With the fervor of a saint,
I have taken it upon myself to tell the world
of the beauties of the kingdom of Cambodia
and the virtues of the Khmer people.

Thus I pay my debt of gratitude for their warm hospitality.

The opening lines of Roland Meyer’s epic tale of Cambodia: Saramani

Article by Kent Davis

Roland Meyer, self portrait, circa 1909

At the end of the 19th century, a young French boy dreamt of finding a tropical paradise. Books about Pacific island adventures and the discovery of lost cities in the dense jungles of Southeast Asia fueled his imagination. Soon, the urge to travel was irresistible but what set this young man apart from thousands of others is that he shared his stories.

Roland Théodore Emile Meyer was born in Moscow on July 10, 1889. His parents moved to Paris where, after his education, he enrolled in the Indochinese colonial service in 1908 at the age of 19.

Meyer first served for three months in Saigon as a cabinet aide to Governor-General Paul Beau in Saigon. Upon moving to Cambodia in 1909 Meyer’s life changed forever as he immersed himself in the history, language and lifestyle of the modern descendants of the ancient Khmers.

Unlike other colonials, Meyer chose to assimilate with the indigenous culture surrounding him, learning the local language, customs, religion and even setting up his home among the natives outside the French quarter of the town. Meyer was a living example of a visitor who “went native”, much to the surprise of some of his fellow colonials. In 1912, Meyer published Cours de cambodgien, the first book to teach the Khmer language to Francophones.

Cambodian Dancers by George Groslier, 2010 edition.

With Phnom Penh still a small town, Meyer soon met others who admired and respected the legacy of the great civilization that surrounded them. His small circle of friends, many of whom were founding members of The Angkor Society, came to shape the way the world sees Cambodia. They included Jean Commaille, the first conservator of the Angkor site; Henri Marchal, the second Angkor conservator who took over Commaille’s duties when he was murdered by robbers; and Charles Gravelle, director of the country’s branch of the Bank of Indochina and an avid writer himself – all men whose influence is still with us today.

Another associate embarking on a stellar career in Cambodia was George Groslier, an artist and writer two years older than Meyer, who arrived in Phnom Penh in 1910 on an educational assignment. As it turned out, both young men were captivated by a living, breathing vestige of the ancient Khmers; the sacred Cambodian dancers who lived, sequestered, in the royal palace as part of the king’s harem.

On returning to France in 1913, Groslier published Danseuses Cambodgiennes, Anciennes et Modernes, the first formal study of the sacred artistic tradition. Meyer’s experience and vision of the dance and dancers, however, went even deeper and was far more intimate.

Meyer told of a seemingly forbidden romance between East and West — between a royal dancer in the king’s harem named Saramani, and a French boy who came to Indochina to seek his destiny. The boy, like Meyer himself, “went native” and adopted the Khmer name Komlah, which means bachelor.  Through Saramani and her family, Meyer (often writing as Komlah) relates a detailed picture of love and life  in colonial Cambodia.

For a decade, Meyer recorded his notes in his personal diaries, shaping a tale in which it’s difficult to tell fact from fiction.

Saramani - Cambodian Dancer by Roland Meyer, 1919.

In 1919 Meyer published Saramani, Danseuse Khmèr in Saigon. His epic account of Cambodia stretched from the primeval formation of the land tens of millions of years ago, to the peak of the Khmer civilization at Angkor Wat, ending in the modern colonial capital of Phnom Penh. He records the lives of all he encounters on Cambodian soil; rice farmers, fishermen, immigrants, colonials, dancing girls, poor peasants, wealthy merchants, royal servants and even kings.

Saramani title page - 1919

Saramani grew to a massive work of more than 180,000 words exploring many controversial events in the guise of “fiction”. Meyer’s views of colonial lust, capitalistic greed and royal decadence were upsetting to some, to say the least. The same year of its release he transferred to Laos, perhaps out of necessity to escape local consequences…or perhaps to escape romantic entanglements that may have inspired some of the scenes throughout the book.

Was Saramani a real person? Were the book’s fantastic events based on reality or imagination?

Meyer never revealed this but his exceptional accuracy, attention to detail and congruity with historical events implies that there is much more than fiction in his account.

Sketch of a Buddhist pagoda in Ken Svai, a community on a large island in the Mekong River near Phnom Penh. By Roland Meyer, circa 1912.

Meyer worked with the French civil service until retirement. Coinciding with the French Colonial Exposition of 1931 in Paris he published two more books, Komlah, visions of Asia and French Indo-China. Laos. While Komlah relates many more personal impressions in Indochina the second title is a rather dry analysis of the Laotian country.

In 1952 his friend M. Gerard published his final work, a collection of short essays titled Le propos du vieux colonial.

Sadly, like many great men of the French colonial era, Meyer’s trail vanishes late in life. I don’t know where he died, where he is buried, if he has any descendants or what became of his archives. A sad loss to Cambodian, French and literary history.

If any readers have additional information please contact me kentdavis at gmail dot com.

Bangkok, Thailand – In 1052 AD, ancient Khmer priests carved a sandstone monolith with an extraordinary royal history at the temple of Sdok Kok Thom. By the 14th century, however, war and political upheaval caused the collapse of the once-might Khmers, and this story was lost to the world for centuries. As a reporter for the Washington Post in 1979, John Burgess was covering the Cambodian refugee crisis when he first entered this obscure temple.

His tenacious pursuit of its historical mystery are now available in his new book, “Stories in Stone - The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription & the Enigma of Khmer History.”

"Stories in Stone - The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription & the Enigma of Khmer History" - 2010 - Riverbooks

Stories in Stone – The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription

The founding of an empire, the settling of frontier lands, a king’s gifting of gold pitchers and black-eared stallions to a Brahmin priest – these and other remarkable stories come down to us in the Sdok Kok Thom Inscription, one of the world’s most important ancient testaments.

Recovered at a ruined temple in Thailand close to the Cambodian border, the 340-line chronicle unlocks the early history of the Khmer Empire. Yet temple and text have remained little known outside expert circles.

In this full and highly readable account, former Washington Post correspondent John Burgess traces the impact of the great inscription, which was carved onto a sandstone monolith around 1052 AD, abandoned to the wild for centuries, then decoded by French colonialists. He relates the temple’s surprise emergence in 1979 as a haven for Cambodian refugees and resistance fighters during the war in their homeland. Today Sdok Kok Thom is again at peace, its mission of preserving history accomplished.

The detailed book includes photographs of the temple, past and present, Refugee Camp 007 and its refugees and militias; extracts from previously unpublished letters of French savant Étienne Aymonier, the inscription’s first translator, written during his months of travels around Cambodia in 1882-1885; a revised English translation of the full inscription by the University of Hawaii linguists Chhany Sak-Humphry and Philip N. Jenner; a glossary of terms; and suggested further readings.

