To Cambodia With Love

An Essential Travel Guide in a Digital World

Book Review by Kent Davis

To Cambodia With Love is an attractive and useful guidebook for any traveler headed to Cambodia. Its secret is that this book offers a unique collection of tips and ideas that readers simply won’t find anywhere else.

When I began traveling internationally in the 1970s trips were always too expensive and too short. So some things never change!

Info about exotic destinations was sparse, but even a few ideas about sights, food, transport and lodging could make the difference between a memorable adventure and a stressful fiasco.

On my first trip to Laos in 1992 I just ripped the 20 page supplement out of the Thailand Lonely Planet Guide so I didn’t have to carry the whole book…but even those 20 pages made my Laotian trip easier. Knowledge is power!

With the advent of the Internet, travel research has evolved. So have travelers.

Finding mainstream attractions and accommodations is fairly easy. If anything, there’s too much information available and online sources aren’t always reliable. Beyond that, most modern travelers are seeking insights and experiences much deeper than “been there, done that”. Enter senior editor Kim Fay with a new concept to create “travel guides for the connoisseur”.

Young Cambodian monk by Tewfic EI-Sawy.

To Cambodia With Love is a perfect example of how well her formula works. With Phnom Penh-based British writer Andy Brouwer, they sought out more than 60 expert contributors with one thing in common: a passion for some aspect of Cambodian life. Food, history, sights, temples, Buddhism, wildlife, art, music, nature, charity, adventure, education…you name it…these people all live and love their Cambodian dreams.

And to each they posed one question: If you were giving advice to a friend who was headed to Cambodia, what would you tell them?

And so To Cambodia With Love was born, the newest in a brilliant series of travel guides. In addition to Cambodia, ThingsAsian Press now offers guides for Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Shanghai, Northern India, Nepal and Japan.

I can honestly say that I wouldn’t go to any of those places without one of these clever compact guides in my luggage. Why take a chance of missing the most inspirational experiences that await you in these exotic lands?

To Cambodia With Love BOOK DETAILS

Cambodian dancers by Tewfic EI-Sawy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. MOVEABLE FEASTS – A tasting menu of exotic flavors

2. SEEING THE SIGHTS – Fresh perspectives on exploring must-see attractions

3. SECRET GARDENS – Where to hide away from the touring masses

4. INTO THE WILD – Outdoor experiences for adventurous travelers

5. WHEN IN ROME – Lessons on living local and making yourself at home

6. PAYING IT FORWARD – Suggestions for giving back while you’re on the road

7. RESOURCES FOR THE ROAD – Practical advice to help you prepare for your travels

8. EPILOGUE – One writer takes his sons on a local detour in Siem Reap

The book also features an Introduction, detailed Contributor Biographies (see below), Credits and  an Index .

Andy Brouwer (at right without glasses)

EDITOR BIO

British-born Andy Brouwer made his first trip to Cambodia in 1994. That white-knuckle ride hooked him for life.

When his annual visits didn’t satisfy his craving, so he upped sticks to Phnom Penh in 2007. As well as having a serious interest in temples, books, and pretty much all things Khmer, he is a lifetime supporter of Leeds United and has an insatiable passion for the music of Steel Pulse and Ennio Morricone.

For the adventures of Cambodian life, updated daily, visit Andy’s blog.

Tewfic EI-Sawy

PHOTOGRAPHER BIO

Tewfic EI-Sawy is a New York City-­based freelance photographer who specializes in documenting endan­gered cultures and traditional life in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

He is particularly interested in photograph­ing cultural ceremonies and religious and tribal rituals.

He leads photogra­phy tours to India, Sikkim, Indo­china, Indonesia, and the Himalayan Kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan. His images, articles, and photo features have been published in various magazines and other publications.

CONTRIBUTORS

Note: This complete alphabetical list of contributors is quoted from To Cambodia With Love.

Juanita Accardo — Juanita is a regular visitor to Cambo­dia. She adores Ratanakiri and treats it like her second home. When she’s not traveling, she’s back in the United States working at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, California.

Matt Ames — If Matt is not in Cambodia, he is probably in Roanoke, Virginia, studying data visualization, working on art projects, making music, or writing and directing short films. Matt would like to especially thank the monks of Wat Tahm-rai-saw in Battambang for their friendliness and willingness to answer a bunch of stupid questions.

