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

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 – For those of us living an easy flight or a bus tide away from Angkor, reading Helen Churchill Candee‘s book Ang­kor the Magnificent is a reminder that, for nearly a century, some people have virtually circled the globe for the privilege of seeing the temples that residents of Cambodia may take for granted.

As Helen Candee's photo shows, Angkor Wat had fewer visitors in the 1920's!

Her trip to Angkor in 1922 meant finding in Hong Kong a ship whose captain knew how to avoid pirates in the South China Sea, then sailing to Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City was then called, and from there traveling by boat to Siem Reap province. But nothing deterred this American woman, a larger-than-life personality who ended up better known for writing one of the first eyewit­ness accounts of the sinking of the ship Titanic in 1912, on which she was a passenger.

Visiting Angkor, she described it as “one of the most grandiose cities of antiquity” in her book first published in 1924. “’In these precincts, the race called the Khmers lived a life of luxury, pomp and display, which has not been exceeded at any time in any part of the world. And all this was at a time when Europe was sunk in the dull apathy of the Dark Ages, when France was a savage coun­try, England uncivilized and Germany a hinter­land of barbarous hordes.”

"Angkor the Magnificent" - Helen Churchill Candee. DatAsia, Inc., 2008, Hardbound, 359 pages.

A new edition of “Angkor the Magnificent” has been released by the US publishing house DatAsia, which has published other out-of-print books dealing with Cambodia.

“I knew that her words were as relevant today as the day she wrote them,” DatASIA publisher and editor Kent Davis said.

Journalist and historian “Randy Bryan Bigham and other Titanic historians including Phillip Gowen provided text and photos for Helen’s first published biography,” Mr. Davis said.

Written as a journal rather than a travel guide, one of the most surprising aspects of her book on Angkor is how fresh it reads. Using a very person­al and even poetic style of writing, Ms Churchill Candee creates an intimacy with the reader as she describes fellow travelers and incidents that might have happened just yesterday: hotel guests complaining about their rooms, tourists fascinat­ed by Cambodian classical dancers or negotiating with market vendors.

Also found in her visit to Angkor is the female star of long-ago stage shows imposing her cap­rices on her patient husband, and a single woman who, while behaving as an austere celibate flirts with that same husband at the first opportunity. There also is the fat Catholic priest, taking the best seat in a small boat away from a Cambodian woman carrying a baby, two irascible journalists and a US artist eager to sketch everything she sees in Cambodia.

Ms Churchill Candee’s views on Vietnam and Cambodia are pointedly anti-colonialist, which one could expect from today’s Western commen­tators but less from a casual visitor 90 years ago. In Saigon, which she describes as a city of “luxu­ry, pomp, dissipation,” she found the French bored, trying to recreate the atmosphere of their towns back home while at the same time desper­ately hoping to leave the colony. Juxtaposed with the colonials are the Vietnamese, working 12 hours a day carrying buckets of coal to ships and pulling rickshaws, many of them living on the streets because of heavy French taxes, which made owning a home prohibitive.

“We look on the sallow nostalgic French and then the impoverished native and wonder why the combination was ever made,” she writes. “In the interests of civilization and proper progress is the proper answer. It is the greed of those who exploit Asia for the benefit of the West.”

In Phnom Penh, Ms Churchill Candee found a better atmosphere: The French appeared less unhappy and the Cambodians less scared. How­ever, she noted, King Sisowath and his Cam­bodian officials had no power, although, in theory, Cambodia was an independent country under the protection of France: The King was on a salary and most of the country’s revenues, exploited by the French, went to Paris.

1920's view of Phnom Penh's Royal Palace.

Ms Churchill Candee arrived at Angkor by boat and because the Tonle Sap lake’s water level was too low for the vessel to dock, passengers had to transfer from the bigger boat to small fish­ing embarkations at midnight. Doing this today in Siem Reap in the middle of the day in the dry sea­son is frightening enough, let alone in the middle of the night in 1922.

“We were a silent crowd, half asleep, and we were a timorous one,” she recounted. Cars were awaiting them on shore. At their Bungalow in the morning, they were greeted with a sight that one can only envy: Angkor Wat Their rustic hotel was about 100 meters from the monument’s first steps and moat.

“We had not been told [Angkor Wat] would greet us like the sun at early morning,” she writes. “But we were thrown before its beauty unprepared, unshrived, unshorn.” She would dedicate nearly two chapters to describing the temple.

The enigmatic faces of the Bayon temple mes­merized her: “Nowhere in the world does mutual race understanding seems so impossible as before the great temple of Bayon [...] An art expresses a people’s soul. A soul that could be thus expressed is not one that the West could understand,” she wrote.

