It’s always interesting to look back in time and the experience of the first western visitors to the great monuments of Angkor and how they shared that with the world. A while back I posted an intro to Francis Garnier’s expedition in the late 1800s which is among the earliest detailed records of temples in Angkor which include the writings of Zhao Daguan, the Chinese diplomat who visited in the 13th century, and anecdotal reports left by Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese missionaries of the 16-17th century, and the journey of Henri Mahout. This time, we look back a little after those times when Angkor, now under the French protectorate and released from Siam, was entering its great era of conservatorship and restoration, while also opening to visitors and becoming known to people around the world.
Here, are some excerpts from the fabulous publication, The Illustrated London News which was exactly what the name implied and ran from 1842 until 2003. In at least a few of their volumes they mention Angkor mostly with brief book reviews and the highlights are those of the journeys of Loti and Beerski. The great conservator of Angkor in the early 1900s, Henri Marchal, is also quoted in one chapter.
The Illustrated London News Vol 143, 1913 – They provide a review of the 1913 publication “Siam” with the author visiting Bayon Temple, “The Ruins of the City of Angkor the Great: Before the Temple of Bayon“
“We reach a shapeless mass of rocks, a kind of mountain above which the fig-trees of ruins spread their large green parasols. And this is Bayon. These rocks were builded long ago by the hand of man; they are factitious; they are the remains of one of the most prodigious temples of the world. The destruction is bewildering…. The temple, of which the scarcely recognisable ruins are before me, represents the earliest conception, crude and savagely immense, of a people apart, without analogue in the world, and without neighbours: the Khmer detached branch of the great Aryan race, which planted itself here as if by chance, and grew and developed far from the parent stem, separated from the rest of the world by immense expanses of forest and marshland. About the ninth century this sanctuary, ruder and more enormous, was in the plentitude of its glory.”
From “Siam” by Piere Loti (Translated by W. P. Baines). Photograph by P. A. Thompsom reproduced courtesy of the publishers, Messrs T. Werner Laurse Ltd.
The Illustrated London News Volume 159, 1921 – features a series of photographs with introductory headlines of “RECLAIMED FROM THE JUNGLE: THE “VERSAILLES” OF CAMBODIA” and “REVEALED AFTER AGES OF OBLIVION: WONDROUS KHMER SCULPTURE.”. It features some introductory passages along with the images
Some of the most wonderful architecture and sculpture in the world is to be found at Angkor, the ancient capital of Cambodia, that part of French Indo China which lies south east of Siam. Cambodia has been a protectorate of France, with a native King, since 1863, but it was only in 1907 that the district containing the great Angkor ruins was handed over to Cambodia by Siam, in exchange for other territory. Up to that date the magnificent monuments of the Angkor group, which date from medieval times (about 900 to 1200 A.D.), had long been allowed to fall into decay and had become overgrown with jungle of vegetation, whose strong and spreading roots, wing rapidly in that humid climate, had disintegrated the masonry and caused a good deal of it to collapse.
By the efforts of the French School of the Far East, under the control of the Academy, this strangling overgrowth has been cleared away and the splendid ruins revealed and restored. A replica of the central tower of the great Temple of Angkor Vat, the best preserved of the ancient buildings, has been erected at Marseilles for next year’s French Colonial Exhibition.
The recent researches of French archaeologists at having largely superseded existing works on the subject, written some forty years ago. A later book, of great descriptive charm, was Pierre Loti’s “Pelerin d’Angkor.” published in 1912. Writing in “L’Illustration.” our Paris contemporary, M. H. Marchal, our Curator of the Angkor Group, says: “Assyrian and Egyptian bas-reliefs have. their counterpart in the bas-reliefs of the Khmer temples.”
And yet how ignorant people are of these things! Why this gap, one might ask, in the history of art, when we know all about the Far East as regards India, China, and Japan?
One can give the following reasons: (1) The discovery of the Angkor ruins was comparatively recent; (2) Cambodia lies outside the great steamship routes, (3) Up to 1907, these monuments were Siamese.
The time has come to place Khmer art in the rank which it deserves. The examples found in these latest clearings show that Khmer sculpture has an original and intrinsic beauty comparable to any other in the world.”
M. Marchal suggests that, as the journey to Angkor is so long and costly, representative examples of Khmer art should be exhibited in Paris.
The Illustrated London News Volume 162, 1923 – the author, M. Jeannerat de Beerski who visited Angkor in 1919, waxes-lyrical with a romantic overview of Angkor Thom’s highlights and three beautiful drawings, one noting the likeness of Khmer playing polo as seen on the Elephants Terrace, another of the causeway into Angkor Thom (see below), and other small picture of a battle scene from the bas-reliefs on the Bayon.
As the guide has it, with more reason than many of his fellows, “the genii built this temple, the Bayon, and over it erected many towers with many heads fashioned to their image… at night, when men, animals, insects and trees are asleep, when the water is as black as ink, when the sky is not speckled with stars, they wake, and the monstorous mouths speak… “
The reference to “Ambassadors’ Palaces” (the north and south Khleangs?) is interesting and more on that in a future post. The description of entering Angkor Thom is also interesting for several reasons, including a mention of the villages existing inside Angkor Thom which coincides with other reports, and the name given to the north gate
Past the first defence of the city and over a hundred yards the Northern Gate, one of five, the Gate of the Spirit Nok, a four-headed titan surmounting it. “On either side extends the wall built with laterite, eclosing the city in a vast square. ……. Within its chaos, humanised by two little villages, paltry enough, but suggestive, “They give us a glimpse of what Angkor Thom looked like, for, if the genius of the race is no more, it’s ancient habits have been left almost free from time’s defacement. The temples were magnificent…. the nobles’ palaces were no doubt rich and gorgeous; but the huimble dwellings were certainly built at hazard, and in the lanes and alleyways of poor quaters the scene was en grand what is now found en petit in the aforsaid hamlets.”
Pierre Jeannerat de Beerski is the author of the 1923 publication Angkor Ruins in Cambodia.
Also in Volume 162 is an article by a French official and his meeting with a Khmer student on her way to becoming a dancer for the Royal Ballet Corp which I’ll post in full here as it is such a wonderful story.