‘While reporting on Cambodians fleeing war and revolution in 1979, John Burgess came across an ancient Khmer temple hidden in the bush… 30 years later he returned to that temple to decipher its history. The result is this lovely book that tells the story of the temple and the larger Angkor Empire leavened with Burgess’ own odyssey to recover that history.’

Elizabeth Becker
Author of When the War was Over

About the Author

John Burgess worked at the Washington Post for 28 years, most recently as Deputy Foreign Editor in charge of Europe, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. John’s career as a journalist began in Southeast Asia and he later served as Tokyo bureau chief for The Post in 1984-87. Since retiring he has been able to devote more time to his passion for historical study, with a month of research in Thailand and Cambodia allowing him to complete his work on the mysteries of Sdok Kok Thom.

For the latest information please visit the Stories in Stone website.

John Burgess at Sdok Kok Thom

Availability

Available now from Riverbooks in Bangkok

Available for advance order on Amazon in the USA

Khmer culture is featured on WHYY TV's "Art of Life" series.

Extended  Interview with Rorng Sorn

The WHYY website now features an extended interview with Rorng Sorn, who was born in rural Cambodia in 1968. In the interview, Rorng Sorn recounts the difficult road from the countryside of Cambodia to the urban streets of Philadelphia.

Rorng Sorn interviewed on WHYY TV

Despite the challenges, Rorng Sorn achieved the education she so desired, earning a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In return, she serves her community through her role as Executive Director of the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia.

A portrait of Rorng Sorn's family before the war.

In her inspiring interview, Rorng Sorn describes her personal experience of what life was like for her family during the Khmer Rouge and the devastation that followed. Most important, she talks about how she became a leader in Philadelphia’s Khmer community so she could contribute to preserving her culture.

Links

The Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia

WHYY Art of Life features on Cambodian culture

Cambodian Dancer Chamoeun Yin – Philadelphia Folklore Project

Khmer Art Gallery – Philadelphia

In the second month of the bingshen 丙申 year of the Yuanzhen 元貞 reign of the Yuan 元 dynasty [1296], a Chinese delegation representing the recently-crowned emperor Temür 鐵穆耳 (Chengzong 成宗; r. 1294-1307) set sail from the southern coastal city of Mingzhou 明州, headed for Cambodia.

We cannot be entirely sure of the delegation’s objective, nor of the role that was expected to be played by a young member of the mission named Zhou Daguan 周達觀.

Portrait of Emperor Temur Khan who ruled from 1294–1307. Wikipedia image.

What we do know is that Zhou’s account, written some time after the eleven months he spent in the capital Yasodharapura (now known as Angkor Thom) in 1296-97 and titled Zhenla fengtu ji 真臘風土記 [Account of the Customs and Geography of Cambodia], is the only surviving eyewitness account of the civilisation of Angkor. The work then, offers a unique glimpse of that world at the end of the thirteenth century, just as its golden age was beginning to draw to a close.

"A Record of Cambodia: Its Land and its People" by Zhou Daguan. Translated by Peter Harris.

Given the importance of Zhou’s account, it seems astonishing that this slim volume, A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People, translated with an introduction and copious notes by Peter Harris, represents the first ever translation of the work into English directly from the classical Chinese, but this is indeed the case.

Previous English renditions (the latest reprint of which appeared in 2007) have been based solely on Paul Pelliot’s (1878-1945) masterful French version of the work, Mémoires sur les Coutumes du Cambodge of 1902, and inevitably suffer from being too far removed from the original text. Peter Harris, by contrast, is able to draw not only on Pelliot’s pioneering study (and revised version with incomplete notes, posthumously published in 1951), but also on the ground-breaking scholarship of Xia Nai 夏鼐, whose annotated edition of Zhou’s text, Zhenla fengtu ji jiaozhu 真臘風土記校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000) includes variants from thirteen editions. There is also a tremendous amount of new linguistic material in the present edition, with Harris making use of important studies by Michael Vickery, Bernhard Karlgren, Edwin G. Pulleyblank and others.

The impeccable scholarship of this study, combined with the accuracy of Harris’ fluent translation, make this version certain now to supersede that of Pelliot as the standard edition of Zhou’s account in any Western language.

The Record of Cambodia as it exists today is divided into 40 sections, but Harris notes that the present order suggests that they may at some point have been rearranged (17). Indeed, parts of the text ‘show clear signs of having been cut or mutilated’ (28), and Harris cites the seventeenth-century bibliophile Qian Zeng 錢曾 (1629–1700?), who claimed that the text on which presently-existing editions are based was ‘muddled and jumbled up, six or seven tenths of it missing, barely constituting a book at all’ (29).

As it stands it contains quite thorough descriptions of the architecture and customs at court, interesting details concerning such matters as sumptuary restrictions on dress, and more cursory observations on law, death, agriculture, sex, prostitution, slaves, language, trade, flora, animals, liquor, transport and various other topics. Harris renders Zhou’s text into accurate but free-flowing English, occasionally altering the sense of a word (the translation of the term fan 番 as ‘local’ is one example Harris himself signposts, 31-2), but always acknowledging where this has been done.

Wenzhou, China

Of Zhou Daguan himself we know almost nothing, other than that he was a native of Wenzhou 溫州, but one of the strengths of this book is Harris’ skilful evocation of the ‘kind of frontier spirit’ (5) that existed in thirteenth-century Wenzhou and the other coastal cities that helped to connect southeast China to Asia and the wider world.

These were the ports from which large quantities of raw and manufactured goods, including lacquer, celadon, ceramics, silks, cinnabar, paper, musk, pewter and glass departed daily, and the people with whom Zhou grew up, we are told, were ‘traders, merchants and sailors, broad-minded, outward-looking [and] well-versed in the affairs of the world…’ (10).

As historians increasingly seek to highlight the roles of Asian societies in the early modern world economy, and become ever more aware of the ways in which the emerging discipline of global history can enhance our understanding of early modern cultures, the publication of this new edition of Zhou Daguan’s account of Cambodia seems extremely timely. Indeed, the Yasodharapura Zhou describes is a key site of global interaction, with immigrant Siamese who, unlike the locals, engage in silk production and are competent tailors (76), geese recently introduced from China (73), and a range of Chinese goods available for sale, including paper, combs, needles, mats and much more (71). Intriguingly, Zhou also tells us that ‘although cloth is woven domestically, it also comes from Siam and Champa. Cloth from the Western Seas 西洋 is often regarded as the best because it is so well-made and refined” (50). *

If we know little about its author, then we know even less about the publication history of the Zhenla fengtu ji itself, save that the book must have been circulating in some form by at least 1312, as it is referred to in Wu Qiuyan’s 吾邱衍 Zhusushan fang ji 竹素山房集, published in that year (41 n.17).