Face tower at Preah Khan.

She also describes other monuments, including Ta Prohm and Prah Khan; her visit to Siem Reap town, then just a village; and a Cambodian classical dance performance at Angkor Wat.

She also speaks of the animals portrayed in sculptures and wall carvings at Angkor. “It is like nothing else,” she writes of the naga. “The form is the result of many centuries of legend and belief; the past evidence of past religion and stories.”

Ms Churchill Candee had come to Cambodia hoping to better understand what had happened after the Khmer empire lost its power around the 15th century. In the absence of books and ar­chives that were probably written on perishable material and destroyed by the elements and wars, leaving only religious and administrative records carved on stones, the transition between Angkor and the weak Cambodian nation of the late 19th century is hard to explain, she writes.

The Khmer dominated the region for cen­turies and then, she says at the end of her book, “The envy of the enemy killed them. [...] A race arose from obscurity; it built the most marvelous edifices of Asia; it was subjugated and it disappeared.”

Today, Angkor remains, she writes, “not only a secret place but a place full of secrets.”

Helen Churchill Candee at age 50.

Reading about Ms Churchill Candee’s life is as captivating as reading her book. Born in 1858 in New York City to one of the first English families to immigrate to the US in 1620, Ms Churchill Candee divorced her abusive husband in 1896 — ­something that, at the time, usually brought dis­grace on a high-society woman — Randy Bryan Bigham says in his chapter on her life.

Wishing to support herself and her two chil­dren, she started writing essays in US women’s publications, first on housekeeping and etiquette, and later on health, education and community government, Mr. Bigham wrote.

Her first book, “How Women May Earn a living,” was a best seller in 1900 and is considered groundbreaking. She supported women s rights all her rue, even heading a march in Wash­ington, DC, in 1913 for women’s suffrage.

This scene from the movie "Titanic" may have been inspired by Candee's experience.

A hostess who entertained US presidents as well as artists in Washington, she became an inte­rior decorator before the profession was ever es­tablished; worked for the White House as well as for embassy residences; and wrote a series of books on interior design, antique furnishings and tapestries.

Traveling extensively, she found herself on the Titanic on its fateful maiden journey. According to Mr. Bigham, the scene from the 1997 James Cameron film “Titanic” in which Jack and Rose stand at the ship’s bow came out of her memoirs.

During World War I, Ms Churchill Candee volun­teered at the front with the Red Cross in Italy, a country she especially loved. Her travels in the 1920s took her to Asia, on which she wrote travel and political stories. Her book on Angkor, one of the rare English-language publi­cations on the subject at the tune, earned her an award from King Sisowath.

She died in 1949 at the age of 90 at her cottage in the US state of Maine.

For more information about Helen Churchill Candee and her book  please visit AngkorSecrets.com.

The restored temple of Chau Say Tevoda. Note the new stone sections in lighter color.

Between 1,120-1,150AD, Angkor Wat’s sponsor, King Suryavarman II, also began building the elegant Hindu temple of Chau Say Tevoda. Yasovarman II is credited with additional work during his brief reign (1,160-1,166AD). Finally, Jayavarman VII (ruling 1,181-1,215 AD) added new decorative elements to harmonize with the religious transformation he initiated converting the state from Hinduism to Buddhism.

The central shrine is encircled by sacred female images called devata.

Two of the Khmer civilization’s greatest kings, Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII, also installed the greatest number of sacred female images, or devata, in their temples. The style and unique qualities of the devata at Chao Say Tevoda make this small temple well worth a detour on any visit to Angkor.

The Khmer kings Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII enshrined images of more than 4,000 sacred women in their temples. No one knows exactly why.

Chau Say Tevoda includes a central sanctuary, two libraries and four gopura (gateway) structures, one for each cardinal point. Directly to its north sits Thommanon temple, which was also built by King Suryavarman II based on a similar design.

Thommanon also features prominent devata in fine condition (see Devata.org’s Thommanon photo gallery here) but there are significant stylistic differences in the women populating the two temples. For years, Thommanon was in far better condition thanks to extensive restoration done by the EFEO in the 1960’s under the direction of Bernard Philippe Groslier.

Many of the women at Chao Say Tevoda express strength in their beauty.

Unfortunately, Chao Say Tevoda had been devastated by centuries of natural erosion, and all that remained were 4,000 pieces of stone masonry, many of which had tumbled down an embankment into the Siem Reap River.

