Volume 1: Angkor Wat in France

In the first volume, Angkor in France: From plaster casts to exhibition catalogues, the author focuses on how Western explorers and scholars, especially the French, ‘discovered’ and reconceptualised Angkor as a cultural heritage site and brought some of its original masterpieces, and plaster cast replicas, to display during the colonial exhibitions held in France, and other European countries, over a 70-year period (1867–1937). In his Introduction, Falser defines the role and understanding of Angkor Wat as a transcultural process, explaining his own methodological key assumptions and aims. He points out that the terms and concepts used in this book are based on Western views of art and architectural history and cultural heritage studies (p. 9), which did not correspond with the Khmer/Cambodian mindset about cultural and political images related to Angkor Wat and its symbolic meanings. Stressing too that the study is based on his particular viewpoint as an art/architectural historian and trained preservation architect, Falser begins with an overview of Angkor Wat's spatial-architectural configuration, with a small selection of accompanying — primarily French — architectural plans and photographs. This allows the readers to understand the idea of the Angkor complex in relation to subsequent architectural enquiries, and provides a basis for the book's critical history of the production of the virtual ‘Angkor Wat Project’ between Asia and Europe, from the 1860s until the present time.

Like previous researchers, Falser begins with the history of the first king of Angkorian civilisation in the early ninth century, Jayavarman II. The King had his own city built on Mahendraparavata (Kulen mountain) (p. 11), centre of the ancient kingdom of Cambodia since the Funan and Chenla periods (from the first to the late eighth centuries), and considered its commercial, religious and cultural hub. Then, he discusses the state temples built by the Khmer kings during the Angkorian period (from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries), including the last great king of Angkor, Jayavarman VII (r. 1181 to 1220 [?]), and the rise of the rival Sukhothai Kingdom of Siam in the late thirteenth century. Finally, the narrative ends with the abandonment of Angkor, as the state capital, by Khmer kings in 1431, and the moving of the capital from Angkor to Tuol Bassan, then Chaktomuk (or Phnom Penh, the present capital of Cambodia), then to Longvek and Udong (from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries).

Angkor, however, was never entirely abandoned, and continued to be an active site of regional and ‘international’ Buddhist pilgrimage and of personal and cultural-political affirmation for all Cambodian kings and their subjects up to the present day (p. 12). In the second part of his Introduction (p. 18), Falser discusses Angkor Wat as a site of religious veneration and royal affirmation and cultural-political focal point for the whole nation, and its unique history. Its silhouette has appeared on the Cambodian national flag and currency since the nineteenth century. The ancient name of this twelfth-century temple constructed by King Suryavarman II (r. 1113–50), dedicated to Vishnu, was Vrah Visnuloka or Brah Bisnulok, as attested to in a seventeenth-century inscription. 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, however (p. 12).

The institutional and spatial configuration of Angkor and its surrounds had been planned since the 1910s by the French colonial administration and finally decreed as an archaeological park in 1925–30 (p. 19). What did Angkor Wat mean to the French before and after 1900? And which specific (cultural, aesthetic, political, normative) French pre-configurations enabled colonial and metropolitan France to enter into a specific relationship with the twelfth-century temple complex? To answer this, the first volume of Angkor in France, aptly subtitled ‘From plaster casts to exhibition catalogues’, maps the physical translations of Angkor Wat for French-colonial museum and exhibition spaces between 1867 and 1937.

In this first volume, Falser makes use of 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; European or Asian; etc. Fasler explains that these theories and concepts from previous studies help us to understand how Angkor Wat's architecture was viewed in the eyes of European researchers and scholars, by a process of cultural translation. He also points to Foucault's concept of heterotopias to discuss the various simultaneous heritages of Angkor (pp. 45–53).