Mariam Arthur — Mariam has traveled the United States extensively and went global in 2006. Her writing career started in California for regional newspa­pers. She transferred her skills to Hollywood in 2000. She has resided in Cambodia since 2007, where she lives within view of the Royal Palace with her cat, Tigger.

Anne Best — A London-based anthropologist, Anne Best is the author of The Monk, the Farmer, the Merchant, the Mother: Survival Stories of Rural Cambodia. This book tells the true stories of the lives of four simple country people. Now elderly, they reflect on the events of their lives and talk about the traditions of Khmer village life.

Andrew Booth — British-barn Andrew has such eclectic talents and absurd determi­nation, most would agree he is the man to have with them on a desert island. When not obsessing over the logistics of bespoke itineraries for his travel company ABOUTAsia, Andrew can be found spending its profits for the education of Cambodian rural poor through the IAMCAMBODIA Foundation, where he is cofounder and director.

Adam Bray — Adam Bray is a writer and photogra­pher based in Mui Ne, Vietnam. He has contributed to more than a dozen guidebooks for countries in South­east Asia, including Insight Guides’ Laos & Cambodia, DK’s Eyewitness travel guide to Cambodia and Laos, and Thomas Cook’s Travellers Cam­bodia – as well as numerous books in the To Asia With Love guidebook series. He is also regularly featured on CNNGO.com and CNN.com.

Elizabeth Briel — Elizabeth Briel is an artist and travel ­writer with an Asian focus. She has recently illustrated her first book, H is for Hong Kong, photographed her second, Lost & Found: Hong Kong, and is writing another about her quest through Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam in search of the perfect paper. Cur­rently she is based in Australia and Asia. In Cambodia, she ran a solo charity project teaching photography to kids while working as a radio DJ.

Janet Brown — The author of Tone Deaf in Bangkok, Janet loves Cambodia from the per­spective of a Bangkok resident but harbors dreams of someday being very, very old in Kratie. Look for her forthcoming Clueless in Cambodia sometime in 2030!

Cristiano Calcagno — Italian-born Cristiano Calcagno lives with his wife in Kompong Thom, where he has worked for many years. In his spare time he conducts field research into the ancient sites around his home province … and rides his bike.

Hing Channarith – Hing Channarith is the CEO and founder of the grassroots NGO the Cambodian Children’s Advocacy Foundation (CCAF). He formerly managed the Kien Khleang National Rehabilitation Centre’s Veterans International Cambodia just outside Phnom Penh for a decade.

Karen Coates — Author of Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War, Karen Coates splits her time between the American Southwest and Southeast Asia. She’s covered Cambodia for publications around the world since 1998, when she worked at The Cambodia Daily. She now writes the Ramblin’ Spoon blog about cuisine.

Kent Davis — Kent Davis is a publisher, author, trans­lator, and educator with twenty years of Southeast Asian work and travel ex­perience. In 2005, he founded DatASIA Press and initiated Devata.org, an indepen­dent research project documenting, cataloguing, and analyzing the sacred women whose portraits fill the walls of Angkor Wat and other Khmer temples.

Tiara Delgado — From Los Angeles, California, Tiara Delgado is the founder of Global Vision Video production company. In addition to working on documentaries, she has been a news correspondent for CAM-TV in Long Beach, California, and is currently a contributing journalist for The Khmer Post newspaper, also in Long Beach. She has been traveling to Cambodia since 1999 and has resided for the past two years in Phnom Penh, where she works as an English teacher.

Christine Dimmock — Christine Dimmock is a volunteer tutor for migrants and refugees in Australia, who first traveled to Southeast Asia and Cambodia in the 1990s. Her travel adventures also took her to Afghani­stan in the early part of the last decade.

Kim Fay — Raised in the Pacifie Northwest, Kim Fay first traveled to Southeast Asia in 1991. Since that time, she spent four years living in Vietnam and has traveled back frequently, writing about the region. As an expert on travel literature and Vietnam, she has been a guest speaker on NPR and has written for numerous publications, including Travel + Leisure. She is the author of Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam and creator and series editor of the To Asia With Love guide books. She lives in Los Angeles.