On March 29, 2000, H.R.H. Princess Buppha Devi with APSARA Authority and other Cambodian dignitaries welcomed H.E. Yang Tin Ai, Ambassador for the People’s Republic of China as his government initiated a massive restoration project of the temple that included both Chinese and Cambodian workers. Tim Tye’s Asia Explorers website offers a few excellent photos taken while the restoration.

The Chinese restoration project was controversial because they chose to totally reconstruct the temple buildings by including newly fabricated stones. While American and Japanese teams rejected this approach it conformed to UNESCO and ICOMOS guidelines allowing for their use of 2-9% of modern replica stones in heritage reconstruction.

The Chinese restoration team included replicas of missing stone sections (seen above in lighter colors).)

The results are dramatic. The new sections are easy to identify and, while the replicas do not equal the artistic quality of the original Khmer sections, they do help visitors experience the temple in a condition closer to what was originally built.

The Chinese team completed their work in 2009, when the improved temple again began receiving visitors.

May the devata of Chao Say Tevoda bestow blessings on the Chinese for their important contribution of restoring this Khmer cultural treasure.

NOTE: A complete photo gallery of all the unique Chau Say Tevoda devata is in preparation. The link will be posted here in the future. In the meantime a trinity of devata appears below:

This devata's crown, with central element, is unusual. None of the symbolic attributes that devata display have yet been interpreted.

This alert looking devata is crowned by her long, thick, braided hair dressed in coils.

This graceful crowned devata is similar to her sisters at Angkor Wat. Note that she holds a "rooted bud" (Devata.org terminology) exactly like the sacred women surrounding the central sanctuary on the top level of Angkor Wat.

Sacred female image from Chao Say Tevoda

From the 8th-14th centuries, the Khmer civilization unified most of Southeast Asia, implementing systems of government, religion, education, agriculture and architecture that still color the region today.

Khmer nobility and peasants alike chose to live in homes of wood, bamboo and thatch as they reserved the more permanent materials of stone and brick only for temples to their gods. Today, thousands of their religious structures still dot the landscape of Cambodia and Thailand, offering us clues to understanding the amazing people who built them.

The best photo index of Khmer temples in Cambodia and Thailand is available free thanks to the efforts of “Khmersearch,” a skilled (and generous) German photographer. Panoramio hosts his high resolution photo collection of  ancient Khmer temples, hospitals, dharmasalas, ruins and water features. Each photo is geographically located using Google Earth.

I found this extensive collection while researching the obscure temples of Prasat Mebon and Prasat Toap near Banteay Chhmar. In fact, many of the structures featured are virtually unvisited sites that are difficult to find, making this online resource especially unique.

Note that his photo collection offers only visual verification of the sites and does not include historical details.

We at Devata.org express our gratitude to Khmersearch for the time and effort devoted to creating this important record of Khmer history. The temple list below is organized by country (Cambodia and Thailand).

Temples featuring devata (sacred women) appear in green (note that devata are not necessarily included in Khmersearch images). Links to Devata.org photo sets and related devata articles appear in red.

Cambodia

“All Cambodia Sites”

Thailand

Lost Goddesses by Trudy Jacobsen

By Kent Davis

This article is based on research presented by Trudy Jacobsen in her book “Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in the History of Cambodia“.

“Lost Goddesses” traces the trajectory of female influence in Cambodia from ancient to modern times. Immediately following her Preface, Dr. Jacobsen opened the book with a Glossary. The vocabulary that a society uses is an important indicator of values, priorities and beliefs. It therefore struck me as a practical, original and brilliant idea to first introduce the female-related terms that her investigation would include.

The list below includes Khmer, Pali, French and Sanskrit terms with English meanings. With the author’s kind permission, I extracted this list from the complete glossary that appears in “Lost Goddesses“. I have also augmented her list with a sampling of additional terms from the online Khmer-English dictionary at the Southeast Asian Language Library. I regret any mistakes or errors in my attempts to transliterate some of the additional terms. Note that this list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it a complete list of female related words in Khmer…but the words below are certainly explore some fascinating social, political and spiritual concepts.

Khmer Words About Women

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

As early as the 9th century, Khmer people respected women, giving them the right to own property, the right to conduct business, and honoring female images in their temples. Devata.org is dedicated to understanding the role of ancient women in Southeast Asia, and to sharing that knowledge with the modern world to inspire equality, education and advancement for women.

A new book presents compelling evidence that  unleashing women’s full potential is the key to economic progress in the world.  “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” offers practical, effective ways to empower women and to improve the world we live in.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the husband-and-wife Pulitzer Prize winning team that wrote the book, and they practice what they preach. The great news is that it’s easy to do something good; there are plenty of quality organizations that maximize the influence of your contributions, no matter how modest.

