Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The French 'discovery' of Angkor in the 1860s made an international splash and created a
great deal of outside interest in Cambodia. But 'discovery', with all the romance it im-
plied, was something of a misnomer. When French explorer Henri Mouhot first stumbled
across Angkor Wat on his Royal Geographic Society expedition, it included a wealthy,
working monastery with monks and slaves. Moreover, Portuguese travellers in the 16th
century encountered Angkor, referring to it as the Walled City. Diego do Couto produced
an accurate description of Angkor in 1614, but it was not published until 1958. A 17th-
century Japanese pilgrim drew a detailed plan of Angkor Wat, though he mistakenly re-
called that he had seen it in India.
Still, it was the publication of
Voyage à Siam et dans le Cambodge
by Mouhot,
posthumously released in 1868, that first brought Angkor to the public eye. Although the
explorer himself made no such claims, by the 1870s he was being celebrated as the dis-
coverer of the lost temple-city of Cambodia. In fact, a French missionary known as
Charles-Emile Bouillevaux had visited Angkor 10 years before Mouhot and had published
an account of his own findings. However, the Bouillevaux account was roundly ignored
and it was Mouhot's account, with its rich descriptions and tantalising pen-and-ink colour
sketches of the temples, that turned the ruins into an international obsession.
Soon after Mouhot, other adventurers and explorers began to arrive. Scottish photo-
grapher John Thomson took the first photographs of the temples in 1866. He was the first
Westerner to posit the idea that they were symbolic representations of the mythical Mt
Meru. French architect Lucien Fournereau travelled to Angkor in 1887 and produced
plans and meticulously executed cross-sections that were to stand as the best available un-
til the 1960s.
From this time, Angkor became the target of French-financed expeditions and, in 1901,
Angkor by funding an expedition to Bayon. In 1907 Angkor was returned to Cambodia,
having been under Thai control for more than a century, and the EFEO took responsibility
for clearing and restoring the whole site. In the same year, the first foreign tourists arrived
in Angkor - an unprecedented 200 of them in three months. Angkor had been 'rescued'
from the jungle and was assuming its place in the modern world.
Archaeology of Angkor
With the exception of Angkor Wat, which was restored for use as a Buddhist shrine in the
16th century by the Khmer royalty, the temples of Angkor were left to the jungle for many
