stupa for King Suramarit, based on the model of the stupa for Norodom king and queen, with a reference to the old post-Angkorian capital of Oudong (Source: Postcard/© Charles Meyer archive, Paris; Kambuja, 2 (15 May 1965), 73)

fashioned colonial attitude – for its “wisdom from one of humanity’s oldest religious sources, Buddhism and Brahmanism” (Commissariat général du Cambodge 1958, n.p.). Expressing ancestral traditions and a postcolonial claim of national continuity through the re-presentation of (post)Angkorian styles became especially relevant when King Suramarit died in April 1960. It was in this context that the gifted master builder Tan Veut from Battambang

was commissioned by Sihanouk to design his father’s funerary stupa after the examples of those used for King Norodom (died 1904) and his wife (Fig. X.24a) on the same palace grounds. These had been built – as Vann Molyvann explained in the article “Art et culture: Le renouveau des arts khmers”, published in the journal Kambuja in 1965 (Vann 1965) – in the tradition of the stupas of the post-Ang­ korian capital of Oudong (Fig. X.24b). The ceremony took 189

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figure X.25  Two pages from Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (January 1964) with a series of photographs showing the “Burying of the royal ashes” inside the Phnom Penh Palace grounds (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 1 (January 1961), 13—14)

place in January 1961 and was attended by all kinds of family, state, military and ethnic representatives, as well as by the Royal Khmer Socialist Youth and the Corps de Ballet Royal. According to the double-page article “L’enfouissement des cendres royales”, published in January 1961, the reliquary of Sihanouk’s late daughter Princess Kantha Bopha (1948–52) was also placed in a smaller stupa designed by Tan Veut “in the style of the Prasat of Banteay Srei” (Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 1 (January 1961), 14–15; com­pare Ross/ Collins 2006, 72–74) (Fig. X.25, Pl. X.10a,b). Tan Veut continued to design Angkor-style stupas throughout the 1960s (Figs. X.26a–c) and participated in the Independence Memorial of 1962, the authorship of which is disput-

ed to this day (see below).47 Interestingly, his small burial stupa might have provided the model for a small-scale replica that was placed in the open courtyard of the reception room (Fig. X.27a) inside Sihanouk’s super-modern 1966 State Palace Compound. Having reached the nearby audience salon, another model of Angkor Wat, in this case in form of a two-dimensional lacquer panel, would impress Sihanouk’s state guests (Fig. X.27b). This new centre of power was criticised by Charles Meyer as “the new Chamcar Mon society” (Meyer 1971, 14).48 It was around 1960 that Vann Molyvann’s creative genius reached its first apex and Angkor as an obligatory stylistic reference was weakened (Fig. X.28). Inaugurated in No-

47  The author would like to thank Tan Veut’s son Voeuth Savann for giving a tour of his father’s work in February 2011 around Battambang at Wat Slaket, Wat Sdei, and Vat BoVeal. The author would also like to thank him for granting his permission to reproduce a selection of architectural drawings, so far totally unknown in scientific research on the topic. 48 Interestingly, the journal Kambuja labelled this replica as a (stylistically unlikely) miniature of the Independence Memorial itself. See: Kambuja, 52 (July 1969), 119

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Figures X.26a—c  Tan Veut’s plans for Angkor-styled stupas in the 1950s and 1960s (Source: Tan Veut family archive, Battambang)

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Figure X.27a  Small-scale Angkor-styled stupa model as fountain inside Sihanouk’s reception courtyard of the new State Palace Compound (here a visit of the South Vietnamese delegation), as depicted in Kambuja in 1969 (Source: Kambuja, 52 (July 1969), 119)

Figure X.27b  Sihanouk’s audience salon inside his Royal Palace Compound, decorated with a giant Angkor Wat lacquer panel; here during the visit of Takeo Miki in 1966, later prime minister of Japan, as depicted in Kambuja in 1966 (Source: Kambuja, 21 (15 December 1966), 31)

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Figure X.28  Vann Molyvann and Tan Veut (?) debating at a construction site; photograph from Charles Meyer’s personal archive in Paris (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

vember 1961 during the Sixth Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists,49 the partly US-financed Chaktomuk Conference Hall was “one of Vann Molyvann’s masterpieces, both functional and lyrical” (Ross/Collins 2006, 15). It translated the pagoda style of the neighbouring Royal Palace into a new form consisting of a triangulated fanlike concrete structure with a cross-beamed glass facade oriented towards the waterfront (Fig. X.29). In the same context his Sangkum Reastr Niyum Exhibition Hall was opened (Pl. X.11). As the prototype for similar exhibition halls created for Sihanouk’s People’s Socialist Community in all the Cambodian provinces, it served, as the Cambodge d’aujourd’hui declared in 1961, two goals: “On the one hand to let the population follow the progress of national activity in all the domains through constantly updated graphics and photographs. On the other hand, to give foreign visitors such as [political] personalities, observers, and journalists the ability to find a clear and precise picture of the present situation of Cambodia’s economic and social agen­

da”.50 Certainly the most daring project from an urbanist­architectural and social point of view was the Bassac River­ front project (Fig. X.30). It was planned under Vladimir Bodiansky (a Russian-French architect, colleague of Le Cor­busier and CIAM member, teacher of the Parisian Beaux-Arts School during Vann’s formation and construction expert at Cambodia’s Ministry of Public Works), Gérald Hanning (mass housing urbanist, chief town planner at Algiers, and UN technical advisor for Cambodia), Lu Ban Hap (Cambodian graduate returned from the Parisian École spéciale d’Architecture in 1959 and director of Phnom Penh’s Municipal Town Planning and Housing Department), and Vann Molyvann (head of the Urban Planning and Housing Department of the Ministry of Public Works) (Ross/Collins 2006, 94, 95, 36–37, 16–27; compare Vann 2001, 3–14). The Bassak Riverfront social housing project broke with all traditional housing and urban patterns previously known in Cambodia and may be judged retrospectively as

49  “La VIe Conférence de l’Association mondiale des Bouddhistes”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, special

number, (November–December 1961), 2–8, here 2.

50 “L’exposition permanente des réalisations du Sangkum”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, special number,

(November–Decem­ber 1961), 22–23; compare Ross/Collins 2006, 25.

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Figure X.29  Chaktomuk Conference Hall of 1961 by Vann Molyvann (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

Figure X.30  Bassac Riverfront project by Vann Molyvann, to the left in the background the Independence Memorial is shown (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

one of the least successful of all the urbanist projects during Cambodia’s period of independence.51 However, another structure located at an almost perpendicular axis stands out at the crossroads of the Norodom and Sihanouk Boulevards in the new-old capital Phnom Penh as Cambodia’s most important modern-day interpretation of Angkor sty-

listic grandeur – the Independence Memorial with its g­ arden plan and naga fountain. The history of this unique memorial is particularly ambiguous as it was inaugurated only on 9 November 1962, nine years after Cambodia’s independence in 1953. This was most probably due to static problems with the compli-

51  Compare with the section on “urbanism” in the 1961 publication Le Cambodge s’aide lui-même of the Ministère de l’Information; reprinted in Ly/Muan 2001, 58–62.

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cated subsoil structure (which contained an old bridge underneath). The earliest blueprints signed in January 1957 identify Du Ngoc Anh from Saigon and Ing Kieth as Ingénieur des ponts et chaussées for the Cambodian government. Vann Molyvann’s involvement as the architect responsible for public monuments began directly after his return from Paris in early 1957; Seng Suntheng and U Som Ol, architects of the Royal Palace, are also mentioned. Tan Veut – his initial drawing for the building was located for the first time for this research in 2011, Fig. X.31a – and Chieng Suon are listed as the sculptors of the decorative skin for the structure. This indicates that joint efforts between designers, engineers, sculptors, and builders had already begun to materialise in 1959 (Ross 2003; compare Ross/Collins 2006, 88–89).52 Ironically, this was quite similar to the French-colonial strategies used to simulate Ang­ kor’s stone temples in the temporary exhibitions that were held in France where ephemeral hybrids or replicas constructed out of inner wooden scaffoldings and external lightweight fibre mouldings [staff] were the norm; furthermore, the long-term interpretation for Phnom Penh was, like its counterparts in the French universal and colonial Exhibitions, not made of solid stone (Fig. X.31b). The rampiled, internally reinforced concrete structure acted as a stepped platform and was clad with external panels of grey Chinese marble containing “decorative patterns (Khmer: kbach) from Banteay Srei” (Vann 2001, 2253; compare with Kantha Bopha’s burial stupa of 1961), as were the open lower walls and the five-stepped tiers containing decorative naga snakes (Pl. X.12a–d). Finally, the project was finished with crushed marble to give the monument the dark-red colour of the ninth-century temple of Banteay Srei (according to Sihanouk’s instruction). Despite this indication its dominantly placed single structure is often compared with the uppermost tower of the ninth-century mountain temple of Bakong in Rolous near Angkor (compare Fig. IX.61b). In March 2010, Vann Molyvann explained in an interview with the writing author that the whole symmetric composition of the cubic and stepped structure in the centre of a roundabout with radia­ting streets (to the north towards Figure X.31a  Plan and elevation drawing by Tan Veut for Phnom Penh’s Independence Memorial (Source: © Tan Veut’s personal archive, Battambang)

52  The two-page report “Grands chantiers à Phnom-Penh” in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 3–4 (March–April 1959) provided illustrations of the whole monument entirely built up and covered with a wooden scaffolding. 53  In an interview given in August 2004 with the Phnom Penh-based Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture, Vann stated that he “took his collaborators to Banteay Srei to look at the kbach (ornaments)”. Tan Veut (in other sources: Toeung Veuth) was made the head sculptor of the twenty sculptors commissioned to place the moulded ornaments in a precisely prescribed manner.

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Figure X.31b  The Independence Memorial depicted in a photograph, today stored at the Charles Meyer archive, Paris (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

Figures X.32a,b  The Independence Memorial during Sihanouk’s stately ceremonies, as published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 1962 and 1964 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 48—51 (September—December 1962), 22; 72 (November—December 1964), 12)

Wat Phnom as the founding site of the city) was inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. When Sihanouk inaugurated the structure on 9 November 1962 (Fig. X.32a) he did not mention the architects and artists involved in the project, nor did he explain the delays or the stylistic choices. Receiving the international corps diplomatique, passing the military troops with his lieutenant-général Lon Nol (who 196

would replace Sihanouk in 1970), and later visiting the exhibition halls of the Sangkum achievements, Sihanouk’s speech focused instead on the history of Cambodia’s independence by concluding: “We have the privilege and the joy of solemnly inaugurating the commemorative monument of our rediscovered independence, and we respectfully dedicate it to the memory of all our national heroes

4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figure X.33  The National Sports Complex by Vann Molyvann, in a photograph after 1964 from the Charles Meyer archive, Paris (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

who made their highest sacrifice for the independence, liberty, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and peace of Cambodia”.54 In the following years, the Independence Memorial à la Angkorienne would become an annual stage for Sihanouk’s political theatre, for example, in 1964 when “delegations from all provinces of the kingdom” 55 drove around the monument (Fig. X.32b); when the monument was regularly depicted on the covers of S­ ihanouk’s numerous self-­ glorifying journals such as Le Sangkum in September 1967; or in November 1969, when Sihanouk – already strangely absent in his role as god-king-politician in front of the present Buddhist monks – lit the commemorative flame of Cambodia’s independence for the last time before the coup d’état a few months later, and balloons in the colours of the national flag ascended towards the sky (Pl. X.13). However, if there is one structure that helped to “make Phnom Penh a capital of comparable value to [the ancient Angkorian capital of ] Angkor Thom” (Photo-souvenirs 1993b, vol. 6, 5; compare Brissé 1965), or that could be judged along with the city’s modern-day projects as a veritable “Angkorian challenge” (Ross/Collins 2006, 208, 210– 29; compare Nelson 2017), then it is surely the Complexe sportif national (Fig. X.33). Inaugurated on 12 November

1964 during the eleventh anniversary of independence, it was conceived by Vann Molyvann, together with Um Samuth (a former student at the École nationale supérieure des Arts appliqués in Paris and then an employé at Vann’s Public Works Department), Gérald Hanning, the Parisian architects Claude Duchemin and Jean-Claude Morin, Vla­ dimir Bodiansky and other engineers, and the contractor Société française d’Entreprise de dragage et de travaux publics. Originally, it was scheduled to be built for the first Southeast Asian Games in 1963, which finally took place in Jakarta, and the World Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), an ideological alternative to the classical Olympics. Its forty-hectare site comprised three sports facilities, including an indoor arena and open-air stadium to accommodate almost eighty thousand spectators, water sports facilities, and the ‘Olympic village’, which was part of the Bassac Riverfront project. There is probably no other contribution that can provide more insight into the personal motivations of the architect and the cultural-political mise en valeur of the project than the fourteen-page article “La nouvelle architecture khmère: Le complexe sportif national”. It was published – retrospectively – in 1969 for the first issue of the journal Nokor Khmer: Revue trimestrielle and

54 “9e anniversaire de l’Indépendence”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 48–51 (September–December 1962), 22–25, here 25. 55  “Célébration du XIe anniversaire de l’Indépendence”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 72 (November–Decem­ ber 1964), 10–12.

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edited by the Sangkum Reastr Niyum under its director Norodom Sihanouk and rédacteur en chef Charles Meyer. The texts proudly introduced the “grand modern centre for both Olympic meetings and popular manifestations, [which] were both inscribed in the Angkorian tradition and responded to the needs of the new Cambodia” (Vann 1969, 35). After a short biography, Vann Molyvann was interviewed to explain his artistic credo and his sources of inspiration for the project. On the question of how he had managed, with his Parisian Beaux-Arts studies, to synthesise Occidental styles with the great traditions of the Angkorian builders [bâtisseurs angkoriens], Vann responded – under the headline “À l’école des maîtres angkoriens” – with what sounded like a reiteration of his above-mentioned text of 1949 and in line with what he had already proposed in his role as the minister for National Education and Fine Arts in an 1966 article as the “Khmerisation of public instruction” (Vann 1966) – Angkor (Wat)’s ‘architectural affordance quality and actionable capacity’ (see introduction) seemed well alive: My return to Cambodia in 1956 was a moving rediscovery of our monuments of the past, which I saw in a totally new light. The easiest decision might have been to content myself with the excellent Beaux-Arts masters and to follow this path. But this choice wouldn’t have matched with the national course that my country had taken to affirm its Khmer identity. So it was totally natural for me to learn with fervour from the Angkorian masters [C’est donc tout naturellement, puis avec ferveur, que je me suis mis à l’école des maîtres angkoriens]. In fact, upon my return I found my native country full of an unseen creative verve to make away with the sequels of a long period of decline. Everybody knew that we had to return to the sources and profound motivations that had initially created this country, and that Cambodia had, like every nation with an old culture, to completely recover and reaffirm its proper personality. All actual cultural movement, of which architecture is an important part, turns on this basic idea. But certainly that does not mean to simply reproduce the artistic creations of the Angkorian past, but to let oneself be inspired by them, and to transport and adapt them to the new realities. […] As we transformed the influences of ancient India into a new original Khmer art […] we have now, after the independence of 1953, to synthesise, to khmerise [sic] the borrowings [emprunt] from the Occi­ dent in order not to wither, but to feel really integrated in our own civilisation [italics MF] (Vann 1969, 36, 37)

On the question of his best architectural realisations and the role of the state, Vann mentioned the National Sports Complex as the best (Beaux-Arts-related?) example of “Ang­ korian builders’ rigid and ‘classic’ composition schemes of style and the orientation towards the cardinal axes”, the “association of the monuments with surfaces of water”, and the claim for a grandeur of mere scale: 198

I think the most characteristic œuvre of a Cambodian architectural renaissance is the National Sports Complex which is inspired by the grand traditional principles following in its size the scale of the great Angkorian ensembles, but in its construction the latest techniques. […] Our chef d’État, Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, personally encourages any artistic, especially architectural creation. Additionally the national regime of the Sangkum gives the architects a maximum for their research and work, [including] new faculties of architecture and construction. […] The kings of Angkor and their architects built for the country and its people without caring to give their art a signification to pass the Khmer frontiers. The current Cambodian monarchy has no other ambitions than to give back our country a bit of its past splendeur. [italics MF] (Vann 1969, 37)

Neither before nor after this publication – printed on four double pages – was the close relationship between the Ang­ korian built legacy and the New Khmer Architecture established more explicitly during Cambodia’s independence. First, Vann juxtaposed a schematic topographical section and an overall photograph of Angkor Wat with his sports complex in order to exemplify the relationship between architectural dominants, the rhythm of negative (water) and positive (earthen) volumina, and the interplay between large sunlit and narrow dark-intimate spaces (Pl. X.14). On the next pages, he compared (a) the characteristic staircase composition at Angkor (the temple of Pre Rup of the tenth century) with the stadium’s inner gallery and outer public accesses (Fig. X.34); (b) the inner composition of the modern concrete water basins under the open staircases with those of Angkor’s royal palace (Phimeanakas) and its northern water tank; and (c) the modern interplay of rough concrete surfaces and their traces of the casing [béton brut du coffrage] with the contrast of the chiselled Ang­korian temple walls’ framing decorations and blank stone surfaces. Furthermore, no other sample of New Khmer Architecture was circulated more widely in international profession­ al journals. In the French context, the Cahiers du centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment published the twelvepage report “Équipe du complexe olympique de PhnomPenh: Forum de la ville de Phnom-Penh, Cambodge” in its April 1965 issue (Pl. X.15a). By praising three characteristics of the projects: (a) the “general conception in relation to the climatic conditions, cost-saving measures and the architectural reference to the plastic traditions of the epochs of Angkor”, (b) “the speed of its execution” in less than two years, and (c) “the spirit of the [interdisciplinary] team”, Bodiansky and Hanning explained the Angkorian nexus of the project to a professional Western readership. Bodiansky focused on the political and social aspect of this “Forum of the city of Phnom Penh”, which relates to our understanding of Sihanouk’s new architectural ensembles as a stage to propagate his civilising vision in word and gesture. It “not only assigned to national and international

4. New Khmer Architecture: In the name of Angkor

Figure X.34  The design of the National Sports Complex in relation to Angkorian temples, as explained in a 1969 edition of the Cambodian journal Nokor Khmer (Source: Nokor Khmer 1969, 40—41)

sport competitions, but also to all kinds of popular mani- tradition’ was certain­ly not limited to emerging postcolonial festations and reunions, national and religious festivities, and ‘developing countries’ in Africa, Asia, and the Americas processions and military parades, […] conferences, exhibi- and their search for cultural identity. On the same theme, an tions and the reception of foreign guests […] in order to issue on “sports and leisure” in the French journal Architecprimarily assure the direct audio-visual contacts between ture d’aujourd’hui, where Vann and Bodiansky reported on the Chef d’État, his adjuncts and the Khmer people” (Équipe the project (Vann/Bodiansky 1964), a report about the 1964 1965, 2). His colleague, Gérald Hanning, went even further Olympic complex in Tokyo by Kenzo Tange concluded with into the Angkor-related myth-making of the project: in a a comparable word choice – and with similar black-andveritable “amphibian country” (compare with our analysis white illustrations of the concrete structures – about the of the ongoing topos of hydraulic Angkor and aquatic “Gymnase et tour signal du parc Olympique Komazawa” by Cambodia), the “act of demiurge to divide the land and the architect Yoshinobu Ashihara (Fig. X.36): water – with the earthworks being the indefatigable task of the Khmer peasants – had, in its masterly realisation, conIt is interesting to underline that the contemporary exstituted the monumental ancient establishment of Angkor”. pression of the building reflects, by the curves made by This project, which supposedly used traditional oxcarts our new techniques, the great lines of our traditional arà la Angkorienne (compare Pl. EpII.19a) to initiate the chitecture. However, we have not tried to come back exgroundwork operations before the reinforced concrete actly to the typical Japanese forms; our criteria had been structures were built (Figs. X.35a,b), “was for the people of uniquely based on the respect for the functional condithe Cambodian art scene the emotional realisation of their tions and the application of new techniques.56 capacities as modern creators, and, for the UN experts of technical assistance, a valuable experience in developing In the above-mentioned 1969 issue of Nokor Khmer, Vann countries where progress was not a simple supply of Occi- Molyvann explained his Angkor-inspired architectural dental technique but a synthesis of modern techniques and concept in a manner similar to that used by the Ministère the resources of the original culture” (Équipe 1965, 2). de l’Information to propagate it from the political side. In However, the justification of modern architecture with new the 1964 leaflet Le complexe sportif national: Dans la grande materials and new technology on the basis of a ‘national tradition angkorienne (here the inauguration was dated 56  “Jeux olympiques de Tokyo 1964 et les constructions sportives”, in: Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 116/1964, 5–19, here 16.

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Figures X.35a,b  The National Sports Complex as depicted in the international French journal Cahiers du centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment in 1965  working with oxcarts (left) and reinforced concrete (right) (Source: Cahiers du centre scientifique 1965, 3, 7)

Figure X.36  The Tokyo Olympics complex of 1964, as published in Architecture aujourd’hui of 1964 (Source: Architecture aujourd’hui, 116 (1964), 16)

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Figures X.37a,b  The 1964 leaflet Le complexe sportif national, as published by the Cambodian Ministry of Information: “In the great tradition of Angkor” (Source: Ministère de l’Information 1964a, 14, 40)

one month later to 12 December 1964), the headlines proclaimed “More than an inauguration: An apotheosis”: Maybe one hundred thousand people were there […] all had the extraordinary privilege of assisting in the most glorious moment in the history of Khmer people. In all human realisations these are without a doubt the most touching since they condense from a high point of view the will of a nation to conserve the faith in its almightiness. Cambodia always had its sanctuaries; now it has ­another pedestal which brings it even higher: between the creators of Angkor Wat and these who made the Sangkum of the twentieth century, the same soul is rein­ carnated, the soul of the builders of empires. [italics MF] (Ministère de l’Information 1964, 8)

that the realiser of this complex is our Minister and Ar­ chitect Vann Molyvann, assisted by his collaborators, who together held on to prove that the blood of the builders of Angkor has not at all degenerated. [italics MF] (Ministère de l’Information 1964b, 11)

French-colonial research had made Suryavarman II, for Angkor Wat, and Jayavarman VII, for the Bayon-style temples, the great builders of Angkor, and their postcolonial successors were now being declared alongside their own architectural masterpiece – the National Sports Complex (Pl. X.15b). Prince Norodom Sihanouk is depicted as “Chef d’État who decided on the construction of the ensemble”, Lieutenant-General Lon Nol (besides his military task) is shown as the “Sports Minister who gave the ensemble its life”, and finally “Vann Molyvann who made the plans and During the inauguration ceremony with all kinds of polit- supervised the works” (Ministère de l’Information 1964a, ical, cultural, and religious representatives in attendance,57 14) is identified as a creative force (Fig. X.37a). But the rheSihanouk raised the nexus of past Angkorian grandeur and torical connection between the ancestral site of Angkor present self-confidence even higher by evoking the old-­ Wat as a cultural inspiration and the new national forum as fashioned – in fact, colonial – topoi of cultural decline or a place of national rebirth was not enough. In winter 1966, degeneration and political rebirth (compare chapter XII): during the opening ceremonies of the First Games of the New Emerging Forces of Asia (GANEFO) in Phnom Penh’s In this very moment, you, my compatriots, my dearest stadium, both reimagined endpoints of Cambodia’s history of grandeur – Angkor Wat and the Sports Complex in children, you as the builders, the constructors of this Complex […] you allow our motherland a definitive re­ Phnom Penh – were time-space compressed into one coordinated scenario. As the journal Kambuja reported in a birth within the grandeur of the Angkorian epoch. You, sixteen-page photo story: “The GANEFO flame” was lit Khmer People, you knew how to say to the world which inside Angkor Wat on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen, a observes us without indulgence, that you came back as a revived “Apsara” as depicted on the temple’s bas-reliefs (see great people. […] Furthermore, is it important to note 57  See the programme in: Royaume du Cambodge 1964; reports above all in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 72 (November–December 1964), 13–15, or the cover illustration of the firework in Kambuja, 1 (15 April), cover.

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Figure X.38  Royal Air Cambodge advertisement with Angkor Wat, here circulated within the journal Réalités Cambodgiennes in 1965 (Source: Réalités Cambodgiennes, 473 (15 October 1965), 13)

discussion below) “passed the flame on to the first torch”, cember 1967 issue was “a new palace of two hundred rooms “which she handed to the first athlete” (Fig. X.37b). It was in front of Angkor Wat”, built by the French Prix-de-Rome then carried down the iconic passageway of Angkor Wat winner Claude Bach and Vann Molyvann “in traditional flanked by members of Sihanouk’s socialist youth (Pl. X.16a), Khmer style [and] by its low-rise and sober lines and its general disposition evoking an Angkorian temple” (Pl. passed through an Angkor Thom gate, and brought down via Battambang to the bronze bowl of Phnom Penh’s sport X.17a,b); “its foundation stele was placed on 10 November stadium where the temple of Angkor Wat itself was collec- 1968 in the presence of the Chef d’État and the directeur tively praised in the “placard formations” that held the per- général of Air France” (1993a, 256). Furthermore, the comforming masses (Pl. X.16b), and was taken, finally, to a giant plex was equipped with a modern car park and provided “elephant rides to the nearby temples” (Sangkum, 29 (Defireworks display which ended the opening ceremony.58 However, it was not just the Angkorian style that was cember 1967), 3). The article “The ‘Angkor Hotel’, a model used to ‘appreciate’ new Khmer architecture in the capital was given to the Head of State” (Kambuja, 34 (15 January (Brissé 1965). The latest architectural designs were brought 1968), 35) depicted Sihanouk, Vann, Bach, and the spondirectly to “the modern [secularist, MF] pilgrimage site of sors inspecting the model (Fig. X.39). Just as it was said Angkor”, where the tourist hub “Siem Reap: The city be- that Sihanouk’s opening of a casino near the 1969 Hotel neath the towers of Angkor” was equipped with an airport Cambodiana in Phnom Penh (by architect Lu Ban Hap) for the national Royal Air Cambodge (Fig. X.38) and inter- brought bad luck to Phnom Penh and Cambodia as a whole, national carriers.59 What the journal Le Sangkum referred the “équipement hôtelier”60 and the touristic exploitation to as “The hotel industry’s effort in Cambodia” in its De- of the view towards the Angkor Wat temple had a similar 58  “The first Games of the new emerging forces, 26 November – 6 December 1966”, in: Kambuja, 21 (15 December 1966), 38–45, 55, 72–73. See a similar report in: Photo-Souvenirs du Cambodge 1993b (vol. 3: Education), 294–305. 59  See: “Seamreap – City beneath the towers of Angkor”, in: Kambuja, 8 (15 No­vember 1965), 59–67. Guides to Angkor include: Office National du Tourisme 1965, Smith 1966/8. 60  In a 1968 paper in Réalités Cambodgiennes, the capacity to accommodate guests in Siem Reap, including the Le Grand Hôtel d’Angkor, La Villa Princière, and the Auberge Royale des Temples, was summarised as approximately “450 people in 272 high quality apartments and 20 economic rooms”, which was soon augment-

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Figure X.39  Sihanouk, the architects Vann Molyvann, Claude Bach and others inspecting the model of the new Angkor Hotel complex (Source: Kambuja, 34 (15 January 1968), 35)

Figures X.40a,b  Touristic infrastructure and Angkor Wat in late 1960s advertisements (Sources  Réalités Cambodgiennes, 23 August 1968, 19; reprint in Sihanouk 1991, 669)

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fate (Figs. X.40a,b): the older French-colonial and the newer adapted hotel Auberge Royale des Temples61 of the Société khmère des auberges royales (SOKHAR) as well as the – in 1969 recently finalised, but due to the 1970s turmoil never opened – Angkor Hotel were blown up by the Khmer Rouge. To this day the areas to the left and right of the central passerelle over the moat of Angkor Wat remain free of permanent structures. At this point in time, architectural decor à la Angkorienne was already poured in Cambodian concrete for a supposed eternity (Fig. X.41). Tragically, after Cambodia’s second rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Vann Molyvann’s built œuvre, one of the most astonishing architectural achievements in post-war Asia, found itself under serious threat during the culturally ignorant and politically corrupt Hun Sen regime. The more the UNESCO World Heritage Archaeological Park of Angkor is overexploited and the – often overrestored – temple sites systematically ‘ruined’ by uncontrolled mass tourism (see among others Ang et al. 1996 and Winter 2007), the more the architectural legacy of Cambodia’s short era of independence is destroyed, replaced, or structurally intimidated by neo-liberal investment architecture. To wit: the National Theatre and Council of Ministers were recently razed, the performative arts scene (see below) has been systematically intimidated (Turnbull 2006), the Olympic Stadium was sold to a Taiwanese company in 2000 (Ross 2002), and the Front de Bassac housing project has been rebuilt beyond recognition (Turnbull 2004, Knox 2013).62 In the meantime, a veritable ‘hotel zone’ is planned close to Angkor Wat (see epilogue II, compare Figs. EpII.11a–c; Pl. EpII.23).

Figure X.41  Architectural decorations multiplied by Cambodia Portland Cement, as advertised in Kambuja 1965 (Source: Kambuja, 15 August 1965, 114)

5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor Norodom Sihanouk visited the United States in 1953 in the service of his crusade for independence. In late 1958 he returned, together with Son Sann, his minister of foreign

affairs, as the leader of a free Cambodge to speak at the thirteenth session of the UN assembly in New York. On this visit he brought with him what can now be termed a

ed with an additional 200 rooms in the new and 160 in the newly adapted hotels near Angkor Wat, which were intended to accommodate approximately “900–1,000 visitors” (Barré 1968; compare Départment du Tourisme 1970). The 1960s article “Des richesses touristiques exceptionelles” by Jean-Pierre Challard was reprinted in 1993, but its original context could not be verified (Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 211–18). 61  In the 1966 short report “Auberge royale des temples”, the “new start” of the hotel in 1960 was celebrated: “Everything is new and the setting is unequalled since it lies in the heart of the ancient capital of the Cambodian kings, facing the moats of Angkor Wat and surrounded by ageless trees […], 30 to 85 rooms, all air-conditioned, the dining room windows with magnificent views. Seven domestic elephants [offer] short trips across the moat to Angkor Wat or one can climb the slopes of Phnom Bakheng, [and] every Tuesday and Saturday, as the dusk sinks into night, dancers of the Royal Corps de Ballet perform classical Cambodian dances on the esplanade in front of Angkor Wat; a magnificent and dream-like spectacle, rising out of the past to enchant even the most blasé”, in: Kambuja, 20 (15 November 1966), 79. 62  In 1999, initiatives to document and protect Vann’s œuvre were launched by Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Collins’ ARK Research (Ross/Collins 2006). Exhibition initiatives included Space for Architecture at Manolis House, Phnom Penh (then project management Stefanie Irmer and Pagna Serey), Khmer Architecture Tours (KA Tours) with themed walks through Phnom Penh’s and Battambang’s architecture, and the The Vann Molyvann Project by Bill Greaves.

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new tool of cultural (heritage) diplomacy (a term recently music after their visit to Cambodia in 1957, [and of] the discussed in Winter 2015) with which to foster Cambodia’s Corps de Ballet Royal which interpreted two Chinese folknew/old cultural image of pure, tradition-bound, and loristic dances with great success”.64 Missions followed to peaceful (politically neutral) Khmerness: the Royal Khmer the United Arab Republic and Yugoslavia in 1959, and in Ballet. The October–November 1958 issue of Cambodge 1960, to Czechoslovakia, China, Mongolia, and the Soviet d’aujourd’hui reported over twenty-nine pages on Siha­ Union where, after a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet, nouk’s US tour through Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, the Khmer dance group around Bopha Devi was photographed with ‘local’ dancers and the head of state, Nikita Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, and the historic theme park of Williamsburg (associated with the US-American Chruschtschow, as well as with his eventual successor, Leo­ Declaration of Independence). This diplomatic mission was nid Breschnew (Fig. X.42b).65 In 1962 – punctuated by punctuated with dance performances by the Royal Ballet, ­other stops in Malaysia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka – Siha­ which included two of Sihanouk’s children, Princess Bopha nouk was received by President Sokarno of Indonesia (Fig. Devi and her younger brother Prince Chakrapong. The first X.42c). Taking the strategies to perform cultural essentialperformance was held during a reception at the New York ism a step further towards cultural hybridisation (compare Hotel Waldorf Astoria on 19 September where it formed Falser 2013f, 2016c), Bopha Devi was there to “interpret part of a “discrete exhibition on the Khmer civilisation a classical Indonesian dance” for the audience. She also with traditional art objects, plaster casts of Angkorian stat- performed her Khmer repertoire in front of Sokarno in ues and photographs [of Cambodian temples]” to create a this instance – the journal text reconfirmed that “between “par­ticularly unstressed atmosphere [in which] political the Indonesian and the Khmer dance existed very clear links for about one thousand years”66. Later, during his personalities of the two rivalling blocs came together”. The second took place after the presentation of an original own visit to Cambodia in 1968 and with Sihanouk ‘diplomatically’ watching over them, the Indonesian president Khmer sculpture to President Eisenhower in the White House on 30 September where the dinner guests at Cam- supposedly fell in love with her. In 1962, Sihanouk’s Minisbodia’s embassy watched “a classical Khmer dance in all its tère de l’Information largely contributed to the essentialisapurity”; and the third, on 16 October, was held after a re- tion of the “danse classique” in its publication Cambodge: ception-conference at the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco “The Corps de Ballet, véritable conservatoire of the Khmer classical dance, is the oldest choreographic formation in (Fig. X.42a). As Sihanouk explained to the reader of the journal: “The Khmer royal dances have a very old origin the world. Thanks to the personal care of Her Majesty the which is hard to date with precision, but they attained their Queen [Kossamak] it returned with an incomparable éclat highest perfection during the apogee of Khmer grandeur. through the rigorous preservation of its traditions and […] if one judges them on the basis of the bas-reliefs of the thousand-year-old techniques” (Ministère de l’Information temples of Angkor, their gestures and the attitudes of the 1962, 270). Interestingly, the iconised central passageway dancers have hardly changed to this day [and have] con- and silhouette of Angkor Wat was commodified again as a served their highest purity.”63 At this point in time, Siha­ stage and background for this ‘age-old’ dance form in the nouk’s Corps du Ballet was a fixed part of his diplomatic PR-publication Cambodge of 1962 (Fig. X.42d), ‘back-­trans­ missions. Some saw them as a charming “Cirque Sihanouk lated’ from the earlier displays during French universal and [with] acrobatic, illusionist and imitating diplomatic acts” colonial exhibitions between 1889 and 1931 (see below). In (Meyer 1971, 236) – a means of staging cultural perfor- January 1963, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also enjoyed mances of authentic Khmerness all over the globe. As a the Khmer Ballet (Fig. X.42e); and this diplomatic perfortool of mutual cultural exchange, the Khmer dances and mance of cultural delight was later repeated when Sihandancers were sometimes even mixed and hybridised with ouk professed to Liu Shaoqi, then president of the People’s their national counterparts (see below). Shortly before his Republic of China (Fig. X.42f), that he was charmed – seen visit to the United States, Sihanouk travelled to India, Bur- from the other side of cultural diplomacy – by the dancers ma, and (again after 1956) to China. There he met Premier of the Beijing Opera during his official visit (Fig. X.43a) or Minister Chou En-Lai and President Mao and on 24 Au- by the Balinese beauties during his trip to Indonesia in August assisted performances by artists of the Beijing Opera gust 1964 (Fig. X.43b). Those success stories were used in “who had adapted for their repertoire the Khmer dance and the 1963 publication Royal Cambodian Ballet by the Cam-

63  “Le Prince Norom Sihanouk aux U.S.A.”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 10–11 (October–November 1958), 2–29, here 4, 6, 14, 15. 64  “Le Prince Norodom Sihanouk visite: L’Inde, la Birmanie, la China”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 8–9 (August–September 1958), 1–33, here 13, 26. 65  “Visite officielle en U.R.S.S.”, in: Cambodge aujourd’hui, 9–12 (September–December 1960), 24–40. 66  “Le Prince Norodom Sihanouk visite le Sud-Est Asiatique”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 48–51 (September– December 1962), 2–21, here 5.

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Figures X.42a—f  Sihanouk’s diplomatic Royal Khmer Ballet during state visits to San Francisco/ USA in 1953 (above left), to Moscow/Soviet Union in 1960 (above right) and to Indonesia in 1962 (centre left); pictured in front of ­Angkor Wat in the PR publication Cambodge of 1962 (centre right); Sihanouk visiting Delhi/India (below left) and ­Beijing in 1963 (below right) (Source: © Charles Meyer archive (2x), Paris; Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 9—12 (September— Decem­ber 1960), 29; Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 48—51 (September—December 1962), 5; Ministère de l’Information 1962, 271; Royal Cambodian Agency 1963, 24)

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Figures X.43a,b  Sihanouk being greeted by the Beijing Opera dancers and Balinese beauties during his state visits to China in January 1963 (above) and to Indonesia in August 1964 (below) (Sources  © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

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bodian Information Agency (see below), and the special section on “The Royal Ballet abroad”67 summarised the troupe’s diplomatic mission around the planet. However, the ballet’s biggest triumph took place undoubtedly during Sihanouk’s state visit to France in 1964 when Bopha Devi’s troupe enjoyed great success on 25 June in the Opera of Paris at a soirée de gala Franco-khmère.68 The official programme of this transcultural event, today stored in the archives of the Paris Opera, reports that the first part of the evening started with a “défilé” of the Parisian corps de ballet after a march of Hector Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens. It continued with the overture of “Carneval romain” by the same composer and culminated with the “Bourrée fantastique” with the music of Emmanuel Chabrier and the choreography of George Balanchine. The second part of the programme was reserved for the Ballet Royal du Cambodge which performed the “Ballet des Apsaras”, the “Ream Eyso et Moni Mékhala”, and the “Ballet Tepmonorom” (Pl. X.18). The elegantly designed and written programme, accompanied by a twelve-page reader called Les danses cambodgien­ nes containing quotations by George Groslier and Auguste Rodin (see below), described the ancient roots of the Cambodian ballet, which had been supposedly mentioned in the earliest inscription from the sixth and seventh centuries. The programme goes on to explain that during “Angkor’s apogee […] thousands of dancers were attached to the great temples and the palace of the King”, and after long periods of political crises the kings Ang Duong and Sisowath, and lately Princess (now Queen) Kossamak saved the ballet from extinction and brought it back to its “éclat” (Soirée 1964, n.p.). However, there was no mention of the French-colonial efforts to revive the ballet for political ends during the universal and colonial exhibitions from 1889 until 1937. The Cambodian ballet repeated its repertoire in the Théâtre des Nations. As a result, it not only helped to strengthen diplomatic relations with France, it also played an essential role in perpetuating Cambodia’s image as a nation that was pristinely rooted in an eternal cultural past.

As one French reporter observed: “Here exists a dramatic school of which we have ourselves lost the tradition since antiquity and the performance [efficacité] of which stayed intact”.69 After Paris, the diplomatic tour continued to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union (Kiev, Moscow, and Le­ ningrad), and the GDR (Berlin, Dresden, and Neustrelitz). Charles Meyer’s two-page report on the performance “Le Ballet Royal à Paris” quoted a journalist from the newspaper Literarni Noviny from 25 July 1964 who reconfirmed what was (and still is today) a fixed stereotype of the Khmer dance: In the completely packed hall, one could admire the resurrection of the ancient bas-reliefs of Angkor, decorated by Apsaras with sensual lips and celestial smiles […] the spectators at Prague were enchanted as these dances created a perfect ambiance to which one had only to add the melody and the rhythm, the marvellous costumes and masks as well as the accessories as they are represented on the entry gate to the royal city of Angkor Thom or the nine-headed ramp of the balustrade of Angkor Wat.70

Similar essentialist stereotypes were reported on 5 August 1964 in the GDR newspaper Berliner Zeitung on the performance in Berlin’s Metropoltheater: The art of this “pure dance” and of the “danced drama” of the Khmer Kingdom, an art which is almost 1,500 years old and of a rare culture, has had its renaissance through the Ballet Royal of independent Cambodia with the “pure dance” of the Apsaras!71

What was staged in 1964 almost ten thousand kilometres from Cambodia in the Paris Opera House as a mobile commodity of authentic Khmerness corresponded exactly with what Sihanouk’s journal Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (in this case its English version Cambodia Today) propagated already in 1962 as the founding myth of pure Khmer dance – that

67  “Since the return of national independence, the Royal Ballet has been on one triumphal tour of China, in 1956. Smaller groups, including Princess Bopha Devi and the best dancers, went with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Head of State, to the United States in 1958, and on State visits to the United Arab Republic and Yugoslavia in 1959, to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and China in 1960, to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia in 1962, to India and China in 1963. Khmer classical dancing aroused great interest wherever it was performed: an interest which was widely reflected in the international press.” In: Cambodian Information Agency 1963, 24. 68  “La visite officielle du Chef de l’État à Paris”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 67 (May–June 1964), 21–29, here 24. Also: “Visite d’État du Prince Sihanouk en France”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, supplément trimestriel, 2 (April–June 1964), 2–6. 69  “Le Ballet Royal à Paris”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, supplément trimestriel, 2 (April–June 1964), 34–35, here 35. 70  “Triomphe du Ballet Royal en Europe orientale”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 67 (July 1964), 20–21, here 21. 71  “La vie artistique: Fin de la tournée en Europe et retour du Ballet Royal”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 69 (August 1964), 25–27, here 25.

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Figure X.44  Bopha Devi as the dancing embodiment of Khmerness, photographed in front of the Apsara reliefs of Angkor Wat as published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 1962 (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 46—47 (July—August 1962), 22)

is, “the twelfth-century bas-reliefs” of Angkor Wat, brought back to life by “Princess Bopha Devi” (Fig. X.44).72 In August 1964, when his Royal Ballet was just finishing its tour through Eastern Europe and Russia and finally joined its chef d’état for additional dance performances like the “Ballet des Apsaras”, Sihanouk was (again) in Indonesia to assist in the celebration of his brother country’s nineteenth anniversary of independence. It is no surprise that he was greeted during his stopover in Bali by “traditional dancers” (see Fig. X.43b).73 Just after his return from Indonesia in mid-August 1964, Sihanouk also received the Ballet de la République de Corée, which danced in Vann’s Chadomukh Hall. And to keep the diplomatic plates eternally spinning, Sihanouk departed in September 1964 for his fifth visit to China to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the République Populaire de Chine with Liou Chao-Chi (compare Fig. X.43a), Chou En-Lai, and Mao. Not much later Bopha Devi was iconised as Cambodia’s eternal Apsara in model-­

like photographs (Fig. X.45a), on beauty products like the Cambodian hand cream “Cristal Bopha Devi” (Fig. X.45b), as the cover star for Sihanouk’s film Apsara in 1966 (see discussion below) (Fig. X.45c), and was even copied as the “flying Apsara of Angkor Vat” by Western artists like Xenia Zarina in her 1967 book Classic dances of the Orient (Zarina 1967, 83) (Fig. X.45d). Just as we have already elaborated in our double-sided approach to the myth of Jayavarman VII, Angkorian water politics, and a New Khmer Architecture, there are two questions which emerge in this context: First, how did the topoi of ‘purity’ for the Khmer dance emerge in combination with Angkor Wat’s bas-reliefs as its authentic source? And second, how did Sihanouk’s regime convert these into a performative strategy to stage Khmerness, both around the globe and on the ‘original’ temple spots back home, in the context of cultural diplomacy and the self-affirmation of cultural-political grandeur?

72  “Cambodian women”, in: Cambodia Today, 46–47 (July–August 1962), 22–37, here 22. 73  “La visite officielle du Chef de l’État en Indonésie”, in: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 69 (August 1964), 3–6.

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Figures X.45a—c  Bopha Devi photographed in the Phnom Penh Royal Palace; commodified for a hair wax beauty product of Sorakea Khmer Company, and as a star on Sihanouk’s film Apsara of 1966 (Source: Charles Meyer archive, Paris; Kambuja, 3 (15 June 1965), 99; Kambuja, 15 (15 June 1966), 39)

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Figure X.45d  The “flying Apsara of Angkor Vat” as staged by Xenia Zarina in her 1967 book Classic dance of the Orient (Source: Zarina 1967, 83)

Admitting that (a) in “a tragic period between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries no image, sculpture or text remains” from the Khmer dance; (b) “the Angkorian music itself was irremediably lost”; and (c) both only came back to life through their “Siamising” at the royal court in Bangkok and their “re-khmerising” in Phnom Penh (Meyer 1969, 4,5; compare Cambodian Information Agency 1963, 7–9), a look into French-colonial history again provides our most important sources (Falser 2013f). Louis Delaporte’s drawing of Angkor Wat’s central passageway inside his 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge is one very useful starting point (compare Fig. VI.6). Two aspects of his drawings were remarkable: first, although the call for the reclamation and restoration of the decayed ninth- to thirteenth-century temples of the Angkor region (until 1907 on Siamese territory) was, as we have discussed earlier, an essential part of the French-colonial rhetoric in Indochina at this time, De­ laporte depicted Angkor Wat in picture-perfect condition. Second, his drawing did not correspond with the French narrative of Angkor as the abandoned site of a vanished civilisation; on the contrary, he placed a row of five dancing and bare-breasted women with stylised skirts, necklaces, and

crown-like headgear on the perfect stage of the temple’s central causeway (Fig. X.46, detail from Fig. VI.6). He named them “tévadas” or “celestial nymphs”, as they were “sculpted on the walls of Angkor-Vaht” to represent the “living female beauties themselves” (Delaporte 1880, 344–46). Delaporte’s ideal reconstitution of the temple as a stage setting and background for a re-imagined historical dance performance would remain a powerful pictorial combination in the decades to come. When Delaporte, during his second mission to Indochina (1873–74), collected original sculptures and made molds of selected bas-reliefs on the Angkorian temples for his later musée Indo-chinois in the Parisian Trocadero palace (see chapter III), the celestial maidens of Angkor Wat were ‘translated’ through the medium of plaster casts to France (compare Fig. III.27b). For the moment, however, they were only depicted on these thin replicated facade elements, which were, in the following decades, reassembled to create fantastic temple pavilions in universal and colonial exhibitions in Paris and Marseille. When the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris staged the first free-standing Angkor pavilion in its French colonial section, Khmer dance performances were not yet part of the spectacle. In these early European exhibitions, “imaginative representations of the exotic ‘East’ gave little heed to cultural specificities” (Cohen 2010, 4), as long as a random combination of architectural stereotypes and ‘traditional’ dance elements could form a compelling amalgam for the Occidental voyeuristic gaze. Thus, it was right next to the pagode d’Angkor that the kampong Javanais (a ‘traditional’ Javanese village) was installed to stage cultural performances from colonial Southeast Asia (compare Pl. IV.7). In a remake from the 1883 Colonial Exhibition at Amsterdam, the Javanese scenario was executed as a private enterprise by Dutch planters from Java to promote their products. Additionally, the sacred danseuses Javanaises, which were in reality what has been described as “prostitute dancers from the princely courts of Java” (Chazal 2002, 114), presented (compare with Sihanouk’s state visit at Bali, Fig. X.43b) a hybrid cultural performance imitating ‘traditional’ court dance elements together with a gamelan orchestra provided by the plantation owners. Visiting along with other prominent guests, such as the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the composer Claude Debussy, the painter Paul Gauguin supposedly not only satisfied his Oriental sexual fantasies with a member of the show, but also confused Javanese art with the Khmer art of the neighbouring pavilion (Chazel 2002, 131; Cohen 2010, 17; compare Bloembergen 2006, 106–163). Ironically, the French press itself celebrated the Javanese dancers’ “splendid costumes as almost identical reproductions from the bas-reliefs of the Khmer ruins” (Lombard 1992, 122). How the architectural and performative elements from an imagined colonial Far East became exchangeable and even combinable in European spectacles (Bopha Devi engaged with Indonesian dance during Sihanouk’s state visit to Sukarno) was demonstrated by the indoor installation of the Tour du Monde during the 1900 Universal Ex­hibition 211

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

Figure X.46  Depicting ‘dancing Apsaras’ in Delaporte’s 1880 publication Voyage au Cam­ bodge (Source: Delaporte 1880, 206—207, detail)

in Paris, where the painted architectural panorama of Ang­ kor Wat was enhanced (in fact re-enacted) with living Javanese dance performers (Décordet-Ahiha 2004, 39; Falser 2013f, compare Fig. V. 7a). Using ‘authentic’ actors from the colonies as performers in front of their reconstituted village huts or temples facilitated (a) the European voyeuristic gaze on the exotic ‘Other’ with its pre-modern and static tradition, or timeless “ethnographic present” (Fabian 2002, 80)2 and (b) exhibited and promoted the notion of primitive, underdeveloped colonies to justify the exhibiting imperial nation’s sup­ posedly altruistic project of ‘cultural uplifting’ around the planet (Blanchard 2011). In the case of Angkor, the 1906 National Colonial Exhibition at Marseille marked a decisive turning point (compare chapter V). Two years previously, the Francophile Sisowath had succeeded the former Cambodian King Norodom to the throne in Phnom Penh and was strongly backed by the French colonial authorities. In 1906 he was invited to France with the highest diplomatic honours, but he had no real political power. Encouraging the French population’s curiosity about exotic French-colonial Indochina, the king was also made the official head of an ‘authentic’ royal ballet troupe for the Marseille Exhibition. In reality, this ballet group was the creation of the French representative in Phnom Penh, George Bois, and was made up of mostly private dancers and only a few real

court dancers (Cravath 2007, 125; referring to Bois 1913). The Royal Ballet troupe enjoyed great success and was invited to Paris to perform during Sisowath’s visit to the French president. Its reputation as an “icon of [the Khmer] traditions, of their eternal religious rites and of the immutability of the Cambodian culture” (Vilain 2006, 29; compare Gosh 1998, 37–43) was established the moment that Rodin executed about 150 drawings and paintings of the graceful gestures of the Khmer ballet (Fig. X.47). As cited by Bois in 1913 (compare Cambodian Information Agency 1963), Rodin in 1906 formulated what would become – from the time of French-colonial politics, to postcolonial Cambodia and finally UNESCO’s intangible heritage listing in 2008 (Ministry of Culture 2004, UNESCO 2002, 2003, 2008; Falser 2013f, compare epilogue II and Pl. EpII.17a) – an essentialist cultural stereotype of the Khmer Ballet: There are stones which are so ancient that one cannot describe them with the terms of historic epochs. And looking at these stones, one thinks about thousands of years […] These Cambodian female dancers gave us all that real antiquity can contain: their own antiquity which equals ours. In three days we experienced three thousand years. It is impossible to see human nature in a higher state of perfection. (Rodin quoted in Bois 1913, 275, compare chapter IV)74

74  It is no accident that this quote was republished as “Interview of Bois with Rodin” in: Cambodge d’au-

jourd’hui, 43 (February–March 1962), 38.

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5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor

Figure X.47  Auguste Rodin sketching the Khmer Ballet dancers during their stay in Marseille and Paris 1906 (Source: L’Illustration, 3309 (28 July 1906), n.p.)

This version of the Royal Khmer dance already contained many of the characteristics of a cultural performance as modern theory defines it today: it was performed for a specific occasion with a structured programme, and it used actors to satisfy the gaze of a defined audience (Fischer-­Lichte 2003, 11–37; Diamond 2005, 390). Press releases like the one in the Petit Journal de Marseille from 24 June 1906 (compare Pl. V.6) described the Khmer ballet ­performances in Paris and Marseille as “animated bas-reliefs of the temples of Angkor” (cited in Vilain 2006, 25; compare with Beau 1906, 177) accompanied by illuminated fountains and electrical colour projections. At the time, the transcultural travel of this topos of Angkor’s built and performed antiquity was in full swing. The Marseille performances combined the traditional costumes, original gestures and authentic music of the royal ballet dancers, with the Khmer king as the ballet’s patron and symbol of an unbroken tradition stretching back to Khmer antiquity and the Angkor Wat temple architecture as a stage set and background. The audience made up of the general public and representatives of the ruling French authorities very quickly found themselves ‘back-translated’ to the original spot (see Pl. V.7). In 1907 the temples of Angkor became part of the French protectorate of Cambodia and the primary cultural concern of the French mission civilisatrice in Indochina. The earlier romanticised imaginings of Angkor were now replaced with scientific research in situ. More important, the new political ‘owners’ of Angkor wished to reconnect the whole contem-

porary canon of Cambodian culture to ancient Ang­kor. This procedure, intended to recreate the present within a pure Angkorian past tradition without foreign influences, was a delicate task. In reality, Angkor had been captured by the Siamese in the fifteenth century, and royal court dance – like some of the Cambodian kings themselves – only survived until the nineteenth century at the Siamese court in Bangkok, the cultural influences of which were still considerable after 1900. At this point, the entire system of art education in Cambodia was systematically grouped around the French-colonial “salvage paradigm” (Clifford 1989) of rescuing traditional Cambodian art from supposed degeneration, agony, and impurity; traditional dance included: They are in agony, the Khmer dancers! […] They’re dying! The charming traditions and poetry of yesteryear are dying! Our steamships and automobiles generate a smoke in which champa flowers wither. Soon, mysterious actres­ ses, we will no longer see you gather the ancient poems and lost beauties floating thick in the air of festival nights. […] What will artists and poets do tomorrow in this chosen land? They will be told that, only yesterday, there still remained one hundred twenty Vestals in whom the entire past and all its rituals were preserved; that these ­Vestals were sometimes seen emerging from their mystery and dancing slowly in splendid costumes with graceful harmony, under streaming lights […] but that now [all this] is gone! (Groslier 1913, 120; translated in Davis 2010, 107)

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The central figure in this was George Groslier (1887–1945), the first French citizen born in Cambodia, a Parisian École-des-Beaux-Arts-graduate, gifted artist and writer. Between the establishment of the École royale des arts décoratifs in 1907 and its reformulation as École des arts cambodgiens in Phnom Penh (with Groslier acting as its first director and also present during the French exhibitions of 1922, 1931 and 1937; see chapters VI to VIII), he had also studied the decorative reliefs of Angkor. Depicting a contemporary crisis of religious beliefs, traditional morals, and performing arts (citation above), his 1913 book Danseuses cambodgiennes anciennes et modernes was the first modern in-depth study of the royal court dancers. In his sketches, Groslier let the ballet dancers emerge – or be reborn in their purest reincarnation – from the celestial maidens on the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Fig. X.48a). However, from an iconographical standpoint, the latter had never been conceived as earthly dancers per se, but as celestial guardian figures for the entertainment of a dead king after apotheosis, serving to mediate between him and the heavenly skies. Concluding his study, Groslier reimagined a “spectacle grandiose” of ancient processions at the Angkor Wat – altogether a virtual re-enactment of the past including retranslated elements of the contemporary dance performance. This hybrid reconstruction would serve as a perfect script for the son-et-lumière shows performed at the exhibitions in France, for the spectacles at Angkor Wat during Cambodia’s independence (see below), and, finally, for the commodified re-enactments by a cultural heritage industry on site after 1990 (see epilogue II, Pl. EpII.17a): Now the extraordinary ritual lies clearly before me! […] mysterious harmonies, dripping down the stones like the drops of some sonorous rain, fade before a procession that has suddenly appeared. Sixteen devadasi advance. The crowd is prostrate, like green rice bending in the wind. […] What a spectacle! The huge, pale sky of Cambodia, the dying sun, the nine towers, the sacred academy, the King, the prostrate crowd. […] Royal elephants, each enclosed in its golden carapace. Then, atop the sculpted mountain, before the shadow of the sanctuary where all powers dwell suspended, the sixteen symbolic devadasi, resplendent like stars in the night! Yes, I see it quite well, the extraordinary ritual. […] Absolute Beauty stands complete before me. […] Of this absolute Beauty she is the sole pure expression […] Alone, she returns from the past to offer us her flower, while all else about her crumbles. (Groslier 1913, 172—73; in Davis 2010, 154—59)

Groslier even translated the arm gestures of the actual dance back into the ancient stone surface of the Angkor temples: Today’s […] giant poses resemble those of the characters set in the sandstone of Angkor. There is a direct line of descent, and absolute relationship between the parts

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and the whole. In fact, the line of descent is so direct that if lokhon [dance] in the modern aesthetic were suddenly to turn to stone, we could precisely superimpose their gestures carved in the past. (Groslier 1913; in Davis 2010, 153).

All this was not far removed from Pierre Loti, the Orientalist par excellence, when he described in his famous 1912 book Un pèlerin d’Angkor what he had experienced during a dance performance at the Phnom Penh royal court: The spectacle starts […] music […] One of the back doors opens; one small, adorable and almost chimerical creature rushes into the middle of the hall: an Apsara of the temple of Angkor! Impossible to make a more perfect ­illusion of it; she has the same features because she is of the same pure race, she has the same enigmatic smile […] the small Apsara from the old ages, slipped away from the holy bas-reliefs [of Angkor Wat, MF] […] these poses are the ancient tradition of this country, as the stone figures which inhabit the ruins […] May France, the protector of this country, understand that this royal ballet of the kings of Phnom Penh is a sacred legacy, an archaic marvel which should never be destroyed! [italics MF] (Loti 1912, 204—213)

Groslier established a small photo studio in the musée ­Albert Sarraut in Phnom Penh (during Cambodia’s independence the Jayavarman VII Museum, today the National Museum) to study the dance gestures through fragmented photographic series (Fig. X.48b). Years later Sappho Marchal, the daughter of the general conservator of Angkor, Henri Marchal, published a study on the costumes and hairstyles of the 1,700 devatas of the Angkor Wat temple (Marchal 1927, 2) (Fig. X.48c). Both Groslier and Marchal followed Angkor Wat’s ‘performative affordance’ (see introduction) and their publications would serve as a perfect pattern book to ‘re-­Khmerise’ (compare Vann Molyvann quoted above) and purify the Royal Ballet à la Angkorienne. When King Sisowath died in 1927, private dance troupes were already performing in front of the Angkorian temples for the growing tourist industry. With the area around Angkor now a part of French Indochine, ever more detailed archaeological and art historical research at the Cambodian site went hand in hand with the desire to stage Angkor Wat as authentically as possible in the French exhibitions of 1922 and 1931, and Groslier’s studies of Cambodia’s performing arts were continuously perfected. Stereotyped as the “direct descendants of the Apsaras on the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat” (Artaud 1923, 207; compare Strickland-Anderson 1926, 266, 269), the dancers now staged their magical night performances in front of the giant Angkor Wat replica (compare Fig. VI.19, Pl. VI.7a,b and 8). On this occasion in 1922, the ballet also performed at the Parisian Opera and was praised as “­ rêveries sur les danseuses cambodgiennes” (compare with the press

5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor

Figure X.48a  George Groslier’s sketches in his 1913 study Danseuses cambodgiennes to let the dancers emerge from the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Source: Groslier 1913, 135, 128, 161, 133)

Figures X.48b,c  Dance poses studied by George Groslier in his photographic studio in the Musée Sarraut in Phnom Penh in the 1920s; Sappho Marchal’s catalogue of Khmer dance elements from Angkor Wat’s decorated walls (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris; Marchal 1927, plate XL)

reactions about Sihanouk’s Corps du Ballet to the same location in 1964) and for its authenticity, purity, and timelessness: There is maybe no more authentic art, more pure, condign of that word in the whole Far East. And here we had a resounding confirmation with this adorable Khmer Ballet, as it was performed only two times at our opera […] strange exoticism, and, above this exoticism and this immediate enchantment of the senses, this spiritual impres-

sion, a dream. […] all this dates, certainly from long ago. It is immemorial. What has come down to us, intact through the centuries, is this Cambodian Ballet, which represents a very elaborate artistic formula that we esteem as perfect, even definite. (de Miomandre 1923, 213—14)

Nine years later, the Parisian Colonial Exhibition of 1931 surpassed, as we have already explored in detail (see chapter VII), all earlier exotic representations in scale, variety, and performance. This “illuminated apotheosis of Angkor 215

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

connaisseurs” (Thiounn 1930/56, 31, 58). As a staged heritage commodity in a combination of architectural settings and cultural performance, the Cambodian ballet in front of or inside the courtyards of the Angkor Wat pavilion (compare Pl. VII.11c), or during a special “fête offerte au président da la République”, was now interchangeable with the Balinese troupe performing in front of the Dutch East Indies pavilion (Fig. X.49) or the “Sudanese fetish dancers” from French Africa in front of artificial adobe architecture (Ca­dilhac 1931). These configurations in the French métropole had, from our transcultural point of view, considerable consequences for the ‘real’ site back in Cambodia: the aesthetics of folkloric dance spectacles in torch-lit and later government-sponsored electric floodlit spaces in front of mysterious temple skylines in France were ‘back-translated’ to Angkor (Cravath 2007, 143) and contributed to the divide of the dance between a new touristic commodity and an old ritual element. The 1963 publication of the Cambodian Information Agency summarised it as follows:

Figure X.49  Javanese dancers as depicted in front of the pavilion of the Dutch East Indies during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (Source: L’Illustration, 4616 (22 August 1931), n.p.)

[Wat]” (de Beauplan 1931) matched the scale of its Cambodian source, and the theatrical effect of its central causeway was enlarged into a cruciform square for cultural performances (compare Pl. VII.11c). In the meantime, the French authorities in Phnom Penh tried in vain to control the ‘real’ Royal Ballet in order to save it from “decadence” and “agony” (Groslier 1918). The success of dance performances in Marseille in 1906 and 1922 proved their political significance, tensions concerning their proper use broke out, and an official invitation to the 1931 Paris exhibition was turned down by the new Cambodian king, Monivong. The French then chose Say Sangvann, the wife of a member of the royal family who had already organised performances for the résident supérieur in Phnom Penh, for a dance troupe. Acting as a substitute for the ‘real’ dance group, the one in Paris in 1931 was a pri­ vate enterprise equipped with costumes and masks from Groslier’s art school and subsidised by the French authorities (Cambodian Information Agency 1963, 19; compare Edwards 2007, 171–73 and Abbe 2015). With this essential shift, the border between ‘authentic’ cultural performance and commercialised folklore was irreversibly crossed, even though the show was still sold as “original” Khmer and “of the greatest purity even from the viewpoint of Siamese 216

Say Sangvann’s company [with great success back from the Paris Exhibition of 1931, MF] was officially recognised as the one and only true Khmer classical ballet group. As such it received a subsidy from the French protectorate authorities, and was granted exclusive rights for gala performances before distinguished visitors in the salons of the French résident supérieur or, on special occasions, in the temple of Angkor Wat. Meanwhile, the palace dancers preserved the title of Corps de Ballet Royal and took part in ritual ceremonies. (Cambodian Information Agency 1963, 19)

As Say Sangvann’s private troupe had now gained a “mono­ po­ly to perform the dance for tourists at Angkor Vat” (Sasa­ gawa 2005, 429), her dancers now “staged authenticity” (compare MacCannel 1973) in gestures and costumes that were even more perfect than the depictions on the ancient bas-reliefs (Fig. X.50). The fight for monopoly over the ‘authentic’ Khmer ballet continued into the early 1940s. Princess Kossamak, the mother of the young Norodom Sihanouk, played a crucial role in this. She took advantage of (a) the detailed studies on the Khmer ballet by Groslier and Marchal, who had re-established its direct and ‘purified’ link to the imagined origins of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat; and of (b) the rising international popularity of Cambodia’s glorious built and performed past encouraged by the mass spectacles staged in France. Feeding the movement of an anti-colonial cultural nationalism, she initiated a major reconfiguration of the royal dance performance that was, ironically, based on French-colonial ideas. She changed the choreography to form a group-precision dance, added entertaining effects, and shortened the previous day-long private royal dance ritual into a two-hour programme. Outwardly, the result was meant to underline the new cultural self-confidence of the Khmer nation on the occasion of international state visits and, inwardly, to

5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor

Figure X.50  Say Sangvann’s private dance troupe of the 1930s in front of Angkor Wat as depicted by the French painter Jean Despujols around 1937 (Source: Cravath 2007, 144; © Meadows Museum of Art, Shreveport/USA)

symbolically demonstrate the authority of the new king, who was rooted in a continued Angkorian antiquity that stretched back to his direct ancient royal ancestors (Cravath 2007, 153–67). With this shift, the status of the Khmer dance changed again, now from its folkloristic effect at French exhibitions to a deeper political meaning back in Cambodia. With its (ostensibly) apolitical appearance beyond a specific time, space, and direction, the royal dance with its ritual components was the perfect performative medium with which to minimalise the tensions that had opened up during Cambodia’s violent transition from a colonial to a postcolonial state figuration – or to bridge the “liminal phase” between the end of French-secular rule

back to a re-imagined, re-ritualised Khmerness of the new/ old nation-state (compare with Turner 1982, 28–94). After Cambodia’s independence in 1953, as part of a kind of national “reconstruction and revival programme”, Kossamak succeeded in ‘re-Khmerising’ (compare Vann Molyvann’s comments) and politicising the royal dance with a new central element.75 She invented the so-called Apsara Dance or roban Apsara, which perfectly served the new Khmer national ideology. In the best fulfilment of Groslier’s 1913 study, the whole choreography staged five Apsaras, which materialised out of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat to perform a dance of salutation before disappearing again into the stone surface (Heywood 2008, 76). 76 Already by

75  In a recent interview entitled “Royal dances of Cambodia: Revival and preservation”, HRH Princess No-

rodom Buppha Devi stated: “The delicate Apsara dance, for instance, [was] also part of the re-construction and revival programme; however, contrary to popular belief, it has a comparatively recent history. Inspired by temple engravings, in 1962 my grandmother, the late Queen Sisowath Kossamak Neary Roth Serey Vaddhana, created the dance for me, as I was the Royal Ballet’s prima ballerina at that time. Now it is probably the best known dance in Cambodia” (Burridge/Frumberg 2010, 4; compare Shapiro-Phim/Thompson 2001). 76  Interestingly, this scenario of Apsaras virtually emerging from and disappearing into the temple’s walls was soon taken for granted as an ancient tradition by international researchers, as seen for example in Keith Buchanan’s 1965 study with photographic illustrations of Angkor Wat’s bas-reliefs (Buchanan 1965, 29–32). However, today it is considered a valid story in UNESCO’s video on the ‘Royal Khmer Ballet’ on the ‘List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ (UNESCO 2008; analysed in Falser 2013f, see Pl. EpII.17a).

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Figure X.51  Nocturnal ceremony at Angkor Wat on 27 March 1959, as illustrated in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (Source: Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, March—April 1959, 20—21)

1959, Kossamak had brought the ballet as close as possible to its reimagined origin with a two-day “Buddhist festivity at Angkor” (Fig. X.51). As Cambodge d’aujourd’hui reported about the “cérémonie nocturne à Angkor Vat”: The great temple of Angkor Wat had regained, on Friday 27 March, a bit of its splendour of long-gone days with the “Buong Suong” ceremony, or “thanks-giving”, presided by HRH the Queen and members of the royal family, the government, and villagers. […] The Corps de Ballet Royal participated in this homage with its millennia-old sacred art on the same parvis where, for centuries, extra­ ordinary religious festivities had been presided over by the sovereigns of Angkor at the apogee of their power and glory. (Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 3—4 (March—April 1959), 19)

In order to express the ideological dimension of a supposedly pure continuity from the ancestors of Angkor up to Sihanouk’s era of political power, Kossamak’s Apsara danced with light and portable stage sets à la Angkorienne, and became the showpiece for Bopha Devi, the king’s daughter, not only during important diplomatic missions abroad 218

(see above), but also for representations back home (Fig. X.52, Pl. X.19). Cultural performance, cultural nationalism, and cultural diplomacy were now merged into one, as the above-quoted English and French publication of 1963, Royal Cambodian Ballet by the Cambodian Information Agency reconfirmed. In this book, for which Sihanouk’s private advisor Charles Meyer virtually ‘fabricated’ the visual material from various photographs (Fig. X.53), King Ang Duong (1796–1860) was described as having saved Khmer classical dancing from the gradual “sclerosis of an art form” (compare with George Groslier’s similar word choice). In fact, after the decline of Angkor, Khmer classical dancing only survived at the Siamese court in Bangkok, as it had been split between a version for the Cambodian king’s private palace and one progressively commercialised for the public and sanctioned by the French authorities. Finally, it was brought back to national(ist) glory with Queen Kossa­mak, “under its granted administrative statute as Royal Corps de Ballet” (Cambodian Information Agency 1963, 9, 18, 20, 22). Following the establishment of the École national du théâtre in 1958, the Faculty of Dramatic and Cho­reographic Arts was installed in Phnom Penh’s École des Beaux-Arts (Diamond 2005), with the neighbouring

5. Cultural (heritage) diplomacy: From cultural performance to the re-enactment of Angkor

Figure X.52  The re-nationalised Apsara dance performed by Buppha Devi in the late 1950s, as depicted in the international journal Eastern Horizon in 1956 (Source: Eastern Horizon, IV.6 (June 1956, 23))

Figure X.53  An original photographic collage of hand gestures as it survived in the Charles Meyer archive, Paris (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

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branches of arts and archaeology, architecture and urban- It included an introduction to three different dance perforism, and plastic arts. In the journal Kambuja the school’s mances, which formed part of the above-mentioned – now founding rector, Vann Molyvann, praised Sihanouk’s efforts rather banalised – reinvention process à la Angkorienne to “renew the Khmer arts” and the “ballet royal [as] the only (Pl. X.21a). The first “Danse des Apsaras, interprétée par traditional art form which stayed alive during the evolution SAR la Princesse Bupphadevi” was explained as follows: of modern techniques through the continuous regeneration “The Apsaras are celestial female dancers in their role to through the efforts of Queen Kossamak” (Vann 1965). divert the Gods. The Khmer sculptors of the past reproThe cultural performance of Khmer dance was not only duced ad infinitum their grace and beauty on the walls of used during Sihanouk’s diplomatic missions around the the Angkorian temples. Today, one Apsara, descended world, it was also turned into a stage set back home in from the paradise of Indra, executes a pure dance just for Phnom Penh’s postcolonial establishments for incoming the pleasure of the human eyes”. After the second, Ramayavisitors. However, a third performative strategy also emerged na-based section “Rama and Sita”, the third section “Ballet in parallel: a parcours-like diplomatic tour between Cam- Tepmonorum” was introduced as “a group of female dancbodia’s new and old capital. This included not only (a) an ers to implore the Gods to give a favourable ear to their obligatory “showcasing of the capital” (Ross/Collins 2006, prayers. Under a supernatural impulsion their dance be45) with its new architectural highlights, including the comes that of the celestial Apsaras. Hereupon they underSangkum Exhibition Hall, the Independence Memorial, stand that their prayers have been answered and they the State Palace Chamcar Mon, the Chaktomuk Conference thank the gods”.78 One of the most detailed diplomatic parcours was elabHall, the National Theatre, and the National Sport Complex; and (b) occasional side trips to other sites including orated in the “Programme de visite pour toutes les délégathe new harbour at Sihanoukville, the hill stations of Bokor tions gouvernementales des puissances amies” from 7 to 18 and Kirirom, the Anlong Romiet prototype village, and November (Royaume du Cambodge 1964b), in the context water irrigation projects, etc.; but also the undisputed of the eleventh anniversary of Cambodia’s independence in highlight, (c) a visit to the Angkor Archaeological Park, 1964 and the inauguration of the National Sports Complex where Sihanouk and his friend, the French Angkor conser- (see above and below) (Pl. X.21b). Never before and rarely vator Bernard Philippe Groslier, acted as private guides after, as we shall see, was the hybrid and space-time comthrough the ruins along the French-colonial Grand et Petit pressed (heterotopian) mélange of (a) the representations Circuits. The (usually two-day) stay was invariably conclud- of Cambodia’s contemporary politics, (b) the propaganda ed with a Khmer ballet performance or with a son-et-lu- of its infrastructural achievements in the capital and all mière show in front of Angkor Wat itself and a fireworks over the country, (c) the visit to ancient capitals and temdisplay above the site (Pl. X.20a,b). ple sites, and (d) cultural performances of various kinds in The National Archives in Phnom Penh contain a large modern and ancient settings, more convincingly staged. In collection of official programmes that were printed for the three alternating groups, the “governmental delegations of diplomatic delegations and the highest state guests from the friendly powers” underwent a parcours from 7 to 13 the late 1950s onwards.77 An example of these is the trilin- November. Their itinerary included: gual (Czech, Khmer, French) programme “Danses Khmères offertes le 19 Janvier 1963 à Angkor Wat en l’honneur de audiences with the king; a visit to the royal tombs of Son Excellence Monsieur le Président de la République So[the post-Angkorian capital of] Oudong with picnic and cialiste Tchéchoslovaque et de Madame Antonin Novotny”. folkloric representations; a military parade (on Independ­

77  Some of the programmes of the visits to Phnom Penh’s cultural-architectural masterpieces and Siem Reap

included official dinners at the Grand Hotel and trips to Angkor with dance performances, these comprised the visit of “Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra of Kent (2–5 October 1959)”; “the participants of the 6th session of the Comité pour la coordination des études du Bassin inférieur du Mékong (20–21 October 1959)”; “the international press (14–26 November 1961)” including Jean Lacouture for Le Monde and Max Olivier Lacamp for Le Figaro; “the parliamentary delegation of the Czech Republic (24 January–1 February 1960)”; King Leopold of Belgium in February 1961; “Yang di Pertuan Negara (Head of State of Singapore) and Puan Noor Aishah (10 April 1963)”; “the delegation of the German Democratic Republic (27 January 1964)”; “His Excellency Mr. Diosdado Macapagal, President of the Republic of the Philippines, and Mrs Macapagal and his Highness the Tengku Abdul Putra, Prime Minister of Malaysia and Puan Sharifah Rodziah (11 February 1964)”; “the Asia-6 Conference for diplomats sponsored by the Quaker Conferences in Southern Asia (12–22 January 1965)”; and “His Excellency Subandrio, High-Representative of the Indonesian President Sukarno (14–16 February 1965)” (National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh). Compare with Sihanouk’s own account in his 1981 Souvenirs doux et amers in the chapter “Du monde entier, de hautes personnalités rendent visite au Cambodge”, in: Sihanouk 1981, 308–313; compare Krisher 1990. 78  See NAC B346.

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ence Day) and banquet; a visit to the hill station of Kiri­ rom with lunch at the Chalet Royal with a stop at a nearby village with its handicrafts; a reception at the throne hall and an artistic representation of the Chadomukh Hall; a visit to the building of the royal flotilla; a visit to the community development centre at Along-Romeat; a folkloric representation and the inauguration of the Permanent Exhibition of the realisations of the Sangkum Reastr ­Niyum at the Front du Bassac; the inauguration of the National Sports Complex (12 November); [and, finally,] a rest or visit to the National Museum Jayavarman VII and the Museum Preah Sihanouk. (Royaume du Cambodge 1964b, n.p.)

On 14 November the departure for Siem Reap by airplane was scheduled with military honours and the following programme: “Visit of the Bayon temple and the Petit Circuit (guidance of the conservator); accommodation in the Grand Hotel, the Auberge des Temples and the Villa Princière; tea at the Srah Srang [water reservoir] with the folkloric representation of the Trott dance; official dinner given by the governor, Chef de la province de Siem Reap at the Grand Hotel”. What followed on the same evening at ten was certainly considered the high point of the tour by every participant: the “artistic representation by the Corps du Ballet Royal on the parvis of Angkor Wat (staged by Hang-Thun-Hak, choreography by Princess Bopha Devi) with the ‘Dance of welcome and good wishes’, and a fragment of the Ramayana; illumination [of the temple], and finally after the dances the visit of the illuminated Angkor Wat”. On 15 November the programme offered the option of “repose at the pool of the Villa Princière, a visit to the monuments of the Grand Circuit, or the Banteay Srei temple with picnic”. Finally, the performative parcours ended with the “return to Phnom Penh, [optional] a travel to the sea (Kep), to Kampong Cham (province number one in economic aspects) with a visit to Sangkum’s Permanent Exhibition and a rubber tree plantation at Chup”. The 1964 celebrations easily count as the largest effort made by Sihanouk’s regime to merge past Angkorian glory with the cultural-political ambitions of the new Cambodian nation-state in a wide international diplomatic forum. Two years later in 1966 – exactly one hundred years after the famous French Mekong explorative mission and its staged stopover at Angkor (see chapter I) – the most im-

portant single visit of a European head of state during Cambodia’s short period of independence occurred. This was the visit of Charles de Gaulle. On his way back from Ethiopia, travelling to Oceania to assist a French nuclear bombing experiment in the Pacific, the president of the French Fifth Republic – and Sihanouk’s greatest political reference point – arrived on 30 August at Phnom Penh and spent 1–2 September at the temples of Angkor where he enjoyed an itinerary that recalled past spectacles of colo­ nial grandeur (compare second introductory quote of this chapter).79 Almost ninety pages in Sihanouk’s journal Kambuja were devoted to “General de Gaulle’s state visit to Cambodia” (General de Gaulle 1966; compare Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 128–67). The cover of the 15 September issue in English depicted de Gaulle’s ‘bath’ in the contemporary Cambodian crowd after his arrival at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong airport. Official press photographs that survived this visit are part of the Sihanouk Archives at the École française d’Extrême-Orient and the Archives Nationales in Paris: one of those photographs shows the French and Cambodian leaders at the airport with Vann Molyvann’s modern-style reception architecture behind them (Fig. X.54) and a traditionally dressed (Angkor-style) guardian holding a traditional parasol above them (Pl. X.22a). Altogether this scene appeared like a transcultural déjà vu with reference to the moment in May 1931 when Maréchal Lyautey opened the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris and presented the Angkor Wat replica to his British royal guests (compare Fig. Intro.1a). De Gaulle’s arrival was followed by a “solemn audience at the Throne Room” in the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, speeches, the reception of the rectors of the Royal University and the heads of diplomatic and consular missions, and de Gaulle’s symbolic decoration as “supreme general of the royal Cambodian armed forces and the first honorary citizen of Phnom Penh”. The visit also included Madame de Gaulle’s tour of an orphanage, a scenic open-car drive through Phnom Penh’s architectural masterpieces (including the French-colonial Central Market) and past waving crowds, the water festival with pirogue races and illuminated floating altars on the Bassac River, and, at the end of the day, a state palace banquet in the newly opened Chamcar Mon State Palace with “HRH Bopha Devi dancing for the General the Dance of the Wishes” (General de Gaulle 1966, 50). On 1 September in the National Stadium, in front of “one hundred thousand people”, de Gaulle

79  In a chapter called “Decolonisation and grandeur” in his 1977 book Intellectuals and decolonisation in France, Paul Clay Sarum described de Gaulle’s strategy to evoke French-colonial “grandeur” at a time when France’s global influence (including Cambodia) was a thing of the past. From this point of view, his visit to Francophile Sihanouk must have been a satisfying experience: “De Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO, his nuclear force de frappe, and his haughty anti-American diplomacy were a financial drain on France, but they gave an illusion of continued old-style grandeur that was agreeable even if only partly believed. In this way Gaullist foreign policy was functional, perhaps necessary, to French decolonisation. It provided a psychological cushion for the modernisation of France’s conception of its grandeur. De Gaulle’s quasi-monarchical and prestige-conscious regime was the necessary transition from imperial France to the France of Aron and Giscard d’Estaing” (Sorum 1977, 208).

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Figure X.54  A transcultural affair: Photograph of Charles de Gaulle’s 1966 visit in Phnom Penh (arriving at the airport); depicted as cover illustration of 2010 inventory publication of Norodom Sihanouk’s estate being archived at the EFEO in Paris (Source: Bernon 2010, cover)

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gave his “discours de Phnom Penh” (see Sihanouk 1981, this great king did for the people” (General de Gaulle 1966, 317–20): it formulated a homage to French-Cambodian 62) (Fig. X.55b). friendship,80 a vision of a neutralist Cambodia, and a warnThe journal praised “the final climax of Charles de ing against American aggression in Vietnam. French-colo- Gaulle’s visit to Siem Reap” represented by a “son et lumière show at Angkor Wat [as] the most perfect of all Asian monnial publications, such as Jean Yves’ 1948 Angkor, had made the “twelfth century a determinate era for builders and in- uments [that] pays homage to the most famous of all Westnovators [like] the French sovereign Philip-Augustus who ern heads of state” (General de Gaulle 1966, 64). At this had built the Paris University at the same time as Jayavar- show, the Khmer Ballet was transformed from a cultural man VII” (Claeys 1948, np). In fact, this invented compar- performance into a kind of historical re-enactment, generison of global (architectural) history had already been ally defined as unique blend of “collapsing temporalities” staged in the Trocadero palace with the plaster cast replicas and a recreation of “historical continuity, exploited for idein Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée on the one ological ends” (Agnew 2007, 309). In this specific context, the king of a postcolonial nation allowed the pre-colonial, side and Delaporte’s musée Indo-chi­nois on the other (see chapter III). In 1966 and ‘back-translated’ to postcolonial “authentic past” of his direct ancestors to be theatrically Phnom Penh, this theme was reflected in de Gaulle’s recep- re-enacted at the original, “credible setting” (an important tion at the National Stadium where examples of both na- feature of re-enactments; compare Gapps 2010, 403) before tions’ proud twelfth-century architectural and cultural her- the head of the former colonial power. In a “reconstitution itage – Notre Dame de Paris and the Bayon towers – were historique grandiose” (as the official journal called it),82 formed by cardboard placards held by the Cambodian au- nine hundred laymen and six hundred ‘monks’ in historical dience in the stands (Pl. X.22b). The final Joint Fran- and religious costumes participated in the re-enactment of co-Cambodian Statement underscored both nations’ mutu- a royal coronation ceremony and the procession of an Ang­ al share in preserving the “treasures of Khmer culture and korian king in which the actual children of the real King Sihanouk (Prince Naradipo and Princess Botum Bopha) civilisation”.81 Arriving in Siem Reap, “the town shadowed by the towers of Angkor, a new triumph for the French- staged the historic royal couple in order to “narrow the miCambodian friendship” was celebrated with the dedication metic gap” between fact and fiction (Agnew 2004, 332) – a of the Avenue du Général de Gaulle, which led straight to crucial element in re-enactments in general (Pl. X.23). the southern elevation of Angkor Wat. After receiving the Again a kind of déjà vu or ‘spectacular back-translation’ of members of the École française d’Extrême-­Orient at the the painstakingly planned 1:1-scale Angkor Wat scenario Royal Residence and visiting the Ta Prohm temple with during the 1931 ­International Colonial Exhibition in Paris its French-colonial left-in-the-jungle aesthetic, like many (compare the technical elaboration of the project in chapter diplomatic guests before him during the French-colonial VII, see Figs. VII.12,13, 25a,b; Pl. VII.5,16), the gigantic ilperiod (compare chapter IX), de Gaulle was shown the lumination now staged the ‘original’ temple back in Cambas-reliefs of the Bayon temple. As he had done for the US bodia’s postcolonial 1960s. This time, it was designed by the president Richard Nixon in 1953 at the very same spot (Fig. Cambodian Vann Molyvann – and made possible, as interX.55a) – and as even Khmer Rouge leaders would mimic in nal documents reveal, by the electrification system installed the mid-1970s (compare XI.15d) – Angkor Chief Conser- by Siemens Germany. In the same 1966 English issue of vator Bernard Philippe Groslier acted as guide through Kambuja, Bernard Hamel reported, under the title “A hisAngkor, this time with “Samdech [Sihanouk] explaining toric visit”, about what he called a “historic reconstitution” the Buddhist socialism of Jayavarman VII and the work with Angkor Wat as the shining star:

80  In his speech, de Gaulle tried to merge French-colonial history and postcolonial Cambodia: “Friendship, trust! Indeed! Between Cambodia and France, however different the origins and latitudes, what affinities! On both sides, a history charged with glories and sorrows, a culture and art that stand as models, fertile lands with vulnerable frontiers surrounded by foreign ambitions over which danger constantly hovers. The fact that, a century ago, the two nations associated their destinies for some time has no doubt helped Cambodia to maintain its integrity while France found in it a very useful aid. But, having afterwards, by common consent, separated their sovereignties and founded their relations on friendly cooperation, the esteem and affection in which the two peoples hold each other are today greater than ever” (General de Gaulle 1966, 82). 81  “Their attention was drawn to the success of the united efforts being made to preserve and to arouse interest in France in the treasures of Khmer culture and civilisation, whilst a knowledge of French culture and science was being propagated widely throughout Cambodia.” In separate agreements, the “prospecting for minerals and oil and the provision for the archaeological service in Cambodia” were fixed. Both from the Joint Franco-Cambodian statement of 2 September 1966; see: General de Gaulle 1966, 86–87. 82  Compare the similar report “La visite historique du Général de Gaulle”, in: Études Cambodgiennes, 7 (July–September 1966), 2–5; also in: Photo-souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 128–67; compare with a rather similar vision in Groslier 1913, 172–73, as quoted above.

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Figure X.55a  Bernard Philippe Groslier showing the Bayon reliefs to Richard Nixon in 1953 (Source: Prodromidès 1997, n.p.) After a private dinner, Charles de Gaulle returned to Ang­ kor Wat, accompanied by Samdech Head of State. This time, in the unequalled setting of the most imposing and perfect of monuments erected by the Khmer people dur­ ing the Angkor period, an unforgettable spectacle was of­ fered by Samdech Head of State in honour of his guest. This was a magnificent “Son et Lumière” performance which had as its theme “The Glory of Angkor” and which lasted about an hour and a half. Splendour and magnificence; these are without a doubt the two words best suited to describe this evening and to evoke the glorious past, brought to life in front of the spectators. Transported out of time, all those who were lucky enough to be pres­ ent will ever retain vivid memories of this magnificent his­ toric re-constitution. An extremely fine text by Bernard Groslier described the Royal Coronation which was performed in the temple court. The main actors were HRH Prince Norodom Naradipo and HRH Princess Botum Bopha, son and daughter of the Head of State, in the roles of the King and Queen. Under the glare of the spectators and in the play of the cleverly arranged shadows and lights, the spell-bound audience saw Angkor Wat’s five towers spraying into the night like foaming torches. At the same time on the vast terrace, also brightly illuminated, with the outside galleries of the temple in contrasting semi shadow, the famous dance of the Apsaras was performed in front of the King and Queen. Then, as the

sounds of traditional music floated out of the silence of the night, at first dulled and then more and more distinct, the magnificent Coronation Procession began its slow and majestic walk past. For almost forty minutes more than seven hundred warriors and courtiers in rich costumes, a dozen elephants with sumptuous trappings, numerous horsemen, dancers, musicians, palanquin bearers and a legion of characters from the courts of the King of Angkor walked past, presenting our famous guest with a breathtaking fresco from the past. Thus, for a moment, we were in the Cambodia of Surya­varman II and Jayavarman VII. Then the Procession having little by little disappeared into the night, the famous Angkor Wat gallery of bas-re­ liefs was suddenly illuminated revealing the silhouettes of hundreds of bonzes seated in an attitude of meditation like purple patches on a gold background. Almost immediately their voices broke the moving silence to chant the stanzas of Victory, bringing this unforgettable evening at Angkor to a close. [italics MF] (Hamel 1966, 70, 71)

In 1969 in his paper entitled “La musique et la danse sous les rois d’Angkor”, Bernard Philippe Groslier, who wrote the script “The voices of one night in Angkor” for this retro travel into Angkor’s restaged past (Groslier 1966b), explicitly corrected his father’s (George Groslier’s) invention of the “dancing maidens emerging from the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat”.83 With his many publications on Angkor

83  “The monuments themselves give only us only little precious information on the dance. Not that the female figures are rare on the Angkorian temples, but it does not make sense to see them as only dancers. As protective deities, praying and following the almighty and mysterious god who lives in the cella, they are here to surround him, to serve him, and to adore him, forever perpetuated in stone. At Angkor Wat, the god-serving enchantresses are multiplied ad infinitum; however, they do everything but dance [italics MF]. On the bas-reliefs we can only find at most two or three dancing poses” (Groslier 1969, 91).

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and his enormous influence on Cambodia’s new cultural self-­understanding, Groslier was, without a doubt, one of the most important cultural brokers between the former French-colonial regime, whose scientific methods and aesthetic concepts were used to make Angkor the most impressive archaeological reserve in the world, and Sihanouk, the state leader of independent Cambodia. Groslier’s historical (and less purely archaeological) approach tried to situate the Angkorian empire – with its water politics and its iconic king, Jayavarman VII – in the all-encompassing grid of entangled world civilisations. His poetic text for this event in 1966, entitled “Les voix d’une nuit d’Angkor: Texte de spectacle son et lumière offert au Général de Gaulle, sur le parvis d’Angkor Vat, par le Royaume du Cambodge, le 1er septembre 1966”, counts as one of the most vital myth-making documents used to foster Cambodia’s revived, postcolonial notion of cultural grandeur and to convey the indeed transcultural – in this case French-Cambodian – nature of the heritage construction called Angkor Wat. Although the first phrase and two intermediate remarks alone are telling – “Mon Général, La grandeur seule sied à la grandeur […] Is it really by chance that both our nations met? Too many affinities seemed to bring us here. […] It is good that we both meet here like this, at the very place itself of our conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor” –, the rest of the French text is also worth quoting in extenso in our English translation: My General, only grandeur befits grandeur. It therefore suits to welcome you in the middle of its people, next to the Prince who incarnates it, that Cambodia presents in this night the most beautiful and most perfect temple of Asia: Angkor Wat […] this new Cambodia is fitting of its past. Here, now, under the dark sky, Angkor Wat is stand­ ing silently, immobile, immanent. It is the result of the care of the last thousand years of our history […] The ap­ ogee of our first thousand years of glory […] Without breathing, time in the course of the centuries followed each time larger, more beautiful, and more dominating monuments which represented the advancement of our people. In the centuries when vanished Rome survived in Byzantium through Christian faith, the Khmer empire started to write its history and to carve — in precious wood, then in golden bricks — the towers for the honour of the Master of the Universe. When the first emperor was crowned in the Occident, the first king of Angkor was enthroned in the Kulen Mountains, towards the rising sun. Then, towards the conquered and evergreen plains, his successors built in stone the symbolic moun-

Figure X.55b  Bernard Philippe Groslier and Norodom Sihanouk entertaining Charles de Gaulle inside Angkor Park in the first days of September 1966, here at the Bayon temple, as published in Kambuja (Source: Kambuja, 15 September 1966, 62)

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tain from where the Orient shines. This was the time when France inflated the naves of its cathedrals […] The people of Angkor […] their architecture is made by the land itself. The sky and the water are the horizontals, the clear and plain trunks of the large trees predefined the vertical lines […] Willing to express the space governed by the gods and kings, they needed this incomparable wideness of the view which, on the other side of the continent, only France with its Versailles would retrieve. […] If Cambodia knew how to rise in front of all nations, it is due to the profound and compulsive union of its people and its kings. […] It is this unique bond between the peo­ ple and the person who incarnates it that the Cambodia of the past and of the present could and should live for­ ever. Nothing shows this better than the superior temple of Angkor Wat and its thousand stone figures, which ani­ mate it at this moment when they emerge from the deep­ ness of the night. […] the king and the queen, in front of them the celestial female dancers which came down to earth this evening, these daughters of water and light come to offer flowers and smiles […] this is the unique moment where a whole people marvels at the miracle of its own genius, so perfect that just the gods themselves could have made it […] now, here is the long procession, elephants, all the people of the Kingdom, colours, music around their princes […] Now the pageant leaves in the darkness which is also the sign of a dying time. If happy people have no history, proud people write it […] And they know the price. Too much success and glory could only attract hatred and envy. […] Jayavarman VII […] his gigantic stone temples are prayers of stone. Turned up too late to save Angkor, he knew at least to show Cambo­ dia the right path into the future. Long centuries of humil­ iation followed […] It is for peace that Cambodia came back to life. With all the past calamities, it has heard the great instructing voice. It has taken up the conquest of its soil, persistently and patiently, this time without the illusion of glory and power, but only for the joy and benignity to rebuild its own nation. […] The chants of the venerable monks […] are not the silence of oblivion, but the will to live. The great signs of the times, my General, you saw them yourself, […] France knew them as well. The heavy desperations under the enemy. […] Is it really by chance that both our nations met? Too many affinities seemed to bring us here. And now that the [colonial, MF] confrontation has ceased, how these affinities do seem to us to be elective. Two old countries, too rich in humanity to be intolerant, too little do we value short-lived triumphs […] Two young nations, too lively not to be generous, we both know that one only pos-

sesses what had been given from the heart and with amity. It is good that we both meet here like this, at the very place itself of our conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor. And it is good that our Prince and our people are around you. He descends from the imperishable tradition to which Angkor Wat is just one step. He incarnates the kings of the past and forever; he signifies the continuance of Cambodia. On the square in front of Angkor and proud of your presence, this Cambodian people are fervent to take again the strand of its history, the sense of its destiny. And the voices of this night will announce the dawn of the next day. [italics, bolding MF] (Groslier 1966b)

Groslier’s text concluded – in a mode highly relevant for the political aspect of re-enactments in the form of “pageantry” – with a direct and “affirmative address” (Lamb 2008, 243) to the French president and the Cambodian king, in which Angkor Wat was turned into the symbol of a “conjoint caring effort of both nations”. At this final point, King Sihanouk used the staging of the Khmer emergence myth to subliminally communicate a new political self-confidence to his former colonial master. In his 1981 memoirs Souvenirs doux et amers, Sihanouk reconfirmed de Gaulle’s exclamation during the sound-and-light show: “deeply moved by this evocation of our ancient history: C’est extra­ ordinaire, c’est fabuleux!” (Sihanouk 1981, 315–20, here 320). However unique this son-et-lumière show or re-enactment à la Angkorienne of 1966 might have seemed, it was repeated just two years later for another political guest at the other end of the ideological spectrum. Just two months after Jacqueline Kennedy’s private visit to Cambodia, which included a tour to Angkor with Sihanouk and the opening of the “Avenue J. F. Kennedy” in November 1967 (Figs. X.56a,b), Josip Broz Tito, president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, visited his non-aligned brother country and was treated with a similar parcours through Phnom Penh from 17 to 22 January 196884 as well as a reduced version of the de Gaulle sound-and-light show on 19 January at Angkor Wat (Fig. X.57a). Groslier’s text from 1966 was slightly modified to reflect a more socialist undertone. Now, the “Monsieur le Président de la République” and the “Maréchal” were addressed for the same scenario, but in this version the Romans no longer conquered the Gauls, but “Trajan and Hadrian brought the pax romana to the Dacians”, and both the non-aligned and socialist Cambodian and the Yugoslav nations were now “united in a common history of battles” against imperial politics (Sihanouk 1968, 16, 20; compare Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 305–314) (Pl. X.24a,b). Back home in Yugoslavia, the daily Zagreb newspaper Vjesnik reported about the event on 20 January

84  “La visite d’état du Maréchal Tito”, in: Études Cambodgiennes, 13 (January–March 1968), 6–7; compare “Le Cambodge accueile le Président Tito (17–22 January 1968)”, in: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 256–303, 332; especially the text “En l’honneur du Président Tito: Nocturne féerie à Angkor Wat (19 Janvier 1968)” (295–301).

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Gaulle and Tito, their shows at Angkor were nowhere near as spectacular. On 9 November 1968 – during the escalating Vietnam War – Cambodia celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of its national independence. Neither before nor after Sihanouk’s sixteen-year regime was such an event ever staged on a larger scale or in a more spectacular manner to celebrate Sihanouk’s regime in the name of Angkor (Fig. X.58). Alain Daniel’s four-page article in the journal Études Cambodgiennes found the perfect description for this mass spectacle, which was organised by Sihanouk’s Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmère: “Une expérience de théatre total” (Daniel 1968). The journal’s own introduction above his personal text described the general scenario:

Figures X.56a,b  Jacqueline Kennedy (and US diplomat Jacques Klein) with Norodom Sihanouk during her visit to Angkor in November 1967: having tea at Srah Srang in Angkor Park and opening J. F. Kennedy Avenue in honour of the American president (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 243; Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

1968 (Fig. X.57c). The author of the short entry, entitled “Angkor, a bridge between the rushed-by countries” characterised the sound-and-light show as “a moment when the petrified history of this [Cambodian, MF] nation was animated again” (Vrhovec 1968).85 The visits of President Soeharto of Indonesia in April 1968 (Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 315–24), of Emperor Haile Selassie from Ethiopia in May 1968 (Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 325–29), and of President Hamani Diori from the Republic of Niger in November 1969 (Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 330–35) followed, but even though their diplomatic parcours through Phnom Penh and Siem Reap/Angkor were almost interchangeable with those created for de

On 9 November in the National Sports Complex, a grandiose manifestation of the Cambodian youth aimed to replace the traditional military parade. This manifestation was essentially an act of faith in the future of the kingdom and an homage to the “Father of the national Independence” and chef d’État who brings all Khmer energy and goodwill together. Seventy thousand young men and women in front of the prince Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed that “the Khmer nation will never die” and that after several centuries of a trial of strength Sangkum’s Cambodge has regained an exceptional dynamism to guarantee a [brilliant] future. This confidence in the destiny of the kingdom was equally expressed in a speech by the chef d’État himself in which he drew a parallel between the power of Khmer nationalism and the heroic national Vietnamese resistance against the American invaders. (Daniel 1968, 4)

However, Daniel’s own contribution observed the scene from a slightly different and more critical point of view. Questioning the role and form of the dramatic spectacle in the modern world, he referred to ancient Greek amphi­ theatres, to squares in front of cathedrals where medieval mystery plays were enacted (similar to Asian forms of acting), and to Cambodia’s tradition of collective open-air theatres. In the context of the faculties of theatre, choreography, and folklore at Phnom Penh’s newly established Université Royale des Beaux-Arts, and the open public space in front of the Palais Royal, he declared that “the use of the Olympic stadium for the joining of hundreds of thousands of people exploded the classical stage scene with the spectator around it under the immensity of the sky and the natural open space, a commentator announcing all the action over all the tiers with musical accompaniment: towards a spectacle of a total dimension”. The aim of the show, Daniel continued, was to demonstrate how historically the public adherence to the throne had allowed the Cambodian nation to preserve its imperiled national independence: “The

85  My thanks for this information go to Marko Špikić, expert of cultural heritage, in Zagreb/Croatia.

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Figure X.57a  Tito’s visit to Cambodia in 1968 with a sound-and-light-show at Angkor Wat on 19 January (Source: © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

Figure X.57c  Tito’s visit to Cambodia in 1968 as reported back home in the Croatian newspaper Vjesnik (Source: Vjesnik XXIX/7516 (22 January 1968), 2)

Figure X.57b  “In presence of Madame Tito, Samdech offers, in the name of the Khmer people, a statuette from Angkor to the illustrious Yugoslav hero, the Maréchal Tito” (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 86)

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Figure X.58  Un spectacle grandiose: D’Angkor au Cambodge du Sangkum, the success story from Angkor to Sihanouk’s government of Socialist Buddhism, as remembered and reprinted in the Photo-Souvenirs series in 1993 (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 3, 349—350)

lesson was clear: Let us unite and ‘the nation will never die’” (Daniel 1968, 5). The didactic aspect of the representation, involving tens of thousands of young people from all the provinces, was to make the people aware of their country’s past in a new and dramatised way. Daniel concluded with the best definition of what this hybrid mix of cultural performance and historical re-enactment may have had as its effect: “But exactly here lies the danger. The evocative power of such a spectacle is enormous, and draws much more upon sensibility than on intelligence. This power somehow chokes any critical spirit, and requires a particular rigor on the content of the message.” Seemingly contrary to Daniel’s critique – but congruent to our hypothesis of a dangerous exploitation of former French-colonial research data on Ang­kor to achieve the different ideological ends of the new Cambodian nation-state – M. Hang Thiun Hak, the man responsible for the spectacle, explained: “We try as many times as possible to refer to existing documents, such as texts on old steles, or bas-reliefs of temples […] We try to be honest. This scientific conception of history is one of the lessons that we would like to keep from the Occident.

And above all, we want to push back all bigotry of chau­ vinism” (Daniel 1968, 6). The two-hour show programme reached an unprecedented scale in Cambodia’s modern history and included the Royal Ballet, folkloric dance troupes, five hundred actors, singers, musicians, and dancers as well as the whole personnel of the School of Fine Arts, two hundred school children, pupils, and university students, and, above all, the eighty thousand participating spectators in the bleachers, and the few attending guests from abroad along with the whole diplomatic corps. The concrete contents of the event under its title “XVe anniversaire de l’Indépendance: La Nation khmère jamais ne périra” were described in a separate text box inside Daniel’s own comment. Indeed, they merged all the elements: (a) a reimagined ancient kingship; (b) a recivilising mission à la Jayavarman VII; (c) a re-presented grandeur through the reconstituted Bayon temple as the ancient architectural reference point for the modern era (compare Paris 1931 scenario on Fig. VII.25b); and (d) cultural performances and historical re-enactments combined into a postcolonial or neo-Angkorian amalgam:86

86  Legends to Jayavarman VII: “Angkor et le temps de l’apogée sous le règne du grand Jayavarman VII, le Cambodge du Sangkum et de Sihanouk, et le temps du renouveau, telles étaient les deux parties du spectacle. La seconde partie du spectacle, l’ère du Sangkum et de Sihanouk. Politique de l’eau, politiques des usines,

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The action takes place at the end of the twelfth century. Faithfully reconstituted after the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, drawn by six people on his chariot and protected by royal umbrellas, King Jayavarman VII enters the stage, followed by a long cortege. On the vast field of the stadium he decides to build a temple dedicated to the honour of Lord Buddha. Thus, coming from all four directions a crowd of workers runs together carrying enormous cubic stone blocks. In a few moments, the familiar silhou­ ette of the Angkorian Bayon temple with its four-sided Buddha faces is reconstituted from plywood in the mid­ dle of the stadium. […] The Royal Ballet dances around the temple for its consecration and crowds from the neighbouring villages come to see the new construction: peasants with their working instruments, dancers, men, and women, as on the bas-reliefs of the real Bayon temple. […] But there are also wounded and handicapped people, and loiterers. Full of compassion, the king ap­ proaches and heals them, as a stele of Jayavarman VII in­ dicates: “He suffered the diseases of his subjects more than his own; because it is the public pain which makes the pain of the kings, and not their own.” But Buddha announced that the life of man brings war after peace […] and the stadium is filled with fighting warriors. […] Finally there is victory, and thankful songs are sung for the gods. […] The second part of the spectacle takes place in the modern epoch, the Sangkum era. After Jayavarman VII, Norodom Sihanouk brings back the light of independ­ ence in 1953. To illustrate the modern politics and the realisations of the regime, humour and poetry were chosen. As the statistics of the results are shown they come into animated form. Water politics is indicated through a river: innumerable young girls in rows of four flow over the lawn, shaking blue scarfs above their heads. The illusion is excellent. The river sets a water wheel in motion and spreads into a field of sleeping students on the ground. Under this inundation they stand up. Trees grow. A whole orchard emerges: the politics of agricul­ ture. On the river the harvested products come to the factory with turning machines, and the chimneys are

smoking: industrial politics. Transported by the railway to Sihanoukville, the finished products are loaded onto a departing cargo ship: politics of transportation. But the nation must constantly remain awake and needs orderliness for everyone: peasants, workers, railwaymen, sailors, dockworkers, etc. become soldiers. And all the figures execute the movements of a paramilitary ensemble. Night has fallen, all is dark apart from the very centre in shadows: the illuminated bust of the Chef d’État. From here a light comes to illuminate the country and the whole kingdom, following the five principles of Pancha Sila: Independence, neutrality, territorial integrity, Buddhist ­ socialism, and nationalism. With this image the tiers ­ ­become illuminated by innumerable fireflies, and the spectacle finishes in a magical dream world. [italics MF] (Daniel 1968, 6,7)

While Garry praised Sihanouk’s postcolonial regime as a “theatre of profound transformation” (Garry 1964, 1), Daniel’s use of the term “total spectacle” to describe the 1968 event represents not only a thoughtful critique of the dangers of the all-encompassing evocation of Angkor, but also perhaps his secret amazement at this “mass manifestation in the sign of the great [emerging] Socialist countries of Asia” (Daniel 1968, 6). While independent Cambodia quickly approached financial and social oblivion during a period of military escalation in neighbouring Vietnam, the US bombing of Cambodian territory, and the rising concern in both left- and right-wing factions about the misleading politics of the monocratic regime, Sihanouk, the country’s leader, gradually exited the real Cambodian stage in favour of, strangely enough in the eyes of all observers, film-making – a final and costly attempt to realise his ‘vision’ of a reborn Angkorian nation-state.87 It can come as no surprise that most of his films were at least partly shot at both original Angkorian temple sites and at modern spots in Cambodia’s new/old capital Phnom Penh, or that leading roles were played by himself, his wife, Monique, and other members of his family and political

politique des transports, politique de commerce, sont successivement evoquées tandis qu’au centre du terrain subsiste le temple de Bayon, témoin de l’apogée d’Angkor”. In: “L’hommage de la Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmère à Samdech ‘Père de l’Indépendance’, 9 Novembre 1968”, depicted in Sihanouk’s retrospective Photo-Souvenirs du Cambodge: Sangkum Reastr Niyum 1955–1969, volume 3 on “Education” of 1993 (Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 3, 344–50). 87  Sihanouk’s film productions are documented in historic critiques on the king’s own homepage with help from his son Norodom Sihamoni (Sihanouk 2014). Precious information for this research project has been found in the Parisian Archives Nationales where the whole estate of Sihanouk is stored today (Fonds Norodom Sihanouk CARAN AP665) and was published as an inventory with the help of the EFEO in 2010 (Bernon/ Geneste 2010). Most of Sihanouk’s films are now online in low resolution via youtube. In 1997 the documentary Norodom Sihanouk, roi cinéaste was written by Frédéric Mitterand and directed by Jean-Baptiste Martin (Mitterand/Martin 1997). The Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre in Phnom Penh also contains important information. Thanks go to Cheav Engseang, Than Thanaren, Chea Sopheap and Gaetan Crespel for their help in February 2011.

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staff. After Sihanouk’s 1965 documentary Kampuchéa, which depicted Sangkum’s achievements, the journal Kambuja announced that “Cambodia’s first 35 millimetre film”, Apsara, would have its “world première” at Phnom Penh’s LUX Cinema on 20 August 1966. Sihanouk himself justified the film’s simple plot, a “romantic love story” between a lieutenant of the Royal Khmer Air Force and an old star of the Royal Corps de Ballet, by comparing it with films “like Mayerling, Katia, and Sissi [because] the public in general liked to see beautiful things and to escape from the greyness of their everyday life”. Furthermore, the “Princess Bopha Devi [in her] slight body, like that of a miniature person having escaped from the Angkor frescoes, [provided for the film] a wonderful sight [with] ballet sequences”88 and scenes at Angkor Wat.89 After films like The enchanted forest (Fig. X.59a) and Preah Vihear90 in 1966, the 1967 movie Le Petit Prince du peuple (Khmer: Prachea Komar), starring Sihanouk’s son Norodom Shamoni in the main role, was released. It symbolised Sihanouk’s own self-perception of being a reincarnation of the Angkorian kings, “wise and righteous to his people”, as the film had it (Fig. X.59b). In November 1968, not surprisingly, Sihanouk obtained the premier grand prix, (termed “Apsara d’or”) from the French film director Marcel Camus, president of Siha­ n­ouk’s newly initiated Festival international du Film de Phnom-­Penh. Vann Molyvann, the festival’s artistic director, also praised his efforts to create an “authentic national

character” for Khmer film.91 In films like Ombre sur Angkor [Shadow over Angkor], in the same year, Sihanouk took the main role and turned towards contemporary events, including a CIA plot, which, as he himself declared, hinted at the general “threat over Cambodia” (Gordon 1968, 58) and the rising critique of his politics. Two cinematographic productions, however, marked Sihanouk’s last artistic (as well as cultural-political) activities promoting a revival of past Angkorian grandeur for contemporary ends. His last phantasmagorically enacted ‘heritage utopias’ of 1969 would turn, after the coup d’état in 1970, into twenty years of real-life heritage dystopias of civil war (1970–1975), the Khmer Rouge genocidal experiment to turn a Hyper-Maoist Cambodia into a pre-modern state (1975–1979) and, finally, Vietnamese occupation (1979– 1989). The production Crépuscule [Twilight] was again edited by La Société Nationale de Cinématographie du Cambodge. Khemara Pictures (Fig. X.60) and starred Sihanouk in the role of Prince Adit, a retired general of the Royal Khmer Army and a chronic malaria sufferer. His real wife Monique starred as Maharani Maya, a beautiful Indian widow.92 There is no other work in Sihanouk’s œuvre where the French-colonial scientific and myth-making topoi of Angkor’s grandeur shines through more clearly than in this historical ‘re-imaginaire’ of ancient glory93 – nor is there any­ thing to match its visionary, melancholic, and fatalistic undertone (made clear by the title), which foreshadowed Si-

88  “World première of Apsara, LUX Cinema in Phnom Penh on 20 August”, in: Kambuja, 18 (15 September 1966), 113–17. 89  By this time Angkor Wat had already been discovered by international filmmakers: Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim was filmed there in 1965 with Peter O’ Toole in the starring role. 90  The back cover of Kambuja, 18 (15 November 1967) featured an opening scene in which young cadets line up for their promotion in front of Angkor Wat (see Pl. X.20b). 91  In his opening speech, Vann declared: “Today, the cinema holds in Cambodia the place which the Shadow Theatre had before. We have to express our gratitude to Samdech chef de l’État who has contributed to the boost of Khmer cinematographic art with his own personal realisations. Like the great kings of Angkor directing themselves the construction of the great temples, Samdech Norodom Sihanouk has given the Khmer cinema an authentic national character, which is indispensible for the evolution of our traditions and culture. Thanks to his œuvres, our country could not only be represented in several cinematographic summit meetings, particularly in Moscow, Tashkent, and Marseille, but could also win some encouraging prizes.” In: “Le premier Festival international du Film de Phnom-Penh”, in: Études Cambodgiennes, 16 (October–December 1968), 36–38. Compare the cover depicting the 1968 awards show in Réalités Cambodgiennes, 625 (29 November 1968). 92  The French version of the film Crépuscule with English subtitles is available in low-resolution on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7FZ_7ZOUm0 (accessed 22 January 2014). The synopsis, originally hand-written by Norodom Sihanouk is available on the king’s own homepage under “Cinéma/synopses”. 93  In an interview in The Indian Express (7 December 1969), Sihanouk explained his connection to Groslier and the intentions for the film: “The subject matter of ‘Twilight’ was provided by the excellent book sent to me by [my] friend Bernard Groslier, the French world-famous archaeologist, a book very simply entitled “Angkor”. The book is remarkable from all points of view: its presentation, its text, its photographs, its s­ cientific value (for instance, the admirable translation in French of the Khmer poems engraved on the stones). In a word, it is the achievement of a famous experienced and deeply cultured writer. The reading of the book inspired me in the making of the film. I did not want to depict in the film all that is described, suggested, or evoked by the eminent archaeologist. I no longer wanted to film a trite document about Angkor. I did want to create a ‘fiction’ film, according to my habit […] a love story, a journey across my country” (National Archives Paris, Fonds Norodom Sihanouk, CARAN AP 665).

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Figure X.59a  Film still from Sihanouk’s 1966 film The enchanted forest (Source: © Charles ­Meyer archive, Paris)

Figure X.59b  Screenshots from Sihanouk’s 1967 film Le Petit Prince du peuple (Source: © Bophana Film Archive, Phnom Penh; Internet You-Tube)

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Fig. X.60  Official poster for Sihanouk’s 1969 film Crépuscule, with Sihanouk and his wife in the starring roles sitting in front of the Preah Khan temple’s double-storied ‘library’ (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

hanouk’s imminent removal as head of the Cambodian state and the downfall of the country as a whole. During their rendezvous at Siem Reap, and after many elegant car drives and long promenades through Angkor Park, both protagonists sit at the moat facing Angkor Wat and begin to talk about India’s influence on Khmer culture (Pl. X.25a–c).

Prince Adit (Sihanouk) directly quotes the section “What Cambodia owes to India” from Bernard Philippe Groslier’s 1956 monograph Angkor, hommes et pierre on the Khmer’s civilisational emancipation and unique cultural genius (Groslier 1956, 19; compare Coedès 1948b). In a subsequent visit to a Buddhist monastery containing the statue of Jaya­ 233

X  Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

varman VII (Bayon temple) – “the most fascinating personality in Khmer history” – Adit quotes Groslier’s (in fact, Finot’s 1903) translation of the famous stele describing the ancient king’s all-embracing compassion for its people (Pl. X.25d). In front of Prah Khan’s double-storied ‘library’ (compare Fig. X.60), in fact the very first site to be restored by the French through the newly imported technique of anastylosis (see Figs. IX.44a–g; compare Pl. XI.37d), the first confrontation with Adit’s jealous nurse foreshadows a future catastrophe, but Maya leaves with diplomatic friends for Phnom Penh where festivities for the anniversary of national independence are about to take place. What follows is an astonishing montage which merges cinematographic fiction with historically authentic film footage of the architectural highlights of the city (Pl. X.25e–j): Vann Molyvann’s Independence Memorial, Chaktomuk Conference Hall, the State Palace, National Sports Complex and social housing projects, including the 1968 scenes of the collective mass formations to celebrate Sangkum’s major achievements, such as the reinvented “politique de l’eau”. The next shots, before Adit and Maya meet again at his beach villa at Kep, alternate between native dancing scenes in the countryside and fashionable, cigarette-smoking Khmer couples in a modern restaurant (Pl. X.25k–m). After the suicide of the lovesick nurse in a lotus pond, a period of Buddhist mourning, and Maya’s shocked return to India, Adit is left alone with his sickness and is shown longing for death while gazing out towards the sun sinking over the sea (Pl. X.25n–o). In the short-film/documentary Cortège Royal – with an solemn poetic French commentary by Robert Aubry-La­ chainaye – Sihanouk drew his inspiration, as he stated ­retrospectively in his 1993 Photo-Souvenirs, directly from

the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Pl. X.26a). In a shot lasting over twenty minutes, a long line of personnel from the Royal Palace, dressed in colourful dresses and ethnic distinctions to form a kind of “ethno masquerade” (Agnew 2004, 330), staged and documented Cambodia’s imperial past (Pl. X.26b,c). This can be seen as Sihanouk’s last artistic attempt, in the context of the second film festival of 1969, to re-enact both Angkor’s kingly glory and perhaps also what he had already lost in terms of real political authority. Sihanouk’s extraordinary postcolonial experiment in appropriating Angkorian grandeur for the purposes of shaping the young Cambodian nation-state as a “new Ang­ kor”,94 to merge “the real and the suggested, presence and [cultural] memory”, had come to life. Again, foreshadowing Cambodia’s imminent descent into Republican civil war and Khmer Rouge auto-genocide, the film ends with the procession walking into the night: The golden gates slowly close and here is the victory drum which starts the celestial ballet of the Apsaras, mes­ sengers of goodwill for their danced offering of golden and silver flowers. On this day, oh how full of pomp, of Victory, the Angels of celestial Paradise dance so that your life will be long and your reign will be long. And the Bakous put their shells to their mouths at the end of this wonderful night: Is this then the prelude? At the shell’s last sound, all the instruments send their allegories to echo heavenwards. And then the cortege drawn up again resumes its majestic march towards the many coloured and many shaped night, of time and space, of real and suggested, of the present and memory. [italics MF] (Cor­ tège Royal 1969, transcribed in: Sihanouk 2014/Cinématographie)

94  In the editorial for the journal Sangkum in 1969, the committee of the newly founded Association générale

des Cambodgiens de France explained: “What will be the destiny of Kambuja? Will it disappear from the world map or will it survive as a nation worthy of its name? This problem is of capital importance for the Khmer people in general and for the Khmer elite in particular. […] The ‘holy mission’ of the Khmer youth is clearly defined: help the Khmer land emerge in the centre of the universal cultures and civilisations, as a New Angkor [Nouvel Angkor] for the twenty-first century”. In: Sangkum, 43 (February 1969), 83, 86.

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XI



Making Angkor Global (1970—1990): Hot and Cold War Politics, Competing Inheritance Claims and the Invention of Angkor as Heritage of Humanity In the past, we were known for our Angkor Wat temples, which were built in the era of slavery. Slaves built Angkor Wat under the oppression and coercion of the exploiting classes of that time in order to make the kings happy. If our people could build Angkor Wat, they can do anything. (SWB FE/5632/C/11, 5 October 1977) —Pol Pot in a speech of 27 September 1977 The monuments of Angkor are not only the heritage of the people of Kampuchea but equally constitute the heritage of Humanity as a whole. We are seriously affected to see that our monuments of Angkor suffer from the destructions caused by Vietnamese aggression. After the recall of the Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea, we will strongly need international assistance from the International Community, from UNESCO, Japan, and all friend countries to restore and preserve the monuments of Angkor. (Délégation permanente 1983, 3) —The Khmer Rouge as UN-acknowledged exile government of Democratic Kampuchea in the 1983 Dossier Angkor for UNESCO

Regimes changes and inheritance claims: five general observations and findings The twenty years from 1970 to 1990 represent a unique phase in the 150-year transcultural heritage trajectory of Angkor Wat. This period traced the changing political regimes over and territorial configurations within Cambodia as well as the affiliated physical, but also semantic, impact on Angkor as a temple site. In this respect, five general observations and findings will determine the structure of this chapter. The first observation forms a paradox. On one hand, those twenty years saw the most violent period in the modern history of Cambodia: It began with the civil-war-like situation during the US-backed Khmer Republic (1970–75) and was followed by the genocidal regime of the China-­ aided Khmer Rouge (organised under the cynically named Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–79), during which millions of people were killed, landscapes and towns devastated, and the country’s cultural integrity crippled for decades to come. And it ended with the country’s occupation by the Soviet Union-backed Vietnamese Heng Samrin regime (1979–89) and the parallel guerrilla warfare of the exiled protagonists of the former Democratic Kampuchea. However, if the seven decades from 1900 to circa 1970 are accepted as a phase in which the temples of Angkor (and Ang­kor Wat in particular) were the target of an immense physical manipulation through (post)colonial archaeology and architectural conservation work (see chapter IX), the complete opposite was true during these twenty years of unprecedented human violence. After Bernard Philippe Groslier was finally forced to abandon the archaeological

mega-site of Angkor Park and his hubristic project of a reprise totale of Angkor Wat in 1972, virtually nothing happened with the temple structures. Certainly, during this time human abandonment of the site resulted in the encroachment of the surrounding tropical forest, which fostered the slow deterioration of the temples, and the illegal trafficking of sculptural objects from inside the temple grounds increased considerably. Despite the overdramatised news reports, which were issued by the changing regimes inside and outside Cambodia in order to attract international attention for higher political goals, the architectural sanctuaries themselves survived almost untouched. This is surprising considering that, as we shall see, there were many instances of fighting inside the park and of occupation of the temple sites – Angkor Wat most prominently – by the military and by thousands of refugees. The second observation is that this ‘saving’ of the temples is down to one simple reason: none of the above-mentioned political regimes, not least the brutal Khmer Rouge, dared to touch this important site of religious pilgrimage and cultural-national self-assurance. Indeed, all of the political regimes of modern-era Cambodia up to this day – from French colonial rule (1863–1953) through the country’s first period of real independence (1953–70), to Cambodia’s globalised rebirth in 1990 – produced explanatory periodisation models in which their own political raison d’être was seen in specific and salutary relation to the cultural ‘golden age of Angkor’. One prominent example of this can be seen 235

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in the ambivalent climax of 1966 when ex-colonial France (in the person of President Charles de Gaulle) and newly born Cambodia (represented by the prince and head of state, Norodom Sihanouk) congratulated each other for their “conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor” at a sound-andlight show held at Angkor Wat (see chapter X, compare Groslier 1966b). In this chapter, we will conceptualise these actions as the strategies of rhetorical framing (compare Duro 2006) in political agendas that contained concrete cultural heritage claims over – or claims of inheritance of – historical artefacts. As we shall see, those strategies were comparable to, but more powerful than, the colonial ones that were used to instrumentalise appropriated original and/or copied artworks and architectural fragments from Angkor in colonial museum spaces and universal/colonial exhibitions in France. In the context of the temples of Angkor, this was particularly important for the state configurations between 1970 and 1990, since their rather brief existence was constantly threatened by the other regimes, and they were therefore all the more in need of hastily fabricated self-justifications. A “discourse of practice” stands therefore behind the following analysis in order “to question [those] basis assumptions about common or best practices, and to scrutinise [those] ethical and epistemological foundations” (deVereaux 2009, 65) that helped, in our case, to associate and finally merge Angkor with the ‘heritage of humanity’ rhetoric so relevant for the site’s nomination to UNESCO World Heritage in the early 1990s (see chapter XII). In line with what has recently been termed a “discursive turn in critical heritage studies” (Harrison 2013, 95–113), we claim that the heritage of Angkor during those twenty years was – to sum it up – primarily produced or represented through a “discursive practice” (after Hall 2005; compare Waterton/Watson 2010, Hall 2011) rather than physically fabricated by handson physical preservation action. In reference to David Lowenthal’s seminal 1985 book The past is a foreign country we may define these fast-changing political constellations in relation to their heritage strategies as veritable discursive regimes that helped to turn the abstract past of Angkor through “a selective recall” (Lowenthal 1985, 263) into a “present past” (Butlar 2006) or “heritage present” (Harvey 2010). The third observation is that all political stakeholders around the microcosm of Cambodia and Angkor became little more than pawns in the larger ideological Cold War endgame between the United States (which backed the

Khmer Republic), China (which financed the Khmer Rouge and later its exile government), and Russia (which was behind Vietnam’s occupation of the country). Taking the first two observations into consideration adds an absolutely crucial element to this analysis: Current historical research about this specific period – studies about the Khmer Republic are few, but those on the Khmer Rouge period are specifically numerous – has regionalised the contexts of those regimes to Cambodia or former Indochina, or have quite rightly internationalised them as embedded in the climax of Cold War politics, which framed Cambodia as the final victim of larger ideological block systems. However, the semantic ‘trans’-formation of Angkor in this process has been overlooked in scientific literature to this day: in fact, it has followed an unforeseen trajectory from being the centrepiece of the French-colonial mission civilisatrice (compare Falser 2015a) and a royalist signboard during Sihanouk’s postcolonial reign (previous chapter X; compare Falser 2016c), to being a truly global, even ‘universal’ icon of cultural heritage. Incorporating all parallel – local, national, regional and international – reference frames into an abstract amalgam, let us conceptualise Angkor and especially Angkor Wat as a ‘trans’-cultural heritage configuration. What is most often ignored in almost all the publications that primarily focus on the Archaeological Park of Angkor’s after its inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List1 is that this configuration actually began to come to life a full two decades before its de facto inscription in 1992 (see next chapter). It was initiated for the first time in 1970, and therefore even slightly earlier than the ratification of UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention itself which is all too often in the centre of scientific studies (compare Francioni 2008, di Giovane 2009, Cameron/Rössler 2013, Duedahl 2016, Anatole-Gabriel 20162). In this context, the fourth observation is that various nations within a truly global radius formulated their inheritance claims on Angkor well before UNESCO’s globalising machine started to turn. From the mid-1980s onwards, India – the largest non-aligned country in Asia and the only non-Warsaw Pact country to diplomatically acknowledge the People’s Republic of Kampuchea – was awarded the contract (we may call it a ‘return gift’ in our transcultural configuration of cultural heritage) to restore Cambodia’s heritage icon of Angkor Wat. The scientific competence of the Archaeological Survey of India was rhetorically framed by an assessment of the supposedly cultural and ancient

1  Above many others: Kingdom of Cambodia et al. 1996, Miura 2004/2015, Winter 2007, UNESCO Cambo-

dia 2008 and 2013, Hauser-Schäublin 2011, Ishizawa 2012, Daly/Winter 2012, Silva/Chapagain 2013, Chapman 2013, Stubbs/Thomson 2017. 2  The 2016 publication by Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel, La fabrique du patrimoine de l’humanité. L’UNESCO et la protection patrimoniale (1945–1992), goes into a deeper research of what happened before 1972. Her casestudy on Angkor, however, ignored (an observation rather typical for French research on the topic) almost all recent publications about Angkor in English language.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Hinduist ties between India and Cambodia. Another new stated Eurocentric nature in “cultural discourses of heritpresence in this cultural playing field was Japan, Asia’s age in non-Western settings” (Wu/Hou 2015). emerging economic powerhouse. Its protagonists argued Connected to the elements mentioned above, the fifth from a religious point of view that shared Buddhist tradi- finding in this chapter challenges the idealised post-1992 tions virtually obliged countries from as far as East Asia to narrative of the supposedly successful emergency salvage offer disinterested help in order to aid in the ‘renaissance of and World Heritage creation of Angkor through the UnitCambodia’. In addition, Poland’s State Ateliers for Conser- ed Nations’ family of civilised states, altruistic NGOs, and vation of Cultural Property offered its assistance to Vietnam-­ self-proclaimed heritage experts. It will be revealed that occupied Cambodia in the name of a greater socialist broth- after the Khmer Republican government’s first international call for help in 1970, the elites of Cambodia’s inhumane erhood. And as if this were not enough, France re-emerged shortly thereafter with claims of its own long-standing on- Khmer Rouge regime fruitfully mimicked and therefore site competence in civilisational uplifting (this topos was strongly fostered UNESCO’s ‘cultural-heritage-of-humanity’ already introduced by Henri Mouhot in the early 1860s, rhetoric. After the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, the UN-acsee chapter I), a development which was clearly fostered by knowledged exile government – transformed from their UNESCO’s own interests and formulated in its headquar- earlier incarnation as Maoist guerrilla fighters inside ters in Paris. Bringing these different strands together in ­Cambodia to urbane French-speaking diplomats in Paris – order to conceptualise the multi-layered heritage configura­ simply co-opted (we may even say ‘invented’) the idea of tion of Angkor in the late Cold War period will help to chal- ‘­Ang­kor as World Heritage’ and used it to regain power in lenge recent methodological approaches of critical heritage Cambodia. In the ongoing modern tradition to depict the studies which have an overemphasised focus on the global­ stylised silhouette of Cambodia’s most important heritage effects of “authorised heritage discourses” (Smith 2006) icon on the country’s national flags (Pl. XI.1a–j), the flag of through which primarily Western expert cultures impose the exiled Democratic Kampuchea depicting Angkor Wat’s “tacit universals within international framing” (Mas­kell golden three-tower silhouette against the blood-red back2015, 4) on local settings. In fact, well before UNESCO’s ground of revolutionary class struggle continued to wave cosmopolitan heritage regime – made up of primarily in front of the United Nations’ headquarters in New York white male heritage experts and their globalised schemes – and for UNESCO in Paris until the late 1980s (Pl. XI.2). At overran the site after 1992, and ever since (see chapter XII this point in time, the regime’s genocide against its own and epilogue II; compare Falser 2015c), the transcultural people had long been known around the world. heritage formation of Angkor from the 1970s has included To sum up, the competing claims over and the voices diverse viewpoints: Republican-Khmer nationalist, Mao- for and against the cultural heritage of Angkor between ist-Marxist Khmer Rouge and internationalist-socialist, 1970 and 1990 form a hybrid and transcultural configu­ cultural Hindu-Indian, religious Buddhist-Japanese, and ration. The question of their chronological and contextual more recently neo-colonial French, as well as Khmer refu- coming into being presents a great lacuna in scientific regee diasporas from Thailand to France and the United search about the 20th-century history about Angkor until States. Thus, this chapter will seek to re-diversify the often today and will, therefore, stand in the centre of this chapter.

1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975), or: The invention of Angkor as a heritage icon for ‘all humanity’ As we saw in the first volume of this book, the French-colonial leadership claim over Angkor was rhetorically predefined and visually tested in French museums and on exhibition grounds between 1867 and 1937. This claim was made operational back on (or better ‘back-translated’ to) the ‘real archaeological site’ after the Siamese 1907 retrocession of Angkor to Cambodge and the installation of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) as the site’s appointed institution for research and restoration. The durability of this French claim – with King Sihanouk’s Francophile backing – in outlasting the crucial political threshold of Cambodia’s national independence after 1953 was astonishing (see chapter X). Seen from the perspective of the physical impact of restoration, nothing seemed to have changed in the first two years after the country’s

republican turnover on 18 March 1970 (it became known as a coup d’état), when a right-wing and US-backed government under General Lon Nol came to power after deposing Sihanouk (Kulke 1970, Marschall 1975; Chandler 1991, 192–235). During that time, Bernard Philippe Groslier, with a staff of more than one thousand (!) workers, continued to guide the EFEO’s restoration work at Angkor and was busy with the largest restoration project at Angkor Wat (see chapter IX). Throughout the 1960s, resto­ ration efforts were d ­ ramatically modernised and transferred into a bilateral French-Cambodian joint venture. However, France remained the only real European, now ex-colonial, partner to introduce the latest scientific methods and conservation technology ‘from the West’. Despite the fact that Cambodia had become an independ237

XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

ent nation-state, a national and collective people-centred or even participatory concern for the country’s built cultural heritage continued to be silenced through the mo-

nopolist royalist grasp on Angkor that was exercised by the king and monocratic politician Norodom Sihanouk (see previous chapter).

1.1. The Hague Convention and Cambodia’s republican plans for Angkor In June 1970, the entire construction of the cultural heritage of Angkor changed, as did – ever since and up to this day! – its semantic framework. For the first time, real international concerns beyond France and Cambodia were formulated, and the age of a truly global connectivity within the discourse on Angkor abruptly began. Due to dramatic warlike events, the purely national – and this now meant republican – element of the Angkor-as-heritage movement was demoted to second place on Lon Nol’s hurried agenda (and his publication) of Neo-Khmerism (see below). This subordination of belated national claims under internation­ al emergency agendas was, as a matter of fact, observed a second time in 1992 when Angkor Park as the primary cultural asset of a newly born Cambodian nation-state was instantly nominated as a “site in danger” by the UNESCO World Heritage List – even before a protection agency and a management system on the national level were installed in 1995 (see next chapter). During the first days of June 1970 – only about three months after the republican regime had deposed Sihanouk – North Vietnamese/Viet Cong forces attacked the Siem Reap area and penetrated Angkor Park. Just how multi-sited, simultaneous (heterotopic), and global the heritage politics over Angkor had become at this point is indicated by a little note in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 June. It was entitled “U Thant appeals for old shrine”, the acting United Nations’ “Secretary-General appealed to all sides […] in the fighting zone […] not to destroy Angkor Wat, one of the most sacred and renowned religious and cultural monuments of man” (U Thant 1970). Only one day later, on 11 June, the official Message du Gouvernement du Cambodge à l’attention de l’opinion mondiale condemned the invasion of “the imperialist troops of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Vietcong) on Cambodian territory”. Through the formulating of this plea in French, the internationally acknowledged diplomatic language of the time, and the interweaving of

the specific Cambodian context of foreign occupation and the violation of national sovereignty over cultural property with direct quotes from the official introduction of the ­International Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954,3 Ang­kor was turned into the “cultural heritage of all mankind” and threats to its integrity were deemed a concern for “all peoples of the world”: Being “convinced that damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world [patrimoine culturel de l’humanité entière]”, and considering that “the preservation of the cultural heritage is of great importance for all peoples of the world”, the Government of Cambodia sees it as its most important duty to bring to all people the attention towards the threat of destruction of the monuments of Angkor and all the other monuments which are the symbols and testimonies of the rich Khmer culture and high civilisation, which belong not only to Cambodia alone, but to the whole [of] humanity. Finally, the Cambodian Government cautions the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Governments about their impudence of all abuse and destruction, and wants to inform international opinion that on our side we have already taken all necessary measures to safeguard those masterpieces of human cultural heritage [joyeux de l’héritage culturel humain], and that all depredation and acts of vandalism against our monuments and sacred sites will be blamed on the Vietcong and North Vietnamese invaders; those only and uniquely responsible to respond to history and the whole world as their deliberate acts of destruction of all cultural goods [destruction de tous ces biens culturels] are concerned. Issued in Phnom Penh, 11 June 1970. [italics MF] (République Khmère/ COPROBIC 1971, 17—19)

3  Along with its important forerunners, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which defined the first

formal statements of the laws and crimes of war, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954 (enforced 1956) was a reaction to the heavy losses of cultural heritage during the Second World War and was the first real international treaty to focus entirely on the protection of cultural property in armed conflict. Relevant for this context, it also comprised monuments, archaeological sites and artistic objects on-site or in storage, depots and museums. For the original text, see Final Acts 1954 (the Hague Convention 1954); for its general context, see Toman 1994 and 2005; and for the specific Cambodian context between 1970 and 1990, see Clément/Quinio 2004.

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Again, just two days later, on 13 June 1970, the Motion du Parlement Khmer à l’Assemblée Générale de l’Orgnaisation des Nations Unies presented another argument for an international outcry defending “the temple group of Angkor not only as a cultural heritage of a [Khmer] people, but of the whole [of] humanity” (my emphasis; République Khmère 1971, 20). Indeed, for the first time in the modern history of Angkor, the salvage paradigm for the temple site was not embedded in the classical colonial rhetoric (after Rudyard Kipling’s famous ‘white man’s [in this case French] burden’) or exploited by exclusively royalist claims during Cambodia’s short period of independence; it was instead presented by a national government of Cambodia to the global family of “civilised nations”.4 According to the text, the “invader’s use of the temples of Angkor as a bulwark seriously threatened the historic monuments [and] meant a double violation of the Charter of the United Nations [of 1945] and of the 1954 Hague Convention, which had been ratified by Cambodia on 25 April 1962”. Following international rules of the Convention, a decree by the Republican government was issued on 24 June 1970 to create the Comité National Pour la Protection des Biens Culturels en Cas de Conflict Armé (COPROBIC) with the rector of the Phnom Penh University, Tan Kimhuon, as president, and eleven members and two advisors, including B. P. Groslier and Bruno Dagens.5 Its head office was established in the Phnom Penh National Museum. Additionally, the Commission Nationale Cambodgienne pour l’UNESCO was made responsible for the Committee’s administration. As described in COPROBIC’s first (again, French) Rapport Annuel 1970, the first meeting took place on 30 June, together with the Far East Asia specialist, the French founding member of ICOM (International Council of Museums), and, relevant in this context, a UNESCO representative, Vladimir Elisseieff (Elisseieff 1970). A second reunion occurred in July in order to define the protection perimeter of the cultural property of Phnom Penh. For the October 1970 mission the French heritage protection expert André Noblecourt

visited Cambodia (Noblecourt 1971).6 The bilateral agreement in favour of the EFEO’s ongoing (and monopolistic) work at Angkor was hastily renewed, and the various international recommendations of heritage protection in wartime and/or tropical contexts were implemented.7 Under Tan, the Khmer Delegation attended UNESCO’s Sixteenth General Assembly in Paris (12 October–14 November 1970): after the Khmer Republic was officially acknowledged as a representative and voting member state, the delegation launched a declaration on 21 October 1970. It not only highlighted that it was “a victim of foreign aggression” but also quoted The Hague Convention in relation to the menaced cultural heritage of Angkor. More important was the appendix De la problème des biens culturels au Cambodge, which, with a map of Angkor Park (one with a protection perimeter was also circulated, see Pl. XI.3a) and a list of the monuments, brought the groundbreaking request to the point: To sum up, there are two essential problems: the surveillance of the sites and the conservation of the monuments, in the global context of their protection against war and beyond the war. This seems only attainable through the neutralisation of the grand monumental ensembles under an effective international control. [italics MF] (République Khmère 1971, 35—52, here 43)

Together with the document suggesting the “neutralisation” of Angkor Park, a one-page appeal to save Angkor was introduced in six languages (including English, French, Khmer, and Vietnamese) (Pl. XI.3b). The word choice was freed of all previous French-colonial undertones in favour of a mix of national and universal claims: It is unquestionably true that the culture of a nation is testified by its cultural property. Angkor Wat, symbol of the Khmer genius among other monuments of the Angkor group, is one of the concrete testimonies of the

4  However, as was mentioned in chapter IV, this idea of a family of “civilised nations” coming together to

care for a global canon of cultural heritage was initially formulated in the context of the Congrès international pour la protection des œuvres d’art et des monuments during the Paris 1889 Universal Exhibition, and was therefore itself a somewhat colonial (Western) project. 5  Members were Yim Venn as the Directeur des Arts; Chea Thay Seng as the Inspecteur des antiquités nationales et Conservateur du Musée National; Touch Puyeto as dean of the Phnom Penh-based University’s Archaeological Faculty; Bruno Dangens of the EFEO to represent the Conservateur d’Angkor (Bernard Philippe Groslier); Duong Sarin as secretary-general of the Khmer National Commission for UNESCO, and other representatives of all the ministries. 6  Compare with the dossier Missions de MM. Noblecourt, Crassier, Fauquet, Martinetti, experts et techniciens de l’UNESCO auprès du Comité national pour la Protection des Biens Culturels en cas de conflit armé, Phnom Penh 9.–18.10.1970 in UNESCO Archives, Paris (BRX.APA.1). 7  The report mentioned Noblecourt’s 1956/58 UNESCO publication Protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict (Noblecourt 1958), the ICOM-UNESCO 1959 recommendation L’Organisation des Musées, conseils pratiques, and, finally, the UNESCO guidelines La préservation des biens culturels, notamment en milieu tropical of 1969.