Here are three ways you can help today:

1. Help girls go to school.

Srei Devata Middle School has no electricity so students learn on a battery powered computer charged by solar panels.

Girls who get an education have fewer children, earn more money, and are able to help younger siblings. American Assistance for Cambodia enables individuals and organizations to revolutionize life in a village forever by actually building a new school for as little as $13,000.

In 2005, DatAsia, the publishing firm that supports Devata.org, funded construction of  Srei Devata Middle School in Kampong Thom Province, as well as an initial operating budget, through AAfC. While Nick Kristof doesn’t flaunt the fact, he and his family also funded a school with this efficient foundation in 2008.

Another excellent program AAfC operates to help girls in Cambodia is Girls Be Ambitious, where uneducated girls are at great risk of being trafficked into brothels or exploitative labor situations in factories. For $10 a month, you can keep a girl in school and help her build a better future.

2. Support woman’s business and education.

A microloan of $50 can help a woman start a business, producing income she can use to feed her children and send them to school. Two great groups helping women around the world are Mercy Corps and BRAC.

"an illiterate woman who used compensation money after being gang-raped to build a small school in which she herself enrolled." Story & photo by Nicolas Kristof

Have you read about Mukhtar Mai’s courageous efforts to bring educational equality to girls and women in one of Pakistan’s poorest regions? Her story and other accounts from Pakistan were so shocking that we immediately donated to her cause on behalf of the students of Srei Devata School. Cambodia is slowly recovering from its time of genocidal horror, but many others still live in the agony and ignorance of human cruelty. Anyone can help with the click of a mouse and PayPal.

3. Make girls smarter.

Child receiving a Vitamin A capsule in Cambodia.

How can a few pennies per person change lives? Many pregnant women living in poverty don’t get enough iodine, so their fetuses’ brains do not develop properly. Their children routinely lose ten to 15 IQ points—particularly girls, for reasons not fully understood. The solution: Iodize salt, at the cost of a couple of pennies per person per year.

Helen Keller International provides technical assistance to establish nutrition and eye health programs in partnership with host countries throughout the world. Did you know that 80% of blindness worldwide is preventable? Neither did I.

For details go to Helen Keller International.

There you have it. Three ways and multiple efficient foundations that enable you to improve the lives of women now. Do you have $10? $100? Pick one and see how it feels.

Article by Kent Davis

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. Scheduled for Release – Summer 2010.

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When an envelope filled with review books arrives, I never know quite what to expect. As a copy of Angkor the Magnificent fell into my hands, it took a moment to realize that this was the long-awaited reprint of the Helen Churchill Candee journal of her travels through Cambodia in 1922 had finally arrived. This was a must-read book for me, and I was not disappointed with what I found in the pages of this wonderful book.

"Angkor the Magnificent" - Helen Churchill Candee. DatAsia, Inc., 2008 (Originally published 1924 by Frederick A. Stokes Co.) Hardbound, illustrated, 359 pages

Much more than a mere travelogue, Helen Candee wrote what was then a definitive look at ancient and early 20th Century Cambodia – considered “one of the first significant works on Cambodia in the English language.” She was honored in 1929 by the King of Cambodia for her work, and it is presented in a modern edition with original photos, spellings and artwork (with some minor editing done for clarity). The type has also been reset, but the original flavor of the book’s design left intact.

Although the maritime community knows Helen Candee as a Titanic survivor, she lived a long and full life as an adventurer, writer, journalist, social leader, suffragette, friend of presidents and especially as a noted interior decorator. The text of Angkor the Magnificent has been supplemented with two welcome additions; a biography of Helen Candee written by Randy Bingham and supplemented with additional information and insights by Phil Gowan, and Helen’s own slightly fictionalized tale of the disaster, Sealed Orders, first printed in Collier’s Weekly as the cover story of the May 4, 1912 issue.

Helen was already a skilled and seasoned writer when Angkor the Magnificent was written. Complete details of her journey to and the exploration of Angkor Wat are given with an almost lyrical cadence; she leaves little to the imagination, using very rich descriptions of the people, land and ruins so that the reader is easily able to imagine tromping with her through the jungles of southeast Asia. It was evident that she took great pride in relating to her readers just what she had witnessed, and did so in a way that allows armchair travelers like myself to live vicariously through the eyes of the author.

