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

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

To Cambodia With Love

Secrets of the sacred women of Angkor Wat; a tarantula brunch in the remote Cambodian countryside; hikes in the misty Cardamom Mountains; a leisurely cyclo ride through the streets of Phnom Penh…savor these experiences and other insights from savvy expatriates, seasoned travelers, and inspired locals.

To Cambodia With Love is a unique journey of discovery seen through the eyes of more than sixty experienced Asian travelers.

Contributors include Angkor expert Dawn Rooney (Angkor: Cambodia’s Wondrous Temples), acclaimed memoirist Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father), Nick Ray, author of The Lonely Planet Guide to Cambodia, Devata.org researcher Kent Davis (Daughters of Angkor Wat) and may others. According to the editor more than 63 writers contributed to the final edition.

The book pairs each essay with practical facts enabling travelers to follow in the writer’s adventurous and imaginative footsteps.

To Asia With Love

In addition to his personal contributions, the entire collection was edited by Cambodian resident Andy Brouwer, who for years has captivated readers around the world with his detailed accounts of life in Cambodia.

Renowned cultural photographer, Tewfic El-Sawy brings the entire collection of tales to life for readers with vibrant, full-color photographs.

With precious tips on dining, shopping, sightseeing, and culture, To Cambodia With Love is a one-of-a-kind guide for passionate travelers.

Based on the highly praised To Asia with Love: A Connoisseurs’ Guide to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

— “… a guide with depth and color that most of [its] competitors lack …” - International Herald Tribune

— “… breaks new ground in the travel writing field …” - Untamed Travel

— “… a refreshing addition to the traveler’s bookshelf … evocative and eclectic …” - Chic Travel Thailand

— “… a delightful introduction to Cambodia and the Mekong region for those looking for some inspiration and adventure.” - Lonely Planet Cambodia

— Honorable Mention - Independent Publisher Book Awards

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

For anyone with more than a passing interest in the great Cambodian empire centered on Angkor, the name of Zhou Daguan is immediately familiar, though for some of a certain age, including the present reviewer, there is still a tendency to think of this obscure but immensely important observer of Angkor in the thirteenth century by the pre-pinyin ren­dering of his name as Chou Ta-kuan. His importance stems, of course, through the fact of his being the only eyewitness chronicler of the city of Angkor and its inhabitants while it was still a major, if fading, power in mainland Southeast Asia.

Until quite recently, it is a fair assumption that most Anglophone readers will have encountered Zhou Daguan in the translation from French of Paul Pelliot by J. Gilman d’Arcy Paul, first published by the Siam Society in 1967. And, since 2001, these same Anglo­phone readers have had the opportunity to consult a more up-to-date and elegant rendering of the French by this journal’s editor, Michael Smithies, published again by the Siam Society. Few readers, whether Anglophone or Francophone, will have gained access to Zhou Daguan by returning to the French translation of this work by Paul Pelliot, published in 1902, let alone the first translation from Chinese into French accomplished by Jean-Pierre-Abel Rémusat in 1819.

A Record of Cambodia - The Land and the People

Now, for the first time in over fifty years, Peter Harris has provided us with a translation of Zhou’s text, work­ing directly from Chinese into English. And he has done so with a very detailed accompanying scholarly apparatus that places Zhou Daguan in his place and time, while explaining his reasons for varying his translation from those offered by his predecessors working from French into English. One point to which the translator gives particular emphasis is the fact that Zhou Daguan’s ‘record’, as we have it, is only part of the document he prepared after spend­ing a little less than a year in Cambodia in 1296-97.

For those not schooled in a deep knowledge of Chinese history, what Harris has to say about Zhou’s back­ground makes for fascinating reading. As Harris says in his introduction, after establishing that Zhou was born near the Chinese port city of Wenzhou in south­eastern China, this ‘is not a place many people outside China have heard of’, but its character as a dynamic and open location, peopled by individuals with a ‘strong sense of identity … pleasure seekers and bon vivants‘, gives clues to the sort of person Zhou would have been.

And it is indeed possible to see in reading Zhou’s account of Angkor that he was, as Harris suggests, a man appre­ciative of good living and able to enjoy what he sees. Yet this débrouillard view of the world went hand in hand with a degree of prudishness which some­times intrudes on his account of sexual practices, most of which he reports on hearsay rather than through personal observation.