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Figure XI.1  B. P. Groslier on a bike between the military lines in Angkor Park in the early 1970s before he left Cambodia (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Cambodian civilisation. Man, no matter to what nation he belongs, owes his pride to this masterpiece which represents one of the most outstanding achievements of humanity, and one of the perfect proofs of man’s capability of creation and progress. Cultural property is priceless as it is often unique and irreplaceable. Thus, for all the people and for each of us, the destruction or the degradation of such property, rare to the nation, is really an unrecoverable loss. […] From today, the National Committee of Cambodia for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict is going to put on the main monuments and the refuges for movable cultural property the distinctive emblem of the The Hague Convention of 1954. Therefore, whenever you come across such places, please help [in] protecting them, and keep away from them as far as you can. The Community of the High Contracting Parties, as well as world opinion would only be very grateful to you. [italics MF] (République Khmère 1971, attachment)

Back in Phnom Penh and during the third COPROBIC meeting on 27 November 1970, Tan reported on the com240

mittee’s successful diplomatic “backstage work” to obtain international support during the assembly in Paris and declared that “all important monuments and sites in the Ang­ kor Park, and forty others in the provinces, had been marked with the blue-white badge of The Hague Convention”. However, “from the side of the occupier which is not a signatory of The Hague Convention, there was just a wall of silence” (République Khmère 1971, 16). A tacit agreement between the conflicting parties would hold until early 1972, long enough to allow a small delegation from Groslier’s team (Fig. XI.1) to circulate between the frontlines in order to continue its task at Angkor Wat: the “Guardian of the ruins of Angkor walk[ed] a delicate path amid war”, according to an article headline in the New York Times on 31 October 1971 by Henry Kamm (Kamm 1971), who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Cambodia: Report from a stricken land (Kamm 1998). Just as Norodom Sihanouk had once done in ‘his’ journals Sangkum, Kambuja, Cambodge d’aujourd’hui (its English version called Cambodia Today), and Nokor Khmer, the Lon Nol regime also created new journals, such as Khmer Republic and New Cambodge, or appropriated older

1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Figures XI.2a,b  Refugees at the Bayon and Angkor Wat temples (Source: Prodromidès 1997, n.p.)

French journals, such as Réalités Cambodgiennes, to sup- kor et les barbares” used more aggressive diction to blame port its new republican agenda. Due to its constant warlike the enemy for vandalism and for the “ridiculous alibi” which defence against Vietnamese invasion and the emerging suggested that Angkor Park was under control of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla fighters, as well as the difficulties it “purely imaginary […]‘Sihanoukist’ forces”.8 In the very first encountered in being fully acknowledged in the global are- issue of September 1971, the journal Khmer Republic: na during its brief political existence of five years, the Month­ly Illustrated Magazine on Modern Cambodia pubCambodian government made the notion of “the volun- lished an overview of Cambodia’s people, culture, law (inteering people’s army to defend the fatherland” and “the cluding the new republican constitution), military, and battle over the occupied and threatened heritage of Ang- press. A special section on diplomatic missions brought kor” the two constant discursive features of its print media Angkor Wat to the centre stage of UN politics: propaganda. In June 1971, the Bulletin d’Information du Cambodge of the Cambodian embassy in Paris (4, rue Acting Prime Minister of the Khmer Republic, General Adolphe Yvon, 75 Paris 16) reprinted a published radio Sisowath Sirik Matak, visits UN Headquarters August 16, message by Sirik Matak from Réalités Cambodgiennes, in 1971 [in New York] and meets with Secretary-General U which the appointed prime minister commemorated the Thant. The Prime Minister briefs the Secretary-General on first anniversary of the above-quoted appeal made by the the military and economic situation in his country, as well Cambodian government on 11 June 1970. He reported on as the preservation of the historic and religious monuthe “tacit accord of the enemy to let the personnel of the ment of Angkor Wat. [italics MF] (Khmer Republic vol. 1/ Conservation continue its work in Angkor Park” and on no. 1 (September 1971), 18) the ongoing pillage and the suffering of the civilians in and refugees from “this perimeter of a no man’s land” (Figs. Later in the journal, a double-page spread presented an XI.2a,b; Pl. XI.4; compare Figs. IX.89a,b). Additionally, he aerial photo of Angkor Wat, and different text blocks commented on an interview with a deserted officer of the Vietfurthered once more the proposal of a “demilitarised and neutral zone under international control” and assured cong C-40 unit from inside the temple, which supposedly readers that “the Khmer Republic abstained from all mili- housed “twenty thousand refugees”. It offered a rather cutary action or occupation activities inside the Angkor Park”. rious mix of photographs depicting the disrespectful “Viet­ However, the second section of the report, entitled “Ang- cong at Angkor Wat” (Fig. XI.3). Its composition may have 8  Bulletin d’Information du Cambodge, Bureau de Presse et d’Information de l’Ambassade du Cambodge, issue 12/71 (25 June 1971), 1–2.

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Figure XI.3  “Vietcong at Angkor Wat” as reported in the first 1971 issue of the journal Khmer Republic (Source: Khmer Republic, vol. 1, no. 1 (1971), 58)

reminded the national reader in a rather tragic way of his own past bourgeois life when Angkor Wat had not only served as a picturesque backdrop for the emerging Cambodian tourist industry but also as a painted background canvas for middle-class studio photography (compare Cougil 2004, 2006) (Figs. XI.4a,b)9: Lon Nol revealed to the world that the communists had set up camp in Angkor Wat. Inside Angkor Wat, the communists have two shields. First the edifice itself. Lon Nol said that Cambodian troops would not contest the Vietcong occupation of Angkor Wat for, while it would be physically possible to drive the communists from the temples and grounds, the war damage would be irreparable. The Prime Minister of Cambodia called for a “demilitarisation” or “neutralisation” of Angkor Wat, but of course there was no response from the communists, sitting prettily inside. The lack of respect that caused them to move into Angkor Wat in the first place made it clear that appeals to cultural heritage would be scorned by them. The second shield is the civilian population with the Vietcong inside Angkor Wat. […] The religious building now is used by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese as a major headquarter to direct their war against Cambodia. […] Life for the communist invaders of Cambodia’s national monument is free and easy as the pictures accompanying this article show. It is a great thing to have

captured the most treasured possession of a country, and the Vietcong, at least those seen in pictures here, find the situation opportune for joking and having fun. [italics MF] (Khmer Republic vol. 1/no. 1 (September 1971), 58)

As a strange counterpart, the coloured back cover of the next issue of Khmer Republic from October–November 1971 featured a female republican soldier in military uniform and a field telephone with the headline “Help Save Angkor…” (Pl. XI.5). At this point, the minister of foreign affairs, Koun Wick, held his English speech on 7 October 1971 at the United Nations’ Twenty-Sixth Session (1956th Plenary Meeting) in New York. After recalling military events, he made Angkor a crucial asset, since the occupation of this centre of tourist activity also affected the national economy. But perhaps more important was that the issue of cultural heritage was brought to the foreground: 182. Among the many acts of vandalism committed on Khmer territory there is one which affects the heritage which belongs not only to the Khmer nation, but also to all of mankind. The historic temples of Angkor, the preservation of which is still entrusted to the French School of the Far East, are in serious danger of destruction, because they have been occupied by North Vietnamese and Viet-Cong regular troops, who have made them their real sanctuaries and fortified military bases from

9 The author would like to thank the Cambodian Documentation Center (DC-Cam) in Phnom Penh,

especially its director Youk Chhang, for the precious help provided during the research for this publication.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Figures XI.4a,b  Cambodian families in a group photo in front of Angkor Wat in 1960 (above); young Cambodian posing in a photo studio in front of Angkor Wat’s painted silhouette (below) (Source: © Documentation Center of Cambodia; Cougil 2004, 5, 91)

which they attack our forces with impunity. 183. In this connexion, the Khmer Government, as of 11 June 1970, launched an appeal to all countries, and in particular to those that are signatories to The Hague Convention 1954, to take the necessary steps and set in motion the necessary and appropriate activities in order to help us to enforce respect for and safeguard this artistic and cultural heritage. For its part, the Khmer Government could have freed Angkor by force, but it prefers to seek all possible

peaceful means rather than to run the slightest risk of damage to these monuments. We want to spare Angkor from the fate of the historic city of Hue in Viet-Nam. 184. That is why, in accordance with the principles enunciated in The Hague Convention of 1954, the Khmer Government has again addressed a solemn appeal to all Member States and to all men of goodwill to help it to convert the Park of Angkor into a demilitarised, neutralised zone placed under international control. 185. I hereby renew

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Figure XI.5 The UNESCO Courier of June 1968, claiming UNESCO’s worldwide “conservation missions” to salvage Athens, Venice, Borobudur and Angkor (Source: The UNESCO Courier, June 1968, 8—9)

that appeal. The Khmer Government undertakes, for its part, to avoid any action or any military occupation of Ang­kor, and awaits a similar commitment from the adversary. International action for the preservation of these temples is exceedingly urgent, particularly as quite recently, on 13 September 1971, the aircraft in which members of the Khmer Government were riding on their way to Siem Reap, at the time of its landing at the Siem Reap airport, came under the fire of mortars shot from one of the bases installed at the summit of the Bakheng monument in the Park of Angkor, wounding a number of the civilian population. In the search for a solution to preserve the temples of Angkor from destruction, we express our deep gratitude to the Secretary-General, U Thant, and to UNESCO for the efforts that they have made in this direction. [italics MF] (Koun Wick 1971, §§ 182—85)

Shortly thereafter (so fifteen years after Jayavarman VII on the cover of 1956 and more than five years after a similar edition featuring “Monuments in peril” at Angkor Wat in 1965, compare Pl. IX.24a,b), UNESCO, in December 1971, turned the exclamation “S.O.S. Angkor” into the headline for a themed issue of its UNESCO Courier: A Window to the World (Pl. XI.6a,b). In the decade before UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention in 1972, this cover with Jaya­ varnan VII (compare his reinvention since the French-colonial 1930s and Cambodia’s postcolonial 1960s, see Figs. X.4–5; Pl. X.2a,b) was one of a string of similarly dramatised slogans that were designed to save “threatened” sites of cultural heritage, including Angkor, Venice, the Athens Parthenon, and Borobudur (Pl. XI.7a,b).10 Around 1970, old-fashioned ‘cultural heritage as civilising mission’ claims, like those made by France in colonial Indochina, seemed

10  UNESCO’s June 1968 issue of The UNESCO Courier – with the cover slogan “Threatened” – published a “World map of UNESCO conservation missions” (compare with the similar issue from January 1965 with more European and American sites) which covered Asian sites like Borobudur/Indonesia (explained by B. P. Groslier; compare with Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2015b), Sukhotai/Thailand, Bhaktapur/Nepal, Srirangam/India, and Ang­kor/Cambodia, along with other postcolonial heritage sites in Africa and heritage icons in Europe. See The UNESCO Courier, June 1968, 8–9.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Figure XI.6  Quoting the French daily newspaper Le Figaro to save Angkor in Réalités Cam­ bodgiennes in December 1971 (Source: Réalités Cambodgiennes, 775 (17 December 1971), 24)

to slowly clear the way towards a kind of “post-war internationalism” (Harrison 2013, 56) in which UNESCO’s self-­ declared conservation missions (Fig. XI.5) began to encompass the whole planet (compare Falser 2015c,f). For the December 1971 cover of the journal, depicting the head of iconised King Jayavarman VII (compare his French-historiographical career in chapter X), the two-page introductory comment by the Japanese-American UNESCO specialist Hiroshi Daifuku embedded – through a dangerous narrowing of historical facts – Angkor’s actual “menace by armed conflict” into a supposedly continuing history of Cambodia’s endangerment through its eastern neighbour: “the Chams pillaged Angkor in 1177 AD”, and now Vietnam had invaded the country. Daifuku judged the Cambodian suggestion of a “neutral zone” around the temples to be the only promising option against “the loss of identification

and continuity [possibly] leading to the eventual disappear­ ance of an entire people”, which he described alongside examples of Rome’s destruction of Carthage and Nazi Germany’s destruction of Warsaw (Daifuku 1971, 4). This transnational borrowing of slogans, proposals, and illustrations to ‘save Angkor’ was continued in a piece for the French newspaper Le Figaro with the headline “Pour la sauvegarde d’Angkor: Cri d’alarme de l’UNESCO” (Fig. XI.6). The article addressed the same issues, and the proposal to “evacuate all military from Angkor Park” was followed by a list of the three “neutral countries to control the neutralised zone: Switzerland, Denmark and Austria”.11 In late January 1972, the situation worsened considerably in the northwest of Cambodia where the invaded enemy inside Angkor Park forced the EFEO to close its restoration sites at Angkor Wat and elsewhere (compare the end

11  “Intervention de M. Hoeur Lay Inn, représentant de la République Khmère à la 2e Commission de l’ONU,

20 October 1971”, in: Réalités Cambodgiennes, 775 (17 December 1971), 24–25. The Austrian proposal may have had a concrete reason, since by that point it was already clear that the Austrian politician Kurt Waldheim would follow, from January 1972 onwards, his predecessor, the Burmese diplomat U Thant, as secretary-general of the United Nations. However, only the Swiss National Commission to UNESCO would take any concerted initiative in those years (see below), whereas Austria made individual suggestions.

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of chapter IX). Shortly afterwards, the Khmer National Commission for UNESCO published its first (French) UNESCO Bulletin in March 1972. Not only was the new design of the Angkor Wat tower silhouette on the flag of the Khmer Republic (Pl. XI.8a), the temple’s silhouette was also used to grace the cover of the Bulletin (Pl. XI.8b). An entire chapter entitled “L’UNESCO et le problème de préser­ vation et de protection de nos monuments d’Angkor” was published inside: the previous national and international events and appeals were summarised, and the thank-you letters from Hang Thun Houn (president of the Committee), and from Tan Kim Huon (president of COPROBIC) to René Maheu (the French director general of UNESCO since 1961) were reprinted. As a kind of proof of the global connectivity effected through the latest communication technologies, Koun Wick (Cambodian minister of foreign affairs) reported in a capitalised telegram-style from 2 February 1972 to Maheu about the closing of all conservation sites in Angkor: HONNEUR VOUS INFORMER QUE PUIS VINGT JANVIER TROUPES VIETCONGS-NORDVIETNAMIENNES OCCUPANT ZONE ANGKOR SANS AUCUN AVERTISSEMENT ONT FAIT ARRETER TRAVAUX CHANTIER DE CONSERVATION ET PROTECTION — STOP — ILS ONT DETRUIT ECUSSONS BLEU BLANC CONVENTION LA HAYE PARC ANGKOR ONT ARRETE CHEFS CHANTIERS ET OUVRIERS TITULAIRES CARTE BLEUE DE LA CONVENTION […] ONT INTERDIT DESORMAIS ACCES ZONE ANGKOR — STOP — SELON DONNE SOURCE VIETCONG NORDVIETNAMIENS PROJETTENT MENER ACTION ARMEE DANS LA ZONE ANGKOR — STOP — […] VOUS SERAIT RECONNAISSANT BIEN VOULOIR EXAMINER OPPORTUNITÉ USER VOTRE INFLUENCE POUR OBTENIR APPUI INTERNATIONAL AFIN SAUVEGARDER DE PATRIMOINE HUMANITÉ — STOP (Khmer National Commission 1972, 9)12

Maheu responded only on 19 February by reconfirming that Hiroshi Daifuku would be sent to Cambodia as a “fonctionnaire du département du patrimoine culturel”. This was a turning point in the call for immediate action, since Maheu had just defined his hesitant position on 24 January 1972 to his sub-director of the culture section:

Deliberately, I have put this affair on hold because I estimated, on the one hand, that no precise danger menaced Angkor (against certain “information” which appeared in the press from time to time), and on the other hand, that the political conditions did not allow me to initiate any new diplomatic action. However, I will try to get in contact with the concerned parties […]. At this point I ask you to follow the evolution of that situation and to let me know when dispositions should be made for new official plans.13

As was detailed later in the Bulletin, Daifuku came to Phnom Penh on 26 February to meet several politicians and was at Siem Reap between 29 February and 2 March to talk to the local authorities, the staff of the French Conservation, and to refugees from the Park area. In its rather jumbled “Chronology of events” section, the journal Khmer Republic reported on the “official” occurrences in the first months of 1972: the US president, Richard Nixon (he visited Angkor with Bernard Philippe Groslier in 1953, see Fig. X.55a), presented his “eight-point peace plan for Indochina”; Sirik Matak visited Siem Reap on 22 February (he also met Groslier, see below); an Angkor Wat Preservation Day was organised by the Education Ministry at Phnom Penh on 24 February, in which several officials and universities participated; from 26 February onwards “UNESCO delegate Hiroshi Daifuku visited Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and the temple areas in company of Foreign Minister Koun Wick” (Fig. XI.7a); finally, the “Operation Angkor Chey [Victory at Angkor] in the Siem Reap-Angkor area” was launched on 29 February by the republican forces under Major General Sor Hor (Fig. XI.7b).14 These military actions made dramatic cover illustrations for the February and March 1972 issues of Réalités Cambodigennes (Pl. XI.9a,b). This way of presenting the nexus between political and military operations on the one hand, and cultural inheritance claims over Angkor (including the tragedy of the refugees from this area) on the other, continued in the August 1972 issue of the journal Khmer Republic: illustrations with captions such as “Khmer paratroopers in Operation Angkor Chey: The fabled temple of Angkor Wat can be seen in the background” or “The flag of the Khmer Republic on a temple on the summit of Phnom Bakheng, the day when

12  The English translation of the telegram-styled messages reads: “We have the honour to inform you that

since 20 January North Vietnamese-Vietcong troops occupy the zone of Angkor without any warning and stopped all work sites of conservation and protection. They have destroyed all blue-white badges of The Hague Convention and hindered all site managers and workers holding the blue card of the convention […] Since then they prohibited all access to the Angkor zone. According to available information the Vietcong-North Vietnamese are planning further military action in the Angkor zone […] We would [be] very thankful if you could examine the option to use your influence to launch international backing to safeguard this heritage of humanity.” 13  Letter from 24 January 1972 by René Maheu to Richard Hoggart, attached to the assistants of the generaldirector, Mr. Gérard Bolla (deputy general-director) and Mr. Jimenez. In: UNESCO Archives, Paris (CLT. CH.65). 14  “Chronology of Events”, in: Khmer Republic, vol. 1/no. 3 (March 1972), 25–26.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Figures XI.7a,b  Hiroshi Daifuku at Angkor; military in front of Angkor Wat, as depicted in Khmer Republic, March 1972 (Source: Khmer Republic, 3 (March 1972), 25, 26)

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XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

Figures XI.8a,b  The fight over Angkor, depicted in the August 1972 issue of Khmer Republic (Source: Khmer Republic, 4 (August 1972), 21, 22)

Khmer troops recaptured the hill from the VC/NVA” (Figs. XI.8a,b) commented on the military operation. A few pages later, a well-illustrated essay entitled “Angkor must be saved” (Pl. XI.10a,b) provided the information that the Vietnamese “troops, chief among them regiment 203 of the autonomous unit C-40 have fortified their positions inside

the temples, dug trenches and underground bunkers and have set up food and ammunition depots”.15 In November of the same year, the journal New Cambodge recycled Daifuku’s slogan “S.O.S. Angkor” from the UNESCO Courier of December 1971: it described the enemy “not among the civilised, but [as] vandals”, which had finally “chased from

15  See the section “Chronology of events”, and “Angkor must be saved”, in: Khmer Republic, vol. 1/no. 4

(August 1972), 17–22 (here 21) and 40–51 (here 49).

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Angkor the eminent archaeologist Bernard Philippe Groslier, whose neutrality was recognised by all”.16 Two other sources allow us to characterise this crucial moment in 1971–73 when the formerly exclusive French affair of Angkor was rather instantly turned into a truly globalised media event: on the one hand, Groslier’s personal diary entries commented on the fading French monopoly over Angkor.17 On the other end of the spectrum, however, the telegram-style copies from the international press gave an “outside” perspective. They were then collected and personally annotated by Beijing-exiled Sihanouk and later donated as original papers to, and catalogued by the EFEO, before being finally deposited at the French National Archives in Paris (Bernon/Geneste 2010). As a third source, a first-hand report by the former lieutenant-gen­ eral of Lon Nol’s Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), Sak Sutsakhan (who, after 1979, led Son Sann’s guerrilla troops against the Vietnam-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea, see below), was produced in 1978 for the US Army Military History Department in Washington. Here, the year 1972 was characterised as “the beginning of the so-called ‘Khmerisation’ of the war in Cambodia” (Sak 1980, 28), and the initial VC/NVA forces slowly gave way to allied Khmer communist forces. This also comprised FANK’s Military Region MR4, which defended the province and city of Siem Reap and led a special attack on the Angkor area (Fig. XI.9): Operation Angkor Chey launched on 29 January with the objective of encircling the Angkor Wat/Angkor Thom temple complex and ruins, and interdicting the flow of enemy supplies into the Angkor area. The enemy had been able to create a sort of sanctuary there because of our hesitation to risk damaging those national treasures. Initially the operation was marked by small-scale skirmishes along Route 6, east and west of Siem Reap. On 21 February, FANK units ran into stiff resistance as they tried to rout the enemy from fortified positions along the southern periphery of the temple complex. […] In Siem Reap, FANK Operation Angkor Chey was dealt a serious blow when elements of the 203d VC/KC Regiment recaptured Phnom Bakheng Mountain, a key terrain feature which had been in FANK hands since 19 May. Enemy control of this high ground left the Siem Reap airfield exposed to harassing fire and denied to friendly air operations. As a result, the FANK were forced to use the Tonlé Sap Lake and the new airfield south of Siem Reap for supply deliveries. [italics MF] (Sak 1980, 101, 107, 111)

This rather diffuse ‘Khmerisation’ of the conflict was also mirrored in the context of Angkor, since Groslier’s personal notes seem also to constantly switch between a supposed Vietcong and Khmer Rouge occupation of Angkor (Prodromides 1997, 263–77). Quite rightly, his entries from 21 December 1971 and 16 August 1972 placed the “truce between the Vietcong and the Khmer at Angkor” within a wider context of the “geopolitics” in Cambodia and beyond, and in them he agreed with US ambassador Emory Swank that “the possession of Angkor was evidently a great political asset”. According to Groslier’s notes on 21 to 25 January 1972, “Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were encircled during the night, all conservation sites were interrupted and all material seized, and the Chef of the Khmer Rouge, Mith Xhem, presided over a sort of purification [épuration]”, since the French archaeologist was considered “an agent of the CIA”. In March and again in June 1972, the US diplomat Enders discussed with Groslier whether “napalm bombing would damage the stones [or even] liquefy the quartz” of the old temples.18 Groslier was shocked by this rather sarcastic remark, as human casualties were not even taken into consideration. On June 16, and in the context of the “catastrophic battle over Phnom Bakheng”, Lon Nol commented rather apathetically on Groslier, reminding him of his earlier “declaration urbi et orbi of never attacking Angkor”: “But Mr. Groslier, you will be here to repair all that. I have seen that at the Taj Mahal: one replaces the old stones with new ones. So, this will be the way to do it at Angkor!” (Prodromides 1997, 276). On 29 November 1973, a few weeks before Groslier left Siem Reap forever on 3 February 1974, he reported on the “mixed presence of Viets and Khmer Rouge” at Angkor. Taking a closer look into Sihanouk’s private collection of international press releases by UPI (United Press International), AFP (Agence France-Presse), and Reuters about the crucial moment of February 1972, one might feel surprised that Angkor Wat stayed intact through those weeks of heavy fighting. As a matter of fact, Sihanouk’s handmade annotations were especially dense in the context of a UPI message from 8 February 1972, which related the news of a new military confrontation over Sihanouk’s supposed plan to install an alternative government at Angkor proper (Pl. XI.11): [t]he apparent ambush occurred only hours after a visit by u.s. ambassador emory c. swank to the nearby government-held town of siem reap, the headquarter of three government brigades operating east, west and

16  See the article “S.O.S. Angkor”, in: New Cambodge, 21 (November 1972), 22–24. 17  Groslier’s original diary could not be identified in the EFEO Archive in Paris but were reprinted in

excerpts in Prodromides’ monograph Angkor: Chronique d’une renaissance (Prodromides 1997, 263–77).

18  According to Groslier, on 21 May 1972 T26 airplanes dropped this inflammable liquid over sections of

Angkor Park; likewise, the Americans engaged in B-52 carpet-bombing over the whole of eastern of Cambodia during Operation Freedom Deal until August 1973 when those operations were suddenly stopped.

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Figure XI.9  A battle map with Angkor in Khmer Republic at War, a published military report by Sak Sutskhan in 1980 (Source: Sak 1980, 100)

south of the fabled ninth-century temple ruins. the clash on the southern approaches of angkor came amid building speculation here that the government is trying to forestall a north vietnamese and khmer rouge political move in the temple area. intelligence reporters relayed by field reporters indicate that the communist may be trying to set up a sort of “government on cambodian soil”

before the nixon-chou meeting in peking feb. 21. (cambodia, phnom penh, feb. 8 1972 (upi))19

Shortly thereafter, on 16 February, AFP reported on a press conference by Chau Seng, Ministre chargé des missions spéciales du GRUNK, during which he reinforced that his government’s presence at Angkor was merely “to control at all

19  The original document was analysed in the collection of the Sihanouk Estate in the National Archives

Paris, under the file name AP665/252 Angkor and ‘Attaque d’Angkor’ (1972). This file name applies also to the other above-quoted sources.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

costs the historic monuments and their preservation […] and that the rumour of an Angkor-government was nonsense as the only political interest was the capital alone”. Other news in the following days reported on the presence of “four thousand North Vietnamese and Cambodian guerrillas” and on the “napalm dropping by Thai-based A37 bombers”. However, serious reporters refused to call the entire scenario a “Battle over Angkor, [as] heavy airstrikes were ruled out because of the danger of hitting the outer wall of the Angkor Complex which stood only three hundred metres behind the Communist positions”.20 The Thai head of state, Marechal Thanom Kittikachorn, also supported the plan to neutralise Angkor. The undated Rapport sur la protection des biens culturels by COPROBIC (most likely from late 1972) reconfirmed once more that the Khmer Government undertook everything to save Angkor from a destruction through warfare and did not set up any system of defence in the Park, as all military and police had been removed from the perimeter of Ang­kor. Profiting from this opportunity, the communist Vietnamese, however, had moved into this haut-lieu of art and history, […] had forced the inhabitants to execute fortification works within the perimeter of Angkor Park and even within the walls of the temples where they have installed heavy weapons. Ignoring the international laws and reglementations, they had likewise transformed some temples, like the world-famous Angkor Wat, into a veritable fortress (République Khmère 1972, 3, 10).

The Ministry of Culture report Les chefs d’œuvres de l’art khmer en péril au Cambodge from 16 July 1973 was written in the same vein: now Angkor Park had turned into a “military camp” with a “whole defence system of trenches, bunkers and underground galleries”, and the only way to save the ruins was – once more – the “neutralisation of Angkor Park” (République Khmère 1973, 9, 11, 13). In fact, the claim over Angkor was not only nationalised when republican representatives formed new commissions and protection agencies were freed from Sihanouk’s elitist-royalist connotation; the mission to safeguard the threatened site through a family of ‘civilised nations’

under the 1954 Hague Convention and UNESCO’s emerging claim on cultural heritage instantly internationalised Angkor-as-heritage. Finally, the case was also globalised as a topic that circulated through worldwide media coverage and attention. In addition to that transcultural layering, a totally new – one might call it trans-regionalised – configura­ tion of cultural heritage claims emerged. In 1965, the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation (SEAMEO) was established as an intergovernmental organisation by Southeast Asian countries (most of them had just gained independence) in order to promote regional cooperation in education, science, and culture. Originally, during the late Sihanouk era, Cambodia was not a founding member. In 1971, the year the Khmer Republic joined SEAMEO, it proposed a Preparatory conference on the restoration and animation of historical sites, for the purpose of establishing in Phnom Penh an Applied Research Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts (ARCAFA), which was finally held from 4 to 8 December 1972 in Phnom Penh and its proceedings were published under this name. The effort to stage this transregional meeting of Southeast Asian nation-states in Phnom Penh to discuss archaeology and cultural heritage protection systems was all the more astonishing since Cambodia’s entire governmental forces in those months were devoted to the ongoing civil war, including the open question about the Archaeological Park of Angkor. Due to the unsafe situation on the site, Angkor was ultimately not included in the post-conference tour, which visited Prasat Banan in the Battambang province instead. Beforehand, the invitations issued to all the ministers of education from the SEAMEO member countries had requested “a delegation of three specialists, these to be 1. an archaeologist; 2. a historical monument architect or specialist; and 3. a site-arrangement specialist”. Cambodia was represented with some old French faces as consultants,21 which included B. P. Groslier and his right-hand man at the Conservation d’Angkor, René Dumont.22 The participating countries of Indonesia, the Khmer Republic, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the Republic of Viet-Nam were asked to send their “Country Reports”, which were also published in the proceedings (ACRAFA 1972a–d, for the wider context see Solnheim 1974). Accord-

20  “Face à face à Angkor (Roland Pierre Paraingaux/Siem Reap 20 February 1972/afp)”, Sihanouk Estate in

the National Archives Paris, AP665/252 Angkor and ‘Attaque d’Angkor’ (1972).

21  According to this requirement, the representatives for the Khmer Republic were Chhun Hean Ho Tong

Ho (chairman of the conference in his function as Counsellor to the Ministry of National Education, Culture, Youth and Sports), Huot Kim Leang (rector of the University of Fine Arts), and Chea Thay Seng (Inspector of Cultural Patrimony). Consultants to the conference were Charles Archaimbault (ethnologist, EFEO Bangkok), Yves Boiret (chief architect for historical monuments at Paris), Bernard Philippe Groslier (directeur de Recherches EFEO and CNRS, Conservateur d’Angkor), René Dumont (architect DPLG France), and Touch Puyeto (dean of the Faculty of Archaeology in Phnom Penh). 22  Dumont (compare Fig. Intro.17a) would play a crucial role in the late 1980s in rediscovering the plaster casts of Angkor in France (Dumont 1988) to vote for their changed value from secondary sources of art and architecture to primary sources of a French history of collecting Angkor (compare chapter XII).

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ing to the “General considerations” and the “Resolution and recommendations” in the published final report (spanning five volumes), achieving a greater “cultural unity among the countries of SEAMEO” also touched upon the issue of “cultural heritage”, and “the protection of national heritage [necessitated both] an international collaboration in the spirit of the universal character of science, [but] also to develop a regional approach” (ARCAFA 1972a, 27; compare 1972e). The opening speech on 4 December 1972 by the acting Cambodian minister of national education, Keo Mongkry, evoked – only a few weeks after the UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage as a matter for “mankind as a whole” had been adopted in Paris on 16 November 1972 – the totally new transregional narrative of a “Southeast Asian cultural heritage community”. Angkor Wat was now a shining star on the list of Southeast Asian cultural heritage icons, even if the intoned chain reaction of mass tourism and the site’s cultural “spectacularisation” and “fossilisation” into a static entity23 sounded like a self-fulfilling prophecy of the side effects of its hasty nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992: And it could be said first of all that Southeast Asia lives to the rhythm of the same music. […] Out of all this, along our banks, in the heart of our rice fields, on our mountainsides countless monuments exist. They may be only historic relics if we abandon them. They may on the other hand be models and examples of what is best and noblest if we know how to preserve them. All of them, whichever they are and however different, deserve our care for this reason. Whether it be the amazing effervescence of Borobudur or the airy nobility of Angkor-Wat, whether it be the elegant grace of Vat Prah-Keo in Vien­ tiane or the glow of the Thai monasteries or again the purified austerity of a Malaysian mosque, the mysterious writing on the ground in the Palaces of Hue or the baroque grace of a Philippine church with its wonderful bamboo organs […] But these must not be signs emptied of all emotion, fossilised shells that speak of death or merely problems handed over to scientific learning. […] And that is where

the cooperation of all international scientific institutions will be valuable with the framework of this new worldwide movement, this interest in cultural heritage. Nor should these curiosities of the past become a mere spectacle, victims of that often unproductive disturbance of modern life: mass tourism which is basically only an extension of an industry of feverish sightseeing that aims above all at making people forget. On the contrary, and not forgetting all the benefits of tourism, we must aim at raising its ambitions and at taking advantage of the amazing resources offered by modern techniques to allow everyone to make pilgrimages to these places of origin. In short what is needed is that this intelligent study of the past, this massive effort to preserve and revive, should lead us to knowledge and communication. […] It will therefore be all the more exciting to work together since in this way we shall be able to unravel both unity and diversity, in brief, the richness of the countries of Southeast Asia. [italics MF] (ARCAFA 1972b, 37—41)24

Already in the summary report from the Khmer Republic by Chea Thay Seng (inspector of cultural patrimony, Phnom Penh), two major – in fact French-made – deficits for Cambodia’s contemporary heritage formation were identified: (a) the entire focus of brick and stone temple heritage without any vernacular and religious sites on the list (compare Republique Khmère 1972), and (b) an outdated Frenchcolonial protection system that was still in play (compare Tan 1972).25 The Country Report of the Khmer Republic (ARCAFA 1972b, 153–68) was revealing in two aspects: first, it brought to the transregional attention of a Southeast Asian forum the current warlike circumstances in Ang­kor; second, the report’s section about the “animation of sites” (ARFACA 1972b, 265–80) already contained many of the proposals for a “National Park of Angkor” which, though hardly realised until 1989, instantly resurfaced in full scale after the site’s UNESCO nomination in 1992 (see next chapter). These were: commercial exploitation and zoning (spanning from condensed hotel areas and an Angkor Museum to sound-and-light shows at Angkor Wat), extended touristic activities in the region, and an “integrated development” approach to the temple sites and the surrounding “ecosystem

23  This effect was already seen during the space-and-time-compressed national pavilions, including the Ang­kor-styled representations, during the universal and colonial exhibitions (see their evolution in the different chapters in the first volume of this publication) and has been identified for temple sites around the world as “archaeologised heritage” (Falser/Juneja 2013b). 24  This quote was re-used for an article which reported on the ARCAFA conference, see New Cambodge, 22 (December 1972), 32–37, also 23 (August 1973), 52–58. 25  The deficits were highlighted: (a) the roughly eight hundred classified monuments on the list of protection were almost all decreed in the French-colonial 1920s and 1930s, and this included only temples from the sixth to thirteenth centuries with a main focus on Angkor, excluding “the Buddhist (vihara) and private dwellings, and prehistoric sites”; and (b) the “inadequacy of the national legislation”, as it was only based on the French law of historic monuments from 1913 and used for Cambodia until 1930. Other unsolved questions touched upon the destruction, theft, and illegal trafficking of artworks, and the shortage of financial resources and specialised personnel (ARCAFA 1972a, 53–55).

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

of the Kulen-Angkor-Great Lake area”.26 The promising Progress Report of the ARCAFA Project Development Office was published in early 1974 (ACRAFA 1974), just the point when the collapse of the Khmer Republic under the pressure of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas was already imminent, and thus all plans to develop Angkor were abandoned for more than a decade. Beyond these transregional initiatives formed in the Southeast Asian arena, initiatives also emerged at the international level: the National Commission to UNESCO from Switzerland approached René Maheu on 28 February 1973 with an attached article in the Tribune de Genève in which the general secretary of the Swiss Commission, Jacques Rial, pointed to the rumour of Vietnamese soldiers “pillaging Angkor” for global art dealers in Phnom Penh and Bangkok (Pl. XI.12a) and called for a movement “to save Angkor without waiting for global diplomatic negotiations”.27 On 23 May 1973, the Swiss Commission sent two maps of the political situation in September 1970 (Pl. XI.12b) and of the republican version of the “National Park of Angkor” with the proposed delimitation of a neutralised zone (Pl. XI.12c; compare Pl. XI.3a). In this version, the protected zone was considerably larger than had been decreed by the Frenchcolonial authorities in 1925/30 (compare Pl. IX.13), as it covered both giant water tanks of Angkor (West and East barays):28 for the first time in the modern history of the site a non-Asian institution other than the French EFEO had proposed a new protection status for the Archaeological Park of Angkor; this time under the control mechanism of the transnational UN framework. In the meantime, international press headlines in 1973 swung from sensationalised, “The rape of Angkor” (Far Eastern Economic Review, Ba­czynskyi 1973); to intellectual, “The Khmer Rouge [at

Ang­kor] seeking to arrange parley” (New York Times, Durdin 1973); to anxious, “Imperilled temples of Angkor” (Herald Tribune, Becker 1974). Various inheritance claims over Angkor were also adjusted to the national scale within a new republican agenda, although they were rather late, hasty, and unconvincing. Only in 1974, when the battle was almost lost to the Khmer Rouge, who had surrounded the country’s capital of Phnom Penh, did General Lon Nol finally present his (again French) “essai of Neo-Khmerism”. In the book’s conclusion, he aimed at bringing together the “quintessence of Khmer and occidental culture”, that is “France, the United States, and Sun Yat Sen”, in a rather hybrid mix of references, declaring: “Neo-Khmerism is a ‘concept’ formed by the fusion of the European [French-revolutionary, MF] spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity; Buddhist discipline, mercy and egalitarianism; and the global schools of thought” (Lon Nol 1974, 235). If some of these components were not specifically Khmer per se, were they the constitutive elements for a “rebirth [of] the glorious history, […] the Golden Age of Angkor (9th–15th century)” in the contemporary format of “national renaissance, republican democracy and the people’s well-being” (Lon Nol 1974, 36, 39)? To answer this question, Lon Nol interwove his contemporary, combative political agenda and the “barbarous and shameful invasion of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong” with his mission and vision of the new-old Khmer ethnicity (Lon Nol 1974, 18–36): For him, it was not just the classical period of Angkor which formed the reference, but also the precursory elements of “the Khmer race with its long-past victories which led to the Angkorian culture as the apogee of our glory”. With this he was referring to the pre-Angkorian epoch of the sixth- to ninth-century semi-­

26  One sentence of the report on “future prospects” indeed brings to mind an element in future expert re-

ports after 1992: “One of the major concerns of the Khmer Government is establishing the boundaries of the arranging of Angkor Park. This has caused controversy between various administration departments. Prior to the war, the allotment of housing and hotel building plots was done without consideration for site preservation” (ARCAFA 1972b, 164). In the section “Animation of sites”, the first part was dedicated to “The National Park of Angkor” (ARCAFA 1972b, 265–67), with some of the following keywords: transferring the airport, creation of a Siem Reap Site Museum, extension of Angkor Park with the determination of several zones (“Zone I: The Archaeological Park; Zone II: The National Park of Angkor one km around Zone 1; Zone III as a privileged zone to protect the preservation zone” (planned by the Department of Forestry and Fisheries as a vast zone of sylvan-pastoral improvements, to be implemented by a special interministry committee); a zone for increasing tourist activities, such as luxurious hotels and “sound and light shows every Saturday night on the front court of Angkor Wat”. Additionally, other National Parks or tourist circuits were proposed for Phnom Kulen, Ko Ker, and Preah Vihear. The previous Royal Palace in Phnom Penh was renamed “Museum for Art and History”. Finally, and in a move that appears prophetic from today’s perspective, the agronomist Chuon-Spoadi, in his “Contribution à la conservation des monuments historiques khmers et des sites environnants”, pointed to “the necessity of an aménagement intégré as regards the natural resources and the improvement of the ecosystems (Kulen-Angkor-Great Lake)” (ARCAFA 1972b, 308–317). 27 See Tribune de Genève, 47 (26 February 1973), cover, 13. A similar appeal was published by the same author in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 28 February 1973. 28  The letter from the Swiss National Committee to Maheu on 28 February 1973 and from 23 May 1972 in: UNESCO Archives, Paris (CLT.CH.65).

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legendary Chenla kingdom in the southeast of the Cambodian-Vietnamese borderland (see Fig. Intro.4b).29 There (where Lon Nol himself was born and where he situated his own ancestry), “the Khmer-Mon people with their excellence in military techniques and glorious tradition of resistance” against their eastern neighbours had made possible a kind of proto-national “reunification as the beginning of the glorious epoch of Angkor”, which itself resulted in na-

tional independence and national progress. Indeed, it was exactly this combination of past political glory, current national self-defence, and future cultural leadership that led the editor of the journal New Cambodge to place Lon Nol’s presentation of Neo-Khmerism beside a report on the government’s ambitious agenda to establish the ARCAFA centre, which would focus on progressive archaeology and the preservation of cultural heritage.30

1.2. F.U.N.K., G.R.U.N.C. and Sihanouk’s ongoing royalist claim on Angkor I give all to the Khmer Rouge; these are the pure ones [Je donne tout aux Khmers rouges, ce sont des purs]. They will do what the people will need. They are patriots; they will keep Cambodia independent […]. I had been for a Buddhist socialism. This experience has failed. Now there can only be a Marxist socialism, for there is no question that I will come back to power (quoted in Meyer 1971, 378). —Norodom Sihanouk on 16 April and 28 September 1970

When Norodom Sihanouk was deposed in March 1970, he was on his way to Moscow. He then travelled to Beijing to meet Zhou Enlai together with the North Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong. Both encouraged Siha­ nouk to fight the pro-American Lon Nol regime. On March 23, via Beijing Radio, he publicly declared the formation of a political and military resistance movement under his leadership, the Front Uni National du Kampuchéa or United National Front of Kampuchea (hereafter abbreviated to FUNK). Shortly afterwards, it was formally subordinated under the newly established exile government in the name of Gouvernement Royal d’Union Nationale du Cambodia or Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia (hereafter GRUNC) with Penn Nouth installed as prime minister. After a meeting between Sihanouk and their leader Pol Pot, the Khmers rouges (as Sihanouk termed them, probably for the first time; see original quote above) reconfirmed their formal support for Sihanouk: Khieu Samphan was made vice prime minister and minister of national defence, in parallel to his duty (later replaced by security chief Son Sen) as chief commander of the Khmer Rouge Forces Armées Populaires de Libération Nationale du Kampuchéa or People’s Armed Forces of National Liberation of Cambodia (hereafter FAPLNK or PAFNLC); Hou Youn became minister of interior affairs, and Hu Nim, minister of information. As we shall see later in this chapter, both Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and their French-intellectual backgrounds would soon

become – another element in what we have conceptualised in the introduction to this book as the phenomenon of ‘back-translation’ – signposts for the Khmer Rouge’s intellectual landscape within Cambodia. As an intimate personal consultant to the king during Cambodia’s independence, Charles Meyer wrote in his important 1971 book Derrière le sourire Khmer, which detailed Sihanouk’s fateful alliance with the Khmer Rouge: on April 16, Sihanouk officially declared to Agence France-Presse [AFP] and reporters of the Paris-based journal Le Figaro that he did not aim to reclaim power because his vision of a “Buddhist socialism had failed”. On 28 September 1970, he added that “Marxist socialism” was now the agenda of the new government, which he fully supported (Meyer 1971, 378; see original quote above). This strange royalist-Marxist alliance adds yet another layer to our discussion of the competing trans-cultural inheritance claims on Angkor. One early, telling proof of this was the so-called Déclaration du Gouvernement Royal d’Union Nationale du Cambodge concernant les destructions des monuments d’Angkor par les impérialistes americains et leurs valets Lon-Nol-Sirik Matak-Son Ngoc Thanh, which was issued on 19 May 1971 and has survived in the UNESCO archives in Paris. Using a word choice similar to that of the United Nations, appeals from the official Khmer Republic (see above) also configured the historic monuments of Ang­kor as “an inestimable national patrimony and cultural treasures of the whole [of] humanity”. But now a new ene-

29  Lon Nol was born in 1913 in this border area of the Prey Veng Province. Interestingly, he also called his

rather fruitless military campaigns against the Vietnamese “Chenla I and Chenla II” operations.

30  “Neo-Khmerism” and “Preparatory conference ARCAFA” in: New Cambodge, 22 (December 1972), 30–31

and 32–37; and “Presentation of Neo-Khmerism” and “Report on the teaching and the training of archaeologists in the Khmer Republic (ARCAFA)” in: New Cambodge, 23 (August 1973), 31, 52–58.

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1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

my of the monuments was identified: it was “with the help of the American imperialists and their valets in Bangkok and Saigon that the [Republican, MF] traitors undertook a systematic pillage and destruction of the heritage of their ancestors [and] massively bombed and strafed the most prestigious [of] their monuments: Angkor Wat”. In the Déclaration du porte-parole du GRUNC sur la protection des monuments d’Angkor from 19 June 1971 the idea of a neutral­ised zone around Angkor was denounced as a cheap “trick [of the enemy] to play the role of the protector”; “the region of Angkor was under GRUNC administration since one year, […] protected by the Khmer people and their FAPLNK forces against the profanateurs and vandals [and] no international power nor commission would be allowed on Cambodian territory”.31 In addition to direct lines of communication with representatives at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, these claims on Angkor were also sent through other diplomatic channels to the French capital. A Bulletin d’Information with Angkor Wat in its letterhead was circulated by both the embassy of the Khmer Republic (Pl. XI.13a,b) and the GRUNC mission (Pl. XI.13c). In its 1 December 1972 issue, the French GRUNC Bulletin (located at 2, place de Barcelone, 75016 Paris) quoted, under the headline “La destruction des reliques d’Angkor par les traîtres de Phnom Penh sont dénoncées”, the Chinese UNESCO delegate Kouo Jouei, who assured the international community that “the zone of Angkor had been liberated by GRUNC and that any proposals from the other side were declared illegal, null and void”.32 In its edition from 19 January 1973, the Bulletin merged the Khmer Rouge programme of “liberated zones” on Cambodian territory with the cultural heritage of Angkor: after the new year greetings from Sihanouk, Penn Nouth, and Khieu Samphan, GRUNK’s Ministre de l’Interieur, des Réformes communales et des Coopératives, Hou Youn, reported on the “agricultural production movement in the liberated zone”. In a kind of cut-and-paste-affair would Khieu Samphan adapt his new rhetoric in relation to his 1959 doctoral thesis L’Économie du Cambodge et ses problèmes d’industrialisation at the Law and Economics department at Paris Sorbonne University (Khieu Samphan 1959, see below). The same was true for Hou Youn who used the findings of his 1955 PhD thesis in Economic Sciences for the Law Faculty of the same university, entitled La paysannerie du Cambodge et ses projets de modernisation (Hou Youn 1955, see Pl. XI.17), to suit the Khmer Rouge paradigm. Now, he proudly referred to the “complete change of the physiognomy of the liberated zones [with a new] intensification of the rice production as prescribed by FUNK”.33 Entitled “La nouvelle vie dans la région des temples d’Angkor”, an addi-

tional article in the Bulletin reported on “the vigilant population in the liberated region protecting the temples of Angkor threatened by the enemy, improving the irrigation systems of dikes and canals, participating in the activities of social collectives, and carrying out repair work of habitations destroyed by US aviation and artillery”.34 These word choices would migrate into the post-1975 years, when the Khmer Rouge finally gained real control over the territory (see below). However, between late 1972 and early 1973 such messages helped the Khmer Rouge section within the GRUNC coalition – and therefore the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) – at a moment when the North Vietnamese divisions had started to withdraw from Cambodia. Only a real-time and on-site documentation and a strategically propagated overlap of the pure Cambodian elements used to frame the political reality (the China-exiled king and national father figure Sihanouk on the one side, and the temple of Angkor Wat on the other) could give the royalist side of the GRUNC any chance at public credibility. As mentioned above, the international press circulated the rumour that Sihanouk planned to install an alternative government in Angkor, but only proof of his physical presence at Cambodia’s most important cultural site and reference point could help the coalition. In other words, a rhetorical and visual framing of Sihanouk’s ongoing claim over the cultural heritage of Angkor was urgently needed. Between the 22 February and 6 April 1973, Prince Sihanouk and his wife Monique embarked from China and Hanoi on a trip along the Ho Chi Minh Trail into northeastern Cambodia and its Stung Treng and Preah Vihear provinces; their supposed aim was to reach Angkor. The 1973 publication Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State, in the Liberated Zone documented the royal journey as an event somewhere between guerrilla activity, romantic adventure, and political mission over almost eighty illustrated pages with short legends. On Cambodian territory, Sihanouk and his wife supposedly slept in temporary huts, crossed jungles and rivers on foot, and met – with “great joy”, as it was repeated several times – the Khmer Rouge protagonists Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, Hou Youn, Son Sen, Ieng Sary, Khieu Ponnary and Koy Thuon (chairman of the Siem Reap-Kompong Thom region). They spoke to a “delegation of Buddhist monks from the Siem Reap Province”, presided over the first conjoint meeting in the “liberated zone (the Angkor forest served as cover for the meeting)”, celebrated the third anniversary of the coalition on 23 March 1973 with dance performances, and inspected the liberation army’s young male and female recruits. Later Sihanouk posed, together with Noun Chea and Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), for a group pho-

31  For both GRUNC declarations see UNESCO Archives, Paris (CLT.CH.65). 32  Bulletin d’Information, Mission du GRUNC, 99/72 (1.12.1972), n.p. 33  Bulletin d’Information, Mission du GRUNK, 106/73 (19.1.1973), 7–9. 34  Bulletin d’Information, Mission du GRUNK, 106/73 (19.1.1973), 12.

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Figures XI.10a—c  Sihanouk’s ‘cultural pilgrimage’ to Angkor Wat in 1973, as published by the People’s Armed Forces of National Liberation of Cambodia in Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State, in the Liberated Zone (Source: People’s Armed Forces of National Liberation of Cambodia 1973, 99, 107, 102)

to “in front of the temple of the Great Buddha at Phnom Kulen (meaning Mountain of Lychees)” where he took a bath in the river, the rock bed of which was carved with bas-reliefs from Angkorian times. The climax of the trip was described as a “moment of high emotional excitement: [vespertine, MF] Arrival at Angkor Wat, symbol of the everlastingness and imperishable glory of Cambodia and the 256

Khmer nation, and symbol today of the great victory of the NDFC, the RGNDC and the PAFNLC over U.S. imperialism and its valets”; this moment was immortalised by a photograph of Sihanouk together with Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot (Fig. XI.10a). Other photographs were used to prove the military presence inside Angkor Park (Fig. XI.10b) with the legend “Arriving at Angkor Thom (here Bayon

1. Heritage politics during the Khmer Republic (1970—1975)

Figure XI.11  Khmer Rouge soldiers in front of Angkor Wat in a photograph that survived in the archive of the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh (Source: © Documentation Centre of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

temple is guarded by young fighters of the PAFNLC”). Another photograph (Fig. XI.10c) shows the royal couple posing at the Banteay Srei temple, as the legend had it “Great and affectionate was the meeting of Norodom Sihanouk with leading heroes of the Resistance within the country (temple of Banteay Srei)”. The cover of the publication depicted the king in Khmer Rouge clothing on the famous passageway of Angkor Wat (Pl. XI.14). However, specialists today challenge the authenticity of this image and have suggested that it was a photo collage intended to convey royalist wishful thinking, and that the publication itself was a public-relations stunt that was intended to further yet another heritage/inheritance claim on Angkor. Even the French typescript diary notes of Sihanouk’s wife, Monique, which were later published as Voyage historique au Cambodge en 1973, remained vague about the visit to Angkor Wat: 21st day — 19 March 1973: Today is a great day for us. We left Phnom Kulen at 3 am in the morning and, after 2.5 hours [of] road travel, we arrived at… Angkor! Cradle of our civilisation, symbol of our Nation! Angkor which we could liberate right in the first months of our fight, in June 1970! I cannot find words strong enough to express the emotion of Samdech [Sihanouk, MF] and me when we left the car. Dear Angkor, marvellous temple, you raise your majestic towers towards the pale glow of the rising dawn! To see you, we have taken such a long and danger-

ous path! We did not even fear the troops of Lon Nol, which are just 1,500 metres from here. But we had to come here, because the whole world will thus get to know that we are really in the liberated zone, as we could make films and photographs; and all this right in front of the enemy. Those proofs will be irrefutable. During our emotional visit to the temple, we could hear the enemy shooting into the air, so close to here. […] It is all lamentable! We have seen with anger the criminal harm committed against the temple by the traitors. Several spots had been touched by their canons and by napalm… With great regret we left Angkor [Vat, only added by pencil in the publication, MF] at 6:30 a.m. Afterwards we visited the Bayon [and] Banteay Srei. At about 8:30 p.m., we left Banteay Srei in order to return to China en passant of North Vietnam. […] All those souvenirs which we could collect in just one day! Angkor Wat, Bayon, Banteay Srey! Have we really been at these sacred places? Of course, but it seems like a dream. [italics MF] (Monique Sihanouk 1987, 24, 25)

Just a few months after Sihanouk’s reported travels to Angkor, “young fighters of the PAFNLC guarding the Bayon temple” were used for a cover of Le Cambodge en lutte, which was published as a “reportage of the delegation of Chinese journalists about its visit to Cambodia” a few months before the final battle over Phnom Penh (Pl. XI.15, compare Fig. XI.11). In the chapter titled “The valiant sons 257

XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

and daughters of Angkor”, the delegation “had the chance to visit the ancient monuments of Angkor, the pride of national culture”. It met “commandant Pok of the Angkor-Siem Reap-front” to talk about the heroic fight in the rainy season of 1974 to “protect Angkor” against the “eleventh brigade” of the enemy, in what became known as “Battle 802” (Lutte en Cambodge 1975, 30–31, 34). Accompanying the explanation that “defending Angkor, this is defending the native land, defending the honour of the nation, the sovereignty and the dignity of the motherland”, a high commander of PAFNLC was quoted: “Our Angkor, we protect it like the apple of our eyes. Even on the front of Phnom Penh [my] thoughts are about Angkor” (Lutte en Cambodge 1975, 57). Leaving the temples aside, the report of the Chinese delegation closed with the following dialogue: This visit allowed us to understand that the male and female combatants who defended Angkor were the brave sons and daughters of the Cambodian people […] At

the moment to say goodbye they cordially shook our hands with emotional words: — Please bring our fraternal salute to our Chinese brother nation! — Glory to the sons and daughters of Angkor! Good luck for the nearing liberation of Siem Reap! we reaffirmed. — Yes, this will happen soon, wait for the good news! they responded with a firm voice. (Lutte en Cambodge 1975, 37)

Indeed, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. On the same day, Siem Reap was ‘liberated’ and the Park of Angkor became an official part of Democratic Kam­ puchea (Locard 2008a, 2015). And although the subsequent propaganda machine devalorised the cultural heritage of Angkor, it remained an important public-relations tool in the years to come: “Angkor had been built; it was marvellous; it was there. Offering no explanations, DK historians [and in fact all leaders of the regime, as we shall see, MF] returned Angkor to the jungle, but they were unable or unwilling to abandon it altogether” (Chandler 1983b, 44, 45).

2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor Today, a large selection of excellent books is available about the Khmer Rouge period, which lasted from the capture of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 to the regime’s defeat some forty-five months later on 7 January 1979 by the Vietnamese.35 Important characteristics of the genocidal terror regime, officially called Democratic Kampuchea (hereafter DK), will come to light in the following analysis of its specific relationship with the cultural heritage of Angkor. In his article “Le parallèle éminemment douteux entre l’angkar révolutionnaire et Angkor”, Sacha Sher concluded that “the examination of all the attributes in the texts of the DK [the Angkar loeu was its ‘supreme organisation’] does not allow us to detect a particular fascination with Angkor” (Sher 2003, 23).36 On the other end of the opinion spectrum, Henri Locard’s recent contribution in my edited volume investigating the role of cultural heritage in the rhetoric

and applied strategies of political regimes’ civilising mission programmes, claimed that “the myth of Angkor [is] an essential component of the Khmer Rouge utopia” (Locard 2015; compare Locard 2008a,b). Negotiating between both extremes, the following section will be organised along three questions: First, how did the DK rhetorically frame its Marxist-Leninist political agenda with references to the cultural heritage (inheritance) of Angkor; second, how did the physical manifestation of the DK ideology – that is, the planned and realised construction sites to convert Cambodia into an irrigated land of collectivised rice farming – stand in relation to the myth of a hydraulic empire of Ang­ kor; and third, what role did – in silent continuation to the era of the Sangkom Reastr Niyum – the built evidence of the archaeological park of Angkor play in the cultural diplomacy of the DK regime?

35  Those articles and books include, among others, Thion 1981, Vickery 1982, Chandler/Kiernan 1983, Etcheson 1985, Chanda 1986, Albin 1987, Chandler 1988/91, Jackson 1989, Heder 1991, Kiernan 1993 and 1996, Sher 2004, Locard 2004 and 2013, Ciorciari 2013, Mertha 2014. 36  In his 1977/78 publication Cambodia Year Zero, François Ponchaud even created a direct Khmer Rouge antagonism between Angkar and Angkor: “Like the kings of Angkor Wat, who were divinities incarnate, the anonymous Angkar is a new divinity to which the people are to devote themselves body and soul” (Ponchaud 1977, 88).

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2.1. Framing Khmer Rouge ideology with the cultural heritage of Angkor Phnom Penh will certainly be liberated! All of Cambodia is certain to be liberated totally and definitively! A genuinely independent, peaceful, neutral, sovereign, democratic, non-aligned, prosperous new Cambodia with territorial integrity will certainly be built on Cambodia’s sacred and glorious land of Angkor! [italics MF] (FBIS, 29 March 1975, H3) —“Appeal by Hou Youn to people in the area under temporary enemy control,” 20 March 1975

The US-American CIA Foreign Broadcast Information System (FBIS)37 and the Summary of World Broadcast (SWB) from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) provide precious translations of all the Khmer media sources during the DK period, ranging from radio information to speeches made during public gatherings and official decisions. Additionally, the regime’s monthly journal Revolutionary Flag and its few propaganda publications provide a more complete picture of how the Khmer Rouge subsequently linked their ideological rhetoric with heritage/inheritance claims. Hou Youn announced “a new Cambodia to stand on the glorious land of Angkor” two weeks before the final collapse of the Lon Nol regime (see introductory quote above). Henri Locard’s findings that “a grand three-day victory celebration within the walls of Angkor Wat […] with no less than five thousand people attending”, which happened after Siem Reap was ‘liberated’ on 17 April 1975 (Locard 2008a, 26–28; compare Locard 2008b, 2015), could not be reconfirmed for this research. However, this hypothesis fits with the high respect that was initially granted to Angkor Wat during those first weeks after the revolution, when the ideologically motivated downgrading of Angkor within the new Khmer Rouge canon was not yet officially formulated and circulated. Indeed, given the enormous task that was in the pipeline – to empty the city of Phnom Penh in only few days – it may be taken for granted that the leaders and theoretical masterminds of the Khmer Rouge were not present at the (more self-congratulatory than culturally or religiously motivated) gathering at Angkor Wat only a few hours after the capital was taken on 17 April 1975. According to Locard, the remaining staff of the Conservation d’Ang­ kor at Siem Reap (altogether 750 people, including Pich Keo, who was the acting chief conservator after B. P. Groslier left in 1974, compare Pl. IX.25a,b) were put in trucks and brought to the recently evacuated Lolei-Roluos villages nearby, where a good number of them survived the regime. Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh in 17 April 1975 – and therefore even before a much more critical periodisation model for Angkor in relation to new Marxist-­ Leninist agenda was officially presented – the Phnom Penh Domestic Service reported on the new regime’s interest in the site: on 30 May, the headlines “Efforts to restore Siem

Reap, Angkor temples reported” insinuated what the previous republican regime, now unmasked as “Lon Nol heathens” by the communist speaker, had claimed only a few months before against their enemy. Surprisingly, even the French-colonial trumpeting of the “world wonder of Angkor” (compare Mouhot in the early 1860s, chapter I) was appropriated, as was the ongoing mission to protect the temples: Our revolutionary army and people are cleaning up Siem Reap city and the Angkor temples. Siem Reap is a charming, pleasant city and Angkor is one of the world’s wonders. During the five years of the US Imperialist war of aggression the Angkor temples were under the control of our revolutionary army and people and were thus carefully maintained by our army and people who preserved their charm and beauty. However, the traitorous Lon Nol heathens repeatedly and wantonly shelled the Angkor temples, irreparably and unpardonably destroying many sculptured stone works considered as irreplaceable works of art. […] Immediately after liberation, the male and female combatants and cadres of our revolutionary army rolled up their sleeves and plunged into a drive to repair and clean up Siem Reap. […] In short, both Siem Reap and Angkor temples, which are always clean and radiant, are gradually winning back their charm and beauty which existed before Lon Nol’s traitorous coup d’état. [italics MF] (FBIS 3 June 1975, H2)

In the same months of June when Pol Pot visited Mao Zedong in China, Radio Phnom Penh broadcasted that “The Cambodian Revolution preserves tradition and blends it with the scientific era”. For the first time in this context, the collective will of the “people” was identified in a “tradition” which would form the locus of the new Cambodia, the notion of a kind of hydraulic city of Angkor with “canals” and “moats”, which had supposedly existed in the twelfth century, “long before the aggressive imperialist United States had even come to existence as a nation”: As we study Cambodian civilisation, art, and architecture, we realise that the Cambodian people have always been hardworking, active, creative and skilled. This has been

37  The author would like to thank Henri Locard/Phnom Penh for providing the complete FBIS file for the

period of the Khmer Rouge; many thanks also for his advice on this research and for his visit to one of the Heidelberg conferences on the topic (Locard 2015).

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matched with scientific skill. In order to appreciate this aspect of Cambodia we must take a look at our history, including the Angkor era. We should study just two temples of this Angkor era, Banteay Srei and Angkor Wat. […] The whole world admires these masterpieces of the Cambodian people and regards them as rare treasures of mankind. […] As we look at the Angkor Toch temple, commonly called Angkor Wat by our people, the Angkor Thom temple and the surrounding areas, we are struck by the fact that the whole area was a large city crisscrossed with straight roads and canals in a magnificent system. The Angkor Wat or Angkor Toch temple is surrounded by a moat and two large walls. […] These stone temples have stood for several hundred years already and seen from the air, these great towers look magnificent, which is why they are regarded as priceless treasures. The Angkor-era architecture also has artistic and scientific character. The artistic character is reflected in the ornamental sculpture, while the scientific character is proved by the fact that the whole complex was flawlessly planned and built with great precision and care. […] On the basis of our traditions, we are again blending tradition with science […] matching the nation’s traditions with modern science, our people are now in the process of building a new Cambodia. [italics MF] (FBIS, 12 June 1975, H6—7)

Interestingly, these passages expressing respect and wonder for Angkor Wat entirely disappeared from public media in 1976 (as documented via FBIS and SWB). When the new constitution was adopted by the Third National Congress in December 1975, and applied on 5 January 1976 (Constitution 1976, SWB 6 January 1976; compare Jennar 1994, 65–72, Ponchaud 1977, 199–206), chapter III, §3 defined “the new culture [of Democratic Kampuchea as] absolutely opposed to the corrupt, reactionary culture of the different oppressive classes of colonialism and imperialism in Kampuchea”. This also meant that the French concept of Angkor as an eternally referential masterpiece of Khmer culture was questioned: now, the shining yellow temple on the flag (compare Pl. XI.1d) stood only for a “national tradition” in ­general and was, with its blood-red ground, brought closer to the Cambodian communist movement (the Khmer Viet Minh) in the early 1950s (Chandler 1976b, 512). On the official emblem of DK, the previously iconised passageway leading to Angkor Wat’s inner sanctuary (since Mouhot 1863) was now replaced with a canal through a geometricised rice field leading to a shed-roofed factory with smoke emerging from its chimneys (compare Pl. XI.1e): (XI,§16) The design and meaning of the Kampuchean national flag are as follows: The ground is red, bearing a yellow three-towered structure [monument] in the middle. The red ground symbolises the revolutionary movement, the resolute and valiant struggle of the Kampuchean people for the liberation, defence, and construction of

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the nation. The yellow building symbolises the national tradition and the Kampuchean people, who are defending and building the country to make it ever more glorious. (XII,§17) The national emblem consists of a network of dikes and canals, which symbolise modern agriculture, and a factory symbolising industry, framed by an oval garland of rice ears with the subscription “Democratic Kampuchea”. [italics MF] (quoted in Ponchaud 1977, 204)

At this point, the reformulation of a previously obligatory heritage/inheritance claim to Angkor was already a work in process. As a draft, it was presented over twenty-five pages in the monthly Revolutionary Flag issue 4 (April 1976) under the title “Extract from the presentation of the Comrade Party Organisation Representative on the occasion of the great meeting to celebrate the first anniversary of the Great, Magnificent 17 April Victory in Phnom Penh (15 April 1976)”. Organised in three parts, the party representative – probably ‘Brother Number One’ Pol Pot himself – referred first to the “results of the national democratic revolution up to 17 April 1975”: the “complete liberation of the country of Kampuchea from an enslavement of hundreds and thousands of years […] in form of a clear and pure victory” (4); “the sweeping of the country permanently clean from hundreds of thousands of foreigners” (8); and to “having seized back the soul of the Kampuchean nation [as] for several thousand and particularly hundred years it had become a mere shell and the true nature of the Kampuchean people [the peasants] greatly damaged and shattered” (9). Passing, in the second part, over the results of “the socialist revolution and building socialism” in the past year (this basically included the termination of feudal and capitalistic regimes), the final and third part about the “future revolutionary mission” was summarised as “collective heroism” (25), collective labour included (Fig. XI.12). However, as the first part of the treatise about past success stories went back more than one thousand years, the content-rich period of Angkor had to be re-evaluated and was, for the very first time in Cambodia’s modern history, dramatically downgraded to a position of third and last on the list of national achievements: When we look at our history up until today, there are events that are magnificent, events the world admires in awe. The previous generation preferred the magnificent masterpieces of the Angkorian period. Our people built Angkor, but we are not very proud of that because the people at that time were in a slave agriculture regime and were seriously exploited by the feudalists of that generation. Another matter even more magnificent than Angkor is the great victory of 17 April 1975, which the world admires, studies, respects, and praises. Now, there is a new story that we are making that we believe is a better masterpiece than Angkor and is even more magnificent than 17 April: the great revolutionary movement is

2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor

Figure XI.12  Propaganda photography in the journal Revolutionary Flag, here in the fourth issue in April 1976. The legend states  “Our brother and sister peasants in the cooperatives in Kampong Speu province are working hard to put up a major dam to keep water for distribution to the systems of new feeder canals and paddy dikes during dry season” (Source: Revolutionary Flag, 4 (April 1976), 16)

transforming the Kampuchean countryside into a farm garden. Not a flower garden, but a garden of rice crops and various strategic crops transforming it in a great magnificent leap forward so that our country will be in abundance, the livelihood of the people will make rapid progress, and the defence of our country will be even mightier. […] Just go look at the paddy dike systems and the new feeder canals and you will have faith in our people, be proud of our people, and trust that our people can do anything. […] This is the third event that we are now building, this transformation into a new countryside by our revolution. [italics MF] (13—17)

This downgrading of Angkor was indeed a painful ‘framework’ procedure as was made clear in DK’s new national anthem “Glorious Seventeenth of April”, which outlined the bloody fight for a proletarian “Great Leap Forward” – shortly thereafter called a “Super Great Leap Forward”38 – which had surpassed Angkor in importance as the result of a “triumphant absolutism by divine right” (Locard 2004, 31):

Glittering red blood which blankets the towns and countryside of the Kampuchean motherland! Blood of our splendid workers and peasants! Blood of our revolutionary youth! Blood that was transmuted into fury, anger, and vigorous struggle! On 17 April, under the revolutionary flag! Blood that liberated us from slavery! Long live 17 April, the great victory! More wonderful and much more meaningful than the Angkor era! We unite together to build up Kampuchea and a glorious society, democratic, egalitarian, and just; […] Long live new Kampuchea, democratic and gloriously prosperous; determine to raise up the revolutionary red flag to be higher; build up the country to achieve the glorious Great Leap Forward! [italics MF] (DC-Cam 2009, 10)

It was during the 27 September 1977 celebration of the seventeenth founding anniversary of the Kampuchean Communist Party that a special radio emission of The Voice of Democratic Kampuchea broadcast the programme of a mass meeting in Phnom Penh. The centrepiece of this

38  This term was used in the chapter “On building up the country: Introducing the concept of strategy and

tactics in agriculture” of the “Excerpt report on the leading views of the comrade representing the party organisation at the zone assembly” in June 1976 (quoted in Chandler, Kiernan, Boua 1988, 26–35, here 29).

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meeting was the five-hour speech made by the comrade secretary of the party, Pol Pot (Pol Pot 1977a). As he had done a year earlier, Pol Pot structured his marathon speech along similar lines to the three above-quoted elements: past problems, achievements since the 1975 revolution, and finally, an outlook towards “the new era of the Cambodian revolution”. In order to sub-periodise the first phase of the “movement of [heroic] struggle of the Cambodian people before the founding of the Party, that is, from the time of slavery to 1960”, Pol Pot now gave a clearer definition: The history of our Cambodia is more than two thousand years old. It shows that like all other societies, Cambodian society has experienced many revolutionary steps. […] Emerging from the primitive communist society, Cambodian society experienced the epoch of slavery. From this society it evolved into feudal society and capitalist society. Following capitalist society, our country has now entered a new era called the socialist society. Within the framework of the primitive communist society, there was not yet any class distinction. Therefore, there was no class struggle in the primitive communist society. When Cambodian society entered the epoch of slavery, it came face-to-face with class distinction, namely, between the slave owners and the slaves, the owners and the labourers. In feudal society there were landowners and peasants; and in capitalist society there were capitalists and workers.

From this perspective, the kings of Angkor had truly enslaved their people to complete their building programmes.

This was a problematic and complex remark in light of the fact that King Sihanouk was an early ally of the Khmer Rouge.39 In a subtle but crucial re-framing of the cultural heritage of Angkor from its physical, architectural legacy of glorious temples to the social dimension of its enslaved builders, the topos of a people’s strong will which built Ang­ kor Wat and formed a collective achievement was praised and used as an example for Cambodia’s future: We can liberate the entire country and we can defend it, in order to continue defending it well we must continue having good forces. We must also adhere to the stand of safeguarding our honour and territory at all costs. In the past, we were known for our Angkor Wat temples, which were built in the era of slavery. Slaves built Angkor Wat under the oppression and coercion of the exploiting classes of that time in order to make the kings happy. If our people could build Angkor Wat, they can do anything. [italics, bolding MF] (SWB FE/5632/C/11, 5 October 1977)

This new periodisation model of Cambodian history provincialised and downgraded Angkor Wat from a wonder of the world to an “essentially endogenous, purely national event” and embedded it in a Cambodian tradition of class struggle, even if “this interfered with the internationalist elements of the socialist revolution” (Chandler 1983b, 35). The meaning of this model of a collective can-do-anything operation for the giant land-transforming network of dikes and canals that was explained to the DK’s great protectors in China by Pol Pot just a few hours after his Phnom Penh speech on 27 September 1977.

2.2. The hydraulic empire of Angkor as a reference for DK’s hydraulic utopia? In this Phnom Penh speech, Pol Pot defined what he meant by “a socialist revolution [which] consolidated and expanded the foundation of collective socialism”: the oppressive and repressive old production orders had been wiped out; the production power, in particular the labour power of the working people (90 per cent of the population), was completely liberated; and the “collective co-operatives of the peasants throughout the country” were expanded and strengthened. Since vernacular, low-tech agriculture was

considered the very basis of the project, the “Party […] focused on solving the key problem of water conservancy in order to increase rice production [and] the co-operative peasants built all types of water projects which could provide water for 400,000 hectares of farmland in all seasons, rain or shine”. With the “country’s surface of 181,000 square kilometres and 6 million hectares of farmland”, this had the “potential to increase the current population from 8 million to 20 million”. When Pol Pot left for his official

39  During the first months of the regime, Norodom Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh as a kind of puppet

head of state. In his April 1976 request for official retirement, Sihanouk (now under severe pressure) again praised the DK leaders for opening, “under the enlightened leadership of our revolutionary Angkar”, the path towards “a new era which, beyond all doubt, will be the most radiant and glorious in the two thousand years of our national history” (reprinted in Ponchaud 1977, 207–209, 211–12). Nonetheless, Pol Pot placed him under strict house arrest for the next years, as Sihanouk was the genealogically genuine and princely inheritor of Angkor whose ancient monarchs were now accused by the Khmer Rouge as having “suck[ed] the blood out of the Khmer people to endow themselves splendid palaces” (Sihanouk 1986, 21).

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trip to Beijing in order to commemorate the twenty-eighth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (FBIS, 27 September 1977, H1) – called a “goodwill mission of the Cambodian Government and Communist Party” – those “hydraulic installations” [aménagements hydrauliques] as “the treasure for a great mass movement” were once more qualified and quantified for the benefit of China, DK’s great protecting power: “great reservoirs of 100–200 million cubic metres in every zone, middle-size reservoirs of 50–60 million cubic metres in every region, and 5–10 million cubic metres in every district, and a varying-size system of irrigation canals over several hundreds of kilome­tres” (Pol Pot 1977b, 14). By the time Ieng Sary, vice prime minister for foreign affairs and Chef de la Délégation du Kampuchéa Démocratique, gave his French (!) speech at the Thirty-Second Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on 11 October 1977. In this megalomaniac vision Cambodia’s water capacity had already reached “2,800 million cubic metres” and was altogether part and parcel of what he called “a mass movement of profound revolutionary significance, not known before in the two thousand years of our [Cambodian] nation” (Ieng Sary 1977, 18, 22). The question of the role that the myth of a hydraulic empire of Angkor (according to P. B. Groslier, see previous chapter) played for the Khmer Rouge’s own plans to convert Cambodia into an irrigated land is still a matter of academic debate. One might even be tempted to say that all the explanations have overinterpreted this relationship by over­ estimating the intellectual capacity of the Khmer Rouge leaders: after all, Pol Pot (Chandler 1992), was a mediocre student in his Paris days; and though he was a charismatic political leader, he was certainly no intellectual, nor did he read, fully digest, and apply complicated Marxist studies about the exploitation and liberation of the classes. Even the well-known and much-debated PhD theses of Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn (see below) cannot be called the most elaborated work. Additionally, a mere forty-five months in power, though efficient in applying the systematic genocide and torture of its own people, in creating a wasteland of ruined infrastructure and finances, and in concentrating its military defence (and later aggression) against Vietnam, did not leave enough time for the DK leadership to develop a systematic state doctrine. Therefore, we argue that the relationship with Angkor was a far more pragmatic and hybridising copy-and-paste affair which made use of three main things: (a) rhetorical mimicking of the pre-1974 French topos of the cultural grandeur of Angkor (which, in fact, was also embraced by Sihanouk during

the short Sangkum era, see previous chapter); (b) low-level ideological reflection on Marxism with an exaggerated use of some effective buzzwords; and (c) a simple continuation of the vision of technological mastery as propagated until the very last by Sihanouk’s Sangkum era. As regards the first point of mimicking grandeur, the French especially continued until the mid-1970s to propagate the topos of an Angkorian ‘high civilisation’. Keeping B. P. Groslier’s vision of collectivism and an “absence of classes” at Angkor in mind (see previous chapter), Sihanouk already internalized the myth of a benevolent leader by standing on the same level as his populace. When DK created its own flag, instead of the hammer and sickle (like the Soviet Union) or stars (like China) it adopted the golden three-towered emblem of Angkor against a blood-red ground. This was, of course, already a collectivised symbol that reflected an aim to restore national grandeur – or “to rediscover the national soul”, as the official Livre Noire of the regime had it (Sher 2004, 219). In its October–November issue of 1977, the DK journal The Revolutionary Flag finally made Angkorian grandeur part of a history-making process of collective quality: “For example, in the history it is recorded that the people were the creators of Angkor Wat. In fact, it is true. It was built by the people, not by kings. And the struggle also belongs to the people. Our people are history makers.”40 Pol Pot’s famous quote followed in the same month: “If our people can build Angkor Wat, they can do anything.” This was defined as an “Angkor complex” by the Vietnamese author Nguyen Khac Vien in his 1979 analysis of the Cambodian “problems of convalescence” (Vien 1981, 11; reworked in Edwards 2007, 242). Mirrored in the medium of cultural heritage, this “Angkor complex” corresponded to what the historian Stephan Morris has called “a delusion of grandeur”41 that was typical for regimes following a “chiliastic ideology”: in the Cambodian case, “proclaiming the inevitable victory of the true believers and their just case” (as communism had it in general) fell on the fertile ground of Pol Pol’s “hyper-Maoist” version of totalitarian dictatorship. It aimed at a total transformation of man and society, and was paired with a sense of interiority and the paranoiac mechanism of total control and domination towards a systematic auto-genocide.42 Finally, it was, according to Morris, merged with a longstand­ing “traditional Cambodian desire for national status restoration, magnified by the voluntarist and apocalyptic temper of a millenary ideology” (Morris 1999, 21–22, 235, 240). In this case, the architectural grandeur of the Angkor temples on the one hand (in fact a rather French-colonial

40  Quoted in The Truth, the magazine of Documentation Centre of Cambodia 8 (2000), 12, and discussed

in Sher 2003.

41  Morris borrowed this from Meissner’s 1978 psychoanalytic analyses about The paranoid process where “the

retreat to grandiosity” stood in direct relation to the “denial of weakness and dependency” (Meissner 1978, 37).

42  This is not the place to engage with the historic roots and execution details of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

For an overview and further specific literature, see the contributions of Karl D. Jackson, Alexander Laban Hinton, Evan Gottesman, Kelly Whitley and John Marcucci, in Genocide: A reader (Meierheinrich 2014).

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invention), and the endogenous grandeur in the form of the collective will of a mobilised peasantry to turn Cambodia into a hydraulic state on the other, were merged not only rhetorically but also visually: the best showcase of this combined, two-sided narrative survived on the printed but never circulated banknotes of the Khmer Rouge where the cultural heritage of the Angkor Wat and Bayon temples were used to visually frame the new DK ideology (Pl. XI.16a–d, compare Pl.EpI.1a–l). Second, specialists of Khmer Rouge ideology soon raised the prospect of low-level ideological reflection on Marxism inside Cambodia, as a detailed “survey of official DK documents and radio broadcasts [showed a] near to complete absence of references to Marx, Lenin or Mao, [or] to any influences these thinkers may have had on the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s policy formulations” (Frieson 1988, 408). This is not the place to engage in a long debate about Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism in DK itself, as the focus here is only the missing link of a reference to Angkor in the space between internationalist ideology and national cultural heritage. However, it is interesting to note that publications about the Khmer Rouge ideology rarely refer explicitly to the one obvious mediating element: Wes­ tern-Marxist theory on Angkor itself shortly before and during the Khmer Rouge period. Just before the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 the topic of ‘irrigation, society and (Southeast) Asia’ permeated academia (compare our analysis in chapter X), and here we see a scientific and an ideological version (compare Pl. X.4–8). On one side, the Western approach – one example is the 1974 special issue of the French journal Études rurales on “Agriculture and societies in Southeast Asia” – praised the natural and cultural specificity of the Southeast Asian region. Next to B. P. Groslier’s article about the collective works in ancient Angkor, Joseph E. Spencer, in his contribution “La maîtrise de l’eau en Asie du Sud-Est” with a special focus on Cambodia,43 rated the potential of the region’s traditional options (inundation, dam, reservoirs, dikes, etc.) much higher than the potential of “modern Western technologies” (Spencer 1974, 93). More important, on the other side of the spectrum, a special 1969 issue of the Paris-based Centre d’Études et de Recherches marxistes was published: “Sur le ‘mode de production asiatique’.” According to the introduction, international “Marxists in general, and not only specialist historians on Asian history” were invited to comment on the same phenomenon with a reference to Marx’s supposed 1859 definition of “the Asian production mode as characterised

by the vigorous control of the community over the individual” (17). A Marxist interpretation on ancient Angkor by the Moscow Academy of Sciences-based Leonid Sedov completed the edited volume. In his article “La société ang­ korienne et le problème du mode de production” (in fact published one year earlier in the Centre’s journal La pensée), Sedov neither followed Wittfogel’s negative judgement of hydraulic societies in the form of Oriental despotism (1957), nor B. P. Groslier’s glorifying master narrative of ancient Angkor (for both, see previous chapter). In order to explain the “complex irrigation system” of ancient Angkor, Sedov combined ambiguous aspects of a centralised and theocratic state on the one side, with the more positive ones of a “mobilisation [and] integration of dispersed rural communities” and “the soil in the collective possession of territorial communes” on the other (Sedov 1969, 332, 333, 335; compare Sedov 1963). While Democratic Kampuchea was already crumbling, Sedov’s 1978 English summary “Angkor: Society and state” with the slogans of “a much greater use of simple cooperative labour methods, large-scale mobilisation of labour, [and] workers as permanent agriculturalists” (Sedov 1978, 124, 125) were indeed not far removed from the Khmer Rouge’s rhetoric: we may easily imagine that those Marxist interpretations of ancient Angkor using a whole series of keywords served as a handy rhetoric repository for the DK’s rather clumsy descriptions of their own centralised organisation. Now Angkar itself – not the royal-theocratic leadership that stretched from Angkor Wat’s Suryavaraman II to Norodom Sihanouk – was seen to have mobilised, unified, and controlled the “peasant-workers”, as Pol Pot called them repeatedly, to irrigate the collectively possessed land. Third, the topos of a technological mastery of land and water was already commented on by the later Khmer Rouge protagonists Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn in their PhD theses (see above), but such ideas were also widely available through French literature. Khieu Samphan’s 1959 doctoral thesis L’Économie du Cambodge et ses problèmes d’industrialisation (completed at the Law and Economics department at the Paris Sorbonne University, which primarily analysed the reasons for Cambodia’s underdeveloped status in relation to colonialism and foreign investment) advocated for structural reforms in the country and ended with a call for “adherence of the mass of the population” (Khieu Samphan 1959, 192).44 More important was Hou Youn’s 1955 PhD thesis in Economic Sciences at Paris Sor­bonne University, entitled La paysannerie du Cambodge et ses pro-

43  In the same year, Spencer published a similar article in the 1974 volume Irrigation’s impact on society,

edited by T. Downing and M. Gibson.

44  How popular those arguments were ‘in the West’ when the Khmer Rouge came to power is indicated by

a 1976 special issue entitled “Khieu Samphan: Underdevelopment in Cambodia”, with a partial reprint of his thesis in English in the Indochina Chronicle, published by the Indochina Resource Center, Berkeley, California (Indochina Chronicle 1976). His whole thesis was published in 1979, in English, by the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University; and in German in the Kommunistische Volkszeitung/Kommunismus und Klassenkampf/Dokumentation, Frankfurt/Main 1979.

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jets de modernisation (Pl. XI.17). In its fourth part addressirrigation during the dry season. It would be rather coming “the problems of agricultural modernisation”, a specific plex in its utilisation and would demand a serious discichapter was dedicated to “the establishing of a system of pline from the users […] The Cambodian agriculture and assistance against agricultural calamities and the mortality the whole rural life will undergo a veritable transformaof livestock” (Hou Youn 1955, 211–21). Forming a direct tion. The solution of the water problem will bring two ‘back-translation’ from a Sorbonne University qualification rice harvests a year, and therefore totally modify the crop text from 1955 to Cambodia’s dark period of the Khmer calendar. […] The peasant is bound to become a techniRouge twenty years later, key phrases such as “establishing cian, to give up a part of his individualism and to observe a systematic plan for hydraulic installations”, a “hydraulic the discipline which is demanded for the rational funcsystem and regime of Cambodia”, the “possibility of two tioning of a great network of irrigation. The small owners crops a year”, and “inundated rice fields” found their way will have to integrate themselves into a technical organiback into daily politics. These phrases and others were sation and follow the instructions given to him in order to used by Hou Youn, GRUNC’s minister for interior, commu­ not compromise the good utilisation of the entire netnal reforms and cooperatives, to characterise the “liberated work. […] In twenty years, the population of Cambodia zones” before 1975 (see above) and were also circulated will, without a doubt, reach 15 million inhabitants who shortly after through DK’s propaganda machine. However, will need an extra 2.5 million tons of rice for its livelihood. Hou Youn’s individual influence may not have been that [italics MF] (Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July—Septemimportant, as he was purged, most probably by Pol Pot ber 1969, 24—25)) himself, directly after the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. Ironically, the very last projects of Sihanouk’s Sang- The similarity of vision between the Sihanouk era and the kum era served as inspiration for the Khmer Rouge rheto- Khmer Rouge (now with Sihanouk as their imprisoned ric of national self-defence and agrarian self-sufficiency leader) was also exemplified in the journal’s subsequent article, which was written by the king’s long-time advisor through the rigid parcelling of the land (compare Martin 1981; 1985; 1994, 185–214). These ideas were easily at hand, and later critic, Charles Meyer. Titled “L’évolution des cam­ as they had been published in various Cambodian journals pagnes Cambodgiennes”, the article included a section on before 1970. Indeed, the 1969 July–September issue of “the small agrarian mechanisation” of simple peasants. It Études Cambodgiennes (where two years earlier in 1967 praised the ongoing “transformations of the Cambodian had B. P. Groslier published his paper “La civilisation ang­ko­ countryside” and envisioned the “rural and psychological rienne et la maîtrise de l’eau”, see Pl. X.7) published a vi- revolution” to come through use of Mao Zedong’s term, the sionary double-page spread. It earmarked vast areas of “Great Leap Forward” [un grand bond en avant] (later menCambodia around the Tonlé Sap – including the Siem tioned in the refrain of DK’s national anthem), which would Reap-Angkor region – and along the Mekong River as ele- be realised through agricultural collectivisation and “strict ments of one giant irrigation project that aimed at trans- discipline” under centralised supervision (Meyer 1969, 26, forming Cambodia into a hydraulic state (see Pl. X.8).45 30–31). Bilingual publications like Images du Kampuchéa According to the subsequent report in the journal, “Les Démocratique/Pictures of Democratic Kampuchea (1976) perspectives d’aménagements hydrauliques” (compare and Kampuchéa Démocratique en marche/Democratic KamHou Youn 1955): “Enhancing [mise en valeur] the hydrau- puchea is moving forward (August 1977) not only served lic resources of Cambodia are on the actual agenda [ordre as a kind of international guidebook to DK’s overall politidu jour]. Since the Angkorian epoch up to the present day, cal programme. Headlines like “Two years after liberation”, the mastery of water [maîtrise de l’eau] has been the number “An impetus, vast and deep revolutionary mass movement”, one national problem.”46 After addressing a list of projects and “Mastering the water: With water we have rice, with developed under a Comité du Mékong to build hydroelec- rice we have everything” formed a vulgarised version of tric power plants with foreign aid and technology imports the above-quoted sections before 1970, merely adding new (unthinkable under the new self-sufficient approach of the keywords about class struggle and collective heroism: Khmer Rouge), the article discussed “polders” (diked land), and used wording about collective discipline, strict state The trade-union workers, the cooperative peasants, men authority, increase of rice production to two harvests a and women fighters and cadres of the Revolutionary year, and population growth that was astonishingly similar Army mobilise all their physical, moral and intellectual to the Khmer Rouge declarations just a few years later: forces and they put forward their creative spirit and their The building of polders would comprise protective dikes, and a drainage system for the inundation period and the

ingenuity, combative and revolutionary heroism […] Ten, twenty, thirty thousand people are working in each worksite for building up reservoirs, canals, dikes […] The mo-

45  Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July–August 1969), 20–21. 46  Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July–August 1969), 22–25, here 22.

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Figure XI.13  Propaganda illustration in the August 1977 issue of Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward (Source: Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward, August 1977, 9)

bilisation of this powerful collective force has been made possible thanks to the ardent patriotism and to the close union of all worker-peasant people and the Revolutionary Army under the leadership of the Revolutionary Orga­ nisation […] The scenery of rice fields in checkerboards, networks of irrigation, canals, dikes and water reservoirs coming into view everywhere in the countryside shows that, thanks to the cooperatives, the peasants have acquired a great mastery of water and have attained a high political consciousness. [italics MF] (Democratic Kampuchea 1977, 8—9, 12)

The topos of educatory measures through mass participation in building the irrigation system was, in fact, a feature of Sihanouk’s – Buddhist-socialist – Sangkum propaganda (compare previous chapter). Even the illustrations of this movement were astonishingly similar (Pl. XI.18a,b; Fig. XI.13, compare Figs. X.11a,b). The same change could also be seen in the person of Sihanouk, who became part of the

Figure XI.14  Illustration of Sihanouk in Khmer Rouge outfit visiting field workers, as depicted in his biographical sketch Prisonnier des Khmers Rouges of 1986 (Source: Sihanouk 1986, Figs. 5,6)

Khmer Rouge propaganda when he visited (back in the 1960s by helicopter and wearing an elegant suit, compare Figs. X.15a,b,47 now with a shaved head and wearing the revolutionary uniform) the inhuman construction sites in 1975/76 (Fig. XI.14). The section titled “Mastering the water” in the 1977 brochure Democratic Kampuchea is moving forward, which contained a list of dam constructions, was illustrated despite the fact that most had already been built in the 1960s. One photo was subtitled: “The dam of Baray Tuk Thla in the Siemreap region built in the period of ­Angkor, damaged during the war, has been rapidly repaired and can keep water for irrigating the rice fields in both districts of Siemreap and Puok” (Democratic Kampuchea 1977, 13). Once again, the myth of an ancient and updated irrigation system in the historic continuity of Angkor was reintroduced through the back door, this time with the photograph of a dam project which had already been realised for Angkor’s West Baray in 1960 (compare previous Fig.X.10a).

47  In his 1972 book L’Indochine vue de Pékin: Entretiens avec Jean Lacouture, Sihanouk spoke of “552 km of

dikes, 1,510 km of small canals, 11,000 km of new roads and about 1,000 bridges” (Sihanouk 1972, 76).

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2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor

2.3. Cultural diplomacy reloaded: Learning from the French and Sihanouk A 110-page typewritten text The Party’s four-year plan to build socialism in all fields, 1977–1980 has survived to document the DK’s party meeting, which was held from July to August 1976 (Chandler, Kiernan, Boua 1988, 36–119). After a long section on agriculture, part two dealt with “Building socialism in the industrial sector” and included discussions on light and heavy industry, communication, transport and telecommunications, trade, tourism, technology, and finance (money was printed, but abolished). The short section “V: Tourism (importantly Siem Reap–Angkor)” reads as follows: A. Request: It is important to serve the political influence of the Party. Must organise: hotels, water, electricity; communication routes — especially aviation, Siem Reap airfield; places to relax and visit — the regions of Angkor (Wat), Angkor Thom, Banteay Srei, the system of dikes, irrigation channels, canals, rice fields, vegetable gardens, fishing areas, Bareay Tuk Thla [sic], etc.; various artisanry; organisation and administration. B. Method of Procedure: Prepare the resources step by step from 1977 onward. (translated in Chandler, Kiernan, Boua 1988, 104—105)

This short paragraph indicated – beyond all internal ideological debates about the downgrading of Angkor’s legacy – that the famous temple site was still considered an important cultural asset. Besides the complete on-site neglect of the temples, they were – in another silent continuation of French-colonial and Sihanouk’s Sangkum era – an important element of cultural diplomacy and public relations that was seen to “serve the political influence of the Party” (see quote above). Our consultation of the FBIS files with about one thousand pages of public announcements within the Khmer Rouge period from April 1975 to January 1979 brought to light the fact that Angkor Wat was part of important diplomatic sightseeing tours during roughly twenty official visits of international state representatives: these included, most often, the People’s Republic of China, followed by Sweden, Zambia, North Korea, Malaysia, Romania, Pakistan, Laos, and Hong Kong.48 Moreover, Marxist-Leninist Friendship Associations or communist parties from Sweden, Australia, the United States (with “comrade” and The Call editor Daniel Leon Brustein), Belgium, France (with “comrade” Jacques Jurquet), Norway, Denmark, Japan, and Canada sent delegations to Cambodia. Important politicians also visited Cambodia and Angkor, including, among others, Souphanawong from Laos, Ne Win from Burma, and Nicolae Ceausescu from Romania in May 1978. Western intellectuals and reporters also made their trip to

Angkor (see below), as did a number of ‘normal’ tourists, who spent foreign cash money at the site. As the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC) was DK’s official protector, it came to the country as a guest most often. For DK’s first anniversary celebrations on 17 April 1976 in Phnom Penh, PRC’s ambassador to Demo­ cratic Kampuchea, Sun Hao, greeted Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Pol Pot with historic references: The Cambodian people are a heroic people with a long history and tradition of struggle. More than one thousand years ago the Cambodian people fostered the brilliant Angkor civilisation. We are confident that the best sons and daughters of Angkor, liberated from slavery at the cost of much blood, will certainly overcome all obstacles on the path of their advance, defeat all sabotage and bullying activities of the enemy both at home and abroad, and leap forward in the construction of a new, glorious, radiant, prosperous, strong, excellent, and happy society on the vast territory of Cambodia. [italics MF] (FBIS, 20 April 1977, H3)

When a PRC delegation returned to Cambodia on 7 December 1977 to repay the courtesy of Pol Pot’s trip to China a few months earlier, PRC Deputy Prime Minister Comrade Chen Yung-Kuei was accompanied by Pol Pot, Khieu ­Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Public Health Minister Thiounn Thioeunn, and was already on a large propaganda tour through the whole country. During a farewell banquet held on 14 December 1977, he summarised the cultural heritage of Angkor Wat once again as an important framework for DK’s contemporary achievements: This visit of more than ten days full of a varied and interesting programme has been a great benefit to us. […] Thanks to our hosts’ affectionate attention and arrangements, we were able to visit Phnom Penh, the eastern, central, northern, northwestern, western and southwestern regions and Kompong Som town; to tour the worldre­nowned Angkor Wat which is the brilliant art work of the Cambodian working people; visit industries, pharmaceutical plants and rubber plantations […] We saw large irrigation projects which are the fruits of the joint efforts by the leaders and masses, which can operate even while they are still under construction […] We saw the masses being organised in an excellent manner. […] All these victories you have won stem from a strong Marxist-Leninist party with a correct line. [italics MF] (FBIS, 16 December 1977, H1)

48  Le Monde on 21 September 1976 reported visits from Senegal, Guinea and Egypt (Sher 2004, 220).

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XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

Figures XI.15a—d  A Chinese delegation in a group photo with Khmer Rouge soldiers (left above); Ne Win as guest in 1977 of Khieu Samphan (inside the cruciform gallery of Angkor Wat, left below) and together with Ieng Sary in the temple’s central passageway (right above); Comrade Souphanavong with the Khmer Rouge leaders in front of the Bayon reliefs (right ­below) (Source: © Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

When “Pol Pot hosted banquets for visiting PRC technicians” on 18 January and 7 July 1978 (Fig. XI.15a), “Ambas­ sador Sun Hao expressed the wish that the revolutionary friendship and militant solidarity between China and Kampuchea would [be as] last[ing] as the Great Wall and Angkor Wat, and the Yangtze and Mekong Rivers” (FBIS, 268

10 July 1978, A21). During the surprisingly busy diplomatic period of 1977 and 1978, when the political and military troubles with the formerly friendly Vietnam commenced, other Asian dictators also visited Cambodia: “U Ne Win, president and chairman of the State Council of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma” arrived with a delega-

2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor

Figures XI.15c,d

tion in late November 1977 for a three-day visit. Hosted by Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen (FBIS, 28/29/30 Nov 1977, H1-4, H3), this included an easy chat inside Ang­ kor Wat’s cruciform gallery and a walk down the temple’s iconic passageway (Figs. XI.15b,c). Shortly thereafter, the so-called Red Prince “Comrade Souphanavong”, president

of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, paid his visit to Cambodia. A photo with Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan taken on 20 December 1977 during his visit to Angkor (FBIS, 21 December 1977, H2) in front of the Bayon temple’s famous bas-reliefs (Fig. XI.15d), closed a full ideological circle of similar shots in the same spot which were in269

XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

tended to make cultural heritage diplomacy frame political regimes. These ranged from a number of famous guests during French-colonial times, to US president Richard Nixon with Bernard Philippe Groslier in 1953 (see Fig. X.55a), to Charles de Gaulle or Jacqueline Kennedy with Norodom Sihanouk in 1966 and 1967 (see Figs. X.55b, 56a,b). The period also included the Swedish-Kampuchean Friendship Delegation’s “two-week trip of 1,300 kilometres throughout Cambodia” in August 1978 (Fig. XI.16a), during which the delegation’s participants Jan Myrdal49, Marita Wikander, Gunnar Bergström, and Hedwig Ekerwald were tragically duped (Department of Press and Information 1978, Bergström 1979). During an interview in The Voice of Democratic Kampuchea, they proudly announced:

criticised it during the visits and was murdered in Phnom Penh during the two-day-visit just after being granted an interview with Pol Pot. Nonetheless, Becker’s article series in the Washington Post with titles such as “Deterioration threatens Angkor Wat: Cambodia’s political needs undercut ancient temple’s upkeep” and “Cambodia’s Angkor Wat symbolises heritage cult” (Becker 1978) brought some news of the site to the outside world: talks with Ok Sakun (“a foreign ministry official long believed to have been purged” – see his job as leader of Democratic Kampuchea’s UNESCO mission after 1979 as discussed later in this chapter), Thiounn Mumm (“co-director of the country’s main technical institute”), and Thiounn Prasith (“a foreign ministry official in charge of Asian affairs”) reaffirmed what Becker called a “heritage cult in the new Cambodia” with Our Swedish-Kampuchean Friendship Association dele- “visits to Angkor Wat as a major part of its political re-edugation has just completed a two-week visit to Democrat- cation program”. In her 1986 book When the war was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution, Becker recapitic Kampuchea. We are greatly honoured […] We visited ulated her visit to the temples and remarked on the visual the beautiful Angkor temple. […] Everywhere we saw importance of Angkor Wat to the regime, which was conKampuchean people arduously building their war-torn country. […] Everywhere we saw vast rice fields and nu- tradicted in its official slogans: merous waterworks. […] The “6 January” dam that thousands of people are busily and arduously striving to complete is concrete evidence attesting to how a people who rely on their own strength and means can score wonderful feats. [italics MF] (FBIS, 31 August 1978, H1)50

We saw only soldiers and few peasants working in the area — not keeping up the temples, but raking the lawns outside the temples. The temples had been left to deterio­ rate. They were protected in a political sense, however. The temples were at the centre of what the Khmer Rouge and the modern rulers before them consider Cambodian culture. In revolutionary Cambodia, paintings of Angkor Wat hung at the official buildings and guest houses we visited — not photographs of Pol Pot or other Cambodian leaders, and not pictures of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, or Joseph Stalin as in Vietnam. Only Angkor was safe enough to become the symbol of revolutionary Cambodia. Pol Pot was still too insecure to post his picture around the country. [italics MF] (Becker 1986, 417)

In September 1978 the French Communist Party delegation visited Cambodia (Brunel 1978; see Fig. XI.16b). In the same month, the Japanese Broadcast Company NHK accompanied the Japanese-Cambodian Friendship Association for a one-week trip. The resulting 1979 publication Country of mystery: Cam­bodia (Pl. XI.19a) carried an important message: “the globally renowned remains of Angkor Wat stayed basically untouched and were maintained” (NHK 1979, 3), and “big vandalism had been avoided, even if fresh bullet holes were visible on the walls of the temple” (NHK 1979, 5) (Pl. XI.19b). A guide to Banteay Srei told her “the new government did Shortly after, by late December 1978 when the Viet- not intend to continue its policy of the past three years of namese were already marching against Phnom Penh, the allowing only diplomats and special guests to visit Angkor”, Khmer Rouge changed their strategy to block international “a group of forty Thai tourists and a handful of foreign jourtourists from visiting Angkor (compare de Beer 2008). From nalists were allowed a brief visit of Angkor as a dry run of mid-December onwards, the journalists Elisabeth Becker new one-day tours that would be operated from Thailand (Washington Post) and Richard Dudman (Saint Louis Post beginning New Year’s Day [as] thousands of tourists had Dispatch) along with Professor Malcolm Caldwell from already signed up for the $225 side trip from Bangkok to London’s School of Oriental and African Studies were al- Siem Reap” (Becker 1978). This news was reconfirmed by lowed to make a tour through Cambodia.51 Despite being the New York Times, and “Chatichal Choonhavan, the foran early supporter-apologist of the regime, Caldwell openly mer Thai foreign minister and businessman” was cited as

49  Together with Gun Kessle, Jan Myrdal had already written his 1968 book Angkor. An Essay on art and

imperialism (in Swedish, republished in English translation in 1970 and 1971), dedicated to Norodom Sihanouk (Myrdal/Kessle 1971). 50  This fatally wrong-headed estimation of the situation in Democratic Kampuchea was later corrected and commented on; compare Fröberg Idling 2006 and Bergström 2008. 51  This was also reported in FBIS, 28 December 1978, K5; 29 December 1978, H4-5; 2 January 1979, K12–13.

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2. The Khmer Rouge and Angkor

Figures XI.16a,b  The Swedish group in Cambodia, also in front of Angkor Wat, as depicted in their published report in 1979 (above); and the French Communist Party delegation with Jacques Jurquet and Annie Brunel at Angkor Wat, as depicted in L’Humanité rouge in 1978 (Source: Bergström et al. 1979, cover, back cover (above); L’Humanité rouge, 42 (14—29 novembre 1978), cover, 13)

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XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

Figure XI.17 The New York Times reporting about Khmer Rouge Cambodia on 27 December 1978 (Source: The New York Times, 27 December 1978, A3; NYT online archive)

having led the initial tour. The used photograph (Fig. XI.17), was taken from Khmer Rouge propaganda material dating from 1973 (compare XI.10c). Once more, after the warlike confrontation in early 1972 – and shortly before the shocking information about the Khmer Rouge genocide and systematic torture was revealed after the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese on 7 January 1979 –, good news about Cambodia’s built cultural heritage surprised the world: Cambodia today reopened Angkor Wat to foreigners barred from viewing the ancient temple by eight years of war and revolution. No major war damage to the ancient

complex was apparent but neither was there any evidence of restoration or maintenance.52

At this point in time, Pol Pot had already been photographed smiling in front of Angkor Wat with his political entourage (Pl. XI.20). The degree to which the visual presence of Ang­ kor’s architectural grandeur had, against all pseudo-Marxist rhetoric, always been uplifting for the Khmer Rouge regime is indicated by the surviving wall paintings of the Preah Vi­ hear and Angkor Wat temples found in a house in the north Cambodian stronghold of the Khmer Rouge (Pl. XI.21a–c): its owner, Ta Mok (Chhit Choeun), was one of those central to the organised genocide.

52  See the New York Times articles “Cambodia will let tourists visit ancient temple ruins of Angkor” (27 December 1978, A3) and “Temple of Angkor found neglected but unscathed” (28 December 1978, A3). Shortly after, the French newspaper Le Monde reported about “Quarente-cinq minutes pour visiter Angkor Vat” (Le Monde, 30 December 1978, 5).

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3. People’s Republic of Kampuchea Whoever has seen Angkor will never forget it again. But who had visited Kampuchea in 1979 will be marked for life. To those people who built Angkor, this burst in stone, this architectural and sculptural proliferation so unique on this planet, we owe all our admiration and gratitude; and for this people which has suffered more than any other people, we owe all our active solidarity. […] Angkor, the Polpotist Calvary, the renaissance, this verve towards the future: I have seen it all with my own eyes. [italics MF] —Françoise Corrèze in Kampuchéa: Espoirs — realités (1982) Constructing in five years irrigation works of three million ha, two times larger than Vietnam with its ten times bigger population? The discourses of Pol Pot proclaimed that Kampuchea with its spectacular realisations had become the flag bearer of a global revolution. I think I can see a more realistic tendency at play today, but the “complex of Angkor” still deeply impregnates the minds. A complex which can develop into a creative, fecund and vigorous action, but which can also easily fall into utopia. The Vietnamese experience [at Cambodia, MF] showed me that this utopia is one of the major dangers which stalks the leaders and militants of our country with its mission to build a new society. [italics MF] —Nguyen Khac Vien in Kampuchéa 1981: Témoignages (1981)

On 2 December 1978, presumably “several thousand Cambodians assembled in a clearing in a rubber plantation within a liberated zone near Snoul, Kratie province” (Slocomb 2003, 45). Heng Samrin, a deserter Khmer Rouge comman­ der of the Fourth Division based in the Eastern Zone, former member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (in the following CPK) for the eastern region, and the now declared president of the so-called National United Front for Salvation of Kampuchea (in the following NUFSK), read out the Front’s official declaration and programme. As published shortly afterwards in the first issue of the Vietnam Courier of January 1979, he stated that “the genuine patriotic forces of Kampuchea [with] their endeavour to remake their revolution had been betrayed” by the leaders of DK. According to the declaration, with its general Marxist-Leninist orientation and aim of fostering patriotism and proletarian internationalism, the Angkorian past was to be rehabilitated from its recent downgrading within the Khmer Rouge’s Maoist periodisation model; §7 even called for the recovery of the country’s historic “relics and temples” (Viet­nam Courier, 1.1979, 9–12): Throughout the long years when Kampuchea was under the yoke of colonialism, imperialism, and feudalism, many of our compatriots, cadres and combatants developed innumerable difficulties and sacrifices, relentlessly struggled with sublime heroism against French and US imperialism to regain independence and freedom for the country, thus bringing glory to the magnificent Land of Angkor. […] Our patriotic war against US imperialism […] ended with the glorious victory of April 17, 1975. Our country was totally liberated, opening up for the Kampuchean nation a new era of independence, freedom and socialism. […] However, the reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique […] betrayed the country and usurped the people. […] The clique have [sic] trampled underfoot all the fine

traditions, customs and habits of our people, and wrecked our nation’s honoured culture. […] They have destroyed pagodas and temples of Buddhism […] The Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime is neo-slavery and has nothing to do with socialism! […] The National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea has now been founded […] so that this immediate revolutionary task of the Kampuchean people can be fulfilled: To unite the entire people and rise up to topple the revolutionary and nepotistic Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique of militant dictators, henchmen of the foreign reactionary forces; to abolish their barbarous and bloodthirsty regime, to establish a people’s democratic regime, to develop the Angkor traditions, to make Kampuchea into a really peaceful, independent, democratic, neutral, and non-aligned country advancing to socialism, thus contributing actively to the common struggle for peace and stability on Southeast Asia. To fulfil this historic mission, the NUFSK undertakes [above others in eleven ­paragraphs, MF]: §7. To abolish the reactionary culture of the Pol Pol-Ieng Sary clique. To build a new culture with a national and popular character. […] To preserve and restore relics, pagodas and temples, and parks destroyed by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique. [italics MF]

This verbal framing of revolutionary struggle with an Angkorian affiliation brings to mind the Khmer branch of the Viet Minh movement against French colonial rule when the Cambodian left-wing members of the Khmer Issarak modified its neighbour’s flag with a red ground and golden star viewed through an abstract version of a five-tower silhouette of Angkor Wat (Figs. XI.18a,b). After the agreements of the 1954 Geneva Conference, the pro-Vietnamese Khmer communists were forced to leave the country (or go underground) and left a vacuum that was ultimately filled by the Khmer Rouge. In the ‘joint occupation’ of Angkor in the early 1970s, this Cambodian liberation movement ini273

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Figures XI.18a,b  The Khmer Issarak flag as depicted during a reunion with neighbouring Lao and Vietnam resistance fighters (above), and the PRK flag during a meeting (below) (Source: © Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

tially collaborated with (and was even dominated by) its Vietnamese counterpart. In this process we can see a gradual alienation of the Vietnamese communists, with their orthodox Marxist-Leninist political culture oriented towards the Soviet Union on the one side, from the Khmer Rouge, with their increasingly megalomaniac and genocidal “hyper-Maoism” (Morris 1999, 17) oriented towards and influenced by the ‘Super Great Leap Forward’ in China on the other side. Vietnamese border violations finally triggered a reaction of self-defense from the inner-Cambodian 274

Khmer Rouge. At this point, the NUFSK movement became an integral element of the full-scale invasion by communist Vietnam in December 1978, the capture of Phnom Penh in 7 January 1979, and the foundation of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) shortly afterwards. Now, the previous Khmer Viet Minh connotation resurfaced in a visual and rhetorical reality: after the Khmer Rouge connected the three-tower silhouette of their flag to “national tradition” without further specification (compare XI.1d), the new flag was described in the 1981 constitution as “a

3. People’s Republic of Kampuchea

red rectangle with a golden representation of the five towers of Angkor Wat” (Jennar 1994, 86; compare Pl. XI.1f,g), using a design that was similar to that of thirty years earlier. It was pictured in typical political literature during this period and shortly after (Pl. XI.22a,b). While the Khmer Rouge – now the latest member of the group of UN-acknowledged governments in exile (compare Talmon 1998) – was forced to fight a diplomatic war on international red carpets and to use guerrilla tactics against the PRK from the Thai-Cambodia border zone (see below), the new Cambodian government was formed with Heng Samrin as president, Pen Savann as vice-president and minister of defence, the twenty-eight-year-old and exKhmer Rouge commander Hun Sen as minister of foreign affairs (in 1993 he would become prime minister of the new Cambodia), and Keo Chanda as minister of propaganda, information and culture (Chhim 2000, 437, 438, 446). From the very first minute of its existence, and despite its supposedly “successful humanitarian operation in Cambodia”, the PRK embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to gain full international recognition (Klintworth 1989a, 135; Klintworth 1989b). These efforts included small books and leaflets that were published well into the 1980s53 (Pl. XI.22a–d) in order to foster its mission to create a “Viet­ namised Cambodia” (Martin 1986; compare Martin 1994) with a new socialist state foundation “whose superstructure had been damaged by the Khmer Republic and totally destroyed by the DK” (Vickery 1990, 440). The cover of a little Vietnamese book entitled Cambodia – Victory by a pure revolution, published in Hanoi in 1979 (Fig. XI.19), depicted the face towers of the Angkorian Bayon towers in a late-modern socialist abstraction. Besides chapters two and three on “the betrayed revolution” of the Pol Pot regime and “the resistance fight for a pure revolution”, chapter one offered an unctuous treatise on “the country of Angkorian glory”. The basic message was that this “country of temples […] rich and beautiful”, and all “Angkorian glory”, were the result of the “hard labour work of the Khmer people [who were full of] love, independence, justice and diversity […] and hated any kind of pressure regime”. However, in the subsequent section the Khmer Rouge ideology was made an antipode to past achievements: “A nation that had developed to such a glory” could not accept the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime of slavery and cruelty and proved that it had “enough energy and power to fight back” (The Truth 1979, 11–15). In the same year of 1979 the Ministry of Information, Press, and Cultural Affairs of the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Council announced The birth of New Kampuchea on the

Figure X.19  Cover of Cambodia — Victory by a pure revolution, published in Hanoi in 1979 (Source: The Truth 1979, cover)

title page of an English-French publication. Along with a map of the national territory and a photo of Heng Samrin, the text on the cover was directly related to the new flag’s meaning (see XI.1f,g), as described in the new national anthem written by Keo Chenda. A new heritage/inheritance claim, implicit in the name of Angkor, was born: “We draw our strength from our unity and stand ready to shed our blood for victory […]. The blood-red flag with five golden towers is raised and will lead the nation to happiness and prosperity” (Ministry of Information 1979, 10). Celebrating the January 1979 victory, President Heng Samrin outlined the PRK’s revolutionary and socialist-internationalist vision through metaphors of cultural heritage: Kampuchea had become a sea of blood under the sway of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique, betrayers of the Fatherland […] At the same time they trampled underfoot our

53  Some of those publications directed towards public recognition included Cambodia: Victory by a pure revolution; The birth of new Kampuchea; Kampuchea – From tragedy to rebirth (all 1979, see above), The idea of Kampuchea in 1980 (see Pl. XI.22a), Kampuchéa 1981 – Témoignages (1981), Kampuchea – The nightmare is over of 1982 (see Pl. XI.22b), Forward the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1982) (see Pl.XI.22c), La grande conspiration anti-Kampuchéenne (1983), La révolution du Kampuchéa est irréversible (1984) or Undeclared war against the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1985), compare Un groupe de juristes 1990 (see Pl. XI.22d).

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brilliant millennia-old civilisation and turned the radiant land of Angkor into an area of devastation, flowing with blood and strewn with corpses. Owing to their policy, many ancient temples, gardens and parks, which had been built by the skilful hands of our people and were representative of our brilliant civilisation, were seriously damaged and turned into wilderness. […] It was in this spirit that the National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea was born and made public its Eleven-Point Political Programme on December 2, 1978 […]. Not to be separated from the all-round assistance of the peoples in the socialist countries… it is the victory of peace and justice-loving people in the world. [italics MF] (Ministry of Information 1979, 66—77)

the restoration of Angkor was expected in Paris”: Pich Keo, the declared conservateur des temples d’Angkor after Bernard Philippe Groslier left in 1974 (see the end of chapter IX), was reported to have returned after his internment in Roluos during the Khmer Rouge period. A “council for the conservation of the ruins of Angkor” was already founded, and “the examination on how to bring French specialists back” to the site was initiated: supposedly bypassing political non-acknowledgement of the PRK by France, the “Agence de coopération culturelle et technique as an international organism for the francophone countries based in Paris” was suggested as a future means “to investigate, using French specialists, how the conservation work at the famous temples of Angkor could be relaunched”.54 Contrary to DK between 1975 and 1978, the PRK indeed made an effort at cultural heritage preservation. It incorporated some of the Vice President Pen Savann’s speech to the National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea made the socialist physical traces of the country’s recent genocidal history in inheritance claim over Angkor even more explicitly part of the list of commemorative sites to be protected and propa“heritage protection”: gated in order to justify and visualise its own political raison d’être for the ‘Salvation of Kampuchea’ (Figs. XI.20a,b). Our armed forces are also true outstanding sons and On 30 June 1980, the People’s Revolutionary Council issued the “Circular prohibiting the destruction of all culturdaughters of the heroic Kampuchean people living in this al property in the Angkor Park” and the “Decision to creglorious land of Angkor, authentic heirs to the revolution ate an administrative council in charge of the protection and traditions of struggle of our fathers […] In concrete and conservation of cultural property and historic monuterms we must defend our revolutionary gains, protect heritage handed down to us by our forefathers and safe- ments on the territory of the PRK”.55 A Décret-Loi, relatif aux patrimoines culturels, historiques, aux sites et monuguard our red flag with five golden towers, a symbol of ments naturels by the Conseil Révolutionnaire du Peuple du the blood shed by our compatriots, cadres and fighters. Kampuchéa (No. 227-80-CRP) was signed by Pen Savann [italics MF] (Ministry of Information 1979, 85, 87) on 29 November 1980.56 When the Directorate of Monument Conservation, Museums and Tourism published its In the same year, the diplomatic tactics surrounding the cultural heritage of Angkor reached a new level: “the two first annual report in 1980 (in French), the “Conservation rival regimes [i.e., the ruling PRK and the expelled Khmer d’Angkor” was now only one section in addition to the Rouge, MF] accused each other of having devastated the “National Museum, the ex-Royal Palace and the Tuol Sleng” temple of Angkor”, as Le Monde reported on 21 August 1979 prison57 (Pl. XI.23). In the introductory section, Angkor (AFP 1979). On 20 March 1980, in the article “Inquiétudes Wat was to be saved and “revived” at all costs (compare in chapter XII with UNESCO’s similar slogan by Mayor 1991) pour Angkor”, the same French newspaper continued to question the status of Angkor (Rebeyrol 1980), only to re- and was again placed, after its Khmer Rouge de-valorisaport on 5 November 1980 that “a Cambodian mission for tion, on the list of the wonders of the world:

54  “Une mission cambodgienne pour la conservation des temples d’Angkor est attendue à Paris”, Le Monde (5 November 1980). 55  The French publication identified both documents as Circulaire du Conseil populaire révolutionnaire n.150/80 CRP du 30 juin 1980 interdisant la destruction de tous biens culturels situés dans le Parc d’Angkor and the Décision du CPR n.152/80 CPR du 30 juin 1980 portant création d’un Conseil d’Administration chargé de la protection et la conservation des biens culturels et des monuments historiques situés sur tout le territoire de la RPK (Direction de la conservation 1980a, 7; compare Ministère de l’Information et de la Presse 1980). 56  This French text was reprinted in the Japanese series Renaissance Culturelle du Cambodge 1989, 136–58. 57  Besides another section in the report on the reopened Archaeological Museum and the ex-Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng – a former school of the 1960s which had become the infamous S21 torturing prison during the Khmer Rouge – was transformed into a “crime museum [as] a means of propaganda and for the education of the masses”. According to the report, about 15,000 people had been killed there during the short Khmer Rouge period. As a commemorative site, it became, and remains to this day, an almost obligatory and tragic site in any touristic pilgrimage to Angkor. According to the report, 310,000 Cambodians and 11,000 foreigners had already visited the site by October 1980.

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Figures XI.20a,b  Documentation and propaganda photographs during the time of the PRK in Cambodia: Angkor Wat, the National Museum, Choeung Ek (the ‘Killing Fields’) and Tuol Sleng (Source: Klintworth 1989, 95, 31) After it came to power in Kampuchea, the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary-Khieu Samphan clique has destroyed the culture field. They have demolished a great number of statues, mined the Gopura II South of Angkor Wat. […] They have destroyed the archives, the plans of the monuments as other necessary items of the Conservation. […] They destroyed our cultural heritage. But after the liberation of 7 January 1979 the NUFSK has taken all urgent measures to re-valorise all cultural heritage. The Conservation d’Ang­kor opened again in October 1979 thanks to the clairvoyance of comrade Keo Chanda, minister of information, press and culture. […] Why should we safeguard Angkor? Why waste money to save Angkor? For years the image of Angkor Wat has already been on the national flag of Kampuchea. Angkor represents the glorious past of our country and the entire Khmer nation. It is the symbol of evolution and architectural progress, a mirror which reflects the past life, civilisation and history. […] Some people thought that the monuments of Angkor were the work of a king or of angels. But could a king really build,

by himself, a monument in such a size as Angkor Wat or the Bayon? In reality, those monuments of Angkor are the tireless works of our ancestors; Angkor is considered one of the wonders of the world. It is for that reason that we have to protect and conserve it. Angkor has been revived. [italics MF] (Direction de la conservation 1980a)

As the report continued, only fifty-two people were now employed at the Conservation d’Angkor, which had lost “two thousand books and documents, archival material, five thousand drawings, ten drawing tables and all working material”. In a second volume, entitled Rapport technique par le Comité d’inspection des monuments historiques, a specific monitoring team was set up (they inspected fifty-two temples sites between September and October 1980) with Ouk Chea as president and Pich Keo as a member (Direction de la conservation 1980b, 2). When a Liste des monuments dans chaque province de la République populaire du Kampuchéa was published in the same year, the total number was 1,070, with 292 sites in the Siem Reap province and Angkor Wat 277

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Figure XI.21a  Reporting about “artists after the genocide” in the Vietnam Courier in 1979 (Source: Vietnam Courier, 11/1979, 14)

as entry number 56 (Direction de la conservation 1980c). A “Five-Year Plan 1981–1985” foresaw a continuation of “the restoration of the Galerie de barattage to a length of sixty metres [it was left open by Groslier, MF], [and] the remontage of colonnades and vaults”. In the long term, “the clearing of all monuments of Angkor Park, an inventory of the temples, and the redesign of the Srah Srang water tank and the moat of Angkor Wat” was planned. As a remarkable entry on the to-do list after the country had closed itself off from the outside world, the issue of “making contact abroad to solicit support for the work at Angkor” was addressed (Direction de la conservation 1980a). As we shall see below, the new rhetoric was now embed­ ded in a new diplomatic landscape with non-aligned and internationally connected socialist brother states. This included, first of all, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam itself (to be staged as an allied friend, not as the de facto occupier behind Heng Samrin’s puppet government), and an old element of cultural diplomacy. After the Vietnam Courier reported on the nearing of the PRK to diplomatic recognition by “the great friend India” in its May 1979 issue, the headline “Artistes [sic] after the genocide” was the title of a report in its November edition (Fig. XI.21a): in a kind of déjà vu of similar performances staged during the Frenchco­lonial and the postcolonial Sihanouk eras (compare Fal-

Figure XI.21b  “List of necessary material for the conservation service of Angkor at Siem Reap”, list of the Ministry of Culture sent to UNESCO/ICOMOS in December 1981 (Source: © ICOMOS International Archive, Paris)

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ser 2013f), “a Kampuchean traditional dance” group from Phnom Penh’s new “National Theatre” travelled to Vietnam with a stage set of the five towers of Angkor Wat, which also graced the PRK’s national flag. Two months later, the journal reported on “The People’s Republic of Kampuchea: One year after” with the promising comment that “cultural and artistic activities have been restored step by step [and] the preservation of the Angkor ruins [was now] a matter of State policy” (Vietnam Courier 1.1980, 6). Concrete actions, however, were limited. The best proof of those constraints can be seen in the Liste de matériel nécessaire pour le service de la conservation d’Angkor à Siemreap (Fig. XI.21b). As a cry for help, it was established by 9 November 1981, signed by “the director of the Conservation, Pen Yeth” and the “Minister of Culture, Keo Chenda”, and sent to UNESCO and ICOMOS. Its 260 entries ranged from office furniture and almost entirely French literature about Angkor, to a fully equipped photo lab, installations for photogrammetric and chemical analyses and drawing stations (Direction de la Conservation 1981). Any thinkable action from within in relation to cultural heritage was delegated to the culture unit under Keo Chanda’s propaganda ministry where cultural education was considered an instrument to create the new patriotic and socialist man (compare Chhim 2000, 283–97). In this context, thirteen

sections with art (dance, drama, music, etc.), the fine arts school, film, museums, archives, libraries, and tourism were established. As Margaret Slocomb mentioned in her study about the PRK, Prime Minister Chan Si (who left Cambodia as a Khmer Viet Minh in 1954) issued on 16 March 1984 the “49SSR decision concerning the setting up of a committee for the care of the Angkorian temples”, which was chaired by Chan Seng, the party secretary and head of the People’s Revolutionary Committee of Siem Reap/Oddar Meanchey: “According to the decision of the Council of Ministers, enemy ruses have been used to cheat some of our people in Siem Reap to dig holes under the temples and big trees, with the aim of destroying our national cultural health.” Specifically, the high-ranking, interministerial committee was to fill in the holes, replant trees, and “do whatever was necessary to ensure orderliness and restore the area to its original beauty.” Actual work was supposed to commence on 15 April 1984, the day before the decision was signed. This was obviously a mass campaign and involved the volunteer labour of teams of civilians (Slocomb 2003, 184). Despite this rhetorical support for Angkor as a constructed past for the socialist present and the glorious future, the Heng Samrin government did little to nothing to protect and enhance Angkor’s cultural heritage. This duty was given as a diplomatic gift to a foreign nation.

3.1. India recognises the PRK: Cultural ties and the diplomatic gift called Angkor Wat As internal options towards the restoration of cultural heritage were limited for financial reasons, the PRK had to play its culture-political card on the international stage. The United Nations, following their resolution 34/22 of 9 November 1979 (in a vote of 71–35 with 34 abstentions), condemned all foreign invasion into Cambodia, demanded the withdrawal of all Vietnamese military, and supported the Pol Pot regime as the legal representative governmentin-­exile of Kampuchea. Also, Kampuchea Conferences in Stockholm (1979), New York (1981), and Tokyo (1982) supported the ex-Khmer Rouge. On the other side of the spectrum, PRK’s International Conference of Solidarity with the People of Kampuchea, supposedly sponsored by the (in fact, communist) World Peace Council and taking place in Phnom Penh under the telling title Recognise Now: People’s Republic of Kampuchea, must have sounded like a rather invented scenario (International Centre 1980). The largest non-aligned country in Asia and the only non-Warsaw Pact country to recognise the PRK was India. In March 1977, the Janatra Party won the sixth election of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s Bicameral-Parliament), and it neither recognised the Pol Pot regime, still in place until 1979, nor the competing regimes of the PRK and Democratic Kampuchea after 1979. All this changed after January 1980 when in the seventh Lok Sabha elections In-

dira Gandhi’s Congress Party returned to power and soon after, on 7 July 1980, recognised the SU-Vietnam-­backed PRK. This decision was taken despite the stance of the ­ASEAN states (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the United Nations, which both supported the expelled DK regime (see below). Based on his 1985 study India and Kampuchea: A phase in their relations, 1978–81, Tridib Chakra­ borti has it, that “Indira Gandhi’s recognition of the Heng Samrin government [bore] a five-fold explanation”: In decreasing order of importance, it acknowledged the reality of the regime actually in power. It reflected govern­ mental and popular revulsion at the genocidal Pol Pot regime. It registered an essentially emotional desire to demonstrate solidarity with Vietnam. It expressed India’s adversarial relationship with China. And finally, least ­important, it comforted Moscow in its hour of need. The recognition issue was, therefore, a diplomatic victory for Hanoi, Moscow and Phnom Penh, which resulted in strengthening the PRK’s diplomatic credentials at the United Nations and in the nonaligned movement and gave the Vietnamese government a “security relief” from the perspective of its own national interests. […] Indira Gandhi considered it to be the “sheet anchor” of India’s foreign policy [to foster the rapprochement with the So-

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viet Union as the protector of the PRK, MF]. She judged almost all issues of international significance mainly from the viewpoint of the Indo-Soviet alliance. (Chakraborti 2009, 274—75)

Two observations are crucial in this regard: first, if the political micro-constellation of the PRK-DK confrontation of the 1980s must be read within a macro-perspective of the Soviet Union-China confrontation (see above and later in this chapter), then India’s decision to recognise the PRK was also enmeshed in a transnational and even global power game of hot and Cold War politics. After the Sino-Indian conflict and war in the early 1960s over Kashmir, which initiated India’s progressive alienation with China and parallel rapprochement towards Russia, another country came into the focus: Afghanistan. Second, India’s political involvements in Afghanistan and Cambodia allowed for the use of what can be called ‘cultural heritage as diplomatic gift’, since the team at the Archaeological Survey of India (hereafter ASI) was asked to become involved in preserving the national icons of both countries: Bamiyan and Ang­kor Wat respectively (Pl. XI.24a,b). In other words, global politics, which hovered between war-like confrontation, diplomatic recognition, and cultural rapprochement (compare Talmon 1998) were also triggered at the local level through the on-site practices of archaeology, architectural conservation, and the restoration of cultural heritage. Soviet forces entered Afghanistan in December 1979, and Indira Gandhi made her recognition of this move (after her success in the 1980 elections, India’s foreign minister Narasimha Rao abstained from the UN General Assembly vote on the invasion) a part of her “conciliatory attitude towards the Soviet Union” (Chakraborti 1985, 78–84). Additionally, the international press saw her recognition of the PRK as a puppet regime of the SU-backed Vietnamese neighbour as directly related to this mollifying stance. As the New York Times under the headline “India recognises Heng Samrin” had it on 13 July 1980: Having pleased the west by calling for the Soviet Union to quit Afghanistan, India did Moscow a favour last week by becoming the first non-communist country to recognise the Vietnamese-installed Cambodian regime. Such gestures may seem contradictory, the foreign interference of India condemned for keeping Babrak Karmal in power in Afghanistan props up Heng Samrin in Cambodia, but together they spell non-alignment in India’s dictionary. (New York Times, 13 July 1980)

More relevant in our case, Indira Gandhi’s previous state visit to Afghanistan as prime minister in 1969 had already included the initiation of a “joint Indo-Afghan project” to

restore the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan. This included a form of structural repair and “chemical cleaning” that would also be applied at Angkor more than ten years later when, due to the UN’s diplomatic shortfall – comparable to Cambodia and the case of Angkor in the late 1970s – ­UNESCO aid did not materialise. As Rakhaldas Sengupta, the director of conservation of the ASI between 1947 and 1984, remembered in an interview for Time South Asia in 2001, India’s cultural heritage interventions in Bamiyan/ Afghanistan, which began in 1969 (Sengupta 1975, 1984), were simply transferred to Angkor/Cambodia after 1979: When Indira Gandhi visited Bamiyan [as prime minister in 1969, MF] she decided to go ahead without UNESCO aid. So it became a joint Indo-Afghan project, and I ­[Sengupta, MF] went back there in 1969 with a fifteenmember team of Indian engineers, architects, chemists and moulders […] Our work in Bamiyan was appreciated all over the world, and that’s why we were later invited to Cambodia. (Sengupta led the Indian team that went to restore the Angkor Wat temple, but a heart attack forced him to withdraw [sic]). [italics MF] (Rahman 2001)

The close Indo-Khmer relationship between bilateral and non-aligned politics, a civilising or rather emergency mission, and ‘heritage/inheritance claims’ were suggested in the Indian parliament on 7 July 1980, when P. V. Narasimba Rao, the minister of external affairs of India, justified the recognition of the PRK with a reference to India’s cultural ties to Angkor: The temples of Angkor Vat [sic] are a valid testimony of the ­interaction between the cultures of our two centuries. ­Indeed, no other country in the Indochina Peninsula is linked to India as Kampuchea. It is a cherished relationship. The gentle people of that highly cultured country have unfortunately suffered very greatly for no fault of their own. Our hearts have gone out in sympathy to the people of Kampuchea, and India has done whatever it could to alleviate their suffering. We shall continue to do so. […] Our Government is committed to recognising the new Government in Kampuchea, a stand which is shared by an overwhelming majority of political opinion in India. Kampuchea, after all the terrible ordeals which it has had to face, needs all the possible assistance from the international community if it is to develop its economy, restore its internal infrastructure and re-establish its status as a sovereign, independent, non-aligned nation. In furtherance of these objectives, we propose to immediately establish diplomatic relations with the Government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea in Phnom Penh, headed by President Heng Samrin. [italics MF]58

58  Lok Sabha Debates, Sixth Series, Vol. 6, No. 21 (7 July 1980), 414–15; also quoted in Chakraborti 1985, 84.

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The combination of a historically justified and empathetically formulated heritage claim over Angkor Wat in relation to India’s diplomatic agenda for Kampuchea and its declared archaeological mission to save the famous temple site was made even more explicit in two Indian publications: first, the 1987 publication Angkor Wat and cultural ties with India by the initial project leader and archaeologist to set up the first comprehensive project report in 1982, K. M. Srivastava.59 The second was entitled Saving Angkor and was published in 1995 by C. M. Bhandari, the former Indian ambassador to the PRK. The first section in both books tried to establish the fact that the original twelfth-­ century temple of Angkor Wat in particular, and Khmer culture in general, were in large part the refined products of earlier Indian influences. Both second parts contained a detailed discussion of both planned and executed interventions by the ASI from the mid-1980s onwards. In the preface to his book, Srivastava brought India’s historical and present mission for Kampuchea and Angkor Wat to an overlap: Besides, being the preceptor of freedom in the entire universe and always conscious of the brotherly relations since ancient times, the Government of India has been observing with great concern, pain and agony the continuous onslaughts on Kampuchea and the untold sufferings to which the people there were subjected to by the barbarous regime of Pol Pot. In July 1980, as a sequel, India took a bold step by responding to the call of the hour and accorded recognition to the new Government under Heng Samrin, keeping in view the realities of the situation and affirmation of the desires to help in the establishment of peace, stability in the region. Despite of her own problems, India came forward to assist the new regime in every possible manner, in order to revive the age-old ties of close relationship. We stood as brothers since the first century of the Christian era, for a brother must stand to extend help in the hour of calamity. Besides assistance in all other fields, measures were also initiated by the Government of India to preserve the heritage of the country in the form of beautiful monuments, the temple of Angkor Wat being the centre of the greatest attraction. [italics MF] (Srivastava 1987, ix—x)

After a description of Cambodia as a geographical entity and of its general historical background, with constant reminders about “the great influence of Indian culture” since the first century AD (Srivastava 1987, 15, 19, 21), the fourth chapter, “Indian influence on ancient Kampuchea”, was a

rather curious ‘trans-cultural’ undertaking. It attempted to establish a new paternalistic undertone as the basis for India’s contemporary benevolent action – one that was different and yet somehow similar to the previous rhetoric used by the French who sought to frame their wish to save the very same temples as part of an applied mission civilisatrice for their colonial protectorate of Cambodge (Falser 2015a,c).60 In this case, fifteen pages alone were dedicated to defending the writings of the Indian historian and member of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society, R. C. Majumdar (1888–1980), which included Ancient Indian colonies in the Far East (1927), Greater India (1940), and Kambuja desa or an Ancient Indian colony in Cambodia (1944). According to Srivastava, the “supposed imperialism of the past” was a scholarly “misconception” of academia, as “the idea behind the term colony was [supposedly] simply cultural interaction and impact of the people of different countries on each other”, and “not the idea of exploitation” or “military conquest or annexation” (Srivastava 1987, 32–33, 40). Certainly, his comment on conquest and imperialism (contrary to the benevolent cultural exchange through India beyond its national borders) hinted at past British- and French-colonial endeavours in India and Indochina, and therefore stood, nolens volens, exactly within the argumentation line of the Greater India Movement itself (Bayly 2004). The chapter “The temple of Angkor Wat” was followed by “Apsaras at Angkor Wat in Indian context”, which added another, now physical/sculptural, element to the list of India’s cultural gifts to the Khmer. These (art) historical argumenta­ tions used to reformulate a long-standing claim and continuity were rather abruptly followed by the last four chapters of the book which comprised the “structural preservation” and “chemical conservation” of Angkor Wat and concluded with “recommendations” and a twenty-page appendix containing sections of the original project report of 1982 (Srivastava 1987, 82–136). A rather similar approach, containing sections about the historical links between India and Cambodia followed by discussions about India’s salvage mission to Angkor, was presented in C. M. Bhandari’s 1995 book: now, chapters like “The past: A golden era of ties with India” led to the final forty-page summary of India’s “[The] Quest: Saving Angkor” (Bhandari 1995, 105–144), with its introductory words about the “Indian response to the Cambodian international appeal”: This [appeal of 1980] came to the notice of the then In­ dian Prime Minister, the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi, in April 1980. Mrs. Gandhi had her first love with the Angkor mon-

59  However, the earlier 1985 book Cultural relations between India and Southeast Asian countries had already

re-established this topos from a general viewpoint (Sarkar 1985).

60  It should not be forgotten, however, that the Sanskrit expert and director of the EFEO until 1946, George

Coedès, also fostered the topos of “The indianised states of Southeast Asia” with his famous 1948 study bearing this very title (Coedès 1948, in English 1968).

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uments in 1954, accompanying her father and India’s Prime Minister, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. He was the first Head of Government to visit Cambodia to felicitate King Norodom Sihanouk after the declaration of independence from France on 9 November 1953. She naturally understood the urgency behind the appeal and responded positively. The Cambodian side, through Vietnam, conveyed their appreciation for India’s prompt response. [italics MF] (Bhandari 1995, 112)

terested in any type of collaboration. At long last, the circumstances compelled the other countries to withdraw themselves leaving the Government of India a free hand to enter into an agreement”. According to the author, the 1982 report “was kept as a secret”, and in April 1986 a new team around M. S. Nagaraja Rao (then ASI’s director general) visited Angkor Wat to update the old report (Srivastava 1987, ix–xiv). Bhandari qualified and quantified India’s brave salvaging mission in the years to come as follows:

Besides the rhetoric of Indian-Khmer connections, the concrete project of the ASI at Angkor Wat was far from simple, and it was not carried out smoothly. In October 1980, a small team under Rakhaldas Sengupta (director of conservation) visited Kampuchea for six days to make a rough estimate of the needed repairs. Later, three Cambodians received training on conservation, chemical treatments, and photography back in India, and a proposal was sent to UNESCO through T. N. Kaul, India’s permanent representative. However, this had no effect, since the United Nations refused to acknowledge the PRK. Nevertheless, a nine-member team of the ASI under the lead of archaeologist Srivastava (including three conservators, three chemists, and one each from the photographic and drawing sections) left India on 23 February 1982 for Cambodia and returned on 21 June of the same year (Srivastava 1987, 1–7). After a short stay in Hanoi (certainly for political reasons) meetings took place in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap with the ministers of culture and of planning, Chheng Phon and Chea Soth respectively, Director of Conservation Pen Yeth, and the Provincial Revolutionary Committee at Siem Reap. With the help of Pich Keo as “curator of the Angkor monuments”, in September 1983 the team delivered to the Cambodian government, through its embassy in New Delhi, the first “comprehensive project report” about India’s planned work at Angkor Wat. This included structural repair, consolidation work, and chemical cleaning (Mitra 1984). By the time a final agreement materialised in April 1986,61 several other agencies had already proposed a collaboration (for instance from Australia and France, see below), but India supposedly insisted on “play[ing] the dominating role. […] Always anxious to undertake the work, all alone at any cost, the Government of India was never in-

The reality is that the ASI moved in to save Angkor Wat at a time when no one else [was] prepared to do so due to political compulsions of the East-West cold war. […] the working conditions were extreme. But, for seven to eight months at a stretch for seven consecutive years from ­December 1986, the ASI experts spent all their energy in saving Angkor Wat, shoulder to shoulder with their Khmer brethren. […] The total mandays spent by the ASI experts at the site come to over 20,000 while those of the Cambodians to 400,000. [italics MF] (Bhandari 1995, 119)

International concern about India’s project spread globally. In the United States for example, the New York Times reported on “Restoring Angkor Wat, a vast, six-year job” on 31 January 1987 (Hazarika 1987). Shortly afterwards the Washington Post article “Restoration brightens Angkor Wat, but not without controversy” reported that “upset foreign archaeologists from Japan, France, Canada and the United States were turned down by the Heng Samrin government” and the “Indian archaeologists insisted on their natural role [as] India’s cultural influence dated back more than a thousand years” (Hiebert 1987). On 15 April 1988, India Today reported on “a monumental challenge” for the Indians at Angkor Wat (Panijar/Chengappa 1988). Supposedly “dubious guidelines for the restoration in use at Angkor Vat” with polyvinyl acetate (PVA) were criticised in the ICOMOS Newsletter of 1988 under the title “ICOMOS action to defend our heritage”.62 As a response, Ouk Chea, director of the PRK’s Department of Antiquities, had to defend what the New Scientist in a 1989 article entitled “The battle of Angkor Wat”: “Indian archaeologists are repairing the temple of Angkor Wat under armed guard. But the Khmer Rouge are not the only problem. Rival archaeolo­gists are at-

61  Bhandari published an exchange of letters from April 1986 about “the project for the restoration and

conservation of the Angkor Wat temples under [our] joint auspices” between Chheng Phon and Mrs. Sushila Rohtagi, Indian minister of state for education and culture (Bhandari 1995, 118). 62  “ICOMOS action to defend our heritage: Angkor Vat, Democratic Kampuchea. Following an alert from the Australia/Icomos Committee about the dubious guidelines for restoration in use at Angkor Vat, the chairman has requested the government of Democratic Kampuchea to report on completed work and future projects.” See ICOMOS Newsletter 4.1988, 41. Despite this critique that reports had never been circulated, a four-page typescript about the first years of the Indian work survives in the EFEO Archive in Paris, entitled “Archaeological Survey of India. Brief report on the structural conservation and chemical preservation works carried out at Angkor Vat from 1986–87 to 1990–91” (ASI undated). Similar wording was found in an internal report on ASI’s campaigns from 1986 to 1989 in the UNESCO Archives in Paris (CLT.CH.191, undated eleven-page typescript).