Don Gilliland — Don Gilliland is originally from Orlando, Florida, where he worked as a dishwasher, cook, and record store manager. He moved to Thailand in 1996 to work for Tower Records. He taught English for a few years before getting the retail itch again, opening the Lazy Mango Bookshop in Siem Reap in 2002 and Dasa Books in Bangkok in 2004.

Steve Goodman — Steve Goodman is an American who has lived in Phnom Penh since 2005 working as a professional photogra­pher and part-time guitar player. In 2002, after a twenty-two-year career as a software company executive in San Francisco, he began an exciting adventure traveling extensively and shooting photos throughout South­east Asia.

Antonio Graceffo — Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia. He is the author of the book The Monk from Brooklyn and the host of the web TV show Martial Arts Odyssey, which traces his ongoing journey through Asia, learning mar­tial arts in various countries.

Debra Groves — Debra Groves is an Australian photographer working in Cambodia. She left her own wedding photography business on Australia’s Sunshine Coast to move to Cambodia in April 2005, a year after her first visit. She is the founder of the charity Helping Hands.

Anna Hassett — Anna Hassett’s travels to Cambodia have included spending time at the Helping Hands charity outside Siem Reap.

Christina Heyniger — Christina Heyniger is a consultant, writer, and lecturer working with governments, entrepreneurs, and community tourism interests to develop and market eco-nature-adventure tourism products and ser­vices. Her company, Xola Consulting, has supported clients in countries around the world, including Ar­gentina, Brazil, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Peru, India, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, and the United States.

Denise Heywood — Denise Heywood is a lecturer, journalist, author, and photographer. She has lived in Paris, New York, and Cambodia, where she worked as a journalist for three years. Now based in London, she has written books on Luang Prabang and Cambodian dance, including Cambodian Dance: Celebration of the Gods.

Aaron Horwitz – Aaron Horwitz is a Los Angeles­-based filmmaker and writer who has a passion for Asia and spent a good part of 2008 shooting in Thailand. He is also a cofounder of the charity Who Will? We Will! which organizes annual fundraisers for several small, independent NGOs. He is currently working for Causecast and aiming on a return to work in Southeast Asia again soon.

Mark Hotham — In 2001 Mark set off to spend eighteen months traveling India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Laos, and Vietnam before arriving in Cambodia in 2003. Unable to tear himself away, he found work in the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh and settled down for two and a half years. He now lives and works in the travel industry in the UK.

Soumya James — Soumya is writing her doctoral dis­sertation in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in the United States. She is studying the cultural role of the divine feminine during the Angkor period. Her experiences during fieldwork led to a greater appreciation for the people and places in Cambodia.

Helen Ibbitson Jessup — Helen is an art historian specializing in the architecture and sculpture of Cambodia and Indonesia. She has curated exhibitions that have traveled in the USA, France, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. She is the founding president of Friends of Khmer Culture and a trustee of the United States Indonesia Society. Her publications include Art & Architecture of Cambodia and Masterpieces of the National Museum of Cambodia.

Molly Jester — Molly spent many years working on issues related to homelessness and street-living youth in the United States. She first traveled to Southeast Asia in 2001 and fell in love with the region. She’s the president and founder of Stop Exploitation Now! established in 2005 to fight exploitation and abuse in Southeast Asia.

Phil Lees — Phil is an Australian living in Phnom Penh and an avid foodie. He pens Phnomenon, Cambodia’s first food blog. Lonely Planet’s guide to the greater Mekong called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine.”

Peter Leth — Peter is an American who has explored all corners of Cambodia for both work and play. He currently lives in Phnom Penh with his wife and daughter.

Martin Lum — Martin advises the Victoria government in Australia on health. He loves traveling.

Roy McClean — Roy is currently based in Australia and Asia. He spends his time breathing and making shapes with his body (also known as Chi Gung, Wing Chun, yoga, and meditation). He enjoys riding old bicycles through the back streets of low-rise cities.

Steve McClure — Steve is an award-winning writer/ director and cofounder of Ghost-2-­Eleven Entertainment. His first feature documentary, Rain Falls from Earth: Surviving Cambodia’s Darkest Hour, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Sam Waterston and features personal stories from victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia.