To what extent does this new trans­lation overtake those previously avail­able? I would suggest that this is a question that can be answered in two ways. At one level the existence of Harris’s version certainly does not mean we should cast previous French into English versions into the outer darkness. A non-specialist reading Paul or Smithies will still come away with a broadly satisfactory understanding of what Zhou Daguan had to say, with the essentials of his account well and truly available. Indeed, at first glance, this new translation appears like a paraphrase of earlier versions of Zhou ‘s text. Take, for instance, the ‘chapter’ headed ‘Agriculture’ in the Paul trans­lation and ‘Cultivating the Land’ in Harris. The first sentence of this section in Paul reads:

Generally speaking, three or four crops a year can be counted, for the entire Cambodian year resembles the fifth and sixth moons of China, and frost and snow are unknown.

Whereas in Harris it is:

In general crops can be harvested three or four times a year, the reason being that all four seasons are like our fifth and sixth months, with days that know no frost or snow.

On other occasions there are rather more than minor differences in the rendering provided by Harris. Consider as an example the section dealing with ‘Villages’. In Paul’s version it reads:

Each village has its temple, or at least a pagoda. No matter how small the village may be, it has a local mandarin, called the mai-chieh. Along the highways there are resting places like our post halts; these are called sen-mu (Khmer, samnak). Only recently, during the war with Siam, whole villages have been laid waste.

The Harris rendering of this passage is:

In every village there is a Buddhist temple or pagoda. Where the population is quite dense there is normally an official called maijie who is responsible for the security of the village. Resting places called senmu, like our posting-houses, are normally found along the main roads

As the result of repeated wars with the Siamese the land has been completely laid to waste.

In the lengthy footnote (99) that relates to this passage Harris explains his reasons for doubting that it can be read to suggest Buddhism was by this time ‘paramount in villages’; he expands the role assigned to the maijie, pointing out that it may be a Chinese rendering of the Khmer for a village headman, mai’s’rok; and his translation, with ‘wars’ in the plural contrasts with the singu­lar reference to conflict in Paul. This, as another reviewer, Chris Baker, has suggested, raises unanswerable ques­tions about the extent to which conflict between Angkor and the rising Siamese states to the west was already a feature in the fourteenth century.

So, and at a second level, for anyone concerned with the minutiae of transla­tion, the detail of flora and fauna, and the contested nuances in undertaking a translation from the original Chinese text, Harris deserves high praise. His explanations are admirably detailed and informed by references to Chinese historical texts, the abundant French literature on Angkor, and the linguistic work of Michael Vickery and the late Judith Jacobs.

The book is helpfully illustrated with twenty-six photographs chosen to focus on issues raised in the text.

The author and Silkworm Books are to be congratulated for making this important new contribution to Ang­korian scholarship available to a wide audience.

Milton Osborne

Dr. Milton Osborne

About the Reviewer

Milton OSBORNE is an independent scholar based in Sydney. He is also adjunct professor in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, and the author of ten books on the history and politics of Southeast Asia including Phnom Penh: A Cultural History, which is nowavailable on Kindle as an instant download.

Acknowledgement

This review originally appeared in the Journal of the Siam Society, Volume 96. Based in Bangkok since 1904 and under Thai Royal Patronage, the Siam Society promotes knowledge of Thailand and the surrounding region, including many profound works relating to Khmer studies.

Devata.org thanks the reviewer and the the Society for kindly allowing the reproduction of this article in our archive.

Amazon Hardcover ($44) – Amazon Paperback ($25)

Cambodge - The Cultivation of a Nation

The very title of Penny Edwards’ book is a telling stroke; the use of the alien, French name of the country un­derscores her central contention that the Cambodian nation was invented —or cultivated—during the colonial era.

The book itself does not disappoint af­ter so auspicious a title. A real tour de force, beautifully written and crafted, it reflects the author’s vast knowledge of Cambodian history and culture. Hardly a word is superfluous in a dense text marvellously compressed into a scant 250 pages excluding the end materials.

Edwards’ scholarship is meticulous and her book is based on a huge collection of French and Khmer archival, literary and periodical sources. The book is packed with pithy aphorisms, fascinating details and keen insights. One observation that springs readily to mind is the line, “Whereas Marx had set out to turn all peasants into citizens, Saloth Sar [Pol Pot] was determined to turn all citizens into peasants.” (If Marx set Hegel on his feet, Pol Pot has kicked the feet from under Marx, one might add)

Edwards is also keenly aware of Edward Said’s strictures against “Orientalism”. It is refreshing that she allows the Khmers to speak through her translations, such as when the poet Suttanprija In writes of the peasants conscripted by the French for restoration work at Angkor:

Coolies are hired as labor Chopping wood and hauling stone slabs to and fro

…seeing our Khmer race as coo­lies I am overcome with pity for the Khmer race, dirt poor,

Working as coolies for somebody else’s money.