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tacking the Indians for ruining what’s left of Cambodia’s Cambodia (Kambujadesa)” – with an added historical disymbol […] Foreigners come, but they only want to work mension in brackets stemming from Majumdar’s 1944 at Angkor Wat. In our opinion, we gave it to the In­dians, publication describing Cambodia as “an ancient Indian and we don’t want a war over it” (Ciochon/James 1989, 57). colony” (sic); however, as the book was published only after In 1992, a little article in Purattava: Bulletin of the Indian Vietnamese troops had left the country after 1990, and CamArchaeological Society responded: “Restoration of Ang­kor bodia had already seen a political rebirth after the 1993 Vat (Cambodia): An Indian crusade” (Narasimhaiah 1992). elections which put Sihanouk back in power (see next chapOne year later in 1993 India Perspectives again summarised ter), the causality had be reformulated: now, Sihanouk and the Indian work of “Restoring Angkor Wat to its pristine not Heng Samrin was quoted as having launched the “appeal glory” which had been initiated by Indira Gandhi on the to the community of nations, seeking assistance for the resbasis of “her ‘love at first sight’ encounter with Ang­kor Wat toration of Cambodia’s greatest architectural treasure” to way back in 1954” (Bhandari 1993). which Indira Gandhi had supposedly answered favourably. However, the most comprehensive report, Angkor Vat: Added to the ASI’s culture-political campaigns in Afghanis­ India’s contribution in conservation 1986–1993 (Pl. XI.25), tan and Cambodia was now a mission to Angola (1986–90), was published in 1994 by Barkur Narasimhaiah, the leader which was likewise formed within a Soviet-backed game of of the last three campaigns of the ASI at Angkor between political recognition (Narasimhaiah 1994, v, vii; compare 1990 and 1993, after his predecessors K. P. Gupta (1986–88), Talmon 1998, 38–39, 303–304). As a matter of fact, both B. S. Nayal (1988–89) and C. L. Suri (1989–90).63 Achala missions to Cambodia and Angola marked the endpoint in Moulik’s (the director general of the ASI’s) foreword to the a series of similar interventions in the late 1970s and 1980s 1994 book made India’s own civilising mission within a re- when the ASI worked in Nepal (1979), Afghanistan (1969– vived notion of the Greater India Movement – which was 77), Bahrain (1984), the Maldives, Sri Lanka (1984), and not that far removed from the French-colonial self-appoint- Bhutan (1987–89) (compare Joshi 1997). ed ‘duty’ to restore Angkor for the Plus Grande France – In Narasimhaiah’s book on Angkor Wat, chapter II on abundantly clear. This time a great Indian poet was quoted: “principles and methods” aimed to dramatically question the former French civilising mission and inheritance claim Travelling on the “Magic Ship” in 1926, Rabindranath Ta­ over Angkor, and it openly critiqued previous efforts to gore saw the grandeur of the vast culture of southeast- conserve and restore Angkor Wat up to 1972. In fact, his methodological reference for the Cambodian construction ern and eastern Asia. At Borobudur, Bali, Java, Thailand site was a quote from the Conservation Manual of 1923 by and Cambodia, he was struck by the deep and enduring John Marshall, the colonial archaeologist, director-general affinity that these countries had with India. In mellifluous of the British-Indian ASI from 1902 to 1928, and therefore verse, Tagore captured in his poem “Sagarika” the rich the great antipode to the EFEO’s conservateurs at Angkor and vibrant past which bound these nations together in French-colonial Cambodge:64 “Although there are many […] Cambodia had emerged from colonial and civil wars ancient buildings whose state of disrepair suggests at first and wanted this temple complex to be restored since this monument is the national symbol of Cambodia. Re- sight a renewal, it should never be forgotten that their hissponding to this appeal, the then Prime Minister Smt. In- torical value is gone when their authenticity is destroyed, and that our first duty is not to renew them but to preserve dira Gandhi offered to send experts to assist in the effort them” (Marshall 1923, 10, §25). Narasimhaiah applied this to preserve Angkor Vat. […] the archaeologists who were to the actual project: “It is needless to say that this principle part of the team responded in the spirit of adventure as is even more relevant in the conservation work at Angkor they set about the stupendous task of restoring Angkor Vat to its pristine glory […] What will remain is the stand- Vat” (Narasimhaiah 1994, 12). What followed was a list of ing and eloquent testimony of the concern of the Gov- the supposedly severe errors in the French methodology enacted at Angkor Wat: “bench marks” hadn’t been made ernment of India and the care of the ASI to restore a to provide lasting references for all new reconstruction monument which is a great symbol of Cambodian culture work; “overambitious dismantling” had produced unfinas well as being a part of the larger heritage of India and ished archaeological sites with devastating effects; too the world. [italics MF] (Narasimhaiah 1994, viii, xii) many newly integrated elements obliterated the structures’ In this vein, the book was “dedicated to the ancient and “historical value and authenticity” altogether (compare everlasting cultural bonds between peoples of India and Marshall 1923); and, rather than using time-tested meth63  Taken up again in Bhandari’s 1995 book in the telling section on “Highlights of the ASI’s restoration

works at Angkor Wat” (Bhandari 1995, 120–41); Narasimhaiah’s book from 1994 was published in a slight modified, glossier version again in 2002. 64  This French antipathy against the archaeological and protective strategies of the British in India was formulated in the very first Bulletin of the EFEO with reference to “vandalist” restoration measures as Bodhgaya, compare Barth 1901 as discussed in chapter IX.

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Figures XI.22a—d  The 1994 publication Angkor Vat: India’s contribution in conservation 1986—1993 by Barkur Narasimhaiah (Source: Narasimhaiah 1994, plates LII, LXII, XXXIII, XXVII)

ods, “filling up the gaps and joints with fine clay and pointing with cement mortar […] proved to be disastrous to the monument”. Responding to the international critique actually formulated against ASI’s methods at Angkor, Narasimhaiah ended with the self-assured gesture of implanting the tradition of British ex-colonial conservation knowl284

edge from India into the archaeological centrepiece of the EFEO’s mission at (post)colonial Cambodge: Needless to emphasise that Marshall’s words have been extensively quoted above only with a view to make it clear that the Archaeological Survey of India, guided by

3. People’s Republic of Kampuchea

well-laid principles and time-tested methods, has executed conservation work with the dedication of a doctor to a patient, and also with involved feelings. These principles have become a tradition with the ASI, and traditions die hard. The Archaeological Survey of India has not given any place for experimentation in a magnificent monument like Angkor Vat (Narasimhaiah 1994, 11—16)

What followed after this critique of a long-standing (post) colonial rival – in fact, both the ASI and the EFEO continued their colonial knowledge systems of conservation and restoration far into the decolonising era – was a sixty-fivepage catalogue of all “structural conservation” (chapter three) and “chemical preservation” (chapter four) work. It was accompanied by an appendix of eighty photographic plates and twenty-two plans using a ‘before-and-after-restoration’ rhetoric similar to the French justification of EFEO interventions under Marchal and Glaize and up to B. P. Groslier and Malleret (see chapter our IX). In the conclusion, India’s work was described as an “undoubtedly herculean task at Angkor Wat [that] comprised twenty thousand specialised supervisory man-days by the Government of India and more than 400,000 man-days of labour by the Government of Cambodia”, as “nine thousand architectural members, approx. covering two thousand square metres had to be reset in their original positions, several hundred

pillars and architectural members were mended and strengthened in the process of structural conservation and more than 100,000 square metres of surface were chemically cleaned and preserved” (Narasimhaiah 1994, 82). “Structural conservation” work – including new infills with cement concrete (grouting and pointing), mending with epoxy resin, concealing with steel dowels, and adding new blocks in reinforced concrete (RCC) – tackled the following sections (in the order of the chapter’s list): the stepped embankment of the moat, the gateways and galleries of the fourth enclosure on the western side; the southern and northern libraries between the fourth, third and second enclosures; the esplanade; the entrance porches/pavilions and galleries of the third enclosure; the antechamber (cruciform gallery) between the second and third enclosures (Fig. XI.22a); the corners and entrances of the second enclosure; all five towers of the first enclosure (Fig. XI.22b); the railing between the third and fourth enclosure; and, finally, an expanded welded mesh of 1,400 square metres was attached under the open corbelled ceilings of the galleries to prevent the entry of bats and birds (Narasimhaiah 1994, 17–77). The largest and most visually effective undertaking of the Indian project at Angkor Wat – and at the same time the most effective propaganda for outdoing the prestigious French predecessors on the spot – was certainly the restoration of the southern gallery of the eastern side of the 285

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third enclosure. Better known as the famous Samudramanthana or ‘Churning of Milky Ocean’ gallery, it had been dismantled by B. P. Groslier before the EFEO was forced to leave the site in 1972/74 (see Figs. IX.86, 87) and left open as a giant construction site over more than fifteen years (Pl. XI.26a–c). Surprisingly, no mutual exchange of knowledge or data with the EFEO had taken place prior to ASI’s new intervention at this prominent place: “the [French] reason for taking such a drastic step of dismantling the whole gallery is not known, as the pre-conservation graphic and photographic documentation records are not readily available for reference” (Narasimhaiah 1994, 17–77) (Figs. XI.22c,d). In his 1992 article, the story was further dramatised:

1958, compare chapter IX), then the Indian author in 1994 concentrated on the French “reconstruction errors” which had considerably modified the original and therefore authentic appearance of the temple, and which were now in need of urgent correction by the ASI.65 This intervention was, of course, characterised as a pure success story: “The Samudramanthana gallery was reconstructed by using more than 1,412 architectural members including pillars, beams, roof stones, etc. The work had to be carried out very carefully as the members had decayed considerably due to weathering as they were lying on the ground in the open area for more than two decades” (Narasimhaiah 1994, 27). Another achievement in this line was the “consolidation and strengthening of all five towers” of the first enclosure However, more than 2,500 architectural members of these “by providing concealed steel rods” (Narasimhaiah 1994, three structures [the gallery and its flanking entry pavil- 76). When Bhandari published his article “Restoring Angkor Wat to its pristine glory” in India Perspectives in 1993 ions on the eastern side, MF] were lying on the ground under open sky. Due to this, they were weathering fast, (compare his 1995 publication Saving Angkor, Fig. XI.23), the Indian-French concurrence was made even more exand above all the Samudramanthana panel running to a plicit by evoking India’s supposedly more authentic, relilength of fifty metres was fully exposed to the vagaries of gious and cultural, as well as its political, heritage/inhernature since 1970 in which year the French experts who were supervising the work had to leave the country. Be- itance claim over Angkor Wat: fore taking up reconstruction work, some problems facing the work had to be solved. For example, we had to understand the system of numbering the dismantled members. Once they were understood the reconstruction was easy. [italics MF] (Narasimhaiah 1992, 111)

But in the 1994 version (the French had now become new partners at Angkor), the narrative was tamed: Fortunately, the architectural members had been stacked systematically in the open area in the east. […] the numbering of the architectural members was so excellent that there was no room for ambiguity. (Narasimhaiah 1994, 25—26)

In this context, a rather ironic twist in the rhetoric framing strategies to justify archaeological emergency action on the spot took place: If Marchal and later B. P. Groslier had identified “construction errors” by the original Khmer builders of the Angkorian temples in general and for the galleries of Angkor Wat in particular after their partial collapse in 1947 (Marchal 1922 and RCA 12.1947; Groslier

Only the Indian archaeologists who have deep knowledge of the cultural and religious sentiments enshrined in this largest Hindu temple of the world could handle Angkor Wat as a living entity, a revered shrine and soul of a proud Khmer people. This is [an] indirect contrast to the international media criticism, perhaps inspired by professional jealousy against India’s restoration work at Angkor Wat. […] It appears that when the French conservators proceeded to clear the vegetation at Angkor Wat in early parts of this century, the southern gallery (eastern wing in particular) was totally damaged; so much that most of the stone architectural members were reduced to pieces. […] to any visitor to Angkor Wat who is unaware of when this part of monument was reconstructed, it may be wrongly attributed to the ASI and blamed for atrociously excessive use of cement. […] It took two years of continuous work on the gallery [of the Churning of the Sea] to reassemble it along with the two adjoining gopuras (entrance porches and towers); this has been one of the most remarkable achievements of the ASI and to say that it has only done window-dressing is living in a

65  “Some errors had crept in”: The top levels of the plinths, reconstructed up to a certain height before hast-

ily leaving the site, were “not in perfect horizontal in line”, and the redressed pillars had to be adjusted accordingly. The French-made reinforced concrete foundations under the pillars made “the wall-like structure protruding nearly five centimetres above the original level” and this had to be cut back by the Indians. Next, the French-projected reinforced concrete ring-beam to be integrated into the ceiling structure not only necessitated a too destructive manipulation of the original stone material, but also had partly “slipped out of its alignment” and therefore had to be “chiselled out and re-laid after realigning the dislodged stones in their proper position”. Finally, five pillars and two beams of the gallery were found decayed beyond repair or missing, and were, together with some decorative elements, “[re-]cast in RCC and used in the work” to fit the original colour and texture. As a last point, the flooring of the gallery was wrongly made by the French and needed to be corrected (Narasimhaiah 1994, 25–28).

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In 2001, when interviewed about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, Sengupta also responded to the international critique of the ASI’s structural repair work at Ang­ kor, referring to the competing claims over Angkor between India and France: Question: There was severe criticism of the restoration work by the Indian archaeologists at Angkor Wat, wasn’t there? Sengupta: That’s because the French saw Cambodia and Angkor as their domain. So when the project was handed over to India, they didn’t like it at all. That’s why they went after the Indian team, and succeeded in ousting us from there. Question: The Indian restoration work at Angkor Wat is said to have wrecked part of the main temple because of the use of the cement rather than the original rock. Was that the case? Sengupta: Before the Indian team arrived, the French had themselves used cement. So the criticism doesn’t stand. Angkor Wat was built using stone blocks fixed with iron clamps. We were compelled to use cement because in the 1980s the quarries from which the original stand had come from were all under the control of the Khmer Rouge. So if you can’t get the original stone what do you do? You use cement concrete and fix it in place of the original stone blocks. It has the strength and it serves the purpose. The French did exactly the same thing with the pillars supporting a part of the roof of the main temple. Let me tell you something else: when we arrived there we found that an earlier French team had opened up the roof of the temple and had left stones lying around without proper markings. Our archaeologists were confronted with a jigsaw puzzle, but they succeeded in putting the roof together. [italics MF] (Rahman 2001)

Figure XI.23  Bhandhari’s 1995 publication Saving Angkor with India’s contribution to finish the reconstruction site left open by the French (Source: Bhandhari 1995, 121)

fool’s paradise. The Khmer leaders in fact dance with joy when they see this Gallery restored, as if the soul has been restored to the body. [italics MF] (Bhandari 1993, 227—34)

However, far more dubious than the new structural repair was certainly what Narasimhaiah summarised as ASI’s “chemical preservation” work (Narasimhaiah 1994, 78–81). Justification for this type of preservation work was given as “physical decay” (weathering, exfoliation, infiltrating water) and “chemical decay”. The latter concerned the “micro-vegetational growth of a variety of cryptogamus organisms such as moss, lichens, algae and fungi” which, “in combination with the various physico-chemical factors, were contributing to the deterioration of stone”. What Narasimhaiah termed a “very simple process of chemical cleaning and preservation”66 – he even proposed repeating the process “several times” over the coming years – easily counts

66  The “very simple process” was explained as following: “In the first instance, the surface was moistened

with water by spraying. Then the area was cleaned with 1 to 2 percent solution of liquid ammonia, used only to neutralise acids secreted by the hyphae of the micro vegetation, mixed with teepol, a non-ionic detergent, and by brushing gently with nylon brushes or tooth brushes or soft coir brushes, as the situation demanded. The surface was therefore cleaned thoroughly with water. The area thus cleansed was treated with 2 percent solution of polycidc, biocide and zinc silico fluoride separately. Finally, after complete drying of the area, it

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as one of the most impactful interventions in the modern conservation history of Angkor Wat (Pl. XI.27a–c): Almost the entire monument covering an area of nearly 200,000 square metres has been chemically cleaned and preserved. It is heartening to know that the chemical treatment on the surface of the stones has not only exposed the original colour and texture of the building material of the monument, but has also brought back the expressions on the faces of sculptured human and animal figures, which were not to be seen by any one and appreciate the supremacy of the Khmer sculptors over their proud art. [italics MF] (Narasimhaiah 1994, 81)

An aerial photograph (in fact the very first photograph of ASI’s 1994 publication) showed the inner sanctuary of Ang­ kor Wat rejuvenated to bright white sandstone surfaces; its decorated surfaces were brought (is the French term used only accidentally?) back to its “original grandeur” (Singh 1996, 86; emphasis MF) (Fig. XI.24): On the other end of the scale, ASI’s microscopic analyses of the stones as well as the dramatic chemical cleaning (“gently brushing with nylon brushes” included) represented – largely forgotten today behind an all-too-easy critique of the ASI – the climax of confidence in chemical treatment, which was already initiated by Marchal in the 1920s and brought to a ‘ready-to-use’ stage by B. P. Groslier between his internal report in 1958 and the in-depth inquiries into the stone aging and blackening processes of Angkor Wat in the late 1960s (Groslier 1958, Saurin 1954, Delvert 1963; see chapter IX). However, the critique about India’s chemical treat-

ment was commemorated from the international press to internal mission reports by acknowledged experts in the field of conservation and restoration. Philip Shenon, the New York Times correspondent at Bangkok, made the topic worth an impressively well-researched article for the New York Times Magazine with the title “Washing Buddha’s face” on 21 June 1992: Armed with hard brushes and buckets of a solution of ammonia and water, hundreds of unskilled Khmer labourers, working at the Indians’ direction, vigorously rub over the delicate stonework as if it were a dirty kitchen floor. Other Cambodian workers empty trowels of cement into cracks, large and small, in the ancient sandstone. Small knots of Khmer labourers use steel hoists to reassemble stone entryways that began to tumble down centuries ago. The Indian team’s restoration work, begun in 1986 and scheduled to go on for at least two years more, has sparked one of the angriest debates of modern art conservation. Depending on the expert asked the question, Angkor Wat is either being restored to a lost glory or is being irreversibly damaged. (Shenon 1992)

In 1993, the special advisor to the director general of ICCROM, Jukka Jokilehto visited the site, and his photographs indicate a similar catastrophe on-site (Pl. XI.28a,b).67 The less glorious denouement of the ASI’s engagement with Angkor Wat occurred after 1992 with the beginning of the international agreement to ‘emergency-salvage Angkor’ (Narasimhaiah 1994, 83–84): “Constraints encountered by the 1992–93 team were far too many and of serious nature”

was preserved by applying a coat of 2 percent of polymethyl methacrylate in toluene” (Narasimhaiah 1994, 81). The microscopic analysis was only published years after the cleaning had taken place, in a 1996 issue of the journal Conservation of cultural property in India. There, the “chemical conservation” sounded more aggressive and needed to be quoted in extenso: “1. Cleaning of dust, dirt and microvegetational growth: After the whole surface was dry dusted, the peepal tree and other bushes were removed mechanically. Efforts were made to uproot them. The remainder was destroyed with the tree killer solution, prepared by dissolving 20 mgs. of Sodium Hydroxide, 2 g. Casein, 66 g. Arsenic oxide in 100 cc. of hot water with an addition of 2 g. of Phenol on cooling. For breaking the grip of tenacious patches of lichens and to loosen the adhesion of the mosses, algae and fungi etc., 2 percent solution of Ammonia containing 1–2 percent. Non-ionic wetting/softening agents and water was used. 2. Fungicide/Polycide treatment: In order to eradicate and reduce the growth of the Cryptogamous variety of micro-organism, two spays, one each of fungicide and of polycide were applied on the dried surface, using 2 percent solution of Zinc Silico-fluoride in water and 2 percent solution of the polycide in water respectively. 3. Consolidation: Big and small cracks, bulges and fissures were water-tightened with liquid cement mortar, using the sand obtained by crushing the stone of the same colour, in order to fill them deep up to their tip. At some places, epoxy resin was also used according to need. The pulverised, friable and weathered surface of the bas-relief was consolidated by saturating the stone with 0.5 percent solution of Perspex in Toluene. Two coats of 2 percent solution of Poly-methyl-methacrylate in Toluene was then applied with the help of paintbrushes, in perpendicular direction to act as a protective coating on the entire surface. Result: As a result of the chemical treatment and preservation of the Angkor Vat, the whole of the monument regained its original grandeur and look. The original colour and texture of the stone and the beautiful carving ware exposed to the light” (Singh 1996, 83–86, compare Bhatia 1996 and an earlier summary in Narasimhaiah 1992, 113). 67  I would like to thank the team of ICCROM for their support during my archival research in 2016, including Stefano de Caro, Jukka Jokilehto, Joe King, Gamini Wijesuriya, Alison Heritage, Anna Stewart and, for the research library and archival material, Paul Arenson, Daniela Sauer and Maria Mata Caravaca.

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Figure XI.24  ASI’s 1994 publication about Angkor Wat to prove India’s rebirthing of Angkor Wat through an aerial photograph (Source: Narasimhaiah 1994, plate I)

since the male labourers stopped coming to the construction site and migrated instead to the World Monuments Fund, which offered a higher salary at its nearby construction site at Preah Khan; the International Labour Organisation, which was clearing the moat of Angkor Wat; and to the returning French EFEO team installed at the Elephant Terrace at Angkor Thom. An even greater demotivating factor at that time was the Khmer Rouge guerrilla, which attacked the previously French Conservation d’Angkor, now the base of the Indian team, on 9 February, 6 and 22 April, and 3 May 1993. Using rocket launchers and AK-47 rifles, they not only killed several people, they also broke into the

depot and stole a dozen sculptures. The Indian work at Ang­kor Wat ostensibly ended on 17 May 1993; however, ASI would – again after official visits by India’s political leadership in 2001 and a signed joint agreement in April 2002 in the presence of India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee – return to Angkor. This time, the ASI tackled the Ta Prohm temple site, which had been deliberately left in (aesthetically turned into) a ruined state since French-colonial times for the sake of its romantic, picturesque setting. Today it has slowly been turned into a sanitised and overrestored site through ASI’s interventions (compare ASI 2006, see chapter XII and epilogue II).

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3.2. Asian neighbours — Buddhist traditions? Japan’s interest in Angkor Between India’s official recognition of the PRK, which was mission of the French, nor in the ASI’s insistence on cultural (Hinduist) ties. Now the religious (Buddhist) tradilegitimised in Rao’s July 1980 statement about his country’s ties to Angkor, and the first concrete ASI mission to the tions of Angkor served as the underlying explanatory Cambodian temple site in October 1980, another Asian na- model to claim plausibility for the Japanese agenda. This tion was starting to stake a claim to the privilege of salvag- necessitated a reinvention of the Japanese connection to ing Angkor – Japan.68 Roughly forty years after its Second the spot; as Ishizawa had it: “In the seventeenth century, World War invasion into Southeast Asia (including Cam- the exterior commerce of Japan was in full prosperity and bodia; see chapter IX), Japan developed a new expansionist the Japanese cruised Southeast Asia, took notice of the exattitude that was motivated by its role as Asia’s leading istence of Angkor Wat, and even visited the temple.” Referpower after the miracle economic boom of the late 1970s. ring to “archaeological evidence”, the famous early sevenIn the context of Angkor, this trend became apparent in teenth-century Japanese map of Angkor Wat (see Pl. IX.1; the country’s ‘Third World’ engagement with the cultural compare Peri 1923, Mus 1962) served to rhetorically frame heritage industry (Akagawa 2015). The opinion leader for the intended preservationist project. He added that “fourJapan’s emerging interest in Angkor was undoubtedly the teen inscriptions by Japanese pilgrims to Angkor Wat in partly Paris-trained, Khmer-language-and-Angkor special- the first half of the seventeenth century had been discovist – and in 1991, the founder of the Asia Centre for the ered” earlier (Shimizu 1965), although these could not be Research and Human Development of Tokyo’s Sophia Uni- identified again (Ishizawa 1981, 10–11). In the conclusion versity – Yoshiaki Ishizawa. In his 1981 French contribu- titled “Angkor waits for help” [Angkor attends des secours], tion “Recherches sur Angkor Wat et la ruine qui le menace: Ishizawa mentioned that desperate help was needed at the Angkor attend des secours” in the Historical Science Reports recently re-opened, though badly equipped, Conservation of Kagoshima University, he reported that “the Heng Sam- des Monuments d’Angkor under Pich Keo, and he referred rin regime had asked [him] to come and effectuate a full to the broadcast of his reportage with Nippon Television enquiry about the situation of the Angkor temples” (Ishiza- Network on 23 October 1980 and 7 March 1981, which had wa 1981, 1). For two weeks, starting on 9 August 1980, and supposedly attracted 20 million Japanese viewers. Finally, after talks with Keo Chenda and Heng Samrin in Phnom he brought the regional and the global (Japanese) aspect of Penh, Ishizawa and a Japanese team of six journalists and Angkor’s salvage to the point: “This glorious heritage [was] reporters toured (under military protection) the “thirty not only the ‘crystallisation’ of the history of the Khmer most important sites” in Cambodia. As Ishizawa proudly people but also a treasure for the whole of humanity” and summarised, his team produced twenty-two hours of film “Japanese experts assisted to foster the mobilisation of all countries of the world to participate in a movement to and five hundred colour slide films, and finally presented a safeguard the precious and actually endangered monu140-page report The monuments of Angkor to the PRK and the Japanese government, and to international organisa- ments of Angkor” (Ishizawa 1981, 14). From a critical point tions and UNESCO in Paris. After an entry about the dev- of view, the making of such claims over Ang­kor in order to astation of the Battambang Museum, the chapter in the effect political and technical impact and interference ‘from report titled “Cemetery of Buddhist statues” painted a outside’ national borders can also be read as a clever rhecompletely exaggerated picture of Angkor in the rediscovery torical strategy deployed, in internationalist-humanitarian of thirty destroyed sculptures (described as a Khmer Rouge guise, to create a de facto gradual dispossession of Angkor “genocide of Buddhist statues”), the heavily overgrown and as a purely national cultural heritage asset. And this time, partly dilapidated site of Angkor Wat (Fig. XI.25a), and the classic reproach of a solely Occidental (most often Euthe military trenches at the Phnom Bakheng temple (Ishi­ ropean) power structure behind all emerging global heritzawa 1981, 4–9). Interestingly, the title of the fifth chapter age management politics (compare the discussion at the “Lumière et ombre sur le peuple Cambodgien” sounded, beginning of this chapter) was not employable. Attached to intentionally or not, like a reference to the French natural- the above-mentioned article was a reprint of an interview ist and supposed ‘discoverer of Angkor’, Henri Mouhot, given by Ishizawa to Radio Japan in February 1981. Titled who had used the same metaphor of “light and darkness” “One in a hundred million: The fascination of the Angkor in his 1863/64 report (Mouhot 1863, 1664; compare chapter ruins”, the text referred to him as “the first foreigner to surI) to describe the past glory of, present decadence at, and vey the Angkor ruins after the Cambodian War” and made future salvaging mission for Angkor. This time, the effort the nexus between historic Japanese pilgrims to Angkor to ‘save Angkor’ was not couched in the political (colonial) Wat in the jungle, the present-day heritage politics of a

68  It was also right at the political threshold in Cambodia between Khmer Rouge terror and Vietnamese

occupation that the Japanese Broadcast Company NHK produced its 1979 publication Country of mystery: Cambodia (NHK 1979, see above).

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Figure XI.25a  Ishizawa’s 1981 French article “Recherches sur Angkor Wat et la ruine qui le menace. Angkor attend des secours” with photographs of dilapidated porches and damaged Buddhist statues (Source: Ishizawa 1981, 22)

“Japanese-Cambodian relationship”, and the future internationalist rush to create “experts for Angkor”, “training of the locals”, and “foreign support and corporation” even more explicit (Ishizawa 1981, 19, 20). In his next contribution “Angkor Vat menacé de destruction: Recherches sur l’état actuel des ruines d’Angkor”, this time in the first volume of December 1983 in The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies (JSAS), Ishizawa declared himself “the first occidental [sic!] specialist to Angkor” after the

fall of the Khmer Rouge. He also published photographs about his Japanese team and overdramatised pictures of the supposedly precarious state of Angkor Wat (Figs. XI.25b,c). However, he also praised PRK efforts made on the site under Uong Von, who was responsible for the ninety-five workers of the Conservation, and Ouk Chea, the chef de bureau who coordinated fifty-two ruins. In contrast to parallel Polish efforts (see below) which sought to establish a conservation team within the socialist framework of CIDSE (Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité), his establishment of a Comité Japonais pour la Conservation des Monuments d’Angkor came from a rather cultural-essentialist perspective: “For us Japanese who are part of the same Asia, it is normal that we will offer help to them” (Ishizawa 1983, 71). A couple of years later, the ICOMOS Japan-sponsored International Symposium on the Preservation of the Angkor Complex took place on 20 April 1985 at the Institute of Asian Cultures in Tokyo. As the second session held after a similar event called “Borobudur, Sukothai and Pagan: International Symposium on the Study and Preservation of Historic Cities of Southeast Asia”, it was hosted by the institute’s founding director – Ishizawa. Ironically, the notion of preserving an ‘Angkor complex’ could be read again from two viewpoints: the misleading psychological ‘complex’ which elevated the cultural grandeur of Cambodia’s past, and the never-ending internationalist expert mission culture with its claim of salvaging the country’s cultural heritage, which culminated in a UNESCO-triggered ‘NGO-isation’ of Ang­kor after 1992 (see next chapter). In his introduction at the symposium, Ishizawa once again told the story of ancient Japanese pilgrimage to the “Buddhist sanctuary” of Angkor Wat and of the Khmer Rouge leaving entire “machine-gunned sections” on the bas-reliefs (quote: “I saw the site of the ‘massacre’ of cultural heritage”). However, he also introduced a more technical approach when referring to “the responsibility of the Japanese as Asian neighbours to extend assistance to protect these historical assets [sic]” (Ishizawa/Kono 1986, 126, 129; italics MF). In a French section of the proceedings, Ishizawa referred to “a most peaceful project”, called the Japanese government to acknowledge its important role in Asia’s heritage protection campaigns, defined a supposedly “disinterested cooperation” for Angkor in line with the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, and placed “Japan’s mission for culture” within a larger diplomatic, reciprocal framework: “At the same time [this cooperation] would be useful for a valorisation of Japan by the rest of the world” and would be “a good chance for the Japanese [themselves] to correct their classical conception vis-à-vis Asian people” (Ishizawa/Kono 1986, 132). As a consequence, the attached Sophia Appeal for the Safeguarding of the Angkor Complex from 20 April 1985 formed another element in the endless chain of ‘appeals’ combining the classical topoi of cultural decay, the rumour of imminent threat, and the logic of bringing instant help from outside in order to effect cultural recovery 291

XI  Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

Figures XI.25b—c  Ishizawa’s 1983 French article “Angkor Wat, endangered by destruction research about the actual condition of Angkor”, showing a gift exchange between the ­Japanese and the Cambodian team (above); his 1989 Japanese article with a partly collapsed section of Angkor Wat (below) (Source: Ishizawa 1983, 74; Ishizawa 1989a)

(compare Falser 2015c). As benevolent as Makaminan Makagiansar (assistant to UNESCO’s director general for the co-ordination of UNESCO activities in Asia and the Pacific, and later director of the UNESCO Regional Office 292

at Bangkok) may have sounded as he concluded the symposium, his words are a good example of UNESCO’s paternalistic, global mission for ‘development’ and ‘culture’ in the late 1980s:

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Japan, [is] a country which has a very great possibility to contribute more to the world, not only economically, but most of all Japan’s high culture can contribute to the development of the world. I pay my deep respect to your great country and to your great people. I wish and hope that we will continue to work together with Sophia University and its Institute of Asian Cultures and here pay my deep respects to Prof. Ishizawa and his colleagues. I express the desire and hope to contribute to work[ing] together in the spirit of brotherhood and most of all in the Asian spirit of humility and modesty and by profound love of all humanity. [italics MF] (Ishizawa/Kono 1986, 132)

However, the most critical contribution to the proceedings, entitled “Cultural heritage and the Japanese”, was by Yoshihara Tsuboi, then assistant professor at Hokkaido University and founding member of the “Historic Sites Study Group for the comparative and basic study regarding the restoration and preservation of historic monuments and sites in Southeast Asia”. In the wider context of a March 1983 interview with B. P. Groslier, the central figure in the previous French project and now a (supposedly) pessimistic observer of what was happening at Angkor,69 Tsuboi presented a well-formulated criticism of Japan’s grasp on the pan-Asian arena. He highlighted the striking parallel with the country’s recent aspirations for a Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which the Japanese brought to Cambodia and Angkor in the early 1940s (see chapter IX). Finally, he embedded his critique in the burgeoning trend of globalised heritage politics (Tsuboi 198670). Ishizawa’s exaggerated statements about Angkor continued far into the 1980s in a series of articles. On 9 August 1989, his article “Critical deterioration of the Angkor monuments in Cambodia” in the Yomiuri Shimbun (Fig. XI.25c) already men-

tioned the joint UNESCO mission in May of the same year (see chapter XII) and quoted Japan’s Foreign Policy Council “to emphasise the necessity of cooperation for the conservation of cultural assets, along with several concrete propositions” (compare Akagawa 2015): Where the work of preserving the cultural heritage of Asia is concerned, Japan has not played a role appropriate to her stature as an economic superpower. Keeping in mind this indifference of Japan with regard to the cultural assets of Asia, I propose to put into effect the propositions for resuscitating the collapsing Angkor monuments. (Ishizawa 1989a)

On 30 August 1989, the author Kazuhisa Ikawa quoted Ishizawa in his contribution “Ancient ruins fight for life in Cambodia” in the Asahi Shimbun Evening News: “As things now stand, I am afraid that the whole complex of the Angkor remains will collapse in five or six years. […] Whatever of Angkor’s cultural assets can be safe depends on aid from developed countries – particularly from France and Japan where ample human and technological resources are available”.71 In the same year published his own monograph on “Angkor Vat” (Ishizawa 1989b, see Pl.XII.3a). Additionally, Ishizawa initiated the quadrilingual (Japanese, French, English, Cambodian) journal Renaissance culturelle du Cambodge (Ishizawa et al. 1989ff). The list of contributions, mainly by Ishizawa, is a mix of on-site stories of deteriorated temples, dramatic appeals to the international community to set up an international team to save a disappearing Angkor, and reports about the difficult tasks and decisive actions undertaken by the Sophia University Ang­ kor Missions.72 Ishizawa’s contributions to the Journal of Sophia Asian Studies (JSAS) continued in the same manner,

69  As Tsuboi summarised his interview: “Civil war arose during his stay in Cambodia. Unfortunately, the

intensification of that war forced him to reluctantly submit to compulsory evacuation from Angkor and Cambodia. Throughout our meeting, his attitude was cynical, possibly because of the interception of his life’s work and its adverse effect on his health. Pointless displays of anger and obsessive concern for the Angkor complex, shown at times during our talk, gave me an indication of his deep dejection” (Tsuboi 1986, 151). 70  From a more abstract point of view, Tsuboi’s observations sounded like a checklist of critical heritage studies: in “criticism of existing approaches”, he voted for a critical review of Japan’s approach to Southeast Asia, as the country’s “Asia-African solidarity” slogans came along with a “biased view of those people as uncivilised and poor natives” and therefore with “a lack of respect for the people living in those regions”. His “criticism of ‘the theory of the Third World’” related to Japan’s sole understanding of “relief ” support as the sending of “relief funds and materials”, resulting “in the sender’s self-satisfaction”. His “criticism of ‘the theory of development assistance’” hinted at Japan’s “materialistic view of Southeast Asia” with a “political propaganda slogan of the ‘Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’” (compare chapter IX). Finally, Tsuboi’s criticism tackled an on-site “museum-mentality” towards cultural heritage without taking social dynamics into consideration. However, his final claim of “international cooperation” with “neutralised political matters” and his concept of a “cultural heritage of mankind open to everyone […] to prevent the aspect of cultural imperialism” fostered itself the dramatic globalisation of the cultural asset of Angkor, as Ishizawa had called it. 71  Translated from press cuts as they survived in the Press Reviews of UNESCO (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–92) 72  Volume 1 (1989) covers the different Japanese appeals for Angkor, a list of needed items for Angkor Park by PRK’s Ouk Chea, historic French legal texts for Angkor, and Pen Savann’s 1980 status report on art and

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and included titles such as “Angkor Vat en péril: Les dix Cambodia (see next chapter). Ishizawa’s 2012 book, Chaldernières années” (8:1990) or “The greatest treasure ruined lenging the mystery of the Angkor empire, published a sumbeyond imagination: Survey report on the Angkor monu- mary of the Japanese efforts at Ang­kor; however, its subtiments (1980–1993)” (1992). However, 1989 was also the tle Realising the mission of Sophia University in the Asian year when the influence of the returning French could no worlds partly contradicted his concluding reflection that longer be ignored by the Japanese: in May 1989, a joint “[t]he preservation and restoration of the monuments of mission with Claude Jacques, a French philologist and the Cambodia should be carried out by the Cambodians, for the Cambodians” (Ishizawa 2012, 126). At this point in EFEO’s Khmer epigraphist (see in the introduction to this book),73 formed one of the ­preparatory elements in setting time, Japan had already gained its position, along with up a quadripartite supervision of Angkor’s cultural herit- France, of directing the overall destiny of the cultural reage, with France, Japan and UNESCO coming ‘to rescue’ serve called Angkor Park.

3.3. Too many Friends of Angkor (Wat), or: A Socialist brotherhood with Poland Although it is rarely acknowledged in international publications about Angkor’s recent history, 1980 was a busy time in the international tussle for the cultural heritage of Angkor: the Indians arrived in July, the Japanese in August, and yet another party arrived in the same year. This time, it was not the cultural ties to South Asia, nor the religious bonds with East Asia that provided the rhetorical framework. Instead the changed political landscape of socialist brotherhood states around the world brought a new European interest group to the site – Poland. In the context of setting up a Polish-Vietnamese Mission for the Conservation of Monuments with a focus on the architecture of the Champa culture,74 a delegation from the Polish Ministry of Culture together with four conservators from the Polish State Ateliers for Conservation of Cultural Property (PKZ) visited Cambodia for ten days in December 1980 during the Vietnam-backed Heng Samrin establishment. The mission was led by the chemist-conservator and UNESCO-affiliated stone specialist Wieslaw Domaslowski from Torun University.75 Whereas the Polish reports never made any statement about their political agenda, the proudly declared Polish involvement in conservation projects in “Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Mongolia and Vietnam” made the PKZ [compare with the above-mentioned

global salvage politics of the Archaeological Survey of India (Joshi 1997)] a technical element in a wider socialist web of cultural heritage diplomacy (Polak 1991, 29). Interestingly, it was only the foreign (French and Japanese) statements that identified the framework of CIDSE (Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité) behind the Polish mission (Dagens 1985, Ishizawa 1986). After consultations with Keo Chanda, the Polish ambassador to Cambodia and Pen Yeth, the team delivered a report on the conditions and options for the conservation of Ang­ kor Wat, the Bayon, the metal arts in the Phnom Penh Museum, and the mural paintings inside the Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh (Domaslowski 1981, 1991). Like India’s initiatives in 1980, however, nothing happened for the next years at Angkor. Other diplomatic channels opened up only in 1984, when “the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs was informed by the Polish embassy in Hanoi” about the growing interest “in the creation of an international team of conservators for the salvage of the temples in the Angkor complex” (Polak 1991, 29). After another week-long visit by three specialists from Poland to Cambodia in February 1985, this time led by Tadeusz Polak (director of the PKZ) and with the intention of bypassing the UN-acknowledged restrictions regarding the PRK’s rule over

archaeology. Volume 2 (1990) has entries on the “second cultural mission of Japanese specialists”, “Call for imminent action for conservation”, “S.O.S. pour les monuments d’Angkor”, and “Déstruction de l’héritage culturel: ‘Exposition photographique sur Angkor Vat’ à Tokyo”. Volume 3 (1990) continues, above all, with “Tokyo appeal for the safeguarding of the Angkor monuments” and “Role of Japan on the reconstruction of Cambodia”; and volume 4 (1991) with “Deteriorated state of Angkor monuments” and “Crumbling Angkor monuments”. 73  The author would like to thank Mr. Jacques († 2018) for his valuable insights into this period during his participation in the Heidelberg Conference in 2011 and at several occasions at the EFEO in Paris. 74  Later, two reports titled Recherches sur les monuments du Champa. Rapport de la Mission Polono-Viet­ namienne 1981–82/1983–86 were published. 75  About the same time, he sent an internal report to UNESCO on the “Stone statues of the Easter Islands” and published volume 18 of UNESCO’s prestigious series musées et monuments on La conservation préventive de la pierre (Domaslowski 1982). However, Angkor was not yet included.

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Cambodia,76 an interesting meeting took place at the Pol- Gorin (director of the Heritage Conservation Institute at ish embassy in Hanoi on 1 March 1985: “Diplomats of Aus- Moscow) as a committee member. tralia, France, India as well as representatives of conservaHowever, the Polish Friends of Angkor Wat was foundtion authorities from Vietnam, Cambodia and Poland ed more than three months after the Paris-based Associa[met] to undertake steps leading to the creation of the in- tion des Amis d’Angkor (AAA, founded on 6 February 1988), ternational, non-governmental association in order to in- which had Yves Malécot as its founding chairman, Claude form a worldwide public opinion about the necessity of Jacques as secrétaire général and included representatives salvage of the Angkor’s monuments as well as to organise from the old institutional (colonial) institutions of the the international aid for the benefit of their revalorisation EFEO and the Musée Guimet (see also chapter XII). The and conservation” (Polak 1991, 30; compare Bhandari 1995, French agenda was described on 22 June 1988 in the Jour117). However, it was the Polish article by Polak, published nal officiel de la République française as “[to] make known in 1990, which gave greater insight into the highly compet- the Khmer civilisation and to contribute to the safeguard, itive ‘NGO-isation’ of Angkor that was initiated in the the restoration and the mise en valeur of the monumental name of “Friends of Angkor” (Polak 1990). As a starting heritage [patrimoine monumental], namely the site of Ang­ point, Polak mentioned the so-called Committee 100 for kor”.78 It is interesting to note that more or less the same the cultural heritage of Southeast Asia, which was founded wording was used for the Polish project from 1985 to 1990 in the United States in 1971 by its chairman Gordon B. (PKZ 1991). Cambodian conservators were invited to the Washburn, then director of New York’s Asia Gallery House. Polish State Conservatory, and the campaigns at Phnom With a sub-committee for Cambodia under the direction Penh’s Silver Pagoda started in 1985 with a five-year agreement between Cambodia and Poland. More symbolic, pubof Richard Melville, the Asia Society published its journal in 1971 as Angkor: Saving the ruins. Another American in- lic relations rather than in-depth work was initiated at the itiative was the NGO “Friends of Angkor Wat”, which was Bayon and Angkor Wat temples, including small-scale exfounded by the emigrant Cambodian journalist Kim E. cavation and stabilisation work, and petroglyphic tests. Chantarit.77 Back in Warsaw, Polak met representatives of The Polish documentary Angkor Wat: History in stone (Polthe Australian, Indian, French and Swedish embassies in Tel 1986, direction Hanna Kramarczuk) was followed by August 1985. Half a year later, on 24–25 February 1986, a the Austrian film Die Götter von Angkor können wieder “consultative meeting” took place with participants from lächeln (Goess VideoFilm, Vienna 1987). Poland did report Australia (Mr. Colin D. Mackenzie and Max Burke), India back to UNESCO in 1988 about its work on-site from (Mr. N. S. Sarna), Vietnam (Mr. Le Ngoc Son and Hoang “1982 to 1988”79 and was included in the first Cambodian Dao Kinh), the PRK (Ouk Chea), and Poland (Tadeuz Po- conferences and roundtables of international experts in lak) (Figs. XI.26a,b); France did not turn up (though the 1990 (see below). In a 2013 publication Poland for World article claimed they did), and the foundation of the War- Heritage, by the National Heritage Board of Poland, the saw-based NGO Friends of Angkor Wat (with the US con- chapter “Polish contribution to saving World Cultural Hernection included) had to be postponed to the next meeting, itage in the Far East” used Angkor as a case study (Lim which was planned for 6 June 1988. In the meantime, the 2013, 114–27). Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 headline “Polish team seeks to save Angkor Wat” had al- and the end of Poland’s purely socialist endeavour, this ready appeared in the International Herald Tribune on 27 publication helped to construct an imaginaire of Poland’s March 1986 (Reuters 1986). Polak was subsequently elect- salutary missions around the globe in the name of cultural ed chairman, with Chantarit as vice chairman and Ivan heritage.

76  Polak identified the active players in this game: “Minister of Culture and Information Chheng Phon [he

would in 1989 reopen Phnom Penh’s University of Fine Arts, MF], Vice Minister Chey Sophes, and Ouk Chea (director of the Department of Antiquities)” (Polak 1990, 219). 77  An article in the New York Times from 10 November 1991 on the former US ambassador in Phnom Penh (“An Asian hand returns; His flag stays at home”, by Barbara Crossette), described Chantarit as “an anti-Communist former journalist who now lived in Arlington, Virginia, head[ing] an organisation trying to promote the protection and restoration of the Khmer temples at Angkor”. Polak situated him in neighbouring Silver Spring, Maryland. 78  See the webpage of the Association des Amis d’Angkor (AAA), http://www.amisdangkor.fr/1/publications_l_ ami_d_angkor_876894.html (accessed 8 July 2016). 79  J. Zablocki, Délégation permanente de la Pologne auprès de l’UNESCO, to Y. Isar, Cultural Heritage Division UNESCO on 6 October 1988 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

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Figures XI.26a,b The Friends of Angkor Association during their meeting on February 1986 in Warsaw; with Colin D. Mackenzie and Max Burke (Australia), N. S. Sarna (India), Le Ngoc Son and Hoang Dao Kinh (Vietnam), Tadeuz Polak (Poland) and Ouk Chea (Cambodia) (Source: PKZ 1991, 30, 31)

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3.4. France: Re-claiming its position between “russification” and internationalisation With France’s diplomatic non-acknowledgement of the PRK, all official enquiries from the former colonial power in Indochina for project collaborations were turned down.80 As a consequence, French scholars had a difficult time returning to Angkor and thus had to search for other, nonher­itage-related channels. One of the first direct EFEO-related activities was the return of Christiane Rageau, the EFEO’s librarian, through a bilateral 1983 project that was mediated through the Fonds pour l’Édition des manuscrits du Cambodge (Clèmentin-Ohja/Manguin 2007, 61). Between 13 April and 2 May 1985, Bruno Dagens81 of the EFEO returned to Cambodia and produced a report from the viewpoint of a previous member of the Conservation d’Angkor who had left the site more than ten years ago.82 Over forty typescript pages, his Rapport de mission au Cambodge (signed Pondicherry/India, May 1985) remains a precious source in understanding the dramatically changing heritage claims over Angkor. The Indian, Japanese, and Polish teams justified their interests in the Angkor project through supposedly cultural ties, religious traditions, and political solidarity. The newly introduced framework of ‘international help’ ushered them all into the previously French-dominated cultural heritage sector. The French, on the other hand, faced a more precarious situation in which they had to relinquish their quasi-monopolistic grasp over Angkor, including the institutional, technical, as well as linguistically and epistemologically framed heritage regimes that were attached to it. Extended passages of Dagens’ 1985 report are useful to better understand the semantic continuities (persistence) and shifts (adaption) in the French self-positioning from a mission civilisatrice to the patrimoine culturel of Angkor:

timely manner by the Anglophones. There is evidently the political problem of non-recognition, but it is quite evident that the Cambodians do not see that as their problem, and they are accustomed to receiving help from various different sources for many years. […] What to do? […] Foreign languages will become, above all, technical languages. In those conditions, it seems opportune to seriously maintain the traditional technical Francophonie for archaeology in order to avoid that in some years from now certain decisions by certain powerful personalities cannot switch the whole service into another linguistic regime [aire linguistique]. […] Finally, what comes out of my voyage is somehow reassuring. The situation of the monuments and the museums I have seen is far less catastrophic than one may have thought and there is far less irreparable damage than announced. […] there is an almost pathetic call for the French competence, even if it is not totally deprived from a hidden political agenda. From the French side, this gives us the possibility to respond to this call; however, [by] staying modest in this general situation and tackling the most urgent problems first. However, this will enable us to prepare and pave the way to the future to conserve intact the fruit of those long investments for which we earn gratefulness. From the scientific viewpoint, finally, for the EFEO it is another occasion to regain a foothold in those regions where its prestige seems to have stayed intact even after such a long absence. [italics MF] (Dagens 1985, 20—22, 25)

After his meeting with the minister of education and culture, Chheng Phon, and the vice minister responsible for monuments conservation, Chey Sophéar, Dagens spent the From a certain viewpoint the position for France is of a last week of April 1985 in Siem Reap and Angkor: he found remarkable simplicity: she is the only possible interlocu- Angkor Park heavily militarised and a war-like fortified zone on the city’s peripheries in the area of Roluos located tor to count on, as Angkor had always been a French and to the southeast, which was in the hands of the Khmer Francophone affair. France and the EFEO have always Rouge during the night. The Conservation d’Angkor with its cared for Angkor in the name of Cambodia, even after eighty workers was in a devastated condition and in the 1970, and there is no reason why this should change. […] I have heard a customs officer at the airport saying: “You “helpless” hands (as Dagens formulated it) of the EFEO’s old draughtsman, Oum Vong. However – and this stood in come back to take care of Angkor again.” […] And simply stark contrast to Ishizawa’s dramatic reports – Dagens realistically, one may add that just by the fact that the found “relatively little damage” in Angkor Park, despite the enormous published or unpublished documentation is in fact that Angkor Wat’s Gallery of the Thousand Buddhas French, I cannot see how it could be used in a serious and

80  As Bhandari mentioned in his book, French interest in returning was even turned down after a visit by the former French foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, in November 1984 during his stay to oversee the French NGO activities of SOS Infants Cambodge (Bhandari 1995, 116). 81  The author would like to thank Mr. Dagens for his precious insights into his engagement with Angkor, which were provided during several interviews in Paris from 2010 onwards. 82  As he mentioned, three other French missions had been made before him, by the director of the EFEO, François Gros, Christiane Rageau and Pierre Pichard.

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Figure XI.27a  The Paris-based Association des Amis d’Angkor with their letterhead in ­correspondence with the ­director general of UNESCO, Frederico Mayor, in October 1989 (Source: © UNESCO ­Archive, Paris)

had been pillaged. In his report’s attachment “The conditions of the visited monuments of Angkor” (Dagens 1985, 32–34), Dagens did not miss the opportunity to criticise the restoration work of the ASI. According to him, the greatest damage to Angkor Park was the heavy deforestation around the temples. In addition to his confidence that the French formed the only competent force for the future care of the cultural heritage of Angkor (see the above-quoted passages), one of his greatest fears was the supposed “russification” of the institutional setup, the applied technology, technical language, and archaeological expertise at Angkor after the return of Pich Keo, who had left in 1983 for a training mission to St. Petersburg/Russia and Hanoi (Dagens 1985, 22).83 Indeed, his concerns about the approaching ideological (socialist) influence were not farfetched: during his interview with Dagens on 14 April 1985, Chheng Phon reconfirmed his preference for help from Russia, the GDR, and India, and his intention to subordinate any international help for Angkor (including help

from Australia, Vietnam and France) under Polish leadership (Dagens 1985, 36–38). The years 1988 and 1989 up to the early 1990s saw more French missions return to Angkor, but they were already part of UNESCO’s agenda (see next chapter). However, within our transcultural analysis of the heritage construction of Angkor, French initiatives for Angkor were ‘back­-translated’, once more, to Paris. The exhibition Angkor: Un patrimoine mondial à protéger (Pl. XI.29), which took place in the orangery of the Hôtel de Sully between 26 September and 29 October 1989, may be seen as a final element in the French programmes for Angkor during the 1980s. It was initiated by Albert le Bonheur, conservateur at the Musée Guimet and professor at the École du Louvre in Paris, and co-financed by UNESCO, the Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, the Banque Indo-Suez and, last but not least, the Association des Amis d’Angkor (Fig. XI.27a). Its public relations aim to foster French interests in Angkor was obvious.84 The accompa-

83  The author would like to thank Pich Keo for an interview granted in Phnom Penh on 6 March 2010: he

summarised that he came back to Phnom Penh in 1986 and acted as personal guide to Angkor for personalities such as the Thai princess, the visiting French president Mitterrand, and Sihanouk. His career at APSARA was curtailed by Vann Molyvann. He remained director of Phnom Penh’s National Museum between 1991 and 1996, and later he was attached to the Ministry of Culture as adjunct to the director general for technical advice. 84  According to the Communiqué de Presse of the Caisse nationale from 15 September 1989, the exposition’s goal was to “bring back to the memory of the public the importance and beauty” of the Angkor site and “to initiate a movement of opinion for the international safeguarding of this inestimable patrimony”. However, the French undertone was hard to miss: “The French have always played the leading role in the discovery and

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Figure XI.27b  Le Bonheur’s 1989 book Cambodge  Angkor. Temples en péril with an illustration demonstrating India’s rough treatment to clear Angkor Wat with steel brushes (Source: Le Bonheur 1989, Fig. 82)

nying book Cambodge: Angkor. Temples en péril (printed in Japan) gave an overview of the history of Angkor and its cultural treasures, and it ended with the section “Le Cambodge et la France”. In its final remark on “Les temples khmers en péril”, the critique of the Indian team at Angkor Wat was even illustrated (Fig. XI.27b) and the no-

tion that the French must play an important role in the near future was repeated (Le Bonheur 1989, 263). Following Angkor’s hasty nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List in November 1992, a new series of French expert missions were initiated in the early 1990s (see next chapter).

3.5. Cambodian refugees: The forgotten voices of the (trans)cultural memory of Angkor Thousands of Cambodians left their country during the war in Vietnam (the campaign of US bombing had a devastating effect on Cambodian territory), the outbreak of civil war in Cambodia after 1970, the Khmer Rouge genocidal atrocities between 1975 and 1979, and the Vietnamese occupation, which lasted until 1989. Similar to those who fled over the sea to Vietnam’s neighbouring countries and would become known as the boat people, the vast ma-

jority of Cambodians fled to refugee camps along the northwestern Thai-Cambodian border (Fig. XI.28). Cambodians with better financial options left the country for Europe, with France and the North American continent as their preferred destinations. With the influx of Cambodians into those countries, several refugee programmes were debated and occasionally initiated.85 The topics of the Cambodian refugee diaspora, trauma and resilience, and strat-

mise en valeur of the temples of Angkor and it is desirable that in the near future the interrupted mission will be taken on again”. Three presentations were held during the event: by Guy Nafilyan, the architect publishing the first comprehensive set of drawings for Angkor in 1969 (Nafilyan 1969); by Claude Jacques, the secretary general of the AAA; and finally, by René Dumont, previously professor at the Phnom Penh faculty of archaeology and architecture, and co-director of the Conservation d’Angkor. 85  The literature on the topic is vast, and only selected studies are mentioned here. For France see Ponchard 1978, Bonvin/Ponchard 1981, Condominas 1982, Mignot 1984, Py/Simon-Barouh 2001; for Canada see Nann 1984; for the USA see Chan 2004.

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Figure XI.28  Refugees in camps along the Thai-Cambodian border (Source: Condominas 1982, 49)

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egies of cultural survival were treated in various forms of Western scientific research publications, ranging from PhD theses to whole conference volumes (Ebihara/Mortland/ Ledgerwood 1994; Py/Simon-Barouh 2001; Chau/Winter 2006).86 However, little is known and little was published about the specific role played by Angkor (Wat) as a cultural reference point for Cambodian refugee communities abroad. In reference to Gayatri Spivak’s famous 1988 essay “Can the subaltern speak?”, our case may serve as a good example: with non-Cambodian and official interest groups from India, Vietnam, Poland, Japan and France circling the prestigious temple site of Angkor (see above), the exiled voices of the ‘real’, but often powerless, stakeholders of cultural heritage and of living cultural memory about Angkor (compare Phay-Vakelis 2010) were often excluded from the internationalist and globally run (not to mention self-congratulatory) historiography of the so-called experts. However, the Cambodian diaspora, its trauma, strategies of cultural survival and memory, as well as the solidarity initiatives created by and for Cambodian refugees around the world add yet another important element to the transcultural history of the heritage of Angkor. A few samples of the various Cambodian voices and (French) Cambodian initiatives published (often privately) in edited and circulated newsletters and journals were collected during this research.87 With no claim to completeness, nor to correct chronological order (only the retrieved issues are indicated here), print run and duration, cultural affiliation or ideological orientation, those created in France and the United States include the following, among others: • Conscience, edited by Nhep Voleak and Ros Serey, Secretary Heng Chea, Ellicott City, MD 21043/USA 1976 • Association pour la préservation de la culture Khmère, edited by Keng Vannsak, Montmerncy 1976 • Moul Khmer: Mouvement pour le soutien de la liberté khmère, edited by Lim Kim Ya, Paris 1980 • Avenir Cambodge, edited by the Centre Cambodgien, Paris 1983 • Cambodia Today, published by Save Cambodia, Philadelphia 1983 • Association Amitié Franco-Khmère, edited by Guy Evin, Paris 1984 • La voix du peuple Khmer, edited by the Bureau d’Information des Nationalistes Khmers, Strasbourg 1984–86 • Khmer Conscience, edited by Kuon Ea (Noisiel/France), Vora Huy Kanthoul (Long Beach, CA), Tong Mour Ley (Oakland, CA) and Hann So (San Diego, CA), San Jose/ USA 1987–89

• Le salut Khmer. Défense et illustration des valeurs d’un peuple, edited by the Amicale pour la Sauvegarde de la civilisation Khmère, Vincennes 1990 • Résistance Khmère, Paris 1985–91 • Renaissance Khmère, edited by Nghet Chhopininto, Paris 1992 In most of these newsletters and journals across orders and borders, the cultural reference point of Angkor (Wat) was a constant and uniting element, both visually and literally. One of the earliest and most striking statements was circulated in the American newsletter Conscience, in its September 1976 (vol. 1, no. 6) issue where a “motion of the Cambodian refugees and residents in the USA and Canada” brought to light the role of cultural heritage in relation to the ongoing Khmer Rouge genocide: Considering that aside from the loss of human lives, everything which relates closely or remotely to the civilisation of the Khmer people, to its culture and to its history — arts, literature, worship, schools, monasteries, national archives, morals, traditional customs etc. — has been ridiculed or destroyed so that the two-thousandyear-old Khmer cultural heritage is in danger of extinction. (Conscience, vol. 1/no. 6, September 1976

Thus, an appeal to the United Nations and “all government and religious leaders in the world” was formulated. The cover page of this issue visualised the above-quoted words with a bloody Khmer Rouge hand reaching out from above to eradicate Angkor Wat (depicted with its iconised vista towards the central enclosure) from Cambodia’s national soil, which was represented with the outline of the national map (Fig. XI.29a). The French newsletter Avenir Cambodge, edited by the Cambodian Centre in Paris, made Angkor Wat its cover symbol (Fig. XI.29b), and within its February 1983 dossier “Sauver le Cambodge, les réfugiés Cambodgiens, les temples d’Angkor” the Cambodian author Nut Suppya remarked in French in his statement on “Angkor and the misery in the refugee camps”: Angkor is the symbol of the Khmer identity and finds its echo in the subconsciousness of all Khmer people, and art is only the collective manifestation of a people talking to itself. As an eternal symbol, Angkor remains alive in the spirit of the Khmer like the testimony of a refugee who was once a teacher; those piles of ruins in the middle of the jungle — this is my soil, my religion, this is Cambodia. […] All people must have this reference to its cul-

86  Many thanks to the Centre of Khmer Studies in Siem Reap with Krisna Uk (director in 2011), which was willing to share its database on the topic, including a whole series of US-American PhD theses on the topic. 87  Interestingly, even the Bulletin d’Information 17/1981 (5 October 1981) of the Khmer Rouge delegation to UNESCO published a long list of provincial French-Khmer associations, such as L’Amicale des Cambodgiens de Dijon or L’Association des Amis de la Civilisation Khmère de Strasbourg.

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Figure XI.29a  Cover page of the US-Cambodian newsletter Conscience, September 1976, as it survived in the archive of the Center of Khmer Studies in Siem Reap/Cambodia (Source: Conscience, vol. 1, no. 6 (September 1976), cover)

tural heritage in order to exist in relationship to others, and Angkor represents our Khmer identity. Without a proper cultural identity, a whole people risks disappearing or being absorbed by others. […] The dramatic situation of the refugees and the pillage of Angkor represent those two most important problems for Cambodia, all the more as they are interconnected one to the other. [italics MF] (Avenir Cambodge 4.1983, 6)

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A similar line was followed by La voix du Peuple Khmer, edited by the Bureau de l’Information des Nationalistes Khmers in Strasbourg, when a photograph of Angkor Wat was featured on the cover of its February–March 1984 issue (Fig. XI.29c). For the logo of Résistance Khmère, edited in Paris between 1985 and 1991, the silhouette of Angkor Wat, placed within the territorial outlines of Cambodia, ­accompanied a Khmer archer with his weapon directed

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Figures XI.29b,c  Covers of newsletters of refugee communities and political/cultural voices between 1983 and 1984, such as Avenir Cambodge and La voix du peuple Khmer (Source: Avenir Cambodge, 4 (February 1983), cover; La voix du Peuple Khmer, 3 (February—March 1994), cover)

Figures XI.29d,e  Letterheads of the refugee newsletters Résistance Khmère and Renaissance khmère (Source: Résistance khmère, 1 (February 1985), cover (detail); Renaissance khmère, 1 (April 1992), cover (detail))

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against the occupying country of Vietnam (Fig. XI.29d). When foreign aggression ended, the journal was reborn in 1992 as Renaissance Khmère (compare the name with Ishi­ zawa’s above-quoted series Renaissance culturelle du Cambodge from 1989 onwards), and the central towers of Angkor Wat were now part of a peaceful landscape to be

fruitfully seeded by traditional and contemporary stakeholders (Fig. XI.29e). Save Cambodia featured a dancing Apsara in its June 1983 issue (Pl. XI.30, compare Figs. X.42–50). Coping with the trauma of the Cambodian genocide stays a vital topic in Khmer society until today, also through artistic strategies (e.g., in Phay-Vakalis 2010).

4. Claiming heritage without territory: The exiled Khmer Rouge regime and its political strategy for Angkor at UNESCO in Paris during the 1980s If in the modern history of Cambodia, the temples of Angkor were constantly (ab)used for identity constructions by the actual ruling powers, then the years between 1979 and 1989 represent a unique case study.88 While the Cambodian territory itself was occupied by the Vietnamese Heng Samrin regime, the resistance movement around the Khmer Rouge was driven out of the country but recognised by the United Nations as the legal Khmer government under the name of Democratic Kampuchea. As a clever political strategy and in coalition with former King Norodom Sihanouk, its political leaders around Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary appropriated the Western discourse on national cultural heritage: with its Permanent UNESCO Delegation in Paris, the ‘safeguarding of Angkor’ rhetoric was promoted as an inseparable part of the diplomatic struggle of the former Khmer Rouge towards national independence and their return to their native territory. The whole of the correspondence, which has never been consulted for in-depth research surrounding this multi-layered diplomatic warfare over Cambodia, is stored in UNESCO’s archive in Paris. This cache of documents forms a precious addition to the transcultural formation of Angkor-as-heritage, and it will be discussed in this analysis for the first time.89 The Heng Samrin regime in Phnom Penh contacted the director general of UNESCO (1974–87), Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, to denounce the officially acknowledged DK regime for its pre­vious genocidal agenda and to declare its incomprehension to the official DK delegation to UNESCO (Fig. XI.30).90 The outcome was both tragic and ironic: beyond all the above-mentioned efforts of nations such as India, Poland, Japan and France, the claim of the Khmer Rouge/ Democratic Kampuchea regime over the ‘Angkor-as-heritage discourse’ in the 1980s was the most effective, as it successfully instrumentalised and even mimicked UNESCO’s own rhetoric of ‘cultural heritage of/for humanity’. An evaluation of the following analysis can only lead to the sur-

prising conclusion that it was the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in exile – and not Norodom Sihanouk as official historiography has it to this day! – which, during the “endgame in the ideological Cold War” (Slocomb 2003, X), finally prepared the path towards Angkor’s instant nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992 once the political situation had stabilised. The Khmer Rouge, which was still officially called Democratic Kampuchea (DK) after their defeat by the invading Vietnamese in 1979, was almost completely driven out of the country. It was not only successful in establishing resistance bases along the Thai border in Cambodia’s northwestern provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap, and Oddar Meanchey but also in recruiting guerrilla fighters in the numerous Khmer refugee camps on Thai territory (see Fig. XI.28). Although the former leader Pol Pot was still powerful, Khieu Samphan served as both prime and foreign minister in public; China, DK’s powerful old ally, backed the regime. In waging their unpredictable guerrilla war, the former Khmer Rouge remained a constant threat to the Heng Sam­rin government in Phnom Penh and regularly attacked the city of Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor before it finally lost its credibility as an irascible and militaristic partner in the royal-republican-communist pact against the PRK. However, besides the PRK and the DK regime, there was a third important player on a global scale – the United Nations (UN). With the diplomatic support of the United States, China (against the will of the USSR), as well as the European Community (EC), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states, the United Nations officially recognised the Khmer Rouge as the legal representatives of Cambodia (compare Pl. XI.2). As the recognised representatives of a country whose territory was occupied by the Vietnamese-backed enemy, the exiled DK government underwent a considerable change of strategy in their own claim to the cultural herit-

88  Elements of this following section have already been published in Falser 2015b. 89  Most of the sources cited in this analysis refer to the UNESCO Archive in Paris at the Miollis/Bonvin site.

I am grateful to the archive staff for their patience and assistance while I conducted research there.

90  The whole correspondence about the accreditation of DK’s commission for UNESCO with Ok Sakun can

be found in UNESCO Archives Paris, BRX.APA.1 (1970–1984).

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Figure XI.30  Telefax exchange between the new Phnom Penh regime and the UNESCO Director General Amadou Mahtar M’Bow in Paris, ­dated December 1979 (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

age of Angkor between 1975–79, when it was in power/on territory (but internationally mistrusted), and 1979–89, when it was out of power and territory (but internationally recognised). As has been mentioned above, Angkor before 1979 was (a) officially downgraded (provincialised) in or-

der to frame the new Khmer Rouge ideology as a human achievement more important than the famous temple site; (b) incorporated as part of the narrative of an ancient hydraulic empire into the new utopian setup; and (c) abused as a site for cultural diplomacy. Shortly after the Viet305

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nam-based Heng Samrin government took over Phnom Penh and forced the Khmer Rouge to the northwestern borderland between Thailand and Cambodia, the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations – with the USSR’s veto but with the support of the ASEAN countries – condemned the invasion and demanded the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces from Cambodia in repeated resolutions. The “New Khmer Rouge” were now obliged to fight their war in two directions: first, they fought their battle inside Cambodia (which also touched the territory of Siem Reap/Angkor) in the form of a guerrilla strategy and a constant ideological infiltration into the rural villages. Second, they acted on the diplomatic field outside of Cambodia (Peschoux 1992, 14) – and here we focus on the relationship to UNESCO in Paris – in the form of a newly invented political mission for the protection of Cambodian cultural heritage, by using the humanitarian rhetoric of and for a global family of civilised nations. Once again in its modern history, Angkor Wat’s

image was harnessed to gain global attention and sympathy. DK’s Délégation permanente du Kampuchéa Démocratique auprès de l’UNESCO (officially based at 2, Place de Barcelone, 75016 Paris), its Permanent Mission of Democratic Kampuchea to the United Nations (located at 747 Third Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10017), as well as Ieng Sary himself, as “Vice-Premier Ministre, chargé des Affaires étrangères du Kampuchéa Démocratique” continued to reference the central pathway leading up to Angkor Wat’s central massif. Here the path led through geometrically organised rice fields toward a smoking factory instead of the temple (Pl. XI.31a,b). DK’s mission underwent the following three major phases: (1) the search for an inner-political consolidation and international cultural-political strategy (1979–82); (2) the formation of a coalition government with its adjusted propagandistic strategy (1982–85); and (3) initiating a kind of ‘perestroika’ in relation to the cultural heritage of Angkor (1985–90).

4.1. Searching for inner-political consolidation and an international cultural-political strategy (1979—82) During the first months after its expulsion from Phnom Penh in 1979, the DK government was busy establishing its exile government and the guerrilla bases along the KhmerThai border. Astonishingly, international solidarity for the exiled Khmer Rouge resulted in a strange mix of various conferences: the Kampuchea Conferences in Stockholm 1979, Tokyo 1981, and Bangkok 1987 were initiated by leftist intellectuals; the International Conference on Kampuchea of 1981 took place at the United Nations in New York; and three International Conferences on Indochina in 1986, 1988 and 1989 were Australian meetings to debate political-diplomatic options for “conflict resolution in Kampuchea” with no specific focus on cultural heritage (McMillan 1989). Chaired by Marita Wikander, chairman of the Swedish-Kampuchean Friendship Association which visited DK in 1978 (Bergström 1979; compare Fig. XI.16a), the Kampuchea Conference in Stockholm on 17–18 November 1979 with its emblem of Angkor Wat (Pl. XI.32a) was one of the first international events after the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. And it offered an open platform for hypocritical voices: in a message, Khieu Samphan called the Vietnamese invasion “a war of genocide”, and Ieng Thirith (wife of Ieng Sary, minister of social affairs and head of the DK delegation to the event) quoted the cultural heritage of Angkor in her statement: After more than ten months of frenzied destructions, plunders and massacres by the Vietnamese aggressors, Kampuchea — that old and glorious land of Angkor, with a host of artistic and cultural treasures, with a wealth of ­natural and agricultural resources with the skilful hands

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of our people, after the devastating five-year war of 1970—75, lovingly transformed into a country which was verdant in all seasons, with dikes, water reservoirs, irrigation canals and an immense expanse of rice fields — has today become a country of desolation, an arid country where nothing grows, even at the height of the rainy season. […] The VN aggressors looted our factories and museums in Phnom Penh where machinery, objets d’art of gold, silver and precious stones, rare pieces form our national museums, the Silver Pagoda and the Royal Palace, were carried away to VN. As for the sculptured and bas-reliefs masterpieces at Angkor, high points of the Khmer civilisation and the cultural and artistic heritage of all mankind, the Hanoi aggressors have concealed them in coffins so as to carry them off to Vietnam. [italics MF] (Documents 1980, 19)

The International Conference on Kampuchea, held at the United Nations in New York on 13–17 July 1981 with its elected president Willibald Pahr (Austrian minister of foreign affairs and ambassador to the UN), certainly had another diplomatic layout, but nonetheless helped to a much higher degree to foster the exiled DK’s international credibility as the legal representative of Cambodia (Report 1981; compare Kröll 2007). The second Kampuchea Conference after Stockholm 1979 was held in Tokyo in 1981 and gave way to the third one in Bangkok, 25–26 July 1987 (Pl. XI.32b,c), again with Khieu Samphan as DK’s goodwill ambassador and Jan Myrdal as the tragic defender of the ex-genocidal regime in a speech headlined as “The relevance of Angkor”:

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The international relevance of Angkor is important. And here I want point out something that ought to be self-evident: Khmer art is world art. […] The war that tore Kampuchea [apart] until 1975 was very destructive. But Angkor was not hurt. Even though Angkor was in the very centre of the fighting and Angkor Wat a training centre and headquarter for FUNK during that war, only a stray shot or two reached Angkor Wat, as I myself could see when I visited Angkor just before the Vietnamese invasion […] At that time [1978, MF] the preservation and restoration of the monuments was being prepared; the Kampuchean hosts were discussing the possibility of getting brotherly help from archaeologists and specialists from neighbouring countries with Buddhist tradition and culture. No Khmer would let Angkor be destroyed. […] The only threat to Angkor is the Vietnamese invaders. It is under Vietnamese rule that Angkor has been robbed. […] any threat to Angkor is a threat both to the very existence of the Khmer people and to a great common human heritage. And only in an independent Kampuchea where the Kampuchean people freely decide their own affairs can Angkor be safeguarded for the sake of the Khmer people and for all of us. [italics MF] (Jan Myrdal in Third International Conference 1987, 26—28)

Paris­-trained Thiounn Mumm,91 the new chairman of the Scientific and Technical Commission of DK,92 presented the newly adapted Khmer Rouge rhetoric publicly during the Twenty-First General Conference of UNESCO in Belgrade (September 23–October 28, 1980) (General Conference 1980) and in a personal letter to M’Bow on 15 August 1980, with the following six features of cultural heritage (Thiounn 1980). First: The “marvellous cultural heritage of Angkor” [only a few years earlier declared a symbol of enslavement, MF] was now “one of the great world civilisations” and a source of “pride for the Kampuchean people […] who built it”; second: “After the liberation of the region of Angkor in 1970 by the [our] army, these monuments, along with other cultural heritage sites like the National Museum and the Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh, were affectionately maintained and protected”; third: the Vietnamese forces had turned Siem Reap and Angkor into a “combat zone” with a military base only a few kilometres from Angkor Vat [at Phnom Bakheng, MF] and soldier camps inside the perimeters of historic monuments; fourth: the “Vietnamese expansionist aggressors” committed a “crime” in the “massive extermination of the people with conventional and chemical weapons and through famine”, with “systematic destructions of all economic, industrial, agricultural and in particular cultural infrastructures” and with the “pillage of Back in 1979, the propagandist medium Voice of Kam- Angkorian statues, bas-reliefs to be found for sale in Saigon puchea announced the new political line of the Khmer and Hanoi” – in short, with the “wanton aim to destroy Rouge: “Our struggle is no longer one of ideology, but one Kampuchea’s cultural and historic roots and to turn its of defending the territory and race of our beloved Kampu- people into a minority without a past or historic evidence”; chea, which is as dear as our lives” (Raszelenberg/Schier fifth: but the Khmer people proved their “untamability as 1995, 31). This discourse transcended race and territory the builders of Angkor” and “will never accept to live unand spilled over into the culture sector. From this point der foreign domination […] the nation of Kampuchea will onwards, the legacy of Angkor served DK’s delegation to never disappear, the grand civilisation of Angkor will conUNESCO as a constant feature for any kind of public-rela- tinue to live forever in the spirit, the souls and the heart of tions material, such as its monthly Bulletin d’Information, its dignified descendants”; and finally sixth, UNESCO which even conflated simple New Year’s greetings with a should intervene against such destruction, pillage, and depiction of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (Fig. XI.31a). In “genocide”, and the DK was willing to collaborate with a strange continuity from French exhibitions with their ­UNESCO to restore the cultural heritage of Angkor, but only under the “undebatable condition of the total liberaethnographic displays of vernacular architecture (compare Pl. IV.7, Fig. V.11b, Fig. VI.15b) all the way to the UNESCO tion, independence and sovereignty of the country” after World Heritage scenario of reinventing traditionalised the full withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops. eco-villages outside Angkor Park (compare epilogue II, Pl. However, a simple telex from 30 April 1980 addressed EpII.20c–f), the Khmer Rouge made this feature an asset to to the UN headquarters of culture in April 1981 proves that argue for premodern (anti-Western) forms of the Khmer the DK-UNESCO delegation with Paris-trained, ex-Khmer way of living (Fig. XI.31b). In 1980, the Francophile and Rouge Ok Sakun93 as its “Ambassador, Permanent Delegate”

91  Brother of the Khmer Rouge and Paris-trained personalities Thiounn Thioeunn and Thiounn Prasith and

school friend of Bernard Philippe Groslier at the École Norodom Primary at Phnom Penh, Thiounn Mumm was the first Cambodian Polytechnicien from Paris to act as engineer of telecommunication (compare Sher 2004; Locard 2015, 212–13). 92  Mr. Im Saroeun served as permanent adjunct delegate, and Mrs. Hua Kanika as first secretary, in: Bulletin d’Information, Délégation permanente du Kampuchéa Démocratique auprès de l’UNESCO, 21.12.1981 (No. 21/81). 93  Earlier, Ok Sakun, another Marxist Paris student with Ieng Sary and the Thiounn brothers in the 1950s, obtained a diploma from the École supérieure des transports de Paris and was charged with the political de-

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Figures XI.31a,b  Covers of the Bulletin d’information of the Permanent Delegation of Democratic Kampuchea to UNESCO, here from 21 December and 5 October 1981 (Source: Bulletin d’Information, 21/81 (21 December 1981), cover; 17/81, (5 October 1981), cover; © UNESCO Archive, Paris; National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

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Figure XI.32  Telefax from the Permanent Representative of Kampuchea to UNESCO from 30 April 1981 to ask for “visual material of the temples of Angkorvat [sic]” (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

was not at all ready to enhance this hastily invented mission tion to UNESCO in 1981 (a few days after the Internationwith credible propaganda material (Fig. XI.32). M’Bow al Conference on Kampuchea in New York under the aushad, during the Belgrade Conference in 1980, already tak- pices of the UN), Thiounn Mumm, via Ok Sakun, even en up the idea of a “military neutralisation of the Angkor invited the director general to come to Cambodia as “alZone” (in fact a Khmer-Republican invention of 1970/71, most the entire region of the monuments of Angkor was see above) as the political condition for any cultural action now under control”: programme, but his suggestion would be the subject of difficult internal debates for years to come.94 Ok Sakun, on The historic monuments of Angkor are living sites for us, the one hand, warned M’Bow against contacting the Heng [the] people of Kampuchea; they speak to us and they Samrin government in Phnom Penh or visiting Angkor form our lifeblood for the generations to come. This is under its occupation. On the other hand, he took a “neuwhy identity and survival, culture and nation, past and futralised Angkor” diplomatic hostage in the DK’s central ture, the monuments of Angkor and the soil of Angkor demand for the unconditional withdrawal of “the Socialist are intrinsically tied to each other. With them, the Khmer Republic of Vietnam as aggressor” from Cambodia. find their reason to exist as a people and as a nation.95 The thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth sessions of the UNESCO Conferences on Education (Geneva 1981 and 1984) As he responded in a letter of 17 February 1982, M’Bow insisted on the following: (1) any action by UNESCO gave the DK delegation an additional forum to spread its supposed goodwill agenda. In the context of the Paris visit “should be shielded against all political interpretation”; (2) of Ieng Sary, DK minister of foreign affairs, and his delega- UNESCO’s mission for “saving Angkor was a purely scienpartment of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Affair office (see Becker 1986, 57, 323; Sher 2004, 296). During the Khmer Rouge regime, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Ieng Sary (compare Mertha 2014, 37). 94  Within UNESCO itself, several internal reports and analyses were circulated to find a coherent institutional position in this cultural heritage gamble. In his report La question du Kampuchéa: Une analyse politique from 12 June 1981, the Laos representative to UNESCO, Khamliène Nhouyvanisvong, pointed to the “total helplessness of the UN to put into practice the resolutions 34/22 and 35/6 concerning Kampuchea” (both demanded the instant withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia), but also questioned UNESCO’s options to collaborate with the Khmer Rouge because of their “internal factionalism” and militaristic attitude (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.190/1980–1982). 95  Thiounn Mumm to M’Bow in a letter from 14 October 1981 (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.190/ 1980–1982).

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tific and technical undertaking” in relation to §§19 and 23 On 5 April 1982, the DK’s Permanent Mission to the Unitof the 1954 Hague Convention; and (3) it was a purely “hu- ed Nations published a fourteen-page press release called manitarian” task, since UNESCO initially acted in Cambo- The marvellous monuments of Angkor and their strategy dia under the “lead agency” of the UN International Chil- (Figs. XI.33a,b), and the “national resistance against the dren’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) installed in Phnom Vietnamese aggressor” would become a permanent slogan on leaflets of Kampuchéa Démocratique (Figs. XI.34a,b). Penh (M’Bow 1982). During the 114th session of UNESCO’s Executive Board in May 1982, M’Bow admitted, referring Using almost the same word choice as mentioned to the “question to safeguard the monuments of Angkor”, above, the press release accused the “Hanoi authorities [of] that his cultural sub-division had to respect the UN’s rec- taking advantage of the worldwide reputation of the monognition of the DK, which in fact blocked UNESCO’s di- uments of Angkor” and disguising a “political intent” to gain international recognition through a supposedly “culrect actions on Cambodian territory (UNESCO 1982, 31).96 During the international debate at the meeting, Angkor tural” mission: “Actually, they want to take advantage of became an abstract, almost metaphorical substitute for vir- the emotion caused by the fate of the monuments of Angtually every country’s political positioning in the high- kor to achieve their diplomatic manœuvres and aims.” This ly complex late Cold War constellation. In an effort to by- was declared to be “odious hypocrisy” and, above all, the pass resolutions, Willibald Pahr’s suggestion during the UN “root cause of the present tragedy of the monuments of Ang­ General Assembly on 27 October 1982 that “UNESCO’s kor” (Permanent Mission 1982, 13–14). However, the press role in protecting the cultural heritage of mankind could release closed with exactly the same manœuvre, arguing be similar to that of the Red Cross in the area of humani- that the “preservation and restoration of the monuments of tarian protection” was internationally acclaimed.97 The site Angkor” hinged on national independence and sovereignty. of Angkor thus became the subject of wild speculation af- Additionally, it recycled images (some of them had previter every new mission since 1981 (UNICEF, the Polish mis- ously been published in Le Figaro and the Washington sion, the Japanese expert Ishizawa, see above) reported ei- Post) of peaceful tourists at the site and of some of the ther on collapsing or undamaged temples that were only 2,000 Khmer Rouge workers and caring guards in Ang­kor heavily overgrown due to many years of neglect or heavily before the regime change in 1979. affected by man-made warfare. In the meantime, Truong In the same month – April 1982 – the first large interChinh, a member of the Bureau Politique du Parti Commu- national exhibition on Angkor took place in the Western niste vietnamien and president of the National Assembly centre of the international state community. National Geoof the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, had already alerted graphic presented “more than fifty colour photomurals of UNESCO about the wrongful rumour of a “new genocide Angkor” and a fifty-foot-long photograph of a bas-relief under the Heng Samrin administration”, which had in fact carving of Angkor Wat98 in the public lobby of the UN liberated Phnom Penh and saved the Kampuchean people headquarters in New York along with an entreaty to finally from extinction and its cultural heritage from further de- demilitarise the site. Politically correct opening remarks struction: were made by UNESCO’s director of the Division of Intercultural Projects, the Senegalese Doudou Diène and by Wilbur Garrett (the publishing director of National GeoThe monks have returned to the restored pagodas to graphic Magazine). To the contrary, the Ambassador pray to Buddha […] Kampuchea is on the path to rebirth. On the tombs of the victims of a monstrous genocide, Thiounn Prasith (the permanent UN delegate of DK [and Thiounn Mumm’s brother]) used the gathering to officially a whole nation, strong from the glorious past of the denounce the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin govern­Angkorian civilisation, is revived and is marching firmly, ment as cultural barbarians and to underline the “magnifistraight on, following this era’s common trend […] under cent cultural patriotism and the brave fight of the people the flag of Marxism-Leninism. (Truong 1981) 96  An internal report about the various initiatives around this session, “Le problème de la sauvegarde d’Ang­

kor Vat” was at the centre of direct talks with representatives of the DK government on 12 June 1982 in Bangkok, but Raja Roy Singh, assistant director general of UNESCO in Asia, and ambassador Pech Bun Ret, DK’s representative at the United Nations in Bangkok, crossed the border into Cambodia by foot to meet Ieng Sary in DK, only to be informed that “the government troops of DK occupied the sites with intermittence, generally and not only during the night”. Even UNESCO’s Office des normes internationales et des affaires juridiques with Karel Vasak as director underlined in an internal report about “La sauvegarde d’Angkor Wat” (30 June 1982) that UNESCO’s hands were tied (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.190/1980–1982). 97  The Hague Reunion of Juridical Experts met in Vienna in December 1982 under Pahr, in his role as president of the UN’s Ad Hoc Committee, to discuss the topic of “Protection des biens culturels au Kampuchéa” (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.190/1980–1982). 98  News: National Geographic Society News (Immediate Release 3.1982): Exhibit at UN designed to save ancient Angkor (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.THS.APA 566).

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Figures XI.33a,b  The marvellous monuments of Angkor and their tragedy, published in April 1982 by the Permanent Mission of Democratic Kampuchea to the United Nations in New York: cover with the iconic view towards Angkor Wat and ‘Khmer Rouge soldiers caring for the temples at Angkor’ (Source: Permanent Mission of Democratic Kampuchea to the United Nations, press release/special issue 5 April 1982, cover, 7)

Figures XI.34a,b  Propaganda material from November 1982 (Kampuchéa Démocratique: La résistance nationale contre l’agression vietnamienne) and August 1982 (Source: Permanent Delegation of Democratic Kampuchea to UNESCO, November 1982, cover; 30 August 1982, 2)

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for the several thousands of years old civilisation and their report that, amazingly, they are nearly untouched by the national identity”.99 In the article “The ruin of Angkor Wat”, years of war.” However, referring to the menacing vandalwhich was published in the Washington Post on 11 April ism of the last decade and the fast-growing vegetation, the 1982, the journalist Elisabeth Becker appreciated the exhi- article concluded that “[a]fter a thousand-year cycle of debition’s efforts to raise public awareness of the Angkor di- struction, decay, and rebirth, the ancient complex of temlemma and to encourage a serious round of negotiations ples now desperately needs a renewal of the loving and (Becker 1982). The New York Times, in the notice “Angkor expert preservation and reconstruction once lavished on it lives” from 26 April 1982, even saw the exhibition as the by Cambodia and France” (Garrett 1982, 548–51). In the possible “beginning of a more humane cooperation” for magazine, Peter T. White took the reader on a tour through cultural heritage. Finally, National Geographic Magazine the temples with Pich Keo (see Pl.33d), the acting, but published an influential cover story entitled “The temples rather isolated Angkor conservator on-site and concluded: of Angkor: Will they survive?” in May 1982 (Pl. XI.33a–g). “In short, I have learned that the major problem at Angkor In contrast to the Khmer Rouge polemic displayed at of late has been neither war damage nor thievery, but simthe exhibition, the photo stories in National Geographic ply neglect” (Garrett 1982, 585). Despite this relatively op“slightly lifted the veil of secrecy” that had lain across the timistic vision of Angkor’s cultural heritage, the propaganlong-suffering, civil war-prone people and the Angkor da machine of the exiled Khmer Rouge regime was getting temples. The pictures were breathtaking and the message ready to take off: spreading the news of the purported visit was simple: “Despite rumours and exaggerated reports that of the sub-director of UNESCO, Dragoljub Najman, to DK on 16 May 1982 was one of its first actions.100 the temples were demolished or severely damaged, we can

4.2. The Coalition Government and its propagandistic mission (1982—85) On 22 June 1982, during a meeting in Kuala Lumpur of the supposedly travelling by “automobile, on foot and on the different main actors and under pressure from the Chinese, back on an elephant”.101 Prince Norodom Sihanouk (who was living in exile in BeiWith the internally unquestioned and internationally jing and Pyongyang) finally agreed to form the Coalition acclaimed figure of Norodom Sihanouk as president of the Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK): together Coalition Government, the Khmer Rouge gained confiwith the Khmer Rouge under Khieu Samphan as vice pres- dence, and the Délégation Permanente du Kampuchea Déident and minister of foreign affairs, and the Republican mocratique auprès de l’UNESCO published two versions of Son Sann, the former president of the Khmer Republic un- a Dossier Angkor in 1982 and 1983. Today stored at the artil 1975, as prime minister, Sihanouk would serve as its chive of ICOMOS International in Paris, the 1982 issue president. Despite joining in a royal-communist-republican (Figs. XI.35a–c, Pl. XI.34) showed Khmer Rouge soldiers resistance pact against Heng Samrin, all factions of this tri- in front of temple sites, Khmer ballet dancers and the partite coalition kept their own political identity, and their Swedish visitors around Jan Myrdal in front of Angkor own military forces gathered along the Thai-Cam­bodian Wat. It was, besides a battle map as attachment, introduced border. However, the ideological rapprochement between with a comment on “La sauvegarde d’Angkor: Un problème the prince and the Khmer Rouge was not a new phenome- politique”, which sought to unmask a supposed Vietnamese strategy towards Angkor. After having downgraded non – on the contrary. As detailed above, Sihanouk had already made his 1973 visit to Khmer Rouge strongholds Angkor during the Khmer Rouge regime inside Cambodia and to Angkor a propaganda trick (see Fig. XI.10a, com- (see quotes above), it was now upgraded by the exiled pare Fig. XI.14). As he proudly told the UN’s Thirty-Seventh Khmer Rouge regime outside Cambodia as the veritable Gen­eral Assembly on 30 September 1982 (and reprinted in “soul of the people of Kampuchea”: DK-UNESCO’s Bulletin d’Information of 11 October 1982), he again undertook a visit in July 1981 to “three liberated The future of Angkor is not a simple cultural problem. Its zones” and into “the deep interior of the [our] fatherland”, destiny is the one of the Kampuchean nation as a whole.

99 Délégation permanente du Kampuchéa Démocratique auprès de l’UNESCO: Bulletin d’Information, 10/82 (3 May 1982), 15–16. 100  “Le sous-directeur général de l’UNESCO visite le Kampuchéa démocratique”, in: Délégation permanente du Kampuchéa Démocratique auprès de l’UNESCO: Bulletin d’Information 13/82 (14 June 1982), 3–4. 101  “Discours de S.A.R. Le Prince Norodom Sihanouk, président du Kampuchéa Démocratique devant la 37e session de l’Assemblée générale des Nations Unies (30 Septembre 1982)”, in: Délégation permanente du Kampuchéa Démocratique auprès de l’UNESCO: Bulletin d’Information 19/82 (11 Octobre 1982), 2.

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Figures XI.35a—c  Cover and internal pages of the Dossier Angkor of 1982 (Source: Délégation permanente 1982b, cover, 9, 10—11; © ICOMOS International Archive, Paris)

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The problem is right now a primarily political one, related to the Vietnamese occupation. Between 1975 and 1978, under the direction of the government of Democratic Kampuchea, the monuments of Angkor have been maintained and reopened to visitors and foreign tourists. Their restoration has been studied. It was the Vietnamese aggression which put an end to this regained tranquillity. […] The Vietnamese want to annex Kampuchea, and, finally, make it disappear. To reach this goal, they must destroy all which is in their way. As a symbol of the spirit and independence of Kampuchea, Angkor is the preferred target of Vietnam. It is pillaged by the Vietnamese troops, vandalised and abandoned through war and aggression. But the people of Kampuchea, proud descendants of the builders of Angkor, resist relentlessly. The close zone around Angkor Wat is currently a zone of intense combat which, at this moment, forbids all possibilities to restore the temples. […] The present brochure intends: to bring to light the real nature of the problem of Angkor; to show the significance which the government of Democratic Kampuchea has always attributed to this question; to make known the concrete reality of Angkor today; and to indicate the only possible solution to the task to save Angkor [italics MF] (Délégation permanente 1982b, 5)

Similar arguments were repeated across the whole Dossier Angkor of 1983 (today stored at the archive of ICCROM in Rome) as the following: first, Angkor was both geographically and mentally re-invented again as the “heart of Kampuchea”, the “soul, the spirit and even the body of the Kampuchean people”, and as a symbol of “not only the heritage of the Kampuchean people, but equally of the whole humanity” (Pl. XI.35a,b). Second, Lon Nol’s republican era between 1970–75 was now judged to have caused “very little damage to the temples” – a comment probably made as a political concession to the republican partner in the newly founded coalition government. As a new addition to the story, the Khmer Rouge government in 1975–78 “had not forgotten Angkor, but cared for it with 2,700 people”, and the site had been used for various diplomatic visits and even for tourists (Délégation permanente 1983). In the meantime the French-Cambodian connection was quoted in several journals. In February 1982 Paris Match launched the article “La deuxième mort d’Angkor”, with photographs by Marc Riboud (Riboud 1982) and the subtext: “The Cambodians launch an appeal to France to save the most beautiful monuments of the world” (Fig. XI.36). The Vietnamese Heng Samrin government, however, was deemed to have endangered the site through destruction and pillage (quoting “Viets pillaging Angkor” from Paris Match in its 1982 November, Lartéguy 1982), the proximity of military installations, internationally barred chemical and biological

weapons, and random vandalism. It made Angkor a “display window for its alleged pacification” and therefore took it “in total immorality hostage” for the manipulation of international opinion, public endorsement, political recognition, and colonial expansion. Third, the question, “Which future for Angkor?” was answered as follows: as a territorial and symbolic centre, Angkor represented a strategic zone of national importance with its defence being “a preoccupation for all Khmers” and their army, but also a task for the international preservation community. Interestingly, the Dossier Angkor 1983 also included a statement made by Norodom Sihanouk from a 1982 interview conducted in New York, where he denied, for the sake of political manoeuvring, the same help offered by UNESCO that he would welcome in 1989 (like again in 1991) during his invitation to the organisation’s Paris headquarter (see later in this chapter): The monuments of Angkor are not only the heritage of the people of Kampuchea but equally constitute the heritage of Humanity as a whole. We are seriously affected to see that our monuments of Angkor suffer from the destructions caused by Vietnamese aggression. After the recall of the Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea, we will strongly need international assistance from the International Community, from UNESCO, Japan, and all friend countries to restore and preserve the monuments of Ang­kor. It is regrettable that at this very moment, such an eventual project of UNESCO’s help to restore Angkor cannot be dissociated from the overall situation which prevails in Kampuchea. In the given circumstances, such a project would bring UNESCO into the situation to de facto acknowledge the Heng Samrin regime. This is why we cannot accept such a project. [italics MF] (Norodom Sihanouk in Délégation permanente 1983, 3)

As mentioned, the DK’s Angkor-as-heritage-of-humanity discourse was entirely adjusted to the international public; it mirrored enemy stereotypes from both Hot and Cold War rhetoric and used terms from biological warfare to ethnic extinction. By contrast, the tales of bloody class and national struggle sacrifices, like in Khieu Samphan’s 1984 statement on the occasion of the traditional Khmer New Year (or the ninth anniversary of DK), dominated DK’s internal political speeches at that time, and Angkor was in fact only rarely mentioned. In the meantime, newspapers like the Bangkok Post reported that the ASEAN-EC ministerial meeting in Bangkok on 12 April 1983 had welcomed the proposal of a security zone along the border and the restoration of Angkor as a declared “zone of peace”.102 However, a neutralisation of Angkor was no solution for all conflicting parties in Cambodia, which underlined their individual legal heritage

102  “ASEAN welcomes Angkor Wat plan”, in: Bangkok Post, September 11, 1984.

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Figure XI.36  Story about Angkor in a 1982 issue of Paris Match with photographs of Marc Riboud (Source: Paris Match, 12 February 1982, 52—53; personal archive Michael Falser)

claims over Angkor: the Coalition Government issued a “Memorandum on the problem of Angkor” on 10 February 1984 and rejected all these “noble ideas of peace- and justice-loving countries and the international community”, referring to the obvious “gap between the goal longed for to safeguard Angkor and the inevitable grave consequences for the struggle for survival of the Kampuchean people” (Permanent Delegation 1984). At this time UNESCO was desperately looking for other channels through which to

bypass the official UN policy and to get a foothold into Cambodia’s cultural heritage sector.103 The PRK’s foreign minister, Hun Sen, was quoted as rejecting a “demilitarised zone (DMZ)” as simply a backdoor means of interfering in internal affairs: “If people want to help, they should send the money to us, […] our Angkor is in a state of safety.”104 In the meantime, National Geographic’s Angkor exhibition travelled from the UN headquarters in New York 1982 and around the world from Venice in 1982 and Washington in

103  In the UNESCO Archives in Paris a two-page typewritten document, entitled “Restoration of Angkor

Wat”, dating 17 August 1984 and issued by the Indochina Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra/Australia, has survived. It tells of the difficult situation of UNESCO’s involvement since the United Nations only recognised the CGDK and therefore suggested “to circumvent these difficulties that the international restoration/conservation effort […] be conducted through non-governmental organisation (NGOs) rather than intergovernmental channels”. Particular mention is made of Paris-based ICOMOS and Romebased ICCROM as options, and it finally affirmed Australia’s interest in providing help (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.65). 104  Ted Morello, “Bid to save Angkor: A proposal to protect Cambodia’s most revered monument is rejected by Heng Samrin regime”, in: Economic Review, December 6,1984.

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Figures XI.37a—d  Exposition sur les monuments Angkor Vat, prepared by National Geographic under the auspices of UNESCO, shown at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters from 24 February to 14 March 1984, with opening speeches by M’Bow from UNESCO, Ok Sakun from DK’s UNESCO Delegation and John Morris from National Geographic (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

1983 to Vienna, Marseille105, Barcelona in 1985 and South Korea in 1986 (Pl. XI.36a–d). An intermediate stop was of course made at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1984 (Figs. XI.37a–d). There, the inauguration ceremony on 23 February 1984 once again produced the same canon of heritage claims and discourses by the main protagonists, director general M’Bow and Ok Sakun. John G. Morris, the

European correspondent of National Geographic, repeated the slogan that would become the central message in the campaign to make Angkor a global heritage icon from the early 1990s onwards (see next chapter): “Angkor must live for all humanity!”106 In the Communiqué de Presse for DK’s UNESCO mission on the “Exposition sur Angkor à l’UNESCO”, the printed text was a bit different. In it Ok

105  In Marseille the Angkor exhibition was organised by the musée de la Marine, the musée d’Histoire and by

UNESCO, and opened with the mayor of the city, Gaston Defferre, and the conservator, Myriam Morel. Thanks for this information goes to Ann Blanchet of the same museum, and to Laurent Védrine, now director of the musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux. 106  UNESCO Press Release 12 (February 1984) and an internal report both in UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.THS.APA 566 (1982–1986).

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Sakun took the opportunity to once again tell the story of the Coalition Government troops “liberating the temples” from the invaders and “initiating first conservation work”. Furthermore, he invited M’Bow “to come to Democratic Kampuchea for a mission to study the temples [as an element of] the beginning of a fruitful and durable cooperation between Democratic Kampuchea and UNESCO”.107

However, this invitation, as the journal Archéologia had it in its April 1984 issue, did “not fool anyone” (Zamora 1984, 7) – the political situation was far from safe and stable. The French newspaper Libération reported a few months later, that the “cache-cache diplomatique derrière le temple d’Angkor” had brought France once again into the “centre of dispute” (Sabatier 1984).

4.3. The end of the Cold War: Perestroika for the missions for Angkor (1985—1989) This chapter focuses on the three different heritage claims made on the cultural entity called Angkor by three different political/institutional protagonists – the PRK, DK, and UNESCO. It is astonishing that all three factions underwent major cultural-political transformations in their heritage discourses between 1985 and 1990. To a very large extent this was related to the dramatic political changes that occurred at the end of the Cold War, particularly the fall of communism and the problematic status of and changing power constellation between China (backing the Khmer Rouge) and Russia (supporting Vietnam and the PRK). The first major change concerned the PRK in January 1985 when, after the mysterious and sudden death of his predecessor Chan Si, Hun Sen was appointed the world’s youngest prime minister. This marked an end to the old guard of socialist revolutionaries in Cambodia, and Hun Sen gradually outgrew Heng Samrin’s image as a Vietnamese-­ controlled puppet leader. After severe floods, disastrous harvests, failed agricultural reforms, and international trade restrictions, the PRK’s economy found itself in deep crisis by 1985; Hun Sen had to initiate the gradual de-socialisation of Cambodia’s economy. With no money to hand, the cultural sector, including the preservation of cultural heritage, was either restricted to sporadic, small-scale initiatives or, as regards Angkor, dependant on international campaigns by India and Poland (see above). Victories during the 1984/85 dry season offensive destroyed some of the enemy’s military camps. In the context of the so-called K5 plan, the PRK’s military counter-action led to veritable fortification against the infiltrating Khmer Rouge guerrilla, and canals, walls and dams were erected along the Thai-Cambodian frontline (Slocomb 2001; 2003, 229– 51, compare Carney 1980). This may have affected Siem Reap and the Archaeological Park as well. Heng Samrin’s army installed artillery at the Phnom Bakheng, the temple hill close to Angkor Wat, and controlled the major entry points to the city of Siem Reap. However, the Khmer Rouge

were a constant threat, especially during the night. There are even reports of fortification works inside the Angkor Park after 1982, but this could not be verified for this research: “[…] the frequency and the difficulty of the levies increased. The work involved cutting swathes in the forest and erecting strategic barriers around villages. The first clearing seems to have taken place in the park of Angkor in late 1982. They then occurred almost everywhere in the country for the purpose of destroying the guerrillas’ sanctuaries, situated in the dense forests of the mountains and plains” (Martin 1994, 222). In any case, the morale in the PRK’s army was at an all-time low in the face of the effective propaganda campaign that was being waged by the resistance forces after their successful coalition. Faced with mounting international pressure, Hun Sen finally agreed to start direct proximity talks with Norodom Sihanouk in order to work toward national reconciliation. Because of their destabilising martial image and their unwillingness to negotiate with the PRK far into 1985, the Khmer Rouge had lost its last international credibility. According to the publication Undeclared war against the People’s Republic Kampuchea (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1985; compare Pl. XI.22d), the PRK focused on the fight against the coalition’s strongholds along the Thai border, whereas the DK concen­trated its guerrilla war efforts around the Tonlé Sap (Lake), including the Angkor zone. It speaks to the continuing militaristic strategy of the DK that the DK’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO from 1981 through 1988 constantly (re-)published battle maps (compare Pl. XI.34) and “Front News” in their Bulletin d’Information and Communiqués de Presse. As the issue of the Press Release of 27 June 1986 had it, “several Vietnamese positions had been dismantled in the area around Angkor Wat” during the night of 10 June 1986, including a “Vietnamese bat­talion at the village of Trapeang Ses, defence lines north of the temple and the main quarter of Unit 497 to the west of Angkor Wat, […] with thirty-five Vietnamese killed and fifty-two wounded, getting total control over

107  “Exposition sur Angkor à l’UNESCO”, Communiqué de Presse, Délégation permanente du DK auprès

de l’UNESCO, 14/84 (29 February 1984), 2–3.

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Fig. XI.38  Copy of press photograph to capture the GCKD meeting in Beijing on 17 March 1986, with an illustration of Angkor Wat on the wall behind Norodom Sihanouk, Son Sann, ­Khieu Samphan and others (Source: Proposition 1986; © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

the enemy’s defence system around the temple, [and] twen­ ty-five villages liberated”.108 Anticipating what international newspapers would report about new “Tourism to Angkor” (Le Monde, 6 November 1986), a DK press release declared on 20 October 1986, that “new manœuvres of the Vietnamese authorities were aimed at deceiving the international opinion as regards touristic visits to Angkor”: Getting “international organisations” into the country would make them “surreptitiously obliging to de facto acknowledge the puppet regime in Phnom Penh. To achieve this goal, all strategies were suitable: restoration of the monuments of Angkor, touristic visits, sport competitions”.109

In the meantime, in Beijing on 17 March 1986 Sihanouk presented the “Eight-Point Plan of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea’s Proposal for a Political Settlement to the Problem of Kampuchea”, which, apart from calling for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, a cease-fire, UN supervision, and free elections for a nonaligned and neutral Cambodia, also included the offer of a quadripartite government that would include the ex-Heng Samrin and now Hun Sen’s government, Sihanouk as president, Sonn San’s republican movement, and a supposedly much more moderate Khmer Rouge faction (Proposition 1986).110 When the official press assisted in propagating

108  “Nouvelles du front: Plusieurs positions vietnamiennes démantelées dans la région d’Angkor Wat, au

front de Siemréap”, in: Communiqué de Presse, Délégation permanente du KD auprès de l’UNESCO, 039/86 (27 June 1986), 2. A similar notice was “Nouvelles du Front: La ville de Siemréap et ses défenses attaquées, plusieurs positions vitenamiennes détruites dans la région des temples d’Angkor”, in: Communiqué de Presse, Délégation permanente du KD auprès de l’UNESCO, 056/86 (24 September 1986), 1. 109  “Mise en garde du GCKD au sujet des visites et voyages touristiques au Kampuchéa, et notamment à Angkor” (Porte-parole 15 October 1986), in: Communiqué de Presse, 061/86 (20 October 1986), 1–2. 110  In an interview in the autumn of 1986, Khieu Samphan commented on the Khmer Rouge’s “considerable shift from a period of glorifying the communist revolution as being more radical than the History of Humanity”: “Our ideal is above all Kampuchea. It is true that before we thought that independence and prosperity was just viable through communism. But the cruel reality has shown us that persisting that way would have led the country to its disappearance as a nation. The geopolitical context for Kampuchea now needs great

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photographic proof of this historic meeting, an image of Angkor Wat was hung above the newly formed coalition partners (Fig. XI.38). Whereas UNESCO was still dependent on indirect UNICEF endorsement for ideas about a non-governmental consortium to ‘save’ Angkor,111 the greatest shift in direction was brought about in 1987. On 12 June 1987, Xinhua News Agency in Beijing broadcast Son Sann’s proposal to start “technical talks between the parties to the conflict without political preconditions”.112 In fact, this was the date when Son Sann met M’Bow in Paris during an unofficial meeting at UNESCO to underline “that saving Angkor would necessitate an emergency intervention through international specialists and those of UNESCO” to propose and “to negotiate a zone of peace through UNESCO’s direct talks with Vietnam, and not with the in fact powerless Phnom Penh-based Heng Samrin regime”. M’Bow himself reassured Son about his intention to “neutralise Angkor with a dispatch of ‘blue helmets’” and to bring the issue forward in the upcoming executive council meeting in September 1987.113 In his function as “prime minister of the coalition government and president of his republican National Liberation Front”, Son Sann issued an official letter to M’Bow on 15 June 1987, using Angkor Wat’s silhouette on the rubber stamp (Fig. XI.39) and framing his heritage claim in the name of world peace: In order to avoid any irreparable damage to the temple group of Angkor which counts as a cultural property of humanity, it is urgent to declare this cultural zone a zone of peace. Like this, all conservation and preservation work, abandoned since 1972, against human and natural degradations can be resumed. To achieve this, the following is necessary: 1) to demand all foreign and armed forces to pull out along a fifty kilometre perimeter around the region of Siem Reap/Angkor; 2) to allow the representatives of all parties in conflict to meet freely and without coercion in order to discuss setting up the technical procedure for the restoration and preservation of

the monuments of Angkor, with no political implication nor any legal recognition of any party, and to enable international assistance such as from UNESCO; 3) to allow all Cambodian and international UNESCO technicians access to those works, under an international guarantee of security. [italics MF] (Son 1987)

In a letter to M’Bow on 16 June, Ok Sakun commented that large parts of the monument group of Angkor were now under the control of the national army of DK. Even if the PRK rejected this proposal as a strategy to penetrate deeper into the country, it gave UNESCO its first official mandate for providing international assistance towards the establishment of a demilitarised zone at Angkor under the 1954 Hague Convention (a claim that was, in fact, first pronounced by the Khmer Republic in 1970/71). A few weeks later, on 4 July 1987, M’Bow wrote – along with a thankyou note to Son Sann – a letter to the UN’s secretary general, Javier Perez de Cuellar, outlining Son Sann’s proposal and extending an invitation to personal talks about “a mechanism for UNESCO’s task without any political and legal implications” and followed: I have declared in UNESCO’s Executive Council that it seems to me that the safeguard and restoration of the temples of Angkor Wat [sic] cannot carried out in satisfying conditions if security cannot be guaranteed on an international basis.114

A more positive response about “La question d’Angkor Wat” arrived in August 1987 from Cuellar with reference to a “special UN agent for humanitarian affairs in Southeast Asia, Mr. Rafeeuddin Ahmed”,115 but with no concrete actions. Shortly after, the first direct talks between Sihanouk and Hun Sen took place between 2 and 4 December 1987 in Fère-en-Tardenois in northern France. There, Sihanouk renewed a proposal for the neutralisation and demilitarisation of the Angkor Wat area by appealing to the interna-

national unity and the support of the international community.” See “Entretien avec Khieu Samphan – Cambodge: L’union sacrée?” in: Politique internationale, 34 (winter 1986/87), 1–9, here 6. Compare with Khieu Samphan’s own justification (Khieu 2004). 111  A report of a UNICEF mission to Kampuchea (23 May to 6 June 1985) by Hans Reiff (UNESCO’s division of educational policy and planning) was one such occasion, when direct talks with DK’s ministers of culture, information, and education, Chheng Phonn and Choy Vy, helped to endorse “the possibility for UNESCO to ‘go in-between’ UNICEF” for issues of cultural heritage (UNESCO Archives Paris, CLT.CH.190/1983–1985). 112  Broadcasts of Xinhua News Agency Beijing on 12 June 1987 and on Radio Phnom Penh on 30 June 1987 (Summary of World Broadcasts by British Broadcasting Corporation), quoted in Raszelenberg and Schier 1995, 122. 113  “Compte-rendu de l’entretien du directeur général avec S. Exc. M. Son Sann, président du conseil des ministres du Gouvernement de Coalition du Kampuchéa Démocratique, le 12 Juin 1987” (UNESCO Archives Paris, BRX.APA.1). 114  Letter on 4 July 1987 from M’Bow to Javier Perez de Cuellar, the secretary general of the United Nations, New York (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989). 115  Reference in an internal communication to M’Bow on 20 January and 21 July 1988 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

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4. Claiming heritage without territory

Fig. XI.39  Son Sann’s letter of 15 June 1987 to declare the neutral zone around Angkor, with his signature rubber-stamped with the stylised silhouette of Angkor Wat (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

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tional community, which included the United Nations, UNESCO – and finally, given his Francophile past, the French EFEO. By this time, however, France had forever lost its hegemony over Angkor, and all the important French players, such as Claude Jacques and Étienne Clément, were now only subordinated within a larger international interest group that included Japan, the United States and others under the umbrella of UNESCO (see chapter XII). Now, the international and global grasp over Angkor would transform the site into a new and final configuration, one that would change its status forever through a physical, aesthetic and legal impact of unforeseen intensity: UNESCO World Heritage. Probably the last publication to circulate photographs to prove the relatively undamaged, however abandoned and overgrown temples of Angkor was a Khmer-French production. Just before India’s heavy impact on Angkor Wat after 1990 (see above), the curious book Angkor silencieux of 1988 (also published in German) by the Cambodian author Nouth Narang (later Cambodia’s minister of culture and fine arts), with a preface by Michel Butor and photographs by Philippe Gras (1942–2007), pictured the sites of previous French restoration efforts. Together with unpublished photographs from Gras’ private collection in Paris116, these pictures showed Angkor Wat from above (Pl. XI.37a) and from inside the emptied galleries with war-crippled statutes (Pl. XI.37b,c). And they showed ‘our’ Krishna kill-

ing Kamsa pediment on the central tower (Pl. XI.37d) which had played such a central role in all representations of Ang­kor in French museums and exhibitions (compare Figs. III.31a–c, 36, 37; IV.10b; V.18a; Pl.7a; Fig. VII.31a). ­Finally, Preah Khan’s famous round-columned buildings (the site of the very first French anastylosis ever carried out from November 1930 onwards, compare Fig. IX.44) seemed to have returned to its untouched, ruined status (Pl. XI.37e). However, with its poetic and descriptive texts of ancient Angkor, no words were lost in commenting on the approaching end of the so-called ‘dark ages of Hot and Cold War politics over Angkor’ – heritage rhetoric and inheritance claims included. Yes, Angkor had survived those turbulent years of the 1970s and 1980s astonishingly well, given the fact of civil war, genocide and foreign occupation in Cambodia. From the site’s physical condition, it seemed that not too much had happened. However, and this was the goal of this chapter, Angkor had changed its heritage status completely and for ever since from a semantic viewpoint: from a French (post)colonial heritage reserve of applied archaeology and the prestige object of the independent nation-state of Cambodia to an icon of a ‘heritage of humanity’. It was this new rhetori­cal frame which facilitated the site’s fasttrack appropriation through the global heritage community (UNESCO World Heritage label included, as we shall see in the next chapter) and its commodification into a veritable theme park for global mass tourism.

116  The author would like to thank Philippe Gras’ wife, Suong Gras, for her help to study the photographic

collection of her husband in spring 2018 in Paris.

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XII



Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993 All of humanity [humanité] knows that Angkor counts as one of the greatest ensembles of our heritage [patrimoine commun] which needs to be saved at all costs. […] In my function as Director General of UNESCO, I repeat my ardent desire to inscribe the salvage of Angkor [inscrire le sauvetage d’Angkor] into the line of the great undertakings — Abu Simbel, Borobudur, Sana’a — thanks to which the treasures of universal dimension were saved and are today known all over the planet. [italics MF] (Jacques 1990, 5) —Federico Mayor, UNESCO’s director general, in his preface to Claude Jacques’ 1990 publication of Angkor The revenge of the journalists on the politicians is the archive. —Robert Hochner, Austrian journalist (1945—2001)

Introduction Chapter IX of this second volume provided an overview of the available scientific research about the French-made Parc archéologique d’Angkor. It was initiated around 1900 and was put on a precise map in about 1909 (see Pl. IX.8a), but it was officially decreed only in 1925/30 (see Pl. IX.13) and, up to 1970, progressively turned into the world’s largest site of archaeological conservation. Many rather similar summaries of the topic exist today, quoting data easily accessible in official publications provided by the main actor, the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) itself. Few contributions have been produced in greater detail regarding the French-colonial, institutional and archaeological setup of Angkor Park. As we argued in chapter IX, the reason for this was simple: all internal archaeological, architectural and conservation reports as well as institutional correspondence were (often hand- and later type-)written in French, and until today they were never c­ ritically edited, published in longer excerpts or provided in an open access or digital database. All this material still exists and is safely stored in the archive of the EFEO headquarter in Paris. Additional documents are still hidden in archives in Phnom Penh’s National Library, Museum and Archives, and in the National Archive of French Overseas History in Aix-enProvence. For that reason, chapter IX provided, on some 150 pages, the first coherent critical history of the French (post)colonial making of Angkor Park, covering a time span of 110 years between 1860 and the early 1970s and drawing from several thousand pages of internal reports and their affiliated photographic material. And while the traumatic 1970s and 1980s of Cambodia’s history in relation to Angkor Park has been underdiscussed in scientific publications (and provided here for the first time in chapter XI), it is also surprising how little i­n-depth

research has been carried out so far about the second – this time fully international – ‘making of Angkor Park’ around 1990. Today, virtually hundreds of – mostly Anglo-Saxon and to a lesser extent French – publications and on-site case studies on all aspects of heritage studies (conservation and restoration, politics and tourism, economic development and ecological sustainability, heritage management and training, GIS and digital humanities, etc.) exist about what was and still is going on within and around Angkor Park after its nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992 (see glimpses into this scientific work in epilogue II). The years of the nomination process between 1987 and 1993, however, are rarely treated in detail, but they are, as we argue here, so much more relevant for understanding the present situation: the decisions and definitions in those years heavily predefined the Park’s recent past, present and future representation and exploitation. The reason for this desideratum in scientific research is comparable to the first above-mentioned one: those hundreds of internal work reports and correspondence letters between the various upcoming stakeholders over Angkor Park, now from France to Japan and the United States to Germany and beyond, are until today stored in the archive of what was the major player to manage, direct and coordinate the transformation of Angkor Park into a truly globalised heritage site during those six to seven short years: the UNESCO in Paris. A critical history about UNESCO’s role in turning the planet into a globalized “heritage-scape” (Di Giovine 2009; after Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ theory through cul­tural globali­ sation, see Appadurai 1990, 2005; compare Falser 2015f) gradually started to develop following the symbolic threshold of 2000. However, those enquiries ranged from institutional affirmation from within to critical enquiries from 323

XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

outside the system. These studies recently gained consider- (Winter 2007a, 63). Hugues Tertrais’ edited volume Angkor able ­momentum.1 However, a lot of in-depth analyses into VIIIe–XXIe siècle of 2008 missed the short, but ‘crucial historical moment in-between’ when the volume’s useful contribu­UNESCO’s internal World Heritage machinery still needs to be done, and missing analysis also hinders a critical read­ tions switched from the Khmer Rouge aftermath in the ing of the ‘second life’ of Angkor Park. What is officially 1980s right into the 1992 post-inscription period (Tertrais published about its transformation history around 1990 is 2008). Di Giovine’s 2009 study The heritage-scape. UNESCO, often only based on the circulated master narratives of the world heritage, and tourism, with a comparative study of major international players within the game: a) from the Southeast Asian World Heritage sites, continued to critique French to the Japanese and others, b) of course from “UNESCO’s meta-narrative” of cultural heritage of humanity ­UNESCO itself, c) from the Cambodian Angkor Protection over Angkor Park as an applied way of “performing [neo] Agency APSARA which originated only in 1995, d) from colonialism” through its applied preservation politics, and – the International Coordinating Committee for the Safe- particularly important for the case of Angkor! – its imposed guarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor “politics of danger listing” (Di Giovine 2009, esp. 341–365, (ICC), which was established in 1993, e) through themed 319ff). But again, neither any relevant French sources, nor volumes in expert journals and recent guidebooks to Ang- the role of concrete ­individual players behind the scene, nor kor Park, and finally f) self-congratulating summaries from internal archival material about UNESCO’s and ICOMOS’s the participating conservation teams in the catalogues of involvements were taken in consideration. But for the first grand public exhibitions about Angkor, such as in Paris, Bonn, time, the official evaluation reports were included in this imWashington D.C. and Zurich in 1997, 2007 and 2013.2 portant analysis. Cultural anthropologists, like the eminent In the last ten years, the role of the UNESCO regime Japanese Angkor expert Keiko Miura, engage until today over the cultural heritage site of Angkor received more and with the post- (but not pre-)1992 heritage formation of Ang­ more critical investigation, regarding its institutional and kor Park as regards heritage politics and tourism (Miura legal setup (Kérya 2006, compare Monroe 1995), its effect 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010). In the wider context of the Göttinon “largely monolithic, mono-cultural nationalism and gen University proj­ect World heritage Angkor and beyond NGOization” within the Expressions of Cambodia (Ollier/ (Häuser-Schäublin 2011), Miura and her colleagues analysed Winter 2006, 1–19), and the need of “re-scripting Angkor” applied heritage rhetoric of and changing heritage managewith a robust critique of the “UNESCO-sanctioned rep- ment paradigms for Angkor, such as ‘sustainable development’ resentation of Angkor” (Norindr 2006, 56). Tim Winter’s and ‘living heritage’ (Miura 2011a/b; compare Miura 2015 in important 2007 study about Post-conflict heritage rightly at- Falser 2015). However, the historic, transcultural and multributed the formation of “World Heritage Angkor” (Winter ti-sited production processes of the applied and taken-for-­ 2007a, 47–66; compare Winter 2008b) an imminent role in granted, rather essentialist categories of the supposedly auCambodia’s overall cultural recovery. UNESCO’s pre-1992 thentic ‘local, indigenous, traditional and vernacular’ or of behind-the-scenes role in this process was not investigated. the labels ‘Asian, Cambodian, national or Buddhist’ – often However, he was one of the earliest researchers to call the established through (in our case French-colonial) museums, very early phase after 1992 a “neo-colonial” one. What he exhibitions and ‘archaeological site’ strategies (see chapters reflected upon as “cultures of neo-colonialism” meant in this I–IX) – tend to be overseen during post-1992 on-site research context that Cambodia’s early 1990-vacuum in all aspects of campaigns (we will take up this discussion in epilogue II). cultural heritage was not only filled with a veritable invasion As a trend from the 2010s onwards, massive comparative of international aid structure in the wider context of the studies and handbooks on “Asia” – including Heritage in Asia UNTAC mission. Further, the scenario of an “increasingly (Daly/Winter 2012), Asian heritage management (Silva/ pervasive body of foreign ‘expertise’ [...] epitomized in the Chapagain 2013 with Chapman 2013a), Heritage of ruins, World Heritage infrastructure was put in place for Angkor, The ancient sites of Southeast Asia (Chapman 2013b), Archi[and] the convergence of highly skilled and qualified experts tectural conservation in Asia (Stubbs/Thomson 2016, 201–29) drawn from multiple fields and countries, backed by inter- and UNESCO in Southeast Asia (King 2016, including Miura nationally ratified charters, lay in stark contrast to the mini- 2016a) – cover the world heritage site of Angkor with almost mal resources available in either Siem Reap or Phnom Penh” obligatory, and increasingly similar and standardised, thir1  Above many others compare Turtinen 2000, Gamboni 2001, Harrison/Hitchcock 2005, Smith 2006, Fran-

cioni 2008, Di Giovine 2009, Hoggart 2011, Ferrucci 2012, Cameron/Rössler 2013, Kozyma 2014, Meskell 2014, 2015, Falser 2015a/c, Brumann/Berliner 2016, King 2016, Anatole-Gabriel 2016, Duedahl 2016. 2  For the French see above others Clémentin-Ojha/Manguin 2001, Drège 2003; for the Japanese see Japanese Funds-in-Trust 1996/2003, JSA 1995, 2010, Ishizawa 2006; from UNESCO itself compare UNESCO 1992a, UNESCO Cambodia 1994, Beschaouch 2002a/2003, up to the World Heritage Journal 68 (June 2013) Special issue etc.); the Cambodian Angkor Protection Agency APSARA (Ang/Prenowitz/Thompson 1996); the Angkor-ICC (ICC 1993ff, UNESCO-ICC 2010, 2013); themed volumes such as Museum International 56:224/2004; guides like Laur 2002; and international exhibitions, compare Jessup 1997, Kunsthalle Bonn 2007, Baptiste/Zéphir 2013.

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Introduction

ty-page summaries. However, most of them still argue with gained particular momentum in the Cold and Hot War decades of the 1980s and the early 1990s, when the responsible astonishingly little or no concrete archival research of the Park’s formation years of the French-colonial 1920–50s and World Heritage Committee also started to act independently of the international 1980s until the crucial threshold of the and more and more often against the will of the concerned six to seven years around 1990 before the official and com- state parties or – as we shall see in our case – the expressed pletely globalised rebirth of Angkor Park in 1992/93. Also, opinions of involved advisory experts. It is only logical that little concrete efforts have yet been made to conceptualise this conceptual paradigm shift within UNESCO’s nominathe entangled nature of both park versions. But archival re- tion politics around 1987 (when UNESCO’s new director search into the French-colonial making of the ‘first’ Angkor general came in) will also serve as the chronological starting Park between 1900 and 1970 on the one side, and the rebirth- point of our following analysis – however with very different ing process of its ‘second’ version in the years between 1987 conclusions: the authors of the 2013 publication introduce and 1993 on the other, is of particular importance here: as we “two emotional and controversial cases in this period, Angshall prove in this chapter, many, if not all constituting ele- kor (Cambodia) and Galapagos Islands (Ecuador) [to] ments of an ‘archaeological heritage park’ structure from the demonstrate the positive and beneficial effects [italics MF] of French-colonial and early postcolonial period – from inven- applying a danger listing or using the mechanism of a potentory systems and legal norms to spatial protection boundary tial danger listing to draw global attention and support” concepts, institutional organisation schemes up to the ap- (Cameron/Rössler 2013, 139–141, here 139). We argue that plied hierarchies of aesthetic values and technical approach- the case of Angkor was a veritable ‘fall of mankind’ or point of no return in UNESCO’s global heritage agenda: contrary es of conservation, restoration and reconstruction – had been actively recycled (‘trans-lated’). And once again, French to the much-quoted, supposedly ‘unprecedented success story’ of the 1992 Angkor Park nomination and the subseexpertise was crucial for the actual configuration, but it was now, contrary to in the 1920s to 1960s, poured into a new quent international support structure (see later in this chapglobal mould. In other words, the French longue durée signa- ter and in epilogue II), it was exactly in this nomination process between 1987 and 1993, where we can a) identify ture and entangled nature to produce Angkor Park in the first half of the twentieth century (including French museum probably the first complete misuse of UNESCO’s influence and exhibitions sites as well!) and to rebirth the same site to bolster the institution’s cultural-political “prestige”3 and around 1990 is of great importance here in order to under- leadership claim at the ideological threshold of the Cold stand the ‘trans-cultural nature’ of Angkor Park. War into a new globalised era of heritage politics; b) see how One important publication to tackle those above-men- individual actors on UNESCO’s side, from the director gentioned scientific deficiencies of concrete research into the eral himself to the acting president of the World Heritage behind-the-scene workings in the context of Angkor is the Committee (nota bene: in collaboration with the highest 2013 study Many voices, one vision: The early years of the representative of Cambodia) exerted their power to dictate World Heritage Convention by Christina Cameron and a rushed nomination procedure against UNESCO’s own esMechtild Rössler, both active and important players within tablished procedure, and, even worse, against the opinions UNESCO’s heritage agenda. Besides a self-congratulating of contracted experts of the a­ ffiliated advisory bodies;4 and undertone regarding the visionary beginnings of UNESCO’s c) understand how the ­UNESCO network, with its affiliated, World Heritage programme (hence the title), the publication multi-national expert cultures, instrumentalised an exaggeroffers, with unpublished internal material and additional ated rhetoric of ‘emergency’ to de facto perpetuate its local interviews with key figures, precious insights into the unof- influence at the site far beyond any – per definition time-limficial workings of the changing value structures, different ited – ­international ‘emergency aid’ structures. individual players, political-diplomatic power games and Only in the last years and often informed by studies of often ambivalent decision processes behind the official anthropology and institutional ethnography, critique of nomination process. Of particular interest is the section on UNESCO, with its hidden power structures and dubious UNESCO’s applied politics of the “Danger Listing” of natu- decision-making processes, underwent a crucial turn toral and cultural sites (Cameron/Rössler 2013, 135–51; com- wards a more systematic analysis of the organisation’s mulpare Buzzini/Condorelli 2008). This trend understandably ti-layered and multi-centred nature (Brumann 2012; com3  Internal documents quoted in the following will show how internal experts (such as Minja Yang and ­ yndel Prott in 1992) were wary of (ab)using “Angkor [to] bring the greatest prestige to UNESCO” and L ­“ignor[ing] the non-conformity of the nomination with the [existing] guidelines” and “very delicate political difficulties with other States” (see references later in this chapter). 4 A highlight in Cameron/Rössler’s frank moment of analysis is evidence of the internal pressure that ­UNESCO’s director general, Federico Mayor, and the president of the World Heritage Committee, Mayor’s personal advisor for Angkor and later even the leading personality of the ICC-Angkor, Azedine Beschaouch, exerted over affiliated experts, like the contracted ICOMOS evaluator, Henry Cleere, during the final decision meeting at Santa Fe, USA, in December 1992 in order to nominate the site.

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pare Brumann 2014/2017, Brumann/Berliner 2016, see below). Recent studies investigated UNESCO’s “international political pacting, national economic interests, and voting blocs [and] the politics of conservation and endangerment”, and concluded that “the ideal of collective responsibility, once so central to the ideals of the Convention, is losing ground” and that UNESCO’s “World Heritage Committee’s disregard for the Advisory Bodies recommendations has continued unabated” (Meskell 2014, 221, 226; compare Meskell 2015a). The last observation is certainly true in the case of the nomination of Angkor Park, but we argue that UNESCO’s argument par excellence – ‘collective responsibility to protect a cultural heritage of humanity’ – did not lose momentum, but to the contrary was more and more instrumentalised as a kind of ‘benevolent killer argument’ by various interest groups. In the case of Angkor, this started in the 1980s when the slogan ‘heritage of humanity’ was already mimicked by the exiled, Paris-based Khmer Rouge in order to regain territorial influence over Cambodia during the Vietnamese occupation (see chapter XI). As we mapped out recently, the classic argument of a de facto ‘neo-colonial civilising mission in the medium of cultural heritage’ (Falser 2015a–c; compare ­Anatole-Gabriel 2016, 275–3105) was now brought to the forefront by ­UNESCO’s own prestige-driven individual players themselves. They referred to their UN agency’s initial raison d’être: in all too harmonious complicity with the various collaborating old and new – non-Cambodian – lobby groups from India and Poland to France and Japan, Hungary to the United States, etc., the argument of a ‘helping humanitarian hand in times of national (Cambodian) crisis’ was de facto instrumentalised to secure their long-term share over prestigious Angkor Park far beyond any ad hoc emergency measures. Yes, formations of truly Global ­heritage (see the title of Meskell 2015b) like Angkor Park after 1992 may serve – as in this last chapter of this book – as a perfect case study within the recent trend of “ethnographic fieldwork to archival and econometric analyses [to] trace the capillary networks surrounding heritage projects from its precise local embedding, radiating out to ­national arenas, and into the global circuits through which such projects gain traction and leverage” (Meskell 2015b, 2, 6). But we should be reminded about one crucial fact about the recent global turn in heritage studies: the very character of Angkor Park as a truly “global icon” (after Gosh 2011) in the medium of cultural heritage did not at all start with the site’s nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List

in 1992. Rather – and this is why we have eleven chapters leading to this present last one – the nomination of Angkor and the park’s subsequent commodification (see epilogue II) were only a final culmination point of a 150-year transcultural trajectory of ‘Angkor’ through multi-sited – indeed global – space. This global career of Angkor had even begun in the high Angkorian thirteenth century, when a Chinese pilgrim called Zhou Daguan visited Angkor (Abel-­ Rémusat 1819, Smithies 2001). It continued in the sixteenth century with Spanish visits and in the seventeenth century when a Japanese visitor drew the first annotated plan of Angkor Wat (see Pl. IX.1, in Peri 1923). Certainly, this global career accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a series of European explorative missions to the spot, and it continued before and after 1900 (a threshold which is today often conceptualised as a first great moment of ‘globalisation’) with variform ‘trans-la­ tions and re-presentations’ of the glorious temples of Angkor (most often Angkor Wat) in museums and exhibition grounds in Europe (see chapters I–VIII) and in Cambodia’s western neighbours, Siam and lately India (see epilogue I). To take our above-formulated argument of the entangled nature of Angkor one step further, ‘Global Angkor’ as an ‘archaeological theme park’ was prefigured in its first French-colonial and Cambodian-nationalist super-ver­sion between roughly 1900 and 1970 (chapters IX and X), further turned more global before UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention of 1972 was even issued, and was highjacked (when this Convention was out and gained popularity) as a ‘cultural heritage of humanity’ by the most anti-humanitarian, genocidal regime of the exiled – above all, UN-acknowledged (!) – Khmer Rouge regime in the 1980s (chapter XI). Without a doubt, the recent acceleration of the World Heritage regime – particularly during and after the end of the Cold War period – added a new facet to our enquiry, and approaches of “multilateral ethnography” help us to map out the complex processes of how cultural sites like Angkor are negotiated in “structured arenas” such as the World Heritage regime: Christoph Brumann’s work reminds us about “the amorphous social environment of the UNESCO World Heritage that cannot be simply summarised as ‘an organisation’ [and that] there is a whole array of such bodies, tied to each other through a set of procedures but with neither of them in exclusive control” (Brumann 2012, 2, 4). In this vein, our chapter will try to chart out the complex network of a) involved expert cultures (compare Fig. XII.1), of b) the concrete actors behind all

5  In the chapter “Angkor, entre universalité et identité: un oxymorone patrimonial”, Anatole-Gabriel describes,

in her interesting study about the fabrication history of UNESCO World Heritage between 1945 and 1992 (the year of the Angkor nomination), how the French-made superlatives of the cultural grandeur and universal standing of Angkor since the nineteenth century merge with a parallel, typically Western rhetoric of salvaging the site from decay and finally collide with the World Heritage-making process of Angkor. How­ever, the omission of English scientific research literature on the topic is disturbing (not a single, other then French, source is quoted), as much as all short glimpses into UNESCO’s engagement for Angkor are, again, void of any primary (archival) sources from the 1980s onwards.

326

Introduction

the national and diplomatic power and interest groups under the UNESCO umbrella, and of c) the supposedly applied standards, routines and rhetoric at play around the making of Angkor as World Heritage. Drawing on earlier approaches of “multi-sited fieldwork in and of the World System” (Marcus 1995), Brumann votes for a three-fold approach to understand the working of the World Heritage arena: a) “participant observation” by attending the “relatively public sphere of the official meetings” of the World Heritage Committee around the world, b) “formal interviews”, by “meeting the various World Heritage protagonists”, and c) “documentary analysis” of the “related texts of all kinds, written in the World Heritage discourse [such as] manuals and newsletters to magazine articles and protest letters”, by examining their “recurring rhetorical figures, tacit assumptions, and blind spots” (Brumann 2012, 7–14). Considering all three levels very important elements, we may critically ask the old questions always posed to ethnographers: What if a) all decisions which are supposedly negotiated in the semi-public sphere of World Heritage meetings just sanction officially what has been decided months, weeks, days or even hours before behind closed doors? In our case, the World Heritage meeting to decide upon Angkor Park as UNESCO World Heritage was held in Santa Fe in the United States in December 1992, and preserved minutes from the meeting clearly show that nominating Angkor was already decided beforehand and was imposed with heavy pressure by UNESCO’s representative against any expert opinion of ICOMOS and against the dissenting voting members from Thailand and the United States (Cameron/Rössler 2012, 139–41). What if b) interviews with the principle actors from UNESCO or ICOMOS just tell the interviewer in rhetorical shells what he/she intends to hear (compare official interviews with UNESCO’s director general, Federico Mayor, in this chapter) or simply reconfirm the absurd power structure at play (see Henry Cleere’s shocking statements quoted below)? And what if c) the consulted published material just covers – by their very controlled, censored and therefore flattened nature – only a secondary reality of the World Heritage regime (see our following evaluations of the various workshop and conference proceedings)? Brumann himself is well aware of the evident deficit involved as the “access to top-level decision-making [the de facto primary reality, MF,] is hindered by the tacit or explicit conditions of confidentiality” (Brumann 2012, 7). In our case, as in many comparable other World Heritage site processes, as we argue, one more element must be added to scientific research in order to counter-balance what heritage politicians declare in their full-bodied press meeting rhetoric

(hence the introductory quote from a famous Austrian journalist): archival data. As colonial regimes often did in the past with astonishing accuracy (the Archive of French Overseas History in Aix-en-Provence is full of historic material about the French-colonial making of Angkor from 1900 until the decolonising 1950s), so do neo-colonial regimes (as UNESCO itself was repeatedly termed by critical voices) in the present: Despite what may strike external participant observers, engaged interviewers and attentive official report readers as a hidden, complex power structure, hasty internal decision-making processes, and a glib, official, politically correct (in this latter case, humanitarian) rhetoric, UNESCO follows – internally – the strict logic of painstakingly preserving the institutional longue durée processes of the conception, discussion and application of its action programmes. Like other important UN agencies from New York to Vienna, UNESCO in Paris is documenting (almost) all its internal actions and depositing them (almost) un-hier­archized and uncensored in the shelves of its (almost) neutral archive. Again, it is surprising that almost no systematic research and evaluation had been made in the UNESCO archive in order to flesh out the behind-the-scenes process that brought Angkor to the World Heritage List between 1987 and 1993. It is in this context that the present chapter intends to evaluate for the first time this analogue data from the pre-digital era of several hundreds of hand- and typewritten sheets of papers, ranging from telefaxes, press cuts and visual material (photographs, maps, paper clippings, etc.), including minutes and reports of internal working steps, sectorial meetings and incoming/outgoing correspondence, (un)official visits from individuals (politicians, diplomats, technical experts, etc.) and various interest groups (national commissions, associations), press meetings and exhibitions, and planned and/or accomplished field missions. With this approach, this chapter intends to provide totally new evidence in order to trace the multi-centred and multi-layered trajectory of what ‘global Angkor’ constituted around 1990. It will help to correct official narratives (such as the unquestioned ‘success story’ of Angkor as World Heritage itself to begin with), and to localise and provincialize (after Chakrabarty 2000), chronologise and personalise, and therefore diversify the complex agenda of an abstract regime called UNESCO, which brought Angkor to the World Heritage List with such incredible speed and against all obstacles. Additionally, we are convinced that a clearer picture of those decisive years around 1990 will also create a better understanding of what – after the 1992 nomination of Angkor – “world heritage [made] on the ground” (after Brumann 20166) in and around Angkor Park itself. As

6  In her contribution “Thinking globally and acting locally in Angkor”, Keiko Miura summarizes how the

applied UNESCO World Heritage regime after 1992 creates tensions and new challenges inside and around Angkor Park, but pre-1992 archival material is again missing as well as any reference to the entangled nature of the French-(post)colonial formation of Angkor Park, which predefined so many aspects of the actual setting (Miura 2016b; compare with Miura 2015 and Falser 2015c).