Falser points out that generally, when studying the early history of Angkor, we have to rely on foreign sources, including the accounts of officials, missionaries and travellers who visited the Khmer capital. These include the famous report of the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan in the late thirteenth century, accounts from the post-Angkorian period, Portuguese reports from 1600 onwards, a first plan of Angkor Wat made by a Japanese visitor in the 1630s, accounts from Cambodia as a tributary kingdom under Siamese domination until the mid-1860s, and reports from random, short European visits up to 1850, such as that of the French missionary Charles-Émile Bouillevaux (p. 57). Then came the famous report of the French naturalist, Henri Mouhot (1825–61), who arrived in Angkor in early 1860 on his journey through three kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia: Siam, Cambodia and Laos. Unfortunately, he died in the jungles of Laos of malarial fever, near the Mekong River. Seven years after his death, his diary, Le voyage dans les royaumes du Siam, du Cambodge, et du Laos, was published in Paris in 1868. Then, in 1865, French commander, Ernest Doudart de Lagrée (1823–63) (p. 61), set out on a mission to explore in particular the Upper Mekong, flowing through the then fairly unknown borderland between Cochin-china and Laos, in order to facilitate French Indochina's political and commercial penetration into the Chinese province of Yunnan. De Lagrée also sought to collect political and commercial, geological and botanical, astronomical and meteorological, anthropological and ethnological, and historical and cultural information on the region (p. 62). After the mission, these findings were published in three volumes, and submitted to the French emperor Napoleon III. They included much detail about Angkor Wat itself and ongoing research there, in preparation for the next exhibition in Paris. We know that the first Exposition de l'art industriel was opened in the Palais de l'Industrie in 1861 with a focus on drawings and models for the application of the arts in relation to mechanical reproduction (p. 82).

The next major mission at Angkor was by the explorer and artist Louis (Marie Joseph) Delaporte in 1874 (p. 182), very important because he studied Khmer art and architecture in greater detail. Casts of bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat were made, and some stones and sculptures from Preah Khan in Siem Reap were transported to the Universal Exhibition in Paris (in 1878), even though the site was then controlled by the Kingdom of Siam (p. 158). Another mission was conducted by Lucien Fournereau in 1888: he too made plaster casts of Angkor Wat's bas-reliefs and temple fragments (pp. 163–6). In 1891 King Norodom wrote a letter to the Résident supérieur of Phnom Penh 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 ancient times and during all kingship’. But the Résident supérieur wrote to the then-acting gouverneur général in Saigon, 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’ (p. 168).

Delaporte was doing his best to ‘reconstruct the imagination of the visitors’ through his exhibits of Khmer art and architecture in Paris. In Great Britain, the South Kensington Museum's twin Architectural Courts (opened in 1874), strongly influenced his Musée Indochinois in the Trocadero (opened around 1884) (p. 194). Throughout the idea of the translation of Angkor Wat from its real site and the ideal or idealised architectural reconstitution and its inclusion in a performative museum route, visitors were both familiarised with and initiated into the French colonial vision (p. 176). In 1907 the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap had been finally incorporated into the French colonial enterprise of Indochina (p. 185). When Delaporte's last publication came out only a few months before his death in 1925, his project of reconstituting Angkor in a Parisian museum space was overtaken by reality, though he himself was not at its helm. In 2012, the casts were moved to the new storage area at the Musée Guimet in Normandy. And in October 2013 the Musée Guimet held an exhibition titled, ‘Angkor, Naissance d'un mythe: Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge’ — displaying the restored casts from Delaporte's Musée Indochinois side by side with the original Cambodian artefacts (p. 187).

Falser next turns his attention to the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. He points out that Charles Garnier's exemplification of Asia's relevance for a contemporary civilising project (of course, with Europe as its apex) was important as it ran exactly through the continent's two major constituent parts: India and China. For the Indochina pavilion section, Garnier and his colleagues invited visitors to explore the lost civilisations of Southeast Asia, and especially showcasing the work of Delaporte and other explorers who had researched Angkor, from 1870 to 1888 (pp. 194–6).

Indeed, Angkor Wat and Cambodian arts and culture became a topic of discussion and development during and through the colonial exhibitions in France, England and Germany. Falser shows how these exhibitions combined the idea of Angkor, based on fragments of its culture and decorations or originals taken and transported from Cambodia, against the backrop of the technological and industrial revolution of Europe in the late nineteenth century. The reader also learns about the European architects, engineers and artists who showed their new ideas about art and culture through their creations, displayed inside the exhibition buildings or palaces. These in turn resulted in new perspectives on landscape to be introduced to, and to attract visitors to understand the history, culture, religion and traditions of the Cambodian people.