Doug Mendel — A former volunteer firefighter in Colorado, Doug first came to Cam­bodia in 1997 and has since donated equipment to six of Cambodia’s fire stations, including two fire trucks. He also set up the Douglas Mendel Cambodian Relief Fund.

Howie Nielsen — A former dentist in the United States by profession, Howie is a passionate bird-watcher and now trains local guides for the Sam Veasna Center for Wildlife Conservation in Cambodia.

Caroline Nixon — Serving as a medical student elec­tive in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 1980 started Caroline’s passion for travel­ing throughout Southeast Asia. Her favorite destinations are Myanmar and Cambodia. Her favorite pastimes include floating on rivers, cooking, and eating with friends.

Dougald O’Reilly — Dougald received his PhD in archaeology in 1999 and was hired the same year by UNESCO to teach at the Royal University of Fine Arts and pursue his research interests in Iron Age settlements in Cambodia. He founded Heritage Watch International, an NGO that promotes the preservation of heritage assets in Cambodia, in 2003. The author of Early Civilizations of Southeast Asia, he is currently a lecturer at The University of Sydney in Australia.

Joanna Owen — Following Joanna’s first experi­ence with Siem Reap, she made it her home and runs a successful responsible-tourism business with her partner, Thomas at Angkor Hotels. She has just completed an MA in Responsible Tourism Management and set up HOPE, a UK-based charity supporting young adults in Cambodia.

Daniela Papi — Daniela is the founder of PEPY, a hybrid organization encompassing an education development organization and an edu-venture tour company based in Siem Reap. She has been living in Cambodia since 2005 and is always looking for ways to escape the cities-often by bicycle on one of PEPY’s bicycle adventures.

Robert Philpotts — Robert has been writing about Cambodia since UNAMIC times, “but I consider, as far as my books are concerned, what I produce is a bit like white rice without prahok. This is why I spice the texts with pen and ink drawings.” His books include A Guide to Phnom Penh, The Coast of Cambodia, A Post of Independence, and his latest, South of the Heart.

Socheata Poeuv — Socheata made her filmmaking debut with the award-winning film New Year Baby, which was broadcast nationally in 2008. She was formerly on the staff at NBC’s Dateline and TODAY shows and ABC’s World News Tonight. She’s also the CEO of Khmer Legacies, an organization whose mission is to document the Cambodian genocide through videotaped testimonies by having the younger generation interview the older generation.

Jan Polatschek — Jan is a native New Yorker and now lives in Thailand. Using Bangkok as his hub, he travels in Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. He writes about his travel adventures and posts photos on his website, and several of his essays appear in To Asia With Love guidebooks from ThingsAsian Press.

Geoff Pyle — After living in Cambodia for a while, Geoff finds it hard to keep away from the place-the people, the history, the landscape, the food … though it is the architecture, the old stuff and the 1960s stuff, that really gets him going.

Nick Ray — Nick hails from Watford, UK, and after trying his hand attour leading he hooked up with Lonely Planet in 1998 and has worked on more than twenty titles since, including Lonely Planet Cambodia. He lives in Phnom Penh and leads and lectures on tours for top travel companies and international organizations. He also works as a loca­tion scout and manager for television and film. Projects have included Tomb Raider, Two Brothers, and countless documentaries for the BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic.

Dawn Rooney — Dawn is an independent scholar and an art historian specializing in South­east Asia. She has authored nine books on the art and culture of the region. An American now residing in Bangkok, her Angkor: An Introduction to the Temples was first published in 1994.

Geoff Ryman — Geoff is a Canadian living in London. He has published eight novels and a volume of short fiction and has coedited a collection of Canadian fiction and a volume of stories that are collaborations between writers and scientists. His novels and short stories have won fourteen awards. His book on Cambodia, The King’s Last Song, was inspired by a visit in 2001 to an archaeological dig at Angkor Wat. He has twice run workshops in Cambodia in creative writing.

Anita Sach — Anita works as a freelance travel writer and editor, develops tour programs to Asia for tour operators, and leads group tours to the region. She is the author of guidebooks on Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangkok and regularly writes online guides to Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi, and Bangkok.

Sheila Scoville — Sheila lives in Austin, Texas, playing in her band No Mas Bodas, selling music at Waterloo Records, and thinking about her trip to Asia at least five times a day. She misses the scenery, cheap massages, kindness of complete strangers, and street food (especially sticky rice desserts) the most.