Zhou’s account was eventually included in the monumental Siku quanshu 四庫全書 collection initiated by the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (Gaozong 高宗; r. 1736-96) in 1772, but the fact remains that no official record of the mission to Cambodia exists in any of the traditional Chinese sources. That omission links Zhou (and Harris) to another traveller of the Yuan era, Marco Polo, whose A Description of the World, a far lengthier but also far more problematic source of the history of the Yuan world, was revised and edited by Harris in a new edition published in 2008. **

Marco Polo, 1254-1324

In contrast to Polo, Harris notes, Zhou Daguan ‘gives us the impression he can be relied upon’ (2), and ‘seems to be scrupulous about indicating whether he is reporting something first- or second-hand’ (23). This is particularly evident in the section entitled ‘The Three Doctrines,’ in which Zhou describes details such as dress, but admits ignorance in other respects (‘I don’t know what the source of their beliefs is, 53).

The period during which Zhou visited Cambodia at the very end of the thirteenth century marks something of a turning point in the history of Angkor civilisation. It would be over a century before Yasodharapura was finally sacked by Siamese troops and the capital moved to the south of the country, but it is clear from what little we know that the massive construction projects that characterised the reigns of Angkor’s thirteenth-century rulers were missing from the following century (14-17). Zhou notes at one point that ‘as a result of repeated wars with the Siamese the land [surrounding the capital] has been completely laid to waste’ (79), an offhand remark that reads quite portentously to those of us who know how the story ends.

Harris notes that scholars such as Michael Vickery warn against assigning too much authority to Chinese and Sanskrit sources when assessing Angkor civilisation, and he judiciously draws attention to Zhou’s natural prejudices and assumptions (27). One obvious deficiency in the text (apart from its incompleteness) is that not a single Cambodian is referred to by name, and we simply know far too little about the publication history of the account to be able to speculate as to whether these were subsequently removed, or indeed, ever there at all.

But I would argue that – and as an historian of China I am quite prepared to declare my bias here – while the book provides just a glimpse of late-thirteenth century Angkor, it can tell us quite a lot more about China under Yuan rule, a period that as it stands is not particularly well served in terms of traditional source material. The fact that the people of Cambodia do not know how to make soy sauce (75) is probably of very little interest to an historian of Angkor, but the fact that a young Chinese deemed this worthy of note does at least tell us something, however trivial, about culinary practice under the Yuan.

More usefully perhaps, the observations Zhou makes regarding interregional trade, or his advice that ‘when a Chinese goes to this country, the first thing he must do is take in a woman, partly with a view to profiting from her trading abilities’ (70), can contribute much to our understanding of Chinese migration history.

Now brought back to life in Peter Harris’ outstanding new English edition, Zhou’s Record of Cambodia will no doubt find its way into the hands of a new generation of historians and anthropologists, but it should also appeal more generally to anyone interested in a fascinating civilisation about which we know so little.

* ‘Cloth from the Western Seas’ 西洋 is probably a reference to buckram from India, althoughit may also have come from somewhere on the Malaysian peninsular. Some commentators prefer to read the 布 here as 絲布 (i.e. silk). See Xia ed., Zhenla fengtu ji jiaozhu, pp. 87-88.

** The Travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). This new edition was recently reviewed in the pages of this journal by Duncan Campbell.

© Copyright 2010 New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies (NZJAS). This review originally appeared in the NZJAS journal and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor.

About the Reviewer

Dr. Stephen McDowall, is a Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Warwick.

His research interests include late-imperial Chinese history and literature, the literature of travel, China in the Western imagination, early modern global connections and Ming material & visual culture.  His new book, Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late-Ming Hatchet and Chisel (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), examines the fascinating and complex world of late-Ming literati through an analysis of the youji 游記 [travel account] genre.

At the ancient Khmer temple of Angkor Wat, an American artist discovered a special peace that she carried throughout her life…and beyond.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

By STEPHEN GOLDFARB, Alabama Heritage Magazine

IN 1926 LUCILLE SINCLAIR DOUGLASS (1878-1935) visited the ancient Cambodian ruins at Angkor for the first time. That December the forty-eight-year-old artist wrote to her friend Leona Caldwell of her first impressions of this far-off and exotic place:

“Angkor is one of the really great experiences of my life-a more intellectual than emotional experience — not that it left me cold, quite the contrary — but it was more of an uplift — an inspiration.

“Our stay — longer than most tourists — was all too short — Angkor Wat alone requires years of study — living with understanding — a few days seems but a mockery.

“I have never had a place affect me so peculiarly. . . . I shall go back for a time as long as I can stand it and do further study on the spot.

“You see the ruins are set in the midst of the jungle — which held them in its clutches for so many centuries that it still seems jealous of them.”

Douglass described the Angkor climate as “the most trying [that] I have ever encountered … [with its] great humidity and high temperatures — an oppressive heaviness which brought all the moisture to the surface [of one's skin] and left you exhausted with the slightest effort.” And this complaint comes from a woman who grew up in central Alabama.

Douglass rendered Angkor Wat's western entrance in 1927 in this 10 7/8" x 14 1/2" etching. Courtesy US Library of Congress.

But Douglass did return the very next year.

She spent five months there with the purpose of rendering the temples and other ruins in etchings, which could capture their grandeur and intricacy in a way that photography could not. These etchings were first exhibited in April 1928 in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the French ambassador, and then at the French Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931. The story of just how Douglass made her way from the Black Belt of Alabama to the jungles of Cambodia is one of equal parts natural talent, hard work, and fortuitous circumstances.

LUCILLE DOUGLASS WAS BORN ON NOVEMBER 4, 1878, in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of Walton Eugene Douglass (a Civil War veteran) and Mary Sinclair (Mollie) Douglass. She grew up in a large house but in the genteel poverty that characterized so much of the nineteenth-century, postbellum South.

Little is known about Douglass’s early years, except that she was a sickly child who spent a great deal of time reading, favoring books about travels to distant and exotic lands. In interviews she gave after gaining a measure of fame, Douglass singled out the all-but-forgotten travel stories of Hezekiah Butterworth — whose seventeen volumes of Zig-Zag Journeys enjoyed considerable popularity among young readers near the end of the nineteenth century — as having stimulated her yearning for adventure.

Lucille Douglass - 1896. Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Leona Caldwell Collection.

Douglass received her A.B. (baccalaureate degree) in 1895 at the age of seventeen at Alabama Conference Female College, a forerunner of Huntingdon College, where her mother taught. Unfortunately, records do not survive to describe Douglass’s course of study, though it seems safe to assume that she continued to receive art training from her mother, a practice begun when Douglass was a child.

In 1899 Douglass moved to Birmingham, where she made a living as both an artist and an art teacher. She occupied a studio in the old Watts Building between 1901 and 1908. The 1907 city directory listed her as a “china painter.”

Years later Douglass made reference to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of roses that she painted on teacups and other crockery. The sale of this china, as well as hand-painted place cards, financed her future art training. In 1908 she banded with fellow artists Delia Dryer, Hannah Elliot, Carrie Hill, and four other female artists as founding members of the Birmingham Art Club.

Lucille Douglass in her studio with Hannah Elliot, 1907. Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Hill Ferguson Collection.