Interestingly, after the exhibition in 1900, which featured a decoration of Bayon faces in a multimedia scenario of plaster and concrete casts and painted canvas dioramas along with projected cinematic images of the French civilising effort in Indochina, the galleries at the exit of the ensemble were reserved for the work of the explorer and diplomat Auguste Pavie. Pavie's Indochinese mission, for the purpose of ‘territorial expansion’ around 1890, helped to prepare the treaty of 1893 and to negotiate the then expanding frontiers of French Indochina along and across the Mekong River into Upper Laos (p. 222).

More importantly, His Majesty King Sisowath's state visit to France in 1906 introduced many Europeans to Cambodia's cultural heritage as his visit was widely covered in the popular media, not only in France in a series of richly illustrated articles in June/July 1906 in L'Illustration, but around the world. Auguste Rodin, the world-famous sculptor who fell in love with the Khmer classical dancers during their Paris performances, followed them back to the Marseille Exhibition and executed a series of about 150 drawings and paintings of the dancers’ fragile gestures … For Rodin, the ‘friezes of Angkor came to life before his eyes’. As the ‘dancers made antiquity live in him’, he described them as ‘animated architecture’ (p. 245).

Lastly, the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931 is the focus of discussions in this volume because the French colonial government built a replica of Angkor Wat on a 1:1 scale in French territory. This exhibition was the first event where Cambodian arts and architecture, and especially Angkor Wat, was the main subject and iconic symbol, as Falser discusses in detail, in chapter 8, ‘Going real size: Angkor Wat and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris’, based on contemporary reports, including the master plan, budget, techniques of construction, teamwork, and featuring rare photos. As a result, both the ‘Paris’ Angkor and the ‘real site’ of Angkor entered once more, and to a much greater extent than ever before, into a transcultural relationship of similar (or totally opposing) expectations and requirements. Exactly the same strategies were being used to bring the ‘real site’ of Angkor Wat to 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-over-grown surfaces (see M. Falser, ‘The first plaster casts of Angkor for the French métropole’, 2013). Additionally, all souvenir sellers were banned from spoiling the grand perspective at both sites (p. 291).

But nothing stays eternal: the Paris Exhibition in 1931 was over in November. The political situation in France, Europe and the rest of the world was also changing, in the lead up to the Second World War. Angkorian arts and masterpieces from Indochina were displayed for the last time during the 1937 Paris Exhibition. The Indochinese section represented an indigenous street scene, with craftsmen, boutiques, an ‘Annamite’ (Central Vietnamese) restaurant, rustic cabins of fisherfolk, a varied synthesis of Cambodian and Annamite life, under the sign of Khmer arts, by the elegant artificial Bayon (p. 356). France's last Universal Exhibition, during the decline of colonialism and a regionalist paradigm, had changed from the former display of architectural pastiche pavilions to a ‘living heritage’ performance of revived arts-and-crafts (artisanat) (p. 405).

In the conclusion to his first volume of Angkor Wat, Falser summarises all its main points and concepts, emphasising how Westerners, especially the French, had embarked on a ‘project of translation’ to portray Cambodian culture for 70 years. Since the first impressions in Mouhot's monograph, De Lagrée's and Delaporte's missions, the creation of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and the Conservation d'Angkor, and finally the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931, France emphasised its role of safeguarding and protecting the temples at Angkor as well as introducing Cambodia's cultural heritage to the West.

Two epilogues at the end of Volume 1 present other outsiders’ attempts to translate Angkor. In the late nineteenth century Rama IV (King Mongkut) of Siam, wished to dismantle a Khmer temple at Angkor and relocate it to Bangkok. But this initiative was unsuccessful because the Cambodians who lived around the Angkor area protested against the Siamese, forcibly stopping the men who came to dismantle the temple in 1859. Instead, in 1867 King Mongkut ordered the execution of a small-scale model of Angkor Wat for the Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram temple (also known as Wat Phra Kaew) within Bangkok's Grand Palace compound. This replica of Angkor Wat, an approximately 6 by 6 metre model of the inner enclosure, was finalised only for the centennial celebrations of Bangkok in 1882, by his son Chulalongkorn, Rama V (1868–1910) (p. 414).