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we shall see in epilogue II, this data helps to better contextualise the ongoing debate about the recent, actual and future challenges, tensions and conflicts as much as the achievements and challenges at the concrete locality of a global heritage icon called Ang­kor Park. Within the book’s whole analysis of the transcultural heritage formation of Angkor from about 1860 to the 2010s, this chapter covers the short but eminently important time span of a mere six to seven years between 1987 and 1993. It is structured year-by-year into six sub-chapters to summarise the major developmental steps towards the making of Angkor as World Heritage. It will cover 1) UNESCO’s paradigm change towards ‘heritage-in-emergency politics’ during the last breath of Cold War (1987/88), including the role of the new director general, Federico Mayor, who made the case of Angkor his own Chefsache; 2) the first ‘Appeals

for Angkor’ and the first UNESCO actions for the site in 1989; 3) the incipient process of the international and indeed competitive rush to ‘save Angkor’ in 1990; 4) the role and concrete actions of the Cambodian Vann Molyvann to propose Angkor in a transculturally embedded management plan and of UNESCO’s director general, Mayor, to bring Angkor to more global attention with his pathetic Appeal for Angkor in November 1991 in front of Angkor Wat (see Pl. XII.10); 5) the behind-the-scenes context to push Angkor onto the World Heritage List (of Danger) in 1992, with dubious internal pressure tactics and against UNESCO’s own rules and standards; and finally 6) the process to secure Angkor’s globalised status through an international control mechanism, far beyond a time-limited emergency action programme, with the aim of eternalising an international ‘help and control structure’ over Angkor.

1. 1987—1988: UNESCO’s campaign strategies, the blocked entry to Angkor and the return of the substitute called “plaster cast” As discussed in the previous chapter, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow’s engagement with UNESCO as its director general between 1974 and 1987 fell during the peak stage of Cold War politics. At the end of the 1980s, the situation had changed. UNESCO’s next leader would have to tackle the difficult dynamics of the last gasp of this global confrontation, as well as the complexities of adapting UNESCO’s strategies within the educational, scientific and cultural sectors to transitory ideological challenges. As we shall see in this chapter, Angkor Park played a central role over a five-year period as the testing ground for a new form of global heritage politics; the key person in this dynamic was Federico Mayor, the director general of UNESCO from 15 November 1987 to 1999.7 His first project as DG can be summarised here as a process of ‘standardising exceptionalism’. This was meant to formalise UNESCO’s elitist policies of ‘safeguarding’ the so-called universal heritage of humankind into procedure. Not least in the context of Ang­ kor, an important twist in this were the new topoi of ‘emergency’ and ‘threat’, which became fixed strategic elements for the global politics of identifying and nominating sites around the globe for enrolment on the World Heritage List.

It was certainly no surprise that at the very same UNESCO General Conference in Paris, held from 20 October to 20 November 1987, where Mayor was officially elected DG, the “Strategy for international campaigns to safeguard significant aspects of the common cultural heritage of mankind”8 was adopted. As part of the “Major Programme XI: Culture and Future”, the International Safeguarding Campaigns Programme was conceived as a “policy document to guide Member States and the Secretariat [to] apply the provisions of the strategy to all existing and new international safeguarding campaigns” and to move from an initial strategy plan to the formulation of an “appeal”, fundraising, and implementation (UNESCO 1987b, 89). Despite hopes for smooth international safeguard-and-emergency campaigning, Mayor was soon confronted with its complete non-applicability in the case of Angkor: the occupying Vietnamese were not acknowledged by the United Nations, the conflicting parties had not signed the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention nor were they willing to ask UNESCO for help on a neutral basis for Angkor, and last but not least, the site itself was not yet on the World Heritage List. Therefore the site was not a ‘listed

7  Mayor’s previous roles included working as a Spanish molecular biologist, as an advisor to the Spanish

prime minister, as a member of the European Parliament, and as deputy DG of UNESCO from 1978 to 1981 and special advisor from 1983 to 1984. 8  Keywords within the so-called “Development process for an international campaign” included: “coordinating mechanisms involving the highest officers of the government, a substantial resource commitment from the initiating state, an adequate quantity of high-quality technical information about the site, an informed and supportive national and local population, a comprehensive strategy and section plan developed for the campaign, and a rigorous review process throughout the course of the campaign”. Those steps were included in following phases I to IV: Agreement on procedure, development of the campaign strategy and the campaign action plan (including its final step of “appeal made and campaign launched”) to fundraising and implementation (UNESCO 1987a, annex II).

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1. 1987—1988: UNESCO’s campaign strategies, the blocked entry to Angkor …

Figure XII.1  Sketch in Note pour le dossier Angkor by Étienne Clément on 29 June 1988 to contextualise the current political and diplomatic situation between UNESCO’s headquarter in Paris and its planned action in Cambodia (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

prop­erty’ and would not count – along UNESCO’s own above-mentioned definitions – as an ‘endangered property to be salvaged’. Indeed, la question d’Angkor Wat (see previous chapter) was one of Mayor’s first concerns when he took office. In late February 1988, UNESCO’s Office of International Norms and Juridical Affairs assured Mayor that the instrument of the 1954 Hague Convention was not very useful; 9 this led him to form a ‘Working Group on Angkor’ under the coordination of Anne Raidl (director of the Cultural Heritage Division), along with Khamliène Nhouyvanis­ vong, de San, Y. Raj Isar and Étienne Clément (the latter two from the International Standards Unit). Interestingly, it was this very debate that first conceptualised Angkor within UNESCO’s new power structure as part of a transcultural history of heritage in a Euro-Asian contact zone. In its work meeting held on 11 March 1988, the group ­finally abandoned “the idea of Angkor as a neutralised zone”10 at the real spot in Asia, since its unpredictable status made any concrete UNESCO intervention unlikely;

and thus measures to re-valorise substituting sources ‘back in Europe/France’ were reintroduced to the debate. It comes as no surprise that all French protagonists from the earlier 1980s (compare previous chapter) at this point returned to the stage: this included the French Association des Amis d’Angkor (with Bernadette Puiseux and Yves Malécot as actors on the French Committee of UNICEF and Claude Jacques, professor of the École pratique des Hautes Études and former EFEO member), François Grünewald (agronomist and France’s agent in Phnom Penh), the musée Guimet (with its director, Albert Le Bonheur) and the EFEO (with its director, François Gros). This dense web made up of French ex-colonial institutions, old French experts and new amateurs, international agencies and local cultural brokers in cultural heritage diplomacy was charted out in Clément’s Note pour le dossier Angkor on 29 June 1988 (Fig. XII.1).11 His task list included “collecting all documentation about Angkor scattered around France and beyond”, and it also espoused a strategy that would allow for a real physical grasp of Angkor at a time

9  27 January 1988, Office des normes internationales et des affaires juridiques (M. Paszkowski, Directeur p.i.)

to DG Mayor, “Objet: Angkor Wat” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

10  Report of a task force meeting on 11 March 1988 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–

1989). 11  “Note pour le dossier Angkor” by Étienne Clément on 29 June 1988 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

when the ‘real temples’ were not accessible to the French. This was effected through the rediscovery of a substitutive element used in French-colonial museums and exhibitions (when Angkor was not yet part of le Cambodge) that now re-emerged as part of the new political agenda: the plaster casts of Angkor. Originating from Delaporte’s musée Indochinois in the Parisian Trocadero Palace from the mid1880s to 1925, the casts were, according to Clément, “still badly stored in insufficient conditions in the Abbey of Saint-Riquier” in the Somme/Picardie region to the north of Paris (see Pl. III.16a,b). Inherited by the musée Guimet and neglected and disregarded for decades, they were now judged “a significant part of the ‘Mémoire d’Angkor’, [that] deserved better conditions of storage, as they might eventually be restored, exhibited and studied”.12 Of particular interest in this context is the June 1988 summary created for UNESCO entitled “Angkor Wat: Moulds housed in Saint-Riquier (Somme, France)”. In it Le Bonheur highlighted the above-mentioned transcultural connection: it marked the start of a process through which the value of Delaporte’s casts would be slowly redefined from a secondary source for Khmer art to a primary source for French-­ colonial collection histories. From this point of view, the casts were seen as being part of the ‘shared’ cultural heritage and memory between Cambodia and France (compare Falser 2013a, 2016b): This mould collection is unique in the world, and practically unknown. The casts have acquired an inestimable value because of the degradation or even disappearance of a number of those monuments. For instance, a decoration on a pediment of Angkor [Wat] cast at the end of the last century, had already disappeared when photos were taken in 1929/32 for the first monograph prepared for the Temple, published by the EFEO. One can imagine the damage of this collection since this period, bearing in mind the extreme fragility of most surfaces sculpted in sandstone. These remarkable plasters — unique pieces because they were obtained by breaking the clay moulds — are for the most part taken on bas-reliefs. This collection of moulds constitutes a non-replaceable documentation on monumental Khmer heritage, which is presently threatened and inaccessible. It is also, in some ­contexts, a part of French patrimony and testimony of forgotten “know-how”. […] Since the moulds are poorly stored in reserve cellars of St. Riquier, it is hoped that an adequate building will be found for their display. A workshop should also be planned for their restoration by qualified technicians. Since the moulds represent a museum, a documentation centre on monuments should

be set up in parallel (with photos) so as to attract a wider public. […] If funds permit, recasting the moulds in a lighter and more resistant material could be envisaged. At present, it would be useful to obtain funds from sponsors to finance a display building and workshop, and then the services of technicians. [italics MF] (Le Bonheur 1988)

Despite the country’s restricted access to the famous temple site, this excerpt proves that Angkor was still considered a French legacy, a French lieu de mémoire (see introduction). However, the rediscovery of the value of plaster casts must be contextualised within a larger European trend in the 1980s. As discussed in the introduction of this book, groups such as the International Committee for Museology ICOFOM, with its 1985 Zagreb symposium, Originals and substitutes in museums (Sofka/Schärer 1985), ­certainly influenced the postcolonial debate in France, and a presentation by René Dumont (Dumont 1988), previously conservateur-adjoint des monuments d’Angkor, at the ­international Paris conference Le Moulage in 1987 also touched upon the plaster casts from Angkor. It was also during this 1987 conference that the French ICOMOS president, Michel Parent, evoked the rather colonial topos of French responsibility for both the Angkor plaster cast collection in France and for the original site: “There are now two sites of Angkor in this world. It is [one] patrimoine universel” (Association 1988, 125). This view was also highlighted in Le Bonheur’s engagement with the cast collection (Bonheur 1988), his UNESCO-co-financed P ­ aris exhibition Angkor: Un patrimoine mondial à protéger (compare Pl. XI.29 and the catalogue Cambodge-Angkor: Temples en péril) in fall 1989 (Bonheur 1989, see previous chapter), and the musée Guimet’s initiatives to restore the surviving casts from Angkor and re-exhibit them in 2013 (Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, Falser 2013; see introduction to this book and the end of chapter III). This transcultural connectivity between the ‘original’ site and its forms of physical and political ‘re-presentation’, became apparent once again in 1992 when the French journal Connaissance des Arts published a special dossier on Cambodge (see later in this chapter, compare Fig. XII.11b with Pl. III.16a,b, 17). The preparative expert group for Mayor’s meeting with Son Sann in Paris on 22 July 1988, however, still saw insurmountable obstacles for a neutralised Angkor zone. Mayor informed Perez de Cuellar in New York that he intended to formulate a message about UNESCO’s readiness to assist with the Jakarta Informal Meeting of all Cambodian factions, which was to be held a few weeks later (July 1988 and again in February 1989).13 As an alternative, the Indonesian

12  “Rapport du groupe de travail sur Angkor (mai 1988)” by Anne Raidl (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier

CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

13  Telegram of Mayor to J. Mehan, UNESCO-UN liaison office at New York, 22 July 1988 (UNESCO Ar-

chives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

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2. 1989: Appeals for Angkor and UNESCO’s first action

minister of foreign affairs suggested placing the region of Angkor under the “symbolic protection of UNESCO”.14 From 10 to 21 October 1988, Clément continued to carry out his mission “to prepare the terrain for [future] safeguarding actions”, not under UNESCO but through the UNICEF office for Kampuchea and the regional UNESCO Principal Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (PROAP) in Bangkok. There he met, among others, Prince Diskul, the director

of the SEAMEO Regional Center for Architecture and Fine Arts (SPAFA), an organisation that was founded after the failure of the Khmer Republican initiative for ARCAFA (see previous chapter). Later, Clément travelled to New Delhi where he met with the directors of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the ASI (Clément 1988). At this point in time, UNESCO’s own action at Angkor was ready to be put in place.

2. 1989: Appeals for Angkor and UNESCO’s first action The subsequent UNESCO missions for Angkor mirrored the rapid diplomatic rapprochements between Hun Sen and the Coalition Government and, on a larger scale, between China and the Soviet Union in their mutual agreements to withdraw financial and military support for the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam.15 Taking a rather optimistic tone, Henri Lopès – the former prime minister of Congo, now UNESCO’s assistant DG for culture and a very influential actor in the case of Angkor – reassured Mayor about the “good future conditions”: after an agreement had been fixed, the workgroup could – according to the above-mentioned standards for UNESCO’s safeguarding campaigns – now “proceed to phase 2” to develop a concrete campaign strategy.16 In his 1989 report “Angkor: État actuel et perspectives”, Claude Jacques explained to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (EFEO’s umbrella organisation, compare chapter IX) that he had returned to Angkor in late January 1989 with René Dumont under the aegis of the Paris-based Association des Amis d’Angkor (Jacques 1989). His second stay from 10 to 25 May 1989 occurred in his new role as Mayor’s consultant on Angkor. His Rapport sur le monument d’Angkor (11 au 25 mai 1989) was finally delivered as a fifteen-page typescript to UNESCO (Jacques 1989) and indicates how dramatically the situation at Angkor had changed for the old exclusive French-colonial players on site. Perhaps for the first time in French intellectual and institutional history at Angkor, an EFEO-related mission report was submitted to a UN institution (based in Paris), but was also carried out in official collaboration with a new player in the region – Japan. This included its representa-

tive Yoshiaki Ishizawa, who had been active on-site since the early 1980s (compare Ishizawa 1981ff). In Phnom Penh, the French-Japanese mission was received by Cheng Phon and Sok An.17 Additionally, Sœng Kong, director of the International Relations Office, and Pich Keo, back from Russia and now directeur des recherches at the Ministry of Culture, accompanied the team to Angkor. The report repeated the criticisms levelled at the Indian team’s cleaning of Ang­ kor Wat, censuring its use of chemicals and “hard brushes”, as well as its “brutal manner” in readjusting or reconstructing the temple’s stone layers (compare Pl. XI.27a–c; 28a,b). The “recommendations” made by both experts in this ­UNESCO report referred to the insufficient Indian and Polish arrangements on-site and claimed again – rather transparently – that the universal value of Angkor had to be globally defended; a rhetoric that, of course, also served to justify their own nations’ involvement in any future international ‘Safeguarding Angkor’ programme. In what could be critically interpreted as a rather neo-colonial dispossession strategy, the report concluded by incapacitating Cambodia’s own natural (i.e., national) role in managing its own site on its own terms in the present and in the future, and at whatever pace was deemed appropriate. The slogan “Angkor belongs to the whole [of] humanity” – an offshoot of the new internationalist paradigm of ‘coordination and exchange’ – was introduced here and would resonate in many future emergency appeals to ‘Save Angkor’ (Falser 2015c). Indeed, soon after (see below), this line of argumentation led almost directly to the creation of an International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the History Site of Angkor (ICC-Ang­

14  “Coopération avec le Kampuchéa Démocratique (entretien avec Son Sann)”, draft 21 July 1988 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989). 15  Relevant in this context is the fact that the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited his Chinese counterpart Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in May 1989 and that the Tiananmen Square incident in June isolated China internationally. 16  Lopès to DG Mayor on 18 January 1989 on “Objet: Angkor – État de la question et proposition d’action” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55 (1989–1992). 17  Sok An was vice-minister of foreign affairs under Hun Sen’s government and president of Cambodia’s National Committee for UNESCO. He later served as deputy prime minister and director of the APSARA National Authority for Angkor (see later in this chapter and in epilogue II).

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kor) comprising virtually hundreds of international experts in teams from Japan, China, Indonesia, India, the United States, and all over Europe: Nobody doubts that the monument of Angkor belongs to the cultural foundations of the whole humanity and it is evident that UNESCO, at a moment in which Cambodia itself is not able to undertake its conservation, must play an important rule. Until now, India and Poland have signed agreements with the Khmer government at Phnom Penh with regard to the conservation of the two most important monuments of the whole group, Angkor Wat and the Bayon. […] Certainly, other countries wish to participate in the conservation of the monuments of Angkor. First, France, of course, which held the guardianship over Angkor for decades, and Japan which has already made a number of missions, the United States, the Soviet Union, Australia, Italy, Thailand, etc. Between all these countries, a coordination is absolutely necessary for the division of the tasks [répartition des tâches] and the exchange of experiences. [italics MF] (Ishizawa/Jacques 1989, 11, 12)

With Cambodia’s invaders from the east (Vietnam) withdrawing, the country’s western neighbour sent a rather promising message: the Thai government’s extraordinary symposium of senior Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian officials in Bangkok in April 1989. According to the New York Times report on the event, the Thai prime minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, declared “that the decades of military and ideological conflict in the region were ending, and ‘there must no longer be two Southeast Asias’, one socialist and backward, the other capitalist and booming”. Furthermore, he circulated his intention “to turn Indochina ‘from a battlefield into a marketplace’” (Erlanger 1989). This declaration certainly affected the next meeting between Sihanouk and Hun Sen, which took place shortly afterwards in Jakarta. Subsequent international conferences on Kampuchea and the redefinition of Hun Sen’s PRK into the State of Cambodia in April 1989 facilitated UNESCO’s direct collaboration with the Phnom Penh government. Cambodia’s representative, Ok Sakun, sent a list of documents to Mayor on 20 July 1989 to adjust to this ‘new’ political line. For Ok Sakun, an affiliate of a Khmer Rouge ideology – one which had previously downgraded Angkor during Khmer Rouge terror (1975–79) and only mimicked a cultural heritage rhetoric during exile (1979–89) –, delivering the “general principles of a new constitution of Cambodia after its liberation” must have been a bitter pill to swallow. Now its

preamble stated that “the Cambodian people – inheritors of a brilliant thousand-year-old civilisation [héritier d’une brillante civilisation plurimillénaire] evidenced by the marvellous monuments of Angkor – proclaim its determination to preserve its national identity forever” (compare Jen­nar 1994, 100). Additionally, Ok Sakun sent details of the new flag and coat-of-arms (compare above), which not surprisingly included Angkor Wat imagery as a “symbol of the nation, the civilisation and the grandeur of Cambodia”.18 Despite the fact that the Paris Peace Conference on Cambodia (30 July to 30 August 1989) was chaired by France and Indonesia, it did not bring about an immediate political breakthrough between the four Cambodian parties gathered at the table, and cultural heritage was only one element in the global efforts to reconstruct the country. In the full documentation of the event, three statements are particularly interesting in the context of Angkor. During his opening statement on 31 July, Natwar Singh, minister of state for the external affairs of India – like his colleagues in the mid-1980s (see previous chapter) – referred to his country’s “long and multifaceted historical – [also] cultural – links with Southeast Asia” and suggested that the “recognition of the symbolic importance of the monument to the Cambodian nation had inspired India to undertake the restoration of the temple complex at Angkor over the last years” (Acharya 1991, 106). This was more culturally essentialist than Son Sann’s communication from 16 August about the “restoration of Cambodia’s sociocultural infrastructure”, as it included “the restoration, safeguard, defence and protection of the national heritage of Angkor [as] a neutral and demilitarised zone [and] a site of touristic predilection and an integrative part of the patrimoine de l’humanité” (Acharya 1991, 282). The United Nations itself made things far more explicit. By 9 August it had already compiled and presented an impressive 167§-long catalogue of possible measures to help Cambodia. Besides humanitarian, economic and social aspects, UNESCO’S ‘C’ for “culture” was added to Mayor’s list: “the French and Japanese technical expert missions to Angkor in 1989” and the upcoming ‘Round Table’ were mentioned, the “immediate risk of the buildings’ collapse, such as at Angkor Wat” were dramatised, and UNESCO’s resolve to “supervise” the international projects after a “global settlement” of the Cambodian conflict was reconfirmed (Acharya 1991, 256–58). And it was in this sense that Mayor concluded the rather unsuccessful event by demanding that “special attention be given to the preservation and restoration of archaeological monuments, especially those of Angkor [as part of] a common heritage of mankind [and a] basis of a genuine national reconciliation”.19

18  Ok Sakun’s letter to Mayor with “documents for the Paris conference on 30 July 1989” on 20 July 1989

(UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

19  “Statement of the secretary-general at the opening of the conference on peace in Cambodia (Paris, 30 July

1989)” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989).

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2. 1989: Appeals for Angkor and UNESCO’s first action

The most crucial event for Angkor’s future occurred only a few days after the Paris conference, during Siha­ nouk’s visit to UNESCO on 1 September 1989. According to the protocol, the gathering included Ok Sakun, Kech Sisoda from the prince’s cabinet, and L. Marques, K. Nhouyvanis­ vong and Minja Yang for UNESCO. While Mayor took up UNESCO’s role regarding “culture” in general, his main personal concern is obvious in Yang’s overall summary of the meeting: “While a quick reference was made to the educational needs of the Kampuchean people, the discussions centred around the issue of the safeguard of Angkor.”20 Mayor, “receiving the Prince alone for twenty minutes for an informal dialogue before the other participants joined the meeting”, directly asked the prince for his consent for UNESCO’s activities on the spot (and not vice versa, as it was later reported). The more detailed internal minutes of this meeting have demystified the leading role played by Sihanouk as the supposed initiator of Angkor’s enrolment on UNESCO’s World Heritage List: The Director General received Prince Norodom Sihanouk on 1 September 1989 at UNESCO Headquarters. During this meeting, which lasted over an hour, the results of UNESCO’s technical mission to Angkor in May 1989 were discussed. […] While a quick reference was made to the educational needs of the Kampuchean people, the discussions centred around the issue of the safeguard of Angkor. […] 5. While indicating that this meeting was not [sic] a working session, the DG referred to the observations and recommendations of UNESCO’s technical mission to Angkor in May 1989, thanking the Prince for agreeing to the dispatch of this mission. 6. The DG stressed the need for immediate action to strengthen the ongoing restoration efforts which have only received limited international assistance [...] 7. Assuring the Prince that UNESCO’s relations with the UN-recognised Coalition Government will remain unchanged, the DG requested the Prince’s for his consent for UNESCO to assume international coordination of activities for the safeguard and restoration of the Angkor monuments and to carry out through indirect means the most urgent tasks required to minimise the risks of irreparable damage. 8. The Prince, stating that Angkor was “not only a heritage of the Khmer people, but of mankind”, agreed to UNESCO taking on the responsibility of international coordination “outside all

political considerations”. He agreed to UNESCO organ­ ising a technical round table for Khmer and international experts on the restoration of Angkorian monuments, UNESCO involvement in a survey and inventory of the Angkor complex and objects of the National Museum, assistance to the international (i.e., Indian and Polish) conservation teams and the training of Khmers in conservation skills. […] 9. The Prince thanked UNESCO for its concern and expressed his hope for punctual measures to safeguard the Angkor monuments. 10. Ambassador Ok Sakun attributed the destruction of the monuments to the Vietnamese and stated that the site of the Ang­ kor complex was situated in militarily contested zones. Prince Sihanouk, however, did not follow-up on the Ambassador’s comments. 11. The meeting ended with an exchange of gifts between Prince Sihanouk and the DG, and with the Prince’s signature in the DG’s guest book.21 [italics, bolding MF]

As indicated in the same internal report, an additional informal meeting was conducted with “Mr. Cham Prasith, Vice-Minister of the Cabinet of the Council of Ministers of the Phnom Penh government to ensure that the Phom Penh authorities would not object to UNESCO’s international coordination role even if it can not [sic] lead to any official relations with his government. Mr Cham Prasidth, stating that his government understood the inability for UNESCO to work directly or officially with Phnom Penh, would nevertheless welcome any UNESCO assistance through unofficial or indirect channels. He assured UNESCO that his government had no intention of politicising the issue and that UNESCO action should be carried out by non-governmental organisations and by the Indian and Polish conservation teams”.22 On 4 September, Minja Yang, the head of the UNESCO Task Force on Cambodia from 1991 onwards, briefed PROAP in Bangkok about Mayor’s interest in Angkor. What became clear from her letter was (a) the self-imposed pressure to act “as soon as possible in case of further deterioration in the political climate” and (b) the diplomatic rhetoric of the supposedly apolitical, “technical” focus of “indirect assistance” with help from France and Japan. UNESCO’s political ‘now-or-never’ manoeuvring through so-called “immediate indirect activities” was sketched out by mid-September in an internal communiqué from the Paris HQ. Called “Notes for the Direction

20  “Subject: UNESCO’s role in the safeguard of Angkor monuments”, edited minutes by Minja Yang, 4 Sep-

tember 1989, sent to the deputy director of PROAP Bangkok, (UNESCO Archives Paris, Angkor 55). And she continued: “Although this [Sihanouk’s agreement] does not mean that UNESCO can officially work with the Phnom Penh authorities, the path is now clear for UNESCO to assist indirectly the activities taken by the Indian and Polish teams as well as the work of NGOs.” 21  “Meeting between Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the director general (1 September 1989), edited minutes by Minja Yang, 4 September 1989” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989). 22  See above.

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

générale on Angkor”,23 its introductory statement ignored UNESCO’s own two-phased planning of emergency campaigns devised in 1987 (see above) and underscored its desire for recognition and prestige: 1. The “international coordination role” for the safeguard and restoration of the Angkor monuments, entrusted in UNESCO by all warring factions is not only a great challenge and opportunity for this institution, but represents a major political breakthrough in the otherwise grim current state of affairs in the process for a negotiated set­ tlement. 2. The consensus over Angkor that UNESCO managed to obtain from the UN-recognised Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK-composed of Sihanouk, Khmer Rouge and KPNLF) on the one hand, and the Phnom Penh authorities (Heng Samrin/ Hun Sen) on the other, is an extremely delicate one and must therefore be treated with great caution but consolidated with immediate concrete action. 3. If UNESCO wants to capitalise on the present understanding and consensus, UNESCO must act quickly and establish a fait accompli. In view of the ‘urgency’ if UNESCO decides to move forward, the Co-ordinator for Special Activities, Cabinet (CSA/CAB) [Layashi Yaker, MF] proposed [a] plan for immediate indirect activities to the Director General on 6 September, which was accepted in entirety by the Director General on 8 September. [italics MF]

More precisely, those “immediate indirect activities” were discussed at a Technical Round Table of Experts in Bangkok (see below), contracts with French and Japanese experts (Dumont, Jacques, Ishizawa) and exhibitions planned, whereas a “mid-term programme proposal” foresaw further missions and sponsored fellowships. Shortly there­ after, the Draft proposal for a regional programme on the restoration and preservation of Khmer monuments and ­other important historical cultural properties was worked out by Layashi Yaker (coordinator for special activities) and Richard Engelhardt (the future head of the UNESCO office in Cambodia between 1991 and 1994).

The agreement between Sihanouk and the Phnom Penh government to depoliticise the issue of Angkor paved the way for the famous Appeal for Angkor (Ministry of Culture 1989). It was formulated by the Cambodian Ministry of Culture on 30 September 1989 and officially asked the international community to help save Angkor (Pl. XII.1). This call came towards the end of the Cold War when the issue of ‘Saving Angkor’ had already made global headlines in newspapers from Kyoto to Paris, from Moscow to Washing­ ton, and from Calcutta to Madrid.24 In a seemingly diplo­mat­ ic appeasement of the outlawed PRK, which still governed Cambodia under Hun Sen’s new leadership for the State of Cambodia, the ‘imminent threat’ rhetoric was modified. The previous wording, which referred to Vietnamese occupiers pillaging Angkor, was now changed to a more apolitical tone identifying a natural storm disaster menacing a cultural heritage of all humankind and world wonder: An appeal for Angkor! During the night of 31 August to 1 September 1989, very strong winds with torrential rains swept over the Park of Angkor, pulling down more than 750 large trees, causing some damage to historical monuments within the perimeter of the Park. [...] These age-old trees both protected the monuments from wind erosion and enhanced the natural beauty of these historic sites. The Ministry of Culture of the State of Cambodia and the Cambodian National Commission for UNESCO feel it necessary and indeed urgent to mobilise important means both technical and financial, not only to repair the recent damages, but also to restore and preserve other monuments which belong to the Cultural Heritage of all mankind. For these reasons, the Ministry of Culture of the State of Cambodia and the Cambodian National Commission for UNESCO would like to appeal to all men of good will, to the Organisations of Friends of Angkor, to other Non-Governmental Organisations, to countries and specialised institutions such as UNESCO, to take urgent steps to help to repair, to restore and to preserve one of the world wonders. The Ministry of Culture of the State of Cambodia and the Cambodian National Commission for UNESCO welcome

23  “Notes for the Direction générale on Angkor (18 September 1989, salle V, UNESCO HQs)”, drafted on 13

September 1989 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992).

24  This news is collected in UNESCO’s Press Cut collection. Samples include “Après vingt ans de guerre

civile au Cambodge – Le réveil d’Angkor” (Le Monde/Paris, 1 March 1989), “Peace pact may help save Angkor Wat” (Mainichi Daily News/Kyoto, 8 August 1989), “Sauver les temples d’Angkor. Vers une autre conférence sur le Cambodge” (Journal de Genève, 10 August 1989), “Ancient ruins fight for life in Cambodia” (Asahi Evening News/Tokyo, 30 August 1989), “News about Angkor” (Pravda/Moscow, 10 September 1989), “Les éclat d’Angkor” (Le Monde, 10/11 September 1989), “Angkor: Appel à l’UNESCO” (Le Quotidien de Paris, 11 September 1989), “Cambodians to allow preservation of Angkor” (Elisabeth Becker, the Washington Post, September 1989), “Temples d’Angkor: L’UNESCO coordonnera les travaux” (La Libre Belgique, 13 September 1989), “Unesco to restore Angkor Vat” (Telegraph/Calcutta, 16 September 1989), “Angkor: Les dieux sont tombés sur la tête” (L’Express/Paris, 29 September 1989), “SOS pour Angkor” (L’Alsace, 4 October 1989), “Mayor Zaragoza exige un mayor presupuesto para la UNESCO” (ABC/Madrid, 7 October 1989). UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier APA 566 Press.

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2. 1989: Appeals for Angkor and UNESCO’s first action

all kind of assistance, cooperation and suggestions aimed at preserving this common cultural heritage for future generations. [italics MF] (Ministry of Culture 1989)

In a memo dated to 11 October 1989, Yaker reminded ­Mayor of the political restrictions created by UN politics in favour of the Khmer Rouge, but mentioned that the international NGOs Association des Amis d’Angkor (AAA), the US-American Getty Foundation and the Japanese mission were ready to intervene: The Appeal for Angkor was issued by the Cambodian ­authorities of Phnom Penh, which as you know is the government in control of the territory, but is not [sic] ­recognised by the United Nations. For political reasons, UNESCO is not in the position to respond directly or publicly to this appeal.25

A week later, on 19 October 1989, Australia’s former prime minister Gough Whitlam (as well as Australia’s minister of foreign affairs, Gareth Evans, shortly thereafter), spoke out as a member of the executive board during the twenty-fifth session (17 October to 16 November) of UNESCO’s 1989 General Conference in Paris. According to the proceedings, he openly declared his government’s “frustration over the last six years in the efforts to save the Angkor monuments” and welcomed “the Director General’s plan of action” ­(UNESCO 1990a, 230). One week later on 26 October, Ok Sakun took the floor as “ambassador extraordinare and plenipotentiary and head of the delegation of Democratic Kampuchea”. Rather different from his address in the presence of M’Bow during the opening ceremony of the Angkor exhibition at UNESCO in 1984 (see previous chapter), Ok Sakun now unctuously congratulated Federico Mayor for his “immense work” in initiating “all the emergency actions to assure the preservation of objects of inestimable historic value and of those monuments making part of the cultural heritage of all humanity [humanité tout entière]”. Now, he formulated a wish that “the soil of Angkor, with its past of two thousand years [terre d’Angkor, au passé bimillé­ naire] would, with the help of all the international community, finally find a true revival in rediscovered honour and therefore contribute to the emergence of worldwide solida­ rity” (UNESCO 1990a, 567). During the twenty-third plenary meeting of 2 November 1989, Mayor himself took up the topic of “the planned action for Angkor as another facet

of his organisation’s competence of emergency action”, and some two weeks later, DK’s delegate, Ing Kieth, reconfirmed Cambodia’s “willingness to collaborate with UNESCO to safeguard and restore the monuments of Angkor, a cultural zone of peace” (UNESCO 1990a, 747, 898). When the discussion on “Unit 8: Preservation and enhancement of the cultural heritage” was addressed, the Commission for the “Major Programme Area IV” – known as the Communication in the service of humanity – stated that “the General Conference took note of […] the amendment presented orally in commission by the delegate of Australia, the purpose of which was to prepare, with financing from extra-budgetary funds and as soon as the situation permits, a plan of action for launching activities to safeguard the monuments of Angkor” (UNESCO 1990b, 34). In fact, the later, and much-quoted “invitation of UNESCO to initiate a scheme to protect Angkor” (UNESCO 1991b, 5) had never amounted to much more than an individual comment made by an Australian delegate and a response by a Cambodian delegate. This coincided with Mayor’s Paris meeting (at the luxury Crillon Hotel) with the military general and Thai prime minister Chatichai Choonhavan in November 1989 (other sources speak of October) “which resulted in the [Thai] Prime Minister’s declaration of unconditional support for UNESCO’s efforts for the preservation and restoration of the Angkor monuments”.26 International press, in this case the Herald Tribune with a contribution by Elisabeth Becker on 5 November 1989 (see her in­ volvement in Cambodia in the previous chapter), declared: “Cam­bodian factions agree to let UN survey Angkor Wat.” The result was an ‘official’ assignment to UNESCO in the form of a nine-month Plan of action for the conservation of the Angkor monuments (November 1989–July 1990), which was formulated in November 1989. As indicated in its introduction, “the estimated total financial requirement to implement activities” was about 650,000 USD and was based on “the request of Prince Norodom” (in fact, as mentioned above, UNESCO had asked the new president of the Coalition Government for permission to intervene, and not vice versa). It was conceived as a preparatory step towards “larger-scale international action on the conservation of the Angkor monuments when political conditions permit” and was meant to “lead to an International Technical Round Table for Experts scheduled to take place in Bangkok in March/April 1990” (UNESCO 1989).27 In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War

25  Yaker to Mayor in a memo on 11 October 1989, “Subject: Emergency appeal from Phom Penh regarding Angkor monuments” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier CLT.CH.191/1986–1989). 26  This was mentioned in the Chronology of UNESCO Activities for Cambodia (by programme sectors), which survives in the UNESCO Archives. Thanks also to Minja Yang for her valuable information, provided during several discussions in 2017, about UNESCO’s politics for Angkor. 27  This action and financial plan should include: (1) a technical round table of experts; (2) design and support for training programmes; (3) technical assistance to international conservation teams restoring the Ang­kor monuments, (4) urgent repairs to the National Library; (5) inventory and documentation; (6) support to international exhibitions on Khmer Art and public information activities; and (7) UNESCO programme c­ oordination.

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

came to an end, the UN peace plan for Cambodia – the so-called Evans Plan, named after the Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans – was initiated coincident with the

progressive withdrawal of the formerly Russia-backed Viet­ namese forces from Cambodia at the end of 1989 (compare McMillen 1989; Raszelenberg/Schier 1995).

3. 1990: The international rush to Save Angkor gains momentum On 3 February 1990 when the State of Cambodia was officially still in place (see Pl. XI.1h), Norodom Sihanouk announced important symbolic changes in the Coalition Government28: the country’s name, Democratic Kampuchea, was changed to Kampuchea (Cambodge in French; Cambodia in English), with a declared political orientation towards the “Fifth French Republic”. The national anthem was revised back to the version from the independent era (second verse only, the socalled Nokoreach). Additionally, the flag of Cambodia was returned to its form before the coup d’état in 1970 (Fig. XII.2), thus completing a full circle back to its postcolonial design of 1953–70 (compare Pl. XI.1b and 1j). The national emblem, as circulated during the UNTAC years of 1992–3 (see Pl. XI.1i), was dominated once again by Angkor Wat: §4: The central motif of the national emblem shows the three-tower facade of Angkor Wat against the background of the sun with golden radiating rays of sunlight. Below Angkor Wat and framing it in half a circle are the leaves of the Banyan tree. Angkor Wat is the symbol of the nation, the civilisation and the grandeur of Cambodia. The sun and its rays symbolise the national renaissance. The Banyan leaves symbolise Buddhism, the religion of the State of Cambodia. [italics MF]

With Cambodia’s national rebirth, the international engagement on behalf of the country’s icon of cultural heritage gained momentum. On 14 February 1990, the “Conclusion of consultations of the Five Permanent Members of the Security Council on Cambodia” was issued in a press statement that made a new appeal for the protection and preservation of the country’s archaeological heritage by establishing a “demilitarised zone in and around Angkor [and] appropriate civilian custodial arrangements” (Acharya 1991, 490–91). Only two weeks later, the International Symposium on the Safeguarding of the Angkor Monuments took place in the Asahi Hall in Tokyo. As a joint venture, it was “organised by the [newspaper consortium] Asahi Shim­ bun in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Institute of Asian Cultures (IAC) of Sophia University and the Federation of UNESCO Associations in Japan” (Asahi Shimbun 1990).

Just four months after Cambodia’s own Appeal for Angkor on 30 September 1989 – and thus one and a half years earlier than UNESCO (see below) – the Japanese now formulated their Tokyo Appeal for the Safeguarding of the Angkor Monuments. Its twenty-one points read strangely today, as does its address to “the Cambodian people, UNESCO, the mass media of the world, the people and governments of the world, and specifically [sic], the people and government of Japan”. The Japanese appeal easily counts as another example of the internationalist appealmania for Angkor that occurred around 1990 (compare Falser 2015c; compare Anatole-Gabriel 2016, 301–310); building on Ishizawa’s own statements in the early 1980s (see previous chapter), it framed the heritage of Angkor scenario – without the direct involvement of Cambodia’s own voice and agency – as being in deperate need of help from outside. Shortly after the event, Ishizawa informed Henri Lopès at UNESCO in a personal letter that “the SOS Campaign in Japan had started”.29 He claimed that the new era of “scientific, technological and economic globalisation” had triggered the seemingly logical consequence of applying “international assistance” in the name of “humanity as a whole”, now with “Japanese participation” as the main sponsoring element. Despite this apparently new and global approach, the Japanese task list of “training personnel; historical, cultural and technical research; drawing up inventories; securing information, equipment and materials; and preparing eventual participation” was rather similar to what Bernard Cohn has termed in his book Colonialism and its forms of knowledge the classical (colonial) “modalities” of heritage production (Cohn 1996, 6–14). The early 1990s witnessed the ever-accelerating international diplomatic search for a fast political solution for Cambodia: this included the ongoing discussions between and decisions by the Perm-5 Countries (China, the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union) in the UN Security Council, and a further meeting in Tokyo on 4–5 June 1990 with the Sihanouk-Hun Sen joint communiqué to further depoliticise Angkor: The two parties represented at the Tokyo meeting declare that the historic monumental ensemble of Angkor

28  Circulated in: Délégation permanente de Cambodge auprès de l’UNESCO: Information 003/90 (14 Feb-

ruary 1990).

29  Letter from Ishizawa to Henri Lopès, assistant DG for culture and communication, Tokyo 9 March 1990

(UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992)

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3. 1990: The international rush to Save Angkor gains momentum

Figure XII.2  Norodom Sihanouk’s explanation for the new-old flag, as circulated in the Information leaflet 003/90, issued by the Délégation permanente de Cambodge auprès de l’UNESCO on 14 February 1990 (Source: © UNESCO Archive Paris)

should be a zone of non-hostility. They encourage the international community to combine their activities of cooperation in favour of the preservation and restoration of this cultural heritage of the whole humanity.30

This chain of diplomatic wrangling culminated in August and September 1990 with discussions in New York and Jakarta.31 However, the political manoeuvring went hand-inhand with ever more hurried gatherings made up of international long-standing and newly self-declared experts on Cambodia’s built heritage. Directly after the Tokyo event, the first International Round Table of Experts on the Preservation of the Angkor Monuments met in Bangkok from 5 to 8 June 1990 in UNESCO’s office for the Asia-Pacific

region and under its director Hedayat Ahmed. On the one hand, this event, with twenty-eight listed experts from ten countries, was the first official gathering to bring together such a vast number of international actors, institutions and NGOs to apply globalised preservation standards and heritage management procedures to Cambodia’s prime archaeological site, the precise territorial extent and local administrative structure of which was not yet defined. On the other hand, with participants from Japan’s Sophia University, France’s EFEO and AAA, Thailand’s SPAFA, Hungary’s Angkor Foundation, Poland’s PKZ, India’s ASI, the World Monuments Fund, and the Getty from the United States, as well as university representatives from Australia and Russia,32 the meeting was the first formalised testing

30  This quoted text is a ‘back-translation’ of the French version of the Tokyo Declaration as quoted in pro-

ceedings of the Round Table in Bangkok in June 1990.

31  Reported in a long series of Information Note[s] on Kampuchea (as quoted in Guan 2013, 146–58), this

included: the Thai Foreign Ministry’s position and policy on Cambodia (December 1989, February 1990), the Permanent Five Meeting on Cambodia in Paris (15–16 January 1990), an informal meeting on Cambodia in Jakarta (26–28 February), the third Perm-Five Meeting in Cambodia in Paris (12–13 March), the fourth in New York (25–26 May), the Tokyo meeting on Cambodia (4–5 June 1990), the fifth Perm-Five Meeting on Cambodia in Paris (16–17 July 1990), the sixth in New York (27–28 August 1990), and the Jakarta Meeting on Cambodia (9–10 September 1990). 32  Among others, Japan came with Daigoro Chihara (already present in the Safeguarding Borobudur Project, see below), Yoshiaki Ishizawa and Yasushi Kono; France with Bruno Dagens, Claude Jacques, Corneille Jest, Jean Launay, Pierre Pichard and director Léon Vandermeersch (both EFEO); Thailand with S. Diskul, director of SPAFA; Hungary with Janos Jelen; India with ASI’s director J.P. Joshi; the United States with Eleanor Manikka (Michigan University), Frank Preusser (Director of the Getty Conservation Institute) and John Sanday (Getty Grant Program); Poland with Tadeusz Polak (PKZ), and Russia with Tatiana Proskuriakoff (from the Scientific Research Institute for the Theory of Architecture and City Planning, Moscow). Cambodia’s representatives included Ing Kieth, Deputy permanent delegate of Cambodia to UNESCO, Kheang Khaon (Deputy permanent representative of Cambodia to ESCAP), Ouk Chea (Department of Conservation of Historical Monuments), Son Soubert (National Government of Cambodia), Pich Keo (Department of Conservation of Historical Monuments) and Penn Thol (National Government of Cambodia). Richard Engelhardt represented the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) from Bangkok.

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

ground for the global race to claim the largest slice of the Angkor Heritage Reserve. The six representatives from Cambodia seemed to have, if the proceedings of the meeting allow us to gain an appropriate picture at all, played a role in repeating Cambodia’s ‘yes-we-need-international-help’ slogans. Ahmed’s introductory words suggest that “UNESCO’s task to safeguard the monuments of Angkor with its catalytic role to stimulate and amplify the actions of the different interveners” was already an unquestioned fait accompli, one that had occurred more than two years before the rushed nomination of Angkor to UNESCO’s World Heritage List (see below) and faster than any national Cambodian expertise could independently assemble. In his role as moderator, Gérard Bolla, the previous assistant to UNESCO’s general director Maheu (see previous chapter), played down the Bangkok preparatory gathering as supposedly apolitical and “purely technical and informal [in] character” (UNESCO 1990c, 1–3). The stated “enormity of the task” [ampleur de la tâche] to save Angkor – which was once the French-colonial topos used to formulate a self-assigned mandate to salvage and manage Angkor – was now embedded in a newly globalised dimension with keywords suitable for a Foucauldian analysis of outspoken or hidden power structures: “a total cooperation” on national and international levels, “measures of emergency” under a “directive scheme” [schéma directeur] to set up a “control mechanism of international cooperation”. Its operational setup was a classic one in the field of heritage management, implementing “documentation, inventories and surveys”, “security measures”, “consolidation”, “zoning”, and “training”. In his own intervention, Ing Kieth referred to the initial 1981 idea of “Angkor as a cultural zone of peace under UN supervision” by the Austrian Foreign Minister Willibald Pahr in his role as president of the International Conference on Kampuchea in New York (compare Kröll 2007). Later, Kieth’s “compte rendu de mission” (signed “29 June 1990 at Surin”, a town north of Angkor on the Thai side of the Cambodian frontier), already internalised the primacy of the globalised expert/expertise culture over Cambodia’s national heritage through a ‘threat, control and salvage’ rhetoric (compare Mouhot’s wording in 1863 calling for French law and order to contain the archaeological mess called Angkor, chapter I): The multiplication of isolated initiatives without a veritable international coordination risks resulting soon, said the expert, in a serious situation of incoherence and anarchy. The intervention of UNESCO to coordinate the ensemble of the present and future activities, and to establish a mechanism of international collaboration is acknowl­

edged to deserve priority. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1990c, attachment)

UNESCO’s “monumental task” of coordinating the in­ ternational help project for Angkor around a pool of experts was reported in The Nation shortly after the meeting, and the “international safeguard campaign” was set – in a manner similar to UNESCO’s title pages from 1956, 1965 and 1971 to the early 1990s (Pl. XII.2; compare Pl. IX.24a,b; XI.6a) – in direct relation to previous “successful conservation projects like Borobudur in Indonesia, Mohenjo-Daro in India [sic] and Sukothai in Thailand” (Koonphol 1990). In the tradition of exiled Khmer Rouge rhetoric in the 1980s, which was used to hijack ‘saving Angkor’ for political power games, on 17 June 1990, Khieu Samphan issued, as part of the transitional government, the Déclaration du porte-parole du Ministre des Affaires étrangères du Gouvernement National du Cambodge sur la zone de paix d’Angkor. The declaration that circulated through the Khmer Rougeled UNESCO delegation in Paris defended Angkor Wat and other monuments as the “national cultural heritage of Cambodia” and quoted the national Coalition Government’s vote for a “peace zone of Angkor” by dispatching personnel from the International Control Mechanism of the UN (UN-ICM) to Angkor (Khieu 1990). The UN’s “Plan for Peace in Cambodia” was adopted on 28 August, and the state was officially recognised after the country’s Supreme National Council (in the following SNC) was established on 10 September. In a press conference held in Bangkok on 19 September 1990, Khieu Samphan declared that a “meeting should be organised at Siem Reap-Angkor Wat”, as the latter was the symbol of the Khmer nation and on Cambodia’s flag. However, “if Hun Sen would not accept Angkor Wat as a venue, [h]e would like to suggest [the Khmer Rouge strongholds, MF] Pailin or Phnom Kulen, which are in the liberated zone, under the control of the Cambodian National Resistance”.33 In the busy history of the UN’s Security Council’s dealings with Cambodia (compare Department 2007, 414–34), Resolution 668 was agreed upon on 20 September 1990 to tackle “a comprehensive political settlement of the Cambodia conflict”.34 As a direct result of the Jakarta Informal Meetings between 1988 and 1990, all Cambodian parties now accepted a framework “to form the SNC as the unique legitimate body and source of authority in which, throughout the transitional period, the independence, national sovereignty and unity of Cambodia was embodied”. On 15 October 1990, the UN’s General Assembly resolution 45/3 on “The situation in Cambodia” welcomed “an enhanced role for the United Nations in Cambodia and the continuing efforts of the Secretary-Gen-

33  Délégation permanente de Cambodge auprès de l’UNESCO: Information 013/90 (9 October 1990). 34  See for the Security Council Resolution 668 on Cambodia on 20 September 1990, http://www.un.org/

Docs/scres/1990/scres90.htm (retrieved 19 February 2017).

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3. 1990: The international rush to Save Angkor gains momentum

eral within the framework for a comprehensive political settlement”.35 In early October, Henri Lopès had already proposed that Mayor visit Cambodia at the earliest possible opportunity; however, he also suggested enlarging the scope of the visit far beyond a mere “safeguard and mise en valeur of the monuments of Angkor” (an accusation often heard afterwards) with “projects to restore the national education system, develop scientific activities and to democratise communication infrastructure”: To ensure the participation of UNESCO in a programme without a doubt considerable on the UN’s part for Cambodia, the Organisation needs to be present very soon on the spot and manifest its will to take part in the efforts to reconstruct the country. […] The visit to Angkor will be of considerable symbolic value, both culturally and politically. Nevertheless, this visit should not have only this content. Angkor is certainly an important national symbol (as well as a means to develop the touristic resources of the country), but this nation is constituted first and foremost by several million very poor people. An exclusive visit to Angkor would risk being seen as a lack of concern for the problems of the country in its vital domains, while the interest of UNESCO to safeguard Angkor has already been clearly formulated in the last years, and particularly in the twenty-fifth session of the General Conference [in 1989, MF]. This voyage should therefore be presented as a mission to evaluate the needs and the possible actions, and not as a visit uniquely consecrated to the destiny of the temples of Angkor.36 [italics MF]

At this point, around 1990, French scholars were once again among the first to try to reconnect the concrete site of Angkor with an updated historiography of the Frenchmade ‘success story’. Parallel to Ishizawa’s Japanese publication, Angkor Wat, in 1989 (Pl. XII.3a), the most important contribution to this popularising effort was the 1989

pocket-sized and illustrated publication Angkor: La forêt de pierre [Angkor: The forest of stones] by Bruno Dagens, a former EFEO member and Paris-based professor of the ancient history and archaeology of South and Southeast Asia (Pl. XII.3b). Present at Angkor in B. P. Groslier’s last days in the early 1970s and back on the site by the mid-1980s (see previous chapter), Dagens was once again among the vanguard in securing French interests at Angkor. In the second half of 1990, he and Bruno Brughier were in charge of re-establishing the scientific memory of Angkor. This involved documenting, cataloguing, indexing and partly microfilming the EFEO’s existing Angkor documentation made up of 9,000 pages of digging reports, 2,300 dossier pages of monuments, 4,000 pages of Angkor reports, 3,000 plans and 40,000 photos (Vandermeersch 1992b, 217). When Dagens returned from his mission to Angkor, which took place between 15 December 1990 and 17 January 1991, to evaluate, with help from Ouk Chea and his team, the depot of sculptures from the former Conservation d’Angkor, his findings were rather shocking. Of 4,000 stone and wooden sculptures once safely stored and catalogued in 1970, only about 2,500 were rediscovered and identified with almost 350 alone lost from the site of Angkor Wat (Fig. XII.3). On the other side of the spectrum, Claude Jacques, together with René Dumont and with photographs by Luc Ionesco and Jacqueline and Guy Nafilyan, published a more tourism-oriented version of the glorious art and architecture of Angkor (Pl. XII.4).37 Important in this context, it was prefaced by Federico Mayor. If Mouhot in 1863 saw the historical masterpiece of Angkor as a kind of “Oriental M ­ ichelangelo” and placed it next to and even above the European temple art “from Rome and Greece” (Mouhot 1863, 299 and Mouhot 1864, 277), then Mayor situated his own herculean task to “save Angkor” (compare Jacques 1991a38, 1996) as being an almost natural extension of UNESCO’s sounding missions to salvage cultural heritage after the 1960s and 1970s around the globe (see his statement given as introductory element to this chapter).

35  See the UN General Assembly resolution 45/3 on “The situation in Cambodia” on 15 October 1990,

http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/45/a45r003.htm (retrieved 19 June 2017).

36  Henri Lopès to DG Mayor, “Objet: Voyage au Cambodge et à Angkor”, 5 October 1990 (UNESCO Ar-

chives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992).

37  See their context of the books by Dagens and Jacques in the introduction of this book. 38  In “Sauver Angkor et les temples du Cambodge” in the February 1991 issue of Archéologia, Claude

Jacques listed his five travels to Angkor between January 1989 and July 1990, and added information about other missions to the spot: with the AAA, funded by the Banque Indosuez in January 1989, in May 1989 with Ishizawa (see above), in July 1989 with Véronique Dauge, in December 1989 with the World Monuments Fund and the Getty Foundation, and in July 1990 with Prof. Michel Terasse and Christine Hawixbrock. Concluding his short report, Jacques judged “the task at Angkor too heavy for a single state” (Cambodia) and concluded: “We have all reason to hope the best for the monuments of Angkor: Good will is there a lot, the political horizon becomes clearer and it is certain that the world community – the task is too heavy for on single state – could, with UNESCO assuring the coordination to establish a master plan, protect and conserve this ensemble of Angkor which is part of the heritage of humanity even if circumstances had not made it yet possible to inscribe it on the famous list” (Jacques 1991a, 51).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figure XII.3  Bruno Dagens’ 1991 inventory of the depot of Angkorian sculptures of the former Conservation d’Angkor (Source: Dagens 1991, n.p.)

4. 1991: Making Angkor global. Vann Molyvann’s first Angkor Plan and Federico Mayor’s Appeal for Angkor at Angkor Wat Referring to §12 of the UN General Assembly resolution 45/3 of 15 October 1990 (see above), UNESCO finally initiated its first direct on-site action: the Intersectoral Needs Assessment Mission to Cambodia. From 20 January to 5 February 1991, the mission took place under the leadership of Akihiro Chiba, director of the UNESCO Bureau for the Co-ordination of Operational Activities, with members such as Richard Engelhardt39 (UNESCO Liaison Officer for Cambodia) and Véronique Dauge, and in collaboration with Cambodian authorities and humanitarian agencies, namely UNICEF and UNHCR. Its principal objectives were to examine and assess existing and emerging policies and priorities for national reconstruction and rehabilitation, to identify possible areas of international cooperation, and to develop programme profiles. The Cambodian tour comprised a visit to a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border and, according to the report, also involved “technical discussions held with the EFEO at Angkor and the ASI of India carrying out restoration work at Angkor Wat”. Receiving the mission on February 4, Cambodia’s minister of foreign affairs, Hor Namhong, saw the efforts of “national reconstruction” as related to a “global peace process” involving the aid of “international agencies” [emphasis MF]. Additionally, he invited Mayor “to visit the national cultural

sites in the country, especially the monuments of Angkor, and asked for his support to place the Angkor monuments on the list of World Cultural Heritage” (UNESCO 1991a, 3). The mission’s executive report recognised the efforts of the Cambodian government to preserve Angkor, but “the enor­ mity of the task facing the Government [would] require substantial international assistance and the preparation of a global master plan for the conservation of the site and its environment” (UNESCO 1991b, 9; emphasis added). In the final list of priority programme areas, a mid-range or longterm perspective for Angkor was not formulated or emphasised, but instead repeatedly highlighted as a matter of urgency, with about 3 million USD of estimated total costs. At around the same time in July 1991 when the USAmeri­can World Monuments Funds entered the scene with a management plan focusing on the temple of Preah Khan (WMF 1991), an old acquaintance re-emerged: Vann Molyvann. In the context of this book’s conceptualisation of the transcultural history of heritage, Vann Molyvann is possibly the most interesting exponent of concrete agency behind the particularly complex, multilayered and multi-sited process of reconfiguring Angkor as a global icon after 1990. Indeed, he counts as an example of a Khmer elite

39  I would like to thank Richard Engelhardt for his precious insights into UNESCO’s cultural heritage activ-

ities during my stay at UNESCO’s Regional Office for Southeast Asia in Bangkok.

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4. 1991: Making Angkor global. Vann Molyvann’s first Angkor Plan …

who left Cambodia for the two decades between 1970 and 1990 and returned with international – more specifically, in this case and most often, Western – training, and a cosmopolitan understanding of the values of cultural heritage. This elite reapplied the operational terms of a global cultural heritage expert community onto ‘their’ – that is, the ‘national’ and ‘regional’ – focal point of cultural heritage: Ang­kor. Vann (we should remember, first Beaux-Arts-trained as an architect in Paris) served as Sihanouk’s former state architect and chief consultant for culture during the Sangkum era (see chapter X), and then was an emigrant to Switzerland after the Lon Nol takeover in 1970; he brought all this with him to his work for the UN Human Settlement Program. From 1991 onwards, he became president of the Cambodian Council of Ministers and Minister of Culture, Fine Arts, Town and City Planning under Sihanouk. In his journey towards becoming an instrumental figure in setting up Angkor’s first truly Cambodian protection agency called APSARA (see below), Vann first returned to Angkor as a “UNESCO consultant” between 1 and 21 July of 1991. Although it was formatted not in Cambodia itself but by the Paris-based Atelier ARTE and conceived together with Jean-Marie Charpentier, Pierre Clément and Ros Borath40, Vann’s August 1991 report Parcs d’archéologiques d’Angkor (Pl. XII.5) easily counts as one of the first and most interesting documents written by a Cambodian to reconfigure Angkor Park after 1990.41 Given the very limited availability of the document (he provided his own personal copy for this study), almost all samples within the recent wave of thirty-page summaries about the cultural heritage of Angkor in general and the supposed success story of Angkor after 1990 in particular have mainly focused on the international input from outside ‘to rebirth Angkor’. As a consequence, most of them tend to overlook this crucial report by Vann Molyvann and thus the efforts of Cambodian-national agency (see Chapman 2013, 59–97; Stubbs 2016, 201–229; Anatole-Gabriel 2016, 275–310; compare Falser 2015c). The general objectives of Vann’s mission were “to help the national Khmer authorities in several domains” connected to their three requests to UNESCO: “the mise en valeur of the site of Angkor, the safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the rehabilitation of human resources in the culture sector”. Besides other projects, like the “Consolidation of the institutions of the Conservation d’Angkor” with a requested budget of 3.6 million USD, the “Development plan for the environment of the Angkor monuments: Pro-

posal of a zoning plan” was the most prominent element of his study (Vann 1991, A1–20). Building on Cambodia’s request to UNESCO to facilitate the addition of Angkor to the World Heritage List with help from an “International Committee of technical experts”, Vann identified two preliminary areas of study for Angkor Park: first, the problems of deforestation, soil depletion, and the destruction of archaeological sites; second, the issues of two main “target groups” – the “villages and villagers at and around the archaeological sites” and the “national and international tourists”42 (Vann 1991, A2). In a move that was remarkable at the time, he called for two-phase efforts to (a) set up the archaeological park itself, in relation to (b) the “improvement of the living conditions of the local population”. In this context, he referred in extenso to the pressing issue of a coherent “zoning system”. Much earlier than the launch of the much-quoted international initiative for the Zoning and Environmental Management Plan for Angkor (ZEMP), which saw its first results only after the nomination of Ang­ kor (see below), Vann’s proposal was indeed a unique trans­ cultural blend between the site’s own multi-sited history and its present. Most important in this context, Vann based his spatial concept for Angkor Park on another Southeast Asian archaeological heritage site that, since the era of colonial connection between French Cambodia and the Dutch East Indies (see chapter IX), had always played a crucial role as a comparative model and reference point for the institutional, scientific and technical setup of Angkor Park – Borobudur, the eighth- to ninth-century Buddhist site on Java. However, Vann’s introductory comment went far beyond this old connection and introduced another Asian player that would be crucial for Angkor after 1900 – Japan: The studies carried out by the Japan International Cooperation Agency for the monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia have introduced an integrated zoning system which could be adapted for the archaeological park of Angkor. […] [serving] as a general reference the Consultation Committee for the Safeguarding of Borobudur of 1973. [italics MF] (Vann 1991, A5, A8)

As we shall see, this reference to Borobudur had three effects on the transcultural nature of Angkor Park after 1990: First, the heritage park concept of Borobudur/Prambanan from 1900 to the early 1970s served as a bridging ele-

40  He had, like Vann Molyvann, left Cambodia during the country’s war period and completed his architec-

tural education in France. Returning temporarily to his native land in the 1990s, he served, under Vann Molyvann, as deputy director of APSARA. 41  I would like to thank Vann Molyvann for providing this document from his personal archive during an interview in his house in Phnom Penh in March 2010. 42  As a rare element of information, Vann quoted the development of tourism in the 1960s (with “21,180 tourists in 1963” and “35,488 tourists in 1968”), which would be outnumbered exponentially by the dramatic increase of global tourism after 1990 and a forecast number of 2 million tourists per year after 2000 (Vann 1991, A2).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

ment to reconnect the (post)colonial, partly forgotten setup of Angkor Park with the international and globalised standards around and after 1990. As discussed in chapter IX, Borobudur was, from around 1900 to the 1940s, Angkor’s conceptual twin site of cultural heritage as regards the search for and the implementation of archaeological and conservation strategies (keeping in mind the debates about conservation and reconstruction/anastylosis) during the mutual exchange programmes between the French-colonial EFEO and the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Service. Bernard Philippe Groslier himself, the last French general-conservator of Angkor, continued his own engagement with the Javanese site in the early postcolonial age from the late 1960s onwards.43 Indeed, Vann’s quoted Borobudur report of 1973 was published at that tragic transitory moment when (a) Groslier was about the leave Angkor Park forever and the site fell into a frozen twenty-year period from 1970 to 1990 (see previous chapter), and (b) when Groslier’s colleague at Angkor, Jacques Dumarçay, ‘transferred’ the scientific impact of the EFEO in Southeast Asia to Borobudur (Dumarçay 1977, compare EFEO 2002, 216). Second, it was via the Borobudur of the 1970s44 that Vann’s integrated conception of a spatialised heritage park migrated back to Angkor in the 1990s. This process led several rhetorical frameworks to collide: (a) Borobudur had been largely de-colonised during Indonesia’s early era of independence, but Angkor wasn’t, because the EFEO’s impact continued during Sihanouk’s Sangkum era. How­ ever, the new nationalist undertone emerging from Indonesia, which sought to use cultural heritage sites for the country’s reconciliation and unity, now became an important element for Cambodia’s national rebirth; (b) Borobudur’s instrumentalisation as a motor of regional development, both economic and social, became a central feature in the Angkor debate; (c) the setup of an international heritage community at the Javanese site migrated back to Ang­

kor, with the same dominance of Japanese and French e­ xperts under the umbrella structure of UNESCO;45 and (d) the superlative rhetoric framing both sites as unique ­masterpieces of universal artistic value would lead to their addition to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in the early 1990s – Borobudur in 1991 and Angkor one year later. Third, in Vann’s quotation and use of the interim and final reports of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency of the 1970s (JICA 1975, 1979), it is clear that a deep logistical and technoid permeation of the heritage site would be re-imported from Borobudur to Angkor.46 As it was foretold in a more general sense in the introduction of this book, archaeological reserves or theme park setups as imagined in the Japanese studies for Borobudur around 1975 and realised to a certain extent in Angkor Park from the 1990s onwards qualify as ‘reenacted utopian’ (as Foucault circumscribed what he meant with ‘heterotopian’) constellations. They had, as we intended to show in the first volume of this book, striking similarities to those temporary and ephemeral test fields that had predefined archaeological ensembles as global icons – world and colonial exhibitions. The Borobudur-Angkor connection therefore can also be traced back to Paris, when both temple sites were represented as hybrid pavilions at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (see chapter VII). From a holistic perspective, the earlier Borobudur and the later Angkor Park had much in common, in particular: (a) the claim of establishing a decade-long master plan within an international expert network, (b) the overall conception of a ‘national archaeological park’ system with a multi-sited setup, and (c) a whole set of accompanying economic, moral, and political motives and operational terms for the archaeo­ logical reserve (compare JICA 1979, 9–10). Additionally, the effects for Borobudur in the 1980s were similar to those in Angkor from the 1990s onwards: a gradual nationalisation

43  Compare Groslier’s text Borobudur: Is the great Javanese sanctuary doomed? in the June 1968 UNESCO Courier (compare chapter IX, Groslier 1968), his preliminary UNESCO report in 1969, and the reports by his colleague César Voûte in 1969 and 1970. Compare Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2015a, 48–50. 44  The following themes in the Borobudur project of the 1970s also resounded in the case of Angkor: “1. Preservation of cultural heritage is essential to grasp the national and international significance of the project and its universal value as seen from a broad anthropological and historical point of view. […] 2. The symbolic effect of development. Cultural heritage should be drawn upon to play a role in the process of awakening the nation to the common cultural and historical background, to inspire studies in the cultural education field, and encourage social exchange between the regions through tourism. 3. Effect on regional development. 4. Creation of a historical environment” (JICA 1975, 26–27, emphasis added). One point in the general development policy was: “The national archaeological park shall be founded as a monument to national cultural and historical heritage in the form of a ‘fenceless museum’ or ‘palace of living historical and cultural enlightenment’” (JICA 1975, 28). For Angkor as a ‘liking museum’, compare Pl. Intro.22. 45  The link to Angkor was even closer: the crucial player behind the Borobudur zoning concept, the Japanese expert Daigoro Chihara (compare Nagaoka 2016, 7–9, 43), had just joined the First Round Table of Experts for Angkor at Bangkok in June 1990. 46  Especially the multi-level approach of spatial zoning, legal control, social reconfiguration and economic development, mass-touristic commodification, and strategies and techniques of ‘spectacularisation’, was – building on French-colonial efforts on a much lower level (compare Falser 2013d) – new to the Cambodian site.

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4. 1991: Making Angkor global. Vann Molyvann’s first Angkor Plan …

Figure XII.4a  “Conceptual Model of the Archaeological Park” of Borobudur, provided by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in its 1975 master plan. Legend: A) Archaeological preservation special area (sanctuary area), B) Archaeological park protection area, C) Archaeological park scenic area, D) Park facilities development area, E) Archaeological park designated area, F) “Area with villages to be transferred elsewhere (Dukuh level)” (Source: JICA 1975, 39)

Figure XII.4b  “Land Use Model” and “Zoning Model”, provided by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in its 1975 master plan for Borobudur. Legend for the “Land Use Block”: 1) Sanctuary Area, 2) Archaeological Park Facility Area, 3.1) Village Implementation Area, 3.2) Archaeological Park Area, 4) Roadside Area, 5) Nature & Scenery Protection Area. Legend for the “Zoning Block”: 1) Archaeological Preservation Special Area, 2) Archaeological Park Preservation Area, 3) Archaeological Park Scenic Special Area, 4) Archaeological Park Scenic Ordinary Area, 5.1 and 5.2) Access Roadside Scenic Area, 6) Nature Protection Area, 7) Scenery Protection Area (Source: JICA 1975, 54)

of the archaeological space; the politics of an enforced land tional recovery’ (compare Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2015b, and ‘traditional village improvement’, including reloca- 110). By introducing his own “5-Zone Concept” for Angkor tions of people from their housing inside the parks; new (however no visual charts were provided), Vann seemingcommunity development and guidance of efficient public ly copied elements from the Japanese “Conceptual Model investment; education measures to reconnect the national for the Archaeological Park of Borobudur”, including population to their ancient cultural roots; and the prof- zones from A to F and a “Land Use/Zoning Model” with it-oriented fostering of tourism under the slogan of ‘na- “zoning blocks” from 1 to 7 (Figs. XII.4a,b).47 However, to 47  “A/1 – Archaeological preservation special/sanctuary area […] as nationalised land for the sake of strict

preservation, maintenance and control; with villages to be relocated; secured visual expansiveness [and] utilised to ensure the activities of visitors; B/2 – Archaeological park preservation/protection area […] for direct protection, site control, attention to the arrangement of the archaeological remains, appropriate landscaping measures, the provision of tourist facilities, and adequate improvement of the basis of livelihood of the fixed population; C/3 – Archaeological Park scenic/Village improvement area […] with land use planning, full environmental control by zoning, local population benefit with village improvement works, scenic regulation, active landscaping to ensure the expansiveness and quality of the archaeological parks, and the selection of substitute sites; D – Park facilities development area.” Added-on zones from 4 to 7 included elements like access roads, nature and scenery protection (JICA 1975, 39, 55–57, compare JICA 1979, 19–20, 201–202; also discussed in Bloembergen/Eickhoff 2015b, 110–112).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figure XII.5  “Zoning Plan: Borobudur Area” as provided by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in its 1975 master plan (Source: JICA 1975, 69)

better under­stand Vann’s own sketches, additional elements in the JICA report may serve as direct reference: the “Zoning Plan of the Borobudur Area” (Fig. XII.5) with its topographical embedding, indicated core and buffer zones and “visual parameters” from 2.5 to 5 kilometres; and the “Structure/Activity Network Models of Borobudur” (Figs. XII.6a,b) with the indicated connection lines between the temples of Borobudur, Pawon and Mendut (compare those

temples in their restoration process in chapter IX), landscaping and irrigation elements, and the use of far-off visual references, such as the surrounding volcanoes. In merging those ‘point(s) of view’ at Borobudur with the spatial making of Angkor Park in French-colonial times, Vann’s approach was fourfold: First, he based his highlighted “Zone 1: Sanctuary Zone” of the temple grounds “with a perimeter of thirty metres” (for Angkor Thom, Angkor Wat, Prah Khan, etc.) on the two-dimensional map “plotted by Georges Trouvé in 1934 and Henri Marchal in 1935” (compare Fig. IX.49) but indicated that his “Zone 2: Zone of the Archaeological Park with a 300-metre perimeter” extended, building on a map from the republican period around 1973 (see Pl. XI.3a, 12b), far beyond the French-colonial protection line of 1925/1930 (see Pl. IX.13) by including both giant water tanks to the east and west (Pl. XII.6). Surprisingly, Vann’s 1991 proposal to mix small and mid-range perimeters of protec-tion (from thirty metres to three hundred metres) within a larger integrative framework stood in direct relation to the colonial and early postcolonial debates (compare Pl. IX.10b).48 Second, for his “analysis of the actual site” and the result­ ing “directive sketch map” [esquisse plan directeur] (Pl. XII.7), Vann was inspired by the analytical tools of the above-quoted Borobudur report of 1975 to map and interrelate natural elements (rivers, lakes), larger topographical and scenic features and visual connection lines such as hills (like those of Phnom Krom, Bok and Dei from Angkor Thom or Angkor Wat, comparable to Mount Merapi in the context of Borbudur), neighbouring historic and modern sites, and existing and future infrastructural features (highways, airport). Third, Vann combined all previous sketches into one overall map (Pl. XII.8) to indicate protection zones 3 to 5.49 Comparing the zoning concept of 1991 with the French (post)colonial park delimitation reveals the great innovative power of Vann’s vision, which went straight into the ZEMP plan and the later conception of a protected ecosystem of the entire Angkor-Tonlé Sap area. Fourth, a last set of conceptual sketches from the JICA 1975 report to present the “architectural concept” for Boro-

48  Those debates started after the so-called retrocession of Angkor to French Cambodge in 1907, when the vote

for a “protection zone around the principle monuments of Angkor” by the Résident supérieur, Louis Paul Luce, stood against “an integral conservation of the ruins” by the EFEO’s chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier, see Pl. IX.12). They continued with the tightly delimited and legalised set-up of the Parc archéologique d’Angkor in 1925/1930 (see Pl. IX.13), up to the larger-scaled concept of a Park national d’Angkor within a nationwide, interconnected park system foreseen by the Khmer-Republican government in the early 1970s (see Pl. XI.12b). 49  This included: Zone 3 (“zone of regulated soil use around the park of 2.5 kilometres radius, […] against uncontrolled tourism and for the integration of the local population around the monuments”, Zone 4 (“zone with the preservation of historical viewpoints”, including the panoramic views of three kilometres from the monuments like from the upper terrace of Angkor Wat; and the protected views of three hundred metres ­towards the monuments; and the historical axes from Angkor to Banteay Srei, Roluos, Banteay Chhmar and Phimai, of Kulen-Beng Malea, of the royal routes and the historical Siem Reap and Roluos rivers, bridges, the barays; and Zone 5 as the “protected archaeological zone [zone archéologique protégée] of potential sites to-be-discovered” (Vann 1991, A9).

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4. 1991: Making Angkor global. Vann Molyvann’s first Angkor Plan …

Figures XII.6a,b  The “Structure Model: Borobudur” and the “Activity Network Model” as provided by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in its 1975 master plan (Source: JICA 1975, 83, 87)

budur were certainly useful for Vann (Fig. XII.7): here, spatial zoning and movement analyses were finally used as a basis for the architectural features of “theme, service and operation/control facilities”. Resonant with the discussion in the introduction to this book of Foucault’s concept of heterotopias in relation to more recent theme park studies,

Borobudur’s themed – that is, archaeological – space was systematically enhanced with a new theme park architecture and accompanying infrastructural buildings. Themed facilities included “an archaeological museum, a convention hall, a festival plaza”. Refering to our overall conceptual – transcultural – approach to parallel the staging of Ang­ 345

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Figure XII.7  “Architectural Concept: Borobudur Block” as provided by the Japanese Inter­ national Cooperation Agency (JICA) in its 1975 master plan (Source: JICA 1975, 95)

kor in universal and colonial exhibitions in France with the making of the archaeological theme park of Angkor in Cambodia as two versions of ‘enacted heritage utopias’, the Japan-Borobudur connection has a similar feature: The Japanese technoid proposal of a dense network of themed spaces (compare Fig. XII.6b), including a central “Festival Plaza” and a “Ramayana theatre and art gallery”, was similar to the Osaka World Fair which had just taken place in 1970 (with Cambodia’s participation), only five years before the JICA report of 1975. For the Borobudur/Prambanan context, the “kratin [palace] architectural style, with large court­ yards [was proposed] to make for an atmosphere of grandeur” (JICA 1975, 112). Vann’s plans for an “Angkor Site Museum and Reception Hall” [musée site d’Angkor – Gîte d’accueil] (Pl. XII.9a,b) clearly referred, once more, like his plans for the young Cambodian nation-state in the 1960s (compare Figs. X.16c, 29; Pl. X.11, 14), to Cambodia’s traditions of Angkorian water-and-earth landscaped temple sites and vernacular prayer halls. Adding a section on “utility planning”50 to the list of designed elements brought the

whole archaeological theme park zoning, landscaping and spectator-oriented designing back – and this is the central claim of ‘transculturality’ in this book – ‘to where it all started’: the universal and colonial exhibitions. To take again the most prominent for our study, the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (see chapter VII), almost all the same features and facilities were installed in order to enhance prominent icons of cultural heritage, such as the Bali-Borobudur-style pavilion of the Dutch East Indies (compare Figs. VII.38d,e) and, of course, the 1:1-scale replica of Angkor Wat itself (see especially Pl. VII.3a,b). Tested in the ephemeral environment of these European spectacles of early mass tourism, the ways and means to enhance archaeological features of cultural heritage in a park-like setting re-migrated – in a kind of process of ‘back-translation’ – to the ‘original’ sites. To take another example: the Paris 1900 Universal Exhibition’s Tour du Monde panorama, which was structured from the visitor’s viewpoint towards constantly turning and ‘staged’ features such as exotic temples (like Angkor Wat or “a temple from Java”), moving

50  This included “water and power supply and electricity for indoor and outdoor lighting with underground

cables within the park, underwater lightning for fountains and for the illumination of the archaeological remains” (JICA 1975, 128).

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Figure XII.8  The “Scenery Control Plan: Borobudur” as provided in the final 1979 report by JICA (Source: JICA 1979, 201—202)

dancers and tropical landscapes (compare Figs. V.6a,b; 7a,b) to animate a full-scale ‘Cairo Street’ during the 1889 Paris was later envisioned on paper and gradually fabricated on Universal Exhibition (Fig. IV.13a) and to populate Ang­kor the actual site in Cambodia (see Pl. EpII.26b). Wat during the 1966 son-et-lumière show for Charles de In addition to the mapping, lawful zoning, and applied Gaulle (see Pl. X.23), ‘local monks and worshipping resiarchaeology and architectural conservation-restoration of dents’ were reinserted as a complement to these physical archaeological sites in Asia, a more violent strategy of or- interventions. This rather pessimistic analysis is further ganised relocation of local inhabitants was also introduced, illustrated in the final JICA report of 1979 (Fig. XII.8): thus making heterotopian twins of the sites as manifested at only seventy-five years after the Paris panorama of 1900, European exhibitions and the ‘real’ settings in Asia. Only a which merged Javanese dancers with the Angkor setting, few years after the Paris panorama of 1900, the first general the visitors to Borobudur Archaeological Heritage Park conservator of Angkor, Jean Commaille, sketched out his could now stand on the highest platform of the main templan for an undisturbed ‘vista’ towards Angkor Wat (see Figs. ple to better enjoy an artificially produced vista stretching IX.11a–c). In what we now recognise as a process of ‘archae- through the protected temple areas and emptied tropical ologising heritage’ (Falser/Juneja 2013b), the relocation of landscapes that had once partly belonged to local inhabitthe existing monastery in front of the temple and the subse- ants. In the 1970s, this process of resettlement and relocaquent interventions of landscaping and restoration turned tion in the Borobudur and Prambanan heritage reserves51 the ‘living’ Buddhist site of Angkor Wat into a dead ‘re-Hin- (Fig. XII.9) was positively termed a “village master plan” or duicised’, but ‘picture-perfect’ ruin (Fig. IX.33a,b). There, in “comprehensive village modernisation programme”. The use of postmodern keywords such as “local community line with a tradition that used picturesque staffage figures

51  According to the JICA 1975 report, the resettlement programme in two phases between 1976 and 1980 within Borobudur Park concerned almost one thousand people of almost two hundred households on a surface of more than twenty hectares; and the projected resettlement at Prambanan concerned more than 1,500 people in more than three hundred households on almost twenty-four hectares (JICA 1975, 132–33).

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Eco village outside the future UNESCO World Heritage site of Angkor Park (see epilogue II of this volume).

Figure XII.9  The “Relocation Plan of Dukuh: Borobudur Area” as provided in JICA’s 1975 report (Source: JICA 1975, 150)

improvement” in the participatory rhetoric52 of the 1970s returned through the globalised backdoor to the Angkor Park debates of the 1990s and continue to this day: the Borobudur cultural reserve creation of the “Type-A Dukuh [traditional 300–400 person units] serving as a model for new farming communities and new farming community housing” (JICA 1975, 138) was echoed in the so-called Khmer Habitat Interpretation Center inside and Run Ta-Ek

From 9 to 11 September 1991, the Second International Round Table of Experts on the Preservation of the Angkor Monuments took place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. It was financed by the French government, and it gathered a whole global heritage community (including Vann Molyvann) of “thirty-six experts, the majority of whom were members of sixteen institutions/organisations in eleven different countries”53 (UNESCO 1991c, 5). The gathering addressed the same issues, keywords and recommendations that were covered at the First Round Table, held a year earlier in Bangkok, and the underlying tension between UNESCO’s hegemonic and prestige-driven ambitions for Angkor and emerging ‘national’ interests can be read between the lines of the twenty-five-page meeting report. On the one hand, in his opening speech Henri Lopès “emphasised the keen interest taken by UNESCO’s DG, Frederico Mayor, in the preservation of the Angkor monuments” and referred to the November 1989 invitation of UNESCO (during its own general conference!) “to initiate a scheme to protect Angkor”. He additionally “stressed the importance of international cooperation and the necessity for concerted action in order to succeed in the immense task of safeguarding Angkor”; in other words, the “coordination of UNESCO as maître d’œuvre for all projects” at Angkor was now on the table (UNESCO 1991c, 6). However, the report also reveals that the Cambodian “representatives of the institutions in Phnom Penh” had rather different concerns. The “representative of the Khmer People National Liberation Front (KPNFK)” – Son Soubert, the son of Cambodia’s ex-prime minister Son Sann – “drew attention to the importance of other valuable sites and monuments of the country, […] stressed that it was pernicious to give all attention to the sole site of Angkor, [and] suggested, in order to avoid the sharing out of the site between the countries willing to assist […], the establishment of a national coordinating committee for the conservation of Khmer historical monuments” (UNESCO 1991c, 8). “Special problems”, as they were termed in the summary of the “discussion of the different groups”, also emerged from the space between the ‘help-the-locals-

52  The Japanese “Village master plan” would integrate relocated villagers into the “Service Industries” of the

archaeological parks, to include: “a. Establishment of contract agricultural operations with respect to such products as sugar cane, tobacco, vegetables, livestock, etc., which can be used to meet the food demand of visitors; b. Employment opportunities in the maintenance and control of nurseries, fields and other activities contributing to the preservation of the park environment as well as in other service and maintenance activities; c. Measures for giving priority to local commercial activities inside and outside of the parks; and d. Active participation in the running of simple visitor accommodations such as hostels and rest houses and other tourist-related businesses and capital participation in the development and operation of the parks” (JICA 1975, 140). 53  Cambodia was present with Chuch Phoeurn (Doyen of the Phnom Penh University of Fine Arts), Ing Kieth, (general-secretary of the royalist FUNCINPEC party), Ouk Chea, Pich Keo, Uong Von (director of the Conservation d’Angkor), Son Soubert (from FNLPK party), and Vann Molyvann (listed without affiliation, but with his postal address of “Chalet des Roses, CH-1925 Finhaut, Switzerland”). UNESCO (with Gérard Bolla, Minja Yang, Étienne Clément and Véronique Dauge), WMF, EFEO, AAA, SPAFA, Sophia University (with Yoshiaki Ishizawa), ASI, PKZ, Hungary, Interpol, the European Community, and ICOM, etc. were present.

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from-outside’ rhetoric of international experts, and the ‘from-within empowerment’ of Cambodia’s inner-national decision makers. These contradictions during the Paris meeting in September 1991 were underscored by the fact that although “the inscription of Angkor on the World Heritage List” was made “a priority” in the report, it was not something that was formulated in the conjoint statement made by the Cambodian participants. The official statement declared that the “involvement of the World Bank and the Asian Bank of Development” was essential, but also proposed that the site – “like at Carthage” (see below) – should be “temporarily frozen [sic] against squatterisation and anarchic development” until “adequate zoning and legislation” was in place. As far as the “coordination mechanism for the incoming project proposals and pledges” for Angkor was concerned (which were of course exclusively international), UNESCO foresaw establishing “a small-scale technical advisory committee”; and the EFEO’s proposal, which would be relevant to establishing the forthcoming ICC structure (see below), suggested “the disposal of qualified personnel for expertise and ad hoc interventions” (UNESCO 1991c, 15–24). On 11 September 1991, Norodom Sihanouk, addressed the Second Round Table to show, as UNESCO Presse reported, his “political volition to give Angkor the largest possible priority”.54 Two full years after his semi-informal visit to UNESCO on 1 September 1989 (when Mayor requested that he give his consent for UNESCO’s activism for Angkor), he evoked the joint “caring efforts for Angkor during the French protectorate in Cambodia and [his] Sangkum Reastr Niyum after the country’s independence”. This remark sounds astonishingly similar to the wording used for the sound-and-light show at Angkor Wat in 1966, when Charles de Gaulle visited his friend Sihanouk as Chef d’État of an independent Cambodia and Bernard Philippe Groslier formutaled the text to praise the “conjoint efforts [of both nations] to rebirth Ang­ kor” (Groslier 1966b, see in chapter X). More than twenty years later, Sihanouk was now thanking international experts for their “noble mission” [tâche] to save Angkor, and he concluded his speech with “a great homage to that remarkable Frenchmen who dedicated a great part of his life to the preservation of Angkor, the late Bernard Philippe Groslier, the last curator of Angkor” (UNESCO 1991c, annex 4). In doing so, he ignored the efforts of many Cambodian curators at Angkor Park, from Pich Keo (when Groslier left in 1973) to Uong Von in 1991, both of whom were in the audience. Sihanouk’s Francophile image of ‘two great

men saving Angkor’ at the threshold between colonialism and Cambodia’s independence – namely, himself and the EFEO’s Groslier – had migrated into the globalised present, this time with UNESCO’s Mayor as Sihanouk’s new partner in salvaging Angkor. Between UN Security Council resolutions 717 and 718 on the establishment of a UN Advance Mission in Cambodia,55 the Agreements on a comprehensive political settlement of the Cambodia conflict (called the Paris Peace Agreement) were signed by the four Cambodian parties on 23 October 1991 during the Paris Conference on Cambodia: these parties included the royalist FUNCINPEC under Sihanouk, the republican KPNFK under Son Sann, the Khmer Rouge, and the ‘State of Cambodia’ as the heir to the VietnameseCommunist setup that was previously led by Heng Samrin and was now headed by Hun Sen. The settlement committed the Cambodian parties and those supporting them to the withdrawal of foreign forces, to a permanent ceasefire, to the holding of free and fair elections (in 1992), and to the adoption of a new democratic constitution – all under the supervision of the United Nations through the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, UNTAC (Doyle 1995, Findlay 1995, Keller 2005, Hugues 2009). During the same period, UNESCO’s twenty-sixth General Conference took place in Paris (15 October – 7 November 1991). Commission IV passed several resolutions on the topic 3, Culture: past, present and future, on a Nubian Museum in Aswan and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Cairo, and on the conflict over Jerusalem’s cultural heritage. Resolution 26C/3.13 on the Preservation of the Angkor Monuments (tabled by Hungary) was adopted on 6 November. It officially requested that the DG of ­UNESCO take the lead in the whole matter, including the site’s nomination to the World Heritage List (UNESCO 1991d, 60–61). Just one week after the UN General Assembly Resolution 46/18, another recall of the “Situation of Cambodia”56 followed on 20 November 1991. Shortly afterwards, Federico Mayor and his deputy director of culture, Henri Lopès, made a symbolic visit to Cambodia from 28 November to 1 December 1991. For the purposes of this study, Mayor’s advisor on Angkor, Claude Jacques, has kindly provided his “personal dossier”, thus allowing us to reconstruct the whole of the trip (Jacques 1991b). The dossier includes several summaries on recent internal-political history and the UN-Cambodian collaboration, which were intended to brief the DG.57 The “list of

54  “Le Prince Sihanouk participe à une table ronde internationale d’experts sur Angkor”, in: UNESCO Presse 91–177 (Paris, 11 September 1991). 55  Compare: http://repository.un.org/handle/11176/56408 (retrieved 24 October 2017). 56  http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/46/a46r018.htm (retrieved 26 June 2017). 57  This included the documents on the “Political background: Chronology of the Cambodian conflict”, the “Basic data and presentation of the country”, the “Reports of the Intersectorial Mission (January–February 1991)”, the “Chronology of co-operation between Cambodian and UNESCO (1951–91)” and the “UNESCO Proposal of activities in 1992–3” (Jacques 1991b).

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Figures XII.10a,b  The meeting of Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique with UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor, Phnom Penh 28 November 1991; with the aidemémoire signed from both sides (Source: Connaissance des Arts 481 (March 1992), III (photograph Arnaud Carpentier); © UNESCO Archives, Paris)

participants” (with six members of the UNESCO Secretariat and five “invitees of the DG”)58 and the “tentative program of the visit” allow for a contextualisation of Mayor’s delicate mission of heritage diplomacy. Following Mayor’s arrival in Phnom Penh on 28 November and after his attendance at the receptions organised by Sem Hor Namhong (minister of foreign affairs), the agreement with Cambodia to join the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention was

established. This was followed by a lunch offered through the UN’s Development Programme (UNDP) and visits to educational institutions such as the Institut Technique Supérieur Khméro-Soviétique at Phnom Penh University. On 29 November, Mayor met Hun Sen (president of the council of ministers), visited major sites of the city (including the royal palace and the National Museum),59 gave a press conference and inaugurated UNESCO’s Cambodia office. Mayor also had an audience with Norodom Sihanouk in his function as president of the SNC (Fig. XII.10a). During this meeting both protagonists signed an Aide-Mémoire entre l’UNESCO et le Conseil National Suprême du Cambodge (Fig. XII.10b), which was intended to “serve as a basis of the cooperation between Cambodia and UNESCO” (UNESCO 1991e, 9). Besides joint projects on education and communication, the section on “culture” was again the most important and focused entirely on Angkor. Interestingly, the UNESCO-Cambodian agreement to put Angkor on the World Heritage List was already fixed in detail at a moment when the nomination text was not even drafted, let alone supported by an obligatory expert evaluation mission by ICOMOS (which would materialise only a year later; see below). This internal deal included UNESCO’s mission to help “establish the necessary inventories, the nomination dossier [as well as] a comité consultatif international [under] a highest-possible Cambodian authority”. As regards the issue of “the safeguard and development of Angkor”, Cambodia had (nota bene: the country was just emerging from a turbulent period of civil war, genocide and Vietnamese occupation!) to set up a “national coordination structure and an adequate legislation, evaluate the pro­ posals of international assistance and assure the project management for protection, preservation and restoration”. UNESCO’s resolve “to coordinate all bilateral and multi-lat­ eral activities in the context of Angkor” was again reconfirmed (UNESCO 1991e, 5–7). On 30 November, Mayor took a flight to Siem Reap, met the provincial representatives there and visited Angkor Park. It was in this context that he launched his symbolic Appeal for the protection, preservation, restoration and presentation of the site of Angkor on (where else?) the causeway of Angkor Wat (Pl. XII.10). In line with other – French,

58  Members of the UNESCO Secretariat were, according to Jacques’s list, Henri Lopès (assistant DG for

culture), Khamliène Nhouyvanisvong (director of Asia and Pacific Bureau of External Relations), Dieter ­ erstecher (chief of the Section for Interagency Co-operation for Basis Education), Richard Engelhardt B ­(UNESCO Chargé de Mission for Cambodia), Minja Yang (head of the UNESCO Task Force on Cambodia, and chief of the Section for Co-ordination of Emergency and Humanitarian Operations) and Kethy Toulong-­ Farras (programme specialist for the Young Children and Family Environment Project). The invitees of the DG were: Prince Diskul (director of SEAMEO/SPAFA), Ikuo Hirayama (UNESCO goodwill ambassador and president of the National University of Fine Arts of Japan), John Gunther Dean (special advisor of the DG of UNESCO for International Co-operation in Asia), Gérard Bolla (vice-chairman of the Second Round Table of Experts on Angkor and consultant from the Paul Getty Conservation Institute), and finally Claude Jacques (Secretary-General of the AAA and Professor of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), both Paris). 59  This tour excluded – probably due to diplomatic sensitivity for the Khmer Rouge within the actual government – a visit to the Tuol Sleng memorial site (see its Vietnamese instrumentalisation in the previous chapter).

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Khmer, and lately Japanese and English – addresses using a similar wording, his appeal was indeed a milestone in the modern history of Angkor’s transcultural trajectory of heritage. The messianic character of the universally embedded belief in UNESCO’s leading role and its civilising mission to “save Angkor in the name of humanity” was hard to miss. The irony of a civilising mission headed and called for by the United Nations – which kept silent while US bombing devastated entire areas of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which stood by while 2 million Cambodians fell victim from 1975 to 1979 to the genocidal terror of a Khmer Rouge regime, and which acknowledged that regime as the legal representative of Cambodia between 1979 and 1991 during the period of Cold War power games – is also hard to miss. Indeed, its self-appointed mission “to give back the Khmer people their civilisation, pride, and memory of their ancestor’s glory” had a distinctly neo-colonial undertone. In a globalised sense, Mayor’s official vision of ‘peril, danger and salvage’ was not far removed from Mouhot’s para-colonial statement made 150 years earlier (see chapter I): There are times in the history of humanity when both ­history and humanity keep silence. Thus, it is that tragic, unfathomable periods go unrecorded, too fearsome, too distressing to enter the annals. At such times, it only remains to wait for the awakening of history and, with it, humanity at that moment when tragedy, beauty and hope reappear together. Today in Cambodia, tragedy withdraws, hope is reborn, and the beauty of Angkor reaffirms its permanence in history. Buildings, stones, temples, statuary and bas-reliefs silent under the depredations of man and nature are once again preparing to speak of that great civilisation to which they bear witness. Angkor, city of the Khmer kings, is waiting to become once more the symbol of its country. Vestiges, which bear witness to a rich and glorious past, reflect all those values that are a source for the Khmer people of hope reborn and identity recovered. Yes, this symbol is in peril. The ravages of time, the assaults of nature and the pillaging of man further its decline with every passing day. It must be saved! For over a thousand years, Angkor has bewitched humanity and nurtured our dreams. Its influence has reached beyond frontiers and centuries. The mystery of the gods and the genius of the human race shine forth from those stones where human beings used all their talents to create a profound union between nature and civilisation. The site of Angkor is here in Cambodia, yet it belongs to the whole of humanity. For this reason, UNESCO is proposing, with the Cambodian people, to coordinate a safeguarding operation to be carried out with the very highest criteria of expertise. Directed by the Cambodians under international management, the operation for the preservation and restoration of the monuments of Angkor, and the natural surroundings which enhance them, will be part of an integrated development strategy for the region as a whole. We cannot,

we must not, consign our heritage to silence. Angkor is not only the melting pot of Khmer culture: it is also a milestone in the history of civilisation and in the very memory of mankind in which we must search for the roots of our future. Angkor must be saved! This challenge, in which UNESCO proposes to stand beside the people of Cambodia, extends far beyond a mere restoration of relics of the past. For the saving of Angkor will allow an entire people to regain its pride, its will to live and a renewed vigour with which to rebuilt its country. I therefore appeal to the international community as a whole to put the stamp of universal solidarity on the rebirth of Angkor. May the help of each and every one of us be forthcoming so that the Khmer people may see the capital of their ancestors radiant once again. [italics MF] (Mayor 1991a)

The French draft version of Mayor’s text – provided by Claude Jacques, and translated and published here for the first time – was even more emphatic: Appeal for Angkor! Coming to Cambodia it is first the children, the women, and men that I have in mind. Few other people in modern and contemporary history have been through more suffering, undergone more humiliation [on subi un calvaire aussi long, ont bu la coupe jusqu’à la lie]. Without the eyes of these people, the rising ensemble of monuments here on two hundred square kilometres wouldn’t make much sense. But maybe it is the permanence of Angkor with all the values in its temples that gave the Khmer people the power and the energy to survive. This is why, today more than ever, Angkor must be reborn! [C’est pourquoi, aujourd’hui plus que jamais, Angkor doit renaître!] For a thousand years, Angkor has fascinated the people and nourished their dreams. Once more, emerging from a long nightmare, the city of the Khmer kings will open itself to the world! The world has to respond to these smiles of hope, which are engraved in the stone, to help Angkor to dress the wounds inflicted by time and people, and to progressively regain its splendour. For Angkor is not a sunken city or a relic of a defunct civilisation; on the contrary, it is the symbol and standard [étendard] of a living nation, united by the will to reconstruct its country. It is here, on this immense site where the towers of stone and the trunks of giant trees become wedged together, where the past joins the future as a sign of hope and of a renaissance. […] Today, Angkor is in danger! The assaults from time and nature and human pillage helped, day after day, to bring about its degradation. Can the world abandon this part of its heritage [héritage]? Angkor is not just the melting pot of Khmer culture, it is equally one of the milestones in the history of civilisations, on the memory of humanity — this common memory that we have to preserve, to ingrain our future. We should never forget that the settlements of the past arose from the dreams of mankind and took form under its work, watered by the blood and sweat of

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Figure XII.11b  Illustration from special issue Connaissance des arts in March 1992, with the legend: “Ceremony to give back a white plaster cast [surmoulage] of a bas-relief of Ang­ kor – representing a guardian figure from the 9 th-century temple of Lolei – to Prince Sihanouk, on 23 November 1991, by Roland Dumas, ministre d’État, and Michel Bourdon. As a veritable scientific document, it had been taken from a piece of the plaster cast collection of the musée Guimet, stored at the Abbey of Saint-Riquier. The oldest of those casts date from the years between 1873 and 1882” (Source: Connaissance des arts, 481 (March 1992), photograph by Arnaud Carpentier)

Figure XII.11a  Cover of the special issue about Angkor in Connaissance des arts in March 1992, photograph by Marc Riboud (Source: Connaissance des arts 481 (March 1992), cover)

their anonymous builders, ancestors of those who [now] live in their shadow. We must save Angkor! [Il faut sauver Angkor!] This challenge that we want to accept on the part of the Cambodian people goes far beyond a simple restoration of the ruins of the past. To save Angkor is also to give back a whole people its pride and its will to live, to install in it a new energy necessary to reconstruct its coun­ try. Therefore, I appeal to the whole international community so that the renaissance of Angkor will be a symbol of universal solidarity. [I hope] that the help of all will permit the Khmer people to see the capital of their ancestors shine resplendent again [Que l’aide de tous permette au peuple khmer de voir à nouveau resplendir la capital de ses ancêtres]! [italics MF] (Mayor 1991b)

This is a truly unique document in the context of Mayor’s visit to Cambodia, and the final version was published in

the French journal Connaissance des arts in March 1992 for a special issue called Cambodge: Entre ciel et enfer. Un ­dossier de 58 pages réalisé à l’occasion de l’appel du Docteur Federico Mayor, directeur général de l’UNESCO, pour la sauvegarde des temples d’Angkor (Fig. XII.11a). From a broader perspec­ tive, it depicted the transcultural connectivity between Asia and Europe that is so central to this study; in this case (a) between the ‘original’ site in Cambodia and its forms of physical and political ‘re-presentation’ in France, and (b) in a timeline reaching back from ancient and colonial to postcolonial and present times. In the document the well-worn strategy to play out ancient (Angkorian) glory and colonial efforts against post-empire and recent decline was used to justify the international mission to re-civilise the country: more precisely,60 over fifty pages in eight chapters organised under the overarching title “Cambodia between Heaven and Hell”, the issue presented the ruined and picturesque

60  The chapters included an introduction and a “Carnet de voyage” of Mayor’s visit, Mayor’s interview (un-

der the pleasing title “La France jouera un rôle de premier plan”); “une séquelle de la guerre froide” about Cambodia’s period between 1970 and 1990 by John Gunther Dean (previously American ambassador in

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temples and their tragic modern history ‘in Cambodia’ alongside the story of Angkor Wat ‘in France’ – that is, in museums and universal/colonial exhibitions and in Delaporte’s plaster casts from the temple (compare with chapter III), which were abandoned in a depot north of Paris (see Pl. III.16a,b) before being rediscovered as objects of value. As a connecting element between Asia and Europe, the dossier mentioned Mayor’s Appeal for Angkor, delivered in front of Angkor Wat, along with an interview featuring Mayor and Claude Jacques talking about the safeguarding mission of Angkor (see Pl. XII.10). At this point in time, Roland Dumas, ministre d’État chargé des Affaires étrangères, had already made his visit to Sihanouk on 23 November 1991. As the journal Connaissance des arts pictured it in the article “Angkor-en-Picardi”, he offered the king a remade plaster cast from an original sculptural relief at the musée Guimet, taken from the 9th-century temple of

Lolei in the wider Angkor region (Fig. XII.11b). This gesture of a ‘return gift’ (after Marcel Mauss’ famous 1925 Essai sur le don) was to conclude a full transcultural circle of ongoing physical ‘(back)translations’ to constitute a complex net of mutual claims and obligations. It stretched from Delaporte’s engagement with and at Angkor in the 1870 and 1880s (see chapter III), to Maréchal Lyautey’s opening of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris in front of the ­Angkor Wat replica (Fig. Intro.1a) into the postcolonial 1950/60s (back-then already with Sihanouk at play; see chapter X) and the post-1990 global era. In 1992, the author of the journal had to leave the question of the future of the French casts from Angkor unanswered, but some twenty years later in 2013, the musée Guimet would stage the restored casts from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois alongside original artefacts of Cambodian art (compare Pl. III.17; Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, Falser 2013e,g,h).

5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’ In 1992, although the efforts to put Angkor on UNESCO’s World Heritage List picked up speed, the process at this point was marked by ambivalence. On one hand, Cambodians made remarkable efforts to set up all the necessary elements in the cultural heritage sector – though most were little more than gestures in the face of the overwhelming political, social and financial challenges in this period of national reconciliation. On the other hand, almost all ‘real’ fact-and-definition-finding work was, as a logical consequence of the self-imposed time pressure, outsourced to international cultural heritage experts under Mayor’s UNESCO. From a critical point of view, this procedure of time pressure and imposed ad hoc help from outside, led to a partial incapacitation on the Cambodian national level in the cultural sector, which needed time for a slow regrowth over at least a full decade. However, this effect in the cultural section must be contextualised as part of a truly unique mission in the United Nation’s history: at the

same moment that UNESCO’s experts were pushing the built heritage called Angkor towards enrolment on the prestigious World Heritage List, the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) took shape. Its role was to supervise disarmament, human rights, de-mining actions (which also concerned the area of Angkor) and free elections, and it became fully operational in March 1992 after the United Nations’ Security Council Resolution 745 of 28 February 1992.61 Unlike UNTAC’s action, which had a clear start and definite end to the proposed help from outside and a timeline for handing state affairs back to an independent and sovereign nation-state of Cambodia, UNESCO’s emergency politics were completely different. In fact, they created the basis for internationalised assistance infrastructure which was perpetuated far beyond the indeed critical years of 1990–93 (the period of the UNTAC mission itself). It is safe to state that to this very day the process formed a unique case in the international history of cultural heritage

Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge and now “personal representative for the DG of UNESCO for Cambodia), a pictured essay on “sérénité et sensualité” of the temples in the jungle by the photographer Marc Riboud; the story of “Vingt années de tragédie” by the previous journalist of the French newspaper Libération, James Burnet; the “Cahier des charges pour Angkor” by Claude Jacques; an introduction to the “Musée national de Phnom Penh” by its ex-conservator, Madeleine Giteau; and finally, “Angkor-en-Picardie” by Philippe Seuillet. 61  UN Security Council Resolution 745 of 28 February 1992, see http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc. asp?symbol=S/RES/745(1992) (retrieved 25 July 2017). Its mandate “included aspects relating to human rights, the organisation and conduct of free and fair general elections, military arrangements, civil administration, the maintenance of law and order, the repatriation and resettlement of the Cambodian refugees and displaced persons and the rehabilitation of essential Cambodian infrastructure during the transitional period. […] UNTAC’s mandate ended after eighteen months in September 1993 with the promulgation of the Constitution for the Kingdom of Cambodia and the formation of the new Government”. See: Cambodia – UNTAC Mandate, defined on UN’s web link https://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/untacmandate.html (retrieved 24 June 2017).

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politics and management, one that was unthinkable for other nation-states and landmark archaeological sites nominated to UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage List. By comparison, it is totally inconceivable that Italy’s Forum Romanum in Rome (nominated in 1980), China’s Great Wall (nominated 1987), Thailand’s Historic City of Ayuttha­ ya, or Indonesia’s Borbudur and Prambanan Compounds (nominated in 1991) would be managed through an international consortium that not only outsourced local expertise but even controlled all restoration projects on the site with final decisions delegated to non-local ad-hoc experts. Just a few months before Cambodia’s global rebirth as the youngest, and one of the world’s smallest, nation-states, the world’s largest archaeological park – Angkor – was nominated to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site in December 1992. As we shall see, however, the process was far from irreproachable. Moving the methodological approach of this book one step forward, one might well consider exactly how (not) far removed from the colonial era the post-1990 application of international (mostly French) legal, administrative and logistical standards to the mapping, inventorisation, classification, protection, commodification and institutionalisation of Angkor on the (inter)national level – and finally the nomination of the site as world heritage – was. In the colonial period the temples of Angkor were restored as elements of a newly established Parc archéologique (1925/30) and simultaneously represented and temporarily staged in French museums and in the universal and colonial exhibitions in the French métropole from Marseille (1906, 1922) to Paris (1867–1937). In order to conceptualise the transcultural connectivity between both heritage-making scenarios – the colonial project of applied archaeology on the spot, with its universal/colonial exhibitions on one side and the world heritage regime since the 1980/90s on the other –, the following analysis will reveal how Angkor Wat once again served as a uniting and overlapping element. When the French journal Sources UNESCO published its thirty-third volume in January 1992, the cover featured a Bodhisattva face from the Bayon temple (a similar one was

staged about one hundred years earlier as a plaster cast replica in Delaporte’s musée Indochinois in Paris, see Figs. III.26b, 40) with the headline “Angkor, Symbol of a Nation” (see Pl. XII.2). The corresponding article inside the journal, however, did not cite any national stakeholders from Cambodia, nor from the wider social or religious (Buddhist) sphere of Angkor62 but instead focused on UNESCO’s central players: Federico Mayor in Paris and Richard Engelhardt at the recently opened Phnom Penh headquarters. Both declared “Cambodia’s willingness to rise from its ruins”; but whose Cambodia was it? Their rather hastily formed call to “the international community” under UNESCO leadership, for help in the “redoubtable task” would “cost about 100 million USD in the next fifteen to twenty years” (UNESCO 1992a, 7). Equally concerning is that other tasks such as education and communication were added to the task list only on a secondary level.63 In the same year – 1992 – when the nomination was finally pushed through the external and internal obstacles, Lyndel V. Prott,64 the chief expert within UNESCO’s International Standard Section in the division of cultural heritage, raised a critical voice several times, but ultimately her concerns were disregarded. In her internal letter on 9 January 1992,65 she reminded Henri Lopès about the general fifteen-month period required for proper consideration of nominations to the World Heritage List (compare Jokilehto 2011). According to the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (see below for their revised version from March 1992, UNESCO 1992c), nominations had to be lodged by 1 October of the previous year in order to be decided by the World Heritage Committee66 in December of the following year. Prott concluded: Thus, for Angkor a nomination received by 1 October of this year [of 1992, MF] will be checked in the Secretariat, evaluated by ICOMOS by April 1993, considered by the Bureau of the Committee in June 1993 and decided by the Committee in December 1993. These periods are calculated to allow adequate time for evaluation of the site, reporting, translation of documents and study by members of the Bureau, Committee, etc. and already represent

62  Only Seung Kong, deputy director at the Cambodian Ministry of Culture was quoted as calling “Angkor,

the symbol of the country’s unity”. The article “The archaeologist with empty hands” quoted Pich Keo (the first Cambodian Conservator General of Angkor after B. P. Groslier had left in 1973 (see Pl. IX.25), and again after 1979 as the article had it) in his function as the acting director of Phnom Penh’s National Museum ­(UNESCO 1992, 7, 9). 63  In the article “Beyond the stones: The aid of UNESCO does not stop at the stones of the Angkor temple. It is extended to education, communication. Everything has to be reconstructed”, UNESCO’s budget for 1992–93, “independently to the regional activities and the safeguard of Angkor”, was judged to be almost 6 million USD (UNESCO 1992a, 16). 64  I would like to thank Lyndel Prott for her kind explanations about this period via email correspondence in 2017. 65  Chief INS Lyndel V. Prott to Ass.-DG/CLT Henri Lopès on 9 January 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992). 66  The World Heritage Committee is an elected intergovernmental board of experts from member states to the UNESCO 1972 Convention.

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a tight schedule. The Committee has asked the Secretariat to apply the Operational Guidelines strictly. Within this framework, the Secretariat, ICOMOS and the Bureau can of course give priority to Angkor as a site of extreme importance, but I do not believe that this timetable can be changed, in particular because it conforms with the dates or meetings of the Bureau and Committee. [italics MF]

Additionally, Prott mentioned other imperatives that were not yet in place: “the need to have both a safeguard plan and adequate legislation to accompany the nomination as required by the Committee”. Additionally, she referred to the “priority for a monuments expert to visit [Angkor] and devise a management plan, […] at the same time preparing the nomination forms [and then] having a legislation expert to draft the legislation”. On the other side of the internal spectrum, Claude Jacques reminded UNESCO on 21 January to tighten its organisational grasp over Angkor, since international teams were rushing into Angkor without any coordination and their financial wealth would have a negative, or even worsening, effect on the ‘open-hands’ attitude of the Cambodians involved. What he was in fact referring to was a kind of downward spiral which was, from a critical standpoint, even fostered in the following years by the massive ‘ad hoc emergency help politics’ that were implemented from outside and would systematically vitiate individual responsibility from the inside of the slowly evolving Cambodian heritage system. However, Jacques’ sceptical judgement of the ‘local receiving side’ and the push towards the concerted international ‘giving side’ were rather ambivalent: Unfortunately, the diverse programmes in the e ­ laboration process seem to be without any coordination or discussion between the diverse national or NGO organisations, and UNESCO should serve in this moment as a structure for registration (at least where au courant of the projects!). It must be said that the Khmers, clearly privileged and necessary partners, do not make things easier since specialists are rare under them; due to the misery they did and still do experience, [they] open the door to all propositions, wherever they may come from and whichever

interest they may follow as long as they appear liable to bring money, [which is] today the only manifest motor of all action in Phnom Penh. […] Expertise [on various temple sites, MF] was formed, in particular by the EFEO. One should be permitted to ask whether or not these projects announced by the different countries or interested organisations conform with the interests of Angkor and Cambodia and whether the different countries have chosen temples as a kind of promotional display [bonne vitrine] for themselves rather than by the degree of emergency care needed by the selected temples. [It is necessary] to reflect rather quickly and in all objectivity on the urgent problems of the work that must be done at the different temples of Angkor. It cannot be healthy that everyone elaborates on selected projects without even asking the opinion of a competent Khmer authority, nor of UNESCO. We have to move quickly to unite specialised technicians and to constitute the Comité consultatif pour la sauvegarde d’Angkor.67 [italics MF]

The efforts made in Cambodia became slowly more visible despite the fact that Sihanouk’s rather monopolistic grasp on them in direct liaison with UNESCO’s requirements was more than obvious. Two months later, the meeting in Phnom Penh/Siem Reap convened to sign the aide-mémoire along with a mutual to-do list and UNESCO’s Appeal for Angkor in front of Angkor Wat in late November 1991. Sihanouk decreed on 3 February 1992 (or “decided”, according to the document) that the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Monuments and Museums of Cambodia would be created. As far as the internal structure was concerned, Sihanouk himself would act as president along with the minister of culture and nineteen other members.68 The Committee was charged with “care for the safeguarding and development of the archaeological park of Angkor, and the rehabilitation of Cambodia’s museums”, and its prime mandate was “to prepare the application file to nominate Angkor to the World Heritage List” in order to develop management structures and resources and to initiate studies and “structural reinforcements of Angkor Wat and the Bayon temples” (Sihanouk 1992a). In the same context, a plan d’opération was also drafted.69 In a telling sign of

67  Claude Jacques to UNESCO “Sur la restauration des temples d’Angkor” on 21 January 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–92). 68  This included: six members of the secretariat of the SNC, the governors of Siem Reap and Battambang for ‘their’ archaeological parks (the parc archéologique de Battambang was never realised), the directors of the Conservation d’Angkor, of the Phnom Penh National Museum and the Vat Poveal Museum, the rector of the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh and the deans of the five faculties, the director of cultural relations and of the Conservatoire des spectacles. 69  It had two requests: “consolidation and conservation work of the monuments of Angkor Wat and Bayon” and “development of the institutions of the conservation of monuments and museums”, with roughly 2 million USD needed for the next three years (État du Cambodge 1992a). A fact-finding mission of the EFEO in early 1991 identified structural problems with several galleries, the central massif, the southeastern pavilion and the southern gate of the second enclosure (both partly collapsed from bombing), along with much-needed restoration efforts for the bas-reliefs of the third enclosure (affected by mortar shells).

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Cambodia’s rushed reconfiguration in the early 1990s and its desire to speed up a local and slow recovery by entering into supercharged globalisation, Sihanouk also announced that the just-established national expert committee would be ‘advised’ by an international committee of experts whose main goal was to achieve universal recognition of the cultural heritage of Angkor. Now, the new-old Chef d’État proposed installing a “Comité consultatif pour Angkor”, or, as he termed it in English, an “Angkor International Advisory Board” with a wide range of tasks centring around a complete mise en valeur of the archaeological park.70 Obviously, Sihanouk became its president, and members were appointed from among the most financially supportive countries around the globe who were joined by the directors of the on-site teams (the US-American WMF, the French EFEO, India’s ASI, Japan’s IAC and Poland’s PKZ), assisted by the “consultative voices” of ICCROM, ICOMOS and IUCN, and, finally, supervised in its institutionalisation process by UNESCO’s director general. This was, with­out a doubt, the most comprehensive global development of a cultural heritage site of its time, and it created the largest archaeological park on the planet inside one of the world’s smallest nation-states. While UNTAC’s parallel help structure was formed on a temporary basis to assist Cambodia towards complete political independence and within a clear deadline, Sihanouk himself even fostered – compared with his postcolonial deal with the EFEO to continue to manage Angkor after Cambodia’s independence in 1953 (chapter X) – a kind of dispossession within the nation’s prominent sector of cultural heritage: the international set-up of Angkor Park proved to be not only far from provisional but would in fact become a permanent fixture overseen by an increasingly over-bureaucratised superstructure. This has had a devastating effect on the local setting, and to this day (2019) Cambodian authorities are not independently responsible for a single major archaeological temple site within Angkor Park, not to speak of the most important one: Angkor Wat (see the maps in epilogue II of this volume, Pl. EpII.7,8).

Documents from the UNESCO archive in Paris prove that the key players behind the scenes had already made the very concrete decision in early January 1992 (or even earlier) to place Angkor on the World Heritage List, bypassing all internal and external quality control mechanisms. In an attempt to frame the campaign of ‘Saving Angkor’ as a global and humanitarian concern, an International Patronage Committee for Angkor was added to the Consultative Committee for Angkor; however, this project was later abandoned.71 Concerned with the logistical problem of the absence of a heritage system for Angkor and the danger of ignoring the heretofore obligatory time schedule within the internal nomination procedure, on 5 February Prott warned of the diplomatic side effects of UNESCO’s obviously unbalanced priorities for heritage listing in light of its willingness to evaluate other nominations from Algeria, Romania, Russia, and Uzbekistan, among others, against more severe criteria:72 I note from your memo to the Director General of 9 January that M. Bolla and M. Beschaouch have agreed in principle that the nomination of Angkor to the World Heritage List would be considered this year. While I fully understand the political urgency of the nomination, I must point out that this would involve us in many very delicate political difficulties with other States. Cambodia has at the moment no protective legislation, and not even any legislative body which could make some. The committee has consistently refused to list sites without legislation, most notably last year in respect of the Romanian sites, in spite of strong representations from the State concerned, a high degree of public sympathy, and the submission of a draft law. You will also recall the case of the Algiers Kasbah which has not yet been placed on the list for lack of a management plan, and the sites of Novgorod and Buk­ hara which the Committee deferred, despite an ICOMOS recommendation and fulfilment of the legal and conservation requirements on the ground that it was not clear

70  Its task list comprised “a) coordinating scientific research, the definition of a deontological code to uni-

form the techniques of conservation, archaeology and building preservation; b) assisting the Cambodian government with setup of all necessary instruments for the conservation, the mise en valeur and réanimation of heritage; c) promoting and searching for financial resources to safeguard Angkor; d) elaborating a master plan for the overall planning of the environment of Angkor [schéma directeur global d’aménagement de l’environnement d’Angkor]; and e) reinforcing national institutions in the [above-quoted] fields” (État du Cambodge 1992a, attachment). 71  Lopès’ draft list of the “Comité d’honneur” comprised state leaders and aristocrats such as President Norodom Sihanouk, the French president François Mitterrand, Prince Mikasa from Japan, Princess Sirindhorn from Thailand, Prince Charles from the United Kingdom, Indonesia’s president Suharto, Germany’s president Richard von Weizsäcker, Sinia Gandhi from India, etc. in: “Idea of an ‘International Patronage Committee for Angkor’ and establishment of a ‘Consultative Committee for Angkor”, notes by Minja Yang and Henri Lopès from February 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992). 72  “Decision CONF 002 XV: Nominations not considered: Historical Centre of Boukhara (Uzbekistan) & Historical Monuments of Novgorod and its region (Russian Federation)” and “Decision: CONF 002 XV.B: Inscription procedures have been initiated: Kasbah of Algiers (Algeria)”, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/ 3512 and http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/3535 (both from 1991, accessed 28 July 2017).

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what authority would be responsible for the administration of the sites. Angkor has all of these problems. The Division is ready to send an expert to draft legislation immediately, but he will need to know what administrative structures will exist to implement it or he cannot draft. While we will do this with all possible speed, I fear that it will be difficult to ensure that it will be done before the Bureau meeting in June, since it largely depends on developments internal to Cambodia. I bring this to your notice only so that you will be aware that, in attempting to meet political exigencies in Cambodia, we may well create serious political difficulties with other States who will feel that they have been discriminated against, and it will certainly make it very difficult to keep to the Committee’s rules in future. Nonetheless, we are now organising a mission under the World Heritage Fund to prepare a nomination, so that the moment the question of legislation and administrative authority is resolved, the nomination can be proceeded with.73 [italics MF]

Bernard Cohn’s methodological approach to reading the colonial processes of production and application of knowledge (Cohn 1996, 3–15) allows us to contextualise the postcolonial and now globalised heritagisation processes for Angkor around 1990. What he called the “investigative modalities” from survey to surveillance in relation to archaeological sites in British-colonial India was certainly also applied in the French-colonial setting to create the Parc archéologique d’Angkor after 1907 and extended well into Cambodia’s era of independence (see chapters IX and X). Is it any surprise that – after the dark period of twenty years (see chapter XI) from Republican civil war (1970–75), Khmer Rouge terror (1975–79) and Vietnamese occupation (1979–89) – Angkor Park underwent a process after 1990 that was marked by similar neo-colonial/global tendencies? As we shall see in the following analysis, many of the ex-French-colonial modalities, such as mapping/spatialising, inventorying/classifying, training, listing/legislation and tight control/surveillance, were recycled ad hoc to accommodate a self-imposed deadline for placing Angkor as a cultural heritage site under UNESCO’s heritage regime. On 4 March 1992, a meeting of Cambodia’s national committee came up with four dossiers for the Rehabilitation plan for sites and monuments. In light of the above observation of the persistence of French-colonial inclinations within Cambodia’s cultural heritage formation, Dossier 1: Explicative list of the cultural property proposed for inscription for World Heritage (Inventory and description) is a particularly interesting document. Apart from other inventories for archaeological groups and ensembles (such as of Roluos, Sambor Prei Kuk or Preah Vihear), the “indicative list of the principle monuments [were] classified by geo-

graphical area [and in most cases] referenced with the number of Lunet de Lajonquière’s 1909 Inventaire descriptif” (État du Cambodge 1992b, np). Lajonquière’s old register – published just two years after Siam’s 1907 retrocession of Angkor to French-colonial Cambodge (Fig. XII.12a) and reused again in the Liste générale des Monuments historiques du Cambodge on 31 March 1950 – was revived in a national draft list for world heritage in 1992 (Fig. XII.12b). And while Lajonquière’s work was triggered by the retreat of Cambodia’s enemy from the West (Siam/Thailand, compare the discussion in chapter IX), a similar boost to Cambodia’s cultural self-esteem around Angkor occurred after the country’s adversary from the East, Vietnam’s occupying military, withdrew around 1990. And although Lajonquière’s twenty-five page description of the temple in 1911 saw the common judgement of Angkor Wat “as the masterpiece of Cambodian architecture […] [as] rather questionable” (Lajonquière 1911, vol.3, 91–115, here 91), the short (French) version of the Cambodian Committee in 1992 (État du Cambodge 1992b, dossier 1, 6) reads like a draft formulation of criteria for UNESCO’s World Heritage listing procedure (see below). Angkor Wat’s ‘architectural affordance quality’ in Beaux-Arts-related aesthetics (see introduction) came again to the forefront: ANGKOR WAT, with its entry to the west, forms a rectangle of about 1,500 by 1,300 metres, and covers about 200 hectares, including a 190-metre-large moat around it. In the interior of the site, a circular wall encloses a space of 1,025 by 800 metres, about 82 hectares: it is the largest ensemble of the groupe d’Angkor. Angkor Wat is a work of power and reason [une œuvre de puissance et de raison] with a balanced plan of harmony in its proportions and the purity [pureté] of its composition lines, with its particular care for its construction and, at times, its complexity [italics MF].

The report, Dossier 2: Project for the preservation of the Khmer archaeological sites, called – now with Vann’s 5-Zone plan attached (see above) and with one eye on the future nomination “to open the maximum of sites to the visitors under the best conditions of management and security” (no word about local inhabitants) – for “the demining of Zone 5 of Angkor Park, a 300-metre demined zone around the other archaeological parks, and the demilitarisation and physical marking of the demining areas under UNTAC control” (État du Cambodge 1992b, dossier 2, n.p). Finally, Dossier 3: Terms of reference for a management plan of the site listed some of the classic instruments used to set up a heterotopian, ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Foucault 1967, Bennett 1988) in the form of national museums, universal/colonial exhibitions and archaeological parks. These included

73  Lyndel Prott to Henri Lopès (CC to Dermitzel, Dauge, Clément): “Memo 5 February 1992, subject: World

Heritage List nomination of Angkor” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992).

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Figures XII.12a,b  Left a section of Lajonquière’s 1909 Inventaire descriptif of the Cambodian temples (with Angkor Wat at number 497); and right the draft nomination list of Angkor for the UNESCO World Heritage List, March 1992, with simply transcribing the old inventory system (Source: Lajonquière 1909, 504; Etat du Cambodge 1992b, dossier 1, page 3)

entry control (here “tollbooths, guard houses, motorcyclist policemen and site guards”), and “surveillance measures” (of circulation, the “prohibition” to export artefacts or the “control” the trading business), etc. (État du Cambodge 1992b, dossier 3, np) And again, just one month later on 25–26 March 1992, a working group on the training of human resources met in Phnom Penh to advance the International programme for the safeguarding of Angkor and its environment. Similar to the round tables held in Bangkok in 1990 and Paris in 1991, “twenty-four experts from eight countries, including nine specialists” – chaired by Jukka Jokilehto from ICCROM and co-chaired by France (Claude Jacques) and Japan (Yoshiaki Ishizawa) – again mapped out the obstacles posed by Cambodia’s supposed deficiencies in national education, its lack of equipment, the status of dilapidated buildings, and the foreign language problems of Khmer civil servants. Another classic element in the enduring drive to salvage 358

the cultural heritage of Angkor would help to open the floodgates to international experts for many years to come: training. The Cambodian representative Son Soubert, the son of Cambodia’s ex-prime minister Son Sann, referred to an inner-Cambodian, and therefore self-sustaining capacity to develop a process to train “security guards through the reintegration of demobilised soldiers and refugees” and to adapt international standards to the local needs with the establishment of “a multinational glossary on archaeology, architecture and conservation nomenclature”. However, the Japanese had already made the “entire Angkor region [a site of] interpretation training”. And Claude Jacques brought this issue to new heights by proposing that “training was not to be aimed at technicians and foremen for Angkor exclusively, but at the Cambodian national problems in heritage conservation as a whole” (UNESCO 1992b, 3, 4, 15).

5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’

In April 1992, the Cambodian UNESCO section launched Interestingly, UNESCO’s support for the rushed no­ the first issue of the bilingual French-English (and not mination of Angkor began to crumble internally (Claude Khmer) News Bulletin series called “Save Angkor – Sauver Jacques, Lyndel Prott), as an unreferenced but annotated Angkor” (UNESCO Cambodia 1992–4), complete with use­ summary concerning “Critiques et problèmes concernant ful updates about the international campaign and constant notre action d’Angkor” from 13 April 1992 reveals. How­ ever, Mayor was not yet tired of praising “this enterprise self-congratulating gestures (Pl. XII.11a,b). At the same moment in 1992, different French missions were taking without a doubt [as] one of the greatest projects to safeguard cultural heritage worldwide”.75 Furthermore, Minja place; for instance, in February under the name Association Monuments du Monde, a group of French engineers, archi- Yang, the leader of the UNESCO Task Force on Cambodia tects and heritage conservation experts gathered – with since 1991, intended to incorporate UNESCO’s “Special specialised French firms doing business in Southeast Asia – Public Works Programme to employ up to 2,000 workers at for a Mission technique française sur le site monumental Angkor (estimated costs 2.9 Mio USD)” into the so-called d’Angkor in order to identify possible projects (Association “consolidated appeal for Cambodia’s immediate needs and 1992b). One curious aspect of their preparatory Compendi- national rehabilitation” (calling for almost 600 million um of graphical and photographic documents of the principal USD). It should have been launched by the United Nation’s monuments of the site of Angkor, involved an abstract layout secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, during his visit plan of Angkor projected onto the city plan of Paris (Figs. to Cambodia in April 1992, but this did not materialise.76 XII.13a,b). Thus – in a transcultural, albeit unintentional Shortly thereafter, the Ministerial Conference on Rehaway – the archaeological wonders of le Cambodge were bilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia took place in translated back onto the French métropole where the Tokyo from 20 to 22 June 1992. The conference was chaired French-colonial longing for Angkor was aesthetically and by the Japanese Foreign Affairs Ministry and UNDP, and it ended with another Tokyo Declaration acknowledging visually prefigured in museums and exhibitions and where the new reality for Angkor back in Southeast Asia was now, Japan as the new economic player in the region (Ministerisince the 1990s, renegotiated at UNESCO’s headquarters. al conference 1992). Despite internal critique, UNESCO’s A more detailed document was produced by the Mission overall insistence upon nominating Angkor against all d’expertise française des temples d’Angkor, which was com- odds had grown alongside the organisation’s self-congratulatory gesture celebrating the twentieth anniversary of missioned by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and took place between 3 and 14 April 1992. The mission com- the 1972 World Heritage Convention. The Report of the prised heritage specialists from French sites – notably, rapporteur of the Bureau of the World Heritage CommitJacques Dumarçay from the EFEO and experts of the Insti- tee’s sixteenth session is proof of that observation. The tut Géographique National. Referring to earlier French mis- meeting took place in the Paris Headquarters from 6 to 10 sions to the spot (see above), the report pointed, for the July 1992 and was chaired by the DG’s personal advisor first time, to necessary paradigm changes which directly and a future protagonist in Angkor’s international developconcerned the core elements of the French creation of Ang- ment, the French-trained Tunisian research director of the kor as a manifest heritage configuration. This comprised National Institute of Archaeology and Art in Tunis, Azedine addressing the limits of engineering measures involving Beschaouch.77 Opening the session, Deputy Director Genthe extensive use of reinforced concrete at this archaeolog- eral for Programmes, Eduardo Portella, referred to the ical site, the negative effects of anastylosis on brick temples challenge of “rapid global change”, to the upcoming events under B. P. Groslier, and the need to reformulate the meth- “commemorat[ing] twenty years of successful work under ods and goals of future restoration measures (the French- the World Heritage Convention” of 1972, and to the recent made technique of “démontage-rémontage” was to be decision of the director general of UNESCO “to establish avoided in the future). Finally, the situation of Angkor Wat the UNESCO World Heritage Centre” under its German itself was judged to be precarious due to infiltrating water founding director, Bernd von Droste (UNESCO 1992d, 2). and the instability of the central structure, and the neces- Next, von Droste himself listed the activities undertaken sary French budget was estimated at 16 to 17 million FF since the Committee’s last session, which included “pre(Ministère des Affaires Etrangères 1992, 19–23, 24–26, 31).74 parative steps for a systematic monitoring” of properties 74  As one of the follow-ups, the Monuments du Monde organised Journées techniques “Angkor” (like the one

in September 1993 at the UNESCO HQ) and identified “great technical problems” at Angkor (Monuments du Monde 1993, 1). 75  “Critiques et problèmes concernant notre action d’Angkor” from 13 April 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992); compare his preface in Jacques’ Angkor book of 1990. 76  Minja Yang to Bernd Bernander, Director of Rehabilitation UNTAC, on 15 April 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris dossier CLT.CH.THS.APA 566 (1989–1992). 77  Compare his call for a “common responsibility” for cultural heritage in Beschaouch 1990; compare Jacques 1996.

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Figures XII.13a,b  Superimposing the plans of archaeological Angkor and contemporary Paris, as published in 1992 inside the plan collection assembled by the Association Monuments du Monde (Source: Monuments du Monde 1992, n.p.)

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inscribed on the List of World Heritage Sites in Danger and “initial steps in the cooperation with Cambodia for the inscription of Angkor on the World Heritage List” (UNESCO 1992d, 3). Coming to the issue of Angkor itself, “the Bureau took note with satisfaction of the safeguarding activities undertaken by UNESCO for Cambodia heritage” and, after Cambodia’s adherence to the 1972 Convention since 1991, “considered it its duty to participate actively in the restoration and conservation of Angkor”. This extra­ ordinary engagement for a not yet inscribed site was not, according to §3 of the Operational Guidelines, the core duty of the Committee. However, the following sentences of the report hinted at UNESCO’s outspoken pressure on its technical expert evaluation and advisory body, ICOMOS – including its secretary-general, Herb Stovel (present in the meeting), and its World Heritage coordinator and future evaluator of the Angkor nomination dossier, the archaeologist Henry Cleere:

the inner circle of the UNESCO-Cambodia team. In it she admitted that (a) the national administration under the Supreme National Council (SNC) had failed to make “technical sub-committees with members of the four factions operational due to political disaccord, mainly incited by the Khmer Rouge faction”; and (b) that the general press had openly critiqued the “quasi-colonial rule of UNTAC”. A shift in UNESCO’s politics was therefore deemed desirable, but according to Yang were not implementable due to the UN’s internal competition: While it is clear that Angkor would bring the greatest prestige to UNESCO, I felt the reality of present-day Cam­ bodia required by UNESCO to place equal, if not more, focus on education. However, given UNESCO’s limited success in education and in order not to lose on Angkor and culture, I have asked UNESCO/Phnom Penh to concentrate on Angkor since June. [italics MF]

A member of the Bureau underlined the fact that the inscription of this site on the World Heritage List was a matter of genuine urgency. In fact, following the war, which devastated this country, the protection of the site could no longer be guaranteed. A management plan for the site has to be elaborated, legislation revised and the necessary personnel for the protection and restoration of the site have to be trained. UNESCO is participating in the elaboration of a management plan in collaboration with UNDP, Sweden and France. Furthermore, a legal expert will shortly be sent by the World Heritage Centre to advise Cambodian jurists. Finally, restoration specialists will be trained with the assistance of Japanese funds. Following the request of the Cambodian authorities regarding the preparation of a dossier to nominate the site of Angkor on the World Heritage List, a contract will be established with the École française d’Extrême Orient under preparatory assistance. The Bureau requested ICOMOS to evaluate this nomination for inscription and recommend that the Committee consider favourably the possibility of initiating the procedure for inscription. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1992d, 1—17)

“Concentrating” on this action plan against all odds meant that all “extra-budgetary projects for Angkor [should be] more or less funded”, new editions of the Angkor Bulletin should be prepared as a public-relations strategy, and Mayor’s “représentant spécial pour Angkor, Azedine Beschaouch” should be sent on a mission to Angkor in September/October to get a clearer picture as president of the World Heritage Committee. All of this was initiated despite the precarious state of national security in Cambodia, which had resulted, for example, in Richard Engelhardt’s airplane being fired upon at Siem Reap airport by the Khmer Rouge.78 If mapping, inventorying and training had become an international affair beyond Cambodia’s previous colonial connections, France’s ongoing influence in the process of Angkor’s enrolment to the World Heritage List became apparent in another decisive field: legislation. After the reuse of Lajonquière’s 1909 inventory to map and re-establish Cambodia’s national canon of built heritage after 1990, the French-colonial monument protection system for Angkor was also reoperationalised and partly recycled. In this context, a unique document survived in the UNESCO archives in Paris. Ridha Fraoua, a Geneva-based Francophone expert in international legislation for heritage sites in third According to the report, the “three months of exhibits, world and developing countries, was sent on a mission to conferences, film projects and artistic evenings celebrated Cambodia from 14 to 31 July 1992. According to his French the twentieth anniversary of the World Heritage Conven- Rapport de mission from August 1992, his tasks were (a) to tion”; this included Mayor’s press conference and opening “work out a draft Cambodian law for the protection of culspeech on 8 July and an examination of the provisional tural properties which should facilitate the inscription of agenda for the next session to be held in the US-American Angkor on the World Heritage”, and (b) to participate at a city of Santa Fe in December 1992 (UNESCO 1992d, 29– national workshop against illicit trafficking (Fraoua 1992, 30, 32). Minja Yang’s Cambodia follow-up report to the 1). The introductory statements of his mission report made ­Direction general meeting of 16 July 1992 makes clear that for particularly grim reading: as regards the political situadoubts about the laser focus on Angkor had finally reached tion, the Khmer Rouge faction was unwilling to disarm, and 78  Minja Yang to the DG on 11 August 1992, “Subject: Cambodia – Follow-up to the direction general meet-

ing of 16 July 1992” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992).

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the Cambodians did “not believe in the success of the UN peace plan”. The economic situation was judged to be “paradoxical”, comprising a “total freedom of investors in a defunct state without any social, economic or financial regulation, 400 per cent inflation, and UNTAC and other NGOs overheating the real estate market and increasing the living costs”. The military situation was judged not much better, as government forces were sporadically attacked by the Khmer Rouge in a zone of ten kilometres around the site of Angkor, and land mines made access to the archaeological sites sometimes impossible. Finally, switching to his own expertise, Fraoua referred to “complete juridical chaos” and even a “juridical void in the country” where the “Cambodian state had lost all its legislative power [and] the Paris Agreement could not be implemented” (Fraoua 1992, 3–4). As far as UNTAC’s operational basis was concerned, he suggested the introduction and application – “with help from the EFEO” – of the French Code civil of 1954 (paradoxically the first year of Cambodia’s national independence from France). Contrary to UNESCO’s own optimistic ‘civilising push’ in the culture sector, Fraoua suggested that “with all those circumstances, the imperatives of cultural heritage protection were actually not a priority in the eyes of the Cambodian people in power” (Fraoua 1992, 6). His conclusion, however, was an old-fashioned self-justification of the direct transfer of knowledge from outside into Cambodia: I want to insist on the dangers which menace [Cambodia’s] cultural heritage if one does not take necessary measures of conservation in time to fight against the anarchical development of construction, vandalism and the pervert[ing] effects of mass tourism [which] will plague the country. This task of a large scale nevertheless surpasses the weak resources of Cambodia. This imposes, under the aegis of UNESCO, an international campaign like the ones carried out in Borobudur, at Carthage or Abu Simbel, to restore, conserve and protect at least the temples and other historical monuments at Angkor. [italics MF] (Fraoua 1992, 6)

When Fraoua turned to the contents of the Draft resolution for a Cambodian law of heritage protection (he mentioned having already introduced a similar draft “in the case of Gabun”), he reminded the reader of the ‘national’ nature of the project but embedded it within the framework of “international solidarity and reciprocity”. In a situation of “transition in which all action by the ministries of culture, commerce and finance were executed by UNTAC”, he proposed the formation of a “Cambodian Heritage Center”. His point of reference for this endeavour had less to do with Cambodia’s own national sovereignty and instead directly referred to the “old [French-colonial] decrees of 30

April 1931 and 4 March 1933 to install a Central Commission under the Gouverneur Général [de l’Indochine] and local site commissions under the Chefs d’administration locale”. Both decrees were published in the Journal Officiel de l’Indochine française, a reference which he provided, without compunction, in his UNESCO-related document forty years after the end of colonialism in the region. And as if nothing had happened since then, he continued with the colonial-era debate on the pros and cons of either tight protection perimeters around the individual temple sites or larger protection areas for Angkor (no mention of Vann’s proposal in 1991). Turning to the “perimeter of the groupe d’Angkor”, Fraoua referred directly to the French-colonial decree of 21 May 1930. Additionally, his discussion of the open issues of building restrictions for the local population inside the park, developing guidelines for touristic infrastructure, regulations for entry fees and commercial exploi­ tation, as well as standards for inventories and monument classifications was reminiscent of many French-colonial stances, especially as he openly referred to various decrees from 1926, 1936 and 1938 (see chapter IX). Lyndel Prott commented on “Fraoua’s excellent text” in an internal letter to Minja Yang on 20 August 1992 but judged the implementation of the project to be impossible due to the lack of (a) bodies of legislative powers within Cambodia, (b) appropriate reserve and buffer zones, (c) any management plan and (d) well-trained cultural administrators. As regarded the “likelihood of World Heritage listing”, the “enhancement of the prestige of UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee” [sic] stood in direct relation to Angkor’s international recognition and the additional financial resources that would open up for a listed site.79 However, she also feared the “decrease of the prestige of UNESCO and of the World Heritage Committee should further deterioration [of Angkor] occur after listing” due to the above-mentioned inner-Cambodian factors. In short, Prott’s conclusion made the “problem of Angkor [an] issue of principle” in direct relation to UNESCO’s general ethics as refined in the 1987 Strategies for the International Campaigns (see the beginning of this chapter) when Mayor him­ self came into office: In my view, these factors should be made clear to the World Heritage Committee and should be thoroughly discussed by Committee members when it is called on to take a decision. The problem of Angkor raises issues of principle (how does one best help exceptional sites under severe threat? by listing or non-listing?) even if one ignores the non-conformity of the nomination with the guidelines (lack of management plan, etc.). It should be clear that it is the Committee’s responsibility to take this decision, so that, if the Committee later regrets a decision

79  Memo of the Chief of INS, Lyndel V. Prott, to Director of Cultural Heritage, Minja Yang, on 20 August 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, Angkor dossier).