Lundi Seng — Lundi is a doctor practicing rehabilitation, occupational, and physical therapy in Long Beach, California. In January 1979 he fled with his family to Thailand and resettled in Michigan in December 1980.

David Shamash — For the last fifteen years property company director David has been donning his backpack and traveling to the farthest reaches of Cambodia by boat, pickup, or motodop. As a board member of Mekong Blue in Stung Treng, he helped develop the project so that it now supports a large seg· ment of the local community.

Gordon Sharpless — Based in Siem Reap, Gordon has lived and worked in Cambodia for nearly a decade. He is the writer and publisher of the Tales of Asia website and since 2004 has owned and operated Two Dragons Guesthouse in Siem Reap. He is married with two children.

Robert Tompkins — Robert is a Canadian writer, editor, and educator. A regular contributor to ThingsAsian.com, he and his wife, Doris, live in Cedar Valley, Ontario, a rural community thirty-five miles north of Toronto. Bob publishes articles internationally through his freelance agency, Travel Ink. He is also the editor of Futurescapes. Currently, he is involved in an online editing and tutorial service called The Wordsdoctor.

Georgiana Treasure-Evans — Georgiana is a mother, writer, yoga teacher, and healing arts practitioner. During her four years in Cambodia she traveled widely in Southeast Asia with her husband and two small children. She now lives in Herefordshire, UK.

Loung Ung — Loung is the author of two mem­airs: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers and Lucky Child. A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind.

Glyn Vaughan — Glyn is director of All Ears Cambodia, a local NGO fighting against ear disease and deafness. It focuses on the weakest and hardest hit, providing free medical treatment for some of the most vulnerable groups in Cambodia.

Dickon Verey — Dickon lived in Cambodia from 2003 until the beginning of 2006. During that time he volunteered for a number of NGOs. His main work was building a youth and community center in the village of Ksach Poy near Battambang for FEDA. He now lives in Vietnam.

Christine Thuy-Anh Vu — Christine writes and edits work about the arts, culture, and science. Serv­ing as art adviser to several interna­tional collections, she has also been an executive director to a Vietnam-based international arts organization. A Fulbright Fellow in Contemporary Vietnamese Art, she has received other honors and fellowships for her research in Europe and the USA in psychology, gastronomy, and contemporary art.

Ray Waddington — Ray is the president of The Peoples of the World Foundation, a secular, apolitical, nonprofit organization based in the USA. He established the foundation to fund educational scholarships for indigenous people after witnessing their lack of educational opportunities and the negative impact this has on political representation. He recently cel­ebrated his one-millionth kilometer of international travel and is prepar­ing a travel/humor book based on his experiences.

Georgie Walsh — Georgie first went to Phnom Penh to work on a memoir set there in the 1980s. This fell through, but she kept herself busy by editing, teaching, exporting textiles, starting a soup kitchen, co-founding an NGO, and selling some paintings, just to name a few activities. More recently she’s been based in Bangkok and Luang Prabang, where she is working as a freelance journalist.

Peter Walter — Peter Walter is the Southeast Asia managing director for L.EX Consult­ing. A native of Lakewood, Ohio, he has lived with his family in Bangkok for nearly ten years. Whenever he gets the chance, he enjoys spending time exploring the region with his wife, Lyle, and their three boys.

Debbie Watkins — With husband Marc, Debbie created Carpe Diem Travel in 2001 after a ca­reer in banking in the UK. Carpe Diem is a social enterprise travel business, reinvesting profits in the communities its customers visit.

Rachel Wildblood — UK-born, Rachel is a freelance consultant specializing in waste and environmental management. She worked for various NGOs in Cambo­dia over a four-year period from 2005 after arriving as a volunteer.

Mick Yates — Mick is an innovative leadership researcher, teacher, and author. In 2001, Mick was elected to Save the Children’s U.S. board of trustees. Reflecting a long-term interest in children’s issues, the Yates family supports a Cambodian school devel­opment program in a remote area of the country.

Ronnie Yimsut — Born and raised in Siem Reap, Ronnie fled Cambodia after witnessing the massacre of nearly his entire family under the Khmer Rouge regime. Ron­nie is currently a senior landscape architect for the U.S. Forest Service, a published author, and a social and environmental justice issues activist with groups such as Project Enlighten and Bakong Technical College in Cambodia.