I watch their bodies, frail and flat-bellied

Hair thick with dust and grime, stinking like otters.

The Khmers in the Angkor of the colonial period were invisible—even edited out of the illustrations to Henri Mouhot’s posthumously-published book on the ruins, as Edwards tells us. Yet while the French physically appro­priated the monuments and incorporated them as a central part of their discourse on colonialism (and misunderstood their original purpose) the modern Khmers themselves took over that body of ideas and gave it a nationalist twist.

My old teacher David Chandler often drew attention to the fact that the towers of Angkor Wat have featured on all Cambodian flags since independence. “What,” he would ask, “is the signifi­cance of this?” Some students shrugged: wasn’t it obvious, given Angkor’s cul­tural and political significance for the Khmer people? Nationalist politicians might have given similar answers. Penny Edwards’ book is a marvellous riposte to such uncritical and ahistorical thinking. For many Khmers in the early period of the tricolour, it was a pile of old stones, but they came to see it as the central symbol of a newly-minted sense of nationhood. The myth became so pervasive that, as Edwards puts it, “The hypnotic appeal of Angkor Vat as a sacred symbol uniting Khmers in time and space has seduced some observers of modern Cambodian history into ac­cepting nationalist myth as historical fact.” Moreover, she continues, “The dominant paradigm of Khmer national sentiment as a primordial continuum linking pre- and post-colonial Cambodia is a shibboleth.”

Given our familiarity with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community”, there is noth­ing startling in such observations. Some nation states were literally invented: Belgium, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Iraq, for example. The political act of creation was preceded by cultural invention, and this was also the case in long-established states recasting themselves as cultural-ethnic entities. Thus as Eric Hobsbawm tells us, the Lowland Scots appropriated and even invented the symbols of Highland culture in their bid to create a nation, and Jewish nationalists revived a dead language. Cambodia is not Scotland or the Eastern European ghetto, however, and while Edwards takes Anderson and Hobsbawm as her point of departure, she has adapted and enriched their ideas in this highly original study.

Cambodian nationalism, Edwards explains, was produced by the colo­nial encounter of Khmers and French. Again, the idea of Europe providing new models is not new in itself: Marx argued that colonialism inadvertently acted as its own gravedigger by pro­viding Asian revolutionaries with the intellectual ammunition of nationalism, democracy and socialism. But again, this is a generalisation, and generalisa­tions notoriously fail to illuminate the specific circumstances of social and political phenomena. Marx, of course, stressed politics and economics in such processes.

In Cambodia, as Edwards ac­knowledges, the growth of nationalism was partly a result of resentment against repression, economic exploitation and a stunted educational system. However, she argues, this has led to historians being preoccupied with the “political manifestations of nationalism as op­posed to the cultural context”. Indeed she insists that the nationalists did not produce a culture, but rather it produced them. That culture itself resulted from the complex interrelationships between the French colonialists and the Khmer colonised. Without agreeing to sideline politics and economics, we should con­cede that it is necessary to bend the stick back in the direction to which Edwards points if we are to understand the rich­ness and complexity of the historical processes which led to the Cambodian nation.

The book comprises nine chapters. As a history of ideas it is not strictly chronological, with the chapters concen­trating on themes. There are three chap­ters on Angkor and three on Buddhism, interleaved with three more chapters on what she describes as “more urbane themes” of literature and politics. The chapters on Angkor in particular are superb, and contain fascinating details probably unknown even to special­ists.

As she shows, too, the example of Angkor led the French to create a hybrid “national style of architecture”, particularly in the capital, Phnom Penh. For the French, the Khmers were a “decadent” people, whose glory days were in the long-vanished past. Their role, as they saw it, was to preserve that past, whether it be manifested in art and crafts, religion, music, high art, the plastic arts, or ceremony. Thus, Edwards shows how the funeral rites of Ang Duong were much less elaborate than those of Norodom, despite the lat­ter being a figurehead and the former the last reasonably sovereign ruler of the country.

French scholars and erudite administrators also played key roles in the production of Khmerité—“Khmer-ness”. One she examines in some detail is the polymath Suzanne Karpeles, who played a key role in the establishment of the Buddhist Institute and the National Library. In the process of establishing Buddhism as a textual religion and excluding popular strains with their provenance in Hinduism and animism, Karpeles helped establish a national reli­gion – a crucial ingredient in the cement of the newly created nation.