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5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’

to list, UNESCO cannot be accused of not having fully explained the existing problems for protection of the site to the Committee. [italics MF]

In her comment, the topos of “emergency” was seen not so much in relation to the supposedly endangered site of Angkor itself, but to UNESCO’s internal nomination procedures for World Heritage sites under threat as defined in its Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention from March 1992 (UNESCO 1992c). In this context, Prott mentioned that “the Committee could decide to inscribe Angkor on the basis of §57 of the Operational Guidelines”, and therefore gave concrete hints to §§ 57 and 74 on how to officially bypass the established standards of nomination and deadlines (by the national agency), evaluation (by external and neutral experts) and the inscription on the basis of emergency (by UNESCO): §57: The normal deadlines for the submission and processing of nominations will not apply in the case of properties which […] would unquestionably meet the criteria for inclusion in the World Heritage List and which have suffered damage from disaster caused by natural events or by human activities. Such nominations will be processed on an emergency basis. §74: States Parties may request emergency assistance for work in connection with cultural and natural properties in­ cluded or suitable for inclusion in the World Heritage List and which have suffered severe damage due to sudden, unexpected phenomena […] or which are in imminent danger of severe damage […]. Emergency assistance […] may be made available for the following purposes: (a) to prepare urgent nominations of properties for the World Heritage List […]; (b) to draw up an emergency plan to safeguard properties inscribed on or nominated to the World Heritage List; (c) to undertake emergency measures for the safeguarding of a property inscribed on or nominated to the World Heritage List. [italics MF]

the EFEO the exclusive right to manage Angkor after Cambodia’s independence in 1953 (see chapter IX) and parallel to UNTAC’s – time-limited – mandate to supervise Cambodia’s national rebirth, UNESCO’s – unlimited! – mission to watch over Angkor’s cultural heritage system took precise shape. According to the preamble of the Draft plan of action for the programme to protect the cultural and natural heritage of the Angkor area from 18 September 1992: By decision of the Head of State and President of the National Supreme Council of Cambodia, HRH Prince Norodom Sihanouk, UNESCO is charged with coordinating all national and international efforts intended to safeguard the cultural and natural monuments of the Angkor area and to develop that area (hereinafter referred to as the “Programme to protect Angkor”). [italics MF]80

By late September 1992, Mayor’s initial idea of placing “five DG-appointed members [cinq sages] on the International Coordination Committee” was modified to create supposedly equal status between all members of the international controlling body and “only to appoint five to six technical advisors on Angkor”, later known as ‘ad hoc experts’ (see below).81 In a letter from 30 September 1992 to Bernd von Droste zu Hülshoff (Director of the World Heritage Center in Paris), Azedine Beschaouch, in his function as President of the World Heritage Committee, sent his “proposal of the inscription of Angkor to the World Heritage List, […] from UNESCO Cambodia, in the name of the Cambodian authorities”. He reconfirmed that the whole nomination dossier “had been prepared by the EFEO, at the demand of the Cambodian authorities” and “with the allocation of 15,000 USD by the World Heritage Fund”. At a time when the dossier had just been made available to the official evaluation body of ICOMOS, Beschaouch declared “his wish” to have Angkor on the list as a fait accompli:82 I am happy to have finalised, along with the recommendations of the World Heritage Bureau, the procedure towards the inscription of Angkor on the “List”. And, bearing in mind the observation which I made here and the noticed threats, I formulate the wish that at Santa Fe, our Committee will be committed to inscribe, without further delay, Angkor on the World Heritage List.

Critical voices saw it as a defect in the world heritage making of Angkor that the “urgent nomination” was made completely by external experts, suggesting that the site’s parallel nomination to the “List of Danger” (see later in this chapter) would annul the procedure of a neutral quality control. In fact, the rushed inscription process was de facto formu- Reading between the lines of the “note préliminaire” to lated, compiled, managed and pushed through by the same what would become the impressive (fifty-four pages of text elite group of people from outside Cambodia in an incred- and sixty-three pages of plans) French UNESCO document ibly short period of time. Similar to Sihanouk’s deal to grant “668”, also known as Proposition d’inscription du Parc ar80  Draft plan of action for the programme to protect the cultural and natural heritage of the Angkor area, rev. 18 September 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, Angkor dossier). 81  Yang to DG on 28 September 1992 on “Discussion points on Angkor and other cultural activities in Cambodia” (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992). 82  Letter of Azedine Beschaouch to Bernd von Droste zu Hülshoff, Phnom Penh 30 September 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, dossier Angkor 55, 1989–1992).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figure XII.14a,b  Proposed “Zone of Angkor” from 1930 as integrated in the 1992 nomination dossier for Angkor Park as UNESCO World Heritage Site, set in relation to a September 1991 proposal (Source: UNESCO 1992e, maps C.11 and C.12)

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5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’

chéologique d’Angkor et des sites associés de Roluos et Banteay Srei sur la Liste du Patrimoine Mondial, signed “Phnom Penh, September 1992”, it became clear that no Cambodian representative had been included officially in the drafting of the dossier. Additionally, the boundaries of the Park as defined in the French-colonial decree of 21 May 1930 were explicitly included as plan “C.11” (Fig. XII.14a) and set in relation to Vann Molyvann’s version of 1991 (as “C.13”, see above, Pl. XII.8) and a slightly new proposal by Cambodia from September 1991 (as “C.12”) (Fig. XII.14b): This dossier, intended to list the Archaeological Park of Angkor, Roluos and Banteay Srei, has been established for the Cambodian authorities by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient and the École pratique des Hautes Etudes, thanks to the financial support of UNESCO. We thank S. Alvares, B. Bruguier, N. Dalsheimer, N. Rodriguez of the EFEO, Professeur Claude Jacques of the EPHE and M. Ridha Fraoua, lawyer and consultant to UNESCO. In anticipation of a new land-use plan [plan d’occupation des sols] it has been decided for the zone of Angkor to propose the boundaries of the Parc Archéologique as indicated in map C.11. This perimeter is already known as a protected sector [and was] materialised on the spot with information boards [panneaux indicateurs]. With the absence of a buffer zone [zone tampon] and an equivalent perimeter for the zones of Roluos and Banteay Srei, the proposals of the Cambodian representatives present during the Table Ronde for the protection of cultural property in Cambodia in Paris in September 1991, have been provisorily retained and are featured in the maps C.12 and C.13. (UNESCO 1992e, 2)

Only a few days later on 5 October 1992, Mounir Bou­ chenaki, “Director a.i., CLT/CH”, and Minja Yang forwarded this dossier with “(a) an indicative list of monuments proposed for inscription on the World Heritage List, (b) the nomination for the inscription of Angkor Archaeological Park, (c) the photographic and cartographic documents forming the annexes of the above; and (d) the draft legisla-

tion on protection of national cultural property (expected to be adopted by decree by the Supreme National Council of Cambodia” to von Droste. In so doing, they delegated the responsibility for follow-up to Paris and pointed to the “urgent action to be carried out by the Center” in scheduling the ICOMOS evaluation mission.83 Around this time, in autumn 1992, when official celebrations took place to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the World Her­ itage Convention of 1972 and announce the foundation of the World Heritage Centre in Paris (see below), the relevant UNESCO representatives were already taking the nomination of Angkor in the same year for granted, regardless of what an independent evaluation by ICOMOS might yield. Certainly, by this time the official “procedure and timetable for the processing of nominations”, defined in §55 within the Operational Guidelines as requiring a sixteen-month period84 had long past for the case of Angkor, as the deposing of the nomination dossier should have already taken place in October 1991 for a final decision regarding listing in December 1992. Not least because of the institutional and personal prestige-driven impetus, Mayor and his entourage were ready – under the sweeping alibi of an ‘emergency’ – to (ab)use for the first time the mechanism of a potential “danger listing”. According to the obligatory Guidelines, this exit strategy was originally only intended for already inscribed sites (compare Fradier 1984) but was used in this case to actually bypass the official nomination procedure (compare Di Giovane 2009, 331–34; in general The Economist 2010, Cameron/Rössler 2013). In her personal interview with Mayor on 18 June 2009, Christina Cameron, a Canadian heritage specialist and herself ‘on mission’ to Angkor in 1993/485, quoted the DG’s impatience in the case of Angkor at the time: I have enough elements to tell you that either the ­ ommittee declares Angkor Wat or Angkor in general as C World Heritage or I as Director-General will declare that this heritage is in danger because I am able do it, because I think we can no longer wait for the professionals. [italics MF] (Cameron/Rössler 2013, 139)

83  Letter from Bouchenaki and Yang to von Droste on the subject “Angkor: Nomination file from the Su-

preme National Council of Cambodia to the World Heritage Committee”, 5 October 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, Angkor dossier). 84  The following steps taken within a sixteen-month follow-up were: 1 October (deadline for reception of the nomination); 1 November (registration and check for completeness); 1 April (professional NGO evaluation); June (Bureau’s examination of evaluation); July–November (report of Bureau to Secretariat); December (Committee’s examination of Bureau’s recommendations together with NGO comments: inscribed, not inscribed, deferred); January (Secretariat reports to State Party) (compare UNESCO 1992c, §55). 85  Her undated and unpublished, seven-page typescript Mission report – UNESCO Cambodia campaign to the Scientific Advisory Committee (stamped-received at UNESCO Paris in January 1994) survived in the UNESCO Archive. In the preface of the report, she reminded the international expert culture over Angkor in her preface about the “urgent need to address the needs of the local population”, but concluded her report with a rather classical list of ten recommendations in a global heritage management jargon, ranging from the need for a national protection agency, a comprehensive conservation policy, a “Parks Agency” and the “training of officials and tourist operators” (Cameron 1994).

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The “professional” referred to was Henry Cleere, a specialist in archaeological heritage management who was contracted to evaluate the written nomination file in relation to the concrete reality. His report in English and French was officially issued by ICOMOS by “16 November 1992” and followed the format for evaluations at that time. After the section on “description and history,” explaining the coherent archaeological ensemble of the ninth to twelfth centuries, including the remaining traces of an ancient irrigation system, the section on “authenticity” assessed the site’s twentieth-century preservation history as indicated in the nomination report. First, it periodised the EFEO’s interventions from “the erection of supporting structures” to the use of reinforced concrete (1907–1931), and from Marchal’s supposed import of ‘anastylosis’ “from the Dutch authorities” up to the “complete dismantling and rebuilding” strategies used by B. P. Groslier until 1972 (compare chapter IX). By adding the period of “no conservation work” from 1972 until 1989 and the few international campaigns effected since 1990 by India’s ASI, Poland’s PKZ and the World Monuments Fund to the list, the evaluator finally ran the obligatory “Test of Authenticity” in a rather general way: The authenticity of the monuments is not in doubt. […] The successive interventions […] had no significant impact on the overall authenticity of the monuments that make up the Angkor complex. They are discreet and do not obtrude upon the impression gained from individual monuments. It can be stated with ample justification that their effect is considerably less substantial than those carried out on many other monuments that are already on the World Heritage List (ICOMOS 1992, 3—4).

The section on the actual “management and protection” was far less optimistic and included the following points: (a) the “current political situation in Cambodia [being] the main obstacle to the inscription of the Angkor monumental ensemble on the World Heritage List”; (b) the identification of an “extreme scarcity of trained personnel of all grades”; (c) the “absence of any antiquities legislation”; (d) the lack of a national protection agency even if a “National Heritage Protection Authority – NHPAC” was at least initiated; (e) the still missing protection zoning; (f) “a combination of conservation problems” (from abandoned irrigation systems and infiltrating waters into the temple structures to over-abrasive water cleaning); and (g) “inadequate security measures”. The following “evaluation” (ICOMOS 1992, 7) left “no doubt regarding the eligibility of the Angkor complex of monuments for inclusion on the World Heritage List”, as “their absence [would even] devaluate the List”. However, Cleere also pointed to the problems of mass tourism and uncontrolled development, judged “the conservation work at Angkor since 1931 not in full accord with ICOMOS doctrine”, and therefore insisted on the necessity of “a conservation policy for the Angkor complex with established standards and approved methodologies as a vital 366

prerequisite” (ICOMOS 1992, 4–6). The final and decisive element of the report, entitled “ICOMOS recommendations”, was divided into two sections. In the first, the inclusion of Angkor as a cultural property to the list was, according to §23 of the Operational Guidelines, justified along four (out of possibly six) cultural criteria: - Criterion i [referring to the qualifier to be “unique artistic achievement”, MF]: The Angkor complex represents the entire range of Khmer art from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, and includes a number of indisputable artistic masterpieces (e.g., Angkor Vat, the Bayon, Banteay Srei). - Criterion ii [referring to the qualifier of “great influence in architecture, monumental arts or town-planning and landscaping”, MF]: The influence of Khmer art, as developed at Angkor, was a profound one over much of South­ east Asia and played a fundamental role in its distinctive evolution. - Criterion iii [referring to the qualifier to be a “unique or at least exceptional testimony to a civilisation which has disappeared”, MF]: The Khmer Empire of the ninth to the fourteenth centuries encompassed much of Southeast Asia and played a formative role in the political and cultural development of the region. All that remains of that civilisation is its rich heritage of cult structures in brick and stone. - Criterion iv [referring to the qualifier to be an “outstanding type of building or architectural ensemble”, MF]: Khmer architecture evolved largely from that of the Indian sub-continent, from which it soon became clearly distinct as it developed its own special characteristics, some independently evolved and others acquired from neighbouring cultural traditions. The result was a new artistic horizon in oriental art and architecture.

The second section, however, recommended – without explicitly calling it a ‘deferral’ in UNESCO’s official terminology – the postponement of the nomination until a comprehensive heritage system was established, with the following points to be re-evaluated in the future: It is further recommended that final inscription be completed once the Committee has been satisfied on the following points: a. comprehensive and effective monuments law is in force in Cambodia; b. adequate monuments protection agency has been established, is properly staffed and resourced and is carrying out its work competently; c. the boundaries of the World Heritage Site are reconsidered in the light of the results of the UNDP Zoning and Environmental Management project; d. meaningful buffer zones which can be effectively managed are defined; e. an effective mechanism has been set up to monitor and coordinate existing and projected international conservation and exploration projects in the Angkor area.

5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’

This was only the official ICOMOS report version; Henry “a ‘list of World Heritage in Danger’, a list of the property Cleere’s personal experience during his field trip to Cam- appearing in the World Heritage List for the conservation bodia was far more dramatic. In a recent interview con- of which major operations are necessary and for which asducted in 2017,86 he remembered his stay at Angkor as “one sistance has been requested under this Convention”. Seriof the most extraordinary visits in [his] life” as he was ous and specific dangers included, above all, “the threat of “shocked and horrified” to find Angkor “neither properly disappearance caused by accelerated deterioration, largeprotected nor managed within an ongoing military con- scale public or private projects or rapid urban or tourist frontation”, during which he himself “was shot at twice development projects [to] the outbreak or the threat of an while travelling in a military transporter” to visit Banteay armed conflict; calamities and cataclysms” and natural disSrei temple. In an earlier interview in 2008, he summa- asters (UNESCO 1972, §11,4). As far as the element of ideo­ rised his mission similarly: logical and war-like conflicts were concerned, Mayor’s time as DG of UNESCO after 1987 fell without a doubt I got in touch with the people from the EFEO who pro- during one of the most critical phases in the second half of the twentieth century: the global culmination, abrupt end, vided me with all their files. I did a mission there […] with and aftereffects of the Cold War. guns going off in the background […] It was clear, there According to the revised 1992 version of the Operational was nothing, nothing, nothing that is required. There was Guidelines, properties could be included on the List of World no law, there was no antiquities administration, there was Heritage in Danger, if, according to §58 the property was (i) no conservation, there was zilch. [italics MF] (Cameron/ already on the World Heritage List, (ii) threatened by seriRössler 2013, 139) ous and specific danger, and (iii) in desperate need of conShortly after his report was finalised in November 1992, servation and (iv) of assistance from outside. In keep­ing Cleere travelled to the ICOMOS meeting in Sydney in the with §60, such danger for cultural properties could be (a) same month and gave, together with Mechthild Rössler from the “ascertained, proven and imminent danger” of serious UNESCO, a presentation on evaluation procedures. His physical deterioration in various scales, or (b) the “potential grim account of his recent experiences at Angkor aroused danger” because of the lack of a conservation policy or of deep concern and severe critique from the ‘pro-Angkor armed conflict (UNESCO 1992, 17, 18); but “the Com­mittee nomination lobby’, which would continue until the deci- shall delete the property from the List of World Her­itage in sive meeting in Santa Fe in December. On 29 November Danger if the property is no longer under threat” (§71). 1992, “less than two weeks prior to the Committee decision The official Report of the sixteenth session of the World in Santa Fe to inscribe Angkor to the prestigious List of Heritage Committee in Santa Fe, in the US state of New World Heritage”, Norodom Sihanouk sent a letter from Mexico (7 to 14 December 1992), paints an ambivalent picPhnom Penh to Beschaouch to reaffirm his efforts and ture of UNESCO’s expanding heritage ‘emergency’ politics. those of the SNC of Cambodia “to make all effort to estab- Certainly, the nomination of Angkor to both the List of lish solid and responsible administrative structures” of World Heritage and the List of World Heritage in Danger heritage protection. He reassured Beschaouch of his “full was emblematic of this decisive turn. As usual, the streamapprobation [to] implement the statutes of the Cambodian lined report and the heritage politics behind the scenes Authority for the Protection of National Heritage”.87 were rather different from each other. According to the introductory section of the official report, the “outgoing chairman [he would become the main protagonist at AngSanta Fe, December 1992: kor shortly after, MF], Azedine Beschaouch, opened the Making politics with “Danger” session” and reminded the delegates “that in 1992 the ConIn its introductory section, UNESCO’s 1972 Convention vention had completed twenty years of successful work already collectivised the salvage mission of cultural herit- since its adoption”. Federico Mayor hinted at UNESCO’s age as a task for the “international community as a whole”. shift in direction by “highlighting several policy issues, More precisely, it identified “the gravity of new dangers and [above all] the inclusion of sites in the List of World Heritthreats” against cultural and natural heritage of outstand- age in Danger” (UNESCO 1992f, 1–5). Following this, the ing universal value, the coping of which went far beyond new chairperson of the Committee, US-American Jennifer mere (“often incomplete”) national action (UNESCO 1972, Salisbury, was elected by acclamation and Beschaouch was 1). In §11.4, the 1972 Convention required the creation of sworn into his function as rapporteur. Bernd von Droste,

86  Many thanks to Henry Cleere (†) for granting a telephone interview on 25 May 2017. For Cleere’s opinion

about “Archaeology and World Heritage” and “The impact of World Heritage Listing”, see above many other statements, Cleere 2003, 2011. 87  Letter of Sihanouk to Beschaouch, Phnom Penh 29 November 1992 (UNESCO Archives Paris, Angkor dossier).

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director of the World Heritage Centre, again drew attention to the “increasing numbers of World Heritage properties facing serious threats to their authenticity and integrity”. As a result, the “budget for emergency assistance” for 1992 was completely spent, most of it on Croatia’s properties in Dubrovnik and the Plitvice Lakes National Park (both inscribed in 1979), which were placed on UNESCO’s List of Danger in 1992 due to hostilities during the Balkan Wars. Paradoxically, the ineffectiveness of protecting and ‘shielding’ UNESCO properties in times of conflict was not challenged at the time but has since been highlighted, because World Heritage Listing seems to have made some monuments an almost preferred ‘target’ of “performative iconoclasm” during ideological and war-like confrontations (Fal­ ser 2010b, 2011b; compare Gamboni 2001, Prott 2001). Ex­ amples include the destruction of Dubrovnik (1991), Mostar Bridge (1993), the Bamiyan Buddhas (2001) and, most recently, Palmyra (2015). However, it was not a critical review but an outspoken celebration that was at play in 1992 when, according to von Droste, “thirty thousand people” participated in events to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Convention at UNESCO Headquarters (UNESCO 1992f, 6–7; compare Preyssoure 1993). In Santa Fe, Salvador Diaz-Berrio (Mexico) presented the report of the sixteenth session of the Bureau held in Paris from 6 to 10 July 1992, including the Committee’s recommendations for four cultural properties out of which the “emergency procedure for Angkor (Cambodia) had already been initiated”. However, the Paris meetings hadn’t been unanimous on Angkor: In the case of Angkor (Cambodia), the Rapporteur informed the Committee that four members of the Bureau (France, Mexico, Senegal and Tunisia) were in favour of immediate inscription, whereas Thailand and the United States of America, while recognising the outstanding value of the property, would only agree to its inscription once the conditions proposed by ICOMOS had been met. (UNESCO 1992f, 8)

Section X of the Santa Fe meeting report finally discussed the new nominations to the Lists of World Heritage (in Danger). Azedine Beschaouch reported on the successful listing of the Kasbah of Algiers, along with twenty-two nominated sites, seven of which were on the “Danger List”. Angkor was inscribed on 14 December as number “667” on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and celebated in French journals and a special UNESCO stamp shorty after (Pl. XII.12a–c). The causal nexus between the UN’s temporary supervision over Cambodia and UNESCO’s supposed willingness to “waive” its own well-defined preliminaries for World Heritage listing was even published in the written report: The Committee took note of the report presented by Mr. A. Beschaouch. Given the unique situation in Cambodia, which, in accordance with the Paris Accords, has been placed under the temporary administration of the Unit-

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ed Nations since July 1991, the Committee has decided to waive some conditions required under the Operational Guidelines and, on the basis of criteria (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv), has inscribed the Angkor site, together with its monuments and its archaeological zones as described in the “Perimètre de Protection” accompanying the ICOMOS re­ port, on the World Heritage List. The Committee stressed that this action was not to be taken as setting a precedent for the inscription procedure. Therefore, in order to guarantee protection of the site for a three-year period (1993—1995), the Committee has decided that a special in-depth study will be made of the Angkor site, and that reports will be presented to the Bureau and the Committee on the status of the monuments and the protective perimeter. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1992f, 37)

Probably never before in the history of UNESCO’s World Heritage realm had a site been listed without fulfilling at least one of the predefined preliminaries for a functioning heritage protection system. To justify passing over this ­deficiency, Mayor (ab)used – as he reconfirmed in the above-quoted interview from 2009 – the ‘imminent danger and ad hoc help’ rhetoric as a strategy to swiftly effect Ang­ kor’s ‘emergency listing’: ICOMOS’s declared prerequisites, to be fulfilled by the independent national member state itself (Cambodia) before listing, were now tabled and outsourced as a checklist of tasks to be accomplished after inscription within an international help structure. This substantial shift secured – far beyond what time-limited tech­nical assistance programmes such as UNTAC could do – UNESCO’s own controlling influence over the heritage management system of Angkor for decades to come. The tasks to fulfil after nominations were as follows: In order to deal with the urgent problems of conservation quickly and effectively, the Committee has inscribed the site of Angkor on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and has requested, on the recommendation of ICOMOS, that the authorities concerned take the necessary steps to meet the following conditions: a. enact adequate protective legislation; b. establish an adequately staffed national protection agency; c. establish permanent boundaries based on the UNDP project; d. define meaningful buffer zones; e. establish monitoring and coordination of the international conservation effort. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1992f, 37)

How was this decisive switch from the ICOMOS’s recommendation of a postponement to UNESCO’s decision to realise instant and even double inscription of Angkor to the List and the Danger List made possible? In the official report, the annexed “Declaration” requested by the United States delegate about the “Inscription of Angkor” provides some answers:

5. 1992: Pushing Angkor onto the World Heritage List: UNESCO’s politics with ‘danger’

The Representative of the United States of America presented a statement explaining his Government’s position on the Committee action. He noted that, although the United States has voted in the Bureau to inscribe the site only subject to the conditions identified by ICOMOS, the position was now to support the compromise consensus to inscribe Angkor immediately. He noted, however, the United States’ hope that inscription would in fact lead to stronger protection of this site of unquestioned international value, and the United States’ concern that the Committee be willing and able to deal with future problems at the site should circumstances not improve. He noted the position of the United States that this inscription not be understood as a precedent, and congratulated ICOMOS for the integrity of their position and ­advice to the Committee. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1992f, Annex VI)

Again, Cameron’s research into the situation and her interview with Henry Cleere provides some clarification on the subject. According to Cameron, “an informal meeting of the Bureau for which no written record was kept” highlighted the “behind the scenes” mechanisms and the coercive power structure of UNESCO’s self-centred heritage politics, which allowed it to lever out its own evaluation body, ICOMOS: In its technical evaluation of the nomination, ICOMOS judged that the magnificent ruins of the Khmer empire at Angkor clearly had outstanding universal value but recommended that its inscription be deferred until adequate protective measures were put in place. […] Although the informal group was divided, the Chairperson Beschaouch exercised his prerogative by declaring that the site would be inscribed. Cleere describes the situation. “I presented what ICOMOS was recommending and the chairman said: No, no, it’s not possible. No. It must go on the list.” Eventually Beschaouch asked each Bureau member to express an opinion. “The first of them said, Oh no, it must go on the list. The last two, Thailand and the United States, said no, we agree with ICOMOS. But anyway, okay, says the chairman, it will be on the List.” Following intense behind-the-scenes consultations, dur-

ing which the host country switched its position, the Committee took a decision that ignored its own rules, insisting that it should not be taken as a precedent. […] What is unusual is the simultaneous decision to inscribe Angkor on the World Heritage List and the Danger List in order to deal with urgent conservation problems related to legislation, monitoring, boundaries and buffer zones. [italics MF] (Cameron/Rössler 2013, 140)

In our 2017 interview, Cleere reconfirmed this passage in Cameron’s analysis: “I was shattered, in tears because of this attack and criticism from the World Heritage players. The big players Mayor and Beschaouch put a lot of pressure on me, they misused their position; the affair around Angkor had become purely political, all in a great hurry.” 88 ­B eschaouch indirectly reconfirmed this trend in his own evaluation study of the 1972 Convention.89 Both the above-mentioned Croatian and Cambodian cases, taken together, indicate how “World Heritage in Danger” around 1990 had become a common UNESCO strategy in the aftermath of collapsing political blocs during the previous Cold War period. For Angkor, the Cambodia-UNESCO coalition was made official shortly after inscription to the List. In a thank-you letter written after the successful inscription (no word about the Danger List?), Sihanouk again fostered UNESCO’s belief in its right to exclusively lead the salvage campaign of Angkor: Monsieur le Directeur Général, Right at the moment when the site of Angkor is inscribed on the World Heritage List, I would like to reiterate to you that [it] is absolutely necessary, more than ever, that all work undertaken on the site of Angkor will benefit from the best coordination. And I reaffirm hereby, that this task of coordination rests exclusively with UNESCO and its General Director. Please accept, Excellence, the assurance of my highest consideration. Norodom Sihanouk, Beijing, 21 January 1993 [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993a, annex 8)

Shortly thereafter, Angkor formed one of the prominent features in UNESCO’s first issue of The World Heritage Newsletter, published in February 1993. In the editorial, along with a photograph from Angkor, von Droste referred

88  Interview with Michael Falser on 25 May 2017. 89  The observation that UNESCO’s use of the danger-listing mechanism as a political tool with a view to its

own prestige and influence beyond the sovereignty of member states over their properties, was itself mirrored in the wider context of the Santa Fe meeting. Annex II of the report referred to an evaluation study of the 1972 Convention, for which “the consultant Azedine Beschaouch was given the task in 1991”. In this study, Beschaouch saw the inscription on the Danger List not as a sanction but “as the acknowledgement of a condition that calls for safeguarding measures, and as a means of securing resources for that purpose”. Therefore, he voted “to include the possibility of inscribing a site on the List of World Heritage in Danger, without a prior request from the State concerned, in the Operational Guidelines” [italics MF]. In his address on “The World Heritage Convention: Future challenges and prospects” on 6 December in Santa Fe, Mayor spoke of the “question of the World Heritage in Danger” and justified, “such as the recent case of Dubrovnik – to include a property [on this specific list] without preliminary request from the State concerned” (UNESCO 1992g, 1–3).

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again to the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Convention and changing global geopolitics. Inside the issue, Mayor was depicted with the French president Jacques Chirac celebrating the inscription of “The Banks of the Seine in Paris” (1991); the Santa Fe meeting was summarised and a special section on “Sites of Danger throughout the World” featured Angkor as well as the war-damaged roof landscape of Dubrovnik, the earthquake-damaged sites in Egypt, and

other natural sites (UNESCO 1993b, 8–11). At this point in time, at the end of the Cold War, UNESCO’s cultural heritage scheme to make politics ‘with danger’ had reached the global age. Or, as James Clifford termed it just a few years earlier in 1989 in a discussion of the phenomenon of globalisation: “The salvage paradigm, reflecting a desire to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of destructive historical changes is alive and well” (Clifford 1989, 73).

6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed? The first large event after the rushed, but successful, nomination of Angkor was the Preparatory Meeting for the Intergovernmental Conference on Angkor, which took place in Paris between 21 and 22 January 1993. It was not directed by Cambodia, but instead co-chaired by France and Japan. In a quasi fait accompli of the previous power games weeks before Cambodia’s first national protection agency was drafted as an institution, and months before Cambodia’s new constitution was formed in September of the same year (see below), the agenda was moving to codify UNESCO’s strategic control function over a proposed Ang­kor International Consultative Committee (AICC) with its co-chaired structure under France and Japan. Not surprisingly, Takayuki Kimura, the political delegate from Japan – the host nation of the upcoming Inter-governmental Conference on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historical Area of Angkor in October 1993 (see below) – emphasised the “need for cooperation on an international scale, in which the greatest number of countries could take their part, thus providing a broader spectrum of specialists to provide assistance”. On the other side of this spectrum, the French representatives, Serge Degaillaix (from the ministry) and Jean-Pierre Angrémy (French delegate to UNESCO), revived the spectre of France’s long-standing experience at Angkor and its desire to invest millions of French francs in a “coexisting” bilateral (and not necessarily multilateral) cooperation (UNESCO 1993a, 6, 12). Together with Poland, Sweden and Germany, smaller future stakeholders such as Hungary (here in the words of Janos Jelen) intended to broaden the scope beyond a mere “monumental” focus on Angkor towards eco-environmental questions and voted – in vain – for Angkor (and not Tokyo) as the venue of the first international conference on Angkor (UNESCO 1993a, 12–13). Interestingly, UNESCO and Cambodia 90 seemed to have advanced considerably in defining their own role in the project for years to come. Mayor’s institu-

tional mastermind behind UNESCO’s mission to salvage Angkor, the deputy DG for culture, Henri Lopès, took a Janus-faced position on the subject. On the one hand, he proudly reviewed the “main programmes and projects pursued by UNESCO since 1989” and voted for the broadest intergovernmental setup under UNESCO’s (now unquestioned) coordinating function – “in collaboration with Cambodian authorities”. On the other hand, he formulated a classical justification for a supposedly disinterested “mission” and altruistic “task” which would work under “decision-making Cambodian authorities” in the heritage sector (not yet properly established): Mr Chairman, I would like to start by saying how awkward it is for UNESCO to appear to be seeking the starring role. We are a secretariat; as such, it is our duty to execute the decisions of the Organisation’s Member States. At the same time, the Head of our Secretariat is invested with responsibilities for which he is accountable to those who appointed him, namely the assembly of the Member States, whenever a mission entrusted to him by the highest decision-making organ may appear to be in contradiction with other courses of action which may be proposed to him. An intergovernmental meeting of potential donors who might contribute to making this work more effective cannot fail to ease the task of UNESCO which, as decided by the General Conference and the Cambodian authorities, is to coordinate all activities pertaining to the safeguarding of Angkor. But in all preservation programmes undertaken by UNESCO, it has always been up to the authorities of the place in which the monument to be saved is located, to take the decisions regarding what action should be undertaken. In the case of Angkor, it is therefore to be desired that the Cambodian authorities should take the decisions, after having listened to the opinion of the appropriate committees. These may include the com-

90  From Cambodia, Ouk Chea (Director of Heritage and Museums), Ing Kieth (former minister), Sokhom-

aly Suon Kaset and Koh Vani (adviser, permanent delegation to UNESCO) were present. From UNESCO, there were, among others, Henri Lopès, Mounir Bouchenaki (director, physical heritage division), Gérard Bolla (special advisor to the SG on cultural heritage), Matthias Dermitzel (head of the Asia section, physical heritage division) and Minja Yang (head of the Coordination Unit for Cambodia).

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6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

mittee of governmental and intergovernmental experts, or a committee which could enable the authorities of the country in which the site is located to take their decisions in full possession of the facts. The Director General is open to all proposals for a flexible, workable mechanism, so that he can perform his coordinating role effectively. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993a, annex 8)

Most of Cambodia’s representatives had already accepted – and this would continue up to 2004 when the wilfully prolonged ‘emergency-threat-and-danger’ status of Angkor was finally lifted – the role of thankful recipient in need of financial and logistical help from powerful outside partners. In his thank-you letter from Beijing dated to 21 January 1993, Norodom Sihanouk again transferred his familiar partnership with the EFEO to the new globalised set-up by openly hoping that “the task of coordination be performed exclusively by UNESCO and its DG” (UNESCO 1993a, annex 7). Sokhomaly Suon Kaset, delegate of Cambodia’s SNC to UNESCO and of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front in France, was more self-confident in her speech, which called for the creation of a national system for heritage protection before any international impact could be mobilised. However, she did finally submit to the view of Cambodia’s unassailable father, Sihanouk, ultimately agree­ ing to outsource the technical administration over Angkor to the international community: You will recall that, following the occupation of my country by foreign troops in 1980, and in view of the prospects of generalised conflict, our President [Son Sann] called for concerted action by the world’s scholars to preserve the temples of Angkor from the threat of destruction. He therefore proposed to institutionalise the protective zone around Angkor Park, known as the “Angkor Culture Zone”. Unfortunately, for political, not cultural reasons, this project never came to fruition. But the idea of concerted international action to safeguard Angkor remains valid, to avoid a situation in which initiatives by one country or another give it an uncontrolled monopoly over the restoration, conservation and preservation of the temples of Angkor. It is vital to harness the expertise of international scholars. But before that, a competent and legitimate legal Cambodian authority must be established. […] His Royal Highness Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk, who remains President of the National Council for the Reha-

bilitation and Restoration of the Angkor Monuments, expressed the wish that UNESCO act as coordinator of inter­ n ­ ational aid. […] The EFEO can act as technical coordinator in the conservation, preservation and restoration of historic monuments. It goes without saying that the legal government which emerges from the free and fair elections organised and supervised by UNTAC will have sole competence to enforce the bilateral accords, to approve or reject them. It alone will be responsible for the conservation, preservation and restoration of all Khmer historic monuments, and for enacting regulations, norms and laws in that regard. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993a, annex 3)

Again, with UNESCO and French help in formulating the legal text on heritage protection, a supra-ministerial agency, the National Heritage Protection Authority of Cambodia (NHPAC), headed by HRH Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was formally established on 10 February 1993 by a decision of the SNC; however, it was defunct only few months later. Above all, the statutes tried to build “responsibilities” (§6) for the Authority, which would involve making the decisions required for the protection of national cultural property, and considering proposals to register or classify such property as well as overseeing the implementation procedure (SNC 1993). A national Law on the Protection of Cultural Heritage was adopted on the same day, but was promulgated only in January 1996, by which time the International Co-ordinating Committee had long since taken over agency of the Archaeological Park of Angkor (see below). On 24 March 1993 and again on 29 April, Mayor presented the Executive Board of UNESCO with an impressive list of the various actions taken at Angkor since 1990 (UNESCO 1993c, compare Mayor 1993). From 1 to 4 April 1993 in Siem Reap, UNESCO invited “thirty governmental, non- and intergovernmental organisations to participate in the Expert Consultation in Angkor (ECA) to provide a forum for the exchange of information, evaluation of ongoing activities and joint planning and prioritisation for further activities” (UNESCO 1993d, 4). A “summary of past and ongoing UNESCO projects for the preservation of the Ang­kor Archaeological Park (as at 15 January 1993)” proved how – only two months after the site’s inscription as World Heritage – the external grasp over Angkor had already become a completely internationalised business-as-usual-affair, one that, for the time being, was primarily divided between UNESCO, Japan and France.91 All

91  The fifteen activities ranged from (1) the First International Round Table of Experts on Angkor (102,500 USD, funded by Japan/UNESCO Funds-in-Trust) and (2) a survey of the Angkor monuments and development of a site inventory form (75,000 USD, funded by Japan/UNESCO FIT) to (6) the Second International Table of Experts on Angkor (funded by France through UNESCO, 67,500 USD), (7) ZEMP (573,900 USD funded by SIDA/Sweden, UNDP, Angkor Foundation/Hungary and Japan), (8) capacity building for the conservation of monuments (369,000 USD funded by Japan/UNESCO FIT), (12) Angkor Documentation Centre (316,000 USD, funded by UNESCO), (13) special labour-based public works at Angkor (150,000 USD, funded by UNDP/ILO) and 15) preparation of visitor’s guide/information panels at Angkor and training of Cambodian students (50,000 USD, funded by American Express).

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figures XII.15a,b  Internal inventory sheet (1993) and cover (1997) of the bilingual ICOM/EFEO series Looting Angkor: One hundred missing objects (Source: ICOM/EFEO 1993, 26; 1997, cover)

told, the “status of contributions on 15 March 1993” stood at 3 million USD (with Japan at 1.4 million, France at 700,000 and UNDP with 300,000 USD). At the same moment, when millions of US dollars were being poured into Angkor through UNESCO’s coordination, the internal situation in Cambodia was far from stable. Armed robberies into the guarded depot of the Conser­ vation d’Angkor were ongoing, the illicit trafficking market for Angkorian sculptures continued (Figs. XII.15a,b) and the whole archaeological territory was undergoing a full screening process for hidden landmines since the early 1990s (Aitkin 1993) and continued far into the 2000s (Pl. XII.13a,b). The UN (UNTAC) also supervised the Cambodian elections in May 1993 (see below), but terrorist intimidation by the Khmer Rouge attempted to sabotage the procedure with dramatic consequences for Angkor. On the eve of the elections, small towns were shelled, UN workers 372

attacked and the overall number of casualties included two hun-dred deaths and several hundred injuries, “culminating in a large-scale attack on Siem Reap on 3 to 4 May by four hundred Khmer Rouge. Following further attacks on May 19, hundreds took refuge in the temple complex of Angkor Wat” (Doyle 1995, 56; compare Findlay 1995, 80). Headlines in international news, such as “SIEM REAP, Cambodia – Bodies of Khmer Rouge soldiers lay near the ancient Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat Monday, following an attack on the provincial capital of Siem Reap” (Som 1993 for UPI), were not as reassuring to the World Heritage Community as Mayor’s report in Paris (compare Henry Cleere’s statements during the nomination process in late 1992). More trusted news from the New York Times hinted at a secondary reality that was created by the United Nations’ (and UNESCO’s) international standards of democracy (and cultural heritage):

6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

More than one hundred Cambodians from the province have taken refuge around Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century hand-carved mountain of stone that is Cambodia’s national symbol. They fled to the ancient temple after their homes were attacked and burned by the Khmer Rouge. For many, the Cambodian elections seemed a cruel abstraction. “I dream only about the shelling”, said Sok Borann, one of the refugees living in palm-leaf huts in the shadow of Angkor Wat. (Shenon 1993)

In a situation reminiscent of the early 1970s when thousands of local inhabitants took shelter inside the Angkor temples during conflicts (see Figs. IX.89a,b and XI.2a,b), the UN once again appeared helpless to protect Cambodians. However, this didn’t seem to hinder the continuation of the cultural heritage business throughout 1993. On the contrary: three to four decades after French impact on the site in the 1950s and 1960s, with comparable trials at a lower level (compare chapter IX), a new trend towards an all-encompassing penetration into the Angkor zone as an asset of cultural heritage could be observed. This trend can be described as a post-1990 technology-based process of dramatic ‘zooming in and zooming out’ from the 1:1-scale daily human and social reality on site. On the one hand, a microscopic scale was presented in the following years through the conservation sciences. Apart from the parallel studies made by the Archaeological Survey of India at Angkor Wat in the early 1990s (see chapter XI), a straight continuity from B. P. Groslier’s last projects with the Département de protection des matériaux at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle to the present scene could be observed. Pierre Fusay’s 1960s studies Altérations biologiques des grès Cambodgiens were published by the EFEO in 1991 (Fusey 1991; compare Hyvert 1969), influencing new research to enter into the capillary space of the stone temples at Angkor (Figs. XII.16a–c). In the case of Angkor Wat, this new approach was primarily introduced by the German Apsara Conservation Project from 1995 onwards (Figs. XII. 16d,e) and was seen as a way to stabilise the decorative surfaces of the temple by artificially regenerating or even rejuvenating the decreasing tightness of the inner stone configuration (see epilogue II). On the other side of the very ‘spectrum’, a totally new macroscopic scale was introduced through use of satellite images from outer space in order to get the largest possible perspective onto what was termed the ‘cultural landscape of Angkor’ (Pl. XII.14a–d; compare Pl. XII.5). If building inventories, juridical framing and training activities formed the core classical procedures of reappropriating the cultural heritage of Angkor a second time after the French colonial impact, this extra large-scale approach was serving a familiar strategy: mapping and zoning; or as the November 1992 nomination of Angkor to UNESCO’s Danger List termed it more than half a century after the first Parc archéologique was delimited in the 1920s and 1930s (see chapter IX), the “establishment of permanent boundaries”

and a “meaningful buffer zone” (see above and UNESCO 1992f, 37). Initiated by Fraoua’s above-quoted 1992 study, this duty was once again outsourced to an international team who established the Angkor Zoning and Environmental Management Plan of Angkor (ZEMP) before, after Vann’s internal 1991 report, any national agency could take an equal position in the process. As discussed in chapter IX, strategies of sketches and maps, photographs and plaster casts had, in the French-colonial era, served as the “tools of empire” (after Headrick 1981) to create a secondary scientific and technocratic realm beyond Angkor’s daily reality as seen through the eyes of local stakeholders (compare Falser 2013d). By widening the gap between international experts with their imported high-tech instruments “for planners and developers” on the one side, and the local post-conflict participation for and access to special knowledge and information on the other, Angkor as a veritable test site entered the digital age for the first time. As we shall see in the epilogue II that follows this last chapter, the space between high-tech computer-aided micro and macro scales governed by inter­national projects was left untreated. Conceived as a set of rather lowtech approaches for Angkor, it was delegated only some years later to the artificially created ‘regional’ Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap (APSARA). APSARA was now to play the ‘local and indigenous’ role in implementing ­buzzwords, that were created and circulated globally with increasing speed, and key concepts of (neo-)traditional housing, (neo-)vernacular living and soft-ecological tourism inside the cultural reserve of Angkor (see epilogue II). Back in 1993, the ‘white man’s burden’ (to install the ‘neces­sary’ high-tech instrumentarium to save Angkor) was easily narrated on-site when computers from the Western world were the last item on the wish list of war- and genocide-scarred Cambodia, or as was ambivalently stated in Richard Engelhardt’s look back to the heroic days around 1992/93 in his preface to UNESCO’s 1999 publication GIS and cultural resource management: A manual for heritage managers: At Angkor, UNESCO pioneered the use of computer-aided information management tools to bring together fragmentary data from many sources in order to create a data bank to guide restoration work on the monuments, and to aid the creation of an economic and human resource development plan for the devastated surrounding area. ZEMP used computer-assisted geographical ­information systems (GIS) to integrate data from the fields of archaeology, geology, hydrology, climatology, environmental science and demography together with plans being prepared for the development of agriculture, irrigation, road construction and, of course, tourism. The purpose of compiling such an integrated database was to encourage planners and developers from all departments to work to the same plan thereby ensuring that the archaeological remains of Angkor would not be endangered by ill-conceived or uncoordinated actions.

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XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figures XII.16a—e  Left column: Pierre Fusey’s studies between 1961 and 1966 at Angkor Wat about the ­biological alteration of the Cambodian sandstone, published by the EFEO in 1991; right column: German ­Apsara Conservation Project (GACP) working on Angkor Wat’s stone consoli­dation from 1995 ­onwards (Source: Fusey 1991, 74, 76, 77; GACP Folder 1997; GACP 2000)

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6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

UNESCO consciously chose to test the usefulness of computer-aided GIS in this difficult situation at Angkor where map data was non-existent, electricity rare and where no local manager had even heard of GIS, to say nothing of being trained in its use. If GIS could also prove to be a powerful tool to aid site managers everywhere to safeguard the world’s heritage. [italics MF] (Box 1999, IV)

ZEMP started its work in December 1992 with an initial five-month period of field study. It was led by the British environmental planning consultant Jonathan Wagner92 and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), UNDP, the Angkor Foundation/Hungary and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA, compare its role at Borobudur and Vann’s use of its planning instruments), with contributions from the EFEO, the US National Park Service and the Thai Fine Arts Department. According to an internal report by ZEMP’s Steering Committee Meeting on 27 March 1993 at Siem Reap, though the original task was a hydrology study for a better water resource management and understanding of the “specificity of Angkor”, it had mutated considerably. At a moment when a targeted national agency was not yet implemented due to political problems and the conditions of security and “for the national counterpart training” were still struggling, the “study area was expanded to a much larger area than initially foreseen”. It covered an area of five thousand square kilometres between Tonlé Sap Lake and drainage basin and the Dangrek Escarpment to the Kulen mountains (ZEMP 1993a, 4–6; compare Box 1999, 91–96). The impressive project finally identified more than one thousand archaeological sites within the Angkor Plain. Wagner summed up the upcoming paradigm as one of “sustainable development, […] [in which] three demands needed to be reconciled in the planning and management of the material heritage of Angkor: cultural conservation, tourism and productive use of rural resources” (Wagner 1995, 61). The comprehensive 200-page version of the Discussion Draft Report and the small Executive Summary Re­ port (both of September 1993) brought up the concept of a ‘cultural landscape’ – introduced as a new heritage category in UNESCO’s 1992 Operational Guidelines – to cover the wider “Angkor Cultural Reserve (ACR)”. It was split into “areas of Special Archaeological Concern (SAACs), Eco­ logically Sensitive Zones (ESZs), and Historic Urban and Traditional Village Zones (UCZs)” (ZEMP 1993b, §8.4, compare ZEMP 1993c). The 1994 ZEMP Synthesis Report, published in Phnom Penh in the name of the “Kingdom of Cambodia” (ZEMP 1994), finally provided eleven maps

with English and French legends. Based on the “study area” (plan 1) covering the whole range from the Kulen Mountains to the northeast to the Tonlé Sap Lake to the southwest, “archaeological values” from low to medium to high were mapped out in a coloured grid-like pattern in plans 2 and 3 (Pl. XII.15a). “Land use and population density” in plan 5 (Pl. XII.15b) identified “settlements” to the southwest of Angkor Wat (resettled and today gone!) and over the wider Siem Reap area, but used a green field to indicate “forests” over Angkor Thom and a greyish grid to indicate “natural and abandoned shrubs” over Angkor Park. In this 1:300,000 scale with its plotted early digital grid aesthetic, the existing villages of the local population within Angkor Park were even less indexable than in Mouhot’s hand-drawn plan from 1860 where he at least indicated a few little hamlets [hameaux] within a widely inhabited land of archaeological Angkor (compare Fig. IX.1). Plan 4 charted out the “previous park boundaries”, stretching from the French-colonial 1930s to Republican turn-over in 197093 and the 1992 version of the State of Cambodia (Pl. XII.16a). Plans 6 to 9 on “habitat and vegetation”, “administrative areas” and on “present and projected population for 2005” slightly corrected this picture. Together with plan 10 for the above-quoted zoning for Angkor Cultural Reserve, which would cover the whole selected area (Pl. XII.16b), the final plan 11 offered a 1:150,000-scale close-up of “Angkor Archaeological Park and Urban Zones” (Pl. XII.17a). Within a rather complex configuration of mapped-out past, present and future elements (including a new circular around the whole core area), the archaeological, yellow zones of “Angkor Parks” and their inner “restricted areas” were on a collision course with the population growth inside Angkor Park itself. The identification of “Special Areas of Archaeological Concern (SAACs)” was also ambivalent, as was the affiliated “strategy to resettle surplus population from around the Parks” for “those who choose or wish to be helped to relocate away from archaeological sites in which restrictions are applied, areas offering more attractive opportunities for a rural livelihood by providing preconstruct­ ed facilities on agricultural estates”. While “pilot and training venues for the extension of ‘organic farming’, etc.” were proposed for those relocated zones (ZEMP 1993c, 26) and preliminary plans for “tourist resorts” with artificial lakes and performance stages formulated (ZEMP 1993c, diagram 7), “no new pagodas or religious developments” were to be be allowed inside the park and “overnight accommodation [was to] be restricted to Monastery at Ang­kor Wat” (ZEMP 1993c, Box 2). An updated plan about the “protected cultural sites in the Siem Reap-Angkor region” was issued in

92  The “ZEMP Team” was identified with Jonathan Wagner, Minja Yang, Richard Engelhardt, Véronique

Dauge and Khin Vuthy (UNESCO Head Siem Reap sub-office) and a list of twenty-three “experts”, and “technical counterparts” of four Cambodians (ZEMP 1993c, n.p.). 93  A plan version for this “Parc National d’Angkor” concept around 1970 was identified for this research, involving rather different boundaries, in a correspondence letter of 23 May 1973 by the Swiss UNESCO Commission (see Pl. XI.12b; compare Pl. XI.3a).

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1994 (Pl. XII.17b) and republished in the 1999 UNESCO publication GIS and cultural resource management. A manual for heritage managers (Box 1999). Another (more mechanical and abstract) approach using diagrams and charts was directly related to the mapping and zoning strategies of the whole Angkor plan by the international ZEMP team through early-digital technology. In this context, one might speak of a complete structural institutionalisation-bureaucratisation of the Cambodian culture after Western thought patterns and paradigms. This process of an all-comprising planability stretched from the National Supreme Council under Sihanouk down to the protected inner sanctuaries of Angkor Park, and from there through a regional protection agency circling back into the global space of the participating World Heritage community with its self-declared ‘ad hoc experts’ flying in from around the world (see below). What followed did indeed far exceed anything that B. P. Groslier had planned during his tenure as head of what was until 1970 the world’s largest archaeological laboratory in the form of Angkor Park. Building on what had only recently been sketched out by non-Cambodian (ZEMP) experts, the proposals for a hierarchical structure linked a “Superior Council for National Culture” through the established National Heritage Pro­ tection Authority of Cambodia to different agencies for regional, urban and touristic development, environmental protection and the Angkor Parks Agency with an attached “Angkor Forum” (Fig. XII.17a). Another chart laid out a complete hierarchy for a “Department of Monuments and Archaeology Organisation” from its director down to the sections managing training, cultural environment, archaeological activities with laboratories, and “engineering and technical” concerns (Fig. XII.17b). Two other diagrams institutionalised either the whole “Siem Reap-Angkor region” down to the inner “monumental site” (Fig. XII.17c), or the connection between “authorities” and “zones” down to “Angkor Parks” and their “core restricted areas” (Fig. XII.17d). Like Groslier’s 1958 Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor (compare chapter IX), any participatory approach that included local stakeholders, such as inhabitants and monks, was not a priority and was only much later brought into

the discourse through the backdoor under global keywords such as ‘living heritage’ or ICCROM’s ‘People Centred Approach’94 (see below). Almost two years after his substantial report from August 1991, Vann Molyvann formulated a second analysis Parcs archéologiques d’Angkor: Plan d’urgence pour la réhabilitation des ressources culturelles, humaines et économiques des sites d’Angkor. Although the twenty-two-page unpublished typescript was signed “Vann Molyvann, ancien Ministre de l’Éducation Nationale” at the Swiss-French village of “Finhaut, Juillet 1993”, it must have been finalised later, as it included the findings of the December 1993 event in Nara cited below. Generally speaking, Vann’s text was again a curious transcultural mix of local engagement for social aspects, and a balancing act between a ‘going native’ and colonial-era essentialism that was used to commodify and recreate regional culture.95 Additionally, this report mirrored his national understanding of administration and his belief in the top-down planning of Angkor and the effectiveness of international buzzwords of heritage management for the site. In his introduction, Vann referred to UNESCO’s engagement up to Santa Fe, but, more important in this context, he quickly switched to a discussion of his recent Japanese experiences at the 1993 Silk Roads Nara International Symposium on Conservation of Cul­tural Heritage and International Assistance in Asian Countries, which had taken place 21 to 25 November 1993. Months after Japan had signed the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1992, in the same year of Japan’s first nominated sites (in Nara) and only a few months prior to the important 1994 Nara Conference on Authenticity, which established an Asian understanding of the contested term (Larsen/Marsein 1994, Larsen 1995; compare Falser 2010a, 2011c, 2015f), this meeting represented a trial formulation of something akin to a pan-Asian heritage community: along with case studies about archaeological sites from Syria, India, Nepal and Pakistan, Cambodia (Angkor), Indonesia (Borobudur), Thailand (Sukothai) and Vietnam, to China, Korea and Japan, the Japanese representatives tried hard to situate Japan as the prominent new player in Asia’s heritage sector.96

94  I would like to thank Stefano de Caro, Gamini Wijesuriya, Joe King, Katrina Simila, Jukka Jokilehto, Alison

Heritage, Daniela Sauer, Paul Arenson and Maria Mata Caravaca for their precious insights into the wider work of ICCROM, ­especially during my granted status as visiting researcher at ICCROM in Rome in 2015. 95  In this context, it is interesting to compare with his own UNESCO report on Khmer culture four decades earlier (see Vann 1949). 96  Compare with the earlier discussion of Japan’s engagement since 1980 at Angkor, which displayed a similar rhetorical vein. The new understanding of Japan in this global heritage community in Asia – and beyond the country’s ratification of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1992 and the enrolment of the first sites in Nara on the World Heritage List shortly thereafter – became apparent in the explanation on the “purposes of the symposium”: “In the past, Japan absorbed splendid foreign cultures that were introduced through the Silk Road, the main route of cultural exchange between East and West, and was able to establish its own cultural identity. Now is the time for Japan to make a contribution to the international community, not only through economic means, but cultural as well, with the aim of realising a peaceful and affluent global society in the twenty-first century” (Research Center 1995, 274; compare Akagawa 2015 and Peycam 2016).

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6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

Figures XII.17a–d  ZEMP charts and diagrams between 1993 and 1994 to organise Khmer culture as a whole: “Option for institutional framework” from the supreme national level to an “Angkor Forum”; a proposed chart for the organisation of the “Department of Monuments and Archaeology”; diagram to organise the “Siem Reap-Angkor Region”; chart to organise the “relationship between authorities and zones” (Source: ZEMP 1994, diagram 3; ZEMP 1993b, n.p.; ZEMP 1994, diagram 2; ZEMP 1993c, chart in chapter V)

At the conference, Vann presented the above-mentioned (Research Center 1995, 279–80). Whereas Samidi, from InFrench report at a special introductory session of the con- donesia, with signing responsibility for the Borobudur/ ference entitled Open Seminar: Conservation of Angkor Prambanan site on Java, fully supported the essentialist Monuments (Research Center 1995, 7–59). In this context, trope of “Asian countries with their [our] own experiences the threat-and-help rhetoric about and for Angkor clashed: [and] similarities” united in heritage preservation (Research Whereas Yoshiaki Ishizawa again repeated his dramatic de- Center 1995, 254), did Toru Takahashi from the newspaper scriptions of Angkor from the 1980s (compare Ishizawa Asahi Shimbun (Osaka) criticise the UNESCO-launched 1993 and chapter XI), Richard Engelhardt from UNESCO “Olympics of Archaeological Restoration” at Angkor beCambodia had already gone one methodological step fur- tween France, the United States and Japan as “a highly danther by setting the 1993 ZEMP study in relation to “the gerous tendency”. Instead, he voted, with a focus on Angconservation and management of bio-cultural resources” kor Wat, “to leave it up to the Cambodian people to decide (Engelhardt 1995). In his “greetings” as “special representa­ how best to preserve and use the assets”, and only focus on tive of the DG of UNESCO for Angkor”, Azedine Bescha­ the external “cooperation in training the necessary human ouch reconfirmed “the preservation of Angkor [as being] resources” (Research Center 1995, 58–59). the priority project of the Cultural Section of UNESCO”, As Vann continued in his own report, it was in Japan – and he hastened to praise the “initiative taken in realising and for once not at UNESCO in Paris – that the Cambodian the partnership established between Nara and Angkor” authorities called for assistance in establishing a “five-year 377

XII  Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years 1987—1993

Figures XII.18a,b  Vann Molyvann’s approach to chart out the “valeur historique et culturelle du patrimoine”; its English translation of the “historical and cultural value of heritage” in the proceedings of the first ICC meeting in Phnom Penh (Source: Vann 1993, 2)

emergency plan to safeguard Angkor”. Vann proposed a di), Vann also voted for a study of “approaches in the conmanagement chart for Angkor (Fig. XII.18a) which was text of Asian countries, as those countries shared a common built on, as he termed it, the method of “historical site en- origin to be developed together”. Ironically, in order to exgineering” at Sophia University in Tokyo. It was taken up plain what he understood to be “Indochinese cultures” and shortly after in December during the First Plenary Session the “identity and specificity of the Khmer culture”, he was of the ICC in Phnom Penh (Fig. XII.18b). Contrary to the forced to quote the French-colonial studies of “the great mere administrative take formulated by the ZEMP team Orientalist George Coedès” (Vann 1993, 1–3) who had (see above), Vann’s chart represented a cultural and histor- largely contributed to making Angkor the reference point ical values-based approach that would argue from within for Cambodia’s postcolonial psyche (see chapter IX). Vann’s for the Cambodian understanding of ‘Angkor-as-heritage’, “target beneficiaries of the requested assistance” were the using a combination of scientific research, architectural inner-Cambodian institutions of higher education, such as preservation, and tourism development together with socio- the Fine Arts School, the National Museum, the Conserva­ cultural development, school education and workforce tory of Performative Arts in Phnom Penh, and the “old training. Like many of his Asian colleagues (notably Sami- technicians of the Conservation d’Angkor” at Siem Reap. 378

6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

And, using the same French colonial references to tackle his own cultural identity, Vann suggested that in-depth “scientific research about the world of the Khmer monuments” would only be possible – quoting the French “Programme Angkor” – by retrieving “the archives of the EFEO” (Vann 1993, 3–10, compare Vandermeersch 1992, 217). Vann’s next step was to investigate the integration and participation of the local population in and for the archaeological parks, but he had to leave the question of new relocations unanswered. Displaying the same ambivalence between ‘going native’ and the past, present and future French legacy of conceptualising Angkor as an icon of cultural heritage, his concluding “six immediate objectives” (Vann 1993, 12–17) included, above all: the creation of a “master plan [plan directeur] of conservation and restoration of the monuments of Angkor” using the recent French-made “pre-estimated inventory”; a “five-year training plan” imple­ mented with help from Japan and France; and a “strategy for the local population in the mise en valeur of patrimoine”, with the revival of the Corporations Cambodgiennes venue for traditional handicraft (as invented by George Groslier and functioning from the 1910s onwards, see chapter VIII and epilogue II; compare Abbe 2015). UN-monitored elections in Cambodia took place on 23 May 1993 (Jeldres 1993). With a massive voter turnout of 90 per cent nationwide, 45 per cent of the vote went to the United National Front for the Independence, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC in its French acronym), a royalist party led by Norodom Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh. The ruling party, Premier Hun Sen’s Vietnamese-backed Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) came in second with 38 per cent; the Khmer Rouge did not field candidates but threatened the balloting. In early July 1993, a new National Provisional Government of Cambodia was announced with Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen as co-presidents. The National Assembly re-established Prince Norodom Sihanouk and a constitutional monarchy. The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia was adopted on 21 September 1993,97 and Sihanouk was enthroned a few days later. Once again, in line with Mouhot and with the French-colonial explanatory modes that created the topoi of a ‘great civilisation of Angkor’, the site’s grandeur, decline and rebirth played an important role for Cambodia’s national structure and, in this case, was especially visible in the preamble of the new constitution. In fact, the state declared its responsibility to protect and develop the country’s cultural heritage and the listed “World Heritage” of Angkor, which was now (in perhaps the only

such example worldwide) included in the constitution in expressis verbis: We, the people of Cambodia Accustomed to having been an outstanding civilisation [civilisation grandiose], a prosperous, large, flourishing and glorious nation, with high prestige radiating like a diamond; Having declined grievously [tragique déclin] during the past two decades, having gone through suffering and destruction, and having been weakened terribly; Having awakened and resolutely rallied and determined to unite for the consolidation of national unity, to preserve and defend Cambodia’s territory and the precious sovereignty and the prestige of Angkor civilisation [protéger sa prestigieuse civilisation d’Angkor], and to build the nation up again into an ‘Island of Peace’ based on multi-party liberal democratic responsibility for the nation’s future destiny of moving toward perpetual progress, development, prosperity, and glory… §69 The State shall preserve [sauvegarder et protéger] ancient monuments, artefacts and restore historic sites. §70 Any offense affecting cultural and artistic heritage shall carry a severe punishment. §71 The perimeter of the national heritage sites, as well as heritage that has been classified as world heritage, shall be considered neutral zones where there shall be no military activity. [italics MF]98

The Intergovernmental Conference on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historical Area of Angkor took place in Tokyo from 12 to 13 October 1993. At this point, the transcultural trajectory of Angkor-as-heritage had finally reached a completely globalised reality where all its significant layers – as a local site, a regional motor of development, a national symbol, a star of ‘all cultural heritages in Asia’, as an international project and a central element of world heritage and as a global mission – were amalgamated and institutionalised. More than one hundred repre­ sentatives from some thirty states, from Australia to Canada, Japan to France and Vietnam to the United States, together with the European Community, the Asian Development Bank, ICCROM, SEAMEO/SPAFA, UNDP, UNESCO (with Lopès, Bouchenaki, Beschaouch, Engelhardt) and the UN Volunteers Programme, signed the Tokyo Declaration on 13 October 1993 (UNESCO 1993f, 9–14). This was already the third call to “save Angkor” after the Sophia Appeal in 1985 and the Tokyo Appeal in 1990. In 1993 it comprised thirteen paragraphs, and the introductory ‘recognitions’ brought to

97  This constitution is the most recent and is in continued use. The first monarchy constitution was promul-

gated in 1947, the second for Cambodia’s independence on 9 November 1953, and the following versions of 1970, 1975, 1979 and the one of 1989 constituted the ‘State of Cambodia’ under Hun Sen. 98  There are several translations of Cambodia’s constitution. For this version, see: http://www.constitution. org/cons/cambodia.htm (accessed 24 July 2017). The original French translation, here added as text fragments, in Jennar 1994, 16–30.

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an overlap the national sovereignty and responsibility, international corporation/assistance, and the global heritage of humankind as manifested in Angkor: 1. We recognise that the Angkor monuments are one of the world’s most valuable cultural heritages in Asia as well as the national symbol of Cambodia and its people, and that international cooperation for the safeguarding and development of the Angkor region, including the Angkor monuments, is of particular importance for national reconstruction. 2. We recognise that the people of Cambodia have sovereignty over and primary responsibility for the safeguarding and development of the historic area of Angkor. Based on this recognition, we will support the Cambodian people’s efforts to bring about and pursue this task. […] 3. In holding this conference, we respond to the appeal of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia. We recognise the urgent need for international assistance to prevent the Angkor monuments from further decay and destruction. These international efforts should be carried out in a coordinated manner for the safeguarding and preservation of the monuments and historical area taking into account their cultural, socioeconomic and ecological dimensions. 4. We hold this conference for the purpose of mobilising such international efforts. […] 5. We declare our deep appreciation of UNESCO’s action for safeguarding of the Angkor monuments to date, as well as for the recognition of the site as a common heritage of mankind. [italics MF]

After the “appeal to the international community” (§8) and the call for a – per definition one-directional – “transfer of necessary know-how between the international experts and their national counterparts” (§9), the “coordination” of Angkor was, for the first time in the site’s formation history as heritage, completely poured into an “internationalised mechanism for coordination of assistances” (the future ICC-Angkor, see below), though Cambodia as a nation still had – in theory – the last word: 10. We agree to establish a coordinating committee (the Committee) at the ambassadorial level in Phnom Penh as the international mechanism for coordination of assistances to be extended by different countries and organisations […]. In order to assure its coordinating role, the Committee will be systematically informed of the details of work being undertaken on the site and in the region. It will ensure the consistency of the different projects, and define, when necessary, technical and financial standards […]. 11. We agree that the Committee should be composed of representatives of the Kingdom of Cambodia and interested governments and organisations. Relevant non-governmental organisations and foundations may be invited to participate in the Committee as observers. It is pro-

380

posed to place this Committee under the honorary presi­ dency of His Majesty Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. It will be co-chaired by France and Japan, and UNESCO will be in charge of the secretariat of the Committee. We agree that all decisions by the Committee be subject to the agreement and cooperation of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia. The participants share the view that the Committee should be the international mechanism referred to in the Resolution 3.13 of the twenty-sixth session of the General Conference of UNESCO [see above, MF]. 12. We agree to establish, when appropriate, working groups and hold round tables composed of experts nominated by the countries and international organisations which are participants of the Committee. 13. We agree to convene a second meeting of this Conference in due course to review the progress made and to discuss the need for new actions. [italics MF]

The officially published ninety-plus-page document, introduced with a cover illustration showing a Cambodian child sitting on a windowsill high up in Angkor Wat’s central towers (Pl. XII.18a), is a good source to use to analyse the shift in global heritage discourse on Angkor. The direction of the whole text was clear: big business. Only ten months earlier in December 1992 the keywords of “safeguarding” (now mentioned about twenty times in the text) and “urgency [and] emergency” (together thirty-five times) were used as the argument for the rushed UNESCO World Heritage in Danger Listing of Angkor, but now – quasi-overnight – they had been supplanted by a new theme, one that was already present in the main title of the event and mentioned altogether sixty-five times within the text: devel­ opment. The “general introduction” listed Angkor’s past history and present religious importance, the EFEO’s preservation efforts between 1908 and 1973 and the subsequent years “in turmoil” until the late 1980s (compare chapters IX–XI). The text continued by outlining the upcoming challenges of environmental and monumental protection, the forecasted numbers of mass tourism (3,000 persons per monument per day, a “maximum carrying capacity of the park of up to 700,000 tourists a year” and almost 6,000 required hotel rooms) and concluded with state­ments about “an extremely weak national capacity in the preservation, restoration and presentation of Angkor”, the danger of an international black market for Khmer antiquities, and an understaffed Angkor Conservation Office in desperate need of training from outside (UNESCO 1993e, 15, 16). This perceived precariousness was followed by a “response of the international community”, which focused on UNESCO’s recent activities (“coordinating services”, training, Angkor’s World Heritage Listing, legal advice, ZEMP, etc.), remarks on Cambodia’s own legal and institutional efforts and, most telling of all, the tasks-and-price lists of past, present and future projects of international government and NGO initiatives (UNESCO 1993e, 18–31). The concluding section on

6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

“future challenges” contained remarks which read like a business action plan for a commercial theme park (see this term discussed in epilogue II). It commented on the concerns of (a) monumental conservation (“an optimum transfer of knowl­edge [and] technology was needed”, “technical datasheets” of monuments such as Angkor Wat were listed); of (b) archaeology (“conservation should not be an obstacle to, but a necessary part and a process of development”); of (c) regional development (“integrated planning of the Angkor area” with “UN and international development agencies” and a “strong international coordination mechanism”, “preservation of Angkor as a part of the process of improving the welfare of the Cambodian people”, “relocations” inside the park and “new rural settlement areas (estates)” to the outside in service of “demands for manpower for the tourism sector [such as] for hotel and restaurant services, guiding, hair-dressing, tailoring”); and of (d) national capacity building, with “short-term training and occasional lectures given by visiting professors”, from a strengthened Phnom Penh Faculty of Architecture and Archaeology, an on-site training centre, and an “Angkor Technical Unit” (UNESCO 1993e, 36 –87, here 40, 82–84, 86–87). Finally, the “grand total” of international contributions from 1980 to September 1993 was indicated as “9 Mio USD”, with France (3.1), Japan (1.3) and India (3 million USD) as the main investors (UNESCO 1993e, 89). As we can see, the official document of the 1993 Tokyo Conference is an important source through which one can trace the hasty change in the rhetoric of the global heritage community from the emergency salvage to the economic exploitation of Angkor. The unpublished proceedings, ­containing all the talks of the major players during the event, did bring, however, an additional element to the fore: the return of a veritable civilising vision (compare Falser 2015a,c). The Tokyo Declaration itself (see above) had already brought the global value, the international mission, and the national reconstruction of ancient Angkor together. Once again, following Cambodia’s French-colonial and postcolonial period, an “Angkor complex” (compare Vien 1981, 11 and Edwards 2007, 242) was solidified in order to make an archaeological site of glorious antiquity the one and only possible source for a national rediscovery of cultural grandeur. The role of the “world community to assist in the safeguarding of the historic site of Angkor” was mentioned in the Japanese welcoming speech (UNESCO 1993f, 25); however, the French inaugural address given by Serge Boide­ vaix, the co-chairman of the conference and secretary-general of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was not only astonishingly close to Federico Mayor’s 1991 Appeal for

Angkor in its global tone (see above). It also continued the long French tradition of leading a handful of ‘civilised’ nations in a global mission for heritage protection. This tone was formulated impressively by Charles Normand, architect and director of the Amis des monuments de Paris at the opening of the Congrès international pour la protection des œuvres d’art et des monuments at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889 (compare chapter IV) and again by the Paris-based Association des Amis d’Angkor some hundred years later in the late 1980s (compare chapter XI). As a kind of déjà entendu, Boidevaix’s wording seemed to have almost quoted, and at the same time extended, Henri Mouhot’s remarks made 130 years earlier in 1860 (see chapter I) when the French naturalist stood in front of Angkor Wat and, looking at it through the “eyes of the traveller, […] [felt] transported from barbarism to civilisation, from profound darkness [of the present status of decay, MF] to the light [of past glory]”, thus invoking France’s mission to bring “regeneration to this state” (Mouhot 1863, 298; 1864, 275). In 1993, the French politician from the cultural heritage sector sounded like this: Angkor, a jewel of the Cambodian heritage has become a shared concern [Angkor, joyau du patrimoine Cambod­ gien, est devenu l’affaire de tous]. This interest of the national community marks a turning point in the history of Cambodia. […] First of all, we should not forget that the whole process to rehabilitate Angkor is inscribed in the larger framework of international help provided for the reconstruction of Cambodia. One other fundamental element should guide our debates: the symbolic significance of the site for the Khmer people. More than ever, after years of Cambodian tragedy, Angkor is not only the grandiose vision which strikes the traveller, but Angkor is above all the image which conceals in the bark of stone all the whispers and murmurs of the soul of a people on the search for itself.99 […] France is ready to provide technical assistance in training and the conservation of Angkor. […] The École française d’Extrême-Orient has accumulated knowledge capital that is unique in the world [capital de connaissance unique au monde] and [—] as the true memory of Angkor [véritable mémoire d’Angkor] [—] is ready in the effort to transfer this memory to Cambodia. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993e, 33—43)

In addition to this emotional evocation, Boidevaix also made it clear that all technical and financial help from outside was meant to foster Cambodia’s “self-financing” of all restoration work at Angkor in the near future – a hope which has never been fulfilled up to this day, as almost all

99  The French original version is: “Un autre élément fondamental doit guider nos débats: celui de la signifi-

cation symbolique du site pour le peuple Khmer. Plus que jamais après les années de tragédie vécues par le Cambodge, Angkor est non seulement la vision grandiose qui frappe le voyageur, mais surtout l’image qui renferme dans son écorce de pierre tous les bruissement et chuchotements de l’âme d’un peuple en quête de son être.” (UNESCO 1993e, 35)

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temple restoration work within Angkor Park is still covered by non-Cambodian agencies (see the Pl. EpII.7,8 in the following epilogue II). In his own speech at the conference, however, Sihanouk fostered the well-worn essentialist rhetoric that positioned Cambodia’s present and future in direct relation to the country’s historical golden age: With our new Constitution, the Kingdom of Cambodia is now entering a new era of history. May the grandeur of our past encourage the building of a serene future, characterised by conviviality, concord and cooperation. Your support is essential in this long-term endeavour. This is why I cling firmly to the hope to offer, one day, to the eyes of the world, the recovered splendour of Angkor, and to show that we are the worthy heirs of the magnificent legacy of our ancestors. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993e, 50)

After Henri Lopès’ enumeration of UNESCO’s past, present and future mission for Angkor (UNESCO 1993f, 57–61), the report of the Cambodian Delegation was introduced with the statement that the site of Angkor had been given highest national concern:

the International Co-ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor [in the following ICC] met for its inauguration in Phnom Penh on 21–22 December 1993. The minutes of this meeting were prepared by UNESCO as an unpublished file of 270 hand-paginated pages (Pl. XII.19). Its introductory statement celebrated the astonishing fact that, after codifying the international nature of the new Angkor campaign outside the country with the Paris and Tokyo meetings in the same year, this event was indeed “the first meeting on Ang­ kor at this level to be held in Cambodia”. It continued: This event, where more than twenty countries and organizations were gathered, is significant of the importance given by the international community to the safeguarding of this site, jewel of the cultural heritage of mankind, symbol of the national identity and of the reconstruction of the Kingdom of Cambodia. (ICC 1993, v)

Placing himself in the direct lineage of Angkorian kings whose ancient site was now turned into a global heritage icon (compare his strategy from the 1950s on, described in chapter X), “His Majesty Preah Bat Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk Varman, King of Cambodia” sent a greetThe site of Angkor, inscribed on the World Heritage is ings message “to thank the representative donor countries enlisted in the Khmer National Domain. The valorisation and international organizations involved in this Herculean of this domain has been declared as national priority. effort to save Angkor” (ICC 1993, 7). Additionally, he made (UNESCO 1993f, 77) Julio A. Jeldres, the king’s senior private secretary, official biographer (Jeldres 2003) and honorary minister, a repreIn this report, Vann Molyvann once again presented his sentative of the Royal Cabinet to the intergovernmental “five-year urgent plan for the safeguarding, conservation and valorisation of the Khmer National Heritage”. He again committee; and welcomed the “international mechanism” underlined the participatory strategies needed for the pop- over Angkor to meet the still-missing national requireulation living inside Angkor Park but also put one “priori- ments set by the World Heritage Committee in Santa Fe. ty in the identification of ‘bankable’ projects for the Khmer Sihanouk warned against a “dismembering of Angkor by hotel industry”, mentioned the future prospect of “some considering each monument as a separate entity unrelated one million tourists until the year 2000” and concluded to the whole”, and he explicitly underlined the leading, with his – mutually exclusive – wish to combine a help- non-Cambodian roles of the EFEO with its long experience and-investment-from-outside structure with the desire to at the site and of the “scientific advisors for Angkor formed keep Cambodians in charge of Angkor’s fate: by UNESCO’s director general” for their “prior scrutiny of all projects presented” in the future (ICC 1993, 8). Cambodia is going to rely almost entirely on international When Pascal Charlat, chargé d’affaires de France A.I., raised his voice in the name of France’s permanent co-presaid for a long time, since having a dilapidated and weak economic structure, the country cannot hope for the gen- idency of the ICC (together with Japan), he evoked the eration of rapid savings for its autonomy in this sector. “spirit of Tokyo” as a “shared sentiment [sentiment partagé] to tackle together one of the most beautiful cultural chalHowever, while being a recipient of aid, the Cambodian lenges at the end of this century [à relever un des plus beaux Government hopes to be the master of the programmes défis culturels de la fin de ce siècle]”. By placing it under the and projects, except for those pertaining to training, and it suggests that these programmes and projects be exe- great European paradigm of “culture”, a so-called archaeological site of Angkor – produced through French Oriencuted by the Government itself, in collaboration with talist knowledge (see chapters IX and X) and refabricated the associated executing agencies of the United Nations through France’s ongoing expertise (compare the same and/or multi-bilateral institutions and non-governmental rhetoric of “conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor”, when Charles organisations. [italics MF] (UNESCO 1993f, 77—86, here de Gaulle and King Sihanouk met for a sound-and-light 85—86) show in front of Angkor Wat in 1966, see chapter X and Pl. In 1993, the last step towards the institutionalized global X.23) – radiated straight back into an Oriental newborn setup of the management of Angkor Park was reached when nation-state configuration: 382

6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

Finally, the ‘spirit of Tokyo’ represents the will of the inter­ national community to bring its support to the efforts of His Majesty the King of Cambodia, the Royal Government and the Cambodian people for the reconstruction of Cambodia, destroyed but alive and turned towards the future. Roads, hospitals and tractors are certainly indispensable. However, what unites us here today is the idea that culture, a sense of belonging to a common history [sentiment d’appartenance à une histoire commune], but also the receptiveness to universal values [ouverture sur l’universel], is one of the essential dimensions of recovery. Certainly, this is true for all countries, but it is even more true for Cambodia whose national identity is born in the heart of this, as Bruno Dagens has it, ‘forest of stones’. [italics MF] (ICC 1993, 20)

The introductory remarks by Azedine Beschaouch, who had pushed Angkor onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992 and was now speaking in his function as Special Advisor for Angkor to the director general of UNESCO, were ambivalent. On the one hand, he made clear that “international solidarity was not meant to deliver Khmer ­people with ready-to-use solutions but […] to transmit a know-how to form national [Cambodian] specialists and experts capable of preserving by themselves in the respect of deontological rules [dans le respect des règles déonto­ logiques] in the conservation and monumental restoration work what their ancestors had handed down to them”. On the other hand – and this was the exact opposite of Cambodia’s independent and self-sustaining heritage management for Angkor – he hinted at the perpetuation of the ICC’s control mechanism over the site by underlining the international nature of the “campaign to safeguard and enhance Angkor” under a common “concertation and tight cooperation”. In this context, the “restoration of the remnants of the past [were destined] to serve the economic re­ birth of Cambodia, its cultural renaissance and its social upturn” (ICC 1993, 31, 32). A little section in the proceedings introduced the “working methods of the ICC” to be-

come the international control mechanism (ICC 1993, 37), foreseen by resolution 3.13 adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO” in November 1991. It constituted, “de jure, of all the states and international organizations which adopted the Tokyo Declaration on 13 October 1993 and which, moreover, contribute financially or by providing expertise to the safeguarding and development of the historic site of Angkor”. Other states were invited, upon written request, to participate in the meetings; NGOs could (only!) obtain the status as observers. Whereas a plenary session was scheduled once at the end of each year to debate and adopt a report of activities to be transmitted to the government of Cambodia, a technical committee was planned to meet three times a year on incoming project reports and proposals after “seeking the opinion of a group of experts”. Besides concluding sections about “projects and other means of co-operation considered by member countries and international agencies”,100 other elements such as “meas­ ures about looting and illicit trafficking” (compare Figs. XII.15a,b) and annexes (with a long list of participants), the central section of the minutes was – and this was a novelty in the debate – entirely devoted to Cambodia’s own activity reports, requests and visions to make Angkor Park the central element of Cambodia’s cultural, social and economic rebirth. Without a doubt the big star behind all these formulations was Sihanouk’s old state architect from the 1960s (see chapter X), and now “Ministre d’État” and “President of the Delegation of the Kingdom of Cambodia”: Vann Molyvann. In his opening statement (compare the wording of the preface to the document as quoted above), he underlined the “highly historical character of the conference” and merged Khmer monarchy and national pride with a global cultural heritage agenda: For the first time such a conference takes place on Khmer soil, and it is of symbolic value as it coincides with the commencement of a new phase, the national reconstruction and renaissance being marked by the sign of international solidarity, with the reinstallation of the Khmer

100  Projects were proposed by the following (ICC 1993, 137–161): Germany (with the stucco restoration of

the ninth-century brick temple of Preah Ko in Roluos, compare Falser 2006); France (calling out the sum of more than 11 million FF spent to safeguard Angkor between 1979 and 1992, budgeting about 4.5 million FF for 1993 with a focus on stability issues of the “central massif of Angkor Wat”, and 18 million FF for 1994 with projects for a geometric-cartographic investigation of Angkor Thom, an inventory of the objects inside the Conservation d’Angkor, reception concepts for tourists at Siem Reap, a control system against further pillage, the formation of a security police, a chantier-école provided by the Ligue d’Enseignement); India (complaining about “UNESCO’s misleading assessment [during the previous Tokyo meeting] of ASI’s monumental contribution at Angkor Wat since the 1980s”, with a “modification of the Tokyo Document” added to the minutes); Indonesia (referring to the experiences at Borobudur); Japan (starting projects at the library buildings at the Bayon and Angkor Wat temples, for training and socio-economic development, with 2 million USD foreseen for the first years); Poland (running out of money, but referring to its EDUCON training facilities); Russia; Switzerland; Great Britain (naming VSO volunteers and curators of the V&A Museum in London); USA (with the involvement of the National Park Service for the ZEMP project, see above); the EC Commission (with help for demining and transport issues); the Asian Development Bank (to mention joint ventures in the hotel sector); UNDP-UNV and SPAFA from Thailand.

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monarchy, the new constitution […] and the inscription of Angkor to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a source of great moral satisfaction […] More than ever, the royal city, Angkor Wat, represents all cultural values of the Kingdom of Cambodia (ICC 1993, 27).

Today, with twenty-five years of distance, Vann’s “Plan of action of the Royal Cambodian Government for the management of Angkor and its region” can all too easily be termed a naive, even tragic misjudgement of the supposedly altruistic nature of Cambodia’s national-public and political sphere as much as of the international cultural heritage community’s interest in finally and definitively handing all responsibility for Angkor back to Cambodia. Back in 1993, his “seven great prior-ranking operations” tried in a visionary manner to bring Cambodia’s full sovereignty over its own cultural heritage to an overlap with an international financial help structure from outside (ICC 1993, 40). It comprised of: 1) the establishment of a national agency of an “Autorité pour la Protection du Site et l’Aménagement de la Region d’Angkor – APSARA” (founded in 1995, see below) with a – again French-made! – “draft law of the management of a National Estate of Angkor [projet de loi rélatif à la gestion du Domaine National d’Angkor]”; 2) a partly EFEO-trained national Institute of Scientific Research to be finally transformed into an Institute of Khmer Culture; 3) an international (French, Japanese, German, Hungarian, American, etc.) programme for the restoration, preservation and mise en valeur of the Angkor monuments; 4) a systematic human resource development programme (including the Phnom Penh-based École des Beaux-Arts under coordination of Tokyo’s Sophia University and the Paris-based École du Louvre); 5) an education programme for the population (in respect to national identity and, above others, the promotion of traditional arts); 6) the development of the Tourist Agency of Angkor (with the help of the Caisse Française de Développement); and finally, 7) an integrated development of the Siem Reap region (with financial aid from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, JICA). After Ridha Fraoua’s 1992 French draft for a Cambodian law for the protection of cultural properties, intended to facilitate the inscription of Angkor on the register of World Heritage Sites (Fraoua 1992, see above), this new draft law

for Cambodia’s eminently important national Angkor Protection Agency again carried a distinct French signature. As the ICC 1993 report explained in greater detail,101 the draft law had been “sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs” and was based on the study “A legal framework for the management of the site of Angkor”, made in August/ September 1993 by Jean-Yves Rossi, maître des requêtes and deputy secretary general of the French Council of State (ICC 1993, 63). The proposed setup to have representatives from religious stakeholders and regional inhabitants on APSARA’s control body would finally prove as illusory as the idea to have the revenues from Angkor Park managed as public treasure (they were privatised) or to have international agencies serve simply as advisory bodies of a completely independent national agency over Angkor. To this last point: the ICC’s international agencies in fact never handed a single major Angkorian temple – why not the most important one, Angkor Wat itself? – back to Cambodian teams! Vann’s proposed “master plan for a social-cultural development of Angkor” (compare his chart, Figs. XII.18a,b) included almost utopian elements such as a “Cambodian-styled cultural tourism”, participation models of the “local population” and a “fair distribution of the benefits”. His “two-decade plan for the enhancement of the culture of Cambodia (1994–2013)” included a “Plan of action for five years (1994–1998)”. It aimed for the foundation of an “Angkor Conservation Agency – ACA”, swallowing the existing French-era Conservation d’Angkor with its mere focus on historic monuments towards a larger agenda to add socio-cultural and natural areas (ICC 1993, 93) and an “Association of Regional Cultural Development – ARCD”. Additionally, Vann’s longer exposé for a new “Institute of Khmer Culture – IKC” (ICC 1993, 107–111) ironically took up George Groslier’s French-colonial agenda to protect (rather re-invent, control and commodify) Cambodia’s sup­ posedly dying or decadent “indigenous arts” from the 1910s onwards (compare the debate to foster the ‘indigenous element’ in chapter VIII during the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris). Vann’s comprehensive and participatory vision of Khmer culture in 1993 aimed at combining archaeological and architectural work at Angkor Park with “the conservation and development of non-physical traditional and modern cultural property” from music, dance

101  As §2 of the draft law had it, APSARA was planned to follow a national agenda in direct relationship to

World Heritage, to manage and control the region’s listed monuments and object collections, to give authorisation to scientific studies, archaeological diggings and conservation activities and to administer historic sites as national heritage, promote cultural values and public education, and manage responsibilities and obligations in cultural heritage protection. §3 placed APSARA under a National Culture Council (under the King’s patronage), itself (after §4) surrounded by the four advisory councils formed by high religious authorities, national personalities in the domain of art and culture, inhabitants of the province of Siem Reap, and the ICC; and helped by the institutions of the EFEO/France, the Institute of Asian Cultures/Sophia University/Japan, the WMF/USA, the ASI/India and the PKZ/Poland. §6 foresaw the founding of three national public establishments: the Angkor Conservation Office to replace the actual Conservation d’Angkor, an Angkor Tourist Agency to handle the site (within the network of the National Treasury) and an Institute of Khmer Culture (ICC 1993, 64–70).

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6. 1993: Archaeological Park of Angkor — Institutionally globalised… and nationally dispossessed?

and drama to cosmology and design, “regional and ethnic arts and crafts” and “natural heritage”. This idea was indeed revolutionary for Cambodia long before UNESCO itself turned towards intangible heritage programmes. Beyond a “central authority” in Phnom Penh and headquarters in Siem Reap, his vision included provincial branch offices and non-profit organisations. However, such an Institute of Khmer Culture was never founded until today, as the current Hun Sen government only fosters ‘ancient Angkor’ heritage products for global tourism, but no contemporary art scene in Cambodia for Cambodians. Vann’s overall idealistic vision tragically failed: His twenty-year master plan aimed for a fourth and final stage (2009–2013) “much more important than all the others because Cambodia should [then] take the practical initiative in hand for the safeguarding of the cultural and natural heritage all over the country” (ICC 1993, 88). For the case of Angkor, this handover from a supposedly temporary international help structure for Angkor de facto never happened. To the contrary: when Vann formulated his national vision in 1993, UNESCO and its international partners and so-called “ad hoc experts” (how long do Cambodians have to continue to play their role as ‘subaltern trainees waiting for Western experts of conservation?) has already secured their enduring claims over Angkor Park – far beyond any promised ad hoc emergency actions to bridge the supposed void until national legislation measures were finally in place (since 1994/5102) and far beyond the World Heritage Committee’s 2004 decision “to remove the property of Angkor from the List of World Heritage in Danger” (UNESCO 2004, 66). From a critical perspective, Mouhot’s 1860/63 exclamation to salvage the cultural heritage called Angkor from local decadence and physical decay through an external (back then French-colonial) help structure (compare chapter I) had travelled a long way through the postcolonial times of the independent mid-1950s and the traumatic 1980s (see chapters IX to XI). Around 1990, Mouhot’s vision was institutionally globalized through UNESCO’s installation of an international emergency campaign. Our investigation of the site’s transcultural history of heritage over more than 150 years between European and Asian projects shows how the exhibitionary complex called Angkor Wat travelled full circle, from colonial representations in French museums and exhibitions to the status of Angkor Park of a “living museum”, as the 2002 issue of Museum International had it (compare Pl.Intro.22). Angkor Park

was, as we will explore in epilogue II, finally turned into an archaeologically themed universal exhibition itself where different national conservation teams around the world (other than Cambodian) had their ‘own’ prestigious temple sites and competed against each other to fabricate the most picture-perfect ‘pavilion’. In this process, the local and national (Cambodian) part was – again, after universal and colonial exhibitions such as Marseille of 1906 and 1922, and Paris of 1889, 1931 and 1937 (compare chapters IV–VIII) – brought into the picture in order to contribute an ‘indigenous’ element with vernacular scenarios and themed environments of traditional housing, authentic craftsmanship and ‘living heritage’ enactments. As high-tech conservation machineries were installed over the temple sites of the Baphuon (by the French), the Bayon (by the Japanese) and Angkor Wat (by the Germans above others) and international ‘ad hoc’ experts from Tokyo to Paris and New York populated Angkor Park (compare Pl. Ep.II.2c,d), international press coverage and conference proceedings, such as from the ICC December 1993 meeting, continued – in the best colonial tradition (compare Pl. IX.5) – to feature images of peaceful Buddhist monks strolling through ‘their’ religious temples (Pl. XII.19). When the UNESCO Cam­ bodia office in Phnom Penh, under its director Richard Engelhardt (see his below-quoted preface), published its impressive résumé UNESCO in Cambodia 1951–1993 about the work accomplished in the sectors of “culture, education, communication, science and social and human sciences”, Cambodia’s enduring role between ‘to-be-preserved traditions’ and a ‘to-be-salvaged heritage of glorious Angkor’ was set for the years to come (Pl. XII.20): In the Cambodia of the future, the role played by traditional cultural values will be as important a feature of the emerging human landscape as the glorious remains of Angkor are its legacy from the past. Both must be preserved. (UNESCO Cambodia 1994, 5)

Until today, Cambodia might be the only country in the world to have its most prestigious national site of cultural heritage not only included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List but also co-managed, far beyond any emergency action, under direct supervision of an international control mechanism. Some call this a unique success story in the history of World Heritage and a proof of the functioning system of global solidarity; others criticise this unique con-

102  The “Royal Decree establishing Protected Cultural Zones in the Siem Reap/Angkor Region and Guide-

lines for their Management (001/NS)” was issued by Norodom Sihanouk on 28 May 1994; the “Royal Decree establishing a National Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap, named APSARA (NS/RKT/0295/12)” was issued 19 February 1995); the “Royal Decree establishing the Supreme Council on National Culture (NS/RKT/0295/12)” followed on 19 February 1995; the “Sub-Decree concerning the Hotel Zone (79/ANKR/PK)” on 13 October 1995; and finally, the “Law on the Protection of Cultural Heritage (NS/RKM/0196/26)” was issued on 25 January 1996. Compare APSARA 1996, 2005, online: http://apsaraauthority.gov.kh/?page=detail&menu1=753&ctype=document&id=753&ref_id=12&lg=en (retrieved 9 July 2018)

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stellation as the most prominent example of a neo-colonial practice in the global arena of cultural heritage management, which dispossesses a whole nation from its completely independent handling of its most important monuments. Archival evidence, provided in this chapter for the first time, could show that the hasty nomination process between 1987 and 1993 was more than ambivalent in its applied, UNESCO-led power structure behind the scenes, and that a whole French-led set of management tools, from inventorying to protective perimeter zoning, and from le-

386

gal framing to touristic commodification and surveillance, was indeed a creative copy-paste affair from old French-colonial times. In this way, Angkor indeed continues until today its transcultural trajectory through the global space of cultural heritage. After more than 150 years of travelling back and forth within a Euro-Asian – multi-sited – contact zone, the archaeological theme park, heritage reserve and exhibitionary complex called Angkor Park seems to have itself been turned into a historical test site and into its own heterotopian twin: a veritable ‘universal exhibition’ or ‘world’s(af)fair’ (see epilogue II).



Findings and Conclusions for Volume 2

From Jungle Find to Global Icon: Angkor as Archeological Reserve and World Heritage (1860s to 2010s) This book aimed, across two volumes, to investigate the concept of cultural heritage by charting its colonial, postcolonial-nationalist and global trajectories. This enquiry also intended to contribute a decidedly global perspective to the affiliated fields of art and architectural history. Taking a trans-cultural approach to studying the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat allowed us to trace the different phases of the temple’s modern history as they unfolded within the interstices of Asian and European projects. The time span of this study covers roughly 150 years, from the 1860s to the 2010s. The first volume, Angkor in France, traced the temple’s forms of ‘re-presentation’ on the European continent between 1867 and 1937 in eight chapters, with an additional view, in the epilogue, of comparable Asian scenarios from mid-nineteenth-century Siam to early twenty-first-century India. Here, it was particularly helpful to methodologically extend the concept of trans-lation by extending it from its original meaning as linguistic practice into the larger cultural field of exchange processes within and between cultures, over long distances between whole continents, and over a long period of time. On the one hand, this approach of translation helped to investigate the conceptual, semantic and taxonomic shifts of Ang­ kor Wat’s status from that of an active local site of Buddhist (originally Hinduist) worship to that of a global icon of cultural heritage. From a critical point of view, this also meant working out the ‘archaeologising’ tendency (after Falser/Juneja 2013b) to convert the living site into the typically Western aesthetic of a supposedly dead ‘eternal ruin’ to be salvaged, restored, protected and finally commodified. On the other hand, the temple’s physical reality came into view through our questioning of the classical parameters of art and architectural history, such as territorial stability and temporal permanence, artistic originality and physical authenticity, unique authorship and homogeneous identity (compare Fig. Intro.2a). Here, the approach of translation helped to contextualise those modern-day processes at play which indeed mobilised this giant architecture – wasn’t it defined as an ‘immobile’ monument? – to ‘travel’ over 10,000 kilometres, between whole continents, namely Asia and Europe. In our context, this was made possible by the mere transfer of ‘original’ architectural fragments from the temple into Western museums. Moreover, the technique of plaster casting was instrumental to cracking the generic architectural code of Angkor Wat and facilitating multiple physical replications of this temple –

wasn’t it always praised as a ‘unique’ masterpiece? – in French universal and colonial exhibitions. In order to trace this multiple process of transfer, mobility and connectivity (those are indeed the crucial operational terms for developing the new methodological approach of Global Art and Architectural History and Global Heritage Studies), we want to recall just one interesting document (above so many others) discussed in volume one. This was the rediscovered correspondence of Jean Commaille as the first general conservator of Angkor Park after 1907/08 and his counterpart in the French métropole, the Beaux-Arts-trained Auguste Delaval (see Figs. VI.4a,b), exchanged between Angkor Wat and Marseille in 1915 during World War I. Delaval was the architect responsible for the nearly 1:1-scaled replica of Angkor Wat as the star pavilion during the Exposition nationale coloniale in Marseille of 1916 (finally postponed for 1922), and he r­ equested advice on ‘how to build the tower pinnacles’ in an archaeologically correct manner so far from the ruined original. Commaille sent him his sketched proposal of such an ­architectural element, which he himself had not yet re­constructed at Angkor proper. As a result of this unique ­contact situation, Commaille’s reconstruction sketch was not carried out first at the original site; instead, its aesthetic ­effect was first tested in realiter in France. A few years after 1922, the full 1:1-scale, spotless and ageless replica of A ­ ngkor Wat – arguably the largest replica ever made of non-European architecture on the European continent – materialised in the famous 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (see the first illustrations of this book, Figs. Intro.1a,b). The multiple replication processes of Angkor in France had – and this is one of the main hypotheses of the present book and at the same time a bridging element into the second volume, – a considerable effect on the story of Angkor in Cambodia. As physical test sites, the French replicas served as precedents (the German “Vor-Bild” refers to this visual impact) for all, equally Beaux-Arts-trained, French Angkor conservators until 1975 to redeem these full-scale and picture-perfect promises back to the ‘original’ site. We argue that the reflection on these ‘back versions’ of Angkor Wat in the dynamic process of ‘(back) translation’ helped us to avoid falling into the old trap of postcolonial studies à la Edward Said, with its narrative of a one-directional ‘appropriation of the Orient through the Occident’, of the East through the West – in our case, of colonialised Indochine through colonising Europe, or, yet more precise, of Cam387

Findings and Conclusions for Volume Two

bodia’s major religious site through the French-colonial regime. Today we know that this affair is more complex, more nuanced, and – a central element of this book with its structure of two different but connected volumes – multi-layered, multi-centred and reciprocal. If all replication projects of Angkor Wat in France had direct effects on the French-colonial making of Angkor as a parc archéologique and on Angkor Wat as a patrimoine culturel, then those two French-made conceptions were far from stable, static and unanimous. To the contrary, they continued their transcultural trajectory well into the postcolonial ­twentieth and super-global twenty-first centuries and were constantly enriched, questioned, contested, modified and therefore complicated until today into a truly transcultural heritage configuration. Tracing back this transcultural configuration from our present-day perspective into modern history is the overall agenda of this book, as indicated by its title. When the concept of back-translation for cross-cultural research was first circulated in Western academia around 1970 as a tool to understand the semantic shifts from ‘original’ texts with their ‘source’ audiences into other cultural settings with their different ‘target’ audiences, Cambodia was standing on a threshold: from one and a half decades of national independence into a twenty-year phase of extreme violence of civil war, auto-genocide and military occupation. And arguably in no other constellation on the planet had an ex-colonial European regime after World War II entered the era of decolonisation in a seemingly less violent manner than France in its former protectorate of le Cambodge. The French role as the institutionalised protector, preserver and promoter of the world’s largest archaeological site stayed astonishingly intact within what was now one of the world’s youngest and smallest nation-states. While volume one traced the conceptual, aesthetic and physical ‘translation history’ of Angkor into ­French-colonial museum and exhibition spaces between 1867 and 1937, the second volume returned ‘back to the source’ of those translations: Angkor in Cambodia. However, with its four chapters and one epilogue, volume two could certainly not go back to the ‘original site’, as classical art and architectural history would narrate it – simply because this ‘original’ site did not exist anymore. Alongside the gradual canonisation process of Angkor through the coloniser’s own conceptual and aesthetic ‘framework’ to establish norms of high art, advanced civilisation and a patrimoine culturel in the French métropole, Angkor itself had become a veritable site of back-translation. Other than, or better, in-between an imagined original in ancient Cambodia and its fabricated translations in contemporary France, Angkor became (to use Homi Bhabha’s often quoted term) a third space. As was explored in chapter IX, the French narrative of Angkor’s lost cultural grandeur became the centerpoint of a veritable mission civilisatrice: with the practical methods and applied tools of archaeology, conservation and resto­ ration this meant to salvage and eventually return the iconised masterpiece of Angkor Wat ‘in Cambodia’ to the 388

same picture-perfect glory that had already been temporarily and repeatedly tested physically and visually ‘in France’. And if Angkor’s first general conservator Jean Commaille had sent his advice in 1915 on how to temporar­ ily stage a spotless replica of Angkor Wat in the 1916/1922 Marseille Exhibition, many of his successors, like Henri Marchal (arguably the most charismatic general conservator of Angkor ever), later confessed that they were deeply impressed by the Angkor Wat scenarios in France, and even that their impressions motivated and directed them in their restoration work ‘at the original’ in Cambodia. Due to an impressive almost seventy-year effort by the École française d’Extrême-Orient, the Archaeological Park of Angkor (it was decreed in 1925/1930) had reached its most elaborated status around 1970. At this point the Conservation d’Angkor was maybe the largest archaeological heritage regime on the planet. In a figurative sense a veritable back-translator of the above-mentioned Angkor Wat replica in Paris in 1931, Bernard Philippe Groslier (general conservator from the 1950s until 1975), with his vision of a reprise totale of Angkor Wat, definitely crossed the technological, institutional and logistical, but also aesthetic and moral threshold to convert an active Buddhist site of religious veneration into a picture-perfect but dead (we called it ‘archaeologised’) Hinduist ruin of long-gone architectural grandeur. However, by ‘siting’ (after Niranjana 1992) the cultural translations, back-translations and re-translations of Angkor (Wat) as a continued process, the second volume of this book did not stop with France’s colonial and early postcolonial impact in Cambodia until the early 1970s. By mapping the colonial, postcolonial and lately even neo-colonial activities, the four chapters of volume two have tried to show how the coloniser, the colonised, the decolonised and lately the re-coloniser were all active agents in the ongoing process of fabricating Angkor as cultural heritage. Just as the versions of Angkor Wat in French museums and exhibitions until the 1930s were multiple, the architectural, performative and patrimonial uses of the temple in Cambodia continued until today to be ‘multi-sited’ and ‘multi-layered’: this comprised the making of Angkor Wat as an architectural masterpiece inside a French-colonial archaeological park (chapter IX) and as a national icon during Cambodia’s decolonisation (chapter X), the site’s hostage-taking through heritage diplomacy during the endgame of the Cold War confrontation in the 1980s (chapter XI), and finally the temple’s re-emergence as a fetish object for UNESCO’s neocolonial heritage agenda when Cambodia, once again, was reborn as a nation in the early 1990s (chapter XII). Through the above-formulated methodological approach of multiple ‘(back)translations’ we were able, with a view on the concrete actors involved, to conceptualise the entangled nature of the diverse physical and visual representations of Angkor Wat between France and Cambodia. However, volume two also operationalised – and at the same time updated – a second important thought pattern

Chapter IX: The French-colonial making of the Parc archéologique d’Angkor

for our transcultural enquiry: Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (‘of other spaces’). This contributed to our reading of a) Angkor Wat as a transcultural configuration of ‘interconnected sites and simultaneous time frames’ across whole continents, and b) the temple’s highly mobile status as a travelling global icon of heritage through time(s) and space(s), political orders and territorial borders. Further, with his ‘six principles of heterotopia’ (deviation in behaviour, multiplicity of functions, juxtaposition of sites, accumulation of time, systems of opening and closing, compensation), Foucault also provided us c) with a kind of checklist to conceptualise the different Angkor-Wat-as-heritage scenarios as ‘effectively enacted utopias’. Those scenarios were instrumental for the ever-changing political regimes at play in Angkor in the long twentieth century to substantiate their cultural raison d’être, and to their different (parallel, competing, sometimes overlapping) inheritance claims over Cambodia’s glorious past. In other words, the four chapters of volume two investigated – always in direct relation to the past and parallel museum and exhibition spaces à la Angkor Wat in France – the structural behind-the-scenes workings through which Angkor Park as an aesthetic, normative and institutional entity itself became a heritage utopia par excellence. And over the last 150 years until today, the topoi of salvaging, controlling, presenting and eventually reactivat-

ing archaeological pasts for ever-new ideological presents and imagined futures always played a central role: from the invention and caretaking of Angkor Park as a core element within the French-colonial mission civilisatrice in Indochine (1907–53/70, chapter IX) and the site’s cultural-political re-enactment during Cambodia’s short period of national independence (1953–70, chapter X), to its ideological abuse in the service of US-backed Khmer-Republican, neo-Marxist Khmer Rouge or internationalist-Socialist agendas (1970–90, chapter XI), and finally UNESCO’s neo-colonial action programme of the hasty ‘in danger’ listing of Angkor Park as World Heritage (1987–93, chapter XII). Finally, this book will conclude in epilogue II with the observation that all the French-made museum and universal/colonial exhibition scenarios of picture-perfect Angkor Wat (covered in volume one) and all the on-site fabrication processes of Angkor Park (discussed in volume two) finally came, after their 150-year trajectory, to an overlap, closing a full circle of what we aimed at conceptualising a transcultural history of heritage. At this point, the present-­ day heritage management agendas for the Archaeological Park of Angkor and its branded heritage icon of Angkor Wat came to a kind of overlap with the ‘utopic imagineering’ strategies at play within the global and over-commercialised theme park industry.

Chapter IX: The French-colonial Making of the Parc Archéologique d’Angkor Chapter IX presented, for the first time ever, a critical, intellectual, institutional and technical, history of the French – pre-colonial, colonial and early postcolonial – creation of Angkor Park. With a starting point in the 1860s (compare chapter I) and a focus on the post-1900 period, it covered an overall time span of more than one hundred years until 1975. As mentioned in the introductory thoughts to the chapter itself, the challenges for this endeavour were many: almost all historic publication material of that time had been written in French by the École française d’Extrême-­ Orient (EFEO) protagonists themselves and needed, from today’s scientific viewpoint, to be read against the grain in order to overcome their underlying master narrative of a heroic on-site salvage mission. This critical reading seems all the more relevant today as, with twenty years of scientific silence over Angkor Park between 1970 and 1990, those biased narratives from the French-colonial period instantly resurfaced after 1990 and were rather uncritically repackaged. Until today, they are constantly repeated in a great number of, most often Anglo-Saxon, thirty-page summaries in cultural heritage management readers and global conservation manuals. Additionally, they were almost inevitably essentialised within the ongoing French-­ institutional re-engagement with Angkor and lately ­directly adopted with little modification for a national Cambodian

heritage configuration. Most difficult, our systematic analysis of the first decades of Angkor Park necessitated a careful reading of virtually thousands of original French writings and illustrations from internal (daily, monthly, annual) work reports, technical (archaeological, conservational, architectural) sketches and analyses, circulated research papers and unpublished biographical entries from the various Angkor conservators between 1908 and 1974. All these sources are still primarily stored in the archive of the EFEO in Paris. Important sources were also identified for this study in Cambodian institutions such as the National Archives, the National Library and the National Museum in Phnom Penh where they are even more difficult to access under restrictive institutional circumstances. Because of our access to and first-time extensive evaluation of these complete documents, this chapter could a) map out the social-institutional and intellectual-disciplinary milieu over Angkor Park from its beginnings until the last French impact; b) contextualise the concrete agency and employed technical infrastructure across political-­ cultural, institutional and physical-visual regime changes, with a focus on the role of individual actors as cultural brokers between the French and Cambodian scenes and projects; c) bring to light the cross-peripheral network of institutional collaboration and knowledge exchange at play 389

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between the French and Dutch colonial regimes over their most iconic archaeological sites; and d) explore the technical making of Angkor Park, from the great visions, negotiated concepts and the overall workflow logistics down to the various small-scale, day-to-day practices as documented in supposedly ‘neutral and mere technical’ reports. This analysis therefore also brought to light the manifold trial and errors, unquestioned successes and – absent in today’s official historiography – the various aesthetic, disciplinary and methodological borders crossed, as well as dark political moments and technological failures. The latter aspect concerns, above other elements, the relocation of local inhabitants and monasteries from the 1910s onwards, the déclassement and gifting of protected Angkorian artefacts as a diplomatic tool for political survival in the Indochinese context of World War II, the partial collapses of the Baphuon and Angkor Wat temples in the 1940s, and the progressively brutal restoration and intrusive reconstruction practices between the 1950s and the early 1970s. Chapter IX followed a chronologically and thematically structured approach in order to map out the above-mentioned developmental stages. The main three sub-chapters covered a) the cartographic strategies (1860–1910) to give the ‘site’ of Angkor a preliminary, two-dimensional structure, a named reality and a stage along typically Western parameters; b) the spatio-temporal making of Angkor as an archaeological ‘park’, with a view on a series of governmental decrees for the park’s institutionalised delimitation and protection system, first environmental clearing interventions and external stabilisation measures of selected temples as spatial makers on the prepared touristic parcours (1900–30); and c) the progressively in-depth structural re-making of the temples within Angkor Park (1930–73). Altogether this covered the changing technical possibilities and aesthetic norms and expectations that were – following one of the major hypotheses of this study (see introduction) – ‘back-translated’ to the ‘real’ site from all the picture-perfect Angkor (Wat) scenarios as tested in French museums and universal/colonial exhibition sites from the 1880s to the 1930s (see chapters I –VIII). In this context, our special emphasis was twofold: first on the challenge of mapping out the explicit or silent paradigm changes from temple conservation to practices of restoration and reconstruction (including the use of ‘alien’ materials such as reinforced concrete); and second, the deconstruction of the enduring myth of the applied technique of ‘anastylosis’, itself embedded in a complicated and multi-sited network of knowledge and technology exchange and transfers between Europe and Asia – more precisely, between Paris and Athens, Batavia and Angkor. As the first sub-chapter could work out, mapping Angkor was, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, always embedded in a typical cartographic discourse (after Harley 1988) – or better, in a discursive triangle between colonial power, knowledge and spatiality (after Gregory 1994). If this also concerned the Siamese grasp over the site until 390

1907 (see epilogue I), the naturalist Henri Mouhot was made the discoverer of Angkor as a French historiograph­ ical starting point in this process. However, his mere detour travel to the site was nevertheless supported by the British and his first (French-labelled and long unpublished) map of 1860 did not yet have any explicit expansionist or ideological undertone. But placing his map in our transcultural approach to bridge disciplinary boundaries and territorial divides indicates that its blank spots and spatial vagueness around the mysterious “Ongcor la Grande” in the Far East (Mouhot 1863) already foreshadowed – seen from their geographical point of view – the embedding of the first plaster/sulphur casts from Angkor in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867 (see chapter I). Hastily produced in 1866 in the wider context of the French Mekong exploratory mission and sent to France after the French had lost the race against the British for the first photograph of Angkor Wat, these casts were – now seen from an art historical and ideological perspective – similar blank spots: they were not (yet) integrated into the host’s project to establish comparative (i.e. normative, hierarchising) series of global civilisation from non-European low-tech ethnographica to refined European artefacts. To the contrary, the first casts from Angkor found their place in the section of state-of-the-art mechanical reproduction techniques. In the following decades of the 1870s and 1880s, however, the maps produced by the various French explorers and “Orientalist amateurs” (after Singaravélou 1999), from Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier to Louis Delaporte and Étienne Aymonier, and by architects on mission, like Lucien Fournereau with his giant watercolours in a typical Beaux-Arts aesthetic, introduced, as we explored in detail, an ‘archaeologising tendency’ to the spot (after Falser/Juneja 2013b): any contemporary traces of local inhabitants (their villages, path systems through the area and religious engagement with the ‘living’ monastery site of Angkor Wat) were either systematically ‘silenced’ or translated into the picturesque mode as staffage elements to the upcoming touristic exploitation of the site. This process went hand in hand with a gradual institutionalisation of archaeological research for Indochina in general, and Angkor in particular. The EFEO, the major player at Angkor for the decades to come, was founded in 1898, and first orders of monument protection for French Indochine were issued around 1900 (and updated in 1913/ 1923) on the basis of French-metropolitan norms. Right before and after the 1907 retrocession of the Angkor region from Siam to the French protectorate, the Atlas archéologique (1901), Inventaire déscriptif (1902, 1907, 1911), the internal archaeological mission rapports (1907, 1908, 1909) and the Carte archéologique (1910) by the military officer and geographic explorer Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière were unique milestones along the way to conceptualise, spatialise and label – by identifying and listing, scaling and depicting, naming and describing – Cambodia’s archaeological sites within European (French) standards of intelligibility.

Chapter IX: The French-colonial making of the Parc archéologique d’Angkor

The second sub-chapter on the spatio-temporal making of ‘Angkor Park’ explored how two-dimensional cartographic information on the site was further developed into the third dimension of a spatial and visual regime. This transformation process comprised verbal commentaries in governmental decrees (on the legal side), concrete physical interventions (on the infrastructural side and concerning questions of control, general access, major vistas, etc.) and the first emergence of touristic exploitation schemes through new guidebooks (concerning the management of time-space-movement behaviour). In order to understand the institutionalisation of Angkor Park as an aesthetic and geometricised entity, this study analysed, for the first time, hundreds of correspondence documents of the colonial administration of French Indochine, stored today in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence. In a unique process of a ‘time-space colonisation’ (after Gregory 1994), Lajonquière claimed to be the inventor of Angkor as a ‘confined archaeological reserve under the name of Angkor Park’ [domaine archéologique réservé, sous le nom de ‘Parc d’Angkor’] (Lajonquière 1909, 164). How­ ever, at this point in time (in March 1908) the militiaman Jean Commaille had already been decreed by the Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, Louis Alphonse Bonhoure, as the first conservateur des Monuments du groupe d’Angkor. As we can see with the help of previously unknown sketches, plans and commentaries, Commaille’s first actions focussed on the hurried re-creation and enhancement of Angkor Wat’s general vista (as ‘seen’ from the first tourist bungalow in the main axis across the moat), which necessitated clearing the site and forcing the relocation of the active Buddhist monastery in front of the temple. Both ­dubious actions were supported by the newly established Commission des Antiquités du Cambodge and the Paris-­ based Société d’Angkor. Shortly after, Commaille’s Guide aux ruines d’Angkor of 1912 set the standards for all the following tourist guides to the spot, most often written by the acting Angkor conservators themselves. Following our transcultural enquiry to read the formation of Angkor Park in Cambodia and Angkor scenarios in French universal and colonial exhibitions as two simultaneous side-byside versions of Foucauldian ‘enacted utopias’ of cultural heritage (see the introduction of this book), Commaille’s unknown involvement in the replication of Angkor Wat for the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille of 1916/22 through the Beaux-Arts-architect Auguste Delaval (see chapter VI) was explored here for the first time. As we conceptualised it in the introduction, the archi­tectural, performative and patrimonial affordance qualities and action­ able capacities of Angkor Wat came here – in times of World War I! – to a first direct overlap: the French imaginaire of a picture-perfect Angkor Wat – on the one hand through its temporary architectural replication in France, and on the other hand the aesthetic recreation of the ‘real’ site in Cambodia through the emerging disciplines of archaeology and conservation – became a globally entangled scenario

of two parallel projects which in fact were some ten thousand kilometres apart from each other! After an intense debate in the 1910s about the best possible form of a controllable protection zone of Angkor – individual perimeters around single buildings or an all­-com­ prising zone? – Angkor was officially decreed in 1925 and 1930 as a coherent heritage ‘park’ (as we could see in chapter XII, this process was repeated one more time after 1990). This study contextualised for the first time the colonial spacetime regime still at play at Ang­kor Park until today: this included the invention of a Petit et Grand Circuit and itinéraires-types for touristic pedestrians, elephant riders and car drivers (Marchal 1928, Glaize 1948). A prescribed ‘tableau-­ like’ visiting programme of camera-ready vistas included features like Angkor Wat’s restored five-tower silhouette in a newly designed ‘natural’ setting with reflecting water basins, sunrise and sunset spots in and around the park, and picturesque stops at ‘indigenous villages’ (for a similar debate about traditional (or recreated eco-) villages as touristic showcases, see epilogue II). With direct aerial tourism between French-colonial Saigon and the moat of Angkor Wat (Bontoux 1929), Angkor Park’s largest temple was finally reduced to functioning as a toy-world miniature and iconic souvenir (after Stewart 1993) – as it had been while on ephemeral full-scale replica display at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (compare chapter VII). After the two-dimensional setting of the scene and the three-dimensional time-space configuration of Angkor Park, the third and largest sub-chapter covered the various interventions of structural re-making of temples within the protection perimeter. Within a fragile geopolitical constellation with the British in India, Burma and Malaysia in the west, the Dutch to the south in the East Indies, the French in eastern Indochina, and Siam as an independent buffer zone in between, ‘cultural heritage’ as a colonial practice of safeguarding archaeological sites in the form of artificially made heritage reserves became a powerful tool with which each colonial power could underline its raison d’être and mission civilisatrice as a protective force – and Angkor Park became without a doubt the most prestigious asset for the French-colonial endeavour in the Far East (compare Falser 2015a,c). With a detailed analysis of hundreds of pages of internal on-site digging reports (journaux des fouilles) and monthly/annual reports (rapports mensuels/annuels) between 1908 and 1974 (stored today in the EFEO archive in Paris), this sub-chapter presented for the first time a kind of actor-based periodisation model for the various technical and disciplinary paradigms at play over Angkor Park until the end of the French impact in the early 1970s. After a basic clearing of the site in the 1910s, the 1920s were the first real heyday of conservation work by the Angkor conservators when the École des Beaux Arts–trained architect Henri Marchal first introduced sensitive stabilisation measures. However, due to the unmanageable number of more and more manipulated temples in their dynamic tropical climate, Marchal used ever-increasing amounts of 391

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reinforced concrete. The multi-volume publication Le temple d’Angkor Vat (EFEO 1929–32) marked a first peak of a steadily perfected mise en valeur of the temples of Angkor Park – in this case, to bring back and re-materialise the original ‘idea’ of its largest temple, as the underlying architectural Beaux-Arts education doctrine of all Angkor conservators in these decades would prescribe it (see again the discussion of Angkor Wat’s architectural affordance in the introduction of the book). And at precisely this transcultural moment, the ‘same’ temple was re-presented in its condensed architectural idea through a 1:1-scaled and equally facade-oriented version in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris: now, the same success story of the EFEO was not only on self-congratulating display in the impressive 1929-32 book series mentioned above, but along an ‘inside’ parcours through the ephemeral Paris replica itself (compare chapter VII). This moment in time also marked what we identified as a decisive threshold in the intellectual history of Angkor Park, by correcting important elements within its official historiography until today. A cross-peripheral network of cultural heritage diplomacy and scientific knowledge exchange was established between the Dutch East Indies’ Archaeological Service at Batavia and the French-colonial EFEO at Hanoi. It commenced already around 1900, bypassed the metropolitan centres of Amsterdam and Paris altogether and peaked around 1930 with mutual visits of colonial administrators, architects and archaeologists to important heritage sites. In this process the “reconstruction” practice for Javanese temples (in Dutch: reconstructie) was finally imported to and implemented in Angkor. But in what we called a ‘methodological earthquake’, van Stein Callenfels (the director of the Dutch-colonial part) severely criticised – during his never officially reported visit to Angkor in January 1929 – the French ‘conservation’ method as “old-fashioned”. As a consequence, Henri Marchal, himself on an official study tour to the Javanese archaeological sites of Prambanan, Borobudur and the Dieng Plateau in 1930, was, through decisive pressure from the acting EFEO director George Coedès (1929–47) and his chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier, virtually pushed against his own will into adopting the new technical and aesthetic paradigm of reconstruction (also used as a French term until 1932) to bring the ancient temples of Angkor back to their picture-perfect appearance. As we explored in detail with a view of the French infor­ mation channels of journals available back then and of the exchange platform of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres for all ‘French Schools’ in Europe and Asia, the bilateral scientific contact zone between Batavia and Hanoi (or Borobudur/Prambanan and Angkor) was in fact heavily influenced through a third site and event: Athens and the 1931 International Conference in the Greek capital. The internationally acclaimed conclusions of this meeting (later known as ‘Athens Charter’) devaluated ‘reconstruction’ as too radical and endorsed the concept of ‘anastylosis’. It had been introduced by the (again Paris-trained!) 392

Greek civil engineer Nicolas Balanos to describe his project of re-establishing the colonnades of the Acropolis with artificial new stone blocks and supporting iron anchors. Mapped out here for the first time, we could see, that it was finally through a global scientific chain reaction that the French specialists at Angkor (Marchal, Coedès, Parmen­ tier) reacted to the 1931 Athens Charter and hastily adopted the (now in French) term of anastylose officially for the first time only in September 1932. By doing so, they could avoid labelling their successful projects at Angkor with a supposedly old-fashioned and now even internationally proscribed technical denomination called ‘reconstruction’. In this process Marchal did not apply this approach for the first time at the ninth-century temple of Banteay Srei (as the official history has it until today!), but at the temple of Preah Khan: by ‘redressing the round columns’ of the temple’s so-called library building in November 1930 did he in fact came rather close to the very literal translation of ‘anastylosis’, even if the term itself was officially adopted by himself only after the Athens conference. Shortly after, Maurice Glaize was able to push the ­reconstruction-anastylosis to new heights, but the years around World War II nevertheless count as the darkest years at the French-colonial Angkor Park. As we could reconstruct for the first time from internal reports, the de­ listing and diplomatic gifting of ex lege protected Angkorian artefacts became the EFEO’s strategy of institutional survival in the fast-changing political regimes. In less than one decade, the political impact over Angkor ranged from the occupation of Indochina through French Vichy regime-friendly Japan, the Franco-Thai Treaty to keep Angkor Park as a French-administered heritage reserve and Cambodia’s declaration of independence in 1941, to the guerrilla attacks and the occupation of Angkor (Wat) through the Khmer Issarak fighters around and after 1945, and finally the presence of the United States. The partial collapse of the Baphuon temple in 1943 (it stayed under reconstruction far into the 2010s, see epilogue II) and of the southeastern gallery of Angkor Wat in 1947 represented a deep shock for the institutional self-understanding of the EFEO and an immense workload for the years to come. Astonishingly, the EFEO – leaving its headquarters in Hanoi after the French lost the war in Vietnam – succeeded in securing and even extending its monopoly over Angkor Park beyond Cambodia’s full independence in 1953 into the early 1970s. This new phase was accompanied by a remarkable technical and infrastructural improvement of the Conservation d’Angkor – also a necessity given the rapid touristic commodification of the Parc d’Angkor. A new, typically postwar, technoid and almost serialised/industrialised style of in-depth structural interventions – from original ‘conservation’ and ‘reconstruction’ to veritable (new) ‘construction’ methods – virtually flooded the temples of Angkor with tons of cement and reinforced concrete. Giant repair actions like at Angkor Wat’s western entry bridge to move more than five hundred tons of

Chapter X: Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

stones in 1954 by the technician-conservator Jean Laur would only be topped after 1960 by the actions of the last and most ambitious Angkor conservator before France’s monopoly over Angkor ended tragically in 1975: Bernard Philippe Groslier. Groslier’s role as a veritable cultural broker between the French-colonial legacy over Angkor on the one hand and Cambodia’s regime of national independence on the other was explored here for the first time. In this unique constellation, the French would set the perfectly reconstructed stage of a veritable ‘archaeological theme park’ (see the introduction to this book) for the country’s princely chef d’état (and Groslier’s old friend from school!), Norodom Sihanouk, with his own agenda to re-enact age-old Khmer-­ cultural grandeur à la Angkorienne (compare chapter X). This study contextualised, for the first time, Groslier’s unpublished Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor of 1958 as a ‘to-be-effectively-enacted heritage utopia’ (see Foucault’s definition of ‘heterotopias as effectively enacted utopias’ in the introduction to this book) of a complete structural revival and public presentation of the entire cultural landscape of ancient Angkor. The real work programme until the early 1970s, with more than one thousand workers, ranged from a full-scale reconstruction of the major temples and their environmental vistas within a re-established ‘forest of Angkor’ and ongoing relocation practices of the local inhabitants to new chemical treatment systems around and a modern drainage system and new illumina-

tion schemes for Angkor Wat. Mapped out in this chapter using previously unknown archival material from the EFEO, the hubris bred by the scientific and technical advances that made it possible to turn Angkor into the world’s largest and best-equipped archaeological park is again best illustrated by the park’s largest and most iconic temple. Having already crossed the aesthetic, technical and moral line of applied heritage conservation with the brutal reconstruction of the small-scale brick temple of Prasat Kravanh in the early 1960s, Groslier continued with the deposing and systematic numbering of 1,700 stone blocks (of one ton each!) of Angkor Wat’s southeastern bas-relief gallery. What happened at this point at the ‘real’ site was, seen from our transcultural viewpoint, a back-version of monumental mobility with the previous giant physical ‘translation’ processes at play through the plaster casting operations of Ang­ kor Wat’s architecture for French metropolitan museums and universal/colonial exhibitions. Since the historic construction of Angkor Wat in the twelfth century AD, such an enormous amount of the temple’s ancient stone structure had never been ‘in motion’: Standing as a metaphor for the French-colonial endeavour at Angkor as a whole, Groslier’s envisioned reprise totale of Angkor Wat tragically failed due to technical shortcomings during Cambodia’s political bouleversement between 1970 and 1975. His unfinished project was, ironically, finalised in the early 1990s by the ex-British colonial rival of applied cultural heritage politics in Asia: the Archaeological Survey of India.