Life’s Decor is an engaging biography of Helen Candee, well researched and written by Randy Bryan Bigham. She was first a doting mother, and a divorcee at a time when divorce was a social taboo; this separation from an abusive husband lead to her supporting her two children through writing for various magazines. This vocation became the spring board for the successes that she had throughout the rest of her ninety years.

As the author of eight books and numerous magazine articles, Helen specialized in home decor—five of her books dealt with this subject. Bigham gives a highly condensed description of each volume, with subjects as diverse as How Women May Earn a Living (1900), The Tapestry Book (1912) and one fictional work, An Oklahoma Romance (1901) as well as two travel books.

RMS Titanic - 1912

Sealed Orders was written as a semi-biographical version of Helen’s voyage on the Titanic. Published just two weeks after the sinking, it gives a tantalizing glimpse of personalities on board (A blond woman on the steerage deck stands like a Viking’s daughter .. . she describes others as the prettiest woman, the artist of renown, and him of the bachelor’s cabin) as well as Candee’s own experiences on the ship. Chief among her descriptions-and the focus of the title-are three voyagers whose destinies would collide just a few days later-the iceberg, the Titanic and the Carpathia.

The article Sealed Orders is introduced by Bingham, giving insights into the personalities described so obliquely by Candee; adding details about the small group of protectors known as Our Coterie who surrounded her during the trip, and pointing out that she kept to herself certain details of what happened that long-ago night. This introduction does credit to the short story that follows.

Bingham relates Helen’s experiences, her observations of fellow passengers, the rescue effort and aftermath of the disaster. There is much to like about this section of the book although it would have been nice to have had more information about various people and places; for instance, I would have loved to learned more about the telegraphed correspondence between Helen and Lewis Butt, brother of Archie, as Lewis asked for details about his brother. (This reviewer does realize that the focus of this book is on Cambodia and not the author, and urges that a complete biography of Helen be written.)

Candee’s well written book has been supplemented with a bibliography on Cambodia and an index that concentrates solely on this book; this, along with judicious editing of the original text, has made this reprint of Angkor the Magnificent a valuable resource for anyone interested in the Far East. With additional Titanic-related content, this becomes a book that will both grace your bookshelves and help you learn more about Helen Churchill Candee.

The Titanic Historical Society (THS) is the premier source for Titanic and White Star Line information. THS is the original and largest Titanic society in the world. People of all ages and all countries who love the ship and her story are invited to join THS as members and receive the incomparable Titanic Commutator.

The Titanic Museum in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, houses a superb collection of rare Titanic artifacts and documents donated by survivors. This was the first permanent exhibition of Titanic artifacts in the world. Visitors are invited to tour the museum and visit its gift shop in person and online.

"Khmer Women on the Move" By Annuska Derks

By Kent Davis

Personal, engaging accounts of Cambodian women in transition

Less than 1,000 years ago, the Khmer civilization raised some of the world’s most astounding temples to their Hindu gods…and as we still see today, images of ancient women dominate these temples. In A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People 13th century Chinese traveler Zhou Daguan confirmed that women virtually controlled Cambodian commerce.

The fact is that women have always played important roles in Southeast Asian societies, yet their roles are frequently misinterpreted or even escape the notice of historians. Annuska Derks does a fascinating job reporting on the transition of women’s roles in the complex landscape of modern Cambodia.

“Khmer Women on the Move” is quite readable. While academic books of this caliber can be obtuse, the author’s excellent scholarship doesn’t get in the way. One aspect that I found especially engaging is the way the author includes many Khmer language terms in her text — this not only adds authenticity and precision, it also gives readers an enjoyable lesson in useful Khmer vocabulary!

The author made her study quite personal by profiling a number of women, their families and the conflicts they experienced in the dichotomy of modern Cambodia. There, women face cultural crossroads that present challenging dilemmas: Rural vs. Urban; Traditional vs. Modern; Moral vs. Immoral. The author carefully, clearly examines these conflicts (and others) through the personal experiences of Khmer women who are determining their individual futures.

In reading the Acknowledgements, one discovers, perhaps not surprisingly, that the author consulted with three of the world’s foremost Cambodian scholars in preparing this work: Judy Ledgerwood At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler (Studies on Southeast Asia); Penny Edwards Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945 (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory) and Trudy Jacobsen Lost Goddesses: Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History, whose works I hold in high regard and also recommend.

“Khmer Women on the Move” is a readable, interesting, personal account of Cambodian women seizing the opportunity to decide their futures, and the future of their country. But I recommend this book to a much broader group of readers. Anyone interested in learning more about the social fabric of this fascinating land will enjoy it.