Ray Zepp — Ray came to Cambodia in 1995 as part of the Georgetown University project to rebuild the National Uni­versity of Management. His travels in the hinterland prompted him to author his Cambodia Less Travelled and Experiencing Cambodia. He now resides in Battambang and has written the tourist guide Around Battambang. He has also started the new Dewey International University in Battambang.

Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950 By Joel G. Montague

This beautiful new edition from White Lotus Press is a true historical masterpiece that captures the adventure, diversity and visual excitement of early 20th century Cambodia in a medium familiar to everyone: the picture postcard.

While French and Cambodian archives are filled with books, manuscripts and government records, the photographic history of the nation is more limited. As author Joel Montague discovered

“it is a happy coincidence that the era of French expansion to Southeast Asia…coincided with another era, one that came to be known by aficionados of ephemera as ‘the golden years’ of the picture postcard!”

Indeed, postcards became a powerful way to share the adventure of Asian life. Economical and readily available, literally millions were sent to friends and relatives around the world, forming important impressions of Cambodia, inspiring dreams and undoubtedly many journeys.

"Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950" includes hundreds of clear, black & white postcard photos and a special section featuring rare color postcards.

Over the decades, postcards captured the rapidly changing landscape of this nation under French influence, often presenting a contrived, romantic image of the Cambodian Protectorate. Today, however, the fraction of postcards that survived are scattered among dealers, obscure archives and private collectors around the world. And so M. Montague began collecting these snapshots of the exotic life in this Eastern land with the dream of one day sharing this treasure trove of rarely-seen images of Cambodia.

The result of his passion is this splendid 327-page volume. In addition to including hundreds of his best and rarest postcard discoveries, the author organized this presentation into 16 categories, each supplemented with detailed historical information (see below for the full Table of Contents).

Postcards of Cambodia is now an essential resource for colonial scholars (e.g. as an ideal companion to Penny Edwards’ book, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945). Naturally, Montague’s book will be indispensible for other collectors, but with the difficult work so pleasantly accomplished, why collect? The opportunity is here for all curious travelers to instantly enjoy these fascinating glimpses of Cambodian history.

Review by Kent Davis – www.devata.org

One of the earliest postcards from the 1900 Exposition Universelle in "Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950" By Joel G. Montague. The book also includes a special section of color postcards.

BOOK DETAILS

• Title: Picture Postcards of Cambodia 1900-1950
• Author: Joel G. Montague
• ISBN: 9789744801197
• Publisher: White Lotus Co., Bangkok
• Contents: 327 pp., illus., 19 pp. in color
• Size: 210×300 mm, pbk. Weight: 1.400 Kg

From "Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950" By Joel G. Montague

PURCHASE INFO

Publisher and International Distributor – White Lotus Press

Founder Diethard Ande established the Bangkok-based White Lotus Press in 1972. Since then he has produced important new books about Southeast Asia and reissued classic titles that have long been out of print. White Lotus offers fast, reliable shipping worldwide. PICTURE POSTCARDS OF CAMBODIA: 1900-1950 is readily available at bookstores in Thailand.

Cambodia – Monument Books

Australia – Old Asia Bookroom

United States – Dalley Book Service

From "Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950" By Joel G. Montague

COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS

PICTURE POSTCARDS OF CAMBODIA: 1900-1950
By Joel G. Montague

1 – FRENCH INDOCHINA: THE GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

• An Introduction to the History of the Protectorate of Cambodia within Indochina
• Colonial Cambodia
• The Question of “non-History”
• The Picture Postcard: An Ephemeral Record of Early Twentieth Century Cambodia
• Colonial Administration in the Five States of the French Indochinese Union
• A New World: Picture Postcard Maps of Indochina

2 – PICTURE POSTCARDS OF CAMBODIA: 1900 TO MID-CENTURY

• The History of the Picture Postcard
• Categorization of Postcards of Cambodia
• The Messages on Picture Postcards with Images of Cambodia Sent from Indochina
• Photographers, Editors, Printers and the Dating of Postcards
• Identification of Some Key Elements of Picture Postcards Used to Illustrate this Book
• The Postal Service for Indochina Picture