Chapter X: Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970 Like in other countries within French-colonial Indochine (including Laos and Vietnam), Cambodia’s decolonisation from the 1940s until its official independence on 9 November 1953 triggered a profound transformation of the country’s politics, infrastructure, agriculture, transportation and built fabric in architecture and urbanism. However, Cambodia presented one unique exception. The country’s modern-time conception of ‘nation-cum-culture’ or of ‘nation-cum-cultural heritage’ was to a large extent a product of the concrete French-colonial agency of the previous one hundred years, which had provided both the scientific ‘framework’ and the affiliated cultural-political vocabulary and emotional mind-set of cultural grandeur. Moreover, different from the other two countries of ex-colonial Indochina, this French agency was also voluntarily continued during Cambodia’s liminal phase of decolonisation, seemingly creating a win-win situation for both the ex-coloniser and the ex-colonised: on the one side and with the renewed bilateral agreements of 1956 in its hands, the prestigious École française d’Extrême-Orient would, with Bernard Philippe Groslier as a unique cultural broker between the political systems, continue its monopoly over working

on the epigraphic data collection of the genealogies of Khmer kings, providing art historical taxonomies and architectural knowledge about the park, and protecting, caring for, commodifying and presenting it in its ‘glorious antiquity’. Altogether ex-colonial France would gradually modify its mission civilisatrice as a colonial discoverer of Cambodia’s forgotten greatness who uplifted the site from so-called decadence and oblivion to the role of the inventor, guarantor and even benevolent protector of Cambodia’s newborn cultural self-confidence. On the other hand, the Cambodian elite – with the charismatic princely leader of Norodom Sihanouk in the monocratic centre – could ‘extol the virtues of the Angkorian age for modern actions’ (after Osbourne 1966) and merge French-made ‘ready-touse’ cultural heritage narratives and perfectly restored archaeological sites into a veritable theme park to rhetorically repackage and physically/spatially stage a whole new range of hybrid inheritance claims. This included, as this chapter explored, (a) the political reincarnation of the Khmer king Jayavarman VII in the new princely leader Norodom Sihanouk; (b) the evocation of Angkor’s civilisational (infrastructural and agricultural) achievements of the mastery of 393

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water in a modern guise; (c) the revival of the built Angkorian legacy in a modern architectural interpretation; and (d) cultural performances and historical re-enactments to stage inherited cultural ‘purity’ and age-old ‘originality’ within Sihanouk’s programme of cultural diplomacy both inside and outside of his country. Merging both the ex-colonial French and the postcolonial Cambodian elements blurred, as exemplified in the many case studies of this chapter, the conceptual boundaries between scientific facts and fictions of grandeur into a complex faction à la Ang­ korienne. Altogether it seemed that a great project of ‘back-­ translation’ continued to take place during Cambodia’s short period of independence, one that was informed by the different Ang­kor scenarios already tested at French universal and colonial exhibitions (see volume one). Making Cambodia a member of the Non-Aligned Movement with support from important state leaders from India (Nehru) and Indonesia (Sokarno) to Egypt (Nasser) and Yugoslavia (Tito), Norodom Sihanouk succeeded in provincialising global socialism into a Buddhist-Khmer derivate on the basis of Buddhist morale, kingly leadership and social welfare. He believed that he had inherited all three elements for his own role as an enlightened dictator from Angkor’s last glorious king Jayavarman VII (r. around 1200 CE). However, his personal profile as a ‘god-king with humanist affection for the well-being of his subjects’ and as a megalomaniac temple constructor had only been invented between the 1930s and the 1950s. In this process, French epigraphists, art historians and archaeologists like George Coedès or Jean Boisselier all played the major roles. As we explored in this sub-chapter, this bricolage did help to re-sacralise many so-called ‘archaeological’ sites in Cambodia. Sihanouk’s strategy turned the French image of Ang­kor Wat as a dead Hinduist ruin (compare chapter IX) back into a contemporary, living Buddhist monastery. Moreover, other archaeological sites were instrumentalised as para­-religious, nationalist pilgrimage sites, such as Preah Vihear after The Hague’s 1962 legal judgement to reconfirm Cambodia’s ownership against Thailand. And Ang­ kor Thom’s Royal Square, recently restored by French conservators, became, as we contextualised it from historic PR-material, the cultural-political stage to re-enact a supposedly ‘millenary Angkorian rite’, with Sihanouk in action as old-new king. In the same vein, Cambodia’s impressive infrastructural projects passed through a filter of re-invented traditions, and, of course, Angkor provided the major references. In this context, Sihanouk’s problematic topoi of royal-divine top-down governance with collective participation from below, the imagination of cultural-political power combined with agricultural irrigation networks, and the myth of Ang­kor as a hydraulic empire in combination with its built architectural legacy, emerged as a suggestive foundation for independent Cambodia. Again, previous French-colonial cartographic, geographic and archaeological studies (such as by Victor Goloubew, Georges Trouvé or Philippe 394

Stern) provided the basis for the narrative of reconnected continuities when new dams, canals and irrigation systems (like the US-financed one fed from Angkor’s old Western Baray) were inaugurated in the late 1950s. Highly influ­ ential were, as we unearthed from various publications, Bernard Philippe Groslier’s comparative studies of world civilisations in which he set geography, climate, natural resources, culture and political styles of governance in relation to each other. In this context, he praised Oriental civilisations like Angkor for their water management systems and sophisticated rice cultures. This, according to Groslier, had only been possible through a strong central power over collective masses, whereas mismanagement had finally led to Angkor’s ‘laterisation of the soil’ and therefore the collapse of the entire system. With earlier thoughts by Weber, Willcocks and others, Karl August Wittfogel finally established the terms of ‘Oriental despotism’ in Asia’s ­‘hydraulic societies’ (compare the Marxist Leonid Sedov) in 1957, but Groslier’s French and Khmer 1967 essay “La civilisation angkorienne et la maîtrise d’eau” finally con­ solidated the myth of a hydraulic utopia for Angkor. This imagined medieval utopia would turn, when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 (see chapter XI), into a giant dystopia of forced mass labour and genocide in order to return Cambodia into a preindustrial society, one of ‘cultural purity and age-old originality’ (as the classical topoi of French art and architectural history had it), totally purified from foreign (and this meant in the first place colonial-European) influences. Beyond Sihanouk’s symbolic references to kings like Jayavarman VII or magnificent water systems of Angkor, Vann Molyvann, the Cambodian École-des-Beaux-Arts graduate from Paris and later Cambodia’s state architect, created one of the most astonishing architectural structures in postcolonial Asia of the 1960s. As he had already explained in his 1949 “Essay on Khmer culture”, Vann drew from the Angkorian spiritual, symbolic, and monumental legacy, from the new inspiration of wooden pagoda and vernacular-traditional house architecture, and from the fruits of ‘modern, Occidental civilisation’ in the global International Style. After his involvement in the 1955 Phnom Penh International Exhibition and the 1958 Osaka Fair (at the moment when French architects still represented Cambodia at the Brussels Universal Exhibition with an ‘archaeological replica pavilion’!), his obligatory Angkor-style references weakened in his projects of conference and exhibition halls, social housing, etc. With Phnom Penh’s Independence Memorial (inaugurated only in 1962 and sketched out for the first time by Battambang’s master builder Tan Veut), pre-Angkorian temple decoration styles and forms would be merged with – as the architect confessed in an interview with the author in 2010 – the symbolic content of the Parisian Arc de Triomphe. Shortly afterwards, Angkor Wat played a decisive role, less decorative than compositional, when Vann conceived, with an international team and French contractors, Cambodia’s largest

Chapter X: Performing Grandeur: Re-enacting Angkor. Cambodia’s Independence 1953—1970

and most expensive project, the National Sports Complex (inaugurated 1964). Cambodia’s ministerial public relations media paralleled the project with ‘the great builders of Angkor’. As we called it in the introduction to the book, ‘Angkor Wat’s architectural Beaux-Arts affordance’ (a clear floor plan, symmetric composition axes of views and building masses, classical decoration schemes, and a spatially culminating ‘idea’) highly influenced the Beaux-Arts architects as regards both the temple’s French-made replicas and on-site restoration schemes. Because Vann was trained in the same school in Paris and was now returning to his country in 1956, the whole scenario got ‘back-translated’ into a new version: in the journal Nokor Khmer of 1969, Vann set the section drawings and photographs of Angkor Wat (with its negative and positive volumes of moats and high-rising towers) in direct relation to his new sports complex. His strategy to reference his reinforced concrete New Khmer Architecture with grandiose Angkorian and local vernacular traditions was, however, a global trend within Asia’s rising nations. Above other examples, Kenzo Tange’s Olympic Sports Complex in Tokyo of the same year indicated this new direction as well. The fourth section of this chapter covered Sihanouk’s unique diplomatic crusade to embed Cambodia in the postwar political global landscape. Sihanouk‘s cultural (heritage) diplomacy fostered his country’s renewed image of a pure, tradition-bound and peaceful (politically neutral) Khmerness, through a) cultural performances of the Royal Khmer Ballet; b) historical re-enactments for important state guests at Angkor (Wat) and giant celebrations of national independence in Phnom Penh; and c) his own film productions. With his own daughter Bopha Devi as the unquestioned star, Sihanouk’s ballet troupe was instrumentalised as a highly mobile and travelling heritage commodity of supposedly eternal, immobile and pure Khmerness. Filtered from virtually hundred of entries in Sihanouk’s journals Kambuja, Cambodge d’aujourd’hui etc. we could contextualise how the troupe performed with dismountable Angkor-styled stage sets in front of political leaders from the United States, India, Indonesia, the Soviet Union and China, partly in friendly competition with Balinese dancers, the Beijing Opera or the Bolshoi Ballet. For the case of the Royal Khmer Ballet, Angkor Wat’s decorative facades served again as a means to return the supposedly age-old dance tradition to its original authenticity. How­ ever, this strategy was a French-colonial one, as this sub­chapter contextualised with a view on earlier performative scenarios during French universal and colonial exhibitions between 1889 and 1937, and on the concrete agency of George Groslier (the father of Bernard Philippe Groslier) and Sappho Marchal (daughter of Henri Marchal). These ephemeral configurations of exhibitions in the French métropole had, from our transcultural point of view, considerable consequences for the ‘real and stable’ site back in Cambodia: the aesthetics of folkloric dance spectacles in torch-lit and later government-sponsored electric floodlit

spaces in front of mysterious temple skylines in France were re-imported back to the real site and further hybridised the royal dance. It became a new touristic commodity and a political tool of cultural neo-nationalism and global heritage diplomacy. With its (ostensibly) apolitical appearance beyond a specific time, space, and ideological motivation, it was the perfect performative medium with which to minimise the tensions that had opened up during Cambodia’s violent transition from a colonial to a postcolonial state figuration. In other words, it helped bridge the ‘liminal phase’ between the end of French secular rule over le Cambodge back to a re-imagined, re-ritualised Khmerness of the new/old nation-state in a globalised world. Cultural performances à la Angkorienne were also ­included in a parcours-like diplomatic tour for foreign visitors to Cambodia, with stops at the new architectural ­projects in the country’s new-old capital and, as the un­ questioned highlight, at Angkor Archaeological Park. There, Sihanouk and his friend, the French Angkor conservator Bernard Philippe Groslier, acted as private guides for distinguished guests through the ruins along the French-­ colonial grand et petit circuits. The son-et-lumière show at Angkor Wat for Charles de Gaulle in 1966 (repeated for Tito in 1968 with a more ‘socialist’ undertone) counts as one of the most vital myth-making documents used to foster Cambodia’s revived, postcolonial notion of cultural grandeur. It was staged to reaffirm “both nations’ conjoint efforts to rebirth Angkor” (as the script by Groslier for the event had it) and was without a doubt Sihanouk’s most elaborate historical re-enactment, with more than 1,500 actors performing at the illuminated temple. In a unique moment of colliding temporalities, the king and state ­leader of a postcolonial nation allowed the pre-colonial, ‘authentic past’ of his direct ancestors to be theatrically re-enacted in the ‘original’ (in fact, French-restored!) setting in front of the head of the former European colonial power. Similar scenarios were re-used in Sihanouk’s cinematographic productions. Of these, it is in Sihanouk’s 1969 film Crépuscule, a historical ‘re-imaginaire’ of ancient glory, that the French-colonial scientific and myth-making topoi of Angkor’s grandeur shines through most clearly. Arguably, there was also no other production that matched its visionary, melancholic, and fatalistic undertone (made clear by the title), which in fact foreshadowed Sihanouk’s imminent removal as head of the Cambodian state and the downfall of the country as a whole. In the same year the production Cortège Royal took, for the last time, its performative reference from the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat (compare the introduction of Angkor Wat’s performative affordance quality) in a kind of ‘ethno masquerade’ to stage and document Cambodia’s imperial past. Tragically, it was Sihanouk’s last artistic attempt to re-enact both Angkor’s kingly glory and perhaps also what he had already lost in terms of real political authority before the coup of 1970 and the terror of the Khmer Rouge five years later. 395

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Chapter XI: Making Angkor Global (1970—1990): Hot and Cold War Politics, Competing Inheritance Claims and the Invention of Angkor as Heritage of Humanity This chapter covered those twenty years between 1970 and 1990 that represent a particularly revealing but until today surprisingly little researched phase within the 150-year transcultural heritage trajectory of Angkor (Wat). As regards the fast political regime changes of and the territorial configuration within Cambodia as well as the accompanying physical, but also semantic, impact on the temple site of Angkor, five preliminary observations served as an underlying structure of this chapter. The first one came as a supposed paradox: despite the war- and genocide-related human tragedy and immense devastation of the country’s cultural (both physical and mental) landscape, the built fabric of Asia’s largest temple site in general and of Angkor Wat in particular survived almost untouched – even if neglect, vandalism and illicit traffic had a considerable impact. There was, second, a simple reason for this: all competing political regimes repeatedly used Angkor as an object of cultural self-assurance and did not dare to touch it. As discussed and compared here for the first time by exploiting previously unknown historic public relations material, the various regimes – Republican-Khmer nationalist, Maoist-Marxist Khmer Rouge, and internationalist-socialist Vietnamese – integrated the prestige of the famous temple site into their hastily fabricated explanatory periodisation models to justify their own political raison d’être. In other words, the site was appropriated as a rhetorical framing device to place the different regimes’ own cultural heritage claims – or better inheritance claims – in the continuity of a to-be-revived old and to-be-forged new golden age of Angkor. Following ninety years of an Orientalist strategy to make the Angkor Park a signboard, symbol and metaphor for a successful, French-colonial mission civilisatrice, the semantic frame was completely reworked towards a new catchphrase that came up for the first time in 1970/71 and therefore even before UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention was signed: Angkor as cultural heritage of humanity! In this sense “Making Angkor Global” (as the title of this chapter has it) also meant contextualising, third, that the new political stakeholders in little Cambodia were in fact only pawns in a truly global ideological endgame of Cold War politics: the United States backed the Khmer Republic, China supported the Khmer Rouge, Russia financed the Vietnamese puppet regime of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), and finally the United Nations (including the United States and China against the Soviet Union) acknowledged the exiled Khmer Rouge government with its (sarcastic) denomination as Democratic Kampuchea (DK). In this politically complex situation in the 1980s, Angkor may have been left physically untouched, but it was pushed, fourth, to a new level as regards the site’s truly ‘trans-cultural’ heritage formation. For the first time, 396

non-Cambodian heritage/inheritance claims other than from ex-colonial France alone were formulated in the disguise of heritage diplomacy and in fact collided over the site’s most iconic temple of Angkor Wat. India, as a kind of return gift for its diplomatic acknowledgement of the Vietnamese People’s Republic of Kampuchea, was awarded with the permission to restore the temple from the late 1980s onwards and framed this archaeological mission with the narrative of India’s age-old cultural (Hinduist) ties with Cambodia. At the same time, Japan justified its re-emerging thirst for economic influence in Southeast Asia (see its role during the 1940s and again after 1990 as contextualised in the chapters IX, XII and epilogue II) and its cultural engagement in Angkor through the Buddhist traditions shared between both countries; and Poland (via the axis Warsaw-Moscow-Hanoi-Phnom Penh) tried to frame its ideological programme within heritage protection schemes in the rhetoric of Socialist-internationalist brotherhood. Even as France continued its efforts to re-establish its colonial influence by arguing from the perspective of the country’s long-term scientific expertise ‘on-site’, another weak and today forgotten voice was heard from ‘off-site’: that of various Cambodian refugee communities in a diaspora from Thailand to France and the United States, making Angkor Wat an emotional anchor point in various ‘private’ and NGO-journals after traumatic experiences of genocide, loss and exodus. By re-diversifying Eurocentric cultural heritage discourses in non-Western settings, this chapter did, fifth, challenge the often-quoted success story of UNESCO, which claimed to have brought the concept of a ‘world heritage of humanity’ to Angkor around 1990. As our analysis of correspondence material from UNESCO’s Paris archive brought to light for the first time, it was exactly the ex-genocidal, UN-acknowledged (since 1980), and (again primarily Paris-)exiled Khmer Rouge government functionaries themselves that instrumentalised this humanitarian label. Through a clever mimicking of UNESCO’s own rhetoric, they successfully took the archaeological site of Angkor diplomatic hostage for their struggle for political survival. Taken together these observations indicate that the competing heritage and inheritance claims over and the voices for and against the cultural heritage of Angkor between 1970 and 1990 form a truly multi-sited, transcultural configuration. The chronology that emerges reveals that June 1970 counts as the date when the entire construction of the ‘cultural heritage of Angkor’ forever changed its semantic framework. For the first time, real international concerns beyond the French-colonial salvage paradigm were brought up when the appeal of the newly founded Khmer-Republican heritage commission to declare Angkor a neutralised

Chapter XI:Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

and demilitarised zone in the name of the 1954 Hague Convention was put forward to the UN’s global family of ‘civilised nations’ in New York and Paris. Shortly after, around 1972, the Vietcong-North Vietnamese attacks on and partial occupation of Angkor Park in armed confrontation with Lon Nol’s republican army became a global media event in all the leading newspapers from Australia to Europe and the United States. What happened in detail on the spot (military fortifications, heavy battles, refugees inside Angkor Wat, etc.) was for the first time reconstructed in this chapter. For this complex inquiry, unique sources were explored: primarily Norodom Sihanouk’s private press cut collection (today stored at the French National Archives in Paris) and Bernard Philippe Groslier’s internal reports and diary entries (today archived at the EFEO in Paris). At the same moment of local conflicts and global at­ tention, the Angkor-as-heritage construction was also trans-regionalised when the Khmer Republic joined the newly institutionalised family of Southeast Asia’s nations (SEAMEO). Phnom Penh and Angkor were (at the end unsuccessfully) proposed as centres of conjoint archaeological and conservation research of the entire region. Thereby, the Cambodian position was rather progressive as the sole focus of the French-colonial heritage regime ‘on mere old stone and brick temples’ was judged as too exclusive (against, for example, vernacular wooden and monastic heritage) and its protection system, previously back-translated from French legislation, was considered outdated. However, the ambivalence of the heritage bricolage over Angkor at this point became visible in Lon Nol’s hastily formulated ‘neo-khmerism’ that merged the narrative of a continued virtue of the ancient Chenla and Angkor empires with French references to a modern-time state configuration. On the other ideological end, formerly Francophile Norodom Sihanouk merged his ongoing royalist claim on Angkor (this lineage as equally established from French epigraphic studies) with his outspoken support of the Khmer Rouge: the curious 1973 publication Prince ­Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State, in the Liberated Zone documented his royal journey from his exile in China all the way to Angkor as an event somewhere between guerrilla activity, romantic adventure, and political mission, even if his all too happy group photo with Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan and other Khmer Rouge criminals ‘in front of Angkor Wat’ may have been a skilful photomontage. When the regime of Democratic Kampuchea took over Cambodia’s capital and finally the country in April 1975, Angkor was – as this chapter detailed with a view of rare public relations material from various Cambodian archives – integrated into the Khmer Rouge ‘utopia’. This helped to rhetorically frame the Marxist-Leninist political agenda with explicit references to cultural heritage/in­ heritance. Also, the archaeological site itself became part of the Khmer Rouge doctrine to convert the – Frenchmade – myth of the hydraulic empire of glorious Angkor

into the reality of an irrigated land in a non-monetised, ‘re-preindustrialised’ society. And, finally, Angkor Park became (again) a stage for cultural heritage diplomacy. As regards the first element of this enquiry, the US-American CIA Foreign Broadcast Information System (FBIS) and the Summary of World Broadcast (SWB) from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) provided precious translations of all the Khmer media sources during the DK period, ranging from radio information to speeches made during public gatherings and official decisions. Adding rare print media sources such as the journal The Revolutionary Flag to the list of evaluated documents helped to contour Pol Pot’s new periodisation model at play: for the first and in fact last time in Cambodia’s modern history, the cultural heritage of Angkor was dramatically downgraded and regionalised (‘Angkor Wat was built in a period of slavery’) from a world wonder to a mere third position of outstanding achievements, behind the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh and its neo-Marxist revolution. Nevertheless, Angkor Wat was made a solid historical proof of the Khmer power of collective labour force under strict leadership and control, or as Pol Pot had it in a famous speech in 1977: ‘If our people could build Angkor Wat, they can do anything’. To what extent the myth of an ancient hydraulic empire of Angkor was a reference for the imaginaire of a Marxist revolution and the foundation of col­ lective socialism in the form of a network of co-operative peasants (in fact a genocidal system of forced labour against thousands of starving Cambodians) to turn Cambodia into a giant swath of irrigated farmland with dams, dikes and canals is a matter of academic debate until today. In our specific context we argued that the relationship with Angkor was a far more pragmatic and hybridising copyand-paste affair: To start with, we may speak of a rhetorical mimicking of a cultural grandeur of Angkor as a more and more elaborated French-made topos until far into the 1960s. This topos was now turned into a veritable ‘Angkor complex’ (after Vien 1981/Edwards 2007) on the fertile grounds of Pol Pot’s ‘hyper-Maoist version’ (after Morris 1999) of totalitarian dictatorship. It was informed by a rather low-level ideological reflection on international Marxist theories with an exaggerated use of some effective buzzwords around the concepts of civilisation, culture and ancient glory. With earlier French (!) doctorate theses of the 1950s by later Khmer Rouge ideologists Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn about Cambodia’s overdue agrarian modernisation, additional slogans were taken from a wide range of scientific studies, such as from Wittfogel’s 1957 Oriental despotism about Asia’s hydraulic societies or Sedov’s Marxist interpretations. Of great influence was certainly B. P. Groslier’s own hypothesis (again published in French and Khmer in 1967, in suggestive words and convincing archaeological plans) of a Khmer maîtrise d’eau during the golden age of Angkor. And the Khmer Rouge imaginaire stood in a pragmatic continuation of Sihanouk’s Khmer-Socialist vision of technological mastery as it 397

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was propagated in governmental media in the 1960s and partly transposed into concrete megalomaniac projects to virtually flood large parts of Cambodia and the Mekong River Valley (see chapter X). Learning from the French and from Sihanouk’s scenarios, the Khmer Rouge cultural diplomacy à la Angkorienne was, despite negative rhetoric in public speeches (see above), far more common than one might have thought. As this study could extract for the first time from hundreds of FBIS and SWB entries, Angkor Wat was – as if nothing had happened in those times of organised auto-genocide, torture and social destruction – part of diplomatic sightseeing tours. The site was a stage for Marxist leaders (Souphanawong from Laos; Ne Win from Burma, having tea with Khieu Samphan in Angkor Wat’s cruciform gallery; and Nicolae Ceausescu from Romania), state delegations (from China to Pakistan and Zambia) and Marxist-Leninist Friendship Associations from Japan and the United States to France and Sweden (duped salon Marxist Jan Myrdal included). In late 1978, even a few Western journalists and international tourists were admitted back into Angkor Park, even if this was certainly only a last and helpless public relations trick. If current summaries about what happened in Angkor in the 1980s continue to speak of a ‘big void’, this chapter could prove the complete contrary: Angkor Park was catapulted into a truly global and transcultural sphere, and this happened years before UNESCO’s impact. When the Russia-backed Vietnamese puppet regime called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) under Heng Samrin occupied Cambodia between 1979 and 1989, a new ideological line of Marxist-Leninists, fostering national patriotism as much as proletarian internationalism, also rehabilitated the Angkorian past from its recent Khmer Rouge downgrading. By modifying the previous blood-red flag with a stylised yellow three-tower silhouette of Angkor Wat into a golden five-tower logo (speaking a comparable message of revolutionary class struggle), Hanoi-controlled public relations material denounced the genocidal actions of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime of ‘neo-slavery’ and promised to ‘rebirth’ Angkorian glory in the name of future prosperity. With a new commission installed and new decrees for heritage protection issued (only little action was effectuated), the temples were now included in a commemorative and educational visiting parcours (it is still exploited until today!) together with the ex-Royal Palace and the former Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh. It can be argued here that never before had Angkor been enmeshed in such a multi-sited and multi-centred heritage configuration on a truly global scale: While the Khmer Rouge – now the latest member of the group of UN-acknowledged governments in exile – was forced to fight a diplomatic war on international red carpets (see below) and to use guerrilla tactics against the PRK from the Thai-Cambodia border zone, the new Cambodian government embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to gain full international recognition. Because internal op398

tions for the restoration of cultural heritage were limited for financial reasons, and because the United Nations officially condemned the Vietnamese invasion into Cambodia, the PRK had to play its culture-political card – namely, Angkor Wat – on the international stage. The largest non-aligned country in Asia and the only non-Warsaw Pact country to recognise the PRK in 1980 was India. And while the political micro-constellation of the 1980s PRK-DK confrontation over Cambodia (and the rhetorical battle to blame each other to pillage and destroy Angkor) must be read within a macro-perspective of the Soviet Union-China confrontation, India’s decision to recognise the PRK was equally enmeshed in a transnational power game of hot and Cold War politics. This comprised of the aftermath of the Sino-Indian conflict over Kashmir and the parallel rapprochement towards the Soviet Union as the supporter of the Vietnamese PRK. What we conceptualised in this chapter as a global chain reaction of a ‘cultural heritage as diplomatic gift’ strategy had considerable consequences for Angkor: after India had tolerated Russia’s invasion into Afghanistan and subsequently used a restoration campaign of the world-famous Bamiyan Buddhas as a tool of diplomatic appeasement, the on-site responsible (previously British-colonial) Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was ‘simply’ transferred to Cambodia when India’s (Indira Gandhi’s) political recognition of the PRK was awarded with the prestigious restoration project of the country’s most iconic temple: Angkor Wat. In other words, global politics, which hovered between war-like confrontation, diplomatic recognition, and cultural rapprochement, were also triggered at the local level through the on-site practices of archaeology, architectural conservation, and the restoration of cultural heritage. India followed a strategy similar to that of the French, who continued (for the moment in vain) to justify their past-colonial monopolistic claim of la Plus Grande France to again restore the cultural heritage of Angkor through its expertise on-site. As we could extract from various Indian publications (such as Angkor Wat and cultural ties with India of 1987, Angkor Vat: India’s contribution in conservation 1986–1993 of 1994, or Saving Angkor in 1995) to report on ASI’s ‘herculean task’ of restoring Angkor Wat to shining glory, India’s civilising mission to salvage the cultural heritage of ancient Kambuja (compare Falser 2015a,c) was now aligned with a recycled 1930s rhetoric of the ‘Greater India Movement’. This rhetoric originally formulated India’s expansionist self-assurance on the basis of a supposedly centuries-long export of Hindu culture, language and architectural concepts (culminating in our case in Angkor Wat). The competing claims also clashed in curious lines of argumentation: The French conservators in the 1940s had blamed the embarrassing structural collapse of the Baphuon and Angkor Wat temples on historic ‘construction’ errors made by the ancient builders of Angkor. Now India’s ASI responded to international critique of its in-depth structural and highly dubious chemical interventions at Angkor Wat

Chapter XI:Making Angkor Global (1970—1990)

(supposedly 20,000 Indian and 400,000 man-days were invested to repair 8,000 architectural members and to clean 200,000 square metres of architectural surface) by referring to the blatant ‘reconstruction’ failures of the French interventions until 1973 (see chapter IX). However, the transcultural heritage/inheritance configuration over Angkor in the 1980s was still more complex, as other actors started to stake their claims to the privilege of salvaging the site. As a matter of fact, all of them participated in what can from a critical point of view be called a gradual, re- or neo-colonial, dispossession of Angkor as a purely national cultural heritage asset. Also Japan re-entered the Angkorian stage. Roughly forty years after its Second World War invasion into Southeast Asia (Cambodia included), the country developed a new expansionist attitude, motivated by a miracle economic boom in the 1970s and its new ‘Third World’ engagement within the cultural heritage sector. This time, the effort to ‘save Angkor’ was not couched in the political (colonial) mission of the French, nor in the ASI’s insistence on cultural (Hinduist) ties; instead, religious (Buddhist) traditions of Angkor served as the underlying explanatory model to claim plausibility for the Japanese agenda under the lead of the eminent, partly Paris-trained, Khmer-language and Angkor specialist Yoshiaki Ishizawa. However, neither the cultural ties to South Asia (India) nor the religious bonds with East Asia (Japan) could provide the rhetorical framework for applied cultural heritage politics over Angkor. Instead, the changed political landscape with the SU-Vietnam-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea in Cambodia brought a new European interest group to the site – Poland. The country’s famous State Ateliers for Conservation of Cultural Property (PKZ) were – compare India’s ASI projects from Nepal, Afghanistan to Sri Lanka – used as a toolkit for cultural diplomacy in other socialist brotherhood states around the world, ranging from Yugoslavia and Egypt to Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia. In the 1980s also France tried to re-engage with Angkor, but it had to skilfully bypass the diplomatically barred stage through other channels, as it did not officially acknowledge the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as the legal government. The 1985 report by Bruno Dagens (a previous member of the Conservation d’Angkor) evaluating the situation at Angkor became a unique source in this analysis for contextualising the dramatically changed heritage claims over Angkor. The Indian, Japanese, and Polish teams justified their interests in the Angkor project through supposedly cultural ties, religious traditions, and political solidarity. The newly introduced framework of ‘international help’ ushered them all into the previously French-dominated cultural heritage sector. The French, on the other hand, faced a more precarious situation in which they had to relinquish forever their quasi-monopolistic grasp over Angkor, including the institutional, technical, and linguistically and epistemologically framed heritage regimes (fearing a veritable ‘russification’) that were attached to it. As a matter of fact, the to-be-re-

vived French claim over Angkor was in a way ‘back-translated’ to where it once had started in the late nineteenth century when Angkor proper was equally ‘occupied’ by another power (by Siam until 1907): French-­Paris museums (again the musée Guimet) and exhibitions (like the one from 1989 entitled Angkor: Un patrimoine mondial à protéger and organised by the Association des Amis d’Angkor). At the same time, France was Europe’s major host of Cambodian refugees. In various journals with names like Avenir Cambodge, La voix du peuple Khmer, Résistence Khmère and Renaissance Khmère, the various political and social interest groups expressed their fears and hopes about Cambodia’s cultural past, present and future, and the stylised silhouette of Angkor Wat continued to dominate the visual material attached. In the modern history of Cambodia, the temples of Ang­kor were constantly (ab)used for identity constructions by the actual ruling colonial and postcolonial powers. This chapter could, for the first time and on the basis of previously unexplored sources from the UNESCO archive in Paris, add another curious constellation for the 1980s to the list: While the Cambodian territory itself was occupied by the Vietnamese puppet regime of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge were driven out of the country but were – even as their committed genocide was internationally well known by then – recognised by the United Nations as the legal Khmer government. As a smart political strategy and within a royal-communist-republican resistance pact presided over by the former king Norodom Sihanouk, they appropriated the Western discourse on cultural heritage. In Paris, the Permanent UNESCO Delegation of Democratic Kampuchea under Ok Sakun (a previous Khmer Rouge member) circulated clever public relations material: the Dossier Angkor of 1982/83 or newsletters like The marvellous monuments of Angkor and their tragedy over-dramatised a supposedly threatened status of the temples. On the other end of the political sprectrum did the touring Angkor exhibition by National Geographic actually prove the surpisingly untouched condition of the site through new photographic material. In the following, the ‘safeguarding of Angkor’ rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge was – parallel to all the above-mentioned argumentative efforts from interested nations such as India, Poland, Japan and France with their proclaimed cultural, political, religious or institutional ties to the site – promoted as an inseparable part of the diplomatic struggle to regain national independence and sovereignty. Ironically, with the inheritance claim of ‘Angkor as heritage’ (hadn’t it been dramatically downgraded just few years earlier?) being so effective, the ‘New Khmer Rouge’ regime instrumentalised and even mimicked UNESCO’s own rhetoric and was at the same time courted by the United Nations and accepted by a rather helpless UNESCO with its director generals René Maheu and Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow. In light of this, the chapter finally came to the disturbing conclusion that it was precisely the ex-genocidal Khmer 399

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Rouge regime in exile itself – and not Cambodia’s eternal father figure of Norodom Sihanouk, as official historio­ graphy has it to this day! – that consolidated the slogan of ‘Angkor as cultural heritage of/for humanity’. This paved

the way for the site’s instant nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992, once the political situation was settled with the end of the Cold War confrontation over Cambodia.

Chapter XII: Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years of 1987—1993 In addition to providing the first in-depth analysis into the role of the cultural heritage of Angkor (Wat) during the traumatic 1970s and early 1980s of Cambodia’s history, this book also presented completely new historical data related to the following episode, which occurred around 1990. A great number of primarily Anglo-Saxon (and surprisingly far fewer French) summaries in more and more comparative studies and handbooks on ‘Asia’s cultural heritage’ and its management schemes cover what happened in Angkor Park after the site’s 1992 nomination to the ­UNESCO World Heritage List. However, astonishingly little is known until today about the short period just before this point in time. But eliminating this blind spot in scientific research about the intellectual history of Angkor Park is all the more important because, as this chapter argued, the political and institutional decisions between 1987 and 1992 predefined almost all of the site’s more recent developmental stages. The reason for this missing gap of critical scientific enquiry is similar to what was discussed in the previous chapter: those hundreds of internal work reports and correspondence letters between the various upcoming stakeholders of Angkor Park, now from France to Japan and the United States to Germany, are until today stored in the UNESCO archive in Paris, where they are rarely consulted. In consequence, very little awareness exists today about the truly entangled nature of the ‘first’ – French-colonial – life of Angkor Park between 1900 and the early 1970s, and the rebirthing process of its ‘second’ version around and after 1990. As we could chart out for the first time, many, if not all constituting elements of an ‘archaeological heritage park’ structure from the French-colonial and early postcolonial period – from inventory systems and legal norms to spatial protection boundary concepts, institutional organisation schemes up to the applied hierarchies of aesthetic values and technical approaches of conservation, restoration and reconstruction – had in fact been actively and very hastily – recycled. French expertise was again crucial here, but it now helped, contrary to the colonial and rather hermetic period between the 1920s and the 1960s, to catapult Angkor Park into a truly global ‘heritage-scape’. However, in order to fully understand the multi-sited and ‘trans-cultural nature’ of Angkor Park and Angkor Wat today, the site’s gradual iconisation process through museum and exhibition spaces in the French métropole – as discussed in volume one of this book – needs to be taken into consideration. 400

Despite the recently growing interest in the institutional history of the United Nations, a conceptual paradigm shift in UNESCO’s nomination politics during the late 1980s is rarely mentioned. And no other site can, as the present chapter had it, mirror this multi-layered, political, cultural and institutional, transformation process on a global scale better than the case of Angkor Park. Contrary to the supposed ‘success story’ (as official historiography has it until today), our enquiry came to the conclusion that a) the site’s instant nomination to the World Heritage List may count as the first complete misuse of UNESCO’s influence to bolster its own cultural-political prestige and leadership claim at the ideological threshold at the end of the Cold War; that b) individual actors on UNESCO’s side, from the newly elected director general himself to the acting president of the World Heritage Committee, exerted their power to dictate a rushed nomination procedure against UNESCO’s own established procedure of neutral expert evaluation; and that c) the UNESCO network with its multi-national, cosmopolitan expert culture, instrumentalised an exaggerated ‘heritage-in-danger’ rhetoric to de facto perpetuate its local influence at the site far beyond any – per definition time-­limited – emergency campaign. Although this observation may seem to be in line with the recently emerging trend of critical and global heritage studies (compare Meskell 2015b) and an ethnographical interest in UNESCO’s ‘structured arenas’ of universal heritage politics (after Brumann 2012), our case study argues in a different way: it aims at expanding the idea that the globalisation of cultural heritage is a rather recent phenomenon, by adding a decidedly historical dimension that reaches far back in history. Angkor Wat was already made into a global affair when a Chinese delegate reported home from the spot in the thirteenth century. In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers mentioned it, and in the seventeenth century a Japanese visitor drew the first map of the temple. Over the course of our eleven book chapters covering the developments from the 1860s onwards, it became clear that Angkor Wat’s career as a truly global icon of cultural heritage was already in full swing more than one full century before the very period that is constantly named in the thirty-page heritage reader entries about ‘Angkor after 1992’. As a consequence, this last book chapter also comes to the conclusion that the stated exertion of UNESCO’s institutional power around 1990 – at a moment when Cambodia as a traumatised nation was just recovering from

Chapter XII: Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years of 1987—1993

two decades of war, genocide and foreign occupation – can be defined as a neo-colonial version (compare Winter 2007a, 63) of the very same enduring ‘salvage paradigm’ (after Clifford 1989) that lies embedded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the mission civilisatrice to rescue a patrimoine culturel had reached French-colonial Cambodge (compare Falser 2015a,c). In order to chart out the complex network of involved expert cultures and interest groups, the concrete actors under and around the UNESCO umbrella, and the applied standards, routines and rhetoric at play to make Angkor a site of ‘world heritage’, this chapter evaluated the available data from the UNESCO Paris archive: it comprised several hundreds of hand- and typewritten documents (ranging from internal minutes, mission reports, diplomatic agendas and international correspondence to press cuts) and all sorts of visual material attached to the debate (photographs, maps, paper clippings, exhibition folders, etc.). By chronologising the eminently important years between 1987 and 1992, the chapter identified six major developmental stages that finally led to the nomination of Angkor: 1) UNESCO’s paradigm change towards ‘heritage-in-danger politics’ during the last breath of Cold War (1987/88); 2) the first ‘Appeals for Angkor’ and UNESCO actions for the site in 1989; 3) the incipient process of the international rush to ‘save Angkor’ in 1990; 4) the role of the Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann and of UNESCO’s new director general, Mayor, to bring the site to global attention in 1991; 5), the behind-the-scenes efforts to push Angkor onto the World Heritage List (of Danger) in 1992; and finally 6) the process to secure the site’s completely globalised status through an international control mechanism far beyond time-limited emergency action in 1993. The first sub-chapter about the years of 1987 and 1988 unearthed the fact that the site of Angkor Park became the prime testing ground for the fundamental policy change of UNESCO’s cultural heritage agenda to cope with the transitory ideological tensions during the last breath of a global Cold War confrontation. UNESCO’s new director general, Federico Mayor (in office from 1987 to 1999), crafted the rhetoric of ‘threatened and endangered cultural heritage’, and he made the related call for ‘emergency action’ a strategic and even standardised element within the World Heritage Listing process. However, in a critical moment of the seeming non-applicability of Mayor’s plan to get an institutional grasp over Angkor in Cambodia – the United Nations had only acknowledged the exile government of the former Khmer Rouge and the idea of a neutralised zone of Angkor was finally abandoned –, a historic measure to substitute ‘real’ Angkor back in Europe was suddenly re-valorised: with new French protagonists from old colonial-time institutions (such as the EFEO and the musée Guimet in ­Paris), the nineteenth-century plaster casts from the Khmer temples were now rediscovered and brought into the debate as a ‘shared heritage’ and mémoire d’Angkor between France and Cambodia.

In a global climate of political de-escalation in 1989, more expert missions to Angkor were initiated but the old French monopole was decidedly weakened with a newold – Asian – player on the spot: Japan. Parallel to circulating reports about the supposedly insufficient restoration of Angkor Wat by the Archaeological Survey of India (see previous chapter), a Task Force on Cambodia was created within UNESCO. But didn’t its rhetoric of the universal value of the Khmer temple site (‘Angkor belongs to the whole humanity!’) in fact sound rather like a neo-colonial dispossession strategy against Cambodia’s own claim to manage Angkor Park independently in the years to come? Unpublished correspondence material assessed for this study revealed a complex situation: Cambodia’s KhmerRouge-led UNESCO delegation around Ok Sakun was not only keen to continuously mimic internationalist ‘heritage-­ of-mankind’ slogans for Angkor; also King Norodom Sihanouk was – during his UNESCO visit on 1 September 1989 as part of a mutual prestige-driven win-win-situation – willing to facilitate Mayor’s heritage mission for Angkor, and to again stage himself as Cambodia’s national saviour in the name of age-old and revived Angkorian grandeur. As a starting point of a full chain of global calls to save the cultural heritage of Angkor, Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture launched its international Appeal for Angkor in 30 September 1989, only a few months before the complete withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupier. Towards the final nomination of Angkor to the World Heritage List, the international push to ‘Save Angkor’ gained considerable momentum in 1990. As Sihanouk’s adaptations to Cambodia’s national constitution, anthem and flag again brought Angkor Wat back to centre stage as a symbolic reference, the UN’s Security Council voted repeatedly (but in vain) for a demilitarised zone in and around Angkor Park. In a veritable ‘appeal-mania’ for the safeguarding of Angkor, an International Symposium at Tokyo’s Institute of Asian Cultures launched its own petition from Japan’s capital. Shortly after, the first International Round Table of Experts on the Preservation of the Angkor Monuments, with twenty-eight listed experts from ten countries (including France, Japan, Hungary, India and Poland), furthered a complete globalisation of the issue from Thailand’s capital of Bangkok. The ambivalent mix of a) international slogans about the ‘Herculean task’ to save Angkor (as Mayor had it) and the logically deduced claim to establish a globalised, seemingly apolitical and merely technical, system of ‘total cooperation’ and a ‘control mechanism’ over Angkor Park, with b) Cambodia’s fragile status of seeking outside help, sounded like a tragic déjà entendu of the old French-colonial topoi used to formulate a self-assigned mandate to salvage and manage the site. At this point around 1990, first French and Japanese (and not Cambodian) books about Angkor prepared the ground for the site’s commodification as a global tourist destination. As the evaluation of archival material made evident in this chapter, the heritage configuration over Angkor Park 401

Findings and Conclusions for Volume Two

became even more multi-layered in 1991: the UNESCO-led international help structure for local action on this archaeological site was more and more seen as a synonym for Cambodia’s reconciliation efforts on the national scale and as a perfect showcase to address ‘the entire humanity’ within a global peace process after the end of Cold War. As a former Cambodian state architect, trained at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, and now a UNESCO-commissioned returnee to his own country to become its new leader in cultural affairs, Vann Molyvann acted – as our study conceptualised it – as a perfect ‘trans-cultural broker’ between all the above-mentioned levels. In this context his French August 1991 report Parc archéologique d’Angkor (he provided his personal copy for this study) counts as one of the most influential but previously unconsulted sources to lift the site onto a new global scale. In a curious ‘back-translation’, he drew heavily on the commodification of the heritage site of Borobudur on Java/Indonesia as a modern archaeological park, as it was conceptualised in 1970s reports by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (almost the same institution would come to Angkor in the 1990s, see epilogue II). In doing so, Vann brought not only typical modernist strategies of restoration and conservation, lawful zoning and relocation, infrastructural improvement for global heritage tourism, landscaping and the production of picturesque vistas from Angkor’s ex-colonial twin site in the former Dutch East Indies into a conceptual overlap with the latest global keywords of heritage management schemes of the early 1990s. From a higher viewpoint, he also helped to breach the methodological and aesthetic-normative boundaries between the old-fashioned concept of ‘original’ archaeological reserves and the emerging theme park industry to create artificial heritage environments (see the introduction to this book and epilogue II). In the same year of 1991, a Second International Round Table of Experts met in Paris, and Norodom Sihanouk again fostered the story of ‘two great men saving Angkor’ (himself and previously the EFEO’s Bernard Philippe Groslier) by simply transferring his own old French connection to the DG Federico Mayor of Paris-based UNESCO. After the political success in the wider context of the Paris Conference on Cambodia, Mayor finally made his heritage diplomacy voyage to Cambodia in late November 1991. There he fixed, in an internal agreement with Sihanouk that was reconstructed here from previously unpublished material, the nomination of Angkor to the UNESCO World Heritage List long before any official dossier was at hand or an obligatory expert evaluation mission to the site was carried out. As a new milestone in the modern history of Ang­ kor Wat’s transcultural trajectory of heritage, Mayor not only chose, for his symbolic Appeal for the protection, preservation, restoration and presentation of the site of Angkor, the causeway of Angkor Wat, as it had been already iconised within the last one hundred years of French exhibitions (chapters IV–VIII) and archaeological practices (chapters IX–X). With his belief in UNESCO’s civilising 402

mission to ‘save Angkor in the name of humanity’, the messianic (neo-colonial?) undertone of Mayor’s speech was in fact not far removed from Henri Mouhot’s proto-colonial inheritance claims formulated on the very same spot some 130 years earlier in 1860 (see chapter I). The fifth sub-chapter covered the crucial year of 1992 when Angkor was finally pushed onto UNESCO’s List of World Heritage sites. In fact, this happened under enormous time pressure, despite a whole range of institutional and legal obstacles within Cambodia as well as reservations formulated by internal experts, but with a decided ‘heritage-in-danger’ rhetoric to circumvent UNESCO’s own regulations. At a unique moment when the United Nations installed its – explicitly time-limited – UNTAC mission to supervise the first free elections in the world’s newest and smallest country of Cambodia, UNESCO’s cultural heritage mission was, on the contrary, meant to be installed permanently within a newly created international control agency for the world’s largest archaeological reserve called Angkor Park. Using new archival evidence from internal correspondence between Paris, New York, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Angkor, this study has shown for the first time that many of the ex-French-colonial modalities from between 1900 to 1950 re-surfaced. Those ­included the mapping and spatialising of protection perimeters, the inventory and classification of to-be-listed monuments, the legislation of protection and a tight system of control and surveillance. They were recycled by old and new French, and other affiliated ad hoc experts to accommodate a self-imposed deadline for placing Angkor as a cultural site under UNESCO’s heritage regime. This process was nurtured by the official twentieth-anniversary celebrations of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention, the parallel creation of its World Heritage Centre in Paris and the amendment of its Operational Guidelines for World Heritage nominations (in favour of ‘danger and emergency politics’). Most important were, however, the key players of the game: Federico Mayor and Azedine Beschaouch, backthen acting president of the World Heritage Committee, later Mayor’s Special Advisor for Angkor and, above all, leading member of the standing secretariat of the International Co-ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC) over Angkor for the many years to come (see epilogue II). Despite all reported ‘success stories’ about the international Angkor campaign, in-depth research of this study revealed a rather shocking behind-the-scenes mechanism, an internal system of prestige-driven individual actors, cultural-political games at the end of Cold War and, above all, a coercive power structure being applied against UNESCO’s own affiliated experts. In the case of Angkor, the latter issue fully hit the late archaeologist Henry Cleere who was, back in 1992, officially assigned by ICOMOS for the evaluation of the nomination dossier and the on-site conditions, and, under extreme pressure (as he reconfirmed in a personal interview for this book), finally voted in vain to post-

Chapter XII: Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The Decisive Years of 1987—1993

pone the nomination itself due to the dramatic security situation in and around Angkor Park, and due to the complete lack of any institutional on-site structure of heritage management on the national (Cambodian) level. As the last sub-chapter of this final book chapter had it, 1993 was the year when the Archaeological Park of Angkor reached a new status along its 150-year transcultural trajectory: it was institutionally fully globalised. Between the Preparatory Meeting for the International Conference on Angkor in Paris (January 1993) and the main conference in Tokyo (October 1993), the international control agency for Angkor (ICC, co-chaired by France and Japan) was worked out and was finally inaugurated during a Phnom Penh conference in December 1993. We termed the new trend towards an all-encompassing penetration into the cultural heritage zone of Angkor a post-1990 technology-based process of dramatic ‘zooming in and zooming out’ from the 1:1-scale daily human and social reality on site: at moment when Cambodia’s national capacity for building was slowly developing from zero (including a national protection law and a national Angkor protection agency only created in 1995), the impact of the arrival of international knowledge and new technology was enormous. With more and more international expert teams rushing in from Sydney, Tokyo, New Delhi, Paris, Budapest, Cologne and New York, the vision of planning and managing every aspect of Angkor Park took shape: this ranged from the microscopic scale of capillary stone (temple) analysis to the cosmic scale of using satellite imagery and early digital GIS tools to map out the whole ‘cultural landscape’ of the wider Ang­kor region of 5,000 square kilometres and 1,000 temples. As the global heritage regime over Angkor continued to accelerate, Vann’s vision to combine international scientific research, architectural preservation and sustainable tourism for Angkor Park with sociocultural development at the very regional level and with decidedly local participation that benefitted from the global heritage industry

tragically failed. On the other side of the transcultural spectrum, two unique features of Cambodia’s cultural heritage emerged: the ‘world heritage’ status of Angkor Park was codified in the country’s new national constitution of 1993, and the above-quoted conferences of 1993 resulted, from a critical perspective and once again after the end of French colonialism, in the gradual outsourcing of a nationally independent management scheme for Angkor Park to an international control agency with so-called ‘ad hoc experts’ flying in from all around the world (see also epilogue II). The committee’s future task list would, however, instantly switch from ‘safeguarding’ to ‘development’ and would therefore sound more like a business plan from the commercial theme park industry. Contrary to Vann’s vision and in a move that would be unthinkable for other World Heritage sites like the Chinese Wall or the Italian Forum Romanum, the ICC’s international agencies in fact never handed a single major Angkorian temple – why not the most important one, Angkor Wat itself? – back to a Cambodian team! A real national agency for Angkor was only created in 1995/96 (again through French expertise), when the globalised grasp over the site was already institutionalised and therefore perpetuated for the decades to come. As we shall finally explore in the epilogue of this second volume to conclude our analysis of a 150-year transcultural trajectory between Asian and European projects, the ‘enacted utopia’ (after Foucault) of an archaeological heritage reserve called Angkor Park as ‘world heritage’ itself became a veritable ‘world’s (af)fair’ where over-restored temple sites were now presented, like picture-perfect pavilions in universal and colonial exhibitions, by various national (but not Cambodian) teams. The local protection agency of APSARA is today, tragically, somehow reduced to filling in vernacular heritage schemes from ‘traditional living’ to eco-tourism, as is common in the emerging theme park industry around the globe.

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Epilogue to Volume 2 Angkor post-1992: From World Heritage to World’s (Af-)Fair and Theme Park The Great Exhibition [of London 1851, MF], like the many international expositions or world’s fairs that followed it, was a phenomenon of industrial capitalism. Mass producers sought international mass markets for their goods, and world’s fairs provided display cases reaching millions of potential customers. But the fairs were not only selling goods, they were selling ideas: ideas about the relations between nations, the spread of education, the advancement of science, the form of cities, the nature of domestic life, the place of art in society. They were presenting an ordered world. Many of these ideas could be seen in concrete […] form at the expositions. [italics MF] (Benedict 1983, 2) —Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs (1983) Angkor is at the heart of an extraordinary human and scientific adventure where the activity to safeguard and develop this outstanding cultural site will remain as a spectacular example of international solidarity. […] Angkor has then become a laboratory spurred by the relationships between culture and sustainable development, by then evidencing the potential of sustainable tourism, of handicrafts and the full mobilisation of the local communities towards the harmony and construction of a whole society. Other World Heritage sites throughout the world have taken inspirations from the experiments carried out in Angkor, and UNESCO, using Angkor as an example, has been advocating the recognition of culture as a booster for sustainable development. The International Programme for Angkor is not only unique in its approach but also in its operation, with the establishment of the International Co-ordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC-Angkor) with UNESCO in charge of its standing Secretariat. […] Safeguarding any historic site requires a global approach reaching all aspects of heritage, of built structures, of documentation and of the traditions which bring them to life. [italics] (ICC-Angkor 2013, 6) —Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO in “20 years of ICC-Angkor” (2013)

Approaching Angkor Park after its hasty nomination to UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 1992 (chapter XII) comes as an enormous challenge. Seen from the ‘inside perspective’ of the heritage regime at play, Angkor Park represents a unique – and in its sheer scale, the world’s largest – configuration of cultural heritage: unlike other archaeological World Heritage properties of comparable importance, such as the ‘Borobudur Temple Compounds’ in Indonesia (inscribed in 1991) or the ‘Historic City Centre of Rome’ with its Forum Romanum (inscribed in 1980), its institutional protection framework as Cambodia’s first and most important World Heritage site of 401 square kilometres has been totally internationalised. A considerable side effect of this is an over-bureaucratisation and over-formalisation of the decision-making processes on all levels. And with approximately twenty countries implementing some sixty projects in Angkor Park over a time span of almost thirty years, the data available

from all the official meetings, project proposals, and progress reports, as well as proceedings from international conferences and workshops about topics of archaeological investigation, architectural conservation, training concepts, and eco-tourism, has grown into an archive of tens of thousands of written pages. As a consequence, a comprehensive evaluation of the massive amount of data is beyond the scope of this epilogue. Seen from the ‘outside (academic) perspective’, the second challenge is that scientific interest in Angkor Park has equally grown exponentially in the last three decades, resulting in an enormous scholarly apparatus of several hundred of articles, multi-authored volumes, and monographs. The canonising effect here is that Angkor Park as a research subject has become an almost obligatory part in – mainly Anglo-Saxon – global heritage readers and cultural heritage management guidebooks, with an almost serialised production of handy thirty-page summaries about the site.1

1  We listed some of the important ones in chapter IX with reference to Di Giovine 2009, 341–66; Hitchcock/

King/Parnwell 2010, 103–129; Winter/Daly 2012; Silva/Chapagain 2013, 215–35; Chapman 2013, 59–97; ­ iura in King 2015, 221–236; Stubbs/Thomson 2016, 201–230; Anatole-Gabriel 2016, 275–310. M

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Epilogue to Volume Two  Angkor Post-1992: From World Heritage to World’s (Af-)Fair and Theme Park

However, scientific analysis has focussed here most often on the post-1992 inscription era only, with little archival investigation into and conceptual crosslinks about what happened before this crucial threshold (see chapters IX–XII) or beyond the specific locality of Angkor itself (chapters I–VIII). As a consequence, this epilogue also cannot aim to discuss the full range of scientific investigations into the post-1992 Angkor era. So, what can the final epilogue of this book provide? More precisely, how can it connect to the last twelve chapters with their reading of Angkor Park’s history of heritage over the last 150 years as entangled with European projects (volume one), and Asian identity politics and (post)colonial archaeologies on the site (volume two)? Using our conceptual approaches of (back)translation and (Foucault’s) heterotopian multi-sitedness, this epilogue will explore a final set of hypotheses: a) the ‘Archaeological Park of Angkor’ of the post-1992 era closes a full circle within our transcultural enquiry and finally comes itself – as a cultural heritage formation in terms of its institutional, spatial, and physical parameters – to an overlap with its most influential conceptual forerunner – the universal and colonial exhibition. In other words, Angkor World Heritage finally turns itself into a World’s Fair (we will call it a World’s (Af)fair), but one with neo-colonial management characteristics.2 But our hypothesis will go beyond the mere postcolonial critique: with the current globalisation of cultural heritage management schemes and of cultural mass tourism, Angkor Park also continues to develop into a global heritage conglomerate (a term borrowed from Davies 1996, see introduction), with characteristics of archaeological theme parks. In order to structure these hypotheses, Burton Benedict’s conceptual introduction to his 1983 edited volume Anthropology of World’s Fairs is particularly useful. His above-quoted introductory statement reminds us that World’s Fairs (we called them ‘universal exhibitions’ in our French context), beginning with the first Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations in London 1851, were events where mass producers not only offered their products to millions of visitors in sophisticated displays designed for mass market-oriented consumption. In this setup, the business of “selling goods” was also strategically packaged as “selling ideas” (Benedict 1983, 2): those about modern nation-states in their progress-oriented and peaceful endeavours to advance science, education, and technology. And this agenda was emotionally and rhetorically framed by one overarching narrative: the mission of a veritable “parliament of nations” (Benedict 1983, 41) united to serve

a higher civilisational goal for humanity as a whole. And one particular ‘sold product and idea’ was: cultural heritage. If it had, as intellectual history continues to explain it with a Eurocentric undertone, mutated in the era of European Enlightenment into a must-have-element of modern nationstates, the very ‘idea’ of “protect[ing] and safeguard[ing] monuments and works of art” around the planet indeed surfaced prominently as part of the World’s Fair format – more precisely, in the Congrès international pour la protection des œuvres d’art et des monuments during the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Ministère du commerce 1889a, 13–14; see chapter IV). But as ‘civilised’ as the nations may have represented themselves in their self-imposed mission to safeguard cultural heritage, the concept of “nations civilisées” was, during the Congrès international colonial at the very same exhibition in 1889 (Ministère du commerce 1889b, 8), brought into direct overlap with the project of colonial expansion (compare Falser 2015a). In our case, it combined a territorial interest in French-colonial Indo-­ Chine with a civilising mission to safeguard a patrimoine culturel in danger – namely, ‘Angkor lost in the jungle’ in le Cambodge. And it is not by accident that this mission of safeguarding cultural heritage overseas simultaneously materialised in a picture-perfect but compacted display of the targeted temple site: et voilà la ‘pagode d’Angkor’ in the French-colonial section of the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition (compare Fig. IV.9b). As we explored in chapter XII, the analogy of UNESCO’s global ‘heritage in danger’ politics of the late 1980s is indeed striking in this regard, and we termed the hasty nomination of Angkor Park to the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger in 1992 a neo-colonial endeavour3… with long-term effects for the post-1992 constellation, as we shall explore in this epilogue. Blatantly different from the often quoted salvage missions of Abu Simbel or Borobudur, with their decided time-­limited action plan (compare Fig. XI.5 with Pl. EpII.5b), UNESCO’s instant-­ help structure for Angkor was institutionalised and perpetuated far beyond the accomplishment of any heritage-in-­ danger mission. As a consequence, Ang­kor Park as World Heritage was never completely handed back over to the national authorities – not even when the site was officially removed from UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 2004 (see below). But contrary to a mere postcolonial critique about a one-dimensional ‘foreign invasion’ into Cambodia’s cultural heritage realm, we will see in the follow­ ing that Cambodia’s (returning older and slowly re-emerging younger) heritage elites, in ambivalent complicity, voluntarily participated in the ‘win-win’ global game that was

2  In order to explore this hypothesis, two concrete case studies from the first volume of the book are particu-

larly useful and will be referred to repeatedly in the following: the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889 (chapter IV) and the Paris International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (chapter VII). 3  In chapter XII we contextualised what was reflected upon as “cultures of neo-colonialism” (Winter 2007a, 63–66) with the pervasive process of foreign expertise being poured into the void of Cambodia’s cultural heritage regime around 1990.

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played at Angkor Park. In this vein, this epilogue will explore: 1. how the Angkor World Heritage regime was brought into a ‘World’s (af)air’-like, institutionally codified and ritualistic organisation scheme; 2. how Angkor Park’s spatial arrangement as an archaeological heritage reserve mutated into an ‘international concession-styled’ configuration;

3. how the physical (re)making and presentation strategies of the international temple restoration projects followed a ‘national pavilions’-logic from universal and colonial exhibitions; 4. and, finally, how Angkor Park – now with a scientific, commercial, and amusement-oriented range of ‘archaeologically themed’ projects at the margins of a strictly delimited heritage reserve – mutated into a veritable cultural heritage theme park.

1. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)Fair institutionalised and ritualised As Benedict contextualised it convincingly (Benedict 1983, 3–6), universal exhibitions presented an “ordered world” to their millions of visitors. To “preserve order” in such an international “conglomeration of strangers” (sellers, presenters, buyers, visitors), an internal control and coordination mechanism needed to be institutionalised and codified in a set of rules and regulations. And those rules were best “symbolised in ritual”. In other words, world’s fairs themselves can be read as “a distinctive form of modern international ritual”. As we discussed in the first volume of this book with a view on French universal and colonial exhibitions between 1867 and 1937, fair authorities (from the commissaire général and specialists-adjoints for architecture, landscaping, etc. to the members of advisory boards) were officially chosen from the highest political levels to set the rules of a) international participation, b) the spatial arrangement of the event, c) the classification of the material on display, and d) the parameters of all physical representations (the pavilions) down to e) the rules of orderly behaviour for all participants. What Benedict characterised as a potlatch-like process, encounters between the host authorities and the representatives of the participant nations were organised in a ritualised manner to pay mutual respect and give legitimacy to the rival projects realised by nations, states, companies, groups, and experts… altogether a veritable contest of prestige being framed with symbolic statements. To control the set of commonly accepted codes of behaviour, supposedly neutral “officers [were installed] to maintain order and rules for conducting business”, and “ad hoc moots” were eventually held to mediate between different interests during the event. And as part of the ceremonial character, official gatherings of dignitaries, high political guests, diplomats, and governmental representatives took place, and opening/closing ceremonies for the whole event or for the groundbreaking for each of the national pavilions were organised and framed with special pageants

and thematic days. To give the event’s civilising idea additional credibility, meetings of experts and scientific congresses were held, declarations for a better world produced, and technical guidelines for the specialists and commemorative albums for the interested public published. However, discussing the particular effect of colonial exhibitions in this above-quoted ritualised process brings us back to the very first pair of illustrations of the introduction to this book (see Figs. Intro.1a,b). They featured the high ceremonial opening scene of the Paris International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, but the represented ‘ordered world’ and the ‘idea’ of culture and civilisation was in fact staged in a highly contested strategy, as the host authorities and their invited guests placed themselves in front of prestigious icons of cultural heritage which were not their own: Angkor Wat as an ephemeral full-scale replica was staged in the French capital, and ‘real locals’ (from Cambodia) were missing in the depicted scene, as they were not part of the initial institutional setup of the event but were only added to the picture afterwards. Back in Cambodia (see chapters IX to XII), the colonial aspect was built into the French formation of the Parc archéologique d’Angkor in the 1920–40s, silently continued in Cambodia’s short postcolonial era in the 1950–60s, was appropriated in the Cold War heritage diplomacies of the 1970–80s, and resurfaced in a ‘neo-colonial’ disguise in ­UNESCO’s grasp over Angkor around 1990 and the creation of the International Coordinating Committee for Ang­kor (ICC-Angkor) in 1993. Following our line of transcultural argumentation, we see that many of the above-listed codified and ritualistic organisation patterns of universal and colonial exhibitions continue in the post-1992 formation of Angkor Park. However, we leave it to an authentic eyewitness, Philippe Peycam,4 with his 2016 article “ICC-Angkor: A World Heritage site as an arena of competition, connivance and state(s) legitimation,” to identify the most important

4  Philippe Peycam is Director of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands, and

served between 1999 and 2009 as founding director of the Centre of Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Between 2000 and 2009, he participated in the ICC meetings in Cambodia.

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power groups on the world’s (af)fair-like arena over Angkor Park (Peycam 2016): First, UNESCO itself with its “self-congratulatory” practice (743) as ICC’s standing secretariat, and its scientific secretary, Azedine Beschaouch; second, the “two main ICC actors, France and Japan, securing their exclusive role as co-chairs” within the new “geopoli­tics of international cooperation at Angkor”5 (750, 746/8); third, the national agency of APSARA (Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap), founded only in 1995 (after the international help structure was already in place) and progressively dismantled in its preconceived institutional independency6 through the “authoritarian” Phnom Penh regime (764); fourth, the ‘international expert community’ to salvage Angkor, adopting a “UN diplomatico-bureaucratic jargon” (744) in its double (national and scientific) representation mode within the ‘civilised’ family of UNESCO member states; and fifth, the co-chairs’ “near to lifelong appointment of a handful of UNESCO-sanctioned ‘experts’” with their “missions”7 to Angkor (777). In the following text, we group Peycam’s critique into five structural elements which highlight what we call the ‘neo-colonial’ character of ICC-Angkor. Structure and scope: ICC-Angkor’s obvious “structural shortcoming” resulting from the “undemocratic establishment and modus operandi” from its very beginning (Peycam 2016, 764); and

a) the tendency to extend its “monitoring activities [too far] beyond the perimeter of the archaeological site” of Ang­kor, and b) the evolution of its primary task from ­safeguarding architectural heritage into the sustainable ­development of tourism, infrastructure, and urbanism (767);8 Power structure: the French and Japanese co-chairs, UNESCO and Cambodia’s heritage elites “shared a common interest in maintaining the institutional status quo represented by the ICC-UNESCO-APSARA triangle, [and] all institutional partners found in ICC-Angkor a useful mechanism for legitimating their roles and policies [leading to] ICC’s ‘sanctuarisation’, above and beyond the reach of members of the local community” (764–65); Working procedure: “Over the years, ICC meetings became more and more hermetically sealed off from the participation [of other interest groups], and while the co-chairs clung to an outdated ceremonial apparatus in which France and Japan preside over every event, the representatives of the Cambodian government were positioned – in terms of protocol and in the spatial organisation of the meetings – as at the receiving end of foreign benevolence” (764–65); Operational effectiveness as an international collaborative model: within the ICC meetings, projects were presented, but “decisions were made behind closed doors [and] ICC has thus been condemned to serve as an official legitimator for the power in place and its shadowy state practices” (766, 767).

5  Under the heading “French cooperation at Angkor: The failures of an overcentralized management plan”, Peycam contextualised the specific emotional load of France as the ex-colonial protector with the returning École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), and “France’s [own] state centralism” as a model to support a superagency of APSARA with help of the Agence française de développement (AFD) and the ‘Special Priority Fund for Angkor’ (Peycam 2016, 752, 755). Under the heading “Japanese cooperation in Angkor: The limits of segmented aid”, Peycam focused on Japan’s “shared Buddhist experience”, its “new image of benevolence in Southeast Asia”, its “biggest-ever ‘Funds-in-Trust’ to UNESCO for the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on Angkor” (760, 763), the involved Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA, compare its engagement at Borobudur in chapter XII), the Waseda and Sophia Universities, and the supportive role of UNESCO’s new director general, the Japanese Matsuura Koichiro. In this context, Japan’s strategy for Angkor was, in relation to its own institutional system with many ministries for international assistance (compare Blaise 2006; ­Akagawa 2015, 79–114) different from the French side and was rather meant to facilitate heritage conservation projects together with others for infrastructural development (760–63, compare JICA 2006). 6  Vann Molyvann as the respected head of the institution was dismissed in 2001. “The decree, requested by Hun Sen on 31 May 2001 and signed by King Norodom Sihanouk on 2 June, did not give a reason for the dismissal, although Vann Molyvann afterwards invoked his refusal to agree on a number of construction permits [see below and in Kay/Reed 2001, MF]. King Sihanouk reappointed Vann Molyvann ‘senior advisor of the Cambodian King’, an honorary appointment with no effective influence in the management of Angkor. The presidency of APSARA was later entrusted to Vice Premier Sok An, Hun Sen’s close partner in the CPP and the man in charge of all economically strategic national commissions, while the director general’s position was given to Bun Narith, the prime minister’s brother-in-law” (Peycam 2016, 775). 7  What we call ‘neo-colonial’ in having non-Cambodian ‘ad hoc experts’ to watch over Angkor was also reflected by Peycam: “Words like ‘campaign’, ‘mission’, and ‘expedition’ – used regularly by cultural bureaucrats and other heritage ‘experts’ to describe conservation activities, not least under UNESCO auspices – remind me, an historian of colonialism in the region, of the terms employed and postures practised by nineteenth-­ century European empire builders” (Peycam 2016, 771; compare Winter 2007a, Peycam 2010/11 and Peycam/ Heikkila 2009 with my own analysis of “cultural heritage as civilising mission”, in general and in the context of Angkor, in Falser 2015a,c). 8  To compare a positive voice from the inside with a sceptical comment from the outside about the UNESCO structure over Angkor, compare, above others, Lemaistre/Cavalier 2002 with Miura 2015.

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Therefore, ICC’s “operational usefulness” as a corrective to national decisions – like the de facto privatisation of Angkor Park – became questionable;9 Accountability: the project portfolio of the leading power groups within ICC-Ang­kor stayed outside of a transparent “open peer-review process [or] any counter-check of their social applicability” on the local community level (764); and the proceedings of ICC-­ Angkor’s plenary, technical, and quadripartite sessions only mirrored ICC’s’ over-ritualised “top-down model” (765). Taking Lynn Meskell’s analysis about the coercive power structure in UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (Meskell 2014, 221–26) and its politics of multilateralism (Meskell et al. 2015a) into our concrete context shows that the trend of an exaggerated politicisation and (inter)national competition to transform world heritage properties into “transactional commodities” (Meskell 2016, 72) had definitely reached Angkor Park around 1990 (see chapter XII). And the way that Benedict explained the world’s fair potlatch-like effect of total prestation, mutual obligation, and symbolic transaction with Marcel Mauss’s famous theory of the ‘gift’ (Mauss 1925) came to a new level here after this crucial benchmark: if in the late 1980s only one country – non-aligned India – had been rewarded with the restoration of Angkor Wat (through its Archaeological Survey) after its diplomatic acknowledgement of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (see chapter XI), then the heritage reserve of Angkor Park as a whole was turned, from the early 1990s onwards, into a veritable global gift in the material culture of diplomacy (after Biedermann/Gerritsen/

Riello 2018).10 This time, a worldwide range of countries from Japan, China, Indonesia and India, Australia and New Zealand to whole of Europe, the United States and Canada were – in complicity with the present political regime in Cambodia – pouring their development aid money into the country and received, as a (now shared) return gift, the prestigious right to test their full set of cultural heritage “experiments” in the “laboratory” of Angkor, as Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, termed it during a visit to the site in 2013 (ICC-Angkor 2013, 6; see introductory quote, compare Pl. XII.10). Being a ‘neo-colonial’ agent in Angkor Park now meant – different from Cambodia’s short period of national independence in the 1950s and 1960s with France as the sole facilitator (chapter X) – that the roles between the benevolent help structure from the truly international outside and the thankful receiver from the national inside complemented each other in a new but ambivalent ‘win-win’ situation.11 With a kind of ‘ethnographic view’ towards the “world heritage [practice] on the ground”, the “structured arena” over Angkor (after Brumann 2012 and Brumann/Berliner 2016) continues to shine through thousands of pages of some hundred published proceedings that the ICC-Angkor machinery produced from 1993 until December 2018: twenty-five “Plenary Sessions” (Fig. EpII.1a), twenty-nine “Technical Meetings” (Fig. EpII.1b), several “Quadripartite Meetings” of Cambodia, France, Japan, and UNESCO only (Fig. EpII.1c) and a good selection “Reports of Activities/ Reports on Angkor” (Fig. EpII.1d).12 Self-legitimating texts

9  Besides the outsourcing of a new ‘Angkor National Museum’, an ‘Angkor Panorama Museum’ and a new

hotel zone to foreign investors (see later in this epilogue), Angkor Park, as a World Heritage site with its profitable entry ticketing, was “effectively privatised” (Peycam 2016, 759) for the political regime’s economic profit, being managed by Sokha Hotel Limited, a private company close to Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party CPP and a division of the Sokimex Group, Cambodia’s first and largest petroleum company, and far less, as planned, for APSARA’s operational profit (compare Sokheng/Marcher 2000, Cheng 2005, Kuch 2015). 10  Here I borrow my observations from the recent book under this very title in which gifts were introduced as an “indispensable ingredient of global diplomacy and central to the establishment and development of global connections”. That “global gifts were an important vehicle for the establishment of shared values and material and visual experiences, […] key agents of social cohesion and transcultural systems of value in the emergence of a global political community, […] and agents in the unfolding of political rivalries and asymmetries of power” was discussed here in the context of “early modern Eurasia” (Biedermann/Gerritsen/Riello 2018, 1). However, these observations also apply nicely to Angkor Park after 1990 in its ‘world’s (af)fair’ structure in the late-modern Eurasian contact zone. 11  The famous quote by Hun Sen from 1984 in his role as PRK’s foreign minister (“If people want to help, they should send the money to us”, see chapter XI) was now mirrored in the rumour that the Cambodian side was not even inclined in 2004 to have UNESCO lifting the ‘heritage-in-danger’ status over Angkor – one that had guaranteed since 1990 the constant flow of millions of dollars, yen, and euros; international expertise; and global attention for the site. Now, the ‘global-gift’ constellation over Angkor was supposedly played back into global space when UNESCO and its affiliated heritage expert entourage exported the ICC structure as a ‘success model’ into other post-conflict zones, including Afghanistan (2003), Iraq (2004), and Haiti (2010). 12  They are accessible on the ICC-Angkor homepage: http://icc-angkor.org/publications (retrieved 26 January 2019). As mentioned above, the enormous amount of ICC reports will not be evaluated in detail. How­ever, a quick screening of this data allows the extrapolation of the processes behind this veritable ‘world’s (af)fair’ over Angkor Park. It contains a never-ending series of a) indeed ritualised, mutual respect-paying eulogies on the diplomatic side of the main actors of UNESCO, France, Japan, and Cambodia; of b) formalised project summaries and proposals from the ever-growing international heritage community; and of c) rather stand-

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Figures EpII.1a—d  Covers from the various ICC-Angkor proceedings with no mention of a Cambodian counterpart: Plenary Session 1996 (1a); Quadripartite Meeting 1997 (1b); Annual Report of Activities 1998 (1c); Technical Committee Meeting 2001 (1d) (Source: ICC-Angkor online; APSARA archive Siem Reap)

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and declarations as much as commemorative albums were integral parts to underline the institutional, ceremonial, and ritual touch of universal and colonial exhibitions (or of ‘World’s Fairs’ as Benedict called them), and it is astonishing that also the UNESCO/ICC regime for the ‘World Heritage’ site of Angkor continues to follow this strategy up to this day. The following chronological analysis will cover two proceedings of ICC-Angkor conferences in Paris 2003 and Siem Reap 2013, two brochures to celebrate ICC’s fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries in 2008 and 2013, an Angkor Charter in 2012, an Angkor Declaration and an Angkor Heritage Management Framework (both 2013), and remarks about the ICC’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2018. After the Tokyo Conference and Declaration for Angkor in 1993 (see chapter XII, compare Pl. XII.18a), the Second Intergovernmental Conference for the Safeguarding and Development of Angkor (UNESCO 2003a) took place in Paris in November 2003 (Pl. EpII.1a–d). It counts as a veritable ‘world’s (af)fair’, with thirty-six nations and eleven international organisations participating, and a new affirmative document of global solidarity called Paris Declaration for Angkor13 (UNESCO 2003b). It also introduced a new ex post-periodisation model for the international projects of the last “ten years of safeguarding (1993–2003)” and those of the proclaimed “new decade of sustainable development (2003–2013)”. Already the prefaces made the new trend for Angkor – global civilising mission on the one hand, and new local economic exploitation on the other – rather clear.14 An “overview of ten years of safeguarding (1993–

2003)” proudly listed “over twenty countries, international organisations and private stakeholders to contribute US $5 million per year […], more than thirty international operators (international organisations, universities, private companies, NGOs)” to form the present “roster of over a hundred [proposed and/or realised] projects, including safeguarding of 15 principal monuments” and “over 500 expert reports written” (UNESCO 2003a, 16). In 1997, “a technical wing with an Ad Hoc group of experts [had been added to the ICC], in order to draw on high calibre, objective expertise of undisputed legitimacy” (18). If Benedict spoke of an “ad hoc moots” mechanism during world’s fairs (see above), those “ad hoc experts” were needed here to mediate between different project interests over Cambodia’s prestigious World Heritage site. As the Paris proceedings continued, “eleven different countries took [sic] fourteen of the principal monuments, making Angkor the most extensive archaeological work site in operation in the world [and] Angkor Wat remained the centrepiece of attention [and] evolved over the years into a truly international work site with five different teams” (UNESCO 2003a, 27, 29; see below). However, the declared paradigm change from emergency salvage to sustainable development was also mirrored in a new distribution of roles at Angkor Park – arguably not far from the classical colonial strategy of social stratification – between the international teams doing the high-tech and expensive work of temple restoration, and the national APSARA authority, which was assigned soft-skill tasks in more local, traditional, and vernacular heritage categories.15

ardised responses by the selected ‘experts’ on the topics; whereas all reports are more or less void of any subaltern voices from local communities, Buddhist monasteries, neighbourhood organisations, and tour operators within Angkor Park (compare Pl. EpII.1d). 13  The list of the “representatives” adopting the Paris Declaration included above others Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, the UK, the USA, Vietnam; the Asian Development Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), the International Council of Museums (ICOM), ICOMOS, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation Regional ­Centre for the Archaeology and Fine Arts (SEAMEO/SPAFA), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UNESCO, the World Bank, the World Monuments Fund (WMF), and the World Tourism Organisation (WTO)”. Issued on 15 November 2003, the Paris Declaration was a pure self-congratulatory and affirmative document that cemented the international setup over Angkor, and gave two ‘neo-colonial’ samples of their missionary rhetoric, voting for a “necessary transfer [and not a mutual exchange, MF] of know-how between international experts and their Cambodian counterparts” (§13); by fostering the export of the ICC-Angkor “as a model for other similar actions throughout the world” (§16) (UNESCO 2003, 1–3). 14  Whereas Dominique de Villepin as France’s minister of foreign affairs referred to “the international community [being] proud” about the great success of the ICC in caring for the “world public property” [sic] of Angkor and called for a further “international mobilisation”, Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Sen characterised Angkor as a source to “generate revenue” and “tourism as a driver capable of pulling all the wagons towards social and economic growth” (UNESCO 2003a, 2,3). 15  The latter ones included “sociological/ethnographic studies about [and] educating the Angkor Park communities, […] tourist planning and management of the Angkor Park World Heritage [with new] tour itineraries and park animation and event tourism” schemes, ranging from “elephant and moored balloon rides” near Angkor Wat to “holding large-scale international festivals […] like in Baalbek/Lebanon or Carthage/Tunisia” and “setting up a company for evening shows […] like in Prambanan/Indonesia” (UNESCO 2003a, 36, 48, 51, 67).

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The strikingly frequent evocation of an independent national agency as “project owner” (thirty times on some one hundred pages in the proceedings!) can be interpreted as a veritable fig leaf over the great international appetite for Angkor Park: even the above-mentioned tasks for the national agency came with the proposal to “recruit for a three-year period a high-calibre experts with confirmed expertise in tourism planning and management in internationally recognised cultural sites” (UNESCO 2003a, 66). In this vein, the 2003 Paris Conference proceed­ings were themselves designed as a kind of commercial ‘world’s fair’ manual for Angkor, with “forty flagship projects” (UNESCO 2003a, 62–105) and explicit (French) product placements, such as the “benchmark urban plan for Siem Reap and its ‘Gates of Angkor’ development zone drawn up in 1995 by ARTE/BCEOM” from Paris (see below), an “analysis of the synergy between showcasing historical heritage and social-economic development” by the Agence française de développement, and an “analysis and economic modelling of the investments to be made and funding needs” by the concessions construction company of VINCI Group. Those players had, “under supervision of Beschaouch”, as indicated in the acknowledgement section of the Paris proceedings, financed the conference and written its proceedings anyway (UNESCO 2003a, 106). But Angkor was now a ‘world’s (af)fair’ beyond the sole French connection: in 1992 Santa Fe in the Southwest of the United States had been the place where the World Heritage Committee under its president Azedine Beschaouch had pushed, after violent disputes behind closed doors, Ang­kor Park onto the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger (compare chapter XII). Twelve years later, the Far Eastern city of Suzhou in China hosted the very same ­UNESCO entity in its decision in July 2004 to “remove the property of Angkor” from the danger list and to transfer it to the ‘proper’ List of World Heritage Sites (UNESCO 2004, 67). The previously missing requirements of a coherent protection scheme had been delivered in the meantime.16 Surprisingly, removing Angkor Park from UNESCO’s ‘threatemergency-and-salvage agenda’ had no effect as far as a complete withdrawal of the international help structure over the site and the full return of Angkor Park as ‘national property’ to the ‘project owner’ was concerned. To the

very contrary: international influence even increased and was celebrated as a ‘great success story’ in colourful PR publications. The first one of this type was the 2008 brochure15 years of international cooperation for conservation and sustainable development. The over-formalised and elitist structure of ICC-Angkor was – as the ritual had it since 1993 – introduced by French and Japanese co-chairmen who praised ICC-Angkor as a “one-of-a kind-institution [to be] compared to a learned society” (ICC-Angkor 2008, 11). However, a comment by ICC’s now powerful scientific secretary Azedine Beschaouch (“Angkor saved, prosperity on the way”) counts as a bizarre highlight of institutional and personal self-congratulatory rhetoric (compare Beschaouch 2002a, 2003; Zink/Beschaouch/Verellen 2017). Echoes of similar language from French colonial exhibitions and France’s (post)colonial endeavour on the spot were hard to miss:17 I truly stand as a witness. In 1993, I was entrusted with the challenging duties of Scientific Secretary of the ICC. But I also stand as a committed witness. My first — and last — word, unhesitatingly and determinedly, is: Angkor has been saved! Obviously, though, there are imperfections. But for a person to be dazzled by light streaming down from the break in the clouds, no purpose is served by looking for stars enshrouded in darkness. Angkor, now, is dazzling. […] The Angkor site has been made secure. Safety of life and property now prevails at Angkor. No matter how big the crowd, visitors can enjoy their outing on a clean site. […] If we had to describe a reality that eventually imposed itself on the landscape and in people’s way of thinking, a decade later (after years of work to ‘bandage the wounds’), that would mean reviewing the major programs implemented by thirty or more teams from sixteen different countries (and four continents!), some of which are still ongoing. The list would be long, but no drudgery. […] Angkor Thom, the epicentre of the ‘international campaign’, […] Angkor Wat, the landmark temple that is home to no less than six international teams. […] And how could we fail to mention the effort put forth to improve access for tourists, upgrade the monument perimeter areas, and put in cultural itineraries. It’s a delight to walk about Angkor now. The forest resounds with

16  After the “World Heritage site of Angkor” was even mentioned in the Cambodian constitution of 1993

(§70), royal decrees, laws, and decisions were produced to establish the zoning scheme over the site (1994/ 2004), the APSARA Authority as a national protection agency (1995), and a cultural heritage law on the national level (1996/2002) (see APSARA 1996/2019). 17  Compare similar statements from colonial times during the French ‘discovery and exploration of Angkor’ (in chapters I to III), Angkor Wat’s representation as a French-colonial patrimoine culturel during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (in chapter VII), about the impact of French-colonial and early postcolonial archaeology and restoration on the spot (in chapters IX and X), and certainly UNESCO’s and Beschaouch’s own statements around 1990 when Angkor was nominated as a site of ‘world heritage in danger’ (chapter XII).

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singing birds. One’s gaze looks out to serene horizons. Some fifteen years ago, a pressing appeal went out to the international community: ‘Save Angkor!’ We did it! And we’ve moved on to what comes next: ‘Keep what we’ve got. Make it prosper.’ [italics MF] (ICC-Angkor 2008, 19—21)

representative from the Southeast Asia region but of ­seven men from outside of Cambodia: three from France, two from Japan, one from Algeria, and one from Italy.19 However, more than all the printed words, the chosen photographs of the commemorative volume ‘illustrated’ the institutionalised social stratification and ritualised But the 2013 brochure went far beyond this personal state- power structure of ICC-Angkor. What we termed in the ment. After an impressive project list, map, and presenta- introduction to this book as Angkor’s – and particularly tion of the “international contributions to safeguarding Angkor Wat’s – performative and patrimonial affordances and sustainable development of sixteen countries and four and actionable capacities came back to life here, similar to continents” (ICC-Angkor 2008, 22–26, 45–57, see below), scenarios from French-colonial Cambodge (see Pl. V.7) and a “coherent, holistic and integrated approach for the eco-­ French colonial exhibitions (see Pl. V.6). With the Cambohistoric and archaeological site of Angkor” was brought to dian king to legitimise its main actors (Pl. EpII.2a; compare Fig. IX.62; Figs. X.55a,b), and ruling politicians to the forefront to read the site as an “economic and living acknowledge Angkor’s iconic World Heritage status (Pl. religious space” and an “environment in which some 100,000 inhabitants live and work, comprising 112 villages EpII.2b; compare Fig. Intro.1a, Figs. VII.44–45; Pl. VII.15b; and hamlets throughout the 40,000 hectares of the site in- Figs. X.55a,b; Figs. XI.10a and 15), ICC-Angkor’s declared cluded on the World Heritage List” (ICC-Angkor 2008, (international, never Cambodian!) ‘ad hoc experts’ would 43–44). The Paris-educated native Cambodian Lim Bun have their ritual of walking from one Angkorian temple Hok (now National Programme Specialist) had the honour site to the other to check on the universal standards of conof commenting on the “role and operations of ICC-Angkor” servation and restoration (Pl. EpII.2c–d; compare Fig.IX. (ICC-Angkor 2008, 37–40),18 even if its new institutional 45a,b and 69). In the scenario illustrated in the brochure, instrument – with “two ad hoc groups of experts (four ex- which again qualifies for Foucault’s term of an enacted utoperts for conservation and three for sustainable develop- pia of the multi-sited near-and-far and the simultaneous ment)” – tragically consisted of no Cambodians, not even a side-by-side in the realm of cultural heritage (see again the

18  The rules and regulations of ICC-Angkor with fourteen paragraphs were adopted on 1 December 2008,

amended on 31 May 2009, and attached to the publication (ICC-Angkor 2008, 127–33). §2 defined its role as “an international mechanism to coordinate the assistance made available by different countries and organisations for the safeguarding and development of the historic site of Angkor, [to] see to the coherence of the various projects, defin[ing], when necessary, the technical and financial standards required, [overseeing] the implementation of procedures intended to promote the understanding, assessment and follow-through of scientific, conservation and development projects proposed for the Angkor site, [and to] coordinate the development of a methodological document on conservation ethics and practice at Angkor”. Besides paragraphs to make ICC-Angkor a hermetic and elitist setup (attendance from outside only allowed by official requests and explicit invitation!), and strictly hierarchised power structure (from the Cambodia’s king as honorary chairmen, two co-chairmen from Japan and France, and the secretariat by UNESCO down to signatory member-states and their affiliated expert cultures) and a highly ritualised process with plenary, technical and quadripartite sessions (§§3-9), §10 covered the “Ad Hoc Group of Experts [being] appointed by the co-chairmen and the representative of Cambodia on the proposal of the Scientific Secretary, […] remaining independent and un-challenged in their conclusions”. 19  In a separate section the “Ad Hoc Experts” were introduced (ICC-Angkor 2008, 121–24). Those for conservation were: the Algerian Mounir Bouchenaki (formerly director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and ICCROM’s director general), the Italian Giorgio Croci (professor of structural engineering from the La Sapienza University in Rome and formerly chairman within ICOMOS; compare Croci 1998); and the French government architect Pierre-André Lablaude (formerly at the Versailles Public Institution and the French National Commission for Historic Monuments), the Japanese Kenichiro Hikada (director of World Cultural Studies at Tsukuba University, following Hiroyuki Suzuki). Those “Ad Hoc Experts for Sustainable Development” were: the French Jean-Marie Furt (French tourism law and development consultant), the Japanese Tetsuji Goto (JICA member), and the French François Houllier (scientific director at the National Institute of Agricultural Research in France). In a special section, Bouchenaki, Croci, and Lablaude added their personal “Impressions” about Angkor as “UNESCO’s biggest cultural heritage safeguarding project since Abu Simbel” (Bouchenaki), the early heroic days since 1994 on the spot (Croci) and ICC-Angkor as an “experimental laboratory without equal in the world, a genuinely universal think tank, [for] fraternal encounter and [...] fertile dialectics between cultural diversity and universality of values” (Lablaude). Furt’s section on “Sustainable tourism: A challenge for Angkor and the Siem Reap Region” again used the (colonial) term of a “wonderful laboratory” (ICC-Angkor 2008, 61–72, here 64).

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introduction to this book), global mass tourism now started, in reality, to slowly ‘re-ruin’ painstakingly restored heritage icons such as Angkor Wat (Pl. EpII.2e); whereas – at least in the photographic wishful thinking montage of the publication – the local world at and around the very same temple sites was still full of pristine and untouched nature, vernacular and pre-modern traditions (Pl. EpII.2f), and living religious practices of caring Buddhist monks (Pl. EpII.2g; compare Pl. IX.5 with Pl.XII.12b and 19). At the threshold of 2012 and 2013, the ‘world’s (af)fair’like setup over Angkor reached a new climax which itself sounded like a late-colonial echo in globalised disguise.20 One important step in the codification of international cultural heritage practice was the publication of brochures like Angkor World Heritage Asia tourism management plan (December 2012) and the Guidelines for safeguarding the World Heritage site of Angkor (also called the Angkor Charter).21 Shortly after Cambodia was rewarded with more global attention as the thirty-seventh session of the World Heritage

Committee took place in Phnom Penh in June 2013. In this context UNESCO featured a themed volume on “World Heritage in Cambodia” in its World Heritage journal (Pl. EpII.3a,c).22 In the very same busy year of 2013, the Angkor heritage management framework (HMF) was issued in October 2013 as a collaborative effort of APSARA, UNESCO, and ICC-Angkor, but this time pitched through an interest group from Australia’s government and GML Heritage (Golden Mackay Logan) consultants (Pl. EpII.3b).23 Shortly after that, the Third Intergovernmental Conference on Angkor, focusing on “Sustainable and comprehensive management of Angkor, Living heritage”, took place in Siem Reap in December 2013. At the end of the event, the short Angkor Declaration summarised conjoint efforts to strengthen the focus on “the communities living in the eco-­historical site of Angkor” (§9).24 However, the ceremonial, institutionally ritualised, and socially segmented ‘world’s (af)fair’ over Angkor Park was packed into a second commemorative project after 2008: the publication

20  Half a century earlier, during Cambodia’s short era of independence (1953–70), the country under an ‘enlightened dictator’ called Norodom Sihanouk had rather successfully gone window-shopping for international funding schemes for its national, mostly infrastructural, recovery projects (see chapter X). At the same moment, Bernard Philippe Groslier, France’s last general conservator of Angkor Park, drafted his (unpublished) Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor with the vision of “internationalising the conservation of Angkor” (Groslier 1958b, 56) by using new scientific methods and a Western network of cultural heritage expertise (UNESCO, ICOM, etc.) to cover conservation and presentation to ecological questions for Angkor Park (see chapter IX). Now, the trend of a globalised ‘NGO-isation’ over a one more time recovering Cambodia reached another climax while international heritage expertise continued to surge into an already twenty-year-old World Heritage site called Angkor Park. 21  The latter was jointly issued by UNESCO and APSARA on 5 December 2012 in Siem Reap, but its production process already started in 2002 and had, under the chairman Giorgio Croci, fifteen revisions through a working group of more than thirty experts from the various international projects over Angkor. With two parts on “Principles” commenting on “some basic tenets of conservation” and the “Guidelines” as technical recommendations, the Angkor Charter propagated a “multi-disciplinary approach” with special “reference to particular structural/architectural typologies and to specific environmental conditions” of Angkor (UNESCO/ APSARA 2012, 15, 24). 22  Entries covered an interview between Beschaouch and Sok An, thematic sections on Angkor (including Khoun’s comment on “Heritage and population in the Angkor site”, see next sub-chapter of this epilogue), Preah Vihear, Cambodia’s Tentative List for World Heritage, Intangible Heritage (with the Royal Khmer Ballet, compare chapter X), the Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve, and Cambodia’s Memory of the World with the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. 23  The 180-page brochure comprised of a series of components, including a tourism management plan, a risk map, capacity building, and pilot projects. Ten policies should cover issues like environmental conservation, education and interpretation, communication, and information management (UNESCO/APSARA/ GML 2013). 24 The Angkor Declaration (2013) was in its seventeen paragraphs not much different from the Tokyo Declaration (1993) and the Paris Declaration (2003), but it now changed the ‘emergency-help’ rhetoric into a highly ceremonial ‘mission-accomplished’ rhetoric. However, it also listed new keywords such as “sustainable and comprehensive management of Angkor, Living Heritage” (§6), “enhancing the integrated and multidisciplinary approach” (§7), the priority to “the tangible and intangible needs of the communities living in the eco-historical site through implementation of the Angkor HMF” (§9), the “protection of vulnerable communities” (§11), and to share with them “the benefits derived from successful management of the historic site” (§12). Towards the end, it declared the conjoint wish to improve the ICC-Angkor structure through better monitoring (§14), by giving APSARA a “greater role and responsibility” (§15), while exporting its “successful model to other parts of the world in similar cases of cultural heritage facing peril” (§16) and encouraging other countries to support the “ICC’s noble cause of safeguarding Angkor” (§17).

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ICC-Angkor: 20 years of international cooperation for con- development (2003–2013)”, presented a long list of internaservation and sustainable development summarised the cat- tional projects (see the next sub-chapter of this epilogue). alogue exhibition “1993–2013, 20 years of ICC-Angkor” on However, the institutionalised, pyramidal stratification of display during the above-mentioned World Heritage Com- the heritage regime over Angkor Park again came to the mittee meeting and the Intergovernmental Conference on forefront through a series of illustrations. After the short Angkor. As Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, intro to ICC-Angkor, with high international officials (like wrote in the preface, Angkor was a “spectacular example of ICCROM’s recent director general) being “decorated by international solidarity” and a giant “laboratory” for safe- H.E. Dr. Sok An”, the view of the reader was opened into guarding historic sites, promoting sustainable tourism and the 2009 ICC meeting itself with (only) international spehandicraft, and supporting the “full mobilisation of local cialists and ‘ad hoc experts’ in the first row (Pl. EpII.4a). communities”. However, the path towards “harmony” nev- The impressive international input was presented again through high-tech restoration projects on monumental ertheless “required a global approach reaching all aspects of heritage” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 6; compare full introduc- ­architecture (Pl. EpII.4b), but now a new aspect of “comtory quote). Sok An, Hun Sen’s real leader of APSARA after munity participation” was added with a photograph of a Vann Molyvann’s sudden and dubious dismissal in 2001, “religious ceremony at Angkor” and “oxcart tourism” (Pl. proudly reported that the “international community con- EpII.4c). In between both the fact-based, high-tech archaetinued to fully commit in the field and the developed pro- ological restoration work and the soft-skill task of ‘going jects reached the impressive number of 58 plus, concerning native’, the national institution of APSARA was either sim15 countries. And this is far from being over” (ICC-Angkor ply added as partner institution to almost every interna2013, 7). A sense of déjà vu, with echoes of the diplomatic tional project, or it took the assigned role of caring for the handling of the ‘global gift called Angkor’ over the last traditional and vernacular aspects of the wider Angkor some hundred years, might also be sparked by the remarks area (Pl. EpII.4d).26 At the end of the pyramid, the so-called of Serge Mostura, co-chairman of ICC-Angkor as French ‘locals’ were either depicted doing the actual physical labour work for international restoration projects or – and ambassador to Cambodia, who touched lightly upon the ‘eventual full retrocession’ of Angkor to Cambodia:25 “The here only a select few – as highly motivated but seemingly eternal ‘trainees’. ICC-Angkor, supported by the passionate engagement of a community of international researchers for this outstandWhen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ICC-Angkor ing site, will continue to bring its essential expertise, but it was celebrated on 4–5 December 2018 in the Sokha Siem is on Cambodia and Cambodians that eventually [sic, italics Reap Resort and Convention Centre, the below-quoted MF] the responsibility for Angkor is bestowed” (ICC-Ang- press release sounded like a transcultural echo of an endkor 2013, 10). In the meantime, Azedine Beschaouch had lessly repeated ritual. After the international ad hoc experts advanced to “Permanent Scientific Secretary of ICC-Ang- had again given their absurd placet over Angkor Park, and kor” (this attribute was missing in the 2008 volume), and France and Japan took their ceremonial co-chairs to underhe now placed his own function under the new paradigm line the global solemnity over the event, Cambodia’s eterof ‘sustainability’: “Long live our ICC-Angkor!” (ICC-Ang­ nal prime minister (a onetime Khmer Rouge cadre) could, kor 2013, 14). The following two chapters, “Ten years of together with the new king, mimic and even outstrip – at safeguarding (1993–2003)” and “A decade of sustainable least with his own list of honorary titles – a mix of past

25  Wasn’t it already in 1907 that this return of Angkor from Siam was made to a country which was de facto

a foreign ‘protectorate’ of France (see the debate in the introduction to chapter VI)?

26  In the chapter on ‘Safeguarding’, the topic of “Community participation” and APSARA’s work with “Ar-

chaeological Park communities” was introduced with a pair of photographs: the smaller one about a “ride on oxcarts” was misleadingly superimposed with a double-page photograph (ICC-Angkor 2013, 34–35). In reality, the depiction of a “religious ceremony at Angkor Wat” had nothing to do with APSARA’s educational mission per se (compare the same misuse in a colonial exhibition context as in Fig. VII.24a) but more with an alternative religious practice on the very spot ever since. In the chapter on ‘Sustainable development’, the same topic of “oxcart tours” was, together with photographs on “farming”, “handicrafts and a “solar panel station”, repeated to frame the collaborative project “Angkor Participatory Natural Resource Management and Livelihoods Programme” of APSARA and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in which, in a mere two years between 2010 and 2012 and with a funding of US $1.5 million, supposedly “over 2,000 Cambodians were trained by participating in heritage education activities” and “15,723 villagers [had been] beneficiaries of the project” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 62). In the Japan-led “Angkor Community Learning Centre Project”, since 2006 and with a budget of US $2 million, the “number of Cambodians trained [reached] approximately 16,000” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 95). The illustrations about handicraft, dance, traditional music, and animal raising (Pl. EpII.4d right) did, however, have strong similarity to what was commodified as Cambodian culture on display in French universal/colonial exhibitions (compare Pl. V.6; Fig. VIII.30b; Fig. X.47).

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colonial grandeur and royalty similar to the one that had already been staged ten thousand kilometres away and almost a century earlier (back then Maréchal Lyautey proudly presented the Angkor Wat replica to his guests, the British King George and his wife, during the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931, see Fig. Intro.1a): From 1 to 3 December 2018, the ad-hoc experts will visit many work sites in Angkor Park. These visits are organized by the Secretariat of the ICC-Angkor in collaboration with the APSARA National Authority. The following days will be devoted to a number of presentations on main achievements in favour of conservation and sustainable development within the framework of twenty-five years of the ICC-Angkor by specialists […] The ICC-Angkor celebrates its twenty-five years in the presence of Madam Audrey AZOULAY, Director-General of UNESCO and several high-ranking personalities from the governments of France and Japan. On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ICC-Angkor, Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo HUN Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia, will

honour the event with his presence by delivering the opening speech on 4 December, and His Majesty Samdech Preah Bâromneath NORODOM Sihamoni, King of Cambodia, will deign to preside over the closing ceremony on 5 December. (ICC-Angkor 2018)

But these self-congratulatory gestures were far from over. It seemed that the threshold of 2018 and 2019 triggered a new commemorative momentum for the never-ending international salvage efforts at Angkor (compare Falser 2105c). On the French side, the myth about the unquestioned great achievements from colonial times were directly transcribed into the UNESCO-related presence with an August 2018 themed issue on Angkor – Découvrir, restaurer, visiter in the famous Le Monde journal (Pl. EpII.5a).27 In the January 2019 special issue of the World Heritage journal, UNESCO celebrated its own “success stories”, from the Nubian Monuments (Abu Simbel and Philae) all the way – and once again after the UNESCO Courier cover stories from January 1965 and December 1971 (see Pl. IX.24b, XI.6a) – to Angkor (Pl. EpII.5b).28

2. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)fair spatialised Burton Benedict’s checklist in his 1983 volume Anthropol- these ‘ordered world’ imaginaries. To facilitate this the spaogy of World’s Fairs was useful in conceptualising the insti- tial arrangement followed specific criteria, zones were detutionalised setup of Angkor Park after 1992 through the limited for various layout formats and distributed with the lens of universal and colonial exhibitions. Both configura- “host country’s lion’s share” (Benedict 1983, 19) of the largtions, world’s fairs on the one hand and World Heritage (of est and best space. Additionally, classification schemes Angkor) on the other, connected to each other over time were strictly codified regarding which material was allowed and space as what Foucault had termed ‘enacted utopias’ (or not) to showcase the “particular view of the ideally con(see the introduction to this book): they presented two structed world” (29); and finally, detailed parameters for transculturally entangled versions of ‘ordered worlds’, and the display of the various physical objects were defined. In both of them necessitated an internal control and coordi- Benedict’s interpretation “world’s fairs built idealized connation mechanism with a comparable set of ritualised rules sumer cities within their walls [and] they presented a sanand regulations, stabilised in highly ceremonial procedures. itized view of the world with no poverty, no war, no social But Benedict also reminds us that world’s fairs also problems. […] The world was shown as becoming more came with spatialised environments with fully walkable ‘civilized’”, and the overall environmental scenario was arstage sets that allowed the visitor a bodily experience of ranged in “carefully laid out vistas” and dioramas in which

27  The scenography of the themed volume was an interesting montage of old colonial grandeur, with a start-

ing point of Christophe Pottier’s interview about one hundred years of the EFEO and its “Angkor, une Atlantide asiatique pour une emprise coloniale” (6–11), followed by Azedine Beschaouch’s comment on “Angkor est un laboratoire pour la conservation éco-globale” (24–25), entries about Henri Mouhot and George Groslier, and a closing “carnets d’écrivains” with contributions from Louis Delaporte, André Malraux, Pierre Loti, and Jean Lacouture. 28  Here, the storyline started with “the evolution of conservation” with a focus on UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention, continued with an entry on “World Heritage conservation: Successes and challenges”, before the case study on Abu Simbel (“The story of an extraordinary rescue”) connected with “Angkor: The success story of 25 years of conservation”, with Chau Sun Kerya from APSARA describing the “extremely positive track record that makes it a model on a global scale” and giving explicit “thanks to Professor Azedine Beschaouch, Permanent Scientific Secretary of ICC-Angkor since 1993, for his friendly advice” (Chau 2019, 50; compare Chau 2006).

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even nature was presented (for the exotic parts, Benedict talked about “manufactured jungles”) and “sub-ordinated by man-made products” (5). In relation to this epilogue’s central hypothesis, a specific sub-branch of world’s fairs (or universal exhibitions, as we call them in conformity with the French term) is again of particular importance here: one of the most powerful above-quoted ‘ordered world’ imaginations did not only cover the hosting nation’s and participating nations’ own metropolitan spheres but also their different endeavours in a ‘global world’s (af)fair’ – called colonialism. As a consequence, colonial sections of universal exhibitions – or individual colonial exhibitions on their own – had to spatialise this specific ‘ordered world experience’ – namely, the one of a mastered space in overseas colonies. With France’s 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris, where the ‘idea’ of civilising nations to care for their cultural heritage in overseas was also ‘sold’, the colonial imaginaire was for the first time spatialised in an outdoor section (see chapter IV).29 And after the purely national colonial exhibitions in Marseille of 1906 and 1922 (see chapters V and VI), the ‘ideally constructed world’ – now a project of multi-national colonialism – was spatialised in a giant parcours within the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris with which the visitor would virtually walk through the different overseas colonies from French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies to the Italian and Belgian possessions in Africa, and through protectorates or mandated territories such as Syria and Lebanon, in order to get informed about the different civilising tasks and missions of each colonising, protecting, or mandate-holding European nation (see Pl. VII.3a). After the ‘ordered world’s (af)fair’ was institutionalised and spatialised, it needed to be physically materialised. What Benedict called “orgies of competitive displays” (Benedict 1983, 43) reminds us again about the fact that world’s fair events were finally all about placing products on display. These should ideally highlight the “prestige of the manufacturer” and shine as veritable “status symbols” of their presenters, be they individuals, firms, or whole nations. Benedict explored it further: “[Those] objects epitomized nations and states; they were imbued with historic and sacred meanings in Durkheim’s sense. They expressed social unity in a material form. Sentiments emanated from them. […] Commercial companies were represented by pictures or models of the objects they manufactured, towns and regions by their principal products, whole nations by some symbolic object such as a relic or emblem fraught with emotional and historic meanings”. And as “techniques to impress” were essential in world’s fairs, the ‘aesthetic size’ mattered (after Jessup 1950), and “monumentality was a feature of every exposition [to] dwarf the spectator”. Gigan-

tism (and ‘miniaturism’) came in all different aspects, from sheer quantity to whole-world-encompassing scales of display (compare Figs. IV.1a,b) to the overwhelming size of the exhibits themselves (Benedict 1983, 15–18; compare Stewart 1993). In this context, the invention of freestanding national pavilions was first presented in the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris (see chapter I), and buildings came in the physical disguise of partially or fully reproduced souvenirs and stylistic symbolic models to represent the quintessences of each nations’ ideal pasts, swanky presents, and hoped-for futures. The most iconic sets of both spatial and physical displays of the present nations civilisées were the rues des nations stage sets (such as in the 1878 and 1900 Paris Exhibitions) with the different national pavilions in a comparative and competitive side-by-side formation. One of Benedict’s observed strategies in all world’s fairs is crucial for our specific context: the “borrowing of prestigious symbols” – as he explained further: “Symbols of the past were appropriated to enhance the standing of groups or actions of the present, as when modern nations clothe statues of their leaders in Roman togas. Such symbol borrowing was rampant at world’s fairs. It appeared in everything from the smallest commercial exhibits to the buildings themselves” (Benedict 1983, 18). As a matter of fact, this strategy to clothe whole buildings in world’s fair displays with borrowed stylistic references of glorious pasts in order to symbolically enhance the status and prestige of national presents was reflected in the very subtitle of the first volume of this publication. What we conceptualised as a process ‘from plaster casts to exhibition pavilions’ referred to the crucial twist from the national symbolic borrowing to a colonial one: the first plaster casts from Angkor arrived in the 1867 Universal Exhibition and landed in the section of mechanical art reproduction techniques (see chapter I), but they soon after made their career via Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois (chapter III) to the French-colonial sections to authenticate the pagode d’Angkor in the above-quoted 1889 Universal Exhibition (Fig. IV.9), the palais du Cambodge and the palais de l’Indochine in the 1906 and 1922 National Colonial Exhibitions in Marseille (Figs. V.18a and VI.18c), the palais du Gouvernement général de l’Indo-Chine in the above-mentioned 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (Fig. VII.22c), and, finally, the pavillon de l’Indochine in the 1937 International Exhibition (Fig. VIII.26), both in Paris. A colonial borrowing of prestigious symbols of the past meant here that the stylistic quotations and partial or full architectural replications of Angkor Wat under the label of a ‘French-colonial pavilion’ on French soil were not only – re-enacted in parades and ceremonies under French author­ ities – brought from a rue des nations into an avenue des colonies (compare again Fig. Intro.1a with Fig. VII.44 and

29  Now the colonially mastered space from North Africa to Indochina on the one side of the spatial display was confronted, on the other side, with the involved ‘civilising tools’ of military control (represented with the War Ministry), hygiene, and public assistance (compare Pl. IV.6).

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Pl. VII.15b, 45b). Plasters casts from Angkor also helped to transcribe the original site’s historical grandeur of Cambodia’s past into France’s present national prestige of the scientific rediscoverer, patient restorer, political protector and finally “legitimate inheritor” of the cultural heritage of le Cambodge.30 But how do these references to our findings in volume one help to explore this epilogue’s hypothesis that the post1992 formation of Angkor as a World Heritage site finally reconnects in a transcultural circle to Angkor as a world’s (af)fair with neo-colonial tendencies? In a first step, we have already seen how Angkor Park was brought into a world’s fair-like, institutionally codified and ritualistic, self-congratulatory organisation scheme under the International Co-ordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC-Ang­ kor). But how did it, in a second and third step, spatialise and materialise over Angkor Park after 1992? To answer this question, some historic references are useful to recall from chapters IX to XII on how Angkor Park was created in the French-colonial period and how this constellation mutated over the decades. As a starting point and under the umbrella term of ‘cartographic strategies’, we investigated the process of how the earliest French maps from Mouhot in 1860, Garnier in 1873, Fournereau in 1890, and Aymonier in 1901 (Fig. IX.1, Pl. IX.4 and 6)

contributed to a certain ‘space-time colonisation’ (after Gregory 1994; compare Harley 1988 and Lefebvre 1974/91). This concerned the open space over the ancient capital of Angkor with its remaining temples and still inhabited hamlets, as it was progressively perceived and framed (mapped and scaled, inventoried, named, and geometricised), hierarchised and organised, institutionalised and protected as an ‘archaeological reserve’. Crucial in this process was certainly the so-called ‘retrocession’ of the region from Siam in 1907, through which this already ‘archaeologically themed space’ was now de jure incorporated into the French-colonial protectorate of le Cambodge. As a consequence, the Parc d’Angkor was delimited and spatialised as a “domaine archéologique réservé” and a “purely scientific enclave” shortly after and officially decreed in 1925 and 1930, while upcoming guidebooks transposed the same into a commodified tourist parcours.31 In an astonishing continuity, the spatial integrity of the French management of Angkor Park was preserved during Japanese occupation of Indochina in the 1940s, as it was almost instantly handed back to the EFEO with the Bilateral Accords of 1956 once Cambodia had gained its full national independence in 1953/54. At this point, Angkor Park also served as an ‘enacted space’ of reimagined cultural grandeur and reinvented traditions for the Cambodian side (see chapter X).32 Ignored by scientific research until today and contrary to the official narra-

30  The rhetoric of France as a veritable ‘inheritor’ of Cambodia’s cultural heritage strongly surfaced during

the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (see chapter VII and the quotes from Deloncle, Olivier, and Claude Farrère). 31  Some data needs to be remembered here from chapter IX: In reaction to this change of political ownership in 1907, Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière (a military officer and explorer-archaeologist), on the basis of his 1901/09 ‘descriptive inventories’ (Pl. IX.7a,b) and his plan d’ensemble des monuments du groupe d’Angkor of 1908 (Fig. IX.5), turned in his proposal of a “domaine archéologique réservé” under the name of “Parc d’Angkor” (Lajonquière 1909, 163–64). Chief archaeologist Henri Parmentier described it as a “purely scientific enclave” (Parmentier 1933a, 1149) with the self-inflicted task of safeguarding and development under his École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO). What we termed ‘the spatiotemporal making’ of Angkor Park was – on the basis of the 1909 “carte du groupe d’Angkor” (Pl.IX.8a,b and 10a,b) – further investigated through the internal debate about whether to create a “protection zone [only] around the principle monuments” or an all-comprising perimeter for the “integral conservation of the ruins” (Parmentier 1910). An official zoning decree of 1909, recognised in a royal ordinance by Cambodia’s King Sisowath and instantly ‘back-translated’ into a French-colonial arrêté in 1911, handed the whole archaeological region into the responsibility of the EFEO. At the same moment when the French law of historic monument protection of 1913 was simply transcribed in 1924 onto the whole cultural heritage of Indochine, the official Arrêtés créant le parc archéologique d’Angkor, délimitant le parc d’Angkor and fixant la limite du Parc d’Angkor between 1925 and 1930 fixed the “zone réservée” perimeter of Angkor Park (Pl. IX.12, 13). Additionally, guidebooks from the chief conservators like Jean Commaille in 1912, Henri Marchal (he invented the today still valid “petit et grand circuits” through Angkor Park in the 1920s, Fig. IX.21), and Maurice Glaize (he established the “itinerary-types” through the individual temples, see Fig. IX.24) preconceived, until today, the entire space-time management of the touristic parcours, and the sites’ – and particularly Angkor Wat’s – spectacularised visiting and ‘picturesque’ viewing schemes (compare Pl. IX.16). 32  Across this threshold from a late-colonial into an early postcolonial era under the Francophile King and autocratic state leader Norodom Sihanouk, Angkor Park did not only advance until the early 1970s into the world’s largest and best equipped archaeological heritage reserve with more than one thousand workers under France’s last conservator general of Angkor, Bernard Philippe Groslier; as explored in chapter X, his scientifically high-tech restored and ready-to-use temple sites of Angkor Park were now politically re-appropriated for the postcolonial nation-state of Cambodia, and instrumentalised as stage sets for reinvented religious rit-

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tive of a twenty-year total silence over Angkor, the traumatic decades between 1970 and 1990 could be conceptualised for the first time in this book (see chapter XI) as an extremely crucial period for Angkor Park. Although its ‘physical space’ (the architectural site) survived almost untouched (in fact, uncared for) during Khmer republican civil war (1970– 75), the Khmer Rouge period (1975–79) and the Vietnamese occupation (1979–89), the ‘conceptual space’ of Angkor Park changed dramatically and has continued to ever since. In fact, its status changed from that of an Orientalist heritage reserve of applied French-colonial archaeology into a truly global icon of cultural heritage: for the first and last time in its 150-year-long transcultural history, Angkor as a “national park” (see Pl. XI.3, 12b) was – in 1970 and 1971, during Cambodia’s short, elusive, early republican moment as a fully decolonised nation-state (and this included the self-decolonising effort of a coup d’état against the country’s autocratic state leader) – conceived as a ‘fully neutralised space as cultural heritage of all humanity’.33 In the context of this epilogue’s central hypothesis, we argue that it was from this brief moment around 1970 onwards that the old colonial organisation of Angkor Park slowly re-spatialised into a neo-colonial world’s fair-like configuration, with its climax after 2000. As we discussed in chapter XI, the Angkor Park as a patrimonial space was subsequently re-colonised, but now in the form of a truly global commodity of competing cultural heritage and inheritance claims during Cold War politics.34 And just like at the threshold of the post-1992 era, Angkor Park advanced to-

wards a veritable ‘world’s (af)fair’ in the late 1980s: on the one side, countries from India to Poland, and from Japan to France, rushed in from outside with different ideological motivations but united under the slogan of solidarity for Cambodia’s heritage.35 On the other side, the ex-genocidal Khmer Rouge with their diplomatic leaders around Khieu Samphan36 – acknowledged by the United Nations as Cambodia’s official regime in exile – successfully mimicked UNESCO’s own slogans of ‘cultural heritage of humanity’ and took the campaign of ‘Angkor as a cultural zone of peace’ hostage for their struggle of political survival. But around 1990 (see chapter XII), UNESCO’s prestige-driven World Heritage protagonists followed, in ambivalent complicity with Cambodia’s eternal father Sihanouk back on stage and with an internal coercive power structure against opposing expert opinion from ICOMOS, its neo-colonial ‘heritage-in-danger’ politics to push Angkor Park onto the World Heritage List in December 1992. Before any coherent cultural heritage regime could evolve on Cambodia’s national grounds after twenty years of war, genocide, and foreign occupation, almost all ex-French-colonial elements and standards for re-establishing Angkor Archaeological Park between the 1910s and 1950s were, in a move that was comparable to Cambodia’s short era of independence in the 1960s, hastily recycled.37 In continuity with the old colonial ‘paradigm to salvage’ overseas cultural heritage (after Clifford 1989) through joint efforts of ‘civilised nations’ (compare the above-quoted 1889 Universal Exhibition scenario), all this was now poured into a distinctive global

uals à la Angkorienne (Fig. X.8a; Pl. X.3a,b), ceremonial state festivities (Pl. X.20b), and re-enacted pageants of cultural heritage diplomacy (such as for sound-and-light shows at Angkor Wat for Charles de Gaulle in 1966 and Josip Broz Tito in 1968, compare Pl. X.21–24). 33  Nota bene, the moment was far from being a romantic or an easy one: even if it was in a war-like moment and still with French help, it nevertheless happened for the first time under an independent-national heritage protection agency (COPROBIC); and this ‘idea of a newly ordered world’ did not spatialise under a colonial salvage paradigm, but under the direction of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict – and therefore two full years before UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention appropriated the same humanitarian slogan! 34  All the different regimes – from the US-supported Khmer Republic to the China-backed neo-Marxist, genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and the Russia-Vietnam-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea – abused Angkor as an imaginary space of glorious pasts to justify their own ideological presents and visionary futures. 35  The Archaeological Survey of India ‘received’ the restoration project of Angkor Wat as a return gift for India’s diplomatic recognition in 1980 of the Vietnamese regime over Cambodia and substantiated its mission from a Hinduist inheritance claim over Angkorian culture; Japan re-emerged as a benefactor under the slogan of ongoing Buddhist traditions and exchanges; Poland came in via Vietnam in Socialist brotherhood, and France tried to return with its role as ex-colonial protector in a moment when the country itself accommodated thousands of Cambodian refugees with their struggle of cultural resilience in the name of Angkor Wat. 36  He was judged guilty in the Khmer Rouge genocide in November 2018 (Beech 2018). 37  This comprised the above-quoted inventory system (compare Fig. XII.12a,b), protection laws, and decrees for institutional questions from the 1930s all the way to the spatial protection perimeter over Angkor Park: whereas in UNESCO’s internal strategy of chartered Francophone expertise the proposal was launched to apply the old, above-quoted “perimeter of the groupe d’Angkor” from 1930 (compare Fraoua 1992), the requirement of new boundaries and “meaningful buffer zones” as claimed by the ICOMOS expert Henry Cleere (ICOMOS 1992) was, after pressure by the president of the World Heritage Committee in 1992, waived at this point in time and postponed.

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heritage mould of a ‘world’s (af)fair’ dynamic.38 In a strange moment of transcultural, both spatial and temporal, ‘back-­ translation’ (see this term explained in the introduction of this book), the Association Monuments du Monde (a group of French engineers, architects, and heritage conservation experts) superimposed, in their mission report, the upcoming spatial configuration of the World Heritage site of Angkor back onto the very same capital of France (see Figs. XII.13a,b). Wasn’t it exactly there that ‘the world’ had been on display in a full series of universal exhibitions, and where France’s particular colonial imaginary over Indochine was, together with other colonial nations, temporarily spatialised in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (see above)? In 1993, the missing prerequisite of a coherent Zoning and Environmental Management Plan for Angkor was again outsourced to an international expert consortium tasked with developing the concept of a wider “Angkor Cultural Reserve” and five different zones, with “areas of Special Archaeological Concern” and proposed relocations of inappropriate settlements (compare ZEMP 1993b,§8.4 and see Pl. XII.15–17). Significantly in this context, the Draft Law of the Management of a National Estate of Angkor (ICC-Angkor 1993, 40, 63), proposed by Cambodia’s mastermind Vann Molyvann, was also a French product. In 1994 and on the basis of the ZEMP concept, the ‘Royal decree establishing protected cultural zones in the Siem Reap/ Angkor Region and guidelines for their management’ was issued (and was criticised as internal colonialism in the name of cultural heritage), with the No. 70 SSR Government decision of September 2004 making “all lands located in zone 1 and 2 of the Angkor site State properties” (Pl. EpII.6). But this national heritage space of Angkor Park was in fact already globalised. At the 2003 Angkor Conference in Paris, “more than thirty international operators (international organisations, universities, private companies, NGOs)” gathered to celebrate, as the proceedings had it, “a roster of over a hundred projects” at Angkor (UNESCO 2003a, 16, 27). When Beschaouch, in the ICC-Angkor commemorative brochure of 2008, now counted “thirty or more teams from sixteen different countries and from four continents” over the site and “no less than six international teams” over Ang­ kor Wat (ICC-Angkor 2008, 11), the attached map “Projects implemented on the Angkor Archaeological Site” was in fact a highly contested, transcultural affair (Pl. EpII.7). Not only did it, in all its abstract design, directly reconnect to an old colonial paratextual device from earliest French cartography (see above): a neo-colonial ‘dispossession by naming and non-naming’ meant here that the white space

Figure EpII.2  A “Khmer Grand Tour” through the ‘arcadian campagna’ of Angkor? New (bilingual) signaletic system over Angkor Park as indicated in the 2002 Rapport de synthèse for the conservation and development of Angkor (Source: Beschaouch 2002b, 67)

inside the perimeters of zones 1 and 2 again turned the actually (and progressively) inhabited land into an archaeological no-man’s-land whereas the twelve numbered dots indicated the primarily non-Cambodian projects over dead archaeological temple sites. And reconnecting with Benedict’s above-discussed observation of world’s fairs, their ‘multi-national cooperation schemes’ and competitive display and prestige politics – we added colonial exhibitions in their effort to display a conjoint project of multi-national colonialism – were indeed spatialised over World Heritage Angkor Park: a rue des nations-style to line up side by side the different national pavilions was now ‘back-translated’ – ironically alongside the old French-made petit et grand circuits which were now integrated into a new signaletic sys-

38  A series of ‘Save Angkor appeals’ (from Tokyo and Paris to Mayor’s own ‘Angkor Wat performance’ in December 1991) was accompanied with ‘Technical Round Tables of International Experts’ in Bangkok 1990 and Paris 1991 (compare UNESCO 1991c, 5). In this context, the Cambodian representative, Son Soubert, voted in vain for a decided “national coordination committee for the conservation of Khmer historical monuments” [italics MF] (UNESCO 1991c, 8).

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tem39 (Fig. EpII.2) – into a veritable avenue des colonies (ICC-Angkor 2013, 7)), the attached project map had, on (compare Pl. VII.2–3). Along this parcours, a full series of closer inspection, slightly altered (Pl. EpII.8): now, tweninternational projects from France, Japan, the United States, ty-two international projects were listed (Australia includGermany, Italy, Switzerland, China, India, the Czech Re- ed), but Cambodia’s APSARA Authority was simply added public, Great Britain, and Hungary indeed “took” their to all non-Cambodian projects and still had no individual Ang­korian temples (as ICC-Angkor itself called it, see entry of its complete own. At this point, the spatial configabove; UNESCO 2003a, 16) and therefore indeed lined up uration over Angkor Park may have indeed changed into a side by side right through Cambodia’s own most prestig- hyper-colonial heritage-scape that followed the logic of a ious patrimonial space. Wasn’t it neo-colonial in the way concession-styled setup. To quote again Maurizio Marinelli’s that Cambodia as the ‘host’ of the ‘world’s (af)fair’’-like study on the present-day status of the ex-concession of space called Angkor Park did not get the usual ‘lion’s share’ Tianjin40 in present-day China for what we can see as well for of space for its own national self-representation, but to the Angkor Park: with a certain institutionalised and ritualised very contrary was not represented at all with a single indi- “habitus of colonial agency” (after Bourdieu 1984) of the vidual dot on the given map to indicate a major site being international project management as well as the new Cambodian elites within the ‘structured arena’ of the ICC-Angindependently managed of its own? But maybe the above-mentioned ambivalent win-win kor, the latter may be described as well as “a hyphenated situation between all – local, national, international – play- space, something in between which lives and breathes both ers already developed into another spatial configuration. historically and emotionally between different worlds, Whereas UNESCO’s director general continued, in the [which] still maintains the symbolic sanitised order of coICC-Angkor commemorative brochure of 2013, to use the lonial power but not its semantics: a localised globality and contested term of a “laboratory” to characterise Angkor a globalised locale, a third, liminal, interstitial space that Park (ICC-Angkor 2013, 6) and the Cambodian represent- exists ‘in between’ competing cultural traditions, national ative could not seem to get enough of the international boundaries, historical periods and also critical methodolcommunity into Angkor (“fifty-eight-plus projects, con- ogies of seeing and understanding” (Marinelli 2009, 425; cerning fifteen countries – And this is far from being over” see full quote in the introduction to this book).

3. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)fair materialised How did this institutionalised and spatialised ‘world’s (af) fair’-like setting at Angkor Park materialise? Indeed, the ‘orgies of display’ in universal exhibitions with their affiliated ‘techniques to impress through gigantism and monumentality of the national pavilions’ (after Benedict’s keywords, see above) in order to boost the ‘prestige of the manufacturer’ were at play here, too: in a process comparable to the ‘borrowing of the prestigious symbols’, Angkor’s magnificent temple sites as ‘historic monuments’ became central in competitive ‘inter-national’ display in which the impressive appearance of each architecture now also highlighted the ‘re-manufacturing’ (restoration, preservation) mission of the different teams at work. The ‘restoration pressure’ over the individual temple structures, however, increased considerably due to the fact that the overall salvage mission

was now divided up from a once single and coherent (French, Cambodian) management structure into a diversified multi-national endeavour with much too much money available to be spent in a much too short period of time in order to present each nation’s individual temple project as a unique success story. In a ‘back-translated’ version of the rue des nations, the visitor to Angkor Park could now walk from one fabricated vision of an ‘ordered world’ to the other – as he would have along the avenue des colonies in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (compare Pl. VII.3a)41 – and get informed about the different picture-perfect (meaning: painstakingly restored) cultural heritage icons on display. We argue here that some eight decades later and ten thousand kilometres eastwards the visitor to Angkor Park could now, holding the above-quoted

39  Under the coordination of Azedine Beschaouch, the 2002 Rapport de synthèse – Conservation et dévelop-

pement dans la région de Siem Reap – Angkor tried to integrate the whole Angkor Park scenario into a new spatial, signaletic and now bilingual system with the wider Siem Reap area (Beschaouch 2002b). 40  The international concession of Tianjin (1860–1945) to the south-east of Beijing had nine international development areas under France, Italy, Germany, and Austro-Hungary to Japan and others, except China itself which was present with its own urban space. 41  Back then the side-by-side spectacle came, among others, with colonial France and its 1:1-scaled Angkor Wat; the Dutch East Indies with a Borobudur-Bali-styled pavilion; colonial Italy with its Roman Leptis Magna ruin from today’s Libya; colonial Britain with a Hindustan section; and the United States with a replica of Mount Vernon.

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map from ICC-Angkor’s commemorative 2008 brochure in In the sense of Foucault’s concept of heterotopias (see his hand (Pl. EpII.7), encounter a comparable scenario – introduction), we conceptualise the following short case with some old-time protagonists, but with changed sides studies of different international temple restoration and naand sites. We depict here only four different nations with tional architectural projects inside Angkor Park as side-by-­ their world’s fair livres d’or-like publications to celebrate side “effectively enacted utopias” of cultural heritage (Fou‘their’ restoration projects as quasi national pavilions: France cault 1986, 24). In all following cases, a veritable ‘world’s (af) with its École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) still fair-like contest’ of “utopic engineering” (Hetherington 2001, signed, since 1907, responsible for the Baphuon temple (Pl. 51) to produce perfect iconic temple sites with very different EpII.9a) and had given up Angkor Wat in 1975 due to po- restoration strategies accompanied a neo-colonial process of litical turmoil (compare Figs. Intro.15b,d; Pl. IX.17a); India “social ordering” (as Kevin Hetherington called it his 1997 with its Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was now in- book The badlands of modernity, see introduction): the restalled at Ta Prohm (Pl. EpII.9b) as it had equally left its maining patrimonial imaginary space between the glorious Angkor Wat project of the late 1980s and early 1990s after past (to be recreated by high-tech international expertise) severe international criticism (compare Pl. XI.25); Japan as and the super-modern present and future (banned from the the new big player in the game had succeeded in installing World Heritage reserve of Angkor Park altogether) was left its Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor to be filled by the belated national heritage protection agen(JSA) over the Bayon temple and managed to establish it- cy, which was tasked with reinventing and re-materialising self as an actor at Angkor Wat by restoring a so-called ‘li- the tradition of vernacular – and ‘sustainable’, as the new brary’ building (Pl. EpII.9c). Finally, Germany was present terminology had it – ways of living within the cultural rewith its German Apsara Conservation Project (GACP) and serve of Angkor Park. However, the most utopic version in now responsible for giving Angkor Wat’s world-iconic dec- this vein would be realised just outside the delimited reserve orated surfaces a new facelift (Pl. EpII.9d). in the form of a veritable ecovillage (see below).

3.1 EFEO’s Baphuon: A late colonial task completed With the Baphuon temple site, the EFEO resumed in 1995 one of its old (post)colonial, and one of its most challenging, tasks within the Archaeological Park of Angkor. The site was originally built in the eleventh century CE as a Shivaist mountain temple, with several enclosures, a central passageway, and a pyramid of three stories reaching a total height of thirty-five meters with a crowning elevated central tower framed by galleries and pavilions. Cleared from overgrowing (protecting) vegetation by Jean Commaille since 1908, the temple’s massive stone pyramid, origi­ nally built on a weak interior pile of sand, partially collapsed several times in 1918, 1943, 1946, and 1952 before a massive repair work was started from the late 1950s onwards by France’s last general conservator of Angkor, Bernard Philippe Groslier (Pl. EpII.10a,b; compare Pl. EpII.9a and Fig. IX.74). When the EFEO had to stop its activity in Angkor due to political turmoil around 1975, some three hundred thousand stones from the temple, systematically deposed until the early 1970s by Groslier, were left abandoned in the surrounding forest for the next two-and-ahalf decades (see the same fate in the context of Angkor Wat).42 Tragically, the graphic documentation of the stones’ precise location was in large part destroyed in the EFEO headquarters in Phnom Penh during the fall and devastation of Cambodia’s capital by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

From our vantage point of conceptualising how the post-1992 global aid structure to re-establish Angkor Park as an ‘ordered world’ concretely materialised through vari­ form (inter)national strategies of ‘utopic engineering’, the case of the EFEO’s Baphuon project is particularly revealing. In this case, it leads us back to the specific French relationship to Angkor and particularly Angkor Wat, as we described it in the introduction to this book through a particular set of ‘affordances and actionable capacities’ at work. In a situation comparable to the famous mountain temple of Angkor Wat as the EFEO’s most prestigious site until 1975, the mountain temple of the Baphuon certainly offered a comparable ‘architectural affordance’ quality which persisted, in a longue durée effect of French Beaux-Artscum-world’s-fair-aesthetics from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries (compare Figs. Intro.16–17). This became apparent in the ongoing fascination with the temple’s architectural composition scheme of clear axial and concentric symmetries and well-balanced masses culminating in a mountain-like configuration in the final and overall ‘idea’ of the sacred site. A crucial actor to bridge the EFEO’s memory of Angkor from the late colonial and early post­ colonial period into the 1990s was certainly Jacques Dumarçay who had formerly worked as assistant for Bernard Philippe Groslier in the 1960s (compare Dumarçay 1998a).

42  Compare with Groslier’s unfinished intervention of a reprise totale of Angkor Wat (chapter IX and later in

this epilogue).

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As so many French conservators at Angkor before him, the one hand, “identifying the construction techniques of ­Dumarçay was again a Paris École-des-Beaux-Arts-trained the old masters” to rebuild the overall temple (including architect and continued to publish about the noteworthy the original construction fault of an instable inner sand architectural characteristics of Khmer temples in the 1990s core?), and on the other, a systematic “repérage de surface” (Dumarçay 1998b). After 2000 he did so together with Pas- and full recreation of the temple’s overall decorative apcal Royère (Dumarçay/Royère 2001) who had, as an archi- pearance, now with the sixteenth-century ‘sleeping Buddha’ tect himself, already started his architectural investigations feature on its western facade included (Charlotte Schmied at Angkor in the 1990s and continued to publish about his in Royère 2016, back cover, 14). In this context an old fascination for the “art of the builders of the eleventh cen- French-colonial myth from the 1930s (see chapter IX) was turies” (Royère 2009; compare Royère 2002, 2005). But in dangerously recooked to describe the new project around the early 1990s Dumarçay was also responsible for pre­ 2000: the supposedly again-used technique of “anastylosis” paring the scientific and methodological grounds for the (Royère 2016, 14; compare Fig. Intro.30b and Figs. IX.44 EFEO’s re-opening of the Baphuon site in 1995 (now with and 46)44 – as one literally meaning the ‘redressing topped Pascal Royère responsible), with the enduring goal of re- columns’ in an almost ‘natural’ process without larger adconstituting the temple’s overall architectural ‘idea’. Here ditions alien to the original building material (see the full we argue that Baphuon’s ‘patrimonial affordance’ was again debate around this term in chapter IX). What was actually similar to Angkor Wat. In both cases, the imagination that better described as a project “between reconstruction and the crumbling Hinduist sanctuaries had already been en- restoration” was in fact a gigantic and artificial system of hanced (completed, repaired, embellished, added on) in a “reinforced concrete walls, bored piles and covering resins” period of Buddhist revival in the sixteenth century to read behind the largest parts of the decorative surfaces of the the old capital of Angkor itself as a kind of cultural heritage reinstalled Baphuon temple as a whole and the smiling face formation for returning kings like Ang Chan (for Angkor of the reclining Buddha (Pl. EpII.10c). Today it is indeed Wat, see introduction, Fig. Intro.19 and Pl. Intro.12) influ- “mostly invisible” to the ignorant visitor from the outside enced the agenda of the France’s own patrimonial regime spectacle (Royère 2016, 8) (Pl. EpII.11a,b), but it may result of the early and now late twentieth centuries. In the course in the future, after the slightest failure of the temple’s new of the Buddhist revival of the originally Shivaist Baphuon and super high-tech interior, in a complete and irreversible temple, a seventy-five-meter-long ‘Reclining Buddha’ (in ­catastrophe within the range of post-1992 international proparavirvana) had been superimposed over the western fa- jects of ‘utopic engineering’ over Angkor Park. In the meancade with stones taken from the original building material. time, the ‘performative affordance’ of the Angkorian temples As Royère had it in a 2008 summary “Le Baphuon: un siècle and the high-ceremonial ‘world’s (af)fair’ over Angkor Park de restauration”, a “gigantic puzzle” was to be approached seemed well alive. In a déjà-vu-like scene of old French-colo­ (compare chapter IX for the same ‘heroic task’ in the nial grandeur (compare Pl. V.7), the “reprise of the [French] French-Dutch-colonial discussion from the 1910s onwards) Baphuon restoration was inaugurated by His Majesty the to re-identify the once deposed and now decayed and King Father Norodom Sihanouk in February 1995”; the un-numbered stones in a “ten hectare-large dépot lapidaire” EFEO’s Phnom Penh exhibition in the Centre culturel in the surrounding forest. Now, this meant a new reading français of 2001 was “inaugurated by Hun Sen”; the impresof the scarce plan material and surviving photographic evi­ sive “consecration of the Reclining Buddha in 2008” was dence from the 1960s (Royère 2008, 48, 49). As the posthu- carried out by the new Cambodian King Norodom Sihamomous 2016 monograph Le Baphuon de la restauration à ni (Pl. EpII.10d); and the “awarding ceremony to re-open the Baphuon temple” in July 2011 was re-enacted “in presl’histoire architecturale summarised it (after Pascal Royère’s tragic and premature death in 201443), the EFEO’s “projet ence of the French prime minister, François Fillon” (Royère de géant” was twofold, paradoxical, and utopian indeed: on 2011, 1316; compare ICC-Angkor 2013, 94).

43  Here I would like to formulate my posthumous thanks by remembering Pascal Royère as an extremely

charismatic and open-minded project leader who accepted me during my final architecture studies in Vienna and Paris as a stagiaire at the EFEO office in Siem Reap in 1999 and made me visit Angkor Wat for the first time in my life. For an obituary about Pascal Royère (1965–2014), see Pichard 2014. 44  Interestingly, also the concise 2017 review of the posthumous 2016 publication by the eminent architect of the EFEO, Pierre Pichard, described the Baphuon project as one “of the first mountain temples of Angkor being intégralement reconstruit par anastylose” (Pichard 2017, 325).

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3.2 ASI’s Ta Prohm: A ‘manufactured jungle’ sanitised The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was present in Angkor Wat already in the 1980s (see chapter XI). However, it left the site due to institutional problems and heavy international critique about the chemical treatment and structural reconstruction strategies which had turned Cambodia’s most iconic temple site bright white and picture perfect (compare Pl. XI.27–28) – until, shortly after the treatment, a new lichen infestation spread rapidly over the stone surfaces, turning them shockingly black. In ASI’s 2006 publication Ta Prohm temple: A conservation strategy (see Pl. EpII.9b), funded by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, some details about the project at Jaya­ varman VII’s temple site from 1186 CE were indicated. The project was first brought up during the 2001 visit by India’s vice president and was discussed in a Memorandum of Understanding with APSARA a year later. Two international meetings for Ta Prohm took place in 2004 in Siem Reap and in 2005 at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi (ASI 2006, 19–20; compare ICC-Angkor 2008, 45–46 and ICC-­ Angkor 2013, 72). In 2007 the publication Ta Prohm: A glorious era in Angkor civilisation featured, again after the 1980s (compare chapter XI, Pl. XI.24–25), a typical mix of old-fashioned diplomatic affirmations of mutual friendship and a scientific-essentialist discourse of a millennia-old cultural relationship between India and Cambodia. However, the present-day effect of Ta Prohm was for the first time conceptualised as an intellectual-aesthetic theme park-like product of a “veritable dreamland where the distinction between the real and the ideal evaporates [with] a monument [that], completely engulfed by the tropical forest, has generated a sense of mystery to which both the ordinary visitor and the specialist resign. This sense of resignation had” – as the authors, a diplomat and an archaeologist, put it with an anti-French undertone and their view towards the present project’s initial interest in “harmonizing conflicting views” – “so far completely sealed the prospects of critical enquiry and appraisal of the monument. […] Ta Prohm, in its present state, is a French intellectual legacy. It is a site where the forest was left intact to enable future generations to visualize the entire history of Angkor: its origins, decay, and discovery” (Kapur/Sahai 2007, xxix). In this vein, the book presented sections on historic facts, religious and spiritual annotations, and, in the final short chapter, “critical issues relating to environ-

Figure EpII.3  Ta Prohm’s sanitised and picture-ready ­presentation using ‘temple-in-the-jungle’ aesthetics in 2011 (Source: © Michael Falser 2011)

mental protection and archaeological restoration” (Kapur/ Sahai 2007, 31–36; compare Lakshmipriyam 2008).45 In the above-quoted 2013 special issue on Cambodia in UNESCO’s World Heritage Journal (see above Pl. EpII.3a,c), D.S. Sood, leader of ASI’s Ta Prohm project, summarised the task list at six sections of the sanctuary (Sood 2013). What he sold as a well-balanced set of structural strengthening and cautious enhancement of the natural features was another international variation of ‘utopic engineering’

45  After APSARA’s Sok An had redirected ASI from its initial proposal for the Koh Ker to the Ta Prohm site,

scientific investigations were now listed for: soil mechanics, foundation aspects, structural stability, hydrological, geotechnical and botanical factors, ground water, 3-D laser scanning of the different conditions, and “priority grading” to weigh between the site’s “world fame because of its unique relationship with trees” and “the monument’s longevity being threatened by its colossal life-partners”, the giant roots of the terameles nudiflora and ficus trees. The temple’s “current status [was judged] precarious”, but its ambivalent character between “a ruin” and “a ‘living’ monument” respected with only few interventions planned at “limited areas of threat”.

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over Angkor Park: one of over-sanitised full reconstructions and an over-staged fabrication of the temple’s most iconic tree-cum-temple vistas with photo-ready wooden platforms (Fig. EpII.3). In fact, the result was once more a transcultural ‘(af)fair’: one between the back-translated ‘manufactured jungles and laid-out vistas’ which Benedict had mentioned in his above-quoted study on world’s fairs (and which we mapped out in the case of Angkor-in-­the-

jungle scenarios in French universal and colonial exhibitions)46 and revived French pre-, high-, and past-colonial images and imaginations of Angkor as a ‘jungle find’ on the spot (as the subtitle of this second volume has it).47 In the meantime, Angelina Jolie’s visit to the very spot in the 2001, as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (Winter 2002; compare Winter 2007a, 116–38), helped further its status as a ‘global icon lost in the jungle’ (compare Pl. Intro.23b).

3.3 A world’s (af)fair called Angkor Wat: Coping with a late colonial legacy? In a unique configuration in post-1992 Angkor Park, the above-quoted ‘world’s (af)fair’-like schemes of the different nations’ prestige politics – with their competitive displays of gigantism and ‘biggest-ever’ superlatives for the different manufactured pavilions – come to an overlap in their effort to ‘borrow’ from Cambodia’s most prestigious cultural heritage and indeed the world’s largest single religious stone monument: Angkor Wat. What Benedict, in the discussion of a decline of world’s fairs identified as the emerging phenomenon of “multi-national cooperation” setups (compare Benedict 1983, 19, 60) was in fact spelled out in the proceedings of the Second Intergovernmental Conference for the Safeguarding and Development of Angkor in Paris in 2003: “Angkor Wat remained the centrepiece of attention [and] evolved over the years into a truly international work site with five different teams” from France, Germany, Japan, the United States, and Italy (UNESCO 2003a, 29; see below).48 In a neo-colonial outcome, the national/local agency APSARA, “in its capacity as ‘project owner’ [was left] to organise [a] first

scientific and research coordinating seminar” (UNESCO 2003a, 29) only and was not an independent actor in the ‘(af) fair’ to care for Cambodia’s most important temple! What we will continue here to analyse as different versions of ‘utopic engineering’ aimed at bringing back Angkor Wat’s once glorious appearance now came together over one and the same site’s different architectural features. But contrary to the self-congratulatory storylines within UNESCO’s and ICC-Angkor’s proceedings and commemorative brochures, these projects did not start their restorative endeavours from scratch but had to cope with the difficult inheritance and surviving structural impact of the site’s French colonial and early postcolonial legacy (1900– 1975, see chapter IX). As a consequence, the international projects after 1992 dealt with the restoration of an ‘original’ twelfth-century temple site to a far less extent than with the historic and now disintegrating repair work of a French-­ ‘manufactured’ heritage icon from the long first half of the twentieth century.49

46  For example, in the Cambodia installation during the 1900 Universal Exhibition with an overgrown face

tower (Fig. V.4b) or in advertisements in the journal L’Illustration during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition (Pl. VII.12). 47  Photographed in the Gsell/Thomson 1866 constellation (Figs. III.15–16; compare III.30), depicted in the Garnier/Delaporte publication of 1873 (Fig. II.13a) or in the retrocession debate around 1907 (Figs. VI.2a–d), all the way to the concrete interventions on the spot from 1908 into the 1950s (Figs. IX.7a, 58a, 80–81), the UNESCO PR cover in 1965 (Pl. IX.24b), the abandoned sites in the 1980s (Pl. XI.37a,d), or present romantic remarks (compare Pl. Intro.25b), recently republished in the 2010 EFEO publication Archaeologists in Angkor (EFEO 2010, 166–71). 48  As the text had it, those were the Institut Géographique National to set up a topometric surveillance system on the central block and the INDE-LEC (both France) to install lighting rods on each of the five towers; the German Apsara Conservation Project (GACP) to “conserve the thousands of apsara images and outstanding bas-reliefs in Angkor Wat [and] design completely reversible emergency conservation operations”; the Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor (JSA) to restore the northern library, and the Sophia University of Tokyo to work on the causeway; the US-American World Monuments Fund (WMF) to work on the ‘Churning of the sea of milk’ gallery; and the Ingegneria Geotecnica e Strutturale team (IgeS, Italy) to restore the embarkment steps of the western moat. 49  As we shall see, most of the media propagation of the before-and-after repair of the post-1992 impact over Angkor Wat came with some déjà vu of the French interventions: from the work on the central passageway from 1908 onwards, landscaping efforts of the 1920s, the central massif stabilisation of the 1930s, the collapsed and repaired galleries in the 1940s, the western bridge repair of the 1950s, and the restoration of the moat, the installation of a drainage systems, and the massive reworking decorative surfaces in the 1960s.

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Repairing recent restorations? Italian and US-American impact on Angkor Wat Overuse by spectators during events (like the famous water festival), constant neglect, and, finally, heavy rain in September 1997 caused the collapse of the western inner moat embankments (southern section) of Angkor Wat. In the ICC-Angkor commemorative brochures of 2008 and 2013, the Italian Government Team for the Safeguarding of ­Angkor in Pre Rup and Angkor Wat (part of the larger ­UNESCO/Italy Funds-in-Trust programme) signed responsible for the repair work when “geosynthetics were applied as reinforcement to the compaction soil behind the stepped stone embarkment from 2001 to 2003” (ICC-Ang­ kor 2008, 53–54). The Ingegneria Geotecnica e Strutturale team continued its work “to stabilise the West gopura and the west bakan pavilion, the cruciform terrace balustrade, and vaults of west gopura” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 79). What was missing in this brochure (and in so many other project presentations) was the fact that the repair work discussed did not, stricto sensu, concern Angkor Wat’s ‘original’ built fabric alone. The surviving dossier “Reference documents – Expert consultancy on Angkor Wat, October 1997” which survived at ICCROM’s archive in Rome50 reveals that a Mission d’expertise à Angkor Wat in October 199751 came to a strange damage assessment: not only sixty metres of the embarkments themselves slid into the water, but the neglected structure some six metres behind this apparently ‘historic’ structure had caused the incident (Pl. EpII.12e–h). Together with the minutes of an APSARA/EFEO meeting at the site in the same month,52 the appendix of the dossier quoted the historic Rapport de la Conservation d’Angkor during the EFEO’s care of Angkor Park (see chapter IX). A

sense of déjà vu emerges in relation to the 1997 assessment photographs and Italy’s later repair work, as Bernard Phi­ lippe Groslier, some forty years earlier in April 1960, had taken very similar photographs of the – back then ‘original’ – damaged section (compare Fig. IX.75a). Shortly after, he installed a massive reinforced concrete system foundation under the sandstone tiers and a new drainage system behind and right through the old system (Pl. EpII.12a–d, compare Figs. IX.75b–d, 83).53 In this sense the Italian team, as in many cases the other international projects over Angkor Wat (and Angkor Park), only applied a small cosmetic treatment to a much larger ticking time bomb for future restoration measures: the massive – now aging and slowly disintegrating – ‘utopic engineering project’ of the 1950s and 1960s, which had poured a veritable flood of reinforced concrete into Cambodia’s most iconic temples. In the international scramble over the prestigious cake called Angkor Wat, the US-American World Monuments Fund (WMF), already active with restoration projects at the Phnom Bakheng and giant Preah Khan sites, came into the game rather late. This resulted in a veritable diplomatic crisis with ‘the Germans’ who were already at work on the same spot. This time, the entry point was the idea of restoring Angkor Wat’s most iconic eastern (and forty-nine-metre-long) gallery with the famous scene “Churning of the milk ocean, a bas-relief depicting Vishnu commanding deities and demons to join forces in churning the cosmic ocean to release amrita, the elixir of life” (Stubbs 2006, 41). As ICC-Angkor’s 2008 brochure had it (ICC-Angkor 2008, 53), research and documentation work started already in 1996 (compare Gavrilovic/Sanday 1999), technical analysis and planning commenced in 2003, and concrete conser­ vation lasted from 2008 to 2010 (Pl. EpII.13b).54 WMF’s

Compare, among others, for the central passageway from 1908 to 1929 and the 1950s (Figs. IX.13, 33a, 68); the inner water tanks landscaping of the 1920s (Fig. IX.22a; compare Fig. X.14); the structural core around 1930 (Fig. 33b); the central tower around 1935 (Figs. IX.48a,b; compare Fig. III.31); the collapse and repair of the ‘Heaven-and-Hell’ gallery in 1947 (Figs. IX.63–65) and the reinvented gallery ceilings in the 1940s (Figs. IX.66a–e); the western bridge interventions in the 1950s and 1960s (Figs. IX.71, 77); illuminations in the 1960s (Fig. IX.78), the moat’s chemical weeding in the 1960s (Fig. IX.79); the analysis of surface alterations (Fig. IX.84); the repaired tiers of the moat in the 1960s (Figs. IX.75, 83); the drainage system around 1970 (Figs. IX.85); and the left-open dismantling of the ‘Churning of the milk ocean’ gallery around 1970 (Figs. IX.86, 87, 91). To make things more difficult, an additional task was finding ways to ‘un-restore’ the destructive (structural and chemical) impact from the Indian interventions from 1986 until 1993 (Figs. XI.22–24). 50  In this context I am particularly thankful to ICCROM’s archivist Maria Mata Caravaca for her help in unearthing, during several months of archival research in 2015, precious report material about Angkor’s post1992 era. 51  It was carried and reported by Guillaume Stetten, French hydrogeologist from Agence Desaix/Phnom Penh. 52 The Compte rendu de visite d’Angkor Vat, 2 Oct 1997 listed the participants: Nouth Narang (minister of culture and fine arts), Ros Borath (APSARA’s director general), Oung Von (director of the Conservation d’Ang­ kor), Jean-Christophe Simon (architecte chargé de mission à la Conservation d’Angkor), Pascal Royère, and Christophe Pottier (both EFEO). 53  And ICC-Angkor’s depiction of the Italian project was itself a déjà-vu-montage, as the UNESCO Courier had featured the same ‘before-and-after’ storyline already in 1965 (compare Fig. IX.83). 54  WMF’s Press Release from 4 June 2008 gave more details: “ICC’s Ad Hoc Group had praised the pilot

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homepage depicted the ongoing work on the roof (Pl. EpII.13a), which was, according the ICC-Angkor in 2013, completed in December 2011, but WMF was at this point already continuing its project by “replacing the wooden ceiling in the gallery and installing original apsara carvings and replicas on the roof ” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 106).55 That the chosen emergency-care project of the WMF did not really deal with ‘original decay’ is quite comparable to the Italian case. As we explored in detail in chapter IX, no other structural element of Angkor Wat had undergone a more dramatic and intrusive impact under Groslier’s ‘utopic engineering’ of a veritable “reprise totale” of the temple site, as he himself called it in his visionary Étude sur la Conservation d’Angkor in 1958 (Groslier 1958b).56 However, going back to the original documentation of the EFEO’s interventions reveals another astonishing fact: not only did the WMF’s intention to replace the ceiling structure of Angkor Wat’s galleries refer to unmentioned reconstruction works of the 1940s and 1950s (compare Figs. IX.66a–e). Also its selective project to dismantle the roof of the famous ‘Churning of the milk ocean’ gallery alone should have been developed in a much larger context, as its restoration history from the 1960s (see Figs. IX.86–87) was only one interconnected part of a much larger intervention to dismantle the south-eastern entry and gallery system as a whole and to re-erect it on top of a massive solid core of reinforced concrete (Pl. EpII.13c–e) … before the ASI reworked the same ensemble again between 1986 and 1993 (compare Figs. XI.22c,d, 23; Pl. XI.26a–c). In this sense we argue again that the competitive and ‘world’s (af)fair-like’ scramble to have ‘Angkor Wat’ (or ‘Ang­ kor Park’ in other cases) as a borrowed prestigious label in the project list of international restoration teams around the world creates until today, within an over-praised ICC-Angkor structure, a veritable patchwork of rather cos-

metic and in fact quite unsustainable interventions. Comparable to the logic that guided the creation of ephemeral, time-limited, and rushed national pavilions oriented at prestige and impressive appearance at universal and colonial exhibitions, the multi-national efforts at the World Heritage site of Angkor Park – and in this case at Angkor Wat – rarely come as a concerted action. Just as in-depth archival work about the French interventions are most often missing which would in fact help to understand the site’s entire and connected transformation history within nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of truly comprehensive schemes of restoration and conservation are, despite all Angkor Charters and Declarations being formulated, an ongoing desideratum over Angkor Park and Angkor Wat. JSA’s northern library of Angkor Wat: Balanos back in Southeast Asia? When in 2010 Takeshi Nakagawa, professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University and head of the Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor (JSA), took on responsibility for the Report on the conservation and restoration work of the Northern Library inside the outermost enclosure of Angkor Wat (see Pl. EpII.9c), the project had in fact long been completed. In a general sense, the project was part and parcel of the ‘UNESCO/Japanese Funds-in-Trust for the Preservation of World Cultural Heritage’ deal, with a focus on Southeast Asia (Kawada 2004; Akagawa 2015, 79–114). More precisely, Japan’s Angkor projects were embedded the country’s leading role of “segmented aid” for Cambodia’s national reconstruction (Peycam 2016, 760– 64) and were also supported by its function as permanent co-chair of the international ICC-Angkor structure (see above). Besides Tokyo’s Sophia University, with its Angkor

phase of the work which [would now] involve dismantling the roofing system and reconstructing it in order to prevent future water penetration that [was] causing increasing damage to the famed bas relief.” Additionally, WMF experts around John Sanday, Pedrag Javrilovic, and Glenn Boornazian “expected that its conservation work w[ould] provide a prototype for repairing several kilometres of roofs that cover the galleries”, as they had discovered the original but today dysfunctional “ingenious passive drainage system”, now to be dismantled, cleaned, surface-stabilised, and restored “adding a thin sheet of lead to eliminate any possibility of future water penetration”. See https://www.wmf.org/sites/default/files/press_releases/pdfs/Angkor_062008. pdf, retrieved 3 March 2019. 55  In WMF’s press release of 8 January 2013, Bonnie Burnham, president of the WMF, announced the completion of the project that, by “adding a removable, impermeable layer of lead as additional protection to secure the gallery from further damage, [was] able to reactivate the traditional Khmer drainage system”. And continued: “We also discovered that the roof was crowned by a row of finials with dancing figures standing on lotus platforms, and were able to recover enough of the original ornaments from the surrounding area to recreate the design. In a few months, these carvings will be put in place. At APSARA’s request, WMF will also create a wooden coffered ceiling for the gallery, based on research into traditional Khmer designs.” See https:// www.wmf.org/sites/default/files/press_releases/CSM-Gallery-Completion.pdf, retrieved 3 March 2019. 56  Back in 1969 he dismantled the whole roof of the gallery structure (compare Figs. IX.86–87), but the anastylosis project was left unfinished in 1972/73 (Fig. IX.91) due to the forced departure of the French from Cambodia.