Even before Douglass left for Europe in 1909, she sought art training beyond what was available in Birmingham. For several summers she attended the Art Students League in New York City, though there is no record with whom she studied. Between the years 1909 and 1912, she received art training in Europe.

In Paris she studied with Lucien Simon and René Menard. Of greater importance was the time she spent with Alexander Robinson. With his classes she traveled all over Europe-Holland, Spain, and Italy-and North Africa and became his assistant and an art teacher. After her first year with Robinson, she asked him for a frank evaluation of her work; his reply was indeed frank: “You have less talent than many, but you will go farther than the rest because once you undertake a thing you see it through.”

Lucille Douglass in Paris, 1911. Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Hill Ferguson Collection.

A collection of her drawings and pastel sketches held in the Birmingham Museum of Art reflect her traditional art training, which emphasized the anatomically correct rendering of the human figure, and depict the local folkways of the places she visited. With two exhibits of her paintings displayed in Paris in 1911, she was on her way to establishing herself as an artist.

By 1913 Douglass had returned from Europe. She spent that summer with artist Isabelle Percy (who married George P. West in 1916), painting in the northern part of Percy’s home state of California.

World War I ended any further hopes of European travel and training and proved a trying time. City directories show that she kept a residence and studio in Birmingham from 1915 to 1917. Some sources claim that she took training as a nurse and worked with soldiers who were “shell shocked,” and that she herself had some kind of mental breakdown, for which she spent time recovering in Texas and California.

Her life took a fresh turn in 1920, when the forty-two-year-old Douglass accepted a position with the Methodist Missionary Society. She was employed to oversee a workshop in Shanghai in which Chinese women hand-colored an early form of photographic slide used by speakers to publicize the missionary work of the society. The job did not absorb all of her time and energy apparently, for she became first a writer and then associate editor of the weekly English-language publication, Shanghai Times, a position she held until 1924. During these years she traveled extensively in China as a member of the press. These trips were often dangerous, as China was in the midst of revolution and civil war.

While in China, Douglass became close friends with two female writers whose books she would eventually illustrate. Florence Wheelock Ayscough was born in Shanghai to missionary parents and educated in New England. She became a scholar of China and its literature, writing books about China and translating the works of early Chinese poets. Four of her books were illustrated by Douglass, the first three with ink drawings and the last with etchings.

Helen Churchill Candee

The second friend Douglass made in China was Helen Churchill Candee, who had, among other things, the distinction of surviving the 1912 sinking of the HMS Titanic. Roughly two decades apart in age, the two traveled together from November 1926 until January 1927.

This journey led them through the Far East-first to Indochina, then to Siam, and on to Java and BaIi. This adventure resulted in the 1927 publication of Candee’s book, New Journeys In Old Asia, for which Douglass executed twenty-one etchings. It was also on this journey that Douglass first visited Angkor. Candee had been there before and had published the book Angkor the Magnificent in 1924.

Angkor was the seat of the ancient Khmer empire from the ninth to the fifteenth century and was abandoned, only to be rediscovered in the 186Os by French explorers after Cambodia became part of the French overseas empire. Angkor — best known for the two complexes, Angkor Wat and the larger Angkor Thom — was the center of what is considered the most prosperous and sophisticated civilization in the history of Southeast Asia.

Angkor was not only a religious center but also the administrative center of the Khmer empire, with a vast system of reservoirs, canals, and moats-the basis of an extensive irrigation system for agriculture. Eventually the Khmers were overthrown, and the jungle reclaimed Angkor, though the ruins remained a pilgrimage site for Buddhists.

Etching of the Bayon rendered by Lucille Douglas in 1927, measuring 15 9/16" X 11 13/16". Courtesy Library of Congress.

Douglass saw more in Angkor than simply an exotic artistic subject. She gave detailed lectures on Angkor in both the United States and Europe. She also spoke on Angkor at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London, the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London), and at Oxford University, as well as many less august bodies. On January 10, 1930, she gave a talk at the National Geographic Society entitled “Angkor — A Royal Passion.” The brochure announcing the lecture gave the following description:

Knowledge of present conditions at the site of the ancient Cambodian metropolis will come to the Society through this interesting speaker, writer and artist, who will illustrate her talk with lantern slides, colored by herself, and motion pictures.

…In company with French archeologists Miss Douglass carefully examined the new excavations…. Her account will be authoritative, as well as entertaining.

For the last years of her life, Douglass made New York her home base, though she traveled frequently to Europe and occasionally visited Birmingham. From November 1928 until late spring of 1929, she was a faculty member of a “floating university.” On the ship President Wilson, Douglass taught art history, sketching, and painting to a hundred “boys and girls” of unspecified age as the ship sailed around the world.

An article in the November 6, 1928, New York Evening Post referred to Douglass as “one of America’s best known painters and etchers” and stated that the ship’s itinerary would include such exotic places as Siam, BaIi, Java, and Singapore, as well as “all the cities … on the more usual type of tour.”

In a letter to her friend, Leona Galdwell, Douglass wrote of her “floating university” experience: “I am glad … to have had the experience, though I should not care to repeat it.”

Lucille Douglas poses for a portrait in North Africa, date unknown. Courtesy Birminham Public Library Archives.

In a 1933 interview she gave to the New York World Telegram, a fifty-five-year-old Douglass reflected over her life of art and adventure:

I have made my life as I wanted it. I have given up marriage and home ties, because I know they would not be possible with my career. I am sorry not to have a home, but one must not be greedy. I have planned my life just as it is, and I am content with it.

After an illness that lasted several months Douglass died on September 26, 1935, in the home of a friend in Andover, Massachusetts.

Her remains were cremated and, in the following year, flown to Angkor where they were spread around what was described as “a magnificent mango tree.”

Under a spreading mango tree
(Encircling continuity)
There lies for all eternity
What particles survive the flame
Of one who now is but a name.

Civilizations long forgot
Left beauty in old Angkor Vat
An artist loved it well and true:
In paint and print she saved the view.
When she was called, she had one thought:
That was to lie in Angkor Vat.

What doth her Spirit — Who shall say
Where beauty reigns both night and day?
Free as air she is to roam.
With spreading mango tree for home.

Angkor Wat lotus pond sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Lucille’s Artistic Legacy

In the five years following her death there were three exhibits of Douglass’s works in New York galleries and a fourth after World War II in her adopted hometown of Birmingham.

Lucille Douglass pastel created between 1909 and 1913. Courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art. Gift of the estate of Leona Templeton Caldwell.

In January 1951 the Birmingham Historical Society and the Birmingham Art Club sponsored a retrospective of her works at the Birmingham Public Library, which brought pieces owned by museums together with those held by local collectors.

However, very little was written on Douglass over the next half-century, nor was her art exhibited. This was due no doubt to the triumph of abstraction and other modernist movements in art that made the works of Lucille Douglass seem old-fashioned.