The other epilogue is about another much more recent attempt at making a replica of Angkor Wat, as the world's largest Hindu temple, this time in Bihar, India, in 2012. After media and Internet publicity in India, both the Cambodian government and local people immediately reacted and protested against the project. Here, Falser demonstrates the most recent stage of Angkor Wat's transcultural trajectory, through its global circulation in the form of a translocated heritage icon (‘image’) in the virtual worlds of the Internet (p. 416).

Volume 2: Angkor Wat in Cambodia

The second volume of Falser's study, Angkor Wat in Cambodia: From jungle find to global icon, is divided into four main chapters: the management of the Parc Archéologique d'Angkor by the French during the protectorate period; Angkor after Cambodian independence in 1953; Angkor during the civil war in Cambodia (1970–90); and Angkor as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

In the first of these (chap. 9), the author describes the creation of the Conservation d'Angkor, which officially opened in Siem Reap in 1908, under its first director, Jean Commaille, after Siam returned three northern provinces (Battambang, Siem Reap and Sisophon) to Cambodia in 1907 (p. 1). This office managed the entire Angkor region, which would become the Parc d'Angkor in 1925 as proposed by Étienne Lunet de Lajonquière, who compiled an inventory of the ancient monuments of Indochina in the early twentieth century. Subsequently all management and restoration work, archaeological research, drawing, mapping, photographing, among others, for the temples, continued to be focused within the Park zone. Many guidebooks and comprehensive summaries about the temples were written and published by the Conservation d'Angkor's directors and EFEO researchers. These included the guidebooks by Jean Commaille (1912), Henri Marchal (first edition, 1928), Maurice Glaize (1944), and Henri Parmentier (c.1950s). Falser's intention here is to present a critical intellectual, institutional and technical history of the French — pre-colonial, colonial and early postcolonial — creation of Angkor Park. More importantly, he shows how the colonial space-time regime remains at play at Angkor Park today. The French interventions included the creation of a petit et grand circuits and itinéraires-types for tourists — pedestrians, elephant riders and car drivers — as proposed by Marchal in 1928, and Glaize in 1948 (p. 391).

The importance of this volume is its analysis and presentation of data from thousands of original French writings and illustrations from internal (daily, monthly, annual) work reports, technical (archaeological, conservation, architectural) sketches and analyses, circulated research papers and unpublished biographical entries from the various Angkor conservators, between 1908 and 1974 (p. 389). These are available at the Library of the EFEO in Paris, and institutions in Cambodia such as the National Archives, the National Library, and the National Museum in Phnom Penh. This discussion allows us to focus on the role of individual actors as cultural brokers between the French and Cambodian scenes and projects; institutional collaboration networks and knowledge exchange between the French and Dutch colonial regimes over their most iconic archaeological sites, and explore the techniques behind the creation of Angkor Park, from the great visions, negotiated concepts and overall logistics down to the various small-scale, day-to-day practices as documented in supposedly ‘neutral and mere technical’ reports.

After Cambodia's independence in 1953, King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the throne in favour of his father, King Soramarith, in 1955. In chapter 10, ‘Performing grandeur — Re-enacting Angkor: Cambodia's Independence 1953–1970 under Norodom Sihanouk’, the author discusses the role of Sihanouk who led the country, as chef d’état, modelling himself on the ancestral kings of the Khmer Empire, especially the Great King Jayavarman VII. With the support of French scholars and researchers, especially his old friend, Bernard Phillipe Groslier, a son of George Groslier — the founder of the National Museum of Cambodia (the former Musée d'Albert Sarraut) and the School of Fine Arts (both created in 1920) — nominated as Délégué artistique, along with the Cambodian, Sum Hieng, to work on the Paris Exhibition in 1931 (p. 290), Sihanouk, came with his own agenda to re-enact Khmer culture in ancient times, to showcase the grandeur à l'Angkorienne (p. 393). Meanwhile, under Bernard Phillipe Groslier, appointed by the King, Conservation d'Angkor continued its mission to manage, research, reconstruct, re-establish, and restore the temples at Angkor.