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International Mission to reinstall the western causeway of of totally new elements in their distinguishably new, but Angkor Wat between 1993/7 and 200757 (see Pl. EpII.4b style-and-form-adjusted abstraction (Figs. EpII.4a–c) – it right) and to further engage with questions of cultural her- came as an ambivalent mix of post-war reconstruction aesitage, natural environment, and tourism (compare Ishiza- thetics ‘à la Venice Charter’ of 1964/65 and a reinforced wa/Tabata 2006, Ishizawa 2012), JSA’s engagement at Ang- concrete anastylosis ‘à la Balanos’ from the Athens Acropkor Wat was a smaller project conducted alongside its olis project of the 1930s (compare Figs. IX.50–53 and Pl. prestigious Bayon temple restoration project, which began IX.21a–c). As we explored it in detail in chapter IX, the latin 1995. As the counterpart of two similar structures to ter strategy had been brought over by previous French Ang­ symmetrically flank Angkor Wat’s central causeway, the kor conservators from Marchal to Groslier to Angkor Park northern ‘library’ was a compact sandstone structure with by adding ‘reconstruction’ techniques from the Dutch East a cruciform plan, vaulted roofs, and projecting porches Indies (compare Figs. IX.67a–d; Fig. IX.73c). that had already been investigated by the French in the 1920s, re-assembled by B. P. Groslier in the 1950s, and also GACP’s project of an ‘anti-aging’ ruin? included in the ASI campaign in the late 1980s. As the report had it, JSA’s units for architecture, archaeology, petrol- In the 2002 volume of the journal Museum International, ogy, geotechnology, geology, and environmental studies with the ambivalent name Angkor, a Living Museum (comstarted preliminary surveys from 1998 onwards and poured pare Pl. Intro.22, see discussion below), Hans Leisen, proJapan’s experience of – completely! – dismantling and re- fessor of stone conservation at the University of Applied storing the northern library at the Bayon (completed in Sciences in Cologne, Germany, in his contribution “Con1999) into a “draft restoration plan” proposal for the ICC-­ tour scaling: The disfiguring disease of Angkor Wat reliefs” Angkor in 2000/2001 (JSA 2001, 57–59), and started con- summarised ‘his’ German Apsara Conservation Project crete action in 2001. As Nakagawa reconfirmed in the re- (GACP) at Angkor Wat. It had started in 1995, was financed port, after the conservation of the standing structure had by Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (department of been reflected upon, a different strategy was chosen: “a Kulturerhalt), and stood in cooperation with the Angkor method of partial dismantlement and rebuilding was Conservation Office and the APSARA Authority. Its focus adopted”, while “the basic policy of respecting the tradi- was and still is on the temple’s decorative surface – some tional construction method” was combined with the “re- 1,850 female figures of celestial devata and enchanting apstoring and returning of original elements” and “using sara, as much as some seven hundred pediments, “as they newly available sandstone [by] ensuring their harmony were directly exposed to the influence of weather conditions, in a poor state of preservation, at risk of total loss with past restoration areas”. In 2003, “additional members were assigned to the new materials processing team, […] and in need of urgent attention” (Leisen 2002, 86; compare new pillar elements reinstalled and roof elements rebuilt, other summaries in Leisen/von Plehwe-Leisen 1996, 1998, and the project […] completed in mid-April 2005” (Naka­ 1999, 2006, 2008). In this vein, the German project was in gawa 2010, 20). In the end, Angkor Wat’s northern library the first place also motivated and justified by a recurring reappeared, from a certain distance (compare Pl. EpII.9c), old colonial salvage paradigm between stated “ill-considindeed as a super (picture-)perfect product of high-tech-en- ered or insufficient treatments” in the past, a threat-and-­ gineered restoration expertise. However, judging the result emergency-action scenario in the present, and a long-time from this epilogue’s viewpoint, it can be termed itself as a stabilisation programme for the future.58 Departing from belated ‘world’s (af)fair’-like hybrid of different restoration previous colonial argumentations around the storyline of aesthetics of the past twentieth century. As an over-restored ‘abandoned temples in the jungle’, here the threat scenario and completely solid block – with repaired original ele- was based on a natural and simply “irreversible” process of ments seamlessly coagulated with an exaggerated number the slow weakening and predictable, inevitable decay of

57  As the ICC-Angkor 2013 report had it, the project “reinstalled 5,000 stones, [while] the restoration work

uncovered the high level of wisdom and technology that existed at the time of the original construction, such as methods for diverting rainwater. In November 2007, Phase 1, involving 100 out of the 200 metres of the western causeway, was completed and celebrated with a completion ceremony, held with the participation of Deputy Prime Minister Sok An and 2,400 villagers” (ICC-Angkor 2013, 101). 58  With earlier attempts in this direction (Saurin 1954, Fusey reprint 1991, Delvert 1963, Hyvert 1969), the sole focus on the decorated surfaces of Cambodia’s most iconic temple was new for the 1990s: “The rapid deterioration and the advanced state of decay observed in more than 350 stone reliefs, led to emergency consolidation activities. […] Suddenly one day, the whole precious surface is destroyed by the scale falling off, and what is left is just a rough stone surface, bare of all beauty and of art-historical value. This damaging process seriously endangers the precious surfaces of the reliefs and is extremely active” (Leisen 2002, 91–92).

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Figures EpII.4a—c  JSA’s repair of Angkor Wat’s northern library along the inner western passageway, ­photographed and published in 2010/2011 (Source: © Michael Falser 2011 (4a; above); Nakagawa/JSA 2010, 380, Pl. 29)

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Angkor Wat’s stone material59 – however accelerated by infiltrating salts, increasing climatic amplitudes, and, as an external non-natural factor, pressure from touristic overuse (compare Figs. XII.16a–e). And whereas “fully reversible pre-consolidation techniques”, such as epoxy casts, underpinning, and bonding were employed to “temporarily secure the parts in imminent danger of collapse” (Leisen 2002, 91), a simultaneous working process of the patient investigation of the material parameters and damaging factors, the registration of the climatic conditions (temperature, exposure to rainwater, air humidity), material research (in-situ and through laboratory tests), and testing was progressively fine-tuned over the years. It was aimed at finally establishing a “conservation plan for the 300 most severely decayed Apsaras and several pediments [with the overall] aim to slow down the process that w[ould] inevitably provoke the loss of the beautiful carved surfaces at Angkor Wat” (Leisen 2002, 92; my emphasis).60 To summarise the project from the viewpoint of an international competition in the ‘utopic engineering’ of Angkor Park, its overall goal was to artificially create a kind of ‘anti-aging ruin’ – or more precisely, to stabilise a historic monument of World Heritage status with a new high-tech and high-maintenance in-built mechanism to decelerate the natural decay process of its ‘spectacular’ decorative stone surface.

At this point around 2000, a small publication called Angkor: Atlantis in the jungle (Leisen/von Plehwe-Leisen 2001; see Pl. Intro.25b) propagated the project in a Mouhot-like narrative scheme. Slightly earlier, the above-explored motivations and working steps of the project – from emergency consolidation (Figs. EpII.5a,b), to analysis and mapping (Pl. EpII.14, compare Figs. XII.16d,e) to conservation with tested ethyl silicate mixtures and a variable repair mortar system (Fig. EpII.5c) – were explained in a scientific information brochure called Germany Apsara Conservation Project at Angkor Wat (see Pl. EpII.9d). Its authors were the major actors of the project: Hans Leisen (director, research and conservation), Jaroslav Poncar (photographic documentation), and Simon Warrack (conservation and computer documentation).61 From different viewpoints, the French-colonial explorations about Angkor Wat were updated with new technical and scientific tools: more than half a century after a first campaign around 1930 (EFEO 1929–31; compare Fig. IX.33a–d), the temple’s unique decoration schemes were for the first time photographed in full-scale formats (Poncar 1995,62 1998, 2006, 2013; compare Figs. Intro.6,7,10,11,12; Pl. Intro.10b, 12; Figs. III.34, 37), and its (partial) polychromies further scrutinised. By dating them alternatively into the twelfth and primarily sixteenth but also nineteenth and even twen-

59  In this natural process, stone with its “assemblage of minerals of varying properties” inevitably “under-

goes physical, chemical, and biological deterioration” (Leisen 2002, 86). This had to do with the “considerable amount of layered clay minerals, the periodical process of heat and humidity” and “salt action” which would lead to a systematic weakening and eventual destruction of the stone layers’ bonding forces in a depth of 2–3 centimetres from surface” (Leisen 2002, 86, 90). 60  The documentation system comprised of photo-monitoring 3-D laser recording, creating a database on every single object and an on-site documentation for individual interventions, as all reliefs and pediments were first mapped and classified according to their materials, techniques of execution, threat (such as dangerous salt-crust formations), status of damage and decay (sanding, crumbling, contour scaling). Material research methods in situ consisted in measuring the capacity of the natural stone to absorb water and testing the mechanical strength of the stone material. Laboratory investigation focused on Angkor Wat’s mineralogy (physical behaviour, such as capillary water absorption, hydric and thermal swelling, porosity, water vapour diffusion, permeability, strength, and elasticity). Concrete conservation measures comprised of the re-attachment of loose scales to the stone interior by applying thoroughly tested filling mortars, as the conservation plan is, according to Leisen, “centred on the pointing (the filling of cracks and joints) and the injection of the contour scales with mortars and binders that are physically, chemically, and aesthetically well adapted to the original sandstone, and the final consolidation with ethyl silicate, a material with properties similar to the stone. […] New bonding bridges of the consolidation agent are built up between the mineral grains. The aim of these measures is to slow down the process that will inevitably provoke the loss of the beautifully carved surfaces at Angkor Wat” (Leisen 2002, 92). 61  At this point 360 of the 1,850 decorative female figures were judged to have “serious damage”, but “ultimately, it will not be possible to completely stop the damage to the enchanting reliefs” and “regular and sound maintenance [would be] the most effective conservation measure” (Leisen/Poncar/Warrack 2000, 6). In the following, issues like the damage through salt infiltration and weathering and the use of repair mortars were further developed (Siedel et al. 2008/2009; Leisen/von Plehwe-Leisen/Warrack 2004; Leisen/von Plehwe-Leisen 2005), enquiries were expanded into Angkor Wat’s corner pavilions (Leisen et al. 2004), and the vaulting systems of the famous galleries were investigated from their constructive viewpoint (Pfefferkorn/Leisen 2005). 62  At this point, Jaroslav Poncar had developed the so-called ‘slit-scan photography’ to document Angkor Wat’s four galleries of some 94 metres length and 2.3 metres height each in one single photograph.

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Figures EpII.5a—c  GACP’s emergency consolidation work for the Apsara figures of Angkor Wat, with project director Hans Leisen (5b; upper right) and his team of Cambodian stone conservators around Simon Warrack (5c; below) (Source: GACP 2000, 18; GACP 2001, 55; GACP 2000, 25)

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tieth centuries CE63 and speculating on their purpose, these studies somehow reconnected with the investigative drawings by Lucien Fournereau for the 1889 Universal Exhibition (see chapter III; compare Fig. III.33, Pl. III.9–12, especially 13).64 Some hundred years after the relocation of the active Buddhist monastery in front of the temple’s central pyramid in favour of an ‘archaeologised spectacle’ (after Falser/Juneja 2013b) for the upcoming tourist industry (see Figs. IX.11a–c), the emerging global heritage paradigms of ‘community involvement’ and ‘living heritage’ now challenged elitist Western conservation and restoration practices. Simon Warrack’s astonishing repair of Angkor Wat’s most venerated statue in 2003, the four-metre-high Ta Reach in the temple’s western entry pavilion, peaked in a religious ceremony with an orchestra choir of Buddhist monks and two hundred praying participants from the surrounding local communities (Pl. EpII.15a,b).65 After the 1997 exhibition Angkor et dix siècle d’art khmer in Paris and Washington, DC (Jessup 1997), with a pure art historical focus, the 2007 travelling exhibition Angkor: Göttliches Erbe [Angkor: Divine heritage of Cambodia], on display in the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn and the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, featured GACP in its catalogue for the first time side by side with the great player of France in the “multinational endeavour to salvage Angkor” (Leisen/von Plehwe-­Leisen/Royère 2007; compare Ros 2007a,b and Son 2007, 2011). A special show in the Martin-Gropius-­Bau exhibition hall in Berlin further propagated GACP in the German capital (Lei­sen/von Plehwe-Leisen 2008, see Fig. EpII.9d), while it became a fixed element in the above-quoted ICC-­Angkor brochures in 2008 and 2013 (ICC-Angkor 2008, 49; ICC-Angkor 2013, 97). In the meantime the operational term of ‘international

training of the locals’ had reached a new level: GACP’s integration of Cambodian staff not only helped to install an independent APSARA Stone Conservation Unit (now with the GACP’s longtime team member and site manager Long Nary as the head of the unit) but also produced the first Khmer-­English Handbook for stone conservation and restoration in Angkor (Fig. EpII.6) in 2012 (APSARA 2012). At this point in 2013, the circle of ‘(back)translations’ within our two-volume enquiry into Angkor Wat’s transcultural history of heritage came to a close by interconnecting the site’s career ‘from plaster casts to exhibition pavilions’ (first volume) and ‘from jungle find to global icon’ (second volume). Of what Foucault in 1967 had termed heterotopia’s multi-sited ‘simultaneities’ (see book introduction), the appendix of the catalogue of the 2013 musée Guimet exhibition Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe. Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge offered as a unique ‘side-by-side’ constellation: ‘on the one side’, the curator of the show, Pierre Baptiste, in his article “Les moulages, de l’errance à la restauration” (Baptiste 2013c; compare Baptiste 2002, 2013a,b) reflected on the restoration procedures of the rediscovered plaster casts from Delaporte’s musée Indo-chinois in the Parisian Trocadero Palace as they were now for the first time again ‘on display’ next to Khmer artefacts (see chapter III and Pl. III.17–18; in the same catalogue Falser 2013g; compare Falser 2011, 2013d,e, 2019). ‘On the other side’, Hans Leisen and his team contributed with a reflection about the present ‘on-site’ restoration of the very same decorative surfaces back at the ‘original’ temple, and the use of the historic casts from around 1900 as “indicators of the rapid deterioration of the Khmer monuments” (von Plehwe-Leisen/Leisen/Decker 2013)66 (Pl. EpII.16a). At this point, the transculturally entangled logic of both ele-

63  Red and white, ochre, gold, and blackened polychromies were detected on its cruciform gallery walls,

bas-relief sections and door frames, in a corner pavilion and the galleries of the central shrine in the uppermost platform (Kiesewetter et al. 2001; Kiesewetter 2002/2003; von Plehwe-Leisen/Leisen 2005, 2008; compare Roveda 1998/2001 and Dürre 2001). Whereas primarily red and white layers were brought in the context of Angkor Wat’s period Buddhist revival of the sixteenth century under Ang Chan (especially as surviving preliminary drawings used to complete the bas-reliefs in the temple’s north-eastern corner; compare the discussion in the introduction of this book, and Aymonier 1904 to Coedès 1962a, 240–42, Boisselier 1962), the golden elements were associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the black layer on the famous bas-reliefs seen as a coating of lacquer. 64  Those colouring schemes had been re-applied inside the Angkor Wat replicas of the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille 1922 (compare Pl. VI.6) and of the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris (see Pl. VII.7, 10). 65  The stone figure with eight arms was said to represent Vishnu but was also venerated by the local Neak Ta cult. In the context of the repair work of statue (fixing cracks on the shoulder, replacing some later-added concrete arms, and reinstalling the old original head which was found in the National Museum in Phnom Penh), religious leaders were consulted for their consent, a ceremony, and finally community participation helped to negotiate with the different national heritage authorities for the best solution and brought a “reputation boost” to the GACP project as a whole (Warrack 2007, 96; compare Warrack 2013). 66  “The plaster casts of the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat realised for the musée Indo-chinois appear today as precious evidence of the original motifs and are useful indicators for the speed of their deterioration. From a documentary viewpoint, their three-dimensional character is even superior to photographic evidence. […] In their quality of historic copies, they allow us to refind the initial intentions of the artists without intervening

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Figure EpII.6  Handbook for Stone Conservation and Restoration in Angkor, developed as a ­bilingual brochure in a collaboration of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the GACP with the APSARA Stone Conservation Unit (Source: APSARA Conservation Unit 2012, cover)

ments ‘on display’, ten thousand kilometres from each other, profoundly destabilised the old-fashioned dichotomies and categories of art history and cultural heritage, such the original and the copy, the primary source and its substitute, the permanent and the ephemeral, or the area studies’ territorial containers such as Asia or Europe (for this discussion, see chart Fig. Intro.2a). However, the epilogue’s central hypothesis, that the World Heritage site of Angkor Park itself became a world’s fair with neo-colonial characteristics, needs further reflection here. Both above-quoted cases (the restoration and

museum-like display of the ancient plaster casts in the musée Guimet ‘on the one side’; and the restoration and exposure of Angkor Wat’s ‘original’ surfaces ‘on the other side’) can also be contextualised as two transculturally ­entangled strategies of ‘utopic engineering’. Like Angkor Wat’s replicated surfaces for the temple’s 1:1-scaled model in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (Pl. EpII.16a above), they manipulated the temporal, spatial, and physical regimes over Angkor; and they had effects on the touristic commodification and spectacularisation of Angkor Wat for the global heritage industry.67 Additionally,

on the actual status of the bas-reliefs which today do not provide the original hand of the sculptor with the precision which the executed mouldings [empreintes prises] in the nineteenth century can better appreciate. […] Drawings, photographs, plaster casts […] all these documents constitute a significant part of our patrimonial memory [une partie non négligeable de notre mémoire patrimoniale]. […] And with all other documentary measures in use, the historic moulages equally need to be cared for and stay available for future generations (von Plehwe-Leisen/Leisen/Decker 2013, 264, 267). 67  In this vein, Delaporte’s moulds and casts in his museum were not, as the Paris exhibition intended to narrate, mere proof of an amateurish (art lover’s) effort to make unknown Khmer art and architecture “accessible au public” (see Delaporte 1880, 248). As we explored in the first volume of this publication, they also served as a veritable archive and ‘generic code’ for the different Beaux-Arts architects responsible for the multiform Angkor pavilions in the French universal/colonial exhibitions from 1889 to 1937 (see chapters IV to VIII). In this sense, a critical reflection was missing in the Paris exhibition about the ambivalent implications of the rediscovery, repair, permanent ‘re-presentation’ and integration into the global circulation, of the thin decorative devices once at play for Europe’s ephemeral events, as hybrid assemblages and replicas of those architectural monuments from overseas which were turned into appropriated cultural heritage icons of the coloniser.

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Figures EpII.7a,b  “International Show of Ramayana in Angkor” as prepared in sketches for the 1995 show in front of the ‘real’ temple of Angkor Wat (Source: personal archive Claude Jacques)

the high-tech efforts to artificially decelerate the ‘natural and inevitable’ aging and decaying process of the decorative skin of Angkor Wat helped, in a figurative sense, the ‘great spectacle effect’ over the site whose reflecting surface served for sound-and-light projections (Pl. EpII.16b below). In another strange déjà-vu-effect, the temporary stage set for an “International Show of the Ramayana in Angkor 434

Wat” (Kith 1995) now (Figs. EpII.7a,b) looked similar to the ones for dance shows in front of the Angkor Wat replica of the 1922 National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille (Fig. EpII.7c; compare Pl. VI.7b). At the same moment were Angkor Wat’s restored Apsaras on the temple’s inner decorative schemes recycled to reenact the old founding myth of the Royal Khmer Ballet, now on UNESCO’s Intangible

3. Angkor Park post-1992: A World’s (Af)fair materialised

Figure EpII.7c  Dance show in front of the Angkor Wat replica at the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille 1922 (Source: L’Illustration, 4143 (29 July 1922), 87)

Cultural Heritage List since 2008 (Pl. EpII.17a; compare Fig. X.48a and Falser 2013f). Additionally, the French-made Les nuits d’Angkor, the “Serious Staging”68 of the famous opera singer José Carreras (Pl. EpII.17b), the sound-and-

light show The legend of Angkor Wat: When history comes to life in 2008/9 with a ‘Mouhot-cum-Apsara-story’ 69 (Pl. EpII.17c), and the Angkor Wat Night Lighting Tours operated by “angkorhotels.org” between 2008 and 201070 did in

68  Serious Staging is a Hong Kong-based event management firm that prepares shows like “Macau Govern-

ment Handover” in 1999 and the opening of the “Louis Vuitton Flagship Store Opening Party” in 2008 (both Hong Kong). The “unprecedented concert by renowned tenor José Carreras, supported by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, was held in the mythical surrounds of the Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The spectacular experience involved construction of a bespoke stage and a setup of over 40 tons of lighting, power, and control equipment – all the while respecting and protecting this UNESCO Heritage site”. Online http://www.­ serious-staging.com/portfolio/Jose-Carreras-at-Angkor-Wat, retrieved 1 March 2019. 69 “The legend of Angkor Wat: When history comes to life! Enjoy the warmest Khmer hospitality as you begin this spectacular evening with a leisurely stroll along a traditional Khmer village market bustling with various folk performances, local delicacies, arts, and handicrafts. Angkor Wat in an extravagant display of lights, sounds, water screen, and other special effects […] You will be transported back in history during a time when this ancient wonder of the world was once the centre of a powerful empire. […] Additionally, there will be a special celebration featuring the official national APSARA on stage with hundreds of Cambodian performers amid an extravagance of lights and sounds. During the event, guests will take pleasure in a sumptuous dinner which promises to be a gastronomic delight.” Online http://www.thaiticketmajor.com/performance/ angkor_wat08_eng.php, retrieved 2 February 2010. 70  The text for the Angkor Wat Night Festival: “Take the opportunity to visit the legendary Angkor Wat at night and see the magnificent temple spectacularly lit up. […] Journey back in history more than 800 years and see the legendary Angkor Wat come to life. Be entertained by soldiers training using swords, spears, bows/ar-

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fact use the same thin decorative – and now properly conserved – skin of the temple as a projection screen that had already been used in its replicated – and now partially re-

discovered and equally restored – form, in the famous 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (Pl. EpII.16b above; compare Pl. Intro.11, Pl. VII.16).

3.4 APSARA’s Khmer Habitat Interpretation Center Conceptualising international restoration projects over Situated between major archaeological temple sites, it is World Heritage Angkor Park in a pavilion-logic of World’s presented as a completely utopian setting (Pl. EpII.18a) Fairs also necessitates directing our attention to the above-­ where visitors would walk through vegetable patches and mentioned neo-colonial process of “social ordering” (com- shady fruit trees; pass by a compost station, a fish pond, pare Hetherington’s 1997 book on The badlands of modernity and a picturesque oxcart; and finally reach the traditional in the introduction and above): if all major archaeological model house (Pl. EpII.18b). As an exhibitionary space in temple sites were already taken by international teams, the itself, it displayed photographs and models of traditional national APSARA authority could only ‘take’ the remain- Khmer houses (Pl. EpII.18c). This staging had a ‘self-coloing patrimonial imaginary space left. It was filled with a nial’ atmosphere on many levels: first, the so-called “local new project of ‘utopic engineering’, one to reinvent a sup- population” was asked to come and see what forms of traposedly old tradition of vernacular (or ‘sustainable’) ways ditional living had been conceived for them from the offiof living. If the above-depicted map from the ICC-Angkor cial level to be “replicated on their [own] land” but was it2008 publication (see Pl. EpII.7) did not indicate any na- self, with its own already existing local ways of living, not tional presence, this missing gap of a Khmer representation integrated as the real ‘authentic’ informants about what was inside the ‘national estate of Angkor Park’ was, five years happening right outside this utopian enclosure. How later, mentioned in ICC-Angkor’s commemoration bro- Khoun explored the Khmer Habitat display in his contrichure from 2013 (see Pl. EpII.8): the second chapter, “A bution, “Heritage and population in the Angkor site”, for decade of sustainable development (2003–20013)”, came the 2013 special issue of UNESCO’s World Heritage journal with a list of “implemented projects”, and the APSARA Au- was, second, conceived to “provide the opportunity for thority appeared with Khoun Khun-Neay as deputy direc- tourists from all over the world to find out about the comtor general of APSARA and contact person for a New Zea- munities living in Angkor Park and discover the traditionland Government co-funded project called Khmer Habitat al way of life that is an essential ingredient of the cultural Interpretation Center: landscape” (Khoun 2013, 30) – without actually venturing out themselves into the ‘real’ villages. Instead, Khoun used In order to preserve the traditional architecture of Khmer his favourite illustration of “Tourists enjoy traditional oxhabitat in Angkor, the APSARA National Authority estab- cart rides in Angkor Park” (Pl. EpII.19a) to illustrate his lished within the Angkor Archaeological Park a Khmer vision of the local inhabitants’ role as, together with their Habitat Interpretation Centre. The Centre is a place where pre-modern means of transportation, exotic ‘living ethnoinformation on the communities living in the Angkor Ar- graphical exhibits’ (compare for the world’s fair context, chaeological Park is available, describing their living con- Mathur 2001). At this point, the fusion of the two ‘ordered ditions and traditional habitat — one of the main compo- worlds’ – the restored archaeological site of Angkor (Wat) nents of the Angkor cultural landscape. It mainly provides on the one side, and the local oxcart driver through Angkor for the local population by showing the different ways of Park on the other – had already been circulated in the profarming their land, with a view to improving their daily ceedings of the UNESCO 2003 Conference on Angkor in lives. In this Centre villagers may also acquire a wealth of Paris (see Pl. EpII.1c); and it continued, as a combined set information aimed at improving their living conditions. of pre-modern signifiers, its career as a perfect Leitmotif of cultural heritage longing in the ICC-Angkor commemThe APSARA National Authority technical staff assists them in trying to replicate on their land what they can see oration brochures of 2008 and 2013 (see above Pl. EpII.2f at the Centre. [italics MF] (ICC-Angkor 2013, 54) and 4d). rows and other weapons of the time period, spectacular performances, live musical acts and beautiful Apsara dancers whilst you enjoy a traditional Khmer dinner inside Angkor Wat, and experience this magnificent Wonder of the World spectacularly lit up at night. […] Candles & flaming torches will add to the mystical & spiritual aura of the temple, as you enter the Gate House under the three towers and begin your journey back in history. […] The King would also like to invite you for a once in a life time light tour of the Angkor Wat Temples by flaming torch light. You will be granted full access to the innermost sacred temple. Feel the carvings come to life as they dance in the flickering candlelight accompanied by acoustic classical Khmer musicians.” Online https://www.angkorhotels.org/event/Angkor_Wat_Night_Lighting_Tours, retrieved 1 March 2019.

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Benedict’s 1983 Anthropology of World’s Fairs reminds us that the above-quoted models to improve the physical and moral conditions of people came from the visions for progress and amelioration on display in universal exhibitions. However, what he termed the display of “idealized presents being supported by an idealised past” (Benedict 1983, 34) was more often included in the classification of civilisation and ethnicity within which ‘native architectural styles’ were attributed to colonial people on display. In this sense the above-quoted Khmer display of traditional houses and people within Angkor Park came as an additional moment of déjà vu and veritable ‘back-translation’ from those universal and colonial exhibitions from 1889 and 1900 to 1922, 1931 and 1937 which we have covered in the first volume of this book (chapters IV–VIII).71 However, the contested nature of this imaginaire between traditional living and archaeological reserve had already travelled a long way (see chapter IX):

here we remember Henri Marchal’s guidebook from 1928, which proposed his tourists to Angkor Park a little detour to the “indigenous villages [as] a tableau rustique and amusing for the lovers of exotic spectacles” (Marchal 1928, 203). But also the flip side of the display of the good vernacular and traditional – the ‘un-ordered world’ scenario – travelled from the colonial and early postcolonial era72 into a ‘neo-colonial’ post-1992 era as it surfaced in a severe control system over the housing patterns inside Angkor Park: while APSARA’s highly motivated house architect, Sim Buntho­ eun,73 designed neo-traditional model houses for a new ecovillage outside Angkor Park (see below), A ­ PSARA was busy with its assigned policemen from the Mixed Intervention Unit (MIU) – as reported in the Phnom Penh Post on 21 August 2017 (Pl. EpII.19b) – to dismantle 171 “allegedly illegally constructed houses within the protected area of Angkor Archaeological Park” (Soth 2017, my emphasis)74.

4. Greater Angkor Park post-1992: From archaeological reserve to theme park This last section will engage with the question of how Angkor Park, now together with a full range of ‘archaeologically themed’ projects just outside the delimited heritage reserve, mutated into a global cultural heritage conglomerate with a veritable theme park atmosphere. This brings us back to the discussion in the introduction of this book. Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ was a useful starting point for conceptualising the simultaneous side-by-side and juxtaposed configurations and accumulation of multiple time frames and spaces which seemed to be, at first glance, incompatible. In the thematic order of this two-volume publication, this approach helped to understand a) how the ‘exhibitionary complexes’ (after Bennett 1988) à la Angkor

(Wat) in French museum and exhibitions on the one side (volume one), and the archaeological making-of processes of Angkor Park and Angkor Wat in Cambodia (volume two) stood in a transcultural connectedness; and b) how this colonial-time scenario had – in an ongoing process of back-and-round-trip translations – a long-lasting effect on Angkor Park in Cambodia’s postcolonial period until 1990. Adding Benedict’s observations on World’s Fairs was useful in this epilogue to draw a transcultural circle and understand how those ‘ordered world scenarios’ – ranging from well-arranged museums, temporary fairgrounds, ceremonial festivities, and cultural heritage reserves – were recooked after 1992, together with neo-colonial desire for

71  The visitor to the 1889 Universal Exhibition saw Charles Garnier’s display of an Histoire de l’habitation

humaine with primitive huts or archaeological models from non-Europe (Figs. IV.4–5) right under the national-progress icon of the Eiffel Tower, before he walked through the Orientalist rue du Caire scenario (Fig. IV.13a) and reached the French-colonial section with the pagode d’Angkor next to a Javanese village (Figs. IV.8a). In the 1900 Universal Exhibition, an overgrown face tower à la Bayon stood next to a “Laotian hut” (Fig. V.4b). Angkor Wat’s replica in the National Colonial Exhibition in Marseille 1922 came with a rustic hut at an artificial water tank (Fig. VI.15b), and in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, traditional houses were on display in the Indochinese section (Fig. VII.22c) and a “reconstitution of indigenous rustic life with a straw hut [stood] inside the Cambodian pavilion” (Fig. VII.24b). 72  Here we remember the re-establishment of aesthetically correct monks’ houses within the relocated monastery inside Angkor Wat in the 1930s (Figs. IX.8, 12) and B. P. Groslier’s effort to integrate the emptied or at least purified villages right in front of Angkor Wat’s western entrance into a “jardin anglais” setting (RCA 1968; compare Fig. IX.23a). 73  I thank Sim Bunthoeun for taking me to the Khmer Habitat Interpretation Center and the ecovillage of Run Ta–Ek in 2010. 74  In fact a series of different comments can be mentioned about the conflicting value structures between religious and daily living practices inside, and land ownership, sacred landscape protection, cultural resource management and touristic explotation of Angkor Park. To name a few, compare Apsara 1996/8 to Candelaria 2005, Anderson 2007, Baillie 2007, Son 2007, 2011, Higgins-Zogib 2008, Gillespie 2009, Ang 2012, Luco 2013.

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strictly hierarchised institutional organisation, late-modernist illusions of total technological mastery, and imported global heritage expertise, into a newly enacted utopia called World Heritage of Angkor. But Benedict’s analysis into the most recent development of World’s Fairs is also valuable here for our final observation of this book: with changing marketing schemes; new products and media on display; and new patterns of visual, spatial, and physical consumption, their old-fashioned agendas of national prestige and competition, top-down instruction and education strategies, their hierarchised ‘ordered world’ display and the techniques applied to impress (gigantism, monumentality) lost their once-elitist prerogative to interpret the world. What Benedict investigated in this tendency as “fair-and-counterfair” constellation with a constant peripheral “growth of the amusement zone” just outside of the delimited and authorised fairgrounds themselves (Benedict 1983, 52–59) will be paralleled here for Angkor Park and its larger environment: ­defined borderlines of the cultural reserve itself became permeable, ‘ordered world’ scenarios jumbled; strictly mapped out and legally protected zones became fuzzy; clear-cut layout, presentation, and classification schemes of exhibits and people on display got blurred and tested in new formats just outside the delimited area; seriously presented (in our case restored temple) architecture on display was contrasted and parodied with “gimcrack buildings” and spectacularised though popular helicopter and balloon rides; and ideological and aesthetic instruction patterns were replaced by popular entertainment schemes. Here, the new field of theme park studies was taken into consideration in the introduction to this book to comprehend the current Angkor Park scenario beyond its well-­ defined borders, and as a kind of secularised pilgrimage site within the logic of today’s globalised mass culture (Young 2002). Certainly, this new configuration still bor-

rows from historic architectural follies, pleasure gardens, and translated jardin élysée-like archaeological staging (compare Figs. Intro.20–22 and III.6; Pl. IX.5), museum displays (compare Figs. III.11, 28, 36), and universal and colonial exhibitions with their idealised ‘temples and people from Angkorian pasts’ displays. However, today’s global mass tourists expect culture and leisure, and want to be entertained with and immersed into newly fabricated ‘sequences of themed stage sets, free of contradictions and without the previous elitist claims of authenticity’ (after King 2002). Spending a short week in the wider region of Angkor today provides the visitor with a much larger set of ‘archaeologically themed environments’ (see introduction; after Holtorf 2007, Schlehe/Hochbruck 2010, Lukas 2007/ 2018). As we shall see in the following case studies, the conceptual and aesthetic boundaries of the real and the reinvented got progressively blurred beyond recognition by walking from the archaeological park itself into adjacent open-air museums, (future) hotel zones, historical re-enactments and live performances in cultural and ecological villages. Altogether we enter a whole cultural heritage conglomerate in form of a hyper-commercialised tourist district beyond the classical park boundaries (after Davis 1996). So, to conclude this book, we will accompany the visitor through a series of ‘imagineered frames’ featuring archaeologically themed environments along the margins of Ang­ kor Park and, beyond that, into a larger heritage space of longing (compare Stewart 1993), an expanded vanity fair of Western expert cultures. ‘Utopic engineering and alternate ordering’ (Hetherington 1997) comes here with a whole range of different ‘archaeological theme park settings’ and ‘enacted utopias’ of Angkor’s cultural heritage: from an ethnographic playground within a so-called ecovillage, to a commercial and gigantomanic hotel project, a low-key amusement park, a painted panorama and a high-tech museum – all the way to just end where the whole book about Angkor Wat’s transcultural history of heritage had started…

4.1 The Ecovillage of Run Ta-Ek: archaeological ethnography re-enacted? In a French-English leaflet of 2008, Khoun (then APSARA’s depu­ty director in charge of land and habitat management75) presented his Canada-New Zealand-Singapore-funded project called Run Ta-Ek: Eco-Village for sustainable development. Concept note of an ecological human settlement.76

With reference to the some 120,000 people in 112 villages within “the true living site of Angkor”, he assured the reader that, on the basis of a Royal Government decree from 2004, the inhabitants within Angkor Park still had the right to stay in their existing habitations, but that “building new

75  I would like to thank Khoun Khun-Neay posthumously for his support during my stays in Cambodia and

for his visit to my 2010 Angkor workshop at Heidelberg University (see introduction) with his presentation on “Land use, housing, and living in Angkor Park: The vision of APSARA National Authority”. 76  As indicated, international consultants were Pierre Guertin (architect, urban planner, and professor at Laval University from Quebec/Canada) and Thomas Fraser Ltd. (Auckland, New Zealand); financial support came from the International Development Research Center IDRC (Regional Office for Southeast and East Asia), Singapore.

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houses was not allowed” anymore and that APSARA “invited young families to establish [their] new house with all commodities outside the protected zones 1 and 2 […] on a voluntary basis” (Khoun 2008, 4–7). More precisely, this promised land was a government-purchased 1,012 hectare spot just some kilometres outside to the east of Angkor Park. The “project philosophy” for the overall design guidelines came with a patronising twist that had strong resonance with a colonial exhibition-like display mode of a ­‘denial of coevalness’ (after Fabian 1983): “the Run Ta-Ek ecological human settlement project [was therefore] not conceived in a modern urban space with its brutal negative impact on the livelihood” of the potential new inhabitants, but in one that supposedly gave them “the possibility to evolve favourably through space and time, at their own pace of life, in a lifestyle based on their traditional ways“ (Pl. EpII.20a,b), in “a milieu of opportunities and equal chances to progress [and] a symbiosis between economic growth, social values and nature”. The future inhabitants’ task was assigned to the “production of agricultural commodities, handicraft activities and ecotourism”. In a theme park-like jumble and juxtaposition of visions of enhanced pasts and speculative ­futures, the whole project was planned to “optimize the archaeological remains in the nearby remains [such as the tenth-century ceramic kiln site] and revitalise an old Angkorian water reservoir” nearby, but to function on the basis of “renewable energy such as sun, wind, natural manure and bio-fertilizers and other bio-degradable products” (Khoun 2008, 8–9) (Pl. EpII.20c–f). The whole project built on Khmer feasibility studies on topography and soil in

2006/7 and the initial concept of an “agroville” by the Canadian architect Pierre Guertin (Guertin 2007),77 who Khoun knew from his own thirty-year work life as a city planner in Quebec during the period of Khmer Rouge t­error in and Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.78 The whole settlement was planned to house 850 families or some 5,000 people, in six neighbourhoods of 750 people, with a central one to house 1,250, which was grouped “around the main existing ponds [as] man-made square reservoirs built in Angkor times” (Pl. EpII.21a–c). House styles should “not necessarily exactly replicate a traditional Khmer house model but should reflect some of the traditional specifications such as stilts, flight of stairs, sloping roof, shutters, living space underneath the residence; and use materials, techniques and know-how associated with the natural resources of the Siem Reap area” (Pl. EpII.21d). The planning of “ethno-tourism” foresaw a new network of walking paths and bicycle track circuits for tourists in order to – we remember the very same slogans and voyeuristic displays of ethnic artisanat in France’s last colonial exhibition in 1937 (see Figs. VIII.25b, 27a, 30b) – “witness traditional life, observe workers in the fields and watch crafts-­persons in their daily life” (Khoun 2008, 12, 16). Shortly after, the Run Ta-Ek project was exported to the 4,500 hectare ‘Samdech Techo Hun Sen Ecovillage’ project, south of the Preah Vihear UNESCO World Heritage site. In our above-defined sense to conceive the ongoing making of Angkor’s archaeological pasts and (in)tangible heritage presents into a veritable theme park with added-on spaces around the clear-cut World Heritage reserve,

77  Building a first French study in 2007 about the “agroville” of Run Ta-Ek (Guertin 2007), Guertin’s unpub-

lished 2008 report La création d’un écovillage dans un milieu traditionnel Khmer. Phase II: Principes et plan d’aménagement du Village central (Québec 7 avril 2008) not only summarised the initial proposal but also critiqued the Cambodian implementation as regards the water-soil system and the milieu, as a newly built canal-road system had cut the natural water flow of the site with its sandy and highly permeable, deforested, and unshaded grounds (Guertin 2007, 8–11). Additionally, he complained that the instant switch from ‘agroville’ to ‘ecovillage’ had not yet triggered a new conceptual thinking of the planners; warned about an overstressed imaginary of a ‘stable and traditional village pattern’ due to the reality of a recent diaspora experience of its targeted population, and referred to the present need of “new forms of agricultural life in changed condition in the twenty-first century” (13). Whereas “very few vestiges from the past” existed, a nearby “old ancestral route” was to be included into the new road system (48), and the design of the “family home” should not entirely “reproduce the traditional model of a Khmer house” but enable the new residents to bring detachable building material from their old habitations within Angkor Park” (70). As traditional Khmer villages normally had their centre built up with houses, Run Ta-Ek was oriented around the empty space of a ‘central pond’, hence the proposed name of ‘Chea Lea’ for this first unit. I would like to thank Mr. Guertin for a personal email correspondence and more material sent about this matter. 78  Khoun was himself a completely global player as a trained architect and urban planner. In Cambodia, he was dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh (1968–75), deputy director of the Southeast Asian Applied Research Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts (1972–75), and director general of the Ministry of Culture in 1975. During the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese era over Cambodia, he was senior architect in the Ministry of Public Works and of Higher Education of the Quebec/Canada (1977–2004) before he worked as consultant to the Asian Development Bank (2004). Returning to Cambodia he became the director of the Monuments and Archaeology Department of APSARA (2004–2008), and became its director general from 2008 onwards, in charge of Land and Habitat Management.

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Figures EpII.8a—d  Gabrielle Martel’s ethnographic study of Lovea village near Angkor (1961/62, ­published 1975): aerial photograph (1a); traditional houses (1b); environmental plan (1c); oxcart and harvest (1d) (Source: Martel 1975, planches 2, 4 (collage), 11 (collage), 362)

the Run Ta-Ek project came as an ambivalent ‘local-global theme mix’. It comprised of a) ethnographic references to Cambodia’s traditional life patterns, b) resurfacing archaeological topoi of Angkor as an ancient hydraulic empire, c) UNESCO’s globalised management strategies for World Heritage, and, finally and overlooked in the academic debate (see below), d) neotraditional-regionalist urban planning trends on a global scale. 440

As regards the ‘ethnographic theming’ of the concerned relocation project, Guertin’s wish in his 2008 French study to have the newly planned features of the ecovillage as “sustainably beneficial for its future inhabitants as those [features] still being preserved in the age-old village of Lovea” some twenty kilometres to the northeast of Angkor Park is particularly interesting (Guertin 2007, 6). Without a doubt Gabrielle Martel’s ethnographic study Lovéa: Village des

4. Greater Angkor Park post-1992: From archaeological reserve to theme park

Figures EpII.9a,b  Two different versions of ‘living traditions’: ‘Case cochinchinoise’ on a postcard for the 1907 Colonial Exhibition in Nogent, eastern outskirts of Paris (left); Cambodian modernist model house of 1961 (right) (Source: postcard 1907 in Blanchard 2011, 262 (left); Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2 (1961), 9 (right))

environs d’Angkor was a well known reference to all present actors. Already executed in 1961, but published by the EFEO only in 1975, her “observation of the milieu rural Khmer” and the stated contrast between the “hamlets within Angkor Park [hamaux du Parc d’Angkor], themselves being progressively confronted with international tourism”; and the rediscovered “old village world close to the ancient capital, itself surrounded by archaeological vestiges and rice fields, and with its craftsmanship-oriented inhabitants [artisanat] and ecologically built habitat of stilted houses” (Martel 1975, 3–10, 16, 33, 53) certainly set the tone for the new project (Figs. EpII.8a–d). Interestingly, Martel’s study itself took place in the same moment of 1961/62 when Jean Delvert’s geographic study Le paysan Cambod­ gien (Delvert 1961) established a French-scientific – we call it late-modern, slightly nostalgic and almost self-reflective – interest in Cambodia’s ‘good old past’ of traditional peasant communities and vernacular rural settlement patterns. While Cambodia itself had continuously been represented in French-colonial times as a country of archaeological pasts and ‘ethnographic presents’ (after Fabian 1983) (Fig. EpII.9a), it was at that point around 1960 when the postco-

lonial and independent nation-state of Cambodia itself actually searched for a truly contemporary solution to the topic (Fig. EpII.9b).79 Shortly after, the Khmer Rouge turned the clock backwards again and circulated the image of the pre-modern “village in Kampuchea Démocratique” (compare chapter XI, see Fig. XI.31b). It seemed that Cambodia’s self-representation within the larger ‘cultural heritage conglomerate’ of and around post-1992 Angkor Park had not yet regained its final will to be ‘contemporary’. As discussed in chapter X, the French-made topos of Angkor as a hydraulic empire emerged prominently in the 1930s, Victor Goloubew’s aerial reconnaissance flights identified an overlap of historic and ‘modern’ pond settlement structures around 1940 (compare Figs. X.13a,b), and Bernard Philippe Groslier influenced, with his publications until the late 1960s, Cambodia’s postcolonial self-esteem, which had been bolstered by renewed Angkorian grandeur (compare Pl. X.4–8). Interestingly, the archaeological theme of “an inter-relationship between hydraulic features and rice field patterns at Angkor during ancient times” resurfaced again after 1992 under French expertise (compare Pottier 2000, Delvert 2001) and was, now in a new coalition

79  The February 1961 issue of Cambodge d’aujourd’hui pictured Prince Sihanouk opening a (US-funded)

modern-style model school and housing project in Cambodia’s rural, least populated, and poorest province of Stung Treng province. The “model house in wood and fibre-cement was planned to be adopted in rural centres” over the country (Cambodge d’aujourd’hui, 2.1961, 8–9).

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with Australian experts, merged into the Greater Angkor Project to redefine Angkor as “the largest, low-density urban complex of the pre-industrial world” of some five thousand square kilometres (Fletcher/Evans/Pottier et al. 2003; compare ­Evans et al. 2007 and Fletcher et al. 2015 with a whole themed volume on Angkor in the 2015 issue of Antiquity: A review of World Archaeology). With Khoun being directly involved with the University of Sydney World Heritage– related research agenda, UNESCO’s new patrimonial key concepts of ‘(associative) cultural landscapes’ and ‘living heritage’ also influenced APSARA’s self-assigned task to “monitor the dynamic interaction between cultural heritage, natural environment, and contemporary society” and to “reconcile the competing demands of living with heritage”. In what we call a ‘neo-colonial’ or, better, ‘self-recolonising attitude’ to talk about Angkor as an eternal ‘laboratory for experiments’ (see above), Khoun now joined in to declare the Angkor World Heritage site a “paradigmatic test case in protecting the values of World Heritage Sites in developing countries” (Fletcher/Khoun et al. 2007, 385, 388). And his dearest project in this context was without a doubt Eco­ village Run Ta-Ek, as he explained it again in UNESCO’s self-congratulatory 2012 publication World Heritage: Bene­ fits beyond borders.80 How do we conceptualise this strange development? In the wider context of his influential ‘scape’ theory in times of globalisation, Arjun Appadurai talked about “ethno­ scapes”, to include villages, communities, localities (Appadurai 1996, 48–65). Useful for this case study, he also discussed the Janus-faced processes of the “social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity” ‘from the inside’ and efforts ‘from the outside’ in global times of migration and diaspora to artificially re-create ‘imagined communi-

ties’ (after Anderson 1983).81 Keiko Miura’s anthropological-ethnographical enquiry into APSARA’s rhetoric of ­preserving the lifestyle of ‘original’ (old) villagers and the Run Ta-Ek configuration (Miura 2016a, 232) is particularly interesting in our context.82 From a theoretical approach, Appadurai’s discourse about a “deterritorialised” ethno­ scapes can be useful here, as we argue, that it came with a concrete re-territorialisation process in the field of cultural heritage management. Ever-new buzzwords such as ‘living heritage’ and ‘community empowerment’ entered the post1992 Angkor Park debate as aesthetic and normative concepts through globally circulating and UNESCO-related expert cultures, the national elites of APSARA included. As result, those celebrated paradigm changes became physically implemented through the ‘utopic engineering’ of ­totally new ‘indigenised spaces’… such as Run Ta-Ek eco­ village. If the Run Ta Ek’s theme park-like display mode of ‘the ethnographical and vernacular around the archaeological’ had travelled a long way from European universal and colonial exhibitions and resurfaced again in and around the post-1992 Angkor as World Heritage scenario, its ‘neo-traditional’ settlement pattern – established just outside the modern-time archaeological reserve – was influenced through an additional strand. Building on garden city concepts around 1900 and postmodern critiques of urbanism in the 1980s, new-urbanist trends of the early 1990s from the northern Americas (the United States and Canada) were essential: with direct reference to Run Ta-Ek’s concrete layout as a village and its surrounding system – first proposed in Guertin’s preparatory study from Quebec/ Canada, where Khoun himself had also worked and become involved in recent urbanist alternatives – we only

80  Here Khoun justified the project with his declared effort to “minimise the impacts on the outstanding universal value of the World Heritage property through restricting the population to current levels”, but framed it again with the seemingly perennial depiction of a “Circuit of bullock carts [for] community tourism development to complement traditional sectors such as agriculture and craft” (Khoun 2012, 314–15). Now, he compressed the constantly added-on concepts for the theme park of ‘Greater Angkor’ – including buzz­words from the 2007 Angkor Management Plan in assistance from New Zealand Aid Programme with its Angkor Participatory Natural Resource Management & Livelihood programme (see Pl. EpII.4d), and the Angkor Heritage Management Framework in collaboration with Australia – into the enacted utopia called Run Ta-Ek: namely “living heritage and sustainable development; […] participatory democracy” with a planned “village development committee”; a “community-driven tourism focus on rustic and culinary experiences”, heritage awareness-oriented “TV programmes” and training sessions in the villages; altogether a “colossal challenge” of the “regrouping of a proud people” (Khoun 2012, 314–24). 81  Compare above other Indigenous cultures in an interconnected world (Smith/Ward 2000) or Who owns native culture (Brown 2003). 82  Miura’s engagement with ‘living heritage’ is a long history of expertise. Already in 2001 she talked about “Community empowerment in the conservation work of Angkor complex” (Miura 2001, 2016b) before she presented her PhD thesis Contested heritage: People at Angkor (Miura 2004) at SOAS London, with a focus on what she saw as the ‘traditional community’ of Angkor Krau to the north of Angkor Thom. Her claimed “need for anthropological approaches to conservation and management of living heritage sites” (Miura 2008, see Miura 2005) continued with research into Angkor’s “old villagescapes” (Miura 2011a; compare her Japanese monograph Living with Angkor heritage, Miura 2011b, see also Miura 2015 in my edited volume on Cultural heritage as civilising mission).

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Figure EpII.10  Anton Nelessen’s neo-traditional community and “hamlet” planning from the ­early 1990s (Source: Nelessen 1994, 13, 14; Christofordis 1994, 435; collage Michael Falser)

refer here to the single case of the ‘neo-traditionalist’ planning schemes of the US-American architect Anton Nelessen. In his 1994 publication Visions for a new American Dream: Process, principles, and ordinance to plan and design small communities, he summarised his “guidelines to plan hamlets, villages, and neighbourhoods in the urban fringe” as “ecologically responsible small communities” (Nelessen 1994, iii, 10–11). His charts for a “connected hierarchy of communities” to connect small neighbourhoods and “hamlets [with their] distinctive architectural design vocabulary” through newly invented “traditional settlement patterns”

(Nelessen 1994, 13–14, 45) sounded – and indeed looked – like a perfect model (Fig. EpII.10) to plan Run Ta-Ek (compare Pl. EpII.21a–d). Adding what architectural historians also called the trend of a “preservationist’s neo-traditionalism” (Christoforidis 1994, 435; compare Knack 1991) to combine Nelessen’s ‘hamlet’ patterns with questions of revitalisation, enhancement, and economic restructuring of historic environments brings us even closer to the cultural heritage conglomerate of ‘Greater Angkor’ – hotel and wellness resorts in Siem Reap included (Pl. EpII.22), as the next gigantomanic case will exemplify. 443

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4.2 The Gates-to-Angkor Hotel Zone: An archaeologically themed space being super-commercialised? The archaeologically themed environments at the margins of Angkor Park had scientific and ethnographic features (Run Ta-Ek) and were amusement and leisure oriented (see the next case), but they also had a straightforward commercial aspect. This concerned the ambivalent Hotel Zone project which – logically – gained momentum after the World Heritage nomination of Angkor Park and the further commodification of its status as the must-see destination for global mass tourism related to cultural heritage. However, the strict divide between archaeological heritage inside and a commercial zoning outside Angkor Park was new in this context. In French-colonial and postcolonial times from 1910 to 1970, repeated hotel planning within the Angkor Park zone – from the “Bungalow” and “Maison des passagiers” in front of Angkor Wat (see Figs. IX.11a, 15) to the “Auberge royale des temples” and the new “Angkor Hotel” complex (see Figs. X.39–40, Pl. X.17a,b) – always planned to supplement Siem Reap’s mundane “Grand Hotel” and Sihanouk’s later opened “Villa princière”. Even before Angkor Park’s 1992 World Heritage nomination, Vann Molyvann, in his 1991 concept report Parcs archéologiques d’Angkor and with the attached zoning proposal months before the international ZEMP campaign (see Pl. XII.6–8), reflected on the “développement du tourisme”, the problem of a missing “capacité hôtelière”, and the needed “implantation et définition d’un pôle touristique” (Vann 1991, A17). However, his proposal to relate the concept for Angkor Park with a coherent plan for a “Musée de site d’Angkor” and a “Gîte d’Angkor” (compare Vann 1991 (Pl. XII.9a–b) never materialised, and the latter was outsourced to different investors (see below). ZEMP’s proposal of a territory north of Siem Reap towards Angkor Park as a suitable “Tourist Development Zone” (see Pl. XII.16b) was supported by a royal “Sub-Decree concerning the Hotel Zone (79/ANKR/PK)” on 13 October 1995 (compare Wagner 1995a–c). In the very same month, curious plans circulated in the unpublished project dossier Siem Reap Tourism Development Zone – Conceptual master plan prepared for the Ministry of Tourism, Kingdom of Cambodia from October 1995.83 As the imprint has it, it was “prepared by YTL Corporation Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; in close cooperation with: Bunnag Architects (Bangkok/Thailand) and Skaarup & Jespersen, Planners & Architects (Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia & Copenhagen/Denmark)”.84 As Tim Winter mentioned it in his discussion on “touristscapes” over the wider Angkor heritage zone (Winter 2007a, 74–76) and in greater detail in a parallel research article (Winter 2007b, 34–37), a

‘Memorandum of Understanding’ was drafted in November 1995 between the Ministry of Tourism and YTL Corporation to cover the one-thousand-hectare hotel project to “attract more than $1 billion in investment” (Peters 1996; YTL 1996), together with a giant sound-and-light-show strategy for Angkor Wat. However, none of the projects were supported by ICC-Angkor nor APSARA’s Vann Molyvann, who claimed the zone (of de facto only 560 hectares) as one to be developed under ‘his’ authority (Vittachi 1997). What interests us in this context is the involved ‘archaeological theming’ of the concrete proposal with its monumental scale (Figs. EpII.11a–c). Situated to the northeast of Siem Reap on a projected surface of 1.9 by 4.6 kilometres, its prominent feature was, as the dossier described it, the “Siem Reap Multi-Functional Town Square, planned to integrate with a proposed new network of canals, pedestrian walkways, landscape, infrastructure, and roads, and to serve the social, commercial, and cultural focal centre of the new Siem Reap city life” (Ministry of Tourism 1995, 5). With its layout on the large-scaled map, this focal point was indeed meant to stand in concrete relation to Angkor Wat’s configuration some three kilometres across the indicated “boundary” of Angkor Park (see Fig. EpII.11a). With the close-up plans, the archaeological-spatial theming was even accentuated within a veritable water system, as it was approached over a doubled configuration of concentric moats, in supposed “aesthetic reference to the ancient great barays”, whereas the inner “town square was characterized by a formal concentric planning, which recalled that of ancient Angkor site planning” (Ministry of Tourism 1995, 6). As the dossier had it, “Phase I” covered 719 acres with three luxury hotels with some nine hundred rooms. Already at that point in 1995, Vann Molyvann, signing responsible in his function as Ministre d’État and Vice-Président du Conseil de la Culture nationale, came back to the hydraulic system of Angkor and stated that “distinct boundaries needed to be established between the Archaeological Park and all the other areas of development”. Here, he referred to the “proposed two water reservoirs, each measuring fifty metres by five kilometres, and three metres deep, to be built along the southern boundary of the Park, with a total capacity of 1,5000,000 cubic metres to [eventually] contribute to maintaining a sufficient water level in the Siem Reap River during the dry season” (Vann 1997, 32). However, not much happened in the following years, but the restructuring of APSARA in 2001 seemed to have brought a new impetus, and the project was, under French expertise, re-branded

83  Thanks go posthumously to Claude Jacques who provided this document of his private collection dating from his personal involvement as UNESCO’s Angkor Special Advisor for Federico Mayor (see Pl. XII.10). 84  Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s second son and the half brother of the current king, Norodom Siha­ moni, is said to have made this draft deal during his function as FUNCINPEC president and first prime minister of Cambodia following the restoration of the monarchy, serving between 1993 and 1997.

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Figures EpII.11a—c  Plans for the giant Siem Reap Tourism Development Zone, drafted by YTL/ Kuala Lumpur in 1995 (Source: personal archive Claude Jacques)

into “Angkor Tourist City” with planned luxury hotels such as Accor or Four Seasons and the installation of electric shuttle cars provided by a South Korean investor.85 How­ever, when the National Seminar on Cultural Tourism was held in Phnom Penh in July 2001, APSARA reconfirmed the new project’s orientation along reinvented old references:

Angkor Tourist City will be developed in compliance with current planning regulations, but in keeping with Khmer architectural traditions. Green areas and buildings will be blended together. The area will contain tourist and leisure facilities only. It is reserved exclusively for luxury and firstclass hotels with a capacity of over sixty rooms (APSARA 2001, 4; quoted in Winter 2007b, 36)

85  A mentioned Angkor Tourist City investment brochure by APSARA Authority, UNESCO, and the Agence Française de Développement in 2001 could not be located for this study. However, Vann Molyvann’s hold-up of those projects may have led to his dismissal in the same year (see above; compare Kay/Reed 2001, Peycam 2015, 775).

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When Sok An, back then APSARA’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Senior Minister for the Council of Ministers, concluded the event, he openly expressed his ambitions for a total touristic exploitation of Angkor Wat, making a direct comparison to one of France’s most iconic heritage sites in Paris:86 Yes, we need higher quality tourism. Notre-Dame gets 14 million tourists a year; Angkor Wat does not get anywhere near that, and we can reach that level. We are using 1 per cent of our potential, and we have 98—99 per cent to go. (quoted in Winter 2007a, 76)

The next step in this direction followed shortly after: the 300-page Rapport de synthèse – Conservation et développement dans la région de Siem Reap – Angkor, produced by UNESCO, APSARA, and the French Agence française de développement, coordinated by Azedine Beschaouch, prepared by the “Groupe Huit” from Paris, and in expressis verbis “dedicated” to State Minister Sok An and the French ambassador to Cambodia. The report contained sections on “A: Angkor Park”, including a rework on the circulation and signaletic system (see Fig. EpII.2), and “C: Siem Reap”, covering the town’s refurbishment issues. The great second section, “B: Les Portes d’Angkor”, covering some 120 pages alone, was dedicated to the above-mentioned hotel zone in-between Angkor Park and the city. Altogether, it was intended to serve as a hotel, commercial, and residential zone; a logistical, administrative and media centre for Ang­ kor; a site for spectacles, festivals, and festivities; and for Figure EpII.12  Portes d’Angkor project with its planned scientific research about Angkor and a museum with collec- reorientation of the age-old water system from the Kulen tions from the Conservation d’Angkor (Beschaouch 2002b, Mountains through Angkor Park to the Tonlé Sap (lake), as B7–8, 43). Besides long sections about the enormous finan- depicted in Beschaouch’s 2002 Rapport de synthèse for the conservation and development of Angkor (Source: Bescial and high-end-oriented management schemes of the chaouch 2002b, B79) hotel zone to cover the future international need of some “1,200 to 6,000 rooms” (B13), our interest lies again in the archaeological theming of the gigantic site. The very name change from “Cité hôtelière” to “Portes d’Angkor”87 oriented in this direction, as the new site’s dedicated function as ronnemental” referred directly to the “exceptional maîtrise a “véritable portail initiatique au Site Archéologique d’Ang­ de l’écologie of the Khmer civilisation and its sensible rekor” (B11) was attended by debate about the eventual “cre- sponse to the choice of site which had guaranteed the ation of a new ‘porte d’Angkor’ (arriving to Angkor Wat maintenance of the natural resources through the past seven from the east)” (B31). Moreover, the new super-commer- centuries until our days” (B40). Consequently, the whole cial hotel project, with French design firms in the front row, system of “drainage and retention basins” and canals was appropriated the same great archaeological myths of Ang- “inscribed into the principles of the ‘Cité hydraulique’ angkor which were ‘at re-play’ on the scientific side, from the korienne” (B47), which the visionary Angkor Park conserGreater Angkor Project to the small Run Ta-Ek ecovillage. vator Bernard Philippe Groslier had popularised in the Also in the Portes d’Angkor project, a planned “cadre envi- 1960s (see chapter X; compare Figs. X.13b, Pl. X.4–7). How86  Nota bene: these two iconic sites had already visually met in 1966, compare Fig. X.54. 87  The name change to “Portes d’Angkor” was blatantly justified as a promotion gag, as the new name would

give a direct “reference to Angkor, the world’s largest and one of the most beautiful sites of the world” and respond better to “the plurality of the potential investors (hotels, producers of cultural and sportive animations, organisers of adapted spectacles, planners of leisure spaces [golf, horse club, etc.])”, and better reflect “the diversity of its clientele (tourists, participants of international seminars, researchers, artists etc.)” (Beschaouch 2002b, B34). On the 2000 Siem Reap conference on tourism, see: World Tourism Organisation 2001.

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ever, while the above-mentioned scientific projects were primarily interested in historical investigations of the old water system of the great plain, the impact here was meant to destabilise it forever: Portes d’Angkor would be, in the near future, a new constitutive element to “connect the World Heritage site of Angkor and traditional city of Siem Reap” with the old water flow system “Kulen – Angkor – Portes d’Angkor – Siem Reap – Tonlé Sap” (Beschaouch 2002b, B78) (Fig. EpII.12). But that was not enough in the great game of archaeological theming at the margins of Ang­ kor Park. Once again, after a long series of architectural projects in French colonial exhibitions, such as the ones in Marseille of 1922 or Paris of 1931 (compare Figs. VI.8, VII.3,

Pl. VII.3b) to Phnom Penh’s National Stadium by Vann Molyvann in 1969 (compare Fig. X.33 and Pl. X.14), the ‘architectural affordance quality and actionable capacity’ of Angkor Wat (see the discussion of these terms in the introduction to this book) triggered new versions of ‘utopic engineering’. This time, when the new ‘Gates of Angkor’ actors finally came to their preliminary architectural design, they virtually multiplied the setup of Cambodia’s largest temple site by lining up the most important functions in an axial configuration: “The major elements are enhanced through their positioning on square islands, in the form of four modules being encased by moats. The reference to Angkor Wat is very strong here.” (B54) [italics MF] (Pl. EpII.23)

4.3 The Cambodian Cultural Village: The theme of Angkor as amusement zone? Besides a pseudo-scientific re-enactment of Angkor in the archaeological-ethnographic disguise of Ecovillage Run Ta-Ek and the super-commercialised hotel zone with its spatial arrangement in the layout mode of Angkor Wat, there is a third element of archaeological theming à la Ang­korienne which needs to be considered at the margins of Angkor Park. What Benedict referred to as the phenomenon of emerging “amusement zones as [veritable] counter-fairs” right outside the strictly controlled world’s fair grounds (Benedict 1983, 52–59) can be compared here with a fun park scenario which was installed just outside the protected heritage reserve. The private Cambodian Cultural Village (CCV) lies between Siem Reap and the city airport along the National 6 Highway in a north-western direction, as a 210,000 square metre theme and amusement park which opened in 2003. While local newspapers rated the project somewhere between ‘popular with the locals’ and ‘kitsch for the foreigners’,88 the scientific literature used the “strolling through the Cultural Village” as a useful pars pro toto trigger for reading the “expressions of Cambodia” through a series of dichotomous relationships, such as “tradition and modernity, diaspora and home, memory and identity, and the citizen and the state” (Ollier/Winter 2006, 6). Judging CCV’s features in this final epilogue of a publication which has followed Angkor (Wat) on its 150-yearlong transcultural trajectory between European and Asian projects is useful in another way: more than a mere fun-fair installation at the margins of an elitist archaeological World Heritage site, it can be conceptualised as a popular

and refreshingly light-hearted recycling of – once, and maybe even today still, heavily contested – cultural references, monumental to ethnographic displays, tangible to intangible cultures, and historical fragments from Cambodia’s re-imagined deep and very recent pasts. From this perspective, the presented museum displays, ethnographic villages, cultural performances, and architectural miniatures will remind us (with indications added here) of comparable universal and colonial exhibition scenarios in France (chapters I to VIII) but also of the architectural ‘miniaturisation’ strategies applied before and after the European impact (compare epilogue I and Pl. EpI.3–5), and of those historical re-enactments which surfaced after colonialism during Cambodia’s period of national independence (compare chapter X). A homepage online and a printed leaflet at the entry gate tell the visitors: CCV assembles all the miniatures of famous historical buildings and structures, local customs and practices of all races. There are thirteen unique villages, which represent different cultural heritages with eight scenes of show performance. At each scene, the tourist will be able to enjoy traditional dancing . [CVV is a] lifestyle landmark [sic] providing complete facilities and recreation services for both tourists and local community.89

Following the parcours around an artificial lake (Pl. EpII.24a) which vaguely reminds us of the above-men-

88  News from the Phnom Penh Post had it in 2004 that the “Cultural village near Angkor Wat prove[d] popu-

lar” as it had some ten thousand Cambodian visitors between normal weekends and festivities (Cheang 2004). Instead in 2010, a non-Cambodian author saw the “many westerners, except connoisseurs of Asian kitsch, ­rising eyebrows over the multi-million-dollar, Canada Bank-funded, Disneyland-Khmer-style Cambodian Cultural Village because of its perceived tackiness and its clashing mix of Cambodian culture with Disney-esque gross-outs” (Olszewski 2010). 89  “Cambodian Cultural Village,” http://www.cambodianculturalvillage.com/en, retrieved 7 March 2019.

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tioned Run Ta-Ek scenario, the visitor enters the Wax Museum first. Again, according to the web page descriptions, it showcases “famous Cambodian historical people from the first century up to the present’, starting with a ‘welcome apsara’ (Pl. EpII.24b) (“originating from Churning of the sea of milk in Brahmanism”, compare Fig. X.48a and Pl. EpII.17a) to King Jayavarmann VII and his Princess Indra­ devi (compare Figs. X.4–5), and from King Norodom Suramarith and Queen Sisowath Kossamak to a modern Cambodian “happy family”, a movie star of the 1990s and – at least until 2007 before its replacement with another farewell bidding Apsara – a controversial display of an UNTAC soldier ‘taking care’ of a young Cambodian ‘taxi girl’ (Pl. EpII.24c). A second section, called the Historical Museum, features a display on pre-Angkorian myths and also covers “Angkorian lifestyle and on how Angkor Wat was built” (Pl. EpII.24d). Walking through the museum’s representation of Cambodia’s eleven ethnically and racially diversified villages (Chinese, Kola, Kroeung, Cham, Khmer, etc.), the visitor would, according to the web page, get to know the “main model houses of Khmer people” and watch them “making their living by farming, making palm sugar, rice storage, carving, weaving, crafting farm, clay pot making, and fishing” (compare the Paris Exhibitions of 1931 and 1937 on Figs. VII.22c, 24b and VIII.25b, 27a).90 The chain of experiences of déjà vu would also continue in the theme park villages with their affiliated “traditional performances”,

from Apsara dances (compare Figs. X.42–44) to Khmer wedding ceremony shows and “The Greatest King – Jaya­ varman VII Show” on Friday to Sunday evenings in front of a Angkor Thom gate-like prop facade (Pl. EpII.25a; compare Figs. X.52 and 58). Finalising the walk through the Cambodian Cultural Village with a visit to the miniature section with “a collection of the famous and historical buildings and structures in Cambodia” would come as another effect of scenarios which we had already encountered in Angkor-related display modes in French museums and exhibitions (first volume) and affiliated restoration and re-enactment scenarios of the same inside Cambodia (volume two): the chronologically ordered features – combining the implicit concepts of the ‘miniature, the collection and the souvenir’ (Stewart 1993) – are the Khmer-time Kompong Kdey Bridge, Baphuon’s sixteenth-century Reclining Buddha (compare Pl. EpII.11), the former capital Ou Dong, Phnom Penh’s Royal Palace, and Wat Phnom (compare Figs. V.2a–b), a face-tower hybrid (Pl. EpII.25b; compare Pl. Intro.24b, Figs. III.40, V.4b, VII.25b, VIII.26, X.27a), the French-colonial structures of the National ­Museum (Pl. EpII.25c; compare Figs. VII.23a,b), and the Phsar Thmey (New Market) to the Independence Memorial (compare Figs. X.31–32). Towards the end, the tired visitor would find massage facilities, souvenir shops with Angkor Wat being commodified into a ‘sweet’ souvenir (Pl. EpII.25d), and floating restaurants.

4.4 Angkor Wat and its “Age of Prosperity” revisited — North Korea’s Angkor (Wat) Panorama In December 2015 and after four years of construction, the Angkor Panorama Museum opened. It was built by the North Korean Mansudae Newtech Corporation as a 24 million USD joint venture with APSARA, which itself contributed a giant parking lot for five hundred cars and buses for the deal. Completely outsourced for ten long years to the North Korean government, “Angkor Panorama [was] part of a great plan”, as director Yit Chandaroat from APSARA explained with a view of the larger construction site to the east of Charles de Gaulle Avenue, including the neighbouring

new ticket office for Angkor Park, the Asian Traditional Textile Museum under Indian-Cambodian leadership, and ­APSARA’s Norodom Sihanouk Museum, which was financed by the Japanese AEON group (Petersen 2016). Obviously the bilateral friendship deal for the new tourist attraction (critical voices called it an instrument of money laundering that allowed the internationally sanctioned Pyongyang regime to gain access to foreign currency) reached back as far as to Norodom Sihanouk’s period of exile in the 1970s in North Korea’s capital under dictator Kim Il-Sung.

90  If the ‘traditional house’ display mode resurfaced at the same moment in time with the Khmer Habitat In-

terpretation Centre inside Angkor Park and in APSARA’s Ecovillage Run Ta-Ek just outside the reserve (see above), then also the idea of experiencing craftsmanship with living human exhibits on display in staged vernacular architecture can be seen as an additional reminder to similar scenes during universal and colonial exhibitions, such as the ones in Paris 1931 and particularly in Paris 1937 when Cambodia’s colonial-time art school and museum director George Groslier for the last time praised the humble and silent competence of the ‘Cambodian artisan’ to copy and paste old Khmer-styled decoration patterns onto new commodities for sale (Figs. VIII.30–33). As an ambivalent matter of fact, this motif also resurfaced in the Artisans d’Angkor sale shops in Siem Reap, and its homepage tells us: “Angkor – the renowned ancient capital city of Khmer empire – is an aggregate of architectural wonders and ancient symbols that often give us design inspirations. Moreover, our craftsmen took part in the restoration of several parts of the Angkor temples” (http://www.artisansdangkor. com/, retrieved 11 March 2019).

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As the original homepage has it (Pl. EpII.26a), the 6,115 square metre museum space provides information about the history and culture of the Angkor era, with a declared vision: “Our ideal is to be a first-class museum contributing to the development of human civilization through the grand panoramic painting and various artworks which reflect the legendary Angkor Wat and its history and culture.”91 In the Information Hall the visitor can study a map to zoom in to the (in fact old French-colonial) Great and Small Circuit system through Angkor Park, watch over twenty-five major temples being replicated in 1:230 scale, and use a series of touchscreens to get the relevant dates about some “fifty-five temples and twenty-seven kings in alphabetical order”. A movie theatre provides a “historical documentary about the construction of Angkor Wat by proud Khmer people” (and not by ‘slaves’ as Pol Pot once had it, compare chapter XI), and a Service Hall is set up for refreshments and for purchasing fine arts on Angkor “by the renowned Korean artist”. However, the highlight is the central 360-degree “cyclorama”, 123 metres long and 13 metres high. According to the official description, “it represents the millennium-ago contemporary aspects of living in the prolonged Khmer era [with] the splendid oil painting Angkor: The Age of Prosperity (123 m × 13 m) in 360-degree view.” The painted canvas itself is divided into three parts and topics. Part 1, called “defence strategy”, depicts “the Khmer defending their fatherland and their national dignity, with General Jayavarman VII to smash the Champa forces”. Part 2, entitled “construction strategy” fosters the king’s giant building programme to peak in the Bayon temple. The third part on “Prosperity” portrays, in the words of the homepage, “an overall view of the Khmer Empire that had developed mysterious and gorgeous civilization on the vast Angkor plain. Majestic-looking Angkor Wat, Baksei Chamkrong, Prasat Bai, Ta Phrom, Prasat Kravan, hospitals, resthouses, library, roads, canals, moats around Angkor Wat, and homes – all these form a perfect harmony. It shows the happy and joyful life in the beautiful image of more than a million people, who brought the prosperous and glorious era.” As regards this final epilogue’s focus of the great archaeological theming processes in and around Angkor Park after 1992, Angkor (Wat) Panorama is in fact a strange hybrid which connects the attentive reader with three different features within Angkor Wat’s 150-year-long transcultural

history of heritage across different times and spaces. As we analysed it in volume one of this monograph, universal ­exhibitions in France from 1867 until 1937 served to preframe the ironic perspective and grandeur of Angkor Wat for global tourism. More precisely in this case, the Tour du Monde panorama of the Paris 1900 Universal Exhibition had already sent the traveller from Europe on a journey to the East from Egypt to Japan. One stopover was the great vista towards Angkor Wat (compare Fig. V.6b). Back then, the painted canvas was strangely live-enhanced with Javanese dancers (Fig. V.7a). More than one hundred years later, the Paris scenario ‘back-travelled to – almost – the real spot’, but now sixty-three North Korean artists from Mansudae Art Studio presented their hyper-real painted 3D aesthetics as a joyful market-cum-Sunday games canvas (Pl. EpII.26b). In a totally jumbled building chronology (no word is lost about the in fact Hinduist king Surya­varman II as the ‘real’ patron of Angkor Wat), the great Buddhist Jayavarman VII now took a pars pro toto responsibility for the most glorious Angkorian era. This was in fact a wrongly recooked story line which was first set up by French (art) historians and archaeologists in the 1930s (compare George Coedès’ 1935 publication Un grand roi du Cambodge, see Fig. X.4b) and then appropriated by King and Chef d’État Norodom Sihanouk during his short-lived Sangkum period of Cambodia’s independence of the 1960s in order to place himself in a direct lineage to glorious ­ruler of Angkor (see chapter X). Finally, the overall title of “Prosperity” for the Angkor Wat section in the new Panorama linked the old French-colonial and Cambodia’s postcolo­nial period with the country’s superglobal rebirth after 1992 (see chapter XII and earlier in this epilogue). It sounds like the cleverly recycled slogan of Azedine Beschaouch’s self-congratulatory appraisal in the International Coordination Committee’s 2008 commemoration volume with his comment “Angkor saved: Prosperity on the way” (see above; ICC-Angkor 2008, 21). At this point, the initial phase of an international emergency salvage campaign (1993–2003) was seemingly superseded by a phase of “development” – qua monetary exploitation of Angkor Park through overtourism. The plan in this present microscenario wouldn’t be much different, as the tourist would simply cross the road from the North Korean Angkor Panorama to the newly built ticket counters to pay another 20 USD to do the archaeological theme park tour again, but this time to the ‘real’ thing…

4.5 From a Thai museum to a tiny backyard of Siem Reap: Angkor Wat’s eternal replication Interestingly, Angkor Wat itself was not represented as a miniature replica in the Cambodian Cultural Village. But together with the temple’s constantly replicated presence in

hotel lobbies and even swimming pools (Pl. EpII.27a), and on paintings and posters all over Siem Reap’s touristic recreation zone (Pl. EpII.27b), this scenario came in two ad-

91  http://angkorpanoramamuseum.com/en/front/view?#aboutus (retrieved 17 September 2019)

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ditional displays, one in a high-tech museum environment golden era of the Khmer Kingdom through an amassed and one hidden in the backyards of the city.91 collection of invaluable artefacts and through state-of-theAfter the fascinating option to turn the former French-­ art multimedia technology exhibitions for a full pictorial colonial and still used work site of Conservation d’Angkor legendary story for easy comprehension. To be an imporat the northern edge of Siem Reap towards Angkor Park tant inspirational site of art, culture, and history of the aninto a patrimonial site and open-air museum failed for cient civilization legend. [italics MF] many ideological, commercial, political, and institutional reasons, the Angkor National Museum opened in Siem In the following, the visitor is guided through a series of Reap in 2007. Already from some distance Angkor Wat’s archaeologically enhanced frames – namely halls and eight archaeological theme was visible, as the museum’s stylised galleries: the ‘Briefing Hall’ to explain the main features of central cupola seemed to ‘borrow’ from the temple’s archi- the museum, the “exclusive 1,000 Buddha Images” gallery; tectural grandeur (Pl. EpII.28a). In a wording similar to each one about the “origins of the Khmer empire story”, many French and later English guidebooks about the ‘real’ Khmer beliefs, “Great Inventors” (such as, of course, Surya­ site just few kilometres to the north (see chapter IX), the varman II and Jayavarman VII), Angkor Thom, stone inscriptions as “evidence of the past” read by a voice in homepage of the new museum reaches its global clientele through the old-fashioned art historical slogan of Angkor’s “sound-dome technology”, and ancient costumes with the one and only ancient high-classical glory: “fascination of Apsara” (compare chapter X). Central in this parcours is Gallery D: Angkor Wat – Heaven on Earth, which “brings the visitor”, as the homeAngkor National Museum — The Legend Revealed. Angkor National Museum takes pride in revealing the royal histor- page has it, “closer to Angkor Wat [to] learn how the giganical path of this Golden Era of the Khmer Kingdom tic city was constructed, thus maximising the splendour through state-of-the-art multimedia technology to provide that visitors will feel the next time they visit the real Angvisitors a full pictorial story of the legend for easy compre- kor Wat”. In a scenario of multiple replication of the hension. […] Angkor National Museum is glad to assist ‘unique’ temple, a video from the webpage shows how the visitor can experience – some one hundred years after a you with a personal translation device or audio tour set life-enhanced Tour du monde display had presented the (available in Khmer, English, German, Korean, Japanese, French, Chinese, and Thai) […] Angkor National Museum very same view during the 1900 Universal Exhibition (see chapter V, Fig. V.7a, and the affiliated critique) – a sunrise will take its visitors through the journey back in time from the creation to the highest point of Khmer civilization. over Angkor Wat inside the museum – without setting the Through the use of interactive exhibits, visitors will devel- arm clock, without bodily fatigue and hot temperatures, and without pushy tourist crowds chasing the best selfie: op a deeper understanding of customs, traditions, and different beliefs of the ancient empire. A tour of the mu- “To bring the visitors closer to the legend, the exhibitions seum will be joyful for both visitors who have a good un- have been equipped with audio-visual technologies, such derstanding of ancient Khmer civilization and visitors who as Magic Vision, which bring the ancient artefacts closer to do not have any previous knowledge of the ancient you. A nacre optical sunrise simulation will be presented Khmer empire. All artefacts are divided into eight galler- here 365 days”. After passing statues and a giant photoies in the order of the evolution which are enhanced by a graph of Angkor Wat’s ‘Churning of the milk ocean’ gallery realistic atmosphere. Throughout the whole experience, (Pl. EpII.28b), the visitor will finally stand in the centre of Angkor National Museum will allow this legend to be slow- a round screen display with different overlapping views toly revealed before your eyes. [italics MF]92 wards and into Angkor Wat. The hall’s central focus is, however and once again, a miniature replica of Angkor The museum’s explicit “vision” is to be “a world-class muse- Wat’s central mountain temple (Pl. Ep.II.28c). At the end um inspiring Khmer historical education; a cultural learn- of the tour, the visitor is invited to the so-called “Cultural ing institute that enhances artefact preservation, collection, Mall” under the Angkor-Wat-tower-shaped central dome, and restoration; [and] a notable site of arts bringing com- to shop for miniatures and casts of Angkorian temples and munity collaboration and commitment”. Its “objective” statues (compare Figs. VIII.31a–b) before relaxing in rescomes in an archaeological theme park-like rhetoric com- taurants and a spa. parable to Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom or Temple of the As smooth and conflict-free as this double representaForbidden Eye from Indiana Jones (compare Pl. Intro.23a): tion of Angkor Wat – once recognisable ‘from the outside’ towards the stylised dome over the entire museum design, Our Objective: To be the one and only world-class muse- and once seen ‘from the inside out’ standing in the very um in Siem Reap that enhances the cultural heritage of the core of the structure in front of the multiple temple repli91  92  Angkor National Museum (About the Museum), online: http://www.angkornationalmuseum.com/about_

the_museum (retrieved 11 March 2019).

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cations in Gallery D – may seem, critical voices soon detected the contested nature of the project as a kind of neo-colonial ‘world’s (af)fair’-like competition. Similar to the new harbour at the Tonle Sap with a concession to a Korean company of the Sou Ching Group (compare the South Korean sponsorship of the Ecovillage of Run Ta-Ek), the initial Malaysian, then South Korean and later French deals over the ‘Gates-of-Angkor’ hotel zone and the Angkor Panorama Museum by North Korea, the National Ang­ kor Museum was not so ‘national’ at all. In fact, the project had been outsourced by the Cambodian authorities, this time to a Bangkok-based Thai company called Vilailuk International Holdings (Barton 2007).93 But here the ‘colonial’ appropriation process went deeper into history, as also “for the Cambodian cognoscenti, the Angkor National Mu- Figure EpII.13  Miniature replicas of Angkor Wat and the seum’s appearance on the scene seemed ominous, especial- Bayon face towers in Dy Proeung’s private atelier in Siem ly given centuries-old sensitivities concerning Thai designs Reap (Source: photograph Michael Falser 2010) on Cambodian patrimony” (Turnbull 2008). In another ­déjà-vu-like scenario, resonant with the first epilogue’s description of Siam’s miniature replication and transfer, sym- may eventually encounter a decayed signboard. Itself bolic representation and political appropriation of Angkor standing in middle of a strange set of replicated heads from Wat in its Bangkok centre of power in 1860 before French-­ Naga-snake-holding demons (compare Figs. II.21, IX.72c), colonial impact (compare Figs. EpI.3–4 and Pl. EpI.1–2), sitting Garudas from Banteay Srei (compare Figs. IX.47), lintels, pedestals, and other items for the Western curio here we read the critical voices. They see similar processes collector, the signboard reads Angkor Wat in Miniature – at play with a Thai thirty-year concession contract to have the right to speak for Cambodia’s most iconic cultural her- Artist Dy Proeung. Passing through a replicated gate, one itage on display in ‘Siem Reap’ (often translated as ‘defeat reaches a pleasant courtyard and meets the elderly Camboof Siam’): this time a Thai-built museum claimed to be a dian owner of the site, Dy Proeung. After exchanging po‘national museum’ on Cambodian soil, a Thai-designed lite French words, the owner shows the visitor around his museum quoted Angkor Wat’s architectural features, and a rather ‘archaeological’ exhibition site, full of his self-made Thai investor commodified Cambodia’s sculptural patrimo- replicated elements in the wider sense of Angkorian culturny for his own exhibition galleries94 and actually garnished al heritage. One of those is a small-scaled Angkor Wat repa ‘1,000 Buddha Gallery’ with primarily Siamese artefacts lica of black-green colour, today ‘abandoned’ by its artist, from the Ayuttaya era. covered with dust and strangely accompanied by two white-­ coloured models of the Bayon face tower (Fig. EpII.13).95 Leaving all commercial hotel zones, amusement parks, and Our gentle guide Dy Proeung is more than happy to presmuseum scenarios of the touristy centre of Siem Reap be- ent his old working card as a draughtsman from 1960 (Pl. hind, the strolling visitor to the town’s more silent areas EpII.29a) when he in fact worked for the École française

93  Its parent company had for many years invested in Cambodia’s telecommunication and air traffic control

sectors, and the museum deal may have materialised as a reciprocal gift: Hun Sen himself chaired the opening ceremony on 12 November 2007, praising “private investment in museums [to] help Cambodia to combine heritage preservation with development” (this was a copied and pasted UNESCO slogan, see above) and put his daughter, Hun Mana, into the position of chairwoman of the new museum (Barton 2007). 94  As Turnbull explored in his article “A new museum puts a Thai imprint on Angkor” from the New York Times on 2 July 2008, the originally promised great loan of precious Angkorian sculptures from Phnom Penh’s ‘real’ National Museum did not materialise, and Deputy Prime Minister Sok An had first made the deal for sculptures from Siem Reap’s Conservation d’Angkor with South Korea. Additionally, Beschaouch supposedly reconfirmed in an interview that “the majority of the wood, stone and silver Buddhas in the gallery of ‘1,000 Buddha Images’ alluded in design to later Ayutthaya era temples in Thailand and had no aesthetic link with Angkor” at all (Turnbull 2008). 95  The attentive reader of the first volume of this publication would feel curiously reminded of the same ‘replicated’ scenario some nine decades earlier and ten thousand kilometres west of Siem Reap: Wasn’t it during the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris that the French-made replica of Angkor Wat was indeed flanked by some strange face towers to function as camouflaged power stations (compare Fig. VII.25b) for the site’s nocturnal illumination?

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d’Extrême-Orient. Even more relevant for our context, he participated in the famous drawing collection of Angkor Wat of 1969. As indeed touching evidence of this biographical detail, Dy Proeung pulls out his personal copy of this publication (with his name on the cover), which he kept, at greatest risk as he emphasizes, hidden underground in his garden during the Khmer Rouge period (Fig. EpII.14; compare Fig. IX.88c). Finally, he shows a photograph with Norodom Sihanouk and wife Monique visiting his own Ang­kor Wat replica around 1990 (Pl. EpII.29b; compare Pl. Intro.20a), in front of Phnom Penh’s former Sangkum Exhibition Hall (compare Pl.X.11). Reflecting back on Angkor Wat’s career as a cultural heritage icon within Cambodia’s twentieth century, a question came to my mind: Isn’t our charming host in the middle of his replica gallery a veritable transcultural broker across all Cambodian timelines covered in this second volume which traces Angkor Wat’s career ‘from jungle find to global icon’? Born in 1939 in Kandal, he in fact experienced the last breath of the French-colonial effort to create Angkor Park (chapter IX); he was trained as a draughtsman in George Groslier’s École des Arts Cambod­giens and worked for the EFEO during its ‘past-colonial’ management of Ang­ kor Park in Cambodia’s short era of independence (chapter X); he survived the genocidal era of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, and the Vietnamese occupation until 1989 (chapter XI); he experienced King Norodom Sihanouk’s and his wife Monique’s return from Chinese exile to Cambodia in the early 1990s (chapter XII); and he was now showing tourists from all regions of the planet around his private collection at a moment when Ang­kor Park and ­Angkor Wat are commodified as super-global icons on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (epilogue II). In an unforgettable moment during my own year-long study of Angkor Wat’s transcultural trajectory beyond the geographical divide of Asia and Europe, Dy Proeung final-

ly sat down on the pleasant day of 1 February 2010, in front of the masterpiece at his atelier in Siem Reap: another painstaking miniature replica of Angkor Wat (Pl. EpII.29c, compare Pl.Intro.20b). In regard to this book’s first volume’s subtitle ‘from plaster casts to exhibition pavilions’, a second question came to my mind: Wasn’t this the reconciling gesture of a modest and proud Cambodian? Dy Proeung was finally himself as a Cambodian taking the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ posture to watch over ‘his’ Angkor Wat from above – the perspective that had been taken by so many non-Cambodian ‘imperial eyes’ (after Pratt 1992, 169) trying to transcribe an always active religious site of Buddhist veneration into a dead archaeological ruin of Orientalist admiration, and to make it a crowning element within a colonial canon of art and architectural history in overseas (the to-be-salvaged patrimoine culturel in a civilising mission in outre-mer).96 Was Dy Proeung’s posture not reminiscent, in a strange irony considering Angkor Wat’s global and transcultural trajectory, of the very first couple of illustrations of this present book (Figs. Intro.1a,b) when a French-colonial maréchal called Hubert Lyautey passed a full-scale replica of Angkor Wat to open the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris together with his royal guests from Great Britain, while at the very same moment French-colonial military reconnaissance flights over Angkor Park pictured the ‘real’ temple ‘from above’ and dwarfed the site into an archaeological miniature? Would this eternal – physical, visual, and cultural-political – replication process of Angkor Wat as a global icon of cultural heritage ever end? Not for the moment, I thought, as balloon and helicopter rides over the temple were ready to again down-scale Angkor Wat into a handy and quickly consumed commodity for the still expanding mass cultural tourism industry while the World Heritage Angkor Park and its vicinities were further commodified to death into an archaeological theme park atmosphere (Pl. EpII.30).

96  We remember Henri Mouhot’s published appraisal of Angkor Wat’s architect as an ‘Oriental Michelange-

lo’ (chapter I); the first plaster casts from the temple arriving to France and a first down-scaled Angkor model for the Universal Exhibition in Paris 1878 (chapter II); Louis Delaporte’s Angkor missions and installation of his musée Indo-chinois with hybrid Angkor pavilions (chapter III); an Eiffel Tower-like perspective on Ang­ kor Wat’s first scale-reduced hybrid as pagode d’Angkor in the French-colonial section of the 1889 Universal Exhibition; all the way through other exhibition scenarios in Marseille 1906 and 1922 (chapters V and VI, we remember the postcards of a balloon perspective over the Angkor pavilions, Pl. V.5 and Fig.VI.18c, when at the same time flights over the ‘real’ Angkor Wat were projected, compare Fig. IX.23a) to the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in the French capital (chapter VII) with Angkor Wat’s full-scale replica again downscaled into a miniature version (Fig. VII.22a–b); and finally the silent endpoint on a Parisian Swan Island during the 1937 International Exhibition (chapter VIII). Epilogue I reminded us, however, of similar appropriation strategies before and after French-colonial impact, from the Angkor Wat model in Bangkok from around 1860 (Pl. EpI.2a) to an oversize version planned in India for the future (Pl. EpI.4d).

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Figure EpII.14  Dy Proeung’s personal copy of the 1969 EFEO publication about Angkor Wat (with an unfolded plan from inside the book), which he kept hidden during the Khmer Rouge period (Source: photograph Michael Falser 2010)

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Plates

Plates

Plate IX.1  A Japanese plan of Angkor, here in its second copy attributed to Shimano Kenryo, Mito 1722 (Source: BEFEO 1923, plate V; republished in colour in EFEO/Cernuschi 2010, 65)

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Plates

Plate IX.2  A map of French Indochina as depicted in Doumer’s 1905 L’Indo-chine française — Souvenirs (Source: Doumer 1905, between XI and 1)

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Plates

Plate IX.3  Mouhot’s hand-drawn map of the border zone between France’s claim over Cambodge and Siam’s territory to the northwest including Angkor (Source: © Royal Geographic Society, London)

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Plate IX.4  Map of the greater region of Angkor in the 1890 publication Ruines d’Angkor by Fournereau/Porcher (Source: Fournereau/Porcher 1890, 1)

Plate IX.5  Fournereau’s water colour Ruines Khmères du Cambodge for the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris (Source: © ENSBA Paris)

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Plate IX.6  Cambodia and Angkor as part of “the Siamese provinces”, as depicted in Aymonier’s 1901 ­publication Le Cambodge (Source: Aymonier 1901, vol. 2, between 400 and 401)

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Plate IX.7a  The temples of Angkor as vaguely indicated in Lajonquière’s Atlas archéologique of 1901 (Source: Lajonquière 1901, section Cambodge partie nord)

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Plate IX.7b  The same map by Lajonquière after the rétrocession of Angkor, as depicted in the updated 1910 edition in the Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine (Source: BCAI 1910, 128)

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Plate IX.8a Lajonquière’s Carte du Groupe d’Angkor (dated “June 1909”) in his 1911 Inventaire ­descriptif (Source: Lajonquière 1911, map)

Plate IX.8b  The map of the “région d’Angkor”, as published in the Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine of 1910 (Source: BCAI 1910, 128)

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Plate IX.9a,b  Guide Madrolle of 1902, details of folding maps of the territory between Bangkok and the temples of Angkor (Source: Guide Madrolle 1902, between 46—47;folding map in the attachment)

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Plate IX.10a Detailed Carte du Groupe d’Angkor by Buat/Ducret, labelled “Made by EFEO, June 1909” and edited September 1910 (Source: © ANOM)

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Plate IX.10b  Sketch of preliminary protection perimeters around the individual temple sites, executed in 1910 and based on the 1909 map of Buat/Ducret (Source: © ANOM)

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Plates IX.11a—f  Jean Commaille’s watercolour/gouache paintings of Angkor (a—d: Angkor Wat, March—May 1899; e: Bayon, March 1913; f: Angkor Wat, May 1914;) (Source: a—d © EFEO Archive, Paris; e—f André-Pallois 1997, Figs. 19—20)

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Plate IX.12  Sketch of the proposed (smaller) limits of Angkor Park; annexed plan to the order from 16 December 1926 (Source: © ANOM)

Plates

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Plate IX.13  Carte du Groupe et du Parc d’Angkor, as decreed on 21 May 1930 and published in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient in 1930 (Source: BEFEO 1930, plate 32)

Plates

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Plates IX.14a—c  Maps of vehicle-access roads through ­Indochina including Cambodia and Angkor, as illustrated in Nores’ and Gauthier’s tourist guides of 1930 (top and below left) and 1935 (lower right) (Source: Nores 1930, maps; ­Gauthier 1935, map)

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Plates IX.15a,b  Early studies from Marchal’s daily and monthly archaeological diaries of 1920 and 1928 about touristic (or off-limits) itineraries through the temple sites undergoing restoration (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Plates IX.17a,b  Parmentier’s 1960 guidebook on ­Angkor, cover and map (Source: Parmentier 1960, cover, map)

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Plate IX.16  Prescribed touristic parcours through Angkor Wat as proposed in Laur’s 2002 Angkor guide (Source: Laur 2002, 142—43)

Plate IX.17b

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Plate IX.18  Map of the archaeological sites in east central Java as published in 1891 by the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies (Source: Verbeek 1891, plate 3.3)

Plates

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Plates IX.19a,b  Tjandi Mendut in 2015, rather over-restored and with a mark along its entry ­staircase to give the completion date of the restoration in “1904” (Source: © Michael Falser 2015)

475

Plates

Plates IX.20a—c  Berlage’s travel report Mijn Indische reis (translated “My Indian Voyage”, ­published 1931 and republished 1991) with sketches from restoration works on “East Java” (above left) and at “Borobudur” (above right, below) (Source: Berlage 1991, 24, 10, 11)

476

Plates

Plates IX.21a—c  Samples of Balanos’ 1938 publication Les monuments de l’Acropole. Relèvement et conservation, with his methodological approach to rebuild the Athens Acropolis (Source: Balanos 1938, sections from folding plans 5, 12 and 94)

477

Plates

Plates IX.22a—f  Henri Marchal’s sketches in his monthly Journal des fouilles of 1947 about the ­collapse of Angkor Wat’s gallery and the foreseen measures of repair (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

478

Plates

Plate IX.23  Marchal’s monthly report for Angkor on 11 August 1952, for the first time signed under the new legislation of independent Cambodia (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

Plate IX.24a  Cover of the UNESCO Courier of 1956 with its cover story “Twenty-five centuries of Buddhist art and culture” (Source: UNESCO Courier, 6.1956, cover)

Plate IX.24b  Cover of the UNESCO Courier of 1965 with its cover story “Monuments in peril” (Source: UNESCO Courier, 1.1965, cover)

479

Plates

Plates IX.25a,b  The Cambodian Pich Keo taking over the position of general conservator of Ang­kor in 1973/74, in a two-page letter from 30 December 1974 (here sections from the first and second page) that survived in B. P. Groslier’s personal archive “Angkor 1954—80” at the EFEO in Paris (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris)

480

Plates

Plate X.1  Norodom Sihanouk as “general commander of Cambodia”, the Cambodian flag with the silhouette of Angkor Wat and the same temple elevation in the centre of the rising (national) sun, undated (around 1953) (Source: © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

481

Plates

Plates X.2a,b  Covers of Sihanouk’s French journals Le Sangkum and Réalités Cambodgiennes of 1965, both featuring the iconic sculpture of Jayavarman VII (Source: Le Sangkum, 3 (October 1965) and Réalités Cambodgiennes, 474 (22 October 1965))

Plates X.3b  Sihanouk’s ritual reinvention of old Angkor during a 1967 procession at the Royal Square of Angkor Thom (Source: Kambuja, 26 (15 May 1967), 62)

482

Plates

Plates X.3a  Sihanouk’s ritual reinvention of old Angkor during a 1967 procession at the Royal Square of Angkor Thom (Source: Kambuja, 26 (15 May 1967), cover)

483

Plates

Plates X.4a,b  Plans of the supposedly ancient and soon ‘to-be-updated’ irrigation system at and around Angkor, published in Cambodge d’aujourd’hui in 1964 (Source: Cambodge ­d’aujourd’hui, July—September 1964, 28, 30—31)

484

Plates

Plate X.5  Hydraulic Cambodia, as depicted in Kambuja in 1965 (Source: Kambuja, 5 (15 August 1965), 78—79)

Plate X.6  Goloubew’s 1941 hypothetical drawing of hydraulic Angkor (Source: Goloubew 1941, plan 1)

485

Plates

Plate X.7  B.P. Groslier’s plan of hydraulic Angkor, here published in Études Cambodgiennes of 1967 (Source: Études Cambodgiennes, 11 (July—September 1967), 24—25).

Plate X.8  Plan of the “great dam project” for Cambodia, published in September 1969 in Études Cambodgiennes (Source: Études Cambodgiennes, 19 (July—September 1969), 20—21)

486

Plates

Plate X.9a The Pavillon du Cambodge at the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1958 (in the very right upper corner), map of the overall site in the Guide Officiel Exposition Universelle de Bruxelles 1958 (Source: Commissariat général du Gouvernement 1958, vol. 9, map)

Plates X.9b The Pavillon du Cambodge at the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1958, depicted on the cover of the little brochure Le Cambodge à l’Exposition universelle de Bruxelles (Source: Commissariat général du Cambodge 1958, n.p.)

487

Plates

Plates X.10a,b  Tan Veut’s elevation drawing (left) and the realised funerary stupa for Princess ­Kantha Bopha within the Royal Palace grounds of Phnom Penh (Source: © Tan Veut family ­archive, Battambang; photograph Michael Falser 2010)

Plate X.11  Sihanouk’s Exhibition Hall, here depicted in Sihanouk’s Photo-Souvenirs du ­Cambodge: Sangkum Reastr Niyum (1955—1969) of 1993 (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 8)

488

Plates

Plates X.12a,b  The Independence Memorial and the Naga snake fountain in historic colour photographs, today stored in the Charles Meyer archive, Paris (Source: © Charles Meyer archive, Paris)

Plates X.12c,d  The Independence Memorial in 2011 (Source: © Michael Falser 2011)

489

Plates

Plate X.13  The Independence Memorial during Sihanouk’s state ceremony to commemorate the sixteenth anniversary of Cambodia’s independence, published in Kambuja 1969 (Source: Kambuja, 57 (December 1969), 22—23)

Plate X.14  The supposedly neo-Angkorian spatial organisation of the National Sports ­Complex in Phnom Penh in relation to Angkor Wat, as explained in the 1969 edition of the Cambodian ­journal Nokor Khmer (Source: Nokor Khmer 1969, 38—39)

490

Plates

Plate X.15a  The National Sports Complex as depicted on the cover of the international French journal Cahiers du centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment in 1965 (Source: Cahiers du centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment, 73 (avril 1965), cover)

Plate X.15b  The 1964 leaflet Le complexe sportif national — Dans la grande tradition ­a­ngkorienne, as published by the Cambodian Ministry of Information (Source: Ministère de l’Information 1964, cover)

491

Plates

Plate X.16a,b  Bringing the GANEFO flame from Angkor Wat to the Phnom Penh stadium, as reported in Kambuja in 1966 (Source: Kambuja, 21 (15 December 1966), 41, 42—43)

492

Plates

Plates X.17a,b  The new Angkor Hotel, as announced in Le Sangkum in 1967 (left); compare in Sihanouk’s 1991 publication Sangkum Reastr Niyum: Le développement général du Cambodge in 1991 (Source: Le Sangkum, 29 (December 1967), back cover; Sihanouk 1991, 663)

Plate X.18  The Royal Khmer Ballet dancing at the Paris Opera, as depicted in the official p ­ rogramme during Sihanouk’s state visit to France in 1964 (Source: © Paris Opera archive)

493

Plates

Plate X.19  The re-nationalised Apsara dance performed by Buppha Devi in the late 1950s, as depicted in the 1956 reprint of the 1930 publication Danses Cambodgiennes by Chaufea Thiounn (Source: Thiounn 1930/1956, inner cover)

Plates X.20a,b  Fireworks above Angkor Wat (left) and parades as a usual attraction during Sihanouk’s diplomatic visits to the site in the 1950s and 1960s (Source: Kambuja, 3 (15 June 1965), cover; Kambuja 32 (15 November 1967), back cover)

494

Plates

Plates X.21a,b  “Khmer dances” at Angkor Wat as a fixed element of diplomatic state visits to Cambodia, here by the Czech president in 1963 (left) and by “governmental delegations of friendly powers” in 1964 (Source: © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

Plate X.22a  Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Cambodia in 1966, during his arrival at Phnom Penh airport on 30 August (Source: ­Kambuja, 18 (15 September 1966), 19)

495

Plates

Plate X.22b  Visit of Charles de Gaulle to the National Sports Stadium on 1 September 1966, with cardboard placards to depict French and Cambodian icons of cultural heritage (upper photograph) (Source: Kambuja 18 (15 September 1966), 53)

496

Plates

Plate X.23  Sound-and-light show at Angkor Wat during the visit of Charles de Gaulle in September 1966 (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 166—67)

Plates X.24a,b  Tito’s arrival at Phnom Penh on 17 January 1968 and photographs of the “Nocturne féerie” in front of Angkor Wat on 19 January (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993a, 307; Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 7, 295)

497

Plates

Plate X.25a—o  Screenshots from Sihanouk’s 1969 film Crépuscule: a) main view towards Angkor Wat; b) und c) Prince Adit (Norodom Sihanouk) reading to Maharani Maya (Monique Sihanouk) from B. P. Groslier’s 1956 book Angkor, hommes et pierres, sitting at the moat of Angkor Wat ­(compare Pl. Intro.19); d) at the Bayon temple; e) Phnom Penh’s Independence Memorial; f) Chaktomuk Conference Hall; g) the State Palace; h) social housing; i—j) the National Sports Complex and cardboard display about “water politics”; k) native dancing scene in the countryside around Kep; l) modern Khmer couple; m) Adit and Maya; n) Maya mourning the death of the lovesick nurse; o) Prince Adit left alone as an old man at the beach (Source: © Bophana Film Archive, Phnom Penh; You Tube)

498

Plates

Plates X.26a—c  Sihanouk’s last short-film-like documentary Cortège Royal, as remembered and reprinted in the 1993 Photo Souvenirs series (left); and reprinted (right) in the diplomatic programme leaflet of the sound-and-light show for Tito in 1968 (Source: Photo-Souvenirs 1993b, vol. 5, 216; © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh)

499

Plates

Plates XI.1a—j  Cambodian flags, coat of arms or emblems with the stylised silhouette of Angkor Wat: a) French-colonial flag (1863—1948); b) flag of the independent Kingdom of Cambodia (1948/1953—70); c) flag of the Khmer Republic (1970—75); d,e) flag and coat of arms of Democratic Kampuchea (1975—79); f,g) flag and coat of arms of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979—89); h) flag of the State of Cambodia 1989—91; i) emblem of UNTAC (1992—93); j) flag of Cambodia 1993 until today (Source: Wikipedia, creative commons; various PR materials)

Plate XI.2  Democratic Kampuchea on the “First Day of Issue” stamp series of the United ­Nations of the 1980s (UN, UNESCO, UNICEF) (Source: Wikipedia, creative commons)

500

Plate XI.3a  A circulated map of “Parc d’Angkor”, based (as indicated in the legend) on US-American “aerial photography” and added data provided by the “Service géographique des FARK” (Royal Khmer Armed Forces) (Source: EFEO Archive, Paris)

Plates

501

Plates

Plate XI.3b  Save Our Monuments — Protect Our Cultural Property. Call by the National Committee of Cambodia for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (COPROBIC) as published in its 1970 report (Source: République Khmère 1971, n.p.)

502

Plates

Plate XI.4  Refugees at Angkor Wat (Source: © EFEO Archive, Paris; published in Clémentin-Ojha/ Manguin 2001, 59)

Plate XI.5  “Help Save Angkor…”, Khmer Republic in 1971 depicting a young Cambodian woman in military uniform (Source: Khmer Republic, vol. 1, no. 2 (1971), back cover)

503

Plates

Plates XI.6a,b  “S.O.S. Angkor” with the head of Jayavarman VII and a “head of a Buddha, damaged over the centuries” as depicted on the cover and inside of the December 1971 issue of The UNESCO Courier (Source: The UNESCO Courier, December 1971, cover, 4)

Plates XI.7a,b The UNESCO Courier of June and December of 1968, claiming its worldwide “conservation missions” to salvage the cultural heritage from Athens and Venice to Borobudur and Angkor (Source: The UNESCO Courier June 1968 and December 1968, covers)

504

Plates

Plates XI.8a,b  The new Cambodian flag of the Khmer Republic with Angkor Wat’s three-tower silhouette on a Cambodian journal in 1971; cover of the first issue of the newly founded ­Bulletin of the Khmer National Commission for UNESCO in 1972 (Source: © National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh; © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

Plates XI.9a,b  The fight over Angkor brought onto the covers of Réalités Cambodgiennes in February and March 1972 (Source: Réalités Cambodgiennes, 785 (25 February 1972) and 186 (3 March 1972), covers)

505

Plates

Plates XI.10a,b  “Angkor must be saved” (Angkor Wat and refugees at Siem Reap), as ­published in Khmer Republic, 1972 (Source: Khmer Republic, vol. 1, no. 4 (1972), 44, 49)

Plate XI.11  Sihanouk’s annotated cuts of international press reports about the war in Cambodia, here dated “Phnom Penh, 8 February 1972” (Source: © Archives nationales, France)

506

Plates

Plates XI.12a—c  News about Angkor on the cover of the Tribune de Genève in February 1973 (above left); the plan to create a protection zone around the Archaeological Park of Angkor as sent by the Swiss National Commission to UNESCO on 23 May 1973 (above right, compare Pl. XI.3a); a battle map about the situation in Cambodia in September 1970 (Source: Tribune de Genève, 47 (26 February 1973), cover; © UNESCO Archives, Paris)

507

Plates

Plate XI.13a—c  Angkor Wat on two letterheads of the Paris embassy of the Khmer Republic in 1970 (above, centre); and on the Bulletin d’Information of the National Mission of the Royal Government of the National Union of Cambodia, G.R.U.N.C. (Source: © UNESCO Archive, ­Paris; © National Archives, Phnom Penh)

508

Plates

Plate XI.14  Sihanouk’s supposed (staged?) cultural pilgrimage to Angkor Wat in 1973, as published by the People’s Armed Forces of National Liberation of ­Cambodia in Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State, in the Liberated Zone (Source: People’s Armed Forces of National Liberation of Cambodia 1973, cover)

Plate XI.15  Khmer Rouge soldiers situated (in a photomontage?) in front of Angkor Wat, as published on the cover of the Chinese publication Le Cambodge en lutte of 1975 (Source: Le Cambodge en lutte 1975, cover)

509

Plates

Plates XI.16a—d  Khmer Rouge (“Bank of Cambodia”) banknotes with Angkor Wat (5 riels) and the Bayon temples (50 riels ) on the one side, fighters and peasants on the other sides (Source: Personal archive Michael Falser)

510

Plates

Plate XI.17  Hand-drawn map with “Ang-Kor” by Hou Youn in his 1955 PhD thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris (Source: Hou Youn 1955, n.p.; Archive of Sorbonne University Library, Paris)

511

Plates

Plates XI.18a,b  Propaganda illustration in the August 1977 issue of Democratic ­Kampuchea Is Moving Forward (Source: Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward, (August 1977), cover, 10)

Plates XI.19a,b  Illustrations from the 1979 publication Country of mystery: Cambodia by the Japanese Broadcast Company (Source: NHK 1979, cover, 5)

512

Plates XI.20  Pol Pot and his entourage in front of Angkor Wat, on a photograph that survived in the archive of the Bophana Audio-Visual Resource Center in Phnom Penh (Source: © Bophana Phnom Penh, Kathleen O’Keefee Collection)

Plates

513

Plates

Plates XI.21a—c  Mural painting of Angkor Wat and of a map of ­Cambodia with the plan of the Archaeological Park of Angkor; photographed in 2010 in the former house of Ta Mok (called “The Butcher”), situated in Anlong Veng to the north of Siem Reap (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

514

Plates

Plates XI.22a—d  Angkor Wat’s silhouette on the 1980 publication The idea of Kampuchea (“Republic of Cambodia — Light of the Revolution. Ministry of Public Education”); Vu Can’s 1982 Kampuchea — The nightmare is over, and other publications like Forward the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1982) and Undeclared war against the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1985) (Source: © Public Library Phnom Penh)

515

Plates

Plates XI.23  Cover of the 1980 report of the Direction de la Conservation des Monuments, des Musées et du Tourisme (Source: Direction 1980, cover; Fonds B. P. Groslier/© EFEO Archive, Paris)

516

Plates

Plates XI.24a,b  Covers of Indian Archaeology. A Review. The 1969—70 issue was about ­Bamiyan and the 1981—82 issue was about Angkor (Source: Indian Archaeology, issues 1969/70 and 1981/82, covers)

517

Plates

Plate XI.25  The cover of the 1994 publication Angkor Vat. India’s Contribution in ­Conservation 1986—1993 by Barkur Narasimhaiah (Source: Narasimhaiah 1994, cover)

Plates XI.26a—c  National Geographic’s 1982 cover story about Angkor, here above an aerial shot to explain the condition of Angkor Wat with the construction site of the temple’s southeastern gallery; below unfinished by B.P. Groslier after his enforced departure in 1972/73; p ­ hotographs to show the many stone elements from the gallery left around the temple as published in the ASI’s updated publication of 2002 (Source: National Geographic 1982, 556; Narasimhaiah 2002, 85, 89)

518

Plates

Plates XI.27a—c  The ASI’s 1994 Angkor Wat publication intending to prove India’s chemical rebirthing of the site (Source: Narasimhaiah 1994, plates XXIV, LXXV, LXXVIII)

519

Plates

Plates XI.28a,b  The 1993 ICCROM mission report photographs by Jukka Jokilehto about the ASI’s chemical cleaning operation at Angkor Wat (Source: © ICCROM Archive, Rome)

Plate XI.29  Poster of the exhibition Angkor —  Un patrimoine mondial à protéger in Paris in fall 1989 (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

520

Plate XI.30  Save Cambodia network in the United States with its journal Cambodia Today from June 1983 (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

Plates

Plates XI.31a,b  Official stamps of the exiled Democratic Kampuchea used in correspondence with UNESCO in Paris: Ieng Sary on 1 August 1979 and Ok Sakun on 14 October 1981 (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

Plates XI.32a,b  Labels of the Kampuchea Conferences in Stockholm 1979 and Bangkok 1987 (Source: Documents 1980, cover (detail); Third International Conference 1987, cover (detail))

Plate XI.32c  Kampuchea International Conference in Bangkok 1987, with Khieu Samphan on the podium (Source: Third International Conference 1987, cover (detail))

521

Plates

Plates XI.33a—g  Cover story “The temples of Angkor: Will they survive?” by National Geo­ graphic, May 1982: cover (33a); Angkor Wat’s overgrown moat in an aerial photograph (33b); PRK’s guard in front of Angkor Wat (33c); Angkor general conservator Pich Keo with vandalised sculptures (33d); signs of war (33e); bullet holes in the decorative surfaces of Angkor Wat (33f); and the still open reconstruction site of Angkor Wat’s eastern gallery (33g) (Source: © National Geographic, May 1982, cover, 554—55, 550—51, 570, 623, 548, 565; © photographs David Alan Harvey, Wilbur E. Garrett)

522

Plates

Plate XI.33b

Plate XI.33c

523

Plates

Plate XI.33d

Plate XI.33f

524

Plate XI.33e

Plate XI.33g

Plates

Plate XI.34  Battle map as attachment to the Dossier Angkor of 1982 (Source: Délégation permanente 1982, n.p.; © ICOMOS International Archive, Paris)

Plates XI.35a,b  Cover and back cover of the Dossier Angkor of 1983 (Source: Délégation permanente 1983, cover, back cover; © ICCROM Archive, Rome)

525

Plates

Plates XI.36a,b  Angkor exhibitions in New York 1982 (left) and in Barcelona 1985 (right) (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

526

Plates

Plate XI.36c,d  Angkor exhibition in South Korea in 1986, with cover and interior page with a depiction to visualize Angkor Wat’s construction; compare with North Korea’s Angkor ­Panorama Museum, at Siem Reap, Pl. EpII.26b (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

527

Plates XI.37a—e  Philippe Gras’ photographs from his photographic mission to Angkor in 1984, as partly published in the French-German publication Angkor silencieux of 1988 (a—d: Angkor Wat; e: Preah Khan) (Source: © Philippe Gras/La Collection, Paris)

Plates

528

c

e

b

d

Plates

529

Plates

Plate XII.1  Appeal for Angkor (in French), formulated in Phnom Penh by the Ministry of Culture of the State of Cambodia and the National UNESCO Commission on 30 September 1989 (the rubber stamp still showed the stylised five-tower silhouette of Angkor Wat as on the flag of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea) (Source: © UNESCO Archive, Paris)

530

Plates

Plate XII.2  Sources UNESCO of January 1991 to report about “Angkor, symbol of a nation” (Source: Sources UNESCO, 33 (Janvier 1991), cover)

Plate XII.4  The cover of Claude Jacques’ 1990 book Angkor (Source: Jacques 1990, cover)

Plates XII.3a,b  The covers of the 1989 books by Ishizawa and Dagens (Source: Ishizawa 1989, cover; Dagens 1989, cover)

531

Plates

Plate XII.5  The cover of Vann Molyvann’s August 1991 ­report, entitled Parcs d’archéologiques d’Angkor (Source: Vann 1991, cover)

Plate XII.7  Vann Molyvann’s “esquisse plan directeur” in his 1991 report (Source: Vann 1991, n.p.)

Plate XII.6  Vann Molyvann’s plan “périmètre de protection Angkor” in his August 1991 report (Source: Vann 1991, n.p.)

532

Plates

Plate XII.8  Vann Molyvann’s “périmètre de protection” for Angkor Park with zones 3 to 5, as drafted in his 1991 report (Source: Vann 1991, n.p.)

533

Plates

Plates XII.9a,b  Vann Molyvann’s reception centre for Angkor Park in plan and elevation, as drafted in his 1991 report (Source: Vann 1991, n.p.)

534

Plates

Plate XII.10  UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor formulating the Appeal for the protection, preservation, restoration and presentation of the site of Angkor on the causeway of Angkor Wat, on 30 November 1991 (together with, above others, Claude Jacques, Henri Lopès and Pich Keo, photographed by Arnaud Carpentier (Source: Connaissance des Arts, 481 (March 1992), X (© photograph Arnaud Carpentier))

Plates XII.11a,b  Two covers (1992 and 1994) of the News Bulletin of UNESCO Cambodia, launched in April 1992 (Source: UNESCO News Bulletin, 1 (April 1992) and 4 (July 1994), covers)

535

Plates

Plates XII.12a—c  The official UNESCO certificate to inscribe Angkor on the World Heritage List on 14 December 1992 (above left); the French journal L’Express to celebrate Angkor: Patrimoine de l’humanité in a special issue of 16 July 1992 (above right); and the “First Day Cover” of a special French UNESCO stamp, issued 23 October 1993 in Paris (Source: ICC 2010, 4; L’Express, special number 16 July 1992, cover; UNESCO/delcampe.net)

536

Plates

Plates XII.13a,b  Land mine project by the Cambodia Mine Action Centre (CMAC), as mapped over Cambodia (above) and around Angkor Wat (below) (Source: © CMAC/Willers 2006)

537

Plates

Plates XII.14a—d  Satellite images as research tools for Angkor, here on the covers of the internal ZEMP Draft and Synthesis Report of 1994 (above left and right); and of the 1995 publication of the US-American World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the Hungarian Royal Angkor Foundation, entitled Radar Imaging Survey of the Angkor Eco-Site (below left); in comparison a close-up map of the Siem Reap – Angkor Wat area from 2005 (below right) (Source: © ZEMP/APSARA; WMF New York; JICA/APSARA)

538

Plates

Plates XII.15a,b ZEMP’s Executive Summary Report of 1993, here with the maps about “archaeological values” (Plan 2) and “land use and population density” (Plan 5) (Source: ZEMP 1993b, plans 2 and 5; © ICCROM Archive, Rome)

539

Plates

Plates XII.16a,b ZEMP’s Executive Summary Report of 1993, here with the maps about “previous park boundaries” (Plan 4) and “proposed zones” (Plan 10) (Source: ZEMP 1993b, plans 4 and 10; © ICCROM Archive, Rome)

540

Plates

Plates XII.17a,b ZEMP’s Executive Summary Report of 1993 with maps about “Angkor Archaeological Park and urban zones” (Plan 11), and the ZEMP 1994 plan “protected cultural sites in the Siem Reap-Angkor region”, republished in 1999 (Source: ZEMP 1993b, 11 (© ICCROM Archive, Rome) and Box 1999, 100)

541

Plates

Plates XII.18a,b  Cover and logo with Angkor Wat silhouette of the published proceedings of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Safeguarding and ­Development of the Historical Area of Angkor in Tokyo from 12 to 13 October 1993 (Source: UNESCO 1993e, cover, back cover)

542

Plates

Plate XII.19  Cover of the proceedings of the first plenary session of the International Co-Ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC), Phnom Penh (21—22 December 1993) (Source: ICC 1993, cover)

Plate XII.20  Cover of the commemoration volume UNESCO in Cambodia 1951—1993, ­published in 1994 (Source: UNESCO Cambodia 1994, cover)

543

Plates

1a

1b Plates EpII.1a,b  Illustrations from the Angkor Conference proceedings in Paris 2003: 1a,b shows a timeline with accompanying photographs from Mouhot’s ‘discovery of Angkor’ in 1863 (see our c­ hapter I, compare the indicated map on Pl. IX.7b) and from the EFEO’s work at Angkor between 1907 and 1975 (see chapters IX and X, compare the two photographs with Fig. IX.13b and 19); without any clearer indication of what happened between 1975 and 1990 (see chapter XI); right into the globalised period of Angkor from 1991 ­onwards (see chapter XII) with the Second Roundtable of Experts, the signed Accords over Cambodia (both in Paris 1991), and Federico Mayor’s Appeal for Angkor in the same year; the site’s UNESCO World Heritage ­nomination in 1992; the Tokyo Conference and the first ICC meetings with French co-chairmanship in 1993, and Cambodia’s belated national heritage protection system (the photographs indicate the French restoration sites of the Elephant Terrace and the Baphuon temple); (Source: UNESCO 2003a, 12—13)

544

Plates

Plates EpII.1c,d  Illustrations from the Angkor Conference ­proceedings in Paris 2003:

1c

1c,d shows the use of Angkor Wat as a usual frame for two different messages — in the context of local oxcart tourism (1c) and international participation to ‘salvage Angkor’ (1d) (Source: UNESCO 2003a, 37 and inner front cover)

1d

545

Plates

2a

2b Plates EpII.2a—b  Illustrations from the ICC-Angkor 2008 commemorative brochure 15 Years of International Cooperation for Conservation and Sustainable Development to depict the social stratification at play: with King Norodom Sihamoni and the ICC delegation (2a); Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen reading the UNESCO nomination signboard in front of Angkor Wat (2b) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2008, 10, 6)

546

Plates

2c

2d

2e

2f

Plates EpII.2c—f  Illustrations from the ICC-Angkor 2008 commemorative brochure 15 Years of International Cooperation for Conservation and Sustainable Development to depict the social stratification at play: (mostly male) ‘ad hoc’ and other experts with sunglasses and safety helmets on their tour through Angkor Park (2c,d); mass tourism at Angkor Wat (2e); the ‘local’ Cambodian, riding his ox barefoot through pristine palm tree landscape (2f) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2008, 34, 116, 88, 124)

547

Plates

Plates EpII.2g  Illustrations from the ICC-Angkor 2008 commemorative brochure 15 Years of International Cooperation for Conservation and Sustainable Development to depict the social stratification at play: the brochure’s cover with Buddhist monks washing ‘their’ Angkor temple sculptures (2g) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2008, cover)

548

Plates

Plates EpII.3a—c  Pages from the 2013 UNESCO World Heritage journal with its ‘Special issue: World Heritage in Cambodia’ (upper left and below); cover of the 2013 Angkor Heritage Management Framework (upper right) with a photograph from the Baphuon temple (compare Pl. EpII.10b) (Source: World ­Heritage 68 (June 2013), cover, 20, 13; Angkor Heritage Management Framework, 2003, cover)

549

Plates

Plates EpII.4a,c  Illustrations from the ICC-Angkor 2013 commemorative brochure 20 Years of International Cooperation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (compare Plates EpII.2a—f): meeting of the ICC-Angkor in 2009 (4a); religious ceremony at Angkor Wat and oxcart rides (4c) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2013, 17, 34—35 (collage Michael Falser))

550

Plates

Plates EpII.4b,d  Illustrations from the ICC-Angkor 2013 commemorative brochure 20 Years of International Cooperation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (compare Plates EpII.2a—f): high-tech international restoration projects with India at Ta Prohm (above left), France at the Baphuon (above centre), and Japan at Angkor Wat (above right) (4b, collage MF); international help ­programmes for local oxcart tourism and farming (below left), handi­ craft, dance, and animal farming (below right) (4d, collage MF) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2013, 72/94/101; 62/95 (collage Michael Falser))

551

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Plate EpII.5a  Cover illustration from the Le Monde journal with its July/August 2018 special issue on ‘Angkor’ (Source: Le Monde, hors-série (July/August 2018), cover)

552

Plates

Plate EpII.5b  Cover illustration from UNESCO’s World Heritage journal with a January 2019 special issue about its ‘success stories’ from Abu Simbel to Angkor and beyond (Source: World Heritage, 90 (January 2019), cover)

553

Plates

Plate EpII.6  Legal map of APSARA 2011 to indicate zones 1 and 2 over Angkor (Source: APSARA 2011; map included in the dossier for Angkor Park’s nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List online)

554

Plates

Plate EpII.7  Map within the ICC-Angkor 2008 brochure to indicate the (only) international ­“Projects implemented on the Angkor Archaeological Site” (Source: ICC-Angkor 2008, 22—23)

Plate EpII.8  Map within the ICC-Angkor 2013 brochure to indicate the “Teams present in the main monuments of the Angkor Site” (Source: ICC-Angkor 2013, 50—51)

555

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Plates EpII.9a—d  Covers from the various international projects inside Angkor Park: the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) at the Baphuon temple (9a); the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Ta Prohm (9b); the Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor (JSA) at Angkor Wat’s northern library inside the outermost enclosure (9c); and the German Apsara Conservation Project (GACP) to preserve Angkor Wat’s decorative surface (9d) (Source: Royère 2016, cover; ASI 2006, cover; Nakagawa/JSA 2010, cover; GACP 2000, cover)

556

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Plates EpII.10a—d  The Baphuon temple revived: Bernard Philipp Groslier’s intervention in the mid-1960s of a démontage of the collapsed stone layers and their rémontage in front of an internal wall system of reinforced concrete (a,b; left column); the ongoing repair work since the mid-1990s under Pascal Royère to reinstall the sandstone layer of the ‘Reclining Buddha’ on the temple’s western facade in front of a complicated system of old sandstones and laterite blocs, a modern drainage system, and reinforced concrete walls (c; above right); the final inauguration ceremony in 2008 with King Norodom Sihamoni (d; below right) (Sources: (a) Royère 2016, 240, with photographs from 1963 and 1968; (b) EFEO archive Paris, photograph from 1964; (c) © Michael Falser 2010; (d) EFEO homepage/photograph Royère 2008)

557

Plates

Plates EpII.11a,b  Construction site of and sign board to the sixteenth-century ‘Reclining ­Buddha’ of the Baphuon temple (Source: © Michael Falser 2010)

558

Plates

Plates EpII.12a—h  Comparative analysis of the damage and repair work of Angkor Wat’s moat embarkment stair system: left column, under Bernard Philippe Groslier’s regime with a reinforced concrete drainage system (1960—62); right column, the same spot photographed by an ICCROM ­mission after the 1997 failure of the reinforcement system from 1960s (Source: EFEO archive Paris (a—d), and ICCROM archive Rome (e—h))

559

Plates

Plates EpII.13a—e  Restoration of the World Monuments Fund between 2009 and 2013, as depicted on the WMF homepage (13a, below left) and inside the ICC-Angkor 2008 ­brochure (13b, above left); compared to the work of Bernard Philippe Groslier around 1970 for a complete dismantling of the gallery and its partial reconstruction around a solid core of reinforced concrete (13c—e, right column) (Source: ICC-Angkor 2008, 53 (13a); WMF homepage (13b); EFEO archive Paris (13c—e)

560

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Plate EpII.14  GACP’s mapping of the condition of the decorative surfaces of Angkor (Source: GACP 2000, 16—17)

Plates EpII.15a,b  The conservation and restoration/repair work of Simon Warrack (GACP) of the giant Ta Reach statue in Angkor Wat’s western entry pavilion around 2003: public ­ceremony to re-consecrate the rediscovered and replaced original head (left), and the fully restored and decorated statue (right) (Source: photographs © Simon Warrack 2003)

561

Plates

Plates EpII.16a (left column) and b (right column)  The transcultural side-by-side appearance, across orders and borders, of Angkor Wat’s decorative surfaces: the restored plaster casts in the musée Guimet (16a, left above), the same ‘original’ surface at Angkor Wat (16a, left ­centre), and GACP’s digital condition mapping (16a, left below); a historic photograph of the built-in casts into the 1:1-scaled, hybrid Angkor Wat replica of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (16b, right above), and GACP’s surface mapping in 2013 ‘back’ on the original (16b, right below) (Sources: Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 266 (16a left column); La construction moderne, 34 (25 May 1930), 524 (16b, right column above); Baptiste/Zéphir 2013, 265 (16b below))

562

Plates

Plates EpII.17a—c  Inner surfaces of Angkor Wat, with its restored Apsaras being recycled for the video to explain the emergence myth of the ‘original’ Royal Khmer Ballet (on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2008, above); Angkor Wat’s illuminated outer surfaces as background for the great José Carreras show in 2002 (centre); for Les Nuits d’Angkor in 2002, the Angkor Wat performance in 2008, and for all kinds of PR material (Source: 2010 screenshot of UNESCO’s homepage (above); homepage screenshot from ‘serious-staging.com’ (centre), and a collage PR material from 2002, 2008, and 2009 (below))

563

Plates

Plates EpII.18a—c  Scenarios of the Khmer Habitat Interpretation Centre inside of Angkor Park: ­signboard at the entry, model house, oxcart, poster for the exhibition about ‘present traditional Khmer houses’ (Source: photographs © Michael Falser 2011; below right personal archive Khoun)

564

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Plates EpII.19a,b  Dream and reality inside Angkor Park? ‘Tourists enjoy traditional oxcart rides in Angkor Park’ as depicted in the UNESCO World Heritage Review of 2013 with its special issue on “World Heritage in Cambodia” (above); news in the Phnom Penh Post about APSARA’s demolition of ‘untraditional’ houses built by the local population inside Angkor Park (Source: World Heritage Review 68 (June 2013), 30, © Khnoun Khun-Neay (above); Phnom Penh Post 21 August 2017 (below))

565

Plates

Plates EpII.20a,b  Visions of rural Cambodia: aerial photograph of the typical landscape ­pattern during dry season (20a); traditional Cambodian house in the wider Siem Reap region near Roluos (20b) (Sources: all photographs © Michael Falser 2010/11)

Plates EpII.20c—f  Run Ta-Ek in its planning phase 2010/11 with individual houses and gardens, windmills, and sponsorship by the Korean International Cooperation Agency KOICA (Sources: all photographs © Michael Falser 2010/11)

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Plates EpII.21a—d  Run Ta-Ek plans: physical layout plan of the central Chea Lea neighbourhood within the network of six hamlets around and the courtyard planning (21a, above); the proposed planning for an existing ­ancient reservoir (21b, centre left); transcription of the ancient reservoir type into a layout of the Chea Lea Village with its central lake, circular roads, pedestrian paths, and house plots (21c, centre right); APSARA’s vision of a neo-­ traditional house, oxcart driver included (21d lower left) (Source: Guertin 2008, 13, 17, 26; Guertin 2009, n.p.)