Fortunately, there has been a renewed appreciation for her art in recent years, fueled by the current interest in female artists. The publication of Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham, 1890-1950 (Birmingham Historical Society, 2004) by Vicki Leigh Ingham, which devotes an entire chapter to Lucille Douglass, is likely to be the beginning of a revival of interest in this accomplished artist and world traveler.”

About the Author

Stephen J. Goldfarb holds a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology from Case Western Reserve University. In 2007-2008, he curated the exhibit entitled “Howard Cook: Drawings of Alabama” for the Mobile Museum of Art and at the Huntsville Museum of Art.

Goldfarb has written articles previously for Alabama Heritage on artists Marian Acker Macpherson and Lucille Douglass. He now serves Alabama Heritage Quarterly History Magazine as a contributing editor for the “Reading the Southern Past” column. No stranger to Southern reading tastes, Goldfarb retired from the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library in 2003. He has reviewed books for both newspapers and scholarly journals.

© Copyright 2006 University of Alabama – This article previously appeared in Alabama Heritage magazine (Summer 2006, Issue 81) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and the University of Alabama.

An apsara or celestial dancer in classic Southeast Asian art

Between the covers of countless books lurks a mystical creature with multiple masks…

Submissive and beautiful.

Cunning and domineering.

Shy virgin. Adventurous lover.

She is the Asian woman…

Or rather what passes for her in fiction.

Author and Jakarta Post reporter Sara Veal lifts the veil on the inscrutable images.

* * *

For thousands of years, ever since the West encountered the East, an exotic vision of the Asian woman has inhabited Western literature, symbolizing the allure, danger and mystery of the unknown.

“In the Western mind, the fictional image of the ‘Asian woman’ is the most imagined, misunderstood and ‘fetishized’,” says Sheridan Prasso, author of The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (2006), adding this ultra-feminine exoticism has been juxtaposed onto the Asian male, “effectively wiping out his masculinity in Western culture”.

Academic Elaine Kim writes in a similar vein, observing “the inscription in American popular culture of Asian men as sexless automatons is complemented by the popular view of Asian women as only sexual beings, which helps explain … the enormous demand for X-rated films featuring Asian women in bondage, the demand for ‘Oriental’ bathhouse workers in US cities, and the booming business in mail-order marriages”.

The Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates

Such sexual overtones are evident in the dichotomy of the Asian woman in literature. Whether Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipina, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Khmer, Laotian, Korean or Burmese, the East and Southeast Asian woman is either Dragon Lady – seductive, dominant – or Geisha Girl – subservient, ornamental. Between these two extremes lie permutations like China Doll, Lotus Flower, Prostitute and Mail-order Bride, all with sexual connotations.

The term Dragon Lady is thought to have originated in American cartoonist Milton Caniff’s 1930s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and since then applied repeatedly to powerful Asian woman such as Soong May-ling, wife of former Taiwanese president Chiang Kai-Shek, and the no-nonsense dominatrix Ling Woo (played by Lucy Liu) in television’s Ally McBeal.

Madame Butterfly

The Geisha Girl of Western popular imagination has its roots in the eponymous heroine of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, a delicate creature who kills herself when abandoned by her American lover. Puccini’s play was likely based on novelist Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, in which the “hero” fails to understand or master the geisha of the title. Both versions demonstrate the heroine’s otherness, but the opera strongly implies Western superiority over a submissive Asia.

Representing Asia is a common function of the Asian woman in colonial literature. Between 1900 and 1940, French novels on Southeast Asia were often named for their native female character, as in Roland Meyer’s Saramani, Danseuse Cambodgienne (Saramani, Cambodian Dancer).

Saramani, Cambodian Dancer by Roland Meyer - 1919.

In such novels, French scholar Patrick Laude observes, “the Frenchman’s contact with natives … often leads to his adoption of Asian culture and repudiating of Western culture” – the Asian women were at once “Asia herself” and “Asian Eves” tempting Western men to the other side.

An Asian Eve appears in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1924 short story The Letter, based on a true scandal in Kuala Lumpur, in which the wife of a headmaster shot a male friend. The victim, Geoff Hammond, had married a Chinese woman, which lost him favor with the expatriate community. Despite her importance to the plot, his wife lacks a direct voice and is simply referred to as “Mrs. Hammond”. She is described as neither beautiful nor young – evidently not a Geisha Girl, her cunning actions and desire for revenge situate her as a Dragon Lady.

However, the beauty and ultra-femininity of Asian woman is often at the fore of their exoticism, so much so that white female literary heroines sometimes had to resort to yellow-face to redress the balance. In Owen Hall’s 1896 play The Geisha, a Story of a Tea House, an Englishwoman, spurned by her soldier fiancé for a Japanese geisha, wins him back by donning a kimono and makeup to match.

The King and I

Men weren’t the only ones contributing to the Asian mystique. Anna Leonowens, a British governess who spent time in King Mongkut’s court in the 19th century, wrote two memoirs, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of Harem (1873), which condemned her former employer’s harem, ostensibly in support of feminism.

Yet in pointing out the harem’s evils, she imbued it with exoticism, alluding to “heavy curtains of silk and gold”, and infantilized and insulted the Thai women she meant to stand up for, describing them as having “childish minds” and the potential to be attractive “but for their ingeniously ugly mode of clipping the hair and blackening the teeth”. Her observations inspired the Hollywood hit The King and I, which remains officially banned in Thailand due to the offensive portrayal of the revered King Mongkut.

“Leonowens sets up an Orientalizing framework of the Thai woman as oppressed and overly sexualized – one that then plays out in post-Vietnam War fantasies of Thailand to be found in, for example, Michel Houellebecq’s 2001 book Platform,” says Rachel Harrison, head of the Southeast Asian department at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and co-author of the upcoming The Ambiguous Allure of the West and the Making of Thai Identities.

Do Thi Hai Yen in The Quiet American

Indeed, even as – and perhaps especially as – colonialism lost its grip on Asia in the mid-20th century, stereotypes of Asian women persisted and were eagerly lapped up by Western readers, with the Prostitute (with a heart of gold) in Richard Mason’s 1957 novel The World of Suzie Wong, and the Geisha Girl in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955).

In Greene’s novel, middle-aged British journalist Thomas Fowler and young American idealist Alden Pyle quietly tussle over the most beautiful girl in Saigon. The lovely and inscrutable Phuong is Saigon herself, caught between two colonial powers – the older, entrenched Europe and the radical America – waiting to see which will benefit her the most.

Around the same time, Asian women began to speak for themselves in Western literature, mainly through autobiography and history, suggesting that the best weapon against Orientalist fiction was well-articulated fact.

One of the earliest of such texts was Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), which proved so popular that the US State Department sent the author to 45 Asian locales between Tokyo and Karachi.

“I was sent,” Wong writes, “because those Asian audiences who had read translations of Fifth Chinese Daughter did not believe a female born to poor Chinese immigrants could gain a toehold among prejudiced Americans.”

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1975 memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, sought to present a nuanced account of 20th-century Chinese-Americans living in the US in the shadow of the Chinese revolution. However, reflecting ingrained, sweeping assumptions about Asian women, at least one reviewer found this ambiguity too perplexing.