The outcome of the French period was the creation of the idea of a Khmer nation, and of a nationalist ideology which eventually turned on France. It did not have to be a historically tenable discourse, but it presented a triumphalist vision of the past that was seamless and simple to understand: Cambodge was the inheritor of two thousand years or more of unbroken history and culture. In September 1938, Edwards records, a Nagaravatta editorialist claimed that Angkor had been built “to demonstrate to the great power of the Khmers in the world, both to the West and to neigh­boring countries (like Tonkin).” It was pretty poor history, but it illustrates the great hold that the newly created national myths had on the Cambodian literati, and which were to percolate in coming years to the rest of the people.

Review by John Tully

About the Reviewer

John TULLY is a lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Victoria University in Melbourne who was awarded his PhD in History by Monash University for a thesis on Cambodia during the reign of King Sisowath. Tully has also authored “A Short History of Cambodia: From Empire to Survival” and “France on the Mekong: A History of the Protectorate in Cambodia, 1863-1953“.

Acknowledgement

This review originally appeared in the Journal of the Siam Society, Volume 97. Based in Bangkok since 1904 and under Thai Royal Patronage, the Siam Society promotes knowledge of Thailand and the surrounding region, including many profound works relating to Khmer studies.

Devata.org thanks the reviewer and the the Siam Society for kindly allowing the reproduction of this article in our archive.

"The Armies of Angkor: Military Structure and Weaponry of the Khmers" by Michel Jacq-Hergoualc'h

Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, Orchid Press, and Michael Smithies as translator of the original French edition, are all to be congratulated for the publication of this book with its intriguing subject. As Jean Boisselier points out in his Preface, the study of narrative bas-reliefs in the temples of Angkor have been of great importance for our understanding of a society that left behind such a limited number of written—or, more correctly, incised—records.

Today, as scholarship has advanced so substantially, it is all too easy, even for a less-than-casual visitor to Angkor, to fail to recognise how much has been deduced from approximately 1,200 inscriptions, many of which have little to do with the material life of the Angkorian period. It is in these circumstances that the importance of narrative bas-reliefs has long been recognised.

Lunet de Lajonquiere, whose fame rests on his having been responsible for mapping temple sites throughout Cambodia in the first two decades of the twentieth century, observed in 1911 that temple bas-reliefs constituted ‘a veritable mine of information’ about Angkorian society and urged scholars to exploit this ‘mine’. This was a challenge partially met by George Groslier, in his “Recherches sur les Cambodgiens, d’apres les textes et les monuments depuis les premiers siecles de notre ere”, published in Paris in 1921. And through his work, and that of others, much information has been assembled about daily life in Cambodia. The bas-reliefs along the outer galleries of the Bayon are, of course, the best-known sources in this regard.

Yet, again quoting Boisselier, surprisingly enough the armies so frequently displayed in these bas-reliefs have not received the attention they deserve, and it is here that our gratitude must go to the present author. In meticulous detail, and sensibly using line drawings rather than photographs for the greater clarity this achieves, he deals with the entire gamut of military aspects associated with the royal armies that existed during the reigns of Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII and which were depicted on three key temples: Angkor Wat, the Bayon and Banteay Chhmar.

Armies of Angkor - Figure 29

In doing so, Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h sets himself three aims: the selection of bas-reliefs and the study of the weapons used by the different constituents of the army; the study of these constituent parts and their relative importance to each other; and, finally, an examination of the crowds of people surrounding the armies that are depicted. All of this is done against the conclusion that, contrary to the assumptions of various previous commentators, the Khmer armies were not modelled on traditional armies in India.

In each of the sections just mentioned the author approaches his task in detail, so that what follows is greatly simplified and should be seen in this light. In terms of weaponry, Jacq-Hergoualc’h makes clear that, with the exception of a limited number of ‘war machines’, for example, a chariot-like mount with defensive shielding used by warriors to launch their spears (figure 29, page 37) or other primitive ‘ballistae’, including ones mounted on elephants, the armaments of the Khmer army were ‘fairly primitive’ and included swords of various types, axes, bows and arrows and spears.

From his examination of the bas-reliefs, the author concludes that the Khmer armies of the period under review were composed of four basic corps: war chariots, cavalry, elephants and the infantry. To this he adds a further classification, allies and mercenaries, while giving separate attention to enemies, and treating the use of boats for warfare as a separate classification. In his detailed examination of these various fighting arms the author comes to a conclusion that would not surprise soldiers of many wars, past and present. Impressive though the cavalry might have been, and intimidating as the elephants surely were, in the end it would seem that the most important role in any battle was that played by the group known for centuries, irreverently, as the ‘poor bloody infantry’.