3 – THE MONARCHY

• Images of the Cambodian Royal Family

4 – THE PALACE, THOSE SERVING THE MONARCHY, AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

• The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh
• The Palace Staff and Those Serving the Government

5 – CAMBODIA’S CAPITAL, THE GREAT CITY OF PHNOM PENH

• French Colonial Structures
• The Phnom and its Surroundings

6 – CAMBODIA’S LIFELINE -THE MEKONG RIVER

• The Port and Canal of Phnom Penh
• The Great River and the Boats on it

7 – THE KHMER AND OTHER INHABITANTS OF CAMBODIA

• The Khmer
• Other Inhabitants

8 – KHMER DANCE AND MUSIC

• Dance
• Music

9 – INSTITUTIONS OF PARTICULAR INTEREST

• Indigenous and French Troops
• The Prison System
• Educational Institutions
• Foreign and Local Hunters

10 – THE RELIGIONS OF CAMBODIA

• Buddhism
• Catholicism
• Islam (the Cham-Malay)

11 – SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL AND RURAL CAMBODIA

• Major Towns
• Villages and Dwellings

12 – THE CAMBODIAN ECONOMY

• Animal Husbandry and Agriculture
• Fisheries and Forestry
• Commerce and Handicrafts

13 – IMPORTANT EVENTS AND RITES OF PASSAGE

• Festivals and Ceremonies
• The Water Festival

14 – ARCHAEOLOGICAL WONDERS OF CAMBODIA

• Angkor Wat and its Neighbors
• Nokor (Kampong Cham)

15 – CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ABROAD

• International Expositions and Fairs Featuring Indochina and Cambodia
• Tiny Glimpse of the Khmer Presence in Neighboring Countries

16 – COLOR PICTURE POSTCARDS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF POSTCARD EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS

Cambodian palace pavilion from "Picture Postcards of Cambodia: 1900-1950"

Kindle Wireless Reading Device

Digital books about Angkor, Cambodian travel guides, history and even folktales are literally at your fingertips with Amazon’s Kindle Reader.

Kindle has been Amazon’s #1 bestselling item for two years running. It’s also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any Amazon product! Amazon just introduced an improved version for only $139 so if you’ve been waiting to try this technology, this could be the time.

Best of all, Kindle users save money on their books because Amazon offers some Cambodian titles at a substantial savings.

For example:

Angkor the Magnificent – The Wonder City of Ancient Cambodia

By Helen Candee - $9.99 (List $39.95)

“The tale of it is incredible;
the wonder which is Angkor is unmatched in Asia.”

Angkor the Magnificent

So begins Helen Churchill Candee’s classic tale of Asian adventure. Today, readers can again experience the mystery of Cambodia’s vast jungle temples through her eyes.

Although Helen Candee is best known for surviving the sinking of the RMS Titanic, she walked with kings, presidents, the wealthy and the powerful. entertaining, educating and influencing them. This independent woman championed feminine equality and fought tirelessly for woman’s rights.

As a single woman she traveled the Far East with a keen eye for detail, an inquisitive mind, and a sensitivity for local culture. Helen Candee’s travelogue remains one of the most evocative English language accounts of the ancient Khmer capital.

This special Kindle edition included her complete 1924 work with dozens of antique illustrations, an index and bibliography. This digital version also features an original biography of Helen Candee by historian Randy Bryan Bigham, and a reprint of Candee’s original account of the Titanic disaster itself.

A History of Cambodia

By David Chandler - $19.25 (Digital list price $35)

A History of Cambodia

This clear and concise volume provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Hailed by the Journal of Asian Studies as an “original contribution, superior to any other existing work,” the first edition ended in 1953 with Cambodia’s independence from France; the second carries the narrative forward to the present.

In the new material, Chandler focuses especially on the unstable but influential career of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the bloody reign of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and the relative calm that followed the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. This comprehensive general description and analysis of Cambodia will illuminate—for specialists and general readers alike—the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.

Frommer’s Cambodia and Laos

By Daniel White - $9.99 (List $21.99)

Frommer's Cambodia and Laos

This new first edition guide introduces two exotic destinations fast becoming required stops for globetrotting tourists. Through our expert author, readers are exposed to the rich culture and poignant history in Cambodia and Laos. Discover the region’s food and gift markets, lovely beaches and islands, colorful temples, and charming villages.