“It’s hard to tell where her fantasies end and reality begins,” Michael Malloy wrote for the National Observer in 1976, confused by Kingston describing some Chinese women as aggressive and talkative and others as docile and silent.

Still, even these Asian women speaking for themselves may be responsible for perpetuating the Asian mystique, as their critics argue.

Kim suggests that Wong’s autobiography was “valued primarily as evidence that American racial minorities have only themselves to blame for their failure in American life”, an important view “during the Cold War period, when charges of race discrimination in the United States were circulating in developing countries that, having recently been freed from direct colonial rule, were questioning the value of American world leadership”.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Playwright Frank Chin, in his 1991 essay “Come all ye Asian American writers of the real and the fake”, claims Kingston and Amy Tan, who wrote The Joy Luck Club (1989), faked Chinese literature and history to further Western misconceptions about Asia.

Chin criticizes Tan for opening her novel with a fake Chinese fairytale about “a duck that wants to be a swan and a mother who dreams of her daughter being born in America, where she’ll grow up speaking perfect English and no one will laugh at her” and where a “woman’s worth is [not] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch”, and Kingston’s rewriting of Chinese folk heroine Fa Mulan “to the specs of the stereotype of the Chinese woman as a pathological white supremacist victimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civilization”.

He goes on to suggest that Kingston and Tan were only published because they were Christians: “… the only form of literature written by Chinese Americans that major publishers will publish (other than the cookbook) is autobiography”, and “… they all write to the specifications of the Christian stereotype of Asia being as opposite morally from the West as it is geographically”.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

“Self-Orientalization complies with existing stereotypes,” Harrison explains, “the Orientalized subject absorbs this dominant sense of self-identity and uses it as a way of marketing to the outside world, remaining within understandable and understood frames of reference.”

Perhaps due to a relative lack of self-Orientalizing/culture-counterfeiting, fellow Asian women writer Jung Chang has provoked less ire from her peers with Wild Swans (1991).

British citizen Jung Chang’s phenomenally well-received autobiographical novel spanned three generations of Chinese women in the 20th century, painting a vivid portrait of the period’s political and military turmoil, and was deemed by Tasmanian academic Kaz Ross to be a forerunner to the “faction” genre – “history told by fictional narrative means”.

Becoming Madame Mao

Continuing the factual crusade against stereotyping, Chinese-American Anchee Min’s novels focus on strong female figures. Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, is given a rounded portrayal in Becoming Madame Mao (1991), while Empress Orchid (2004) offers a sympathetic account of Empress Dowager Cixi, de facto ruler of the Mancu Qing Dynasty for 48 years between 1861 to her death in 1908, who has often been portrayed as a Dragon Lady in Western cinema.

Male Asian writers have also risen to challenge the Asian mystique. David Henry Hwang’s Tony-winning play M. Butterfly (1988), loosely based on the relationship between French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot and male Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu, subverts Puccini’s opera to tragicomic effect.

Speaking for Myself: An Anthology of Asian Women's Writings

Gallimard, based on Bouriscot, becomes taken with opera diva Song Liling, whom he idealizes as the perfect woman. “She”, however, is a man, and a Chinese spy to boot, and ruins the diplomat’s name and breaks his heart. “Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act,” Song informs his deluded lover, who shortly commits suicide, in a mirror of the original Butterfly.

Beyond Chinese dominance when it comes to East and Southeast Asians in Western literature, a wider range of female voices across Asia are beginning to be heard (or read) in Western press, such as in the recent, and aptly titled, Speaking for Myself: An Anthology of Asian Women’s Writings, which offers nuanced tales of the epic in the everyday, moving away from simple history and autobiography.

Such stories are needed to counter stereotypes that continue to crop up in popular Western literature, from the unseen Dragon Lady that is Mark Darcy’s Japanese ex-wife in Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996) to the Geisha Girl/Prostitute Chinese mistress in Tony Parson’s My Favorite Wife (2008), as well as the more overt Orientalization in Arthur Golden’s best-selling Memoirs of a Geisha (1997).

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

In a sign of the Asian woman being able to directly challenge her misrepresentation, Mineko Iwasaki, who reportedly inspired the memorable geisha, revealed in an interview with Prasso her distaste for the novel’s “misinterpretation” of her “flower and willow world”.

As Iwasaki and Prasso show, the Asian woman of Western popular imagination remains curiously mistaken and outdated in a world where Asian countries are increasingly powerful and Asian women are leading the way.

Presidents, lawyers, doctors, human rights defenders, teachers, writers, mothers, daughters. These are the true women of Asia. It’s time to turn the page on the Asian mystique.

-

Author Sara Veal (archive photo)

About the Author

Sara Veal is a freelance journalist based in Jakarta.

As a child, she grew up in Nigeria and Cambodia before moving to UK to complete her BA and MA.

Her travels apparently inspired a taste for exotic adventure and Sara now reviews films and books, writes about entertainment and culture, and profiles personalities from her Indonesian home with a focus on Southeast Asia.

Visit her website at SaraVeal.com

Artist, architect and historian George Groslier designed the distinctive National Museum of Cambodia building as a tribute to traditional Khmer architecture. © National Museum of Cambodia

By Darryl Collins
(First published in 2005, this article reprint appears here with the author’s kind permission)

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Visitors to Phnom Penh from the 1920s, as they still do to this day, identified the capital of Cambodia by the graceful silhouettes of the Royal Palace buildings and the imposing façade of the then Musée Albert Sarraut that is known today by its more familiar title, the National Museum of Cambodia.

George Groslier - Feb 4, 1887- Jun 18, 1945 - Seen in his museum office. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

George Groslier (1887-1945), historian, curator and author was the motivating force behind much of the revival of interest in traditional Cambodian arts and crafts, and it was he who designed this quintessential building that is today synonymous with ‘traditional Khmer’ architecture.  It is perhaps better described as a building enlarged from Cambodian temple prototypes seen on ancient bas-reliefs and reinterpreted through colonial eyes to meet museum-size requirements.

Groslier, the first baby born in Phnom Penh of French parentage, returned to Phnom Penh in 1909 after being sent to France in 1891 for schooling.  The original concept behind the museum was that it be paired with a school teaching arts and crafts to Cambodian students so they could preserve the pure, untainted forms of traditional decorative and applied arts rather than ‘modern’ debased work.  This reasoned Groslier, could best be accomplished by copying designs from original works of art on exhibition.

The museum building itself featured the work of many of these same young Khmer artisans who contributed their talents to the carving of the massive entrance doors and window shutters and decorated the interior panels with paintings featuring mythological subjects.  These treasures are fortunately still in place.

Early beginnings

Albert Pierre Sarraut - Jul 28, 1872-Nov 26, 1962

The earliest known collections that pre-date this spectacular crimson building are the Musée Khmèr that displayed only samples of Khmer archaeology in the confines of the Royal Palace (1905) and the Musée de Phnom-Penh of the same year that displayed examples of Khmer sculpture within the compound of the former Lycée Sisowath.