As the author puts it, the elephants were ‘so impressive, so numerous, so cumbersome, and possibly so useless’. Images of tanks, incompetently used as they were during the First World War, before their role was rethought by strategists as diverse as Liddell Hart, Charles de Gaulle and Hans Guderian, immediately come to mind. And likewise with his analysis of battles fought on water, the images that he conjures up sit more closely with accounts of Salmis or even Lepanto than any later naval engagements in which armaments and manoeuvrability played a vital role. To the extent the bas-reliefs have a story to tell, it is of the boats of rival armies seeking to join battle alongside each other, with the hope of each boat’s crew that it could board and overcome its opponents.

Following his discussion of accessories and camp followers, the author offers a tightly formulated ‘conclusion’ reinforcing his arguments for the paramount importance of the infantry and the uniquely Khmer character of the army. But he does more, for he allows his imagination, soundly based on what he has written and analysed previously, to give us a picture of how he believes the army appeared as it marched off to battle. It is a vision of colour and noise, of a ‘shimmering multitude of parasols, standards and insignia’, of bells and strummed instruments and ‘the booming gong’. As he writes, ‘what a din that must have made!’

Specialist in character though this book undoubtedly is, its appearance will be welcomed by all those for whom a visit to Angkor is more than an occasion for a brief, if wondrous, excursion. The author is to be commended for his contribution to our greater understanding of a society that still remains so elusive in many ways.

Review by Milton Osborne

The Armies of Angkor: Military Structure and Weaponry of the Khmers by Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, translated from the French by Michael Smithies.

First English edition, 2007. 200 pp., 4 plans and 154 line drawings, bibliography, index, 24.5 x 17.5 cm., hardcover.

Dr. Milton Osborne

About the Reviewer

Milton OSBORNE is an independent scholar based in Sydney. He is also adjunct professor in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, and the author of ten books on the history and politics of Southeast Asia including Phnom Penh: A Cultural History, which is nowavailable on Kindle as an instant download.

Acknowledgement

This review originally appeared in the Journal of the Siam Society, Volume 96. The Siam Society, based in Bangkok since 1904 and under Thai Royal Patronage, promotes knowledge of Thailand and the surrounding region, including many profound works relating to Khmer studies.

Devata.org thanks the reviewer and the the Siam Society for kindly allowing the reproduction of this article in our archive.

By Michelle Vachon – The Cambodia Daily

© 2010 The Cambodia Daily – This article appears with the kind permission of the copyright holder. No further reproduction is permitted.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - In 1295, a young Chinese diplomat by the name of Zhou Daguan left the port of Mingzhou in southeast China, bound for Angkor as part of an official Chinese delegation. Little is known of Zhou Daguan — even his name would vary in docu­ments after his death — except for the fact that he took copious notes on life in the Khmer kingdom dur­ing his 11 month stay, which were probably kept for an official report but later turned into a book.

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

Zhou Daguan’s observations of Angkor ended up being the only remaining record on daily life and cus­toms at the Khmer citadel.

As he mentioned in his notes, the Khmer had books: they wrote ordinary texts and official docu­ments with chalk on died-black parchment while Buddhist monks wrote on palm leaves. Those texts, however, have long disappeared, possibly destroyed by humidity, rain and war, while the administrative and religious texts carved on stone at Angkor give no details on ordinary life at the time.

In 1902, the French scholar and Chinese expert Paul Pelliot translated Zhou Daguan’s work into French, and until recently, English-language versions of the book were translations of Mr Pelliot’s French text.

This prompted Peter Harris, a British researcher and international development specialist who studied classi­cal Chinese literature and culture at Oxford University, to translate Zhou Daguan’s book directly from Chinese to English and to publish this new version.

The project; on which Mr Harris casually embarked in the mid-2000’s, became much more complicated than anticipated, he explains in his book released under Zhou Daguan’s original title “A Record of Cambodia, The Land and its People.”

“Putting a 700-year-old book into readable English is not easy to do, especially when the book is written by a subject of one country now very remote from us, about another country about which we understand even less,” he writes.

For instance, Zhou Daguan wrote Khmer words as they sounded to him based on the Chinese pronunciation of his era, Mr Harris says.