This title covers highlights of both countries, including Cambodia’s tourist Mecca and spiritual center Angkor Wat, capital Phnom Penh, and beach resort Sihanoukville.

Laos covers the relaxed city Vientiane, Luang Prabang (a UNESCO World Heritage city for its blend of Laotian and European architecture), and top spots for ecotourism.

The planning chapter includes extensive information on sustainable development and volunteer vacations. Special features include a Khmer and Laotian language primer and separate history and culture chapters for both nations.

Cambodia Travel Adventures

By Janet Arrowood – $7.99

Cambodia Travel Adventures

This book is extracted from our much larger guide to Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia, and it focuses on Cambodia primarily.

Janet Arrowood is a long-time and frequent visitor to Southeast Asia.

Huge lakes, tremendous waterfalls, elephant rides, jungles, wonderful people, fabulous food. The sense of the new and unknown will amaze you. Prices? Phenomenally low. And the scenery is spectacular. Canoe or kayak the South China Sea, see some of the largest waterfalls in the world, visit the islands, trek to hill-tribe areas, visit former royal palaces, wander through local markets.

The imperial temples are unforgettable. Cambodia, almost undiscovered by Westerners, is a land of stunning scenery.

“Travel Adventures” are about living more intensely, waking up to your surroundings and truly experiencing all that you encounter. Each book offers an ideal mix of practical travel info along with culturally enriching activities and physical adventures. And the fun is for everyone, no matter what his or her age or ability.

Comprehensive background information – history, culture, geography and climate – gives you a solid knowledge of each destination and its people. Regional chapters take you on an introductory tour, with stops at museums, historic sites and local attractions. Places to stay and eat; transportation to, from and around your destination; practical concerns; tourism contacts – its all here! Detailed maps feature walking and driving tours. Then come the adventures – both cultural and physical – from canoeing and hiking to taking dance or cooking classes. This unique approach allows you to really immerse yourself in the local culture.

Folk Tales from Cambodia

By Raja Sharma - $2.39

Folk Tales From Cambodia

Cambodian Folktales grew from the imagination and the lives of people, passed through from generation to generation, the stories have sometimes altered during the retelling process, ordinary characters become bigger than life, situations exaggerated.

They remain popular both with adults and children, especially the latter who respond quickly to the stories. They are simple to understand with no complicated plot involved, they are short, and sometimes humorous. The sense of justice is always there, the good character will be rewarded and the evil one always gets punished at the end! Folktales may lead to a better understanding of customs and culture. Here are the folktales, so enjoy! They are sure to delight you.

Details on the Amazon Kindle

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Simply put, it’s the best dedicated ebook reader you can buy… Amazon has managed to increase the contrast on the Kindle in a way that sets it above the Nook, Sony Readers, or any other dedicated ebook reader we’ve tested.” - PC Magazine

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

Daughters of Angkor Wat

Who were these women? Why were they so important to the powerful Khmer Empire?

A growing body  of evidence indicates that Angkor Wat may be mankind’s greatest tribute to womanhood, motherhood and the feminine divine.

Daughters of Angkor Wat begins unlocking the secrets of these women, immortalized in stone so long ago. Advanced analysis using newly available computer technology is just beginning. This book presents surprising theories, hundreds of original photos and new insights from some of the world’s leading experts including:

Paul Cravath
Kent Davis
Madeleine Giteau
Kapil Goel
George Groslier
Trudy Jacobsen
Nitin Kumar
Anil Menon
Julie Mehta
Peter Sharrock
Krishna Murari Srivastava

…and other enlightened observers.

The book’s most unusual feature is that this investigation raises more questions than it answers. The evidence it reveals gives readers the tools to join the experts and to participate in solving this historical mystery.

In development since 2006, the book has been repeatedly delayed by Devata.org’s rapidly expanding body of research so that new theories can be properly expressed. August 22, 2010 marked the release of the world’s first scientific study of the devata, “Clustering Face Carvings: Exploring the Devata of Angkor Wat”, in progress with the Michigan State University computer vision team since 2008.

We now anticipate Advance Reading Copies of “Daughters of Angkor Wat” to be available to the press by early 2012. We are as anxious as you are to see it as you are!

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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 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.