Conservateurs of these early collections between 1905 and 1919 were: L-A. Rousseau, L. Pétillot, Henri Marchal, Roland Meyer and J. de Villeneuve.

Groslier’s intended museum was soon associated with the Ecole des Arts cambodgiens (1917) and became known as the Musée du Cambodge in 1919.  In 1920, this museum was soon to be officially renamed Musée Albert Sarraut after the then Governor-General of Indochina. The official portrait of M. Sarraut (above) was included in the 1920 publication, Cérémonie d’Inauguration du Musée Albert Sarraut et de L’Ecole des Arts cambodgiens.

Construction of the Musée Albert Sarraut

The Musée Albert Sarraut near completion in 1920. © National Museum of Cambodia

The foundation stone for the new museum was laid on 15 August 1917.  Some two-and-a-half years later, the completed Musée Albert Sarraut was inaugurated during Khmer New Year on 13 April 1920 in the presence of H.M. King Sisowath, François-Marius Baudoin, Résident-supérieur, and M. George Groslier, directeur des Arts cambodgiens, and conservateur du Musée.

Title page Cérémonie d’Inauguration du Musée Albert Sarraut et de L’Ecole des Arts cambodgiens, 1920. © National Museum of Cambodia

The original design of the building was slightly altered in 1924 with extensions that added wings at either end of the eastern façade that made the building even more imposing.

As can be seen from period photographs, the museum currently displays many items – in particular the bronze collection, in showcases that are part of the original furnishings.

The Collection

The collection is housed in high-ceilinged galleries open on one side to a square courtyard set with four pools and a manicured garden planted with palms.  It is a haven amidst bustling Phnom Penh.  The galleries are arranged systematically from the front of the building in a clockwise direction.  As Khun Samen, the present Director has whimsically noted, the majestic statue of Garuda ‘king of the birds’ that faces visitors as they enter the building, shows you the direction to take by pointing to his right.

Exhibition display in the Musée Albert Sarraut 1926. © National Museum of Cambodia

The four museum galleries are best understood by their orientation – in the east, the Bronze Galleries containing superb examples of Khmer bronze casting techniques from the 6th to 13th centuries.  Further to the south of these galleries is a new display dedicated to prehistory finds of early ceramics, metal and stone.  To the north of the Bronze Galleries, is a special exhibition space currently displaying fine and rarely- seen examples of Post-Angkorian Buddha images.

The remaining three main galleries surrounding the courtyard progress in an orderly fashion – the Southern Gallery displays sandstone sculptures from the 6th to 11th centuries (Phnom Da to Baphuon styles).  The West Gallery exhibits works of art from the classic Angkor Wat and Bayon styles from the 12th to 13th centuries – it is here the statue of King Jayavarman VII is displayed; while the North Gallery is primarily dedicated to decorative and applied arts – woodcarving, lacquer, ceramics and metalwork.

Many original museum display cases are still in use. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

The porticos surrounding the garden house a wonderful collection of sacred, secular and architectural stone works that include yoni and linga, decorative doorway lintels, carved bas-reliefs on wall sections (from Banteay Chhmar temple) and important stele with Sanskrit and old Khmer inscriptions (dating mostly from 6th to 11th centuries).

Two other masterworks in the collection are the sandstone statue of Yama (the so-called ‘Leper King’, 12th century) housed under the pavilion in the centre of the inner courtyard and the monumental fragment of the bronze Reclining Vishnu (11th century) recovered from the Western Mebon temple in 1936 to be found in the north-eastern corner of the museum adjacent to the temporary exhibitions display.

Research, scholars and staff

Early directors of the museum from the 1920s-1940s contributed greatly to knowledge of the rapidly expanding collection – Groslier himself catalogued the collection, followed by Jean Boisselier and Solange Thierry (interim Director) who added their individual talents to cataloguing and management.

Madeleine Giteau - 1918-2005. Photo courtesy Andy Brouwer.

Control of the National Museum and Arts Administration was ceded by the French to the Cambodians on 9 August, 1951 and following Independence in 1953, the then Musée National de Phnom-Penh was the subject of Bilateral accords (7 November 1956).  From 1956 to 1966, the museum continued to flourish under the direction of Madeleine Giteau, Conservatrice du Musée National.

1966 marked the appointment of Chea Thay Seng, the first Cambodian Director of the National Museum and Dean of the newly created Department of Archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts.  This university that from its foundation as the Ecole des Arts cambodgiens in 1920 was intimately linked with students, artisans and teachers who worked to preserve Cambodian cultural traditions, can still be found to the rear of the museum.

The National Museum Today: Tourism and Culture

By the 1960s, the National Museum had become the centrepiece of a number of provincial museum collections scattered throughout Cambodia.  Today, it is regaining that status – after years of neglect, closure and uncertainty, provincial museums are re-opening across the country.

Following the highly successful ASEAN Summit, this year has been designated ‘Visit Cambodia Year 2003’.  As an integral part of appreciation of Khmer culture, visitors to Siem Reap should ensure their journey encompasses Phnom Penh for it is here the museum treasures of Cambodia are displayed.  This world-class collection of Khmer art spans the gamut of history – from prehistory finds, through pre-Angkorian masterpieces to the art of the classic Angkor periods, and the post-Angkorian Middle Period.  As Khun Samen, the current Museum Director has perceptively stated, “In order to better understand the evolution of Khmer art, it is preferable to study statuary and architecture together.”

The National Museum of Cambodia today.

Entrance to the collection is gained by purchasing a ticket at the north gate and guide services in foreign languages are available.  Visitors can also purchase souvenirs and publications (including ‘The New Guide to the National Museum’) from the bookshop just inside the main door.

How should the importance of this collection be defined?  Khun Samen dedicates this guidebook, “to young Cambodians, … that they may come to appreciate and preserve their cultural heritage”; and to all Cambodian and international visitors, “may the five blessings of the Buddha be upon them.”

National Museum of Cambodia Timeline

Inaugurated: 13 April 1920, Khmer New Year

Renovated: by architect, Vann Molyvann late 1960s (central section, main building)

Closed: 12 April 1975 to 7 January 1979 (civil war)

Re-opened: 13 April 1979, Khmer New Year

Renovated: 1994-1995, roof and sections of building renovated with Australian government funding through AIDAB (now AusAID) and OPG.  Ceremony to mark completion of work attended by HRH King Norodom Sihanouk and The Hon. Bill Hayden, AC, Governor-General of Australia, 28 April 1995.

About the author:

Darryl Collins

Darryl Collins first came to Cambodia in early 1994, to work with staff at the National Museum of Cambodia as one of a group of specialised museum staff and architects, who came to assist with a project funded by the Australian Government between 1993 and 1995.  Darryl has remained in Cambodia ever since, lecturing at the Royal University of Fine Arts (Department of Archaeology) and as a co-member of a team of three in ARK Research (researching and publishing Building Cambodia: ‘New Khmer Architecture’: 1953-1970).