“Chinese being a non-alphabetic writing system, its sound system has changed over time without us know­ing exactly how;” which adds to the difficulty of identifying foreign words in Chinese texts, he explains.

Identifying monuments and locations described by Zhou Daguan also was no easy task. Beside the fact that the names of temples and places have changed, the Chinese diplomat does not specify whether “stone tower” or “north lake” are actual names of places or just his way of describing them. And since literary Chinese does not have the equivalent of capital letters or other marks for proper nouns, it is virtually impossible to know, Mr. Harris said.

Whenever possible, Mr Harris put in brackets the names of monuments or locations as they are called today, such as Angkor Wat or Terrace of the Elephants.

Mr Harris’ book starts with a chapter on China and the and the southeastern region from which Zhou Daguan came, which puts the Chinese diplomat’s comments on Angkor in the context of his own society and culture, and helps make readers aware of the preconceived ideas and prejudices at may have colored his views.

Originally from a small town near the bustling port city of Wenzhou in southeastern China, Zhou Daguan would have grown up surrounded by, Mr Harris writes, “traders, merchants and sailors, broad-minded outward-looking well-versed in the affairs of the world.”

While Zhou Daguan reveals his appreciation of good living in his descriptions of life at court, festivals and food he appears slightly prudish in his comments on sexuality, which was typical of men of his background.

Still, Zhou Daguan was eager to report anything that might have captivated his countrymen For example he describes at length a Khmer custom he calls “zhentan,” which consisted of having girls (9 years old in wealthy families and 11 in poor ones) deflowered by a monk.

“I have heard that when the time comes, the monk goes into a room with the girl and takes away her virginity with his hand, which he then puts into some wine. [...] Some say the monk and the girl have sex together, others say they don’t,” Zhou Daguan wrote.

This carving from the 10-13th century Khmer temple of Phanom Rung (now located in Thailand) seems to be the only illustration of a deflowering ceremony similar to what Zhou describes. As a pair of nervous young girls sit to the right (perhaps awaiting their turn), two standing priestesses bear witness as a third person holding a linga squats between the legs of a girl sitting on the ground. The image of the ritual subject has since been censored, however her foot and toes remain visible. This picture and commentary were not part of the original Cambodia Daily review. Photo by Kent Davis.

According to his writing, the Chinese delegation was sent by Emperor Temur Oljeytu Khan to deliver an edict to Khmer King Indravarman III. The diplomats arrived in the Angkorian capital, then called Yasodharapura, in 1296 and returned home in 1297.

In the Khmer capital, gold was everywhere. In the cen­ter of the walled city of Angkor Thorn, Zhou Daguan writes, “is a gold tower [Bayon], flanked by 20 or so stone towers and a hundred or so stone chambers. To the east of it is a golden bridge flanked by two gold lions, one on the left and one on the right. Eight gold Buddhas are laid out in a row at the lowest level of stone chambers.”

He goes on to write about a bronze tower — today’s Baphuon temple; a gold tower in which sleeps the king, now known as Phimeanakas; and a gold tower with a gold lion, a bronze elephant, a bronze cow and a bronze horse, which is now called as Neak Pean temple.

Neak Pean temple view. This illustration was not part of the original Cambodia Daily review. Photo by Kent Davis.

“I suppose all this explains why from the start there have been merchant seamen who speak glowingly about ‘rich, noble Cambodia,’” he wrote.

The young Chinese diplomat described all aspects of life and customs at Angkor, from the New Year celebrations during which the king lighted fireworks and fire­crackers, and ways of settling disputes, to health and ill­nesses, agriculture and trade, flora and fauna, slavery and funerary rites.

Some sections of Zhou Daguan’s book seem incom­plete, which actually is the case, says Mr Harris. His text, which was recopied several times over the cen­turies was greatly cut according to a Chinese book collector of the 17th century, maybe two-thirds of his origi­nal text is missing, Mr Harris writes.

“I dream that one day I will stumble across the rest of his text in some obscure corner of the Chinese world, and so produce a much fuller version of his work,” he said in interview.

British by birth, Mr Harris lives in New Zealand’s capi­tal, Wellington. His career has included heading the BBC Chinese Service and representing the organization Oxfam Great Britain in Cambodia in 1981 and 1982. He has also worked for Amnesty International; represented the Ford Foundation in China; and founded the Asian Studies Institute at Victoria University in Wellington.

A fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies in New Zealand, he managed a human rights and justice sector reform project in Cambodia from 2005 to 2007, and is now working in Kazakhstan on a government-civil society policy project.