Another Cambodian architect who helped then Prince Norodom Sihanouk to build the country during the Sangkum Reast Niyum time was Vann Molyvann. Educated in France, Molyvann was later nominated as the State Architect, to realise the many iconic public buildings in Cambodia. These included the Independence Monument, the National Stadium, the National Theatres, State and provincial universities. Molyvann's architectural designs for these were mostly based on and inspired by the Angkorian spiritual, symbolic, and monumental legacy, wooden pagodas and vernacular-traditional house architecture, interpreted with elements of ‘modern, Western civilization’ in the International Style (p. 394).

Prince Sihanouk continued to highlight Angkor in his cultural heritage diplomacy by organising many cultural performing arts programmes for state events (p. 229). For instance, the classical dance of the royal ballet troupe was performed for world leaders who visited Cambodia (pp. 218–25), and on all his state visits abroad. He also made films with the temples at Angkor as the background to showcase Cambodia's heritage and landscape (pp. 229–34).

During the Cambodian civil war, Angkor became an autonomous zone and a safe shelter for the local people to escape from the clashes between the Lon Nol government's army and the Khmer Rouge soldiers. In chapter 11, ‘Making Angkor global (1970–90): Hot and Cold War politics, competing inheritance claims and the invention of Angkor as heritage of humanity’, the author covers 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).

Just before the height of the civil war, in 1968, the UNESCO Courier had published a world map of the organisation's conservation missions. Three years later, UNESCO turned the exclamation ‘S.O.S. Angkor’ into the headline for a themed issue: ‘A Window to the World’, with a string of similarly dramatic slogans designed to highlight ‘threatened’ sites of cultural heritage, including Angkor, Venice, the Parthenon, and Borobudur (p. 244). When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, Angkor became a political ideology for Democratic Kampuchea's leaders. They forced the population to build canals and dams for irrigation systems to support the development of agriculture (pp. 258–67). But Angkor Wat and some important temples inside the Angkor area were still used for international guests, especially leaders, officials from communist countries and a few Western journalists, during their visits in Cambodia (pp. 268–72). When the Democratic Kampuchea regime was defeated, Angkor Wat became the international symbol of Cambodia. Many books and articles about its history after the genocide (pp. 273–317), written by Western authors, were illustrated with photographs or paintings of the temples at Angkor. During the 1980s, India, Japan and Poland became the main countries to support and help Cambodia with the research work and conservation of Angkor after years of war and neglect (pp. 279–96).

The twelfth chapter, ‘Angkor as UNESCO World Heritage: The decisive years 1987–1993’, discusses the international support that helped Cambodia to get Angkor listed as a World Heritage Site. Finally, after many meetings, especially after King Norodom Sihanouk's appeal for help, and the assistance of France, Japan and other countries, Angkor was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in danger, in 1992 (pp. 323–58).

The conclusion to the second volume summarises all the main points in this book. The epilogue presents information on Angkor since it was declared a World Heritage Site, the creation of the National Authority of APSARA, the programme of management and preservation in Angkor, and joint efforts between the Cambodian government and international institutions to safeguard and restore the temples at Angkor from 1993 until the present day.

Summing up, Michael Falser's two-volume study of Angkor Wat is so important that we should use it for further research because the author has combined all relevant information on the history and chronology of the research at Angkor since the late nineteenth century. He also describes how the French ‘translated’ Cambodian culture and civilisation, alongside that of their other colonies during the ‘Exhibitions’, from the first plaster cast in 1860s until the Angkor Wat replica during the Paris Exhibition in 1931. For Cambodia, the French-directed Conservation d'Angkor and the creation of the EFEO in the early twentieth century transformed Angkor from a regional religious site into a world-famous monument. Throughout, Falser ensures that the history of Angkor's conservation in Europe is contextualised against the history of Cambodia, especially during the Khmer Empire.

Last but not least, the Cambodian people themselves have also made efforts to preserve and promote Angkor as the icon of their nation through the ages. Although the Khmer Empire collapsed, Angkor was never abandoned, as the French presented it. Indeed Angkor Wat became the symbol of the country which can be seen on the flag, coins and other objects that have represented Cambodia (since the reign of King Ang Duong, from the mid-nineteenth century) and it remains the heart and soul of Cambodia's cultural heritage.