For five years he lectured at the Department of Archaeology, Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh.  In mid-2004 he completed a 1-year consultancy with the Department of Culture and Research, the APSARA Authority, Siem Reap and he spends his spare time writing and researching art, architectural and cultural topics.

In late 2004, Darryl returned once more to part-time work at the National Museum, Phnom Penh as manager for the Collection Inventory Project that will, over a period of some 5 years register works of art and transfer early French records of the museum onto a purpose-designed database.

In 2010, Darryl accepted a position on the Board of Directors of Heritage Watch International, an international organization based in Cambodia that is devoted to protecting and preserving Cambodian heritage and antiquities.

Darryl resides in Siem Reap in an antique home he restored while studying traditional Cambodian houses.  To visit Darryl’s home and read more about his work please visit http://www.darryl-siemreap.com/

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Siem Reap, Cambodia – Angkor Wat temple, the symbol of modern Cambodia, embodies the genius, beauty and power of the Khmer civilization that first civilized what is now Southeast Asia.

Angkor Wat is unlike any other ancient temple on Earth because of the treasure it protects: its vast walls and corridors enshrine a delicate legacy, the exquisite portraits of more than 2,000 Khmer women known as devata. Whether they represent goddesses from heaven or queens here on earth is unknown.

Each day, these sanctified women welcome a new sunrise with the promise of abundance, fertility, peace and enlightenment for this land, and for all who wish to see their message. The heart of Angkor Wat is very much alive and the devata still offer humankind hints of our celestial place in the universe.

Special thanks to architect and photographer Gary Ng, who captured this magnificent series of sunrise photos at Angkor Wat on his first visit to Cambodia. For more of his work, please visit http://gnostec.wordpress.com/

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat sunrise. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple honoring Vishnu between 1,115-1,150 AD. Cambodia adopted Buddhism in the 13th century and Buddhist monks have maintained the temple since that time. © Copyright Gary Ng.

Angkor Wat enshrines more than 2,000 portrait carvings of ancient Khmer women. Their identity and meaning remain a mystery. © Copyright Gary Ng.

George Groslier designed the iconic National Museum of Cambodia. Its style remains synonymous with ‘traditional Khmer’ architecture. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - On April 13, 1920 Cambodians celebrated the New Year of the Monkey with the grand opening of the National Museum of Cambodia, housing the world’s most extensive collection of Khmer art.

Nicole Groslier

Although she wasn’t even two years old at the time, one petite French girl named Nicole has held the National Museum of Cambodia in her heart since that day…and with good reason. Her father George Groslier designed the museum, became its first Conservator, and devoted his life to preserving and perpetuating the art and culture of Cambodia.

Born in Phnom Penh in 1887, George Groslier was educated in France, and then returned to Cambodia in 1909. Service in WWI called him back to Europe but when the war ended he returned to his birth country with his wife Suzanne,  spending the rest of his life devoted to the arts, culture and people of Cambodia.

Nicole Groslier was born in Phnom Penh in 1918 and, like her father, has held a lifelong love for Cambodia and her people.

On April 13, 1920 an H.M. King Sisowath presided over the inauguration of the National Museum of Cambodia. Museum architect George Groslier is seated far left. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

In 1920, H.M. King Sisowath attended the auspicious New Year’s Day inauguration of Cambodia’s first national museum, along with a host of international dignitaries. The facility was initially named for Albert Sarraut, former Governor General of Indochina. Sarraut’s political efforts gave George Groslier the opportunity to design and organize this monument to Khmer art that still today is synonymous with traditional Khmer architecture.

From childhood to maturity, Nicole Groslier would visit her father at his museum office marveling at the magical world of Khmer imagination. Nicole’s first true memory of visiting the museum is in January 1922, when she attended a special ceremony welcoming Marshall Joseph Joffre to Cambodia.

Nicole Groslier attends her first formal museum event with proud parents Suzanne and George. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

Marshall Joffre was honored by this ceremony at the National Museum of Cambodia. Nicole is standing directly in the center of the action. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

Marshall Joffre became one of France’s most senior officers in World War I after replacing the popular Philippe Pétain during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. H.M. Sisowath himself then took Le Maréchal to tour the temples of Angkor.

H.M. King Sisowath took Marshall Joffre on a tour of Angkor after the museum event.

Throughout his career, George Groslier continued his efforts as museum director to catalog the vast collection and to share his appreciation for Khmer creativity with the world. These dramatic photos from Nicole’s personal archive show the museum nearly inundated by the seasonal floods of the Mekong River in the 1930s.

Mekong floodwaters mirror the national museum's Khmer architecture. Circa 1934. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

Two men in a pirogue paddle by the museum entrance. Circa 1934. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

George and his wife Suzanne had two more children in Cambodia. First, Gilbert in 1922 and then their youngest child, Bernard-Philippe Groslier (below), in 1926. Inspired by his father, Bernard-Philippe also pursued a lifetime career focused on Cambodian history and Khmer culture.

George Groslier and his son, Bernard-Philippe, who also grew up to become a noted archeologist in the field of Khmer studies. Photo courtesy Nicole Groslier.

The museum's central courtyard remains a peaceful focal point, surrounded by Khmer art.

From its opening, the museum has attracted enlightened scholars whose work illuminates the mysteries and beauty of the ancient Khmer race. Jean Boisselier and Solange Thierry both added their talents to improving the museum. From 1956 to 1966, the museum flourished under the direction of Mme Madeleine Giteau, who occupied the same official residence as the Groslier family, just behind the museum.

In 1966, Chea Thay Seng became the first Cambodian Director of the museum, as well as Dean of the newly created Department of Archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA). At the origins of this university we find the Ecole des Arts Cambodgiens that George Groslier organized in 1920. It’s goals remain the same, to intimately link students, artisans and teachers working to preserve and perpetuate Cambodian cultural traditions.

Since Cambodia’s  liberation and the restoration of a government by the people the museum has grown under the guidance of two Directors, Khun Samen and Hab Touch. In 2010, the museum’s second female Director, Mrs. Oun Phalline, assumed this vital administrative role.

Today the National Museum of Cambodia houses one of the world’s greatest collections of Khmer cultural material including sculpture, ceramics and ethnographic objects from the prehistoric, pre-Angkorian, Angkorian and post-Angkorian periods. Its facility includes more than 5,000 sq. meters of space devoted to exhibits, restoration, offices and meeting rooms.

Masterpieces of Khmer Culture

In 2007, the museum catalog, Masterpieces of the National Museum of Cambodia by Helen Jessup was published by Friends of Khmer Culture, offering art lovers and historians worldwide the opportunity to appreciate this extraordinary collection.

Article by Kent Davis, www.Devata.org

Special thanks to Nicole Groslier for sharing her photographs and memories.

Sua Sdei Chnam Thmei ๒๕๕๔

Happy New Year 2010