567

Plates

Plate EpII.22  Neo-traditional wellness resort design for Sokhalay Angkor Villa Resort in Siem Reap (Source: Sokhalay Angkor Villa Resort Facebook entry, screenshot 2019)

Plates EpII.23  The giant Les Portes d’Angkor hotel project in direct vicinity to Angkor Wat: overall plan with a reference to an Angkorian ‘hydraulic city’ with parallel moats and a series of concentric moats à la Angkor Wat for hotels, shopping facilities, and a golf course, as depicted in Beschaouch’s 2002 Rapport de synthèse for the conservation and development of Angkor (Source: Beschaouch 2002b, B55)

568

Plates

Plates EpII.24a—d  The Cambodian Cultural Village: plan of the site (24a, above); the Wax and Historical Museum with ‘welcome Apsara’ and the original display of a ‘taxi girl with a UNTAC soldier’ (24b and c, centre); and the large 3-D display of the ‘builders of Angkor Wat’ (24d, below). (Source: photographs © Michael Falser 2010)

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Plates EpII.25a—d  The Cambodian Cultural Village: ‘The Greatest King — Jayavarman VII Show’ (25a, above); a miniature of a face tower with oxcart and Phnom Penh’s National Museum (25b and c, centre); Angkor Wat as sweet souvenir (25d, below) (Source: a © Julia Diezemann 2010; b—d photographs © Michael Falser 2010)

570

Plates

Plates EpII.26a,b  North Korea’s Angkor Panorama Museum, installed since December 2015: Homepage screenshot (above) and view into the Angkor Wat panorama as published in a ­German newspaper in 2016 (below) (Source: Screenshot from the Angkor Panorama Museum homepage (above) and from Süddeutsche Zeitung online, 29 March 2016 (below))

571

Plates

Plates EpII.27a,b  Angkor Wat’s omnipresent replications in Siem Reap’s tourist amusement zone: as a floating model for the swimming pool of the Angkor Century Hotel (above) and in a kitschy sunset painting in a night bar (Source: photographs © Michael Falser 2010/2011)

572

Plates

Plates EpII.28a—c  The Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap and the virtual parcours on its homepage: main entrance from outside with a central dome in the stylised form of an Angkor Wat tower (above); the gallery with a replicated section of Angkor Wat’s famous bas-relief gallery (centre); and a multimedia display about the temple with a small model in the centre of the hall (Source: © Angkor National Museum, screenshots from the homepage 2019)

573

Plates

Plates EpII.29a—c  Dy Proeung on his working card as draughtsman in the 1960s for the EFEO/Royal Kingdom (above); with King Norodom Sihanouk and his wife in the early 1990s to visit his large-scale model of Angkor Wat in Phnom Penh (centre); and in 2010 sitting in front of another Angkor Wat model in his home and exhibition site at Siem Reap (Source: courtesy Dy Proeung; © Michael Falser 2010)

574

Plates

Plates EpII.30a,b  ‘Angkor Balloon’ over Angkor Wat (above) and ‘Helicopter Scenic Flights’ over Angkor Wat (below) (Source: Brochures 2011, collage Michael Falser)

575



Bibliography

Abbreviations AA ABIA AMN ANOM

Arts Asiatiques Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology Archives des musées nationaux, Paris Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-enProvince APSARA Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap ARCAFA Applied Research Center for Archeology and Fine Arts, Phnom Penh BCAI Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine Bulletin de correspondance hellénique BCH Bulletin de l’EFEO BEFEO Bulletin de la Société des Études indochiBSEI noises CARAN Centre d’accueil et de recherche des ­Archives nationales, Paris CEFEO Cahiers de l’EFEO CKS Centre of Khmer Studies, Siem Reap Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie CRAI des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres DC-CAM Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh EFA École française d’Athènes École française d’Extrême-Orient EFEO École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts ENSBA Foreign Broadcast Information System FBIS (CIA) GACP German Apsara Conservation Project GGI Gouvernement général de l’Indochine ICC-Angkor International Co-ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor ICCROM International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property ICOMOS International Council on Monuments and Sites INHA Institut national d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris IJHS International Journal of Heritage Studies JA Journal asiatique JICA Japan International Cooperation Agency JSAS Journal of Sophia Asian Studies JSS Journal of the Siam Society NAC National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh NION Nederlandsch-Indie Oud en Nieuw

OIM ODNI PEFEO RCA SEAMEO SPAFA SWB UNESCO WMF ZEMP

Office International des Musées Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië Publications de l’EFEO Rapport de la Conservation d’Angkor Southeast Asian Ministers of Education ­Organization Southeast Asian Regional Centre for ­Archaeology and Fine Arts, Bangkok Summary of World Broadcasts (British Broadcasting Operation) United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Monuments Fund Zoning and the Environmental Management Plan for Angkor

Archives and libraries APSARA archive, Siem Reap Archive Alcazar, Marseille Archive Chambre de Commerce Marseille Archive Charles Meyer, Paris Archive of the Ethnographical Museum, Berlin Archive and library of the Institut national d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris Archive municipale de Marseille Archive municipale d’Hennebont Archives nationales, Paris Archive of the National Museum, Phnom Penh Archives départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhône, ­Marseille Archives des musées nationaux, Paris Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Province Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (BNF) Bophana Film Archive, Phnom Penh Chambre de commerce Marseille Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh EFEO Archive, Paris and Siem Reap Heidelberg University Library ICCROM archive and library, Rome ICOMOS archive and library, Paris Musée Guimet Archive, Paris National Archives of Cambodia, Phnom Penh National Library, Phnom Penh Service historique de la defense, French Ministry of ­Defense, Paris Sorbonne University Library, Paris UNESCO Archive, Paris 577

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621



Index

Names and Institutions A Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris)  I: 138 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­ Lettres  II: 4, 8, 14, 29, 48, 62, 86–7, 115, 124, 179, 331, 392 Adeline, Jules  I: 231 Aéronautique militaire de l’Indochine  II: 176 Agence économique de l’Indochine  I: 352 Agence/Caisse française de développement  II: 384, 408, 412, 445–6 Agence France-Presse (AFP)  II: 249, 254 Alphand, Jean-Charles  I: 83, 191, 193, 198–200, 213 American Express  II: 371 Ammann, Auguste  I: 196, 198, 397 Ang Chan  I: 12, 17, 24, 27–30; II: 36, 423, 432 Ang Choulean  I: XII Ang Duong  I: 249, 407–10, 414; II: 155, 170, 208, 218 Angkar (loeu)  II: 258, 262, 264 Angkor (Archaeological) Society  II: 6, 29, 65 Angkor Charter  II: 411, 414, 427 Angkor Declaration  II: 411, 414 Angkor Foundation (Hungary)  II: 337, 371, 375, 538 Angkor Heritage Management Framework  II: 411, 414, 442, 549 Angoulvant, Gabriel  I: 284 Apsara (Angkor Wat)  I: 15, 17, 167, 207, 233, 244, 274, 389, 432; II: 105, 209, 214, 281, 425–31, 434, 563, 569 APSARA Authority (Siem Reap)  I: XII, 45; II: 4, 40, 182, 298, 324, 331, 341, 373, 384–5, 403, 408–12, 414–6, 421, 424–8, 432–3, 435–9, 442–8, 554, 565, 567 Apsara dance (→ Royal Khmer Ballet) Apsara (film)  II: 209–10, 231 APSARA Stone Conservation Unit  II: 432–3 Aragon, Louis  I: 332, 334, 402 ARCAFA  II: 251–4, 331, 439 Archaeological Society of Yogyakarta  II: 62

Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)  I: 52, 152–3, 302, 413, 417; II: 2, 48, 70, 135, 151, 236, 280–90, 294, 298, 302, 331, 337, 340, 348, 356, 366, 373, 383–4, 393, 398–9, 401, 419, 422, 424, 427–8, 517–20, 556 Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies  II: 7, 50, 60–74, 78, 81, 84, 87, 95–7, 342, 392, 474 Archive de la planète (Paris)  I: 313 Arnaud, Édouard  I: 22 Artaud, Adrien  I: 252, 255, 261, 266, 400 Artisans d’Angkor  I: 390; II: 448 ASEAN  II: 279, 304, 306, 315 Asian Development Bank  II: 349, 379, 384, 411, 439 Asiatic Society (Calcutta)  I: 44; II: 48 Association des Amis d’Angkor (AAA)  II: 295, 298–9, 329, 331, 335, 337, 339, 348, 350, 381, 399 Association générale des Cambodgiens de France  II: 234 Association Monuments du Monde  II: 359–60, 420 Athens Archaeological Society  II: 6 Athens Charter (1931)  II: 84–97, 122–4, 392 Athens Conference (1931)  II: 50, 84–98, 392 Auberlet & Laurent (Montrouge)  I: XII, 261–5, 268, 293, 297, 300, 304–5, 307, 309, 315, 317, 362, 400, 437 Auboyer, Jeannine  II: 90, 92, 140 Aubry-Lecomte, Carles Eugène  I: 71, 74, 81, 115  Audoul, Alfred  II: 187 Auriol, Vincent  II: 158 Austrian Archaeological Institute  II: 85 Aymonier, Étienne  I: 27, 91, 93, 95, 123; II: 13–4, 22, 28, 92, 390, 418, 432, 461 Azéma, Léon  I: 187, 353 Azoulay, Audry  II: 416 B Bach, Claude  II: 202–3 Baille, Frédéric  I: 239–242, 244 Balanos, Nicolas  II: 6–7, 84–89, 92–100, 126, 392, 427–8, 477 Baltard, Victor  I: 79, 392

Baptiste, Pierre  I: XII, 37–8, 120, 163, 165, 187, 211, 464; II: 2, 330, 353, 432 Barbeau, Henri  I: 362 Bardoux, Agénor  I: 101–2 Barillet-Deschamps, Jean-Pierre  I: 83 Barth, Auguste  II: 16, 28, 48–50, 62–3, 84, 86, 140, 283 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste  I: 115, 352 Basset, Urbain  I: 159, 170, 187 Bastian, Adolf  I: 24, 124, 176, 178–9 Batavia Society  (→ Royal Batavia Society) Batteur, Charles  I: 290, 374; II: 102 Baudoin, François-Marius  I: 239, 242–4, 266; II: 39–40 Beato, Felice  II: 44 Beau, Paul  I: 234, 239–47; II: 213 Beauvais, René de  I: 63, 158 Becker, Elisabeth  II: 253, 270, 313, 334–5 Behrens, Peter  I: 282 Belgar, J. D.  II: 49 Bénézech, Pierre  I: 126 Benjamin, Walter  I: 41, 79, 170, 396–7, 418; II: 59 Béquignon, Yves  II: 87, 89 Bérenger, Henri  I: 345, 373 Berlage, H. P.  II: 70–1, 476 Bernard, Fernand  I: 247–53, 290, 344, 399 Bernet-Kempers, A.J.  II: 63–4, 69, 71, 151 Bernon, Olivier de:  I: XI; II: 3 Bert, Paul  II: 14 Berthod, Aimé  I: 349 Beschaouch, Azedine  I: 47; II: 325, 356, 359, 361, 363, 367–9, 377, 379, 383, 402, 408, 412, 414–6, 420–1, 446–7, 449, 451, 568 Beylié, Léon de  II: 24–5, 28, 30, 33, 41 Bhabha, Homi  I: 44; II: 388 Bhandari, C. M.  II: 281–3, 286–7, 295, 297 Bihar Mahavir Mandir Trust  I: 417–8, 505–8 Bilbaut, Théophile  I: 229, 233 Bizot, François  II: 146, 151 Blanc, Charles  I: 90, 95, 139 Blanche, Charles & Gabriel  I: 23, 282–93, 299, 301, 307–15, 349, 401, 434, 486–9; II: 145 Blanchet & Molinari  I: 261–2 Blondel, Paul  I: 23 Blouet, Abel  I: 23, 24

623

Index

Blum, Léon  I: 332, 347, 371, 402 Bodiansky, Vladimir  II: 193, 197–9 Bodhisattva (Avalokitesvara)  I: 12, 242; II: 354 Boidevaix, Serge  II: 381 Boileau, Louis-Hippolyte  I: 187, 353 Bois, George  I: 245–6; II: 212 Boisselier, Jean  I: 23, 29; II: 1, 111–3, 116, 118–9, 167, 394 Bokova, Irina  II: 405, 409, 415 Bolla, Gérard  II: 246, 338, 348, 350, 356, 370 Bonard, Louis Adolphe  I: 60–61 Bonheur, Albert de  I: 35, 187; II: 298–9, 329–30 Bonhoure, Louis Alphonse  II: 24, 33, 391 Bonnier, Louis  I: 281–2 Bontoux, Henry  I: 20, 273; II: 44–5, 391 Bopha (Buppha) Devi  I: 432; II: 160, 171, 205, 208–11, 217–21, 231, 395 Bosch, F. D. K.  I: 26; II: 7, 50, 61–2, 67–72, 78, 84, 97, 115 Botum Bopha  II: 222, 224 Bouchenaki, Mounir  II: 365, 370, 379, 413 Boucher, Henry  I: 231 Bouillet  I: 90, 112 Bouillevaux, Charles  I: 57, 68, 408; II: 10 Boulbet, Jean  II: 145, 148, 151 Bourdais, Jules  I: 117 Bourdieu, Pierre  I: 51; II: 5, 421 Bourgery, Jean-Marc  I: 137, 170 Bourne, Samuel  II: 44 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros  II: 359 Brah Bisnukar  I: 12 Brahma(nism)  I: 17, 24, 91, 108, 119–20, 145, 222, 242; II: 13, 170, 189, 448 Brandes, J.L.A.  II: 62–3, 65–6 Braudel, Fernand  II: 177 Bréal, Michel  II: 48 Breschnew, Leonid  II: 205 Breton, André  I: 332, 402 Browning, Sir John  I: 410 Brughier, Bruno  II: 339 Brunet, Joseph  I: 101 Brunet, Louis  I: 252, 284 Brunet, René  II: 107 Brunhes, Jean  I: 342 Buat, lieutenant  II: 18–19, 32, 40, 466–7 Buddha  I: 15, 71, 82, 94, 96, 118–9, 156, 164, 166, 201, 208, 221, 228, 244, 389, 413–4, 418; II: 23, 49, 62, 81–2, 87, 105, 165–6, 168, 170, 183, 210, 230, 256, 280, 287–8, 297, 311, 368, 398, 423, 448, 450–1, 504, 557–8 Buddhist/Buddhism  I: 2, 5, 9, 11–12, 15, 24–9, 42, 45–8, 53, 65, 94, 96, 104, 144,

624

153–7, 166, 208, 222, 229, 242, 287, 291, 323, 329, 391–3, 400, 408–23, 443; II: 5, 12–3, 16, 21–2, 24, 26–7, 36, 39, 48–9, 58, 62–3, 65, 71, 92, 113, 126, 140, 154–5, 157–8, 161–71, 183–4, 189, 193, 197, 218, 222, 229–30, 233–4, 237, 252–6, 273, 290–1, 307, 324, 336, 341, 347, 354, 385–8, 391, 394, 396, 399, 408, 411, 414, 419, 423, 432, 449, 452, 479, 548 Buisson, Mesnil du  II: 97–8 Bun Narith  II: 408 Bureau international des expositions (BIE)  I: 347 C Caisse française de développement (→ Agence) Callenfels, Pieter Vincent van Stein  II: 7, 60–1, 71–2, 78–9, 176, 392 Cambodian Commission to UNESCO (→ Commission nationale du ­Cambodge auprès de l’UNESCO) Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)  II: 379, 408–9 Cameron, Christina  II: 325, 365–9 Carlu, Jacques  I: 187, 353 Carné, Louis-Marie de  I: 61, 63 Carnot, François  I: 282 Carpeaux, Charles  I: 94, 241, 277; II: 21–4, 102 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste  I: 277; II: 21 Carreras, José  II: 435, 563 Catroux, Georges  II: 102 Ceausescu, Nicolae  II: 267, 398 Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, ­Paris  I: XI, 4 Centre of Khmer Studies (Siem Reap)  II: 301, 407 Cessac, Léon de  I: 102 CGDK (Coaliton Government)  II: 306, 313–20, 331–8 Chailley-Bert, Joseph  I: 241, 251, 399; II: 17, 28 Cham Prasith  II: 333 Chanot, Aimable  I: 234, 252 Chan Si  II: 297, 318 Chao Phya Bhudhara Bhay  I: 62 Chapon, Alfred  I: 86 Charles-Brun, Jean  I: 342–5, 350, 368–71, 376, 381–90, 402–4 Chastel, André  I: 2, 126 Chau Seng  II: 250, 279 Chau Sun Kerya  II: 416 Charles-Roux, Jules  I: 217, 222, 226, 233–5, 239–43, 252–5, 398–9

Chasseloup-Laubat, Prosper  I: 60–1, 74, 81; II: 158 Chavannes, Édouard  II: 30, 86 Chea Thay Seng  II: 239, 251–2 Chennevières-Pointel, Marquis de  I: 96–7 Chephren  I: 140–1 Chevalier, Michel  I: 71, 79 Chevreuil, P.  I: 25 Chey Sophear  II: 295, 297 Ch(h)eng Phon  II: 282, 295–8, 320, 331 Choan Soadi (Chuon Spoadi)  II: 176, 253 Choonhavan, Chatichai  II: 270, 332, 335 Chou En-Lai  II: 161, 205, 209, 254 Christ(ian/ity)  I: 11, 87, 117, 144, 191, 335, 408; II: 171, 225, 281 Chruschtschow, Nikita  II: 205 Chuch Phoeurn  II: 348 Chulalongkorn, King  I: 248, 251, 414–5 CIAM  II: 193 CIDSE  II: 291, 294 Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris  I: XII Claeys, Jean-Yves  II: 78–9, 102, 137, 140 Clark, Caspar Purdon  I: 157 Cleere, Henry  I: XII; II: 325, 327, 361, 366–9, 372, 402, 419 Clemenceau, Georges  I: 249 Clément, Étienne  II: 322, 329–31, 348, 357 Clifford, James  I: 29, 42, 379, 392; II: 5, 17, 125, 160, 213, 370, 401, 419 Cloizier, René  I: 368–9 Clouzot, Henri  I: 379–81, 403 CNRS  II: 123, 135, 251 Coedès, George  I: 19–20, 24–30, 322, 410; II: 26, 44, 61, 71–2, 77, 80, 87, 92, 97– 104, 107, 124, 128, 157–9, 164–9, 281, 378, 392, 394, 432, 449 Cole, Henry  I: 76, 80, 148–9, 151, 153–4 Cole, Henry Hardy  I: 153, 156 Collège de France (Paris)  I: 349  Collin de Plancy, Jacques  I: 247, 251 Cologne University of Applied Sciences  I: XI; II: 403, 428 Comité de l’Asie française  I: 249; II: 21  Comité du tourisme colonial  II: 34 Commaille, Jean  I: 19, 21, 23, 27, 251–5, 266–8, 272, 277, 286, 307, 400; II: 1, 3, 7, 19–41, 50–3, 69–70, 102, 104, 109–10, 116, 129, 145, 166, 347, 387–8, 391, 418, 422, 468 Commission archéologique de l’Indochine  I: 181, 463–4; II: 4, 8, 18, 31, 36, 63, 109, 463–4 Commission de déclassement (Angkor)  II: 39, 102, 126, 390

Names and Institutions

Commission de délimitation de la frontière Franco-Siamoise (→ Franco-Thai ­Delimitation Commission)  Commission des antiquités du Cambodge II: 15, 16, 28, 391 Commission (de conservation) des monuments historiques  I: 83, 126, 136–9, 159; II: 39, 85 Commission des voyages et missions ­scientifiques et littéraires  I: 101 Commission nationale du Cambodge auprès de l’UNESCO  II: 239, 246, 253, 304, 331, 334, 505, 530 Committee for the rehabilitation of the monuments of Cambodia  II: 355 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)  II: 163, 255, 261–4, 273 Conservatoire des arts et métiers, Paris  I: XII COPROBIC  II: 146, 238–40, 246, 251, 419, 502 Coral-Remusat, Gilberte de  I: 19; II: 46, 92–3, 95 Cordier, Charles  I: 78, 82 Cormon, Fernand  I: 217 Cornell University  I: XII; II: 264 Corps de Ballet (→ Royal Khmer Ballet) Cotard, Charles  I: 189–90 Cottin et fils, Maison  I: 299, 304 Courajod, Louis  I: 130 Couto, Diogo do  II: 179 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)  II: 379, 408–9 Craste, Léo  I: 375 Crevaux, Jules  I: 102 Croci, Giorgio  II: 413–4 Croft, Lara  I: 54, 444; II: 425 Croizier, Edme Comte de  I: 99–100, 120, 179, 394 Cruse, Arthur  I: 375 Cunningham, Alexander  I: 152–3; II: 2, 48 Cuvier, Georges  I: 117, 135–8, 148, 170, 395 Cuypers, Joseph Th.  II: 69 Cuypers-Hulswit, architects  II: 63 D Dacians  I: 155; II: 226 Dagens, Bruno  I: XI; II: 2–3, 143, 146, 239, 297–8, 337–40, 383, 399, 531 Dagobert  I: 133–4 Daigoro Chihara  II: 337, 342 Daladier, Édouard  II: 39 Damrong Prince  I: 412, 415 Daniell brothers  II: 44 Danseuses Cambodgiennes (→ Royal Khmer Ballet)

Darmesteter, James  II: 15 Darwin, Charles  I: 198 Dauge, Véronique  II: 339–40, 348, 357, 375 David, Fernand  I: 281–2 Davioud, Gabriel  I: 117 Debussy, Claude  II: 211 Decoux, Jean  II: 102–3, 158 Defrasse, Alphonse  I: 23 Dehio, Georg  II: 50 Delanghe, Philippe  I: XII Delaporte, Louis  I: XII, 19, 27, 29, 35–38, 61–66, 71, 80, 89–114, 117–26, 130–4, 137–9, 142, 144–8, 153–7, 158–76, 180, 181–7, 190–8, 202, 205, 207, 211–2, 217–21, 228, 231–4, 239–44, 254–8, 261, 264, 272, 277, 290, 307, 320, 334, 353–5, 392–9, 403–4, 410–1, 435, 456–7, 465; II: 2, 10–4, 17, 21–8, 36–7, 41, 50, 54, 90, 92, 106, 109, 112, 119, 125–6, 145, 167, 211–2, 222, 330, 353–4, 390, 416–7, 425, 432–3, 452 Delaval, Auguste  I: 22–24, 221, 253–62, 265, 268, 272, 282–3, 286–91, 307, 399–401, 480; II: 37, 51, 145, 387, 391 Delcassé, Théophile  I: 249 Délégation/Mission permanente (→ Permanent Delegation/Mission) Deloncle, Charles  I: 284 Deloncle, François  I: 249, 401 Deloncle, Pierre  I: 335, 337, 352; II: 418 Delort de Gléon, Alphonse  I: 213–5 Delvert, Jean  II: 135, 288, 441 Democratic Kampuchea  II: 235, 237, 258–67, 270, 279, 282, 304–8, 11–5, 318–20, 331, 334–6, 396–9, 500, 512, 521 Deng Xiaoping  II: 331 Dervaux, Adolphe  I: 283, 345 Deschamps, Paul  I: 142, 353; II: 115 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)  II: 433 Devawongse Varoprakarn  I: 247 Diène, Doudou  II: 311 Diep Dinar  II: 141 Dieulefils, éditeur  I: 244, 246, 475; II: 22–3 Diori, Hamani  II: 227 Diskul Prince  II: 331, 337, 350 Disney, Walt  I: 53–4; II: 447 Dognée, Eugène  I: 79–80, 210, 392 Domaslowski, Wieslaw  II: 294 Doumer, Paul:  I: 219, 222, 239, 241, 249, 279, 321, 342; II: 14–15, 23, 28, 458 Doumergue, Gaston  I: 251, 279, 282, 332, 335, 349, 495; II: 31, 39

Drège, Jean-Pierre  II: 3 Drevet, Jacques  I: 86, 205 Droste, Bernd von  II: 359, 363, 365–9 Duban, Félix  I: 132, 135 Duchemin, Claude  II: 197 Ducret, lieutenant  II: 18–19, 32, 40, 466–7 Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam)  I: XII; II: 242–3, 257, 263 Dufour, Henri  I: 241; II: 21, 24, 28, 102 Dumarçay, Jacques  II: 138, 143, 146, 151, 342, 359, 422–3 Dumas, Alexandre  I: 194 Dumas, Roland  II: 352–3 Dumont, René  I: 24–5, 35; II: 251, 299, 330–1, 334, 339, Dumoulin, Louis  I: 221–3 Dupont, Pierre  I: 187; II: 50, 97 Dupré amiral  I: 89–91 Durand, Julien  I: 347 Dutch Archaeological Society  II: 69, 71 Dy Proeung  I: XII, 45, 442; II: 145, 451–4, 574 E East India Company  I: 151–2 École coloniale  II: 13–4 École d’architecture Paris-La Villette, ­Paris  I: XI École d’arts décoratifs et du dessin en ­Indochine  I: 268, 384 École des Annales  II: 177 École des arts Cambodgiens (Phnom Penh)  I: 267, 283, 290, 313, 388; II: 214, 452 École des arts décoratifs (Paris)  II: 185 École des Beaux-Arts (Paris)  I: 21–4, 94, 98, 126, 129, 132, 136, 139, 142, 147, 166, 205, 215, 221, 229, 258, 371; II: 3, 12, 24, 51, 81, 94, 98, 112, 115, 181, 214, 341, 387, 394, 402, 423 École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine ­(Hanoi)  I: 286, 362, 376–7, 388–9 École des Beaux-Arts, Phnom Penh  II: 143, 155, 218, 229, 384 École du Louvre  II: 167, 298, 384 École Française d’Athènes  I: XII; II: 16, 62, 85–8, 97, 123 École Française de Rome  II: 16, 86 École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)  I: XI–XII, 8, 19–25, 29–30, 44–5, 52, 65, 112, 123, 212, 239–41, 251–4, 267–8, 276–7, 286–7, 290–1, 301, 316–7, 320–23, 374, 398–404, 410, 413, 430, 446; II: 1–8, 14–18, 21–32, 37–41, 47–8, 50–71, 80–107, 111–7, 123–30, 140–1, 145–51, 154, 157–61,

625

Index

165–73, 176, 221–3, 230, 237–9, 242, 245, 249, 251–3, 281–9, 294–7, 322–3, 329–31, 337–44, 348–9, 355–6, 359, 362–7, 371–5, 379–84, 388–93, 397, 401–2, 408, 416, 418, 422–6, 452–3, 466, 470, 480, 544–6, 550–1, 556–9 École nationale supérieure des arts ­appliqués (Paris)  II: 197 École polytéchnique fédérale de ­Lausanne  II: 182 École pratique des hautes études (Paris) II: 15, 329, 350, 365 École spéciale d’architecture (Paris)  I: 375; II: 193 Écoles artisanales d’art appliqué (Hanoi, Gia-Dinh, Bien-Hia, Thudaumont, Phnom Pneh)  I: 316 Écoles professionelles de l’Indochine  I: 245 Eiffel, Gustave  I: 192, 199 Elgin, Lord  I: 42, 151; II: 89 Elisseieff, Vladimir  II: 239 Éluard, Paul  I: 332, 402 Engelhardt, Richard  I: XI; II: 334, 337, 340, 350, 354, 361, 373–9, 385 Enlart, Camille  I: 142, 159, 455; II: 54, 135 Étienne, Eugène  I: 199, 247, 249 European Community  II: 304, 348, 379, 384 Evans, Arthur  II: 111 Evans, Gareth  II: 335–6 F Fabre, Daniel  I: 22, 162, 166, 205–12, 215, 220–1, 242, 397; II: 34, 145, 184 Fallières, Armand  I: 245 FANK (Forces armées nationales Khmères)  II: 249 FAPLNK (Forces armées populaires de libération nationale du Kampuchéa), FNLPK  II: 254–8, 348 Faraut, Félix  I: 90–1, 95–9, 108, 158, 244 Fédération régionaliste française  I: 342, 344, 369, 381, 383 Fergusson, James  I: 24, 144–9, 152–3, 181, 194, 395 Ferry, Jules  I: 138, 158, 191, 213, 396 Filliozat, Jean  II: 115, 141, 151, 168 Fillon, François  II: 423 Filoz, Auguste  I: 91–9, 170, 393, 411; II: 22 Finot, Louis  I: 239, 241, 286–7, 291, 317, 323, 401–2; II: 15, 22, 28, 36–9, 48, 53, 5–63, 69, 80, 86–7, 92, 166–7, 234 Fletcher, Banister  I: 197–8 Fleuriot de Langle, Paul  I: 90

626

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), UN  II: 411 Foucault, Michel  I: 38, 46–55, 72, 148, 189–91, 198, 226, 269, 287, 291, 325, 345, 397, 400; II: 5–10, 13, 16, 19–20, 40, 102, 124, 156, 160, 338, 342, 345, 357, 389–93, 403, 406, 413, 416, 422, 432, 437 Foucher, Alfred  II: 15, 18, 28, 65, 87, 115 Foulhoux, Alfred  I: 202 Fouqueray, Charles  I: 278–9, 321–2, 352 Fournereau, Lucien  I: 19, 21, 23, 29, 160–70, 175, 196, 205, 207, 211, 239, 256–7, 261, 263, 272, 287, 302, 456–61; II: 12–14, 23, 37, 145, 390, 418, 432, 460 Franco-Thai Delimitation Commission  I: 249, 251, 253, 399; II: 16, 103 Fraoua, Ridha  II: 39, 361–5, 373, 384, 419 French Communist Party  I: 332–4; II: 270–1 French Economical Aid (Aide française économique)  II: 127, 145 Friends of Angkor (Wat)  II: 294–6, 334 Front populaire  I: 347, 362, 371 FUNCINPEC  II: 348–9, 379, 444 FUNK (Front uni national du ­Kampuchéa)  II: 254–5, 307 Furt, Jean-Marie  II: 413 G GACP (German Apsara Conservation ­Project)  I: XI–XII, 11, 29, 95, 170, 446; II: 373–4, 422–7, 428–33, 556, 561–2 Gadmer, Frédéric  I: 313, 488, 494 Gaffarel, Paul  I: 234 GANEFO (Games of the New Emerging Forces)  II: 197, 201, 492 Gangsa  I: 408 Garnier, Charles  I: 194–6, 198, 200, 203, 213, 223, 397; II: 437 Garnier, Eugène  I: 231 Garnier, Francis  I: 29, 58–69, 75–6, 82, 89, 97, 110–4, 145, 170–1, 206–8, 259, 287, 392–4, 447; II: 10, 12–13, 21–4, 145, 390, 418, 425 Garnier, Tony  I: 282 Gaston, Joseph  I: 332–3 Gauguin, Paul  II: 211 Gaulle, Charles de  I: 30, 212, 266, 368; II: 30, 127, 142, 153, 155, 163, 221–6, 236, 270, 347–9, 382, 395, 419, 448, 495–7 Gautier, Théophile  I: 215 Gennep, Arnold van  I: 384 Genouilly, Rigault de  I: 61, 410 Genuys, Charles  I: 282–3

Geoffroy-Dechaume, Adolphe-Victor  I: 37, 83, 140, 142 George VI, King  I: 2, 337; II: 416 German Archaeological Institute (Athens) I: 89 Géraud, Léon  I: 345, 352, 356, 375, 379, 384 Getty Foundation/Conservation Institute II: 335, 337, 339, 350 Gilpin, William  II: 43–4 Giteau, Madeleine  II: 115, 182, 353 Glaize, Maurice  I: 21, 52; II: 3, 7, 46, 57, 98–107, 113, 125, 166, 285, 392, 418 Godbarge, Henri  I: 344, 371, 381, 403  Goloubew(v), Victor  I: 27, 268, 290, 317, 320–1, 402; II: 57, 61, 78, 176–9, 394, 441, 485 Gonse, Louis  I: 210–1 Goor, Lulius van  II: 66–9 Gorbachev, Mikhail  II: 331 Gounod, Charles  I: 194 Gourdon, Henri  I: 253, 256, 282, 293, 325, 352 Grandière, Pierre de la  I: 60–1, 68–9, 74, 249, 412 Greater Angkor Project  II: 442, 446 Greater India Society/Movement  II: 281, 283, 398 Gréber, Jacques  I: 350–3, 362, 369, 371 Grégoire, Henri  I: 130 Grison, Georges  I: 191 Gronemann, Isaac  II: 62, 65–6 Groslier, Bernard Philippe  I: XII, 19, 21, 30, 44–47, 212, 441; II: 1–9, 50, 68, 81, 100, 106, 112–3, 116, 119, 122–51, 159–60, 167–81, 220–6, 231–40, 244–9, 251, 259, 263–5, 270, 276–8, 285–8, 293, 307, 339, 342, 349, 354, 359, 366, 373, 376, 388, 393–7, 402, 414, 418, 422, 426–8, 437, 441, 446, 480, 486, 498, 516, 518, 557, 559–60 Groslier, George  I: 40, 245, 267–8, 283, 290, 312–3, 344, 375, 381, 384, 388–9, 403, 408–9; II: 51–53, 80, 92, 102–4, 123–5, 177, 182, 208, 213–8, 222, 224, 379, 384, 395, 416, 448, 453 Grousset, René  II: 177 Grünwedel, Albert  I: 176–9 GRUNK/GRUNC (Gouvernement royal d’union ­nationale du Kampuchéa/ Cambodge)  II: 163, 250, 254–5, 265 Gsell, Émile  I: 62–9, 75, 115, 145–7; II: 22, 425 Guadet, Jules  I: 21–22 Guérinet, Armand  I: 141–3, 170, 181, 233, 396

Names and Institutions

Guertin, Pierre  II: 438–42, 567 Guesde, Pierre  I: 251–8, 265–8, 282–7, 290, 317, 333, 352, 399–400 Guimet, Émile  I: 101, 120, 123; II: 28 H Habsburg  I: 42; II: 6, 50 Hackin, Joseph  I: 185 Hadrian  II: 226 Härtel, Herbert  I: 180; II: 130 Hamy, Ernest Théodore  I: 104, 123 Hanning, Gerald  II: 193, 197–9 Hanoi University  I: 279, 321 Hanseatic Republic  I: 410 Harmand, Jules  I: 71, 90, 101, 103, 124, 137, 198, 247, 394, 399; II: 17, 28 Haussmann, Baron  I: 213 Hautecoeur, Louis  I: 371; II: 94 Hébrard, Ernest  I: 24, 213, 316, 374–5, 403; II: 86 Hébrard, Jacques  I: 199 Heckel, Édouard  I: 234 Hegel, Georg W.F.  I: 114 Heidelberg University, Cluster of ­Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a ­Global Context’  I: XI–XII, 4–6, 37–8; II: 6, 37, 259, 294, 438 Héloïse and Abélard  I: 133–5 Hem Chiam Reun  II: 185 Heng Samrin  II: 235, 273–5, 278–83, 290, 294, 304, 306, 310–3, 315–20, 334, 349, 398 Henrique, Louis  I: 199–200, 212, 249 Hesse, André  I: 282 Hiroshi Daifuku  II: 245–8 Ho Chi Minh  I: 332; II: 255 Hodges, William  II: 44 Hoffmann, Josef  I: 282 Hok Tourn  II: 107, 146 Homolle, Théophile  II: 85, 87 Hor Namhong  II: 340, 350 Horta, Victor  I: 282 Hou Youn  II: 163, 254–5, 259, 263–5, 397, 511 Hugo, Victor  I: 114; II: 50 Hu Nim  II: 254–5 Hun Sen  II: 204, 275, 316, 318–20, 331–8, 349–50, 379, 385, 408–11, 415–6, 423, 439, 451, 546 Huot Sambath  II: 116 I ICC-Angkor  II: 4, 324–5, 331, 349, 370, 378–85, 402–3, 405–21, 422–432, 436, 444, 449, 543, 545–51, 555, 560

ICCROM  I: XII, 8; II: 288, 315–6, 356, 358, 376, 379, 411, 413, 415, 426, 520, 559 ICOM  II: 124, 126, 239, 348, 372, 411, 414 ICOMOS  I: XII, 8, 36, 187; II: 278–9, 282, 291, 313–6, 325–30, 350, 354–6, 361–69, 402, 411, 413, 419 Ieng Sary  II: 255, 263, 267–9, 273, 275, 277, 304, 306–7, 310–11, 398, 521 Ieng Thirith  II: 306 Indira Gandhi  II: 279–83, 398 Indochinese Communist Party  I: 332 Indochinese Union  I: 24, 219, 240, 245, 253, 261, 278, 355, 377, 399; II: 104, 115, 158 Indravarman I  I: 11 Ingegneria Geotechnica e Strutturale  II: 425–6 Ing Kieth  II: 195, 335, 337–8, 348, 370 INHA (Institut national d’histoire de l’art), Paris  I: XII, 21, 23, 63, 109, 122, 146, 175 Institut de France  II: 14, 101 Institute of Asian Cultures, Tokyo  II: 291, 293, 336, 384, 401 Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok  I: XII, 414 Institut géographique national  II: 125, 359, 425 Institut international de coopération ­intellectuelle  II: 84, 94, 97 INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage)  II: 331 International Convention for the Exchange of Reproductions of Works of Art (1867)  I: 151; II: 125 International Labour Organisation (ILO)  II: 289, 371 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  II: 411 Interpol  II: 348 Ionesco, Luc  II: 339 Isanavarman I  I: 11 Ishizawa, Yoshiaki  II: 290–4, 297, 304, 311, 331–9, 348, 358, 377, 399, 531 Ismael Pacha  I: 86 IUCN  II: 356 J Jacopozzi (Société française des établissements)  I: 299, 368, 434 Jacques, Claude  I: XI, 19–21; II: 2–3, 166, 294–5, 299, 322–3, 329–34, 337–9, 342, 349–55, 358–9, 365, 444, 531, 535 Janniot, Alfred  I: 326 Japanese International Cooperation ­Agency (JICA)  I: 224; II: 342–8, 375, 384, 408, 413

Jaussely, Léon  I: 285, 291, 326–7 Java Institute  II: 69, 71 Jayavarman II  I: 9, 11 Jayavarman VII  I: 12; II: 140, 153–6, 163–73, 177, 179, 182, 201, 209, 222,224–6, 229–30, 244–5, 393–4, 424, 448–9, 482, 504, 570 Jeanneret, Pierre  I: 282–3, 401 Jeldres, Julio  II: 382 Jelen, Janos  II: 337, 370 Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmère (→ Royal Khmer Socialist Youth) Joffre, Maréchal  I: 26, 266–7, 271; II: 30, 111, 185 Jokilehto, Jukka  II: 288, 354, 358, 376, 520 Jolie, Angelina  I: 444; II: 425 Jomard, Edmé François  I: 116–8, 123, 394 Jones, Indiana  I: 54, 444; II: 450 Jones, Owen  I: 148, 155 Jones, William  I: 44 Joubert, Eugène  I: 61–3 Jourdan, Frantz  I: 282 Joyeu, André  I: 282, 268 Jurquet, Jacques  II: 267, 271 K Kaempfen, Albert  I: 159, 161–2, 213 Kahn, Albert  I: 313, 494 Kampuchéa démocratique (→ Democratic Kampuchea) Kantha Bopha  II: 190, 195, 488 Kavvadia, Panayiotis  II: 85 Kennedy, George  I: 69 Kennedy, Jacqueline  II: 130, 163, 226–7, 270 Kenzo Tange  II: 199, 395 Keo Chanda  II: 275, 277, 279, 294 Keo Mongkry  II: 252 Kerautret, inspecteur  I: 162 Kethana, HRH  II: 104 Khieu Samphan  II: 163, 254–6, 263–4, 267–9, 277, 304–6, 313, 315, 319–20, 338, 397–8, 419, 521 Khmer Issarak  II: 104–6, 273–4, 392 Khmer Republic  II: 123, 145, 151, 173, 235–54, 255, 275, 310, 313, 320, 331, 344, 389, 396–7, 419, 500, 503, 505–6, 508 Khmer Rouge  I: 5, 8, 15. 43, 46, 50, 332; II: 1, 3, 104, 123, 150–1, 156, 163, 175, 178–84, 204, 222, 231, 234, 235–7, 241, 249–72, 273–9, 282, 287–91, 297–301, 304–22, 324, 326, 331–8, 348–53, 357, 361–3, 372–3, 379, 389, 394–401, 415, 419, 422, 439, 441, 452–3, 509–10

627

Index

Khoun Khun-Neay  I: XII; II: 414, 436–9, 442, 564 Kim Il-Sung  II: 448 Kishore Kunal  I: 417 Klobukowski, Antony  I: 246; II: 28–32 Koechlin, Raymond  I: 185, 281 Koninklijk bataviaasch genootschap van kunsten en wetenschappen (→ Royal Batavian…) Kossamak (→ Sisowath Kossamak) Koun Wick  II: 242, 244, 246 KPNFA (Khmer People National ­Liberation Front)  II: 348–9, 371 Krantz, Jean-Baptiste  I: 72, 114 Krishna  I: 170, 207, 242, 320, 418; II: 322 Krom, Nicolaas Johannes  II: 7, 69, 71, 74, 78, 95 Kuroda Kiyoshi  II: 103 L Labbé, Jean  I: 341–4, 347–9, 352, 368, 376, 379, 402 Lablaude, Pierre-André  II: 413 Labrouste, Henri  I: 23 Lacollonge, Charles  I: 239, 242, 253, 375 Lacoste, Henri  I: 326, 328 Lacouture, Jean  II: 155, 163, 180, 220, 266, 416 Laederich  I: 63, 113, 158 Lafollye, Joseph-Auguste  I: 96–8, 450 Lagisquet, François  I: 239, 242 Lagisquet, Jacques  I: 21; II: 105–11, 119 Lagrée, Doudart de la  I: 29, 60–3, 68–71, 75–78, 82–3, 89, 110, 124, 202, 392–4, 404, 412, 447; II: 10, 13, 24, 390 Lajoinie, entreprise Paul  I: 293, 304, 337 Lajonquière Lunet de, Étienne  I: 428; II: 1, 16–8, 24, 28, 31–3, 62–6, 92, 357–8, 361, 390–1, 418, 462–64 Lambert, Jacques-Georges  I: 326, 328, 352, 357, 361–2, 368 Lamothe, Chomereau  I: 90 La Nave, Henri  I: 142, 181–4, 396 Lançon & Cie, Maison  I: 272 Lanessan, Jean-Louis de  I: 198–9, 341; II: 28 Langlade, Général de  II: 158 Lansberg, Carlo  I: 102 Laprade, Albert  I: 326–7, 370 Laspeyres, Pierre Jean  II: 185 Lassus, Jean-Baptiste  I: 136 Lattre de Tassigny, Jean  II: 159 Launay, Jean  II: 141, 337 Laur, Jean  II: 46, 112–3, 116, 119–22, 129, 168, 324, 393, 473 Layard, Henry  I: 145, 148

628

League of Nations  II: 94 Lebon, André  I: 231 Lebrun, Albert  I: 254, 342 Leclerc, Général  II: 104 Le Corbusier  I: 282–3, 350, 401; II: 193 Lefèvre-Pontalis, Pierre  II: 14 Le Fol, Aristide  I: 352, 356–7, 362, 403 Leisen, Hans  I: XI, 170, 446; II: 428–33 Lemire, Charles  I: 228, 412; II: 14 Le Myre de Vilers, Charles  I: 96, 158, 249 Lenin, Wladimir Iljitsch/Leninism  II: 105, 258–9, 264, 267, 270, 273–4, 311, 397–8  Lenoir, Alexandre  I: 125–35, 139, 142, 145, 147–9, 160, 166, 194, 211, 395–7, 401; II: 13 Léon, Paul  I: 281, 349, 368, 376 Le Play, Frédéric  I: 71, 74 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul  I: 191, 211–3, 397 Leroy-Mondet, architect  II: 183 Lesseps, Ferdinand de  I: 190 Letrosne, Charles  I: 282, 349–52, 368, 378 Lévi, Sylvain  I: 185, 322; II: 28, 159 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  I: 45 Lévy, Paul  II: 60 Leygues, Georges  I: 245  Ligue coloniale  I: 249 Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale  I: 333, 402 Lim Bun Hok  II: 413 Liu Shaoqui (Liou Chao-Chi)  II: 205, 209 Lockroy, Édouard  I: 162, 198 Loisy, Xavier  I: 252 Long, Maurice  I: 258, 266, 268 Long Nari  I: XII; II: 432 Longpérier, Adrien de  I: 118, 123–4 Lon Nol  I: 45; II: 123, 135, 145–6, 163, 173, 196, 201, 237–8, 240, 242, 249, 253–4, 257, 259, 315, 341, 397 Lopès, Henri  II: 331, 336, 339, 348–50, 354, 356–7, 370, 379, 382, 535 Lorin, André-Jules  II: 24 Lorrain, Claude  II: 41 Loti, Pierre  I: 246, 268, 306; II: 36, 51, 214, 416 Loubet, Émile  I: 217, 234 Louverse, Jean  I: 329 Lu Ban Hap  II: 193, 202 Luce, Louis Paul  I: 242; II: 31–2, 344 Lucien, Marcel  II: 116, 146, 151 Lyautey, Maréchal  I: 1–2, 50, 271, 284–5, 289, 293, 332, 335, 337, 339, 495; II: 221, 353, 416, 452 M Maclaine Pont, Henri  II: 71 Madrolle, Claudius  II: 21, 33, 37, 465

Magne, Lucien  II: 85 Maheu, René  II: 246, 253, 338, 399 Maigrot, Émile  I: 350, 371 Maison des étudiants de l’Indochine  II: 182, 186 Maitre, Claude-Eugène  II: 18, 28, 31 Majumdar, R.C.  II: 281, 283 Malécot, Yves  II: 295, 329 Malkine, Georges  I: 332 Mallet-Stevens, Robert  I: 282 Malleret, Louis  II: 1, 98, 105, 112–6, 124, 159, 285 Malraux, André  I: 35; II: 80, 416 Malte-Brun, Conrad  I: 24 Mangin, Charles  I: 284 Manguin, Pierre-Yves  I: XI; II: 3 Mansudae Newtech Corporation/Art ­Studio  II: 448–9 Mao Zedong (Maoist)  I: 332; II: 156, 205, 209, 231, 237, 259, 263–5, 273–4, 396–7 Marcel, Alexandre  I: 22, 221–3, 398 Marchal, Henri  I: 19–23, 44, 215, 226; II: 2–4, 7, 38–47, 50–63, 66, 71–89, 92, 95–102, 105, 107, 111–9, 123–6, 129–30, 135–9, 166, 176, 182, 214, 285–8, 344, 366, 388, 391–5, 418, 428, 437, 472, 478–9 Marchal, Sappho  II: 214–6, 395 Mariette-Bey, Auguste  I: 86–7, 118, 120, 393 Marliave, François de  I: 268 Marrot, négotiant  I: 227–8, 408 Marshall, John  II: 2, 48, 70, 283–4 Martini, François  II: 106 Martzloff, Robert  I: 293, 352, 361 Marx, Karl/Marxism  I: 8, 46; II: 105, 163–4, 178–81, 237, 254, 258–9, 263–4, 267, 270–4, 307, 311, 389, 394, 396–8, 419 Masson, Maurice  II: 183–4 Masson, Paul  I: 234 Matsuura Koichiro  II: 408 Mauger, Henri  I: 21 Maujouy, Pérard de  II: 123 Mauss, Marcel  I: 383; II: 28, 353, 409 Mayor, Federico  I: 21, 30, 44; II: 30, 276, 298, 323–35, 339–40, 348–54, 359, 361–72, 381, 401–2, 420, 444, 535, 544 M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar  II: 304–5, 307, 310–11, 317–8, 320, 328, 335, 399 Mecquenem, Jean de  I: 21  Méhédin, Léon-Eugène  I: 84, 96 Mekong Exploratory Mission (1866–68)  I: 57, 61–71, 89, 110, 123, 135, 145, 153, 202, 392–3, 404, 410, 447; II: 10, 145, 221, 390

Names and Institutions

Mengs, Anton Raphael  I: 128–9, 453 Mérimée, Prosper  I: 136 Meyer, Charles  II: 157, 161, 163, 190, 193, 196–8, 208, 218–9, 254, 265, 489 Mey Than  II: 145 Michelangelo  I: 57, 139, 155, 200, 412; II: 9, 17, 339, 452 Michaux, Hubert  I: 115 Miche, Jean-Claude  I: 408 Michelet, Jules  I: 198 Millerand, Alexandre  I: 217, 271 Milliès-Lacroix, Raphaël  I: 235; II: 31 Mission archéologique de l’Indochine  II: 1, 10, 14, 18, 31, 36, 109 Mistral, Frédéric  I: 342 Mith Xhem  II: 249 Mitterand, François  II: 298, 356 Mitterand, Frédéric  II: 230 Moffat, Abbot Low  II: 106 Mok Tourn  II: 146 Mon Chaosmai-Chalerm  I: 369 Mongkut, King  I: 69, 178, 247, 407–16 Monguillot, Maurice  II: 39 Monique (Sihanouk)  II: 230–1, 255–7, 350, 452, 498  Monteiro, Col de  I: 245 Montigny, Charles de  I: 408, 410 Moojen, Pieter A.J.  I: 326, 329; II: 94–5 Morel, Jean  I: 253 Morel, Victor  I: 234 Morin, Jean-Claude  II: 197 Morris, John  II: 317 Mostura, Serge  II: 415 Mouhot, Henri  I: 19, 29, 57–9, 62–9, 144–5, 176, 178, 196, 200, 205, 306, 392, 408, 410, 412; II: 9–11, 17, 99, 145, 237, 259–60, 290, 338–9, 351, 375, 379, 381, 385, 390, 402, 416, 418, 430, 435, 452, 459, 544 Moura, Jean  I: 90–5, 408; II: 12 Moutet, Marius  I: 379; II: 106 Muller, Leonce  I: 235, 258 Muni Chatidej Udon  I: 251 Mus, Paul  II: 61, 78, 155, 166, 168 Musée Guimet, Paris  (→ Index Places) Musée Indo-chinois  (→ Index Places: ­Paris/Indochinese Museum) Musée Khmer/cambodgien  I: 61, 71, 89, 94–100, 120–2, 148, 158–9, 163, 176, 179, 181, 228, 240, 261–2, 317, 393–4, 450, 455; II: 16 Musée (Louis) Finot (Hanoi)  I: 24, 317, 374; II: 24, 87, 97 Muslim  I: 379, 418, 422; II: 165 Myrdal, Jan  II: 270, 306–7, 313

N Nafilyan, Guy  I: 19–20, 430; II: 123, 145, 299, 339 Nagaravatta  II: 157 Nak Ta  II: 148 Napoleon I (Bonaparte)  I: 30, 60–2, 68, 80, 94–5, 128, 130, 168, 212, 222, 244–5, 393; II: 13 Napoleon III  I: 61–2, 71–74, 84, 249, 393, 410 Naradipo, Prince  II: 222, 224 Narasimhaiah, Barkur  II: 283–9, 518–9 Narasimha, Rao  II: 280 Nerval, Gérard de  I: 215 Nash, John  I: 30 Nasser, Gamal Abdel  II: 164, 394 National Geographic  II: 37, 151, 311, 313, 317, 399, 518, 522–3 National Supreme Council (of Cambodia) II: 338, 350, 355, 361, 363, 365, 367, 371, 376 Nehru, Jawaharlal  II: 161, 164, 205, 282, 394 Nelessen, Anton  II: 443 Néret, Armand  I: 379 Ne Win  II: 267–8, 398 Nhouyvanisvong, Khamliène  II: 310, 329, 333, 350 Nicolas, Pierre  I: 217, 219 Nicoli (pseudonym George Groslier)  I: 388 Nixon, Richard  II: 163, 222, 224, 246, 250, 270 Noblecourt, André  II: 239 Non-Aligned Movement  II: 164, 226, 236, 259, 273, 278–80, 394, 398, 409 Nora, Pierre  I: 1–5, 32, 35, 50, 126; II: 102 Norès, inspecteur des colonies  I: 239  Normand, Alfred  I: 32, 393 Normand, Charles  I: 213 Norodom I  I: 60–1, 68, 94–5, 168, 222, 239, 244–5, 412; II: 189, 212 Norodom Bophani  II: 171 Norodom Montana  I: 266 Norodom Ranariddh  II: 379, 444 Norodom Sihamoni  II: 230, 416, 423, 444, 546, 557 Norodom Sihanouk  I: 24, 26, 30, 43–5, 203, 212, 266, 416, 432, 441–2; II: 1, 4–5, 8, 33, 50, 103–6, 115, 123–30, 140–5, 153–85, 189–211, 215–34, 336–41, 249–57, 262–7, 270, 278, 282–3, 298, 304, 313–20, 332–7, 341–2, 349–56, 363–71, 376, 379–85, 393–402, 408, 414, 418–9, 423, 441,

444, 448–9, 452, 481–3, 488–94, 498–9, 506–9, 574 Norodom Suramarit  II: 161–2, 189, 448 Noun Chea  II: 255 Nouth Narang  II: 322, 426 Novotny, Antony  II: 220 NUSFK  (National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea)  II: 273–4, 276–7 O Odend’hal, Prosper  I: 277; II: 21 Office indochinois du riz  II: 175–6 Office International des Musées  II: 86, 94, 96 Ok Sakun  II: 270, 304, 307, 310, 317, 320, 332–5, 399, 401, 521 Olivier, Germain  I: 282, 326 Olivier, Marcel  I: 285, 287, 289–90, 304, 307, 317, 324, 334–5, 337, 352 Om, Alexis  I: 61 Operation Samakki  II: 161 Orlandos, Anastasios  II: 86 Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indie (→ Archaeological ­Service of the Dutch East Indies) Ouk Chea  II: 277, 282, 291, 293, 295–6, 337, 339, 348, 370 Oum Vong  II: 297 Outrey, Ernest  I: 253, 256 P Pacon, Henri  I: 369 Pahr, Willibald  II: 306, 311, 338 Parent, Michel  I: 36, 187; II: 330 Paris Declaration for Angkor  II: 411, 414 Parmentier, Henri  I: 241; II: 16, 18, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 36–9, 47–8, 54, 61, 65–6, 78, 80, 92, 109, 176, 344, 392, 418, 472 Parti colonial  I: 241, 249 Pasquier, Pierre  I: 266, 284–6, 320–1, 332; II: 40–1, 61, 72, 77–9 Pathé  I: 266 Pavie, Auguste  I: 222, 227, 249; II: 14, 28 Peisse, Louis  I: 139 Pelliot, Paul  II: 28, 154 Penn Nouth  II: 158, 254–5 Pen Savann  II: 275–6, 293 Pen Yeth  II: 279, 282, 294 People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK)  I: 417; II: 236, 249, 273–82, 290–97, 304, 316–20, 332–4, 396–9, 409, 419, 515, 522, 530 Perez de Cuellar, Javier  II: 320, 330 Perm-5-Members (UN)  II: 336–7

629

Index

Permanent Delegation (Mission of ­Democratic Kampuchea) to the UN(ESCO)  II: 235, 270, 301, 304–15, 318, 337–8, 370, 396, 399, 401, 500, 505, 521, 525, 530 Perret, Auguste  I: 281 Pétain, Maréchal  II: 102, 158 Petit, L.D.  II: 63–4 Petsch, Maurice  I: 350, 380–1 Peycam, Philippe  II: 407–9 Pham Van Dong  II: 254 Phra Suphanphisaan  I: 411 Picard, Alfred  I: 191, 194, 200–1, 211, 217, 222 Pichard, Pierre  I: XI; II: 3, 151, 297, 337, 423 Pich Keo  I: XII; II: 150, 259, 276–7, 282, 290, 298, 313, 331, 337, 348–9, 354, 480, 522, 524, 535 Picquié, Albert  II: 32 Pila, Ulysse  I: 226–7 Pinart, Alphonse  I: 102, 118, 120, 124 Pineau, Louis-Alphonse  I: 375, 403 Piranesi  I: 166; II: 13 Pittakis, Kyriakos  II: 84 Piyush V. Sompura  I: 418–9 Planté, Georges-Victor  I: 208 Porcher, Jacques  I: 165, 168–9, 256; II: 23, 460 Poincaré, Raymond  I: 251–2, 256 Polak, Tadeusz  II: 294–6, 337 Pol Pot  II: 163, 235, 254–6, 259–81, 304, 397–8, 449, 513 Poncar, Jaroslav  I: XI, 13–16, 29, 168, 170, 173, 433–4; II: 430 Ponhea-Yat  II: 153 Ponn, minister  I: 251 Porte, Bertrand  I: XII; II: 3 Porte, Jean de la  I: 198–9 Pothuau, amiral  I: 61, 90 Pottier, Christophe  I: XI, 429; II: 3, 81, 114, 416, 426 Poujol, Isabelle  I: XI; II: 3, 22 Pouzadoux, Jean  I: 140 Prost, Henri  I: 24, 376 Prott, Lyndell  I: XII; II: 325, 354–9, 362–3, 368 Proudhon, Pierre  I: 342 Proust, Antonin  I: 138, 159 Q Quatrefages, Jean de  I: 97 Quénioux, Gaston  I: 183–4 Quincy, Quatremère  I: 136 R Raffegaud, Sylvain  I: 162, 201

630

Raffles, Thomas Stamford  II: 62 Raidl, Anne  II: 329–30 Ram  I: 416–9 Ramayana  I: 17, 170; II: 220–1, 346, 434 Ratte, Félix  I: 90–3, 101, 108, 112–3 Ravaisson, Félix  I: 139 Redgrave, Richard  I: 80–1, 149 Revèron, Paul  I: 21 Reynaud, Paul  I: 332, 335, 337 Richaud, Étienne  I: 205 Riegl, Alois  I: 42, 54; II: 50 Risterucci, Jean  II: 158 Ritter, Raymond  I: 347–8 Rivière, Georges-Henri  I: 108, 381 Rodin, Auguste  I: 182, 245, 399; II: 208, 211–3 Rollin, Louis  I: 352 Ronchaud, Louis de  I: 158 Ros Borath  II: 341, 426 Roseberry, Lord  I: 249 Rosny, de Léon  I: 124, 394 Rossigneux, Charles  I: 104 Rouher, Eugène  I: 74 Roux-Spitz, Michel  I: 281 Royal Air Cambodge  I: 13, 446; II: 47, 202 Royal Batavian Society of Arts and ­Sciences  II: 16, 48, 61, 63, 71, 86 Royal Geographic Society (London)  I: XII, 57, 69, 89; II: 9, 11, 459 (Royal) Khmer Ballet (dance)  I: 26, 68, 203, 224, 235, 245–6, 266, 274, 278–9, 317, 320, 381, 389, 399, 482; II: 46, 125, 156, 190, 201, 204–20, 224, 229–234, 304, 395, 414, 434–6, 448, 493–5, 520, 551, 563, 569 Royal Khmer Socialist Youth  II: 175, 190, 202, 227, 230 Royal Siamese Society  I: 410 Royal University of Fine Arts (Phnom Penh)  II: 141, 143, 182, 221, 227, 439 Royer, Jean  I: 375, 403 Royère, Pascal  I: XI; II: 3, 423, 426, 556–7 Rude, François  I: 160 Ruel, Georges  I: 231, 233 Ruskin, John  I: 149 S Sabrié, Paul  I: 23, 290, 352, 356–66, 368, 375, 377, 390, 403; II: 145 Sachy, Alexandre de  I: 210 Sadi-Carnot, Marie François  I: 191, 226, 228 Said, Edward  I: 44; II: 5, 387 Sainte-Marie, Jean-Baptiste de  I: 104 Saint-Simon, Henri de  I: 32, 71, 191, 341, 402

Sak Sutsakhan  II: 249–50 Salisbury, Jennifer  II: 367 Saloth Sar (→ Pol Pot) Sanday, John  II: 337, 427 Sandoz, G.R.  I: 282 Sangkum (Reastr Niyum) (People’s Socialist Community)  I: 416; II: 153–6, 161, 164, 168–9, 176, 180, 193, 196, 198, 201, 220–1, 227, 229–31, 234, 263, 265–7, 341–2, 349, 449, 482, 488, 493 Sarraut, Albert  I: 253, 256, 258, 269, 284, 325, 335, 400; II: 53, 160 Saurin, colonel  I: 244 Sauvestre, Stephen  I: 199–200, 202 Savard, Hélène  I: 158 Schliemann, Heinrich  I: 179 Schlumberger, Gustave  I: 118 Schoelcher, Victor  I: 115 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London  II: 270, 442 Schrieke, B.  II: 61, 71–2 Scellier de Gisors, Georges  I: 23, 221, 240 Scott, George Gilbert  I: 149, 151 Scott, Henry  I: 154 SEAMEO  II: 251–2, 331, 350, 379, 397, 411 Sedov, Leonid  II: 179, 181, 264, 394, 397 Selassie, Haile  II: 227 Senart, Émile  I: 185; II: 28, 48 Seng Suntheng  II: 185, 195 Sengupta, Rakhaldas  II: 280–2, 287 Serré, Georges  I: 268 Service archéologique des Indes néerlandaises (→ Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies) Service de l’hydraulique agricole  II: 175–7 Service des arts Cambodgiens  I: 320, 376, 384–5; II: 182 Service des eaux et forêts du Cambodge II: 127 Service du cadastre du Cambodge  I: 268 Service géographique de l’Indochine  I: 241; II: 125, 173 Shiva(ist)  I: 82, 323, 356, 361, 413, 418–9, 421, 423; II: 422–3 Siebold, Philipp Franz von  I: 117, 394 Siemens Germany  II: 133, 222 Sihanouk (→ Norodom Sihanouk) Silice, Auguste  I: 283 Sim Bunthoeun  I: XII; II: 437 Simon, Jules  I: 90 Sisowath  I: 239, 244–5, 266, 399, 474; II: 28, 30, 32, 208, 212, 214, 418 Sisowath Kossamak  II: 161, 185, 205, 208, 216–8, 220, 448 Sisowath Monireth  II: 103–4, 158

Names and Institutions

Sisowath Monivong  II: 158, 216 Sisowath Sirik Matak  II: 146, 163, 241, 247, 254 Sita  I: 417, 419 Société académique indo-chinoise de France  I: 68, 99, 158 Société centrale des architects  I: 170, 263, 369 Société/Union centrale des beaux-arts  I: 81–3, 393 Socièté coloniale des artistes Français  I: 352 Société d’Angkor pour la conservation des monuments anciens de l’Indochine  I: 253, 344; II: 6, 28–9, 65, 391 Société d’anthropologie  I: 101 Société de Chandernagor  II: 48 Société de géographie de Hanoi  II: 78 Société de la géographie (Paris)  I: 60–1, 89–90, 94, 190 Société de la géographie et d’études ­coloniales (Marseille)  I: 234 Société de Saint-Gobain  I: 293 Société des Amis d’Angkor  I: 287 Société des Amis du Vieux Hué  I: 287, 344 Société des études coloniales et maritimes I: 211–2 Société des études indo-chinoises  I: 287; II: 51, 81, 84, 123, 177 Société des Nations  I: 347; II: 94 Société d’ethnographie (Paris)  I: 78, 124, 394 Société du progrès de l’art industriel  I: 82 Société khmère des distilleries  II: 47 Société nationale de cinématographie du Cambodge (Khemara Pictures)  II: 231 Société Normande d’ethnographie et d’art populaire ‘le Vieux Honfleur’  I: 344 Société philomatique de Bordeaux  I: 229 Société pour (la protection des paysages et de) l’esthéthique de la France  I: 337, 344 Soeharto  II: 227, 356 Sok An  II: 331, 408, 414–5, 424, 428, 446, 451 Sokha Hotel Ltd  II: 409, 415 SOKHAR (Société Khmère des auberges royales)  II: 204 Soldi-Colbert de Beaulieu, Émile  I: 97, 100–5, 108, 110–4, 117–8, 123, 212, 394 Sommerard, Alexandre du  I: 135 Son Ngoc Thanh  II: 104, 158, 254 Son Sann  II: 204, 249, 313, 319–21, 330–2, 348–9, 358, 371 Son Sen  II: 254–5, 269 Son Soubert  II: 337, 348, 358, 420 Sood, D.S.  II: 424

Sophia University, Tokyo  II: 290–4, 336–7, 348, 378, 384, 408, 425, 427 Sor Hor  II: 246 Souphanavong, Prinz  II: 267–9, 398 SPAFA  II: 331, 337–8, 348, 350, 379, 383, 411 Spencer, Herbert  I: 198 Spuller, Eugène  I: 161 Srim Samy  II: 173 Srivastava, K.M.  II: 281–2 Stalin, Josef  II: 270 State Archaeological Service, Athens  II: 6 State Ateliers for Conservation of Cultural Property (PKZ)  II: 237, 294–5, 337, 348, 356, 366, 384, 399 State of Cambodia (SOC)  II: 332, 334, 336, 349, 375, 379, 500, 530 Stein Callenfels, Pieter Vincent van (→ Callenfels) Stern, Philippe  I: 19, 27, 166, 186–7; II: 46, 92, 112, 167, 176–7, 394 Strobel, Edward H.  I: 251 Stutterheim, W.F.  II: 71, 73 Suez Canal Company (Compagnie du ­Canal de Suez)  I: 83–4, 189 Sukarno  II: 155, 161, 164, 170, 211, 220 Sum Hieng  I: 290 Sumphady, Princess  I: 245 Sun Hao  II: 267–8 Sun Yat Sen  II: 253 Suryavarman I  I: 11 Suryavarman II  I: 11–7, 27–9, 420–1, 433; II: 14, 153–4, 168, 182, 201, 224, 449, 450 Swank, Emory  II: 249 Swedish International Development ­Cooperation Agency (SIDA)  II: 371, 375 T Tagore, Rabindranath  II: 283 Taigny, Edmond  I: 78 Takeo Miki  II: 192 Ta Mok (Chhit Choeun)  II: 272, 514 Tan Kimhoun  II: 239, 246 Tan Veut(h)  I: XII; II: 189–95, 394, 488 Tardieu, Victor  I: 286, 290, 342, 377 Ta Reach  II: 423, 561 Taut, Bruno  I: 256 Taylor, Meadows  I: 153, 156 Texier, Henri  I: 337 Thanom Kittikachorn  II: 251 The Hague Convention 1954  II: 146, 238–40, 243, 246, 251, 311, 320, 329, 397, 419

The Hague International Court of ­Justice  I: 416; II: 170, 394 Thibaudeau, Léon  II: 103 Thiers, Adolphe  I: 139 Thil, draughtsman  I: 158 Thioun, ministre de palais  I: 266 Thiounn Mumm  II: 270, 307, 310–1 Thiounn Prasith  II: 270, 307, 311 Thiounn Thioeunn  II: 267, 307 Thirion, André  I: 332, 334 Thomann (Gillis), Harry  I: 176–80, 463; II: 130 Thomsen, C.J.  I: 100 Thomson, John  I: 65, 69–70, 145–7, 261, 392, 448; II: 22, 425 Thonet  I: 387–8 Thorel, Clovis  I: 61–3 Tissandier, Albert  I: 211 Tito, Josip Broz  I: 266, 368; II: 164, 226–8, 394–5, 419, 497, 499 Touch Puyeto  II: 239, 251 Touring-Club de France  I: 344 Tournaire, Albert  I: 229, 289, 293 Tournelles, F. des  I: 199 Toutin & Roussel, entreprise générale de parcs et jardins  I: 304 Trajan  I: 155; II: 226 Trillat, Josoph  I: 287 Trimble, William  II: 173 Trouvé, Georges  I: 21, 316; II: 81–3, 97, 102, 136–7, 175–6, 344, 394 Turletti, Alex  II: 145 U Ujfalvy, Charles de  I: 101–2 Umbdenstock, Gustave  I: 344, 368 Um Samuth  II: 197 UN Centre for Human Settlements  II: 182, 341 UNDP (Bangkok)  II: 350, 359, 361, 366, 368, 371–2, 375, 379, 384, 411 UNESCO (general)  I: XI, 30, 35, 44, 51, 405; II: 4, 8, 32, 94, 123–7, 140–2, 146, 160, 235–7, 239, 244–8, 251–2, 255, 276–82, 292–5, 298, 301, 304, 307, 310–42, 348–89, 396–416, 420–1, 425–7, 435–6, 440–6, 451, 500, 521, 549, 553 UNESCO Bangkok (→ Bangkok) UNESCO Cambodia  II: 359, 363, 377, 385, 535, 543 UNESCO Courrier  II: 248, 342, 416, 426, 479, 504 UNESCO director general  I: 21, 30, 44; II: 30, 246, 292, 298, 304–5, 311–3, 323–8, 333, 338, 348–55, 359, 367–9, 377, 382, 399, 409, 415–6, 421, 444, 535

631

Index

UNESCO Headquarter Paris (→ Paris) UNESCO Intangible World Heritage (List/ Label)  II: 212, 217, 385, 434, 563 UNESCO Khmer National Commission II: 239, 244, 246. 331, 334, 336–8, 370, 505, 530 UNESCO Phnom Penh (→ Phnom Penh) UNESCO Task Force Cambodia  II: 333, 338, 350, 359, 401 UNESCO World Heritage Angkor (1992)  I: 9, 19, 35, 51, 313, 324, 368, 379, 390–1, 397, 417, 420; II: 2–4, 12, 17, 19, 20, 32, 40, 57, 94, 127, 204, 236, 252, 291, 299, 304, 323–386, 400–3, 405–52, 536, 544–6, 554 UNESCO World Heritage Borobudur (→ Borobudur) UNESCO World Heritage Centre (→ Paris) UNESCO World Heritage Committee  II: 325–7, 353, 359, 361–70, 382, 385, 500, 402, 409, 412–5, 419 UNESCO (World Heritage) Convention 1972  I: 51; II: 17, 94, 236, 244, 252, 291, 328, 350, 354, 367, 376, 396, 402, 419 UNESCO World Heritage Fund  II: 357, 363 UNESCO World Heritage in danger  I: 47–8, 213, 402; II: 5, 245, 310, 324–5, 329, 334–5, 339, 348, 353–70, 373, 380, 385, 401, 406, 409, 412 UNESCO World Heritage (List/Label)  I: 5, 8, 18, 47–50, 187, 397, 401; II: 4, 19, 92, 142, 237, 299, 307, 322–6, 328, 333, 338–42, 349, 353, 357–8, 361–3, 368–70, 376, 385, 401–2, 412, 436 UNESCO World Heritage Operational Guidelines  II: 354–5, 361–9, 375, 402 UNESCO World Heritage Preah Vihear (→ Preah Vihear) UNHCR  II: 340 UNICEF  II: 311, 320, 329, 331, 340, 500 Union centrale des arts décoratifs  I: 281–2 Union coloniale  I: 249 Union française/indochinoise (→ Indo­ chinese Union)  United Nations, New York  I: 19, 50, 57; II: 104, 193, 199, 204, 237–8, 241–2, 245, 253–4, 263, 279–80, 282, 294,

632

301, 304, 306–7, 310–1, 313, 316, 319–22, 326–8, 330–53, 362, 368, 372–3, 379, 381–2, 396–402, 408, 411, 419 Université (Royale) des Beaux-Arts (Phnom Penh) (→ Royal University of Fine Arts) UN Security Council  II: 306, 336, 338, 349, 353, 401 UNTAC  II: 324, 336, 349, 353, 356–9, 361–3, 368, 371–2, 402, 448, 450, 500, 569 Uong Von  II: 291, 348–9 U Thant  II: 238, 241, 244–5 V Vaillat, Léandre  I: 350, 368, 375–6, 403 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari  II: 289 Vandermeersch, Léon  II: 337 Van Erp, Theodoor van  II: 65–6, 71 Venice Charter 1964/5  II: 122, 124, 428 Vann Molyvann  I: XII, 24, 44, 224; II: 115, 141–3, 155, 163, 170, 181–204, 209, 214, 217, 220–2, 231, 234, 298, 328, 340–50, 357, 362, 365, 376–9, 382–5, 394–5, 401–3, 408, 415–20, 444–7, 532–34 Van Tao, Nguyen  I: 332–3 Varenne, Alexandre  I: 284–7 Verellen, Franciscus  I: XI; II: 3 Vessière, Gabriel  I: 326, 328 Victoria, Queen  I: 108 Vidal de la Blache, Paul  I: 342 Viet Cong  II: 123, 145, 163, 238, 241–2, 246, 248–9, 253, 397 Viet Minh  II: 104–5, 115, 158, 161, 260, 273–4, 279 Vildieu, Henri  I: 22, 168, 201, 239–44, 375, 398; II: 37, 51, 145 Villard, Thédore  I: 189–90 Villemereuil, Arthur Bonamy de  I: 61–2, 68–71, 124 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène  I: 27, 37, 76, 83, 96, 114, 125–34, 135–43, 144–151, 155–9, 166, 170, 181, 194, 198, 211–3, 394–7, 439; II: 50, 84, 99, 222 Vishnu(it)  I: 12–3, 15, 17, 25–7, 417–8; II: 426, 432 Vitet, Ludovic  I: 136

Vongkat, Prince  I: 320 Vong Van  II: 145 W Wagner, Jonathan  II: 375, 444 Warrack, Simon  I: XI, 95, 170; II: 430–2, 561 Warsaw Pact  I: 417; II: 236, 279, 398 Waseda University, Tokyo  I: XII; II: 408, 427 Washington, George  I: 331 Watson, John Forbes  I: 151–3, 178, 396 Watteville, Oscar de  I: 101–4, 108, 110, 117 Weber, Max  II: 178, 394 Wiener, Charles  I: 101–4, 108, 120 Wikander, Marita  II: 270, 306 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  I: 127–9, 139, 145, 166, 194, 395 Wittfogel, Karl August  II: 155, 178, 264, 394, 397 World Bank  II: 349, 411 World Intellectual Property Organization  I: 420 World Monuments Fund  II: 289, 337–40, 348, 356, 366, 384, 411, 425–7, 538, 560 World Peace Council  II: 279 World Tourism Organization  II: 411, 446 Worsaae, J. J. A.  I: 100 Wyatt, Matthew Digby  I: 148, 151–2 Y Yacovarman  II: 176 Yang, Minja  I: XI; II: 325, 333–5, 348, 350, 356, 359, 361–5, 370, 375 Yano, Makoto  II: 103 Yim Venn  II: 239 Yit Chandaroat  II: 448 Yukanthor, Prince/Princess  I: 222; II: 160 Z Zaepffel  I: 74 Zarino, Xenia  II: 209, 211 ZEMP  II: 341, 344, 371, 373–84, 420, 444, 538–41 Zéphir, Thierry  I: XII, 38, 163, 187, 211, 435; II: 2, 330 Zhou Daguan  I: 57; II: 177, 326 Zhou Enlai  II: 161, 254

Places A Abu Simbel  II: 323, 362, 406, 413, 416, 553 Aegina  I: 139 Afghanistan  II: 280, 283, 398–9, 409 Africa(n)  I: 38, 46, 75, 84, 100, 105, 120, 191, 196, 198, 224, 226, 229, 236, 249, 269–70, 326, 330, 335, 355–6, 362, 376, 402; II: 6, 21, 159, 199, 216, 244, 293, 417 Afrique équatoriale  I: 284 Afrique occidentale française (AOF)  I: 48, 102, 258, 270, 282, 326, 328, 352, 362, 373, 401, 495, 499 Ahmedabad  I: 418–9 Aix-en-Provence (National Archives of French Overseas History)  I: XII, 8, 239, 254, 261, 400; II: 323, 327, 391 Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen)  II: 187 Ajanta  I: 152 Alexandria  I: 74, 76 Alfourou  I: 200 Algeria  I: 75, 81–3, 118, 199–201, 226–9, 233, 236, 258, 289, 345, 355–6, 361, 371, 397, 448; II: 294, 356, 413 Algiers  II: 193, 356, 368 Alhambra  I: 118, 148 Alsace (-Lorraine)  I: 50, 118, 247, 282, 399; II: 48 America(n/s)  I: 75, 77, 84, 100–2, 105, 114, 118, 137, 144–5, 197–8, 200; II: 154, 163, 166, 173, 178, 199, 221–2, 227, 244–5, 254–5, 299, 301, 384, 442–3 Amsterdam  I: 231; II: 6–7, 50, 61, 63, 211, 392 Angkor • Angkor Krau  II: 442 • Angkor Park (Parc archéologique d’Angkor)  I: XI–XII, 9, 18–23, 29–30, 33, 40, 44–56, 123, 132, 148, 188, 193, 200, 213, 215, 222, 224, 226, 278, 290, 313, 337, 344, 356, 379, 384, 390–1, 397, 399–405, 420; II: 1–151, 156, 159, 166, 225, 227, 233, 235, 238–45, 249, 251, 253, 256, 276, 278, 293–4, 297–8, 307, 318, 323–86, 387–403, 405–52, 464–73, 485–6, 501–2, 507, 532–3, 538–49, 554–6, 564–5 • Angkor Thom  I: 11–12, 29, 57, 63, 68, 86, 90–1, 95, 105, 108–15, 122–5, 166, 182, 242, 254–5, 266, 322, 356, 377, 394, 400, 404, 411, 445, 456; II: 10, 16, 19, 31–4, 37–41, 53–4, 57, 78, 82, 97, 100, 105, 119–22, 128–30, 134, 166–7,

170–3, 176, 179, 197, 202, 208, 249, 256, 260, 267, 289, 344, 374, 383, 394, 412, 442, 448, 450, 482 • Angkor Wat [Introduction I: 1–8, 9–30] • Auberge (royale) des temples  II: 129, 134–5, 202, 204, 220–1, 444 • Bakong  I: 11, 68, 166; II: 16, 54, 100–3, 195 • Baksei Chamkrong  II: 54, 449 • Baphuon  I: XI, 11, 166, 356; II: 8, 52–3, 111–2, 128, 141–2, 146, 385, 390, 392, 398, 422–3, 448, 545, 549, 551, 556–8 • Bant(e)ay Kdei  I: 12; II: 10, 54, 78 • Bant(e)ay Samre  I: 11; II: 29, 74, 100–1, 103 • Bant(e)ay Srei  I: 11, 35, 420; II: 54, 60, 74, 77–84, 87, 96, 112, 187, 190, 195, 221, 257, 260, 267, 270, 344, 365–7, 392, 451 • Baray (Eastern/Western)  I: 11; II: 40–1, 54, 100, 105, 116, 173–9, 253, 266, 344, 394, 444 • Bat Chum  II: 32, 40 • Bayon  I: 12, 91–5, 104, 108, 111, 145–8, 160, 166, 170, 175, 181, 184, 221–2, 224, 235–6, 240–4, 247, 277, 290, 313–4, 355–6, 362, 377–8, 389, 396–9, 403, 414, 445, 465, 492; II: 10, 21–2, 31, 38, 44, 52–3, 78, 82, 90, 97, 104, 134, 141–2, 153, 155, 166–9, 173, 176, 182, 201, 221–5, 229–30, 234, 241, 256–7, 264, 268–9, 275, 277, 294–5, 332, 354–5, 366, 383, 385, 422, 428, 437, 449, 451, 468, 498, 510 • Beng Malea  I: 11, 68, 90, 104, 108; II: 15–6, 116, 344 • Charles de Gaulle Avenue  II: 222, 448 • Chau Say T(h)evoda  I: 11; II: 74 • Cruciform Gallery (Angkor Wat)  I: 15, 65, 166, 261, 274, 287, 419, 431, 461; II: 23, 26, 268–9, 285, 398, 432 • Elephant Terrace  I: 12, 420; II: 53, 170–2, 289, 544 • Gallery of the 1000 Buddhas (Angkor Wat)  II: 297 • Gallery of the Churning of the Milk Ocean (Angkor Wat)  I: 17, 163, 178, 268, 433, 443; II: 142–3, 278, 286, 425–7, 448, 450 • Gallery of the Heavens and Hells ­(Angkor Wat)  II: 106–8, 125, 142, 426 • Gate of the Dead (Angkor Thom)  I: 111; II: 119 • Gate of Victory (Angkor Thom)  II: 53

• Hotel Angkor-les-ruines  II: 40 • Hotel d’Air France  II: 134, 145 • J.F.K. Avenue  II: 226–7 • K(h)leang  II: 53 • Khmer Habitat Interpretation Center  I: 384; II: 348, 436–7, 448, 564 • Ko(h) Ker  I: 11, 90; II: 15, 116, 253, 424 • Leper King (Terrace)  I: 93–4, 96, 99; II: 52–3 • Lolei  I: 68, 166; II: 54, 137, 259, 352–3 • Maison des passagers (Angkor Wat)  II: 33 • Mebon (East/West)  I: 108; II: 32, 40, 54, 100, 176 • Nak Ta Veang  II: 148, 151 • N(e)ak P(e)an  I: 12; II: 32, 40, 52–3, 56–7, 60–1, 71, 78, 87, 98–9, 103, 166 • Phimeanakas  I: 161, 166; II: 31, 52–3, 119, 198 • Phom Bakheng  I: 12, 68; II: 9, 32, 40, 44, 46, 54, 87, 176, 204, 244, 246, 249, 290, 307, 318, 426 • Phnom Bok  I: 91, 240 • Phnom Krom  I: 63, 90, 95; II: 118, 344 • Phnom Kulen  I: 9, 90; II: 15–6, 78, 104, 253, 256–7, 338, 344, 447 • Prasat Bei  II: 449 • Prasat Kravan(h)  II: 8, 40, 68, 78, 112, 126, 136–40, 393, 449 • Preah E(i)nkosei  II: 148 • Pr(e)ah Khan  I: 12, 91, 93, 95, 98, 108, 112, 114, 116, 120–3, 161, 166, 228, 240, 247, 356, 394, 404; II: 32, 40, 53–4, 76–8, 89, 104, 119, 166, 168, 233–4, 289, 322, 340, 344, 392, 426, 529 • Preah Ko  I: XI, 11, 166, 442; II: 54, 81, 137, 145, 383 • Prea Pithu  I: 11, 166; II: 53 • Pre Rup  I: 11; II: 32, 40, 54, 126, 137, 198, 426 • Roluos  I: 9, 11, 68, 166, 429, 442; II: 54, 81, 105, 123, 145, 150, 259, 276, 297, 344, 356, 365, 383, 566 • Royal Palace/Square  I: 11; II: 10, 53, 123, 170–3, 198, 394, 482–3 • Run Ta-Ek  I: 53, 379, 384; II: 29, 134, 348, 437–43, 444–8, 451, 566–7 • Small and Great Ciruit  II: 41–2, 44, 46, 53, 60, 105, 112, 127, 220–1, 391, 395, 418, 420, 449 • Spean Thma  II: 10 • Sra(h) Srang  II: 32, 40, 130, 137, 221, 227, 278 • Takeo  I: 108, 205; II: 10, 32, 54

633

Index

Angkor • Ta Nei  II: 54 • Ta Prohm  I: 12, 52, 160–1, 232–3, 247, 411, 420, 444; II: 10, 32, 54, 118, 134, 166, 222, 289, 422, 424, 449, 551, 556 • Ta Prohm Kel  II: 32, 134 • Ta Som  II: 32, 40, 54 • Thommanon  I: 11, 161; II: 54–5, 74, 111–3, 128 • Trapean(g) Se(s)  II: 32, 134, 318 • Vat Athvear  I: 63, 108; II: 148 • Vat Chok  II: 148 Angola  II: 283 A(n)long-Romiet  II: 220–1 Annam  I: 59, 75–6, 94–6, 115, 162, 168, 191, 200–2, 208, 219, 226–9, 235, 238–9, 245, 253, 261, 266, 268, 270, 272, 279, 283, 287, 290, 307, 321, 332, 356–7, 376–9, 401; II: 15, 78, 105 Antwerp  I: 231, 284, 347, 401 Anvers  I: 231 Arab(ia/ic/esque)  I: 83–7, 118, 131, 151, 155, 200, 213, 215, 264, 269, 325, 423 Argos  II: 123 “Asia”  I: XI–XII, 1–9, 18, 21, 30–3, 38, 41–56, 57, 74–5, 84, 94–6, 100–2, 120, 128, 144–5, 148, 157, 159–60, 189, 194, 197–200, 203, 217, 224, 232, 246–7, 251, 256, 261, 268–9, 283, 289, 307, 325, 330, 332, 335, 337, 339, 343, 376, 387, 391, 393, 400–2, 407, 412; II: 2, 4, 6, 20, 39–40, 44, 48, 50, 86, 102–4, 114, 140, 154–5, 159–61, 177–8, 185, 199, 201, 204, 220, 222, 225, 227, 230, 236–7, 239, 244, 253, 264, 268, 270, 279, 290–5, 311, 324, 329, 337, 341, 347, 350, 352–3, 370, 376–80, 385–7, 390, 392–403, 406, 416, 433, 447, 452 Asia Minor  I: 135, 139; II: 85 Assyria  I: 83, 119–20, 127, 139, 142–5, 148–51, 181, 194, 212, 395, 453 Aswan  I: 87; II: 349 Athens  I: XII, 136, 398; II: 8, 50, 77, 86–90, 93, 97, 244, 390, 504 • Acropolis  I: 224, 398; II: 8, 84–97, 100, 392, 428, 477, 479 • Acropolis Museum  II: 89 • Athens Conference 1931 (→ Index Names/Institutions) • École française d’Athènes (→ Index Names/Institutions) • Erechtheion  II: 85, 87, 89 • Parthenon  I: 42, 151, 284, 287; II: 6, 62, 84–9, 92, 97, 126, 140, 244, 428, 504 • Propylaea  II: 85, 87, 89–90, 92

634

• Stoa of Attalos  II: 123 • Technical University of Greece  I: XII Atlantis  I: 446; II: 430 Attica  I: 135 Australia  I: XII; II: 154, 267, 282, 295–8, 306, 316, 332, 335–9, 397, 409, 411, 414, 421, 442 Austria  I: 42, 80, 281–2, 387; II: 37, 85, 245, 295, 306, 323, 327, 338 Avignon  II: 89 Ayodhya  I: 418 Ayutthaya  I: 412, 414; II: 354, 451 Aztec  I: 32, 194, 196 B Baalbek  II: 411 Babel  I: 194 Babylon(ian)  I: 151, 217, 226, 398 Badut, Tjandi  II: 74 Bahrain  II: 283 Bali(nese)  I: 326, 329, 401; II: 62, 70, 72, 74, 94, 205, 207, 209, 211, 216, 283, 346, 395, 421 Bamiyan  II: 280, 287, 368, 398, 517 Bandung  II: 61, 71, 161 Bangkok  I: XI–XII, 54, 62, 69, 166, 176, 227, 247, 249, 251, 337, 407, 409–16, 503; II: 9–10, 104, 176, 211–3, 218, 251, 253, 255, 270, 288, 306, 311, 315, 332–8, 342, 348, 358, 401–2, 420, 444, 451–2, 465, 521 • Chao Phraya River  I: 413 • National Archives  I: 503 • National Library  I: 410; II: 61 • Thonburi  I: 413 • UNESCO Regional Office (PROAP)  I: XI–XII; II: 292, 331, 333  • Wat Phra Kaew/Grand Palace  I: 54, 409–14, 503–4 Banteay Chhmar  II: 344 Barcelona  II: 317, 526 Batavia  II: 7, 16, 48, 61, 63, 69, 71–2, 86, 97, 390, 392 Battambang (city/province)  I: XII, 61–2, 68–9, 71, 95–6, 185, 219, 241, 247–9, 321–2, 407, 410–2, 445; II: 1, 9–10, 24, 31, 103, 148, 151, 170, 189–90, 202, 204, 251, 304, 355, 394 • Museum  II: 290 • Wat Bo Veal  II: 190, 355 • Wat Sdei  II: 190 • Wat Slaket  II: 190 Bavaria  I: 117, 394; II: 84 Beijing  II: 180, 205–7, 249–50, 254, 262, 266, 313, 319–20, 331, 369, 371, 395

• Tiananmen Square (massacre 1989)  II: 331 Belgian Congo  I: 326, 328; II: 417 Belgium  I: 80, 120, 229, 231, 282, 284, 289, 347, 369, 401; II: 220, 267 Belgrade  II: 164, 307, 310 Bengal  I: 151; II: 178 Berkeley, University  I: XII; II: 264 Berlin  I: XI–XII, 38, 46, 89, 180, 268, 436; II: 8, 208, 295, 335 • Berlin State Museums  I: 38 • Berlin Wall  II: 295, 335 • Dahlem Museums (Asian Art)  I: 180; II: 130, 145 • Ethnographical Museum (Völker­ kundemuseum)  I: XII, 124–5, 144, 157, 176–80, 396, 436; II: 130 • Humboldt Forum  I: 38, 157, 180, 436 • Plaster Cast Atliers (Gipsformerei)  I: XII, 38, 176 • Zoological Garden  I: 31 Besançon  I: 138 Bhaktapur  II: 244 Bhopal  I: 153 Bien-Hua  I: 268, 316, 389 Bihar  I: 407, 416–21, 507 Blitar  II: 67 Bodhgaya  I: 152–3, 157, 413, 419; II: 8, 49, 283 Bolivia  I: 101–2, 104, 394 Bombay  I: 151, 153 Bonn  I: 180; II: 2, 324, 432 Bordeaux  I: 95, 228, 234, 398; II: 31, 317 • Chambre de Commerce  I: 229 • Martime and International Exhibition 1895  I: 226, 228–9, 233 • Place des Quinconces  I: 229 • University Bordeaux-Montaigne  I: 4 Borobudur  I: XI–XII, 47–50, 224–5, 395, 401, 414; II: 4, 7–8, 48, 61–6, 71–4, 78, 92, 140–2, 151, 170–1, 244, 252, 283, 291, 323, 337–8, 341–8, 362, 375–7, 383, 392, 402, 405–8, 421, 476, 504 Brazil  I: 45, 190 Brest  I: 59 Bretagne  I: 371, 373, 378 British (→ Great Britain) British India  I: 44, 57, 60, 108–9, 115, 148, 151, 156, 217, 249, 395; II: 2, 6, 12, 34, 48, 71, 97, 151, 283, 391 Brussels  I: 36 • Brussels 1958 World’s Fair  II: 187–8, 394, 487 Budapest  II: 403 Bukhara  II: 356

Places

Burma  I: 57, 145, 148, 166, 249; II: 48, 97, 205, 245, 267–8, 391, 398 Byzantine  I: 117, 139, 148; II: 126, 225 C Cairo  I: 156, 200, 213, 215, 221, 398; II: 94, 349 • Bulaq Museum  I: 87, 118, 139; II: 349 • Cairo Street (→ Paris) Calcutta  I: 151; II: 48, 281, 334 Cambodge (Protectorate)  I: XI, 19, 24, 26, 29, 38, 41–4, 50, 60–1, 68–71, 75, 81, 87, 90, 112, 115, 124, 132, 156, 166, 176, 196, 199, 227, 229, 233, 239, 242, 247–9, 253–4, 307, 322, 386–7, 391, 398–9, 404, 407–15, 428; II: 1, 9–10, 13–8, 23, 26, 31, 39, 48, 51, 84, 98, 104–6, 154, 156–9, 213–6, 247–251, 283–4, 388, 401, 406, 413, 418, 458–65 Cambodia  I: XI, 2–10, 12, 15, 18–19, 21, 24, 27, 29–30, 32, 35, 38, 40–1, 43–7, 50–4, 57–62, 68–71, 74–5, 81, 87–103, 108, 110, 114–5, 118, 120, 123–4, 137, 144–7, 156, 162, 166, 168, 181, 187–8, 196–205, 208, 211–3, 219, 221–9, 233, 236, 239–54, 261, 266–8, 196–205, 208, 211–3, 219, 221–9, 233, 236, 239–49, 251–4, 261, 266–8, 279, 283, 286–93, 304, 307, 313, 317, 320–2, 325–6, 332, 336–8, 344, 356–7, 368–9, 375, 377, 379, 384–8, 389–404, 407–23, 438–42, 446, 448, 474, 491, 508; II: 1–24, 28–34, 37–41, 44–47, 50–1, 63–5, 80, 90–5, 98, 102–7, 111–6, 119, 123–30, 134–7, 140–51, 153–87, 193–234–307, 310–42, 346–59, 361–403, 405–444, 446–449, 451–2, 458–61, 471, 479–81, 485–6, 490–91, 495–6, 500–515, 520, 530, 537, 544–7, 549, 565–6 Cameroon  I: 355 Canada  I: 59; II: 114, 153, 158, 164, 267, 282, 299, 301, 365, 379, 409, 411, 438–9, 442, 447 Canberra  II: 316 Canton  II: 21 Cape Sounion  II: 123 Cardamon Mountains  II: 116 Carthage  I: 47–8, 101, 104; II: 245, 349, 362, 411 Central Asia  I: 96, 102, 394 Ceylon  I: 145, 224, 398; II: 97 Cham(pa)  I: 12, 138, 166, 181, 187, 228, 241, 253, 321; II: 5, 16, 39, 78, 105, 164–5, 245, 294, 448–9 Champagne  I: 374 Chandernagor  I: 77; II: 48

Chartres  I: 140, 148; II: 187 Chenla  I: 10–1; II: 254, 397 Chiang Rai  I: 413 Chicago  I: 286, 398, 416; II: 205 China  I: 48, 50–1, 57–8, 61, 70, 74, 83–4, 101, 118, 144–5, 155, 194, 197–8, 213, 223–5, 239, 289, 325, 392; II: 6, 10, 14–15, 154, 161, 178, 185, 205, 207–9, 235–6, 255, 257, 259, 262–3, 267–8, 274, 279–80, 304, 318, 331–2, 336, 354, 376, 395–8, 409, 411–2, 419, 421 • Great Wall of China  I: XI, 48; II: 268, 354, 403 Chinese  I: 9, 24, 27, 30–1, 54, 57, 60–1, 76, 84, 95, 120, 149, 151, 162, 221, 223, 229, 236, 362, 377, 398; II: 177, 195, 205, 255, 257–8, 268, 313, 326, 331, 400, 448, 450, 452, 509 Christchurch  I: 398 Chup  II: 221 Clichy  I: 187, 353 Cochinchina  I: 25, 57–61, 68, 71, 74–6, 81, 83, 89–90, 96, 101, 115, 158, 199–202, 222, 227, 239, 245, 253, 268, 276, 279, 290, 307, 352, 388–9; II: 9, 15, 51, 441 Colombia  I: 102, 120 Compiègne (for musée khmer → Index Names/Institutions)  I: XII, 89, 96–104, 118, 120, 125, 145–8, 158, 161, 176, 179, 394, 450 Compong-Luong  I: 62, 68–70 Compong-Soai (Svai)  I: 90, 95, 112; II: 116, 168 Congo  I: 120, 200, 326, 328; II: 331 Constantinople  I: 24 Copenhagen  I: 100; II: 444 Corsica  I: 350–1, 355, 371 Côte d’or  I: 75 Croatia  II: 227–8, 368–9 Cyprus  I: 139 Czechoslovakia  II: 205, 208, 220, 421, 495 Czech Republic  II: 220, 421 D Dahomey  I: 282 Dalat  I: 375; II: 41, 102 Danang (Cham Museum)  I: 253 Dangrek Mountains  I: 415; II: 375 Delhi (New)  I: 153, 156, 417, 421, 423; II: 7, 153, 206, 282, 331, 403, 424 Delphi  II: 89–90 Denmark (Danish)  I: 80, 251, 282, 410; II: 245, 267, 444 Detroit  II: 205 Dien Bien Phu  II: 115, 159, 161 Dieng Plateau  II: 62–3, 65, 67, 72, 392

Disney (Land/World)  I: 53–4, 444; II: 6, 447, 450 Djenné  I: 48, 326, 401 Djerba  I: 48 Djibouti  I: 331 Dravidian  I: 417 Dresden  I: 127–9, 176, 453; II: 208 Dubrovnik  II: 368–70 Dutch (East) Indies  I: 25, 101, 115, 117, 185, 200, 203, 217, 224–5, 239, 321, 325–6, 329, 337, 401; II: 2–3, 6–7, 16, 32, 34, 48, 50, 60–81, 87, 94–7, 112, 115–6, 176, 216, 341, 346, 391–2, 402, 417, 421, 428, 474 E Ecuador  II: 325 Edf(o)u  I: 84, 87, 393; II: 14  Edinburgh  I: 69 Egypt(ian)  I: 30, 32, 60, 62, 83, 86–7, 97, 101, 114, 116, 118, 120, 127, 129–30, 136–7, 139, 140–1, 144–5, 149, 151, 181, 194, 205, 213, 224, 226, 369, 393–5, 398; II: 13–4, 22, 94, 97, 164, 178, 267, 294, 370, 394, 399, 449 Egyptian Court (Sydenham)  I: 148, 453 Egyptian (pavilion, park, hall)  I: 32, 84, 86–7, 118, 130, 206, 213, 337, 397, 449 Ellora  I: 222, 398 England  I: 102, 138, 152–6, 178, 249, 391, 410, 414; II: 15, 123 Eskimo  I: 196 Ethiopia  II: 221, 227 Eurasia, Euro-Asia  I: 18, 21, 48, 53–4, 407; II: 50, 329, 386, 409 Europa Park  II: 6 “Europe”  I: XI–XII, 1–9, 18, 22, 29–38, 41–56, 57–8, 60–1, 65, 70–84, 89, 93, 97–101, 105, 110, 116–120, 124, 130, 136, 139, 142–7, 151–2, 155–160, 176, 179, 189, 191–8, 202, 205, 213–5, 221, 226, 229, 231–3, 246, 249, 251, 156–8, 282–7, 325, 330, 334–9, 345, 356, 362, 368–9, 376–8, 384–9, 391–6, 401–4, 407–10, 420, 455; II: 3, 6, 9–10, 13, 17, 20, 39–40, 48–50, 62, 86, 92–5, 102, 122, 124, 126, 145, 154, 157, 165, 178–9, 182, 185, 208–12, 221, 237, 244, 253, 290, 294, 299, 304, 317, 326–32, 339, 346–8, 352–3, 379, 382, 385–90, 392–9, 401–3, 406–9, 417, 433, 437, 442, 447, 449, 452 F Fatehpur-Sikri  I: 152 Finhaut  II: 348, 376

635

Index

Florence  I: XI, 132 “France”  I: XI, 1–9, 19–56, 57–61, 63, 68–71, 74–6, 80, 83, 89–95, 98, 102, 104, 108, 115–120, 124–6, 129, 135–9, 144–7, 158, 163, 168, 170, 181, 187–91, 196–9, 205, 211–5, 217, 222, 224, 226, 228–35, 239, 241, 245–53, 256, 261, 269–70, 279, 282–4, 286, 289–90, 304, 306–7, 320, 324–6, 330–5, 337, 341–350, 352, 355–6, 368–9, 371, 375–84, 391–415, 440, 498; II: 2, 10, 13–7, 21, 26–32, 37, 39, 44, 49–51, 65, 84, 89, 94–5, 102, 104–5, 114–6, 123–5, 129, 140–8, 153, 156–63, 177, 184–5, 195, 208, 211–6, 221–2, 226, 236–8, 244, 249, 251, 253, 267, 276, 282–3, 287, 293–301, 304, 313, 315, 318, 320, 322–3, 326, 329–33, 236–7, 341, 346, 352–3, 358, 361–2, 368, 370–2, 377–84, 387–95, 398–403, 408–25, 432, 439, 446–9, 452, 459, 493, 551 France d’outre-mer (Overseas France)  I: 198, 213, 234, 269, 284, 307, 341–2, 345–7, 352–3, 356, 362, 368–9, 371, 375–9, 384–7, 402–5; II: 452 French Guiana (Guyane)  I: 75, 81–2, 102, 161, 200 French India (Indes françaises)  I: 75, 77, 83, 199, 285, 355, 357, 361–2, 371, 373, 497; II: 107 Funan  I: 10–1 Further India  I: 24, 145, 395 G Gabon  I: 75, 81, 115, 200; II: 362 Gaillon (Castle)  I: 126, 131–3, 395 Galapagos Islands  II: 325 Gallo-Roman  I: 97, 135, 194 Ganges  I: 194, 407, 416–8 Geneva  I: 347; II: 115, 161, 273, 310, 361 Genoa  I: 176 German Democratic Republic  II: 208, 220, 298 German(y)  I: XI–XII, 4–6, 24, 46, 50, 89, 108, 116, 118, 124, 127–8, 155, 176–180, 191, 249, 251, 256, 281, 284, 369–70, 391; II: 6, 15, 19, 22, 36–8, 50, 69, 84–5, 95, 102, 130, 133, 158, 222, 245, 264, 322–3, 356, 359, 370, 383–5, 387, 400, 411, 421–2, 425–30, 432, 450, 528, 571 Giza, Great Sphinx  I: 241 Göttingen  I: 116; II: 324 Great Britain/British  I: 2, 5, 36, 57, 60, 65–9, 71, 74, 76, 80, 104, 108, 125, 138, 144–57, 176, 182, 194, 198, 229, 249,

636

251–2, 284, 289, 337, 339, 369, 392, 395–6, 404, 410, 412; II: 9–10, 12, 15, 41, 43, 48–50, 62, 94, 111, 221, 259, 281, 283–4, 320, 336, 375, 384, 390–1, 393, 397, 416, 421, 454 Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere  II: 103, 293 Greece (Greek)  I: XII, 22, 24, 57, 79, 101, 114, 119–20, 127–30, 135–6, 139–41, 145, 147–8, 151, 181, 194, 201, 244, 361, 395, 412; II: 6–7, 62, 77, 84–97, 98, 123, 126, 130, 154, 339, 392 Grenoble  I: 261–2 Guadeloupe  I: 75, 81, 115, 200, 352, 355, 397 Guatemala (City)  I: 398 Guinea (New)  I: 101, 161; II: 267 H Habsburg  I: 42; II: 6, 50 Haiphong  I: 201, 279 Haiti  II: 409 Halong Bay  I: 222; II: 114 Hanoi  I: 24, 60, 89, 202, 205, 222, 238–9, 242, 244, 249, 253, 256, 266, 268, 270–1, 279, 282, 284–7, 316, 321, 333, 352, 357, 375, 377, 387–8, 398, 403, 408; II: 7, 14–5, 22, 24, 31–2, 37, 39–40, 50, 61, 63, 65, 72, 78, 86, 98, 100, 104, 114, 225, 275, 279, 282, 294–5, 298, 306–7, 311, 392, 396, 398 • EFEO Headquarter  II: 86, 392 • Exposition 1902/3, 1941/2  I: 239, 242, 282; II: 98, 100  • Musée Louis Finot (→ Index Names/ Institutions)  Hariharalaya  I: 11, 429 Harvard  I: 22, 251 Heidelberg  I: XI–XII, 4–8, 37–8, 176; II: 6, 37, 50, 103, 259, 294, 438 Heliopolis  I: 221 Hennebont  I: XII, 253 Herculaneum  I: 84 Hesse  I: 80 Hindu(ism)  I: 11–2, 15, 17, 27, 29, 46, 48, 108, 144, 147–9, 151, 194, 196, 198, 200, 221, 287, 323, 329, 371, 377, 393, 400, 416–23, 507; II: 48, 62–3, 69, 71–2, 92, 95, 98, 168, 237, 286, 290, 347, 387–8, 394, 396, 398–9, 419, 421, 423, 449 Hindustan  II: 421 Hinterindien  I: 24, 176 Holland  I: 231; II: 49–50, 60–2, 185 Hong Kong  II: 267, 435 Hué  I: 235, 253, 256, 266, 283, 287, 337, 344, 375, 410; II: 243, 252

Hungary  II: 326, 337, 348–9, 370–1, 375, 384, 401, 411, 421, 538 I Inca  I: 101–2, 194 Inde(s) française(s) (→ French India) Indes Néerlandaises (→ Dutch East Indies) India(n)  I: XI, 4–5, 11, 24, 30, 44, 46, 50, 57, 60, 77, 81, 83, 96, 101–2, 108, 114, 120, 136, 139, 145–9, 151–7, 163, 176, 182, 194, 196–9, 203, 213, 222–5, 233, 244, 249, 325–6, 395–6, 398, 407, 411, 413, 416–23, 441, 455, 508; II: 6, 12–18, 21, 26, 48–50, 71, 107, 113–4, 154, 161, 164, 178, 182, 198, 205–8, 231, 233–4, 236–7, 244, 278, 279–89, 290, 294–301, 304, 318, 322, 326, 331–3, 337–8, 340, 356, 366, 376, 381, 383–4, 387, 391, 394–401, 409, 411, 419, 421–2, 424–5, 426, 448, 452, 476, 517–9, 551, 556 Indian Ocean  I: 199 Indochina/Indochine(se)  I: XI, 2–3, 6, 8, 19–30, 34–5, 39, 50, 57–62, 71, 74–7, 81, 89, 94, 102, 108, 132, 145, 147–8, 151–2, 156–9, 166, 168, 176, 185, 187, 191, 194, 198–9, 201, 205, 208, 212–3, 218–22, 224–9, 235–62, 266–8, 270–93, 296, 299, 304, 307, 312–7, 322–5, 332–7, 344–6, 352–64, 368–80, 384–90, 394, 396, 398–404, 470, 484, 495–500; II: 1–24, 28, 31–40, 44, 48–53, 60–3, 71–4, 78–81, 84, 92, 94, 97, 99–109, 114–6, 123–6, 135, 145, 153, 157–61, 175–82, 186, 211–4, 236, 244, 246, 264, 266, 280–1, 297, 306, 316, 332, 362, 378, 387–93, 417–8, 420, 437, 458, 463–64, 471 Indochinese Union (→ Index Names/ Institutions) Indonesia  I: XI–XII, 5, 48, 401; II: 4, 63, 115–6, 151, 154–5, 161, 164, 170, 185, 205–9, 211, 220, 227, 244, 251, 330, 332, 338, 341–2, 354, 356, 376–7, 383, 394–5, 402, 405, 409, 411 Indus  I: 194 Insulinde  II: 63–6 Iraq  I: 369–70; II: 409 Italy/Italian  I: 48, 50, 53, 80, 84, 101, 139, 148, 155–7, 281, 284, 289, 331, 401; II: 1, 53, 94–5, 123, 332, 354, 411, 413, 417, 421, 425–7 J Jakarta  I: 445; II: 68, 197, 330, 332, 337–8 Japan(ese)  I: 46–7, 50–1, 54, 57, 74, 83–4, 87, 101, 117–20, 155, 194, 224, 239, 251,

Places

289, 398; II: 6–9, 102–6, 158, 181, 185, 187, 192, 199, 235, 237, 245, 267, 270, 276, 282, 290–4, 297, 299, 301, 304, 311, 315, 322–6, 331–51, 356, 358–61, 370–2, 375–85, 392, 396, 398–403, 408–22, 425, 427–9, 442, 448–50, 457, 512, 551, 556 Java(nese)  I: XII, 48, 50, 138, 145, 147–8, 166, 170, 181, 185, 200–4, 211, 217, 224–6, 244–5, 329, 395, 398, 414, 445; II: 6–7, 12, 26, 32, 48, 50, 60–79, 84–9, 92–97, 98–102, 112, 115, 124, 140, 211–2, 216, 283, 341–2, 346–7, 377, 392, 402, 437, 449, 474, 476 Jerusalem  II: 349 K Kaaba  I: 422–3 Kalasan, Tjandi  II: 61, 71–2, 74, 78 Kambuja  I: 10; II: 47, 140, 163, 169–70, 176–9, 189–90, 192, 201, 204, 220–2, 225, 231, 234, 240, 281, 283, 395, 398, 485, 490, 492 Kampong Cham  I: 68, 71; II: 170, 221 Kampong javanais (Paris 1889)  I: 200, 203–4; II: 211, 437 Kampot  II: 181 Kandal  II: 452 Karnak  I: 87, 144 Kashmir  II: 280, 398 Kbal Spean  II: 145 Kep  II: 221, 234, 498 Khmer Empire  I: 74; II: 10, 19, 128, 153–4, 173, 225, 366, 448–9 Kidal, Tjandi  II: 67, 74 Kirirom  II: 221 Kiev  II: 208 Knossos  II: 111 Kompong Kdei (bridge)  II: 448 Kompong Som  II: 267 Kompong Thom  I: 205; II: 33, 105, 179, 181, 255 Korea  II: 451 Kouang-Tchéou-Wan  I: 236 Krati  II: 273 Kuala Lumpur  II: 313, 444–5 Kulen Mountain  (→ Angkor/Phnom ­Kulen) Kyoto  I: 4; II: 334 L Lahore  I: 151, 221 Laos/Laotian  I: 25, 57, 61, 68–9, 102, 221–2, 236, 239–40, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 270, 277, 290, 296, 306, 317, 377, 408, 412, 415; II: 1, 9–10, 14–6, 107,

114–5, 159, 161, 185, 251, 267, 269, 274, 310, 332, 393, 398, 411, 437 Las Vegas  I: 53, 421–2 Lebanon  II: 411, 417 Leiden  I: XII, 117; II: 69, 86, 407 Leningrad  II: 208 Leptis Magna  I: 48, 325, 331, 401; II: 421 Levant  I: 137, 355, 361 Libya  I: 48, 331, 401; II: 94, 421 Liverpool  I: 153 Loches  I: 93, 108, 155, 163 Loire  I: 284, 286 London  I: XII, 32, 36, 80, 89, 101, 108, 144–57, 158–60, 163, 194, 249, 395–6; II: 7, 9, 89, 270, 384, 405–6, 442 • Annual International Exhibitions 1871/74  II: 153–5 • Architectural Museum  I: 147–51 • British Empire Exhibition 1924/5 (Wembley)  I: 284, 289, 401 • British Museum  I: 42, 135, 139, 148, 151, 164; II: 89 • Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886  I: 157 • Crystal Palace, Sydenham  I: 138, 148–9, 151, 395, 453 • East India House  I: 151–2 • Franco-British Exhibition 1908  I: 398 • Great Exhibition of the Works of ­Industry of All Nations 1851  I: 30, 71, 81, 138, 148, 151, 395; II: 405–6 • Imperial College  I: 157 • Indian Court  I: 154 • India Museum  I: 148, 151–2, 157, 395 • India Office  I: 151, 153, 157 • India Section/Exhibition Road  I: 157 • International Exhibition 1862  I: 71 • Kew Garden  I: 151 • Museum of Manufactures  I: 149 • Natural History Museum  I: 151 • Oriental Repository  I: 147, 151, 395 • South Kensington (Victoria&Albert) Museum  I: XII, 37, 76, 80, 82, 108, 125, 142, 147–57, 158–63, 176, 194, 198, 392, 396, 454–5; II: 384 • Westminster  I: 132 Lopburi  I: 412 Lorient  I: 254–5, 400 Los Angeles  II: 205 Lost City  I: 56; II: 6, 114 Lovea  II: 440 Lovek  I: 12, 29, 90 Luang Prabang  I: 57, 68, 247, 413; II: 10 Lyon  I: 120, 217, 226–9, 243, 398 • Chambre de Commerce  I: 226–7

• Exposition internationale et coloniale 1894  I: 170, 226–8, 233, 408 • Parc de la Tête-d’Or  I: 226–7 M Macau  II: 435 Macchu Picchu  II: 4 Madagascar  I: 75, 200, 236, 258, 285, 326, 328, 345, 355, 357, 361, 497 Madras  I: 151 Madrid  II: 334 Majapahit  II: 67, 71 Malacca  I: 70 Malang  II: 65, 67 Malaysia(n)  I: 148, 168, 422; II: 14, 48, 185, 205, 208, 220, 251–2, 267, 391, 411, 444, 451 Maldives  II: 283 Mali  I: 48, 401 Marseille  I: XII, 8, 18, 23, 74, 76, 96, 212, 217, 224, 226, 233–6, 239, 244–5, 251–2, 255–6, 264–9, 272, 317, 398; II: 3, 6, 21, 24, 26, 37, 122, 156, 176, 211, 231, 317, 354, 387, 391, 398 • Archives départmentales Bouchesdu-Rhône  I: XII, 234, 252 • Archives Municipales  I: XII, 8 • Chambre de Commerce  I: XII, 234, 252–6, 268 • Exposition coloniale et nationale 1906  I: 22, 53, 61, 105, 191, 203, 221, 233–246, 251–2, 266, 271, 313, 355, 391, 396, 398–9, 403–4, 471–5; II: 17, 30, 34, 37, 145, 184–5, 212–3, 216, 354, 385, 417, 452 • Exposition nationale coloniale 1922  I: 22–4, 26, 48, 53, 61, 185, 191, 203, 225, 244, 247–279, 281–8, 290, 293, 296, 307, 313, 320, 322, 345, 391, 396, 399–401, 404–5, 419, 476–83; II: 26, 37, 39, 41, 51, 112, 123, 133, 145, 176, 354, 385, 387–8, 391, 417, 432, 434–5, 437, 447, 452 • Palais de l’Indo-Chine (Exposition 1922)  I: 240, 244, 253–4, 257–62, 265–76, 279, 293, 307, 399, 477–9, 481, 483; II: 145, 417 • Palais/Pavillon du Cambodge (Exposition 1906)  I: 235–6, 242–4, 253, 274, 355, 399; II: 17, 145, 417, 452 • Musée d’Histoire  I: XII, 265, 270; II: 317 • Rond-point du Prado  I: 235, 252, 258 Martinique  I: 75, 115, 355 Maya(n)  I: 32, 48, 145; II: 154 Mayotte  I: 75, 82, 199

637

Index

Mekong (Delta/River/Valley)  I: 11, 57, 60–1, 68–9, 222, 247, 249, 251, 392, 399, 412; II: 180, 220, 265, 268, 398 Mekong Exploratory Mission (1866–68) (→ Index Names/Institutions) Memphis  I: 129 Mendut/Mendoet, Tjandi  II: 61–6, 74, 344, 475 Merak, Tjandi  II: 71–2 Mesoamerica  I: 38 Mesopotamia  II: 178–9 Mexico/Mexican  I: 32, 48, 84–5, 96, 120, 151, 194, 197, 213; II: 368, 411 Mi-Son  I: 321; II: 137 Moissac  I: 139, 142–3 Mongolia  II: 205, 208, 294, 399 Montpellier  I: 296 Montrouge  I: XII, 262, 265, 293, 297 Morocco  I: 24, 84, 258, 284, 331, 344, 355, 378; II: 294 Moscow  II: 206, 208, 231, 254, 264, 279–80, 295, 334, 337, 396 Mount Merapi  II: 344 Mount Meru  I: 11 Mount Vernon  I: 331; II: 421 Munich  I: 139 Myanmar  I: XI; II: 4 Mytho  I: 222 N Naples  II: 97 Nazi Germany  I: 369–70; II: 158, 245 Nepal  II: 244, 283, 376, 399 Nara  II: 376–7 Netherlands  I: 251, 289, 401; II: 7, 69–70, 407, 411 Neustrelitz  II: 208 New Caledonia  I: 75, 101 New Delhi (→ Delhi) New Mexico  II: 367 New York  I: 352; II: 158, 205, 240, 270, 272, 279–80, 282, 288, 295, 306, 310, 313, 315, 330, 332, 337–8, 372, 385, 397, 402–3, 451, 526 • Statue of Liberty (→ Paris)  II: 421, 423 • UN Headquarter  II: 204, 237, 241–2, 263, 306, 311–2, 316, 320, 327, 330, 397 New Zealand  II: 409, 411, 415, 438, 442 Nhatrang  II: 137 Niger, Republic of  II: 227 Nile  I: 60; II: 13, 179 Nîmes  I: 265 Nimrod  I: 145 Ninive  I: 60, 145, 148 Nogent-sur-Marne  I: 296

638

Nogent-sur-Seine (Exposition 1907)  I: 133; II: 441 Nokor Vat (Nagaravatta)  I: 12; II: 14, 104, 157 North Africa  I: 191; II: 417 North Korea  II: 267, 448–9, 571 Norway  I: 80, 118; II: 267 Novgorod  II: 356 Nubia(n)  I: 148; II: 349, 416 O Occident(al)  I: 1–3, 22, 32–3, 39, 42–3, 87, 151, 157, 176, 187, 190–1, 196, 198, 200, 231, 257, 292, 313, 317, 320, 335, 337, 346, 375, 384, 386, 391–404, 407, 409–10; II: 3, 15, 39, 41, 123, 154, 157, 164, 181–3, 185, 198–9, 211, 225, 229, 253, 290–1, 387, 394 Oceania  I: 75, 120, 198, 233; II: 221 Oddar Meanchey  II: 279, 304 Old France  I: 347–8, 381, 383, 498 (O)udong  I: 12, 68, 407, 411–2; II: 9, 189, 220, 448 Orient(alism)  I: 1–3, 29–34, 37, 39, 41–8, 54, 57, 62, 82–7, 95–7, 101, 114, 118, 139, 142, 144, 147–9, 151, 154–7, 176, 187, 191, 196, 200, 203, 212–3, 215, 221–2, 228, 233, 236, 246–7, 261, 269, 287, 304, 317, 323, 325, 337, 351, 362, 369, 375–6, 393–400, 403, 407–8, 412; II: 2–5, 8–9, 13, 15–17, 39, 48, 61, 87, 95, 123, 153–5, 160, 176–9, 183, 185, 209, 211, 214, 226, 264, 270, 339, 366, 378, 382, 387, 390, 394, 396–7, 419, 437, 452 Orléans  I: 194 Osaka (Fairs 1958/1970)  II: 187, 346, 377, 394 P Pagan  I: XI, 145; II: 4, 291 Pahoin  I: 200 Pailin  II: 338 Pakistan  II: 267, 376, 398 Panama  I: 190 Panataran  II: 60, 66–9, 71, 74, 97 Paris • Arc de triomphe  I: 49, 114, 194, 299; II: 196, 394 • Archive of the French National ­Museums (Louvre)  I: 96 • Bastille  I: 90, 194 • Cairo Street (1889)  I: 213–5, 239, 347, 399; II: 347 • Champs-de-Mars  I: 72, 76, 82, 106, 114–20, 166, 190–2, 198, 200, 203, 213, 231, 285, 354, 394, 449

• Cité Universitaire  II: 182, 186–7 • Cluny, Hôtel des abbés de  I: 135, 149 • Colonial Museum (Musée/Exposition permanent(e) des colonies)  I: 61, 68, 71, 74, 81–3, 96, 115, 123, 151, 199, 227, 229, 233, 284, 286, 289–93, 296, 321, 326–7, 339, 349, 393, 401, 493 • Couvent des Petits-Augustins  I: 126, 395 • Daumesnil (Lake)  I: 285, 287, 289–90, 339 • École des Beaux-Arts (→ Index Names/ Institutions) • EFEO Headquarter/Archives  I: XI; II: 249, 282, 323 • Eiffel Tour  I: 191–4, 198–200, 213, 221, 223, 231, 299, 349, 361, 368–70, 390, 397, 422; II: 44, 437, 452 • Élysée Palace  I: 245 • Ethnography Museum  I: 100–5, 113, 290, 394 • Exposition coloniale de Paris 1906  I: 33, 233  • Exposition coloniale internationale 1931  I: 1–3, 5, 22, 26, 29, 34–5, 47–50, 53, 185, 191, 203, 225, 244, 256, 278, 283, 284–339, 341–9, 352, 362, 376–7, 384, 396, 400–3, 419; II: 26, 30, 41, 44, 59, 62, 87, 92–3, 98, 102, 111, 119, 123–125, 127, 133–4, 145, 153, 156, 168, 176, 185, 205, 208, 214–6, 221–2, 229, 237, 342, 346, 353–4, 385, 387–8, 391–2, 395, 406–7, 412, 416–8, 420–1, 425, 432–3, 436–7, 447–8, 451–52, 562 • Exposition des arts décoratifs et ­industriels modernes 1925  I: 281–3, 304, 334, 341, 368, 400–1 • Exposition internationale d’Électricité 1881  I: 362 • Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne 1937  I: 22, 53, 142, 185, 187, 191, 290, 341–390, 396, 402–5, 407, 497–500; II: 62, 102, 124–5, 145, 156, 182, 186, 205, 208, 214, 237, 354, 384–5, 387–8, 395, 407, 433, 437, 439, 448–9, 452 • French National Archives  I: XII, 91, 110, 199; II: 221, 230, 249–51, 397 • French National Library (BnF)  I: XII, 7, 101 • Historical Library of Paris  I: XII • Hôtel de Nesle  I: 126 • Hôtel Sesmaisons  I: 81 • ICOMOS Headquarter/Archives  I: XII, 8

Places

• Île de Billancourt  I: 72 • Île des cygnes (→ Swan Island) • Indochinese Museum  I: 12, 27, 35, 37, 48, 61, 80, 93, 123, 125, 144–188, 194, 196, 205, 207, 212, 217, 219, 221, 231–3, 241–2, 254, 261–2, 264, 272, 277, 290, 307, 317, 320, 353, 355, 395–9, 403–4, 457, 462; II: 10, 15, 21, 37, 50, 54, 92, 112, 119, 125–6, 167, 211, 222, 330, 353–4, 417, 432, 452 • Invalides (dôme/éspalande/hôtel des)  I: 191, 198–204, 211–5, 282, 285, 347, 355, 381, 397, 467–8 • Jardin Élysée  I: 131–5, 166; 395, 401; II: 13, 438 • La Pagode (cinema)  I: 221 • Louvre Museum  I: 36, 87, 89, 96–7, 100–1, 126, 129–30, 138–9, 147, 155, 158–9, 161, 185, 187, 194, 299, 393–4; II: 106 • Musée Cernuschi  II: 2, 60 • Musée des arts modernes  I: 187, 349, 369–70 • Musée de l’Homme  I: 82, 104, 376, 383 • Musée des colonies (→ Colonial ­Museum) • Musée de Sculpture comparée  I: 27, 36–7, 76, 83, 114, 125–6, 129, 135–43, 144, 148, 156–61, 164, 170, 176, 181, 206, 307, 353, 394–5, 439; II: 50, 54, 222 • Musée des Monument français  I: 38, 125–35, 142, 148–9, 160, 187–8, 353, 395, 439; II: 13, 135 • Musée d’Orsay  I: 36 • Musée du quai Branly  I: XII, 38 • Musée Guimet  I: XII, 35–8, 65, 91, 95, 109, 120, 123, 157–9, 163–4, 170, 175, 185–8, 211, 242, 261, 264, 268, 290, 321, 353, 394, 435, 452, 464–5; II: 2, 46, 112, 140, 145, 167, 295, 298, 329–30, 352–3, 399–401, 432–3, 562 • Musée indo-chinois/cambodgien (→ Indochinese Museum) • Musée oriental  I: 82–3, 96 • Musée permanent des colonies (→ Colonial Museum) • Museum of French Immigration ­History  I: 339 • Natural History Museum  I: 90, 101, 116, 136, 138, 290, 376; II: 125, 135, 373 • Notre Dame  I: 27, 134, 136, 148, 194, 286, 299, 325; II: 222, 446 • Old Paris  I: 231, 342, 348

• Opera  I: 194, 299; II: 208, 214–5, 493 • Pagode/Palais d’Angkor (Universal ­Exhibition 1889)  I: 86, 98, 124, 189–204, 205–215, 233, 242, 244, 355, 361, 371, 397, 399; II: 13–4, 34, 51, 112, 145, 184, 187, 211, 406, 417, 437, 452 • Palais de Chaillot  I: 142, 187–8, 353, 355, 367, 369 • Palais de l’Industrie  I: 61, 68, 74, 81–3, 96, 101, 103–5, 109, 115, 117–8, 123, 139, 151, 202, 227, 393–4, 451 • Palais du Gouvernement générale de l’Indo-Chine (International Colonial Exhibition 1931)   I: 287, 290–311, 314–23, 401; II: 145, 417 • Palais du Trocadéro (→ Trocadero ­Palace) • Pavillon de l’Indochine (Exposition 1937)  I: 354, 356–68; II: 145, 417 • Père Lachaise (cemetery)  I: 135 • Petit Palais  I: 371 • Place de la Concorde  I: 282, 299 • Pont de Passy  I: 349–51, 355–7, 361 • Pont d’Iéna  I: 194, 223 • Pont Grenelle  I: 352, 355, 357, 361 • Pré Catelan  I: 245 • Quai d’Orsay  I: 199, 223, 249, 251 • Rue du Caire (→ Cairo Street) • Saint-Denis, Abbey  I: 127, 133, 135, 440 • Saint-Sulpice  I: 130 • Seine  I: 61, 104, 114–5, 117, 139, 176, 190–1, 194, 198–200, 204, 207, 224, 231, 282, 285, 345, 353, 355–7, 361–2, 371, 377, 402, 404; II: 370 • Sorbonne University  I: XII, 4; II: 85, 159–60, 254–5, 264–5, 511 • Statue of Liberty (Swan Island)  I: 115, 352, 362 • Swan Island (Île des cygnes)  I: 347–57, 360–71, 375–9, 385, 389–90, 497–500; II: 102, 452 • Tour du Monde (Universal Exhibition 1900)  I: 193, 221–5, 244, 398; II: 21, 62, 211, 346–7, 449–50  • Trocadero Palace/Museum/Hill  I: 27, 37–8, 61, 71, 83, 94, 96, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114–25, 130, 134–5, 139, 142, 144, 151, 156–61, 166, 170, 176, 179, 181, 184, 187–8, 191, 194, 196, 202, 205–7, 212–3, 217–9, 224–5, 233, 240, 242–4, 254, 261–2, 268, 285, 290, 293, 307, 317, 349, 353, 355, 361–2, 369, 384, 394–6, 403–4, 451, 455, 470; II: 54, 135, 211, 222, 330, 432

• UNESCO Archive Paris  I: XII; II: 254, 282, 304, 316–7, 327, 335, 356, 361, 365, 396, 399–401 • UNESCO Headquarter  I: XI; II: 237, 255, 290, 304, 306, 315, 317, 323, 327, 329, 333, 348, 359, 365, 368, 377, 521 • UNESCO World Heritage Centre  I: XI; II: 359, 361, 363, 365, 368, 402, 413 • Universal Exhibition/Exposition universelle 1855  I: 76, 81, 138, 151 • Universal Exhibition/Exposition universelle 1867  I: 8, 32, 35, 61, 68, 71–88, 98, 100–4, 114–8, 139, 152, 202, 205–6, 241, 371, 391–4, 404, 412, 448–9; II: 10, 62, 124–5, 156, 237, 354, 387–8, 390, 407 • Universal Exhibition/Exposition universelle 1878  I: 53, 83, 86, 89–124, 125, 130, 137, 139, 140, 144, 147, 154, 157–8, 191, 194, 202, 212, 242, 334, 371, 384, 393–4, 404, 451; II: 10, 62, 124, 156, 237, 387–8, 354, 407, 417, 452 • Universal Exhibition/Exposition universelle 1889  I: 13, 22–3, 32, 44, 51, 53, 86, 115, 142, 144, 159, 162, 166, 168, 170, 189–215, 217, 221, 224, 226, 228, 233, 236, 239, 242, 244, 249, 253, 256, 272, 281–2, 313, 323, 334–5, 341, 347, 355, 361, 371, 384, 396–9, 403–4, 466–9; II: 13, 34, 44, 51, 62, 94, 112, 124, 145, 156, 184, 187, 205, 208, 211, 237, 239, 347, 354, 381, 385, 387–8, 395, 406–7, 417, 419, 432–3, 437, 452, 460 • Universal Exhibition/Exposition universelle 1900  I: 22, 170, 185, 193, 217–26, 231–6, 240, 243–5, 252, 281–2, 290, 320, 348, 398, 404, 470; II: 16, 21, 34, 62, 95–6, 124, 156, 184, 211, 237, 346–7, 354, 387–8, 407, 417, 425, 437, 449–50 • Universal Exhibition 1937 (→ Expo­ sition internationale 1937) • Vieux-Paris (→ Old Paris) • Vincennes (Park)  I: 285, 290–1, 296, 307, 325, 332–4, 337, 348, 401; II: 92, 301 Patna  I: 407, 417–9, 505–8 Pawon, Tjandi  II: 65, 72, 74, 344 Persia  I: 83, 114, 118, 137, 155, 194, 196 Peru  I: 101–2, 104, 120, 197; II: 4 Phanom Rung, Prasat  I: 416 Philae  I: 84, 87; II: 416 Philippines  I: 239; II: 185, 187, 220, 251–52 Phimai  II: 141, 344 Phnom Basset  I: 108, 228 Phnom Kulen  (→ Angkor/Phnom Kulen)

639

Index

Phnom Penh  I: XII, 12, 21, 35, 68–9, 90–6, 162, 168, 205, 208, 219–21, 227–8, 231, 236, 239, 244–6, 266–68, 290, 313, 316–7, 320, 344, 357, 375, 381, 384, 397, 399, 408, 416, 438, 442; II: 7, 10, 15, 21, 34, 37, 44, 72, 78, 80, 86, 104, 111, 123, 129, 141, 145, 148, 150–1, 153, 155–6, 158, 163, 165, 169, 177, 181–204, 211–2, 214, 216, 220–3, 226–7, 230–1, 234, 238–9, 240, 246, 250–62, 267, 270, 272, 274, 279–82, 290, 295, 298, 304–6, 310–1, 319–20, 324, 329, 331–5, 341, 348, 350, 355, 358, 365, 367, 375, 378–82, 385, 395–7, 402–3, 408, 414, 426, 445, 497, 506, 530, 543, 574 • Bassac River Front Project  II: 193–4, 197, 204, 221, 498 • Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center  I: XII, 441; II: 230, 498, 513 • Cambodiana Hotel  II: 202 • Central Market (Phsar Thmey)  II: 221, 448 • Central Post Office  II: 182 • Chaktomuk Conference Hall  II: 193–4, 209, 220–1, 234, 498 • Chamcar Mon State Palace  II: 190, 192, 220–1, 234, 498 • Choeung Ek (Killing Fields)  II: 277 • Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam)  I: XII; II: 242, 257, 263 • École des arts Cambodgiens (→ Index Places/Institutions) • École des Beaux-Arts (→ Royal University of Fine Arts) • École Norodom Primary  II: 307 • EFEO Headquarter  II: 148, 151, 422–3 • Independence Memorial  II: 154, 190, 194–7, 220, 234, 394, 448, 489–90, 498 • Indochinese Museum  II: 15 • Jayavarman VII Museum  II: 170, 214, 221 • Monivong Bridge  II: 185 • Musée Albert Sarraut (→ National ­Museum) • National Archives  I: XII; II: 220, 323, 389 • National Library  I: XII; II: 323, 335, 389 • National Museum  I: XII, 40, 276, 268, 317, 375, 384–6, 403–4; II: 53, 80, 104, 112, 115, 126–7, 146, 167, 170, 214–5, 221, 239, 294, 298, 307, 323, 333, 350, 353–5, 378, 389, 432, 448, 451, 570 • National Sports Complex  I: 24; II: 155, 197–201, 220–2, 227, 234, 395, 447, 491–2, 496, 498

640

• Phnom Penh International Exhibition 1955  II: 185–6, 394 • Pochentong Airport  II: 221, 223, 495 • Reyum Gallery  I: XII; II: 195 • Royal Palace  I: 168, 246–7, 320; II: 104, 190, 192–3, 195, 210, 214, 221, 227, 234, 253, 276, 306, 350, 398, 448, 488 • Royal University (RUPP)  I: XII; II: 350 • Royal University of Fine Arts – RUFA (École des Beaux-Arts)  I: XII, 24; II: 141, 143, 155, 218, 227, 229, 239, 251, 295, 299, 348, 355, 378, 381, 384, 439 • Sangkum Exhibition Hall  I: 442; II: 193, 220–1, 452, 488 • Silver Pagoda  II: 294–5, 306–7 • Tuol Sleng  II: 276–7, 350, 398, 414 • UNESCO Cambodia Headquarter  I: XII; II: 354, 361, 363, 377, 385, 535, 543 • Wat Phnom (Monastery Hill)  I: 219–21, 231, 398; II: 17, 34–5, 184–5, 196, 448 Phou, Wat  I: 68; II: 16 Picardie  II: 330, 353 Pierrefonds  I: 96, 138 Plaosan, Tjandi  II: 65, 74 Plitvice Lakes  II: 368 Poland  I: 46; II: 237, 291, 294–8, 301, 304, 311, 318, 326, 331–3, 337, 356, 366, 370, 383–4, 396, 399, 401, 411, 419 Pompeii  I: 84, 148, 194; II: 97, 126 Po-Nagar  II: 15, 137 Pondicherry  I: 50; II: 48, 107, 297 Portugal  I: 57, 80, 217, 229, 289, 401, 410; II: 9, 178–9 Prague  II: 208 Prah-Keo, Wat  II: 252 Prambanan  I: XII, 48; II: 7–8, 48, 60–71, 74, 78, 84, 92, 95–6, 341, 346–7, 354, 377, 392, 411 Preah Khan (Ponteay Prah Khan/Kompong Svay)  I: 95, 112, 120, 122; II: 116, 168 Preah Vihear  I: 48, 415–6, 420, 422; II: 16, 104, 116, 170–1, 231, 253, 255, 272, 357, 394, 414, 439 Prussia  I: 80; II: 10, 48 Pursat  I: 251, 253 Pyongyang  II: 313, 448 Pyramids  I: 9, 193, 352, 422; II: 140 Q Quang-Tchiou-Wan  I: 253 Québec  I: XII; II: 438–9, 442 Qutb Minar  I: 154

R Red Sea  I: 76 Reims  I: 143 Réunion  I: 75, 82, 199, 355, 381 Roluos (→ Angkor) Romania  I: 84; II: 267, 356, 398 Rome/Roman  I: XII, 2, 8–9, 22, 25, 47–8, 57, 83–4, 97, 101, 119, 127–9, 133–6, 139, 144–9, 151, 155, 157, 191, 194, 198, 331, 395–6, 401, 412; II: 4, 41, 86, 92, 94, 225–6, 245, 339, 405, 417, 421 • Académie de France  I: 22 • École française de Rome (→ Index Names/Institutions) • ICCROM Headquarter/Archives  I: XII, 8; II: 315–6, 376, 426 • Forum Romanum  II: 4, 13, 48, 354, 403, 405 • La Sapienza University  II: 413 • Pantheon  I: 284, 287 • Rome-Prize  I: 22–4, 112, 229, 258; II: 202 • St. Peter  I: 9, 25 • Trajan’s Column  I: 80, 155–7, 194, 396, 455; II: 226 Rouen  I: 161, 226–34, 398 • Chambre de Commerce  I: 231 • Exposition nationale et coloniale 1896  I: 170, 217, 226, 228, 229–233, 234, 344, 348, 398, 470 • Old-Rouen (Vieux-Rouen)  I: 230–3, 344, 348, 398 Russia  I: 57, 80, 101, 217, 369–70; II: 10, 48, 176, 178, 193, 205–6, 209, 236, 280, 298, 318, 331, 336–7, 356, 383, 396, 398, 411, 419 S Saigon  I: 20, 57, 59, 61–2, 70–1, 74, 76, 81, 89–96, 147, 158, 161–2, 166, 168, 177, 201–2, 205, 217, 222, 239, 245, 253, 268, 273, 279, 283, 321, 357, 371, 375, 392, 401, 410; II: 9, 21, 24, 29, 33–4, 37, 44, 47–8, 54, 72, 78, 80, 86, 102, 115, 123, 159, 166, 195, 255, 307, 391 • Botanical Garden  I: 283, 401 • Lycée Chausseloup-Laubat  II: 158 • Musée Blanchard de la Brosse  I: 253; II: 24, 114, 123 Sambor Prei Kuk  I: 10–1, 48, 228; II: 116, 137, 357 Sana’a  II: 323 Sanchi (Gate)  I: 148, 152–7, 176, 194, 198, 326, 396, 454–5 San Francisco  II: 205–6

Places

Santa Fe  II: 325, 327, 361, 363, 367–70, 376, 382, 412 Santiago di Compostella  I: 80, 155 Saqqara  II: 94 Sari, Tjandi  I: 217, 224–6; II: 62, 74, 95–6 Saudi Arabia  I: 423 Saxony  I: 80 Say-Fong (stele)  II: 164–6 Senegal  I: 75, 81, 115, 200; II: 267, 311, 368 Sevilla  I: 344; II: 187 Sewu/Sewoe, Tjandi  II: 61, 71, 74, 78 Siam  I: XII, 5, 19, 24–9, 35, 50, 57, 60–5, 68–9, 71, 74–5, 81, 83–4, 87, 90–1, 94–6, 101, 118, 120, 124, 145, 147, 162, 166, 168, 176–8, 181, 187, 196, 212, 219, 223, 227, 233, 239–42, 247–51, 253, 289, 317, 321–2, 337, 369, 393, 397–9, 404, 407–15, 420, 428; II: 1, 5–6, 9–10, 13–8, 21, 30–1, 33, 48–9, 65, 72, 78, 102, 105, 166, 211, 213, 216, 218, 237, 326, 357, 387, 390–1, 399, 415, 418, 451, 459, 461 Sicily  I: 53 Sidi Bou  I: 47–8 Siem Reap  I: XI–XII, 12, 21, 29, 45, 56, 63, 68, 90–1, 95, 162, 166, 205, 219, 249, 411, 420; II: 3, 9, 12–13, 19, 21, 26, 31–3, 40, 51, 78, 80, 86, 102–7, 123, 145, 148, 151, 158, 169, 173, 176, 202, 220–2, 227, 233, 238, 244, 246, 249, 251, 253, 258–9, 265, 267, 270, 278–9, 282, 297, 304, 306–7, 318, 320, 324, 338, 344, 350, 355, 371–8, 383–5, 411–5, 420–1, 424, 439, 443–52, 506, 514, 538, 541, 566, 568, 572–4 • Airport  II: 134, 202, 244, 249, 253, 297, 361, 447 • Angkor Hotel/Grand Hotel d’Angkor  II: 105, 202–4, 221, 444, 449, 493 • Angkor National Museum  II: 409, 449–51, 573 • Angkor Panorama Museum  II: 448–9, 571 • APSARA Headquarter  I: XII; II: 182, 373, 376–7, 385, 408 • Asian Traditional Textile Museum  II: 448 • Cambodian Cultural Village  I: 56, 445; II: 447–9, 569–70 • Center of Khmer Studies  I: XII; II: 301–2, 407 • Charles de Gaulle Avenue  II: 222, 448 • Conservation d’Angkor  I: 19, 21, 47; II: 1, 4, 7–8, 22, 46, 74, 77–8, 84, 87, 92, 101–7, 112–3, 116–7, 124, 138,

140–1, 143, 149–50, 167–8, 251, 259, 276–9, 289, 291, 297, 299, 339–41, 348, 355, 372, 376, 378, 380, 383–4, 388, 392–3, 399, 414, 426–7, 446, 450–1 • EFEO Office  I: XII; II: 148, 423 • Gates of Angkor/Porte d’Angkor  II: 444–7, 451, 568 • National 6 Highway  II: 447 • Norodom Sihanouk Museum  II: 448 • Siem Reap Province  I: 62, 71, 96, 120, 162, 185, 219, 241, 247–51, 321–2, 407, 410, 412; II: 1, 9, 17, 103, 173, 180, 221, 249, 255, 277, 304, 384 • Siem Reap River  I: 12, 162; II: 32, 54, 173, 344, 444 • Sokha Hotel/Resort  II: 409, 415, 568 • UNESCO sub-office  II: 375 • Villa Princière  II: 202, 221, 444 • Wat Bo  I: 45, 443 Sihanoukville  II: 169, 220, 230 Silk Road  II: 376 Singapore  I: 69; II: 72, 135, 185, 205, 208, 220, 251, 435, 438 Singosari, Tjandi  II: 65–6 Sisaket, Wat  II: 15 Sisiphon  I: 247–8 Somalia  I: 331 South Africa  I: 56; II: 6 Southampton  I: 177 South Asia  I: XI, 418, 421; II: 294, 339, 399 Southeast Asia  I: XII, 9, 24–5, 49, 168, 181, 196, 198, 224, 247, 371, 395–6, 419, 422, 436; II: 1, 2, 4, 9, 17–8, 48–9, 62–3, 69, 92, 103, 116, 124, 141, 161, 170, 179–81, 197, 205, 211, 251–3, 264, 273, 279, 281, 290–1, 293, 295, 304, 320, 324, 332, 339, 340–2, 359, 366, 396–7, 399, 408, 411, 413, 427, 439 (South) Korea  II: 317, 376, 411, 445, 450–1, 527 Southwest Asia  I: 196 Soviet (Union)  I: 282, 332–3, 337, 369, 417; II: 205–6, 208, 235, 263, 274, 279–80, 283, 331–2, 336, 350, 395–6, 398 Spain/Spanish  I: 80, 96, 120, 155, 221, 229, 289; II: 9, 95, 326, 328, 400 Spoleto  (Diocletian’s Palace)  I: 24 Sri Lanka  II: 205, 283, 399, 411 Srirangam  II: 244 St. Germain (château)  I: 96–7, 101 Stockholm  II: 279, 306, 521 St. Petersburg  II: 298 St. Pierre et Miquelon  I: 75, 199 St. Riquier  I: 165, 187, 464; II: 330, 352 Stung Treng  I: 68, 91, 93, 251; II: 255, 441 Sudan  I: 225, 229, 326; II: 216

Suez  I: 74, 83–4, 87, 95, 153, 189–90, 224, 234, 392; II: 298, 339 Sukothai  II: 244, 291, 338, 376 Suzhou  II: 412 Sweden/Swedish  I: 80, 118; II: 267, 270–1, 295, 306, 313, 361, 370–1, 375, 398, 411 Swiss/Switzerland  I: 80, 344; II: 245, 253, 341, 348, 375–6, 384, 411, 421, 507  Sydney  II: 238, 367, 403, 442 Syria  I: 102, 128, 224, 398; II: 97–8, 376, 417 T Tahiti  I: 75, 200, 229 Taj Mahal  I: XI, 416, 418, 421–2; II: 140, 249 Takeo (town/province)  II: 174, 176–7 Takht-i-Bahi  I: 157 Tashkent  II: 231 Tchen-La  (→ Chenla) Thai(land)  I: XII, 5, 11–2, 398, 409–10, 412–6, 420, 422; II: 1, 4, 6, 48, 61, 102–4, 116, 141, 151, 154, 158, 170–1, 179, 185, 187, 237, 244, 251–2, 270, 275, 283, 298–300, 304, 306, 313, 318, 327, 332, 335, 337–8, 340, 354, 356–7, 368–9, 375–6, 383, 392, 394, 396, 398, 401, 411, 444, 449–51 Thebes  I: 60 Thessaloniki  II: 86 Thudaumont  I: 316 Tianjin  I: 51; II: 421 Tibet  I: 101, 151 Tihuanaco  I: 102 Timgad  I: 101; II: 28 Tokyo  I: XII; II: 103–4, 279, 290–1, 294, 306, 336–7, 359, 370, 379–85, 401, 403, 411, 414, 420, 425, 427, 542, 544 • Olympic Complex 1964  II: 199–200, 395 • Tokyo Museum  II: 104 Tonkin  I: 89–90, 93, 168, 191, 200–1, 221–2, 227–8, 239, 253, 279, 287, 290, 307, 317, 352, 384, 388, 393; II: 15–6, 111 Tonle Sap (Great Lake)  I: 9, 29, 61–2, 68, 76, 251, 412; II: 9, 179, 249, 253, 265, 318, 344, 375, 414, 446–7, 451 Toulon  I: 95, 168 Tourane (Museum)  I: 317; III: 105 Tripolitania  II: 94 Tuk Thla, Baray  II: 173, 266–7 Tunis  I: 47, 200; II: 359 Tunisia  I: 46–8, 118, 191, 199–201, 226–7, 236, 258, 355, 361; II: 124, 359, 368, 411

641

Index

Turin (Expo 1902)  I: 281 Turkestan  I: 118 Turkey/Turkish  I: 84, 118; II: 84–5, 94 U Udong (→ Oudong) United Arab Republic  II: 205, 208 United Kingdom  I: 418, 423; III: 356, 411 United States of America (USA/US-­ American)  I: 46, 50, 53–6, 84, 114–5, 178, 196, 251, 289, 331, 337, 401, 410, 421, 423; II: 6, 106, 145, 158, 161, 163, 173, 182, 185, 193, 204–6, 208, 222, 227, 230, 235–7, 246, 249, 253, 255, 259, 267, 270, 273, 282, 295, 299, 301–2, 304, 322–3, 326–7, 332, 335–7, 340, 356, 361, 367–9, 372, 375, 377, 379, 389, 392, 394–8, 400, 409, 411–2, 415, 419, 421, 425–6, 441–3, 501, 520, 538 USSR (→ Soviet)  II: 304, 306 Uzbekistan  II: 356

642

V Vatican  I: 83–4, 87 Venice  II: 86, 122–4, 176, 244, 316, 504 Versailles  I: 97; II: 128, 134, 226, 413 Vézelay (Church)  I: 136, 139–42, 148, 155, 157 Vichy  I: 265; II: 102–3, 158, 392 Vieille France (→ Old France) Vienna  I: XI–XII, 4, 196; II: 37, 295, 311, 317, 327, 423 • University  I: XI, 4 • Universal Exhibition 1873  I: 96, 104 Vientiane  I: 247, 413; II: 15, 252 Vietnam  I: 5, 12, 23, 43, 46, 181, 201, 241, 271, 279, 321, 332, 344, 375, 385, 388, 403–4, 407, 410, 412, 417; II: 1, 68, 104–6, 114–5, 137, 145, 150–1, 154, 157–66, 185, 192, 222, 227, 230–1, 235–58, 263, 268, 270–83, 290, 294–301, 304–7, 310–5, 318–20, 326, 328, 331–6, 349–51, 357, 376, 379, 392–3, 396–401, 411, 419, 439

W Warsaw  II: 236, 245, 279, 295–6, 396, 398 Washington D. C.  II: 2, 104, 106, 205, 249, 270, 282, 311, 316, 324, 334, 432 Wat Nokor  I: 228 Weltevreden  II: 61, 72 Williamsburg  I: 55–6; II: 205 X Xochicalco  I: 84–5 Y Yang-tse-Kiang  II: 179 Yellow River  II: 179 Yogyakarta  II: 62, 71 Yugoslavia  II: 126, 164, 205, 208, 226, 228, 294, 394, 399 Yunnan  I: 60–1, 69, 89, 227, 236 Z Zagreb  I: 35; II: 226–7, 330 Zambia  II: 267, 398 Zurich  II: 2, 324, 432