In 1907 France and Siam signed a treaty

 CHAPTER FOUR: GUIDING THE WAY

In 1907 France and Siam signed a treaty that resulted in the retrocession by Siam of the provinces of Battambang, Sisophon, and Angkor¹ to the French protectorate of Cambodia. The treaty was the culmination of years of negotiations between Siam and France and granted to France some of the best farmland in Cambodia,² as well as the monuments at Angkor. One of the first actions taken by the French colonial administration was to assign a man named Jean Commaille, who had been a secretary for the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), to fill the newly instituted position of Conservateur d’Angkor.

The École Française d’Extrême-Orient was founded initially as a permanent archaeological mission in Indochina (first named the Mission archéologique permanente de l’Indochine) in 1898. This Mission was transformed into the EFEO two years later and was at that time placed under the scientific oversight of the *Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.*³ Prior to 1907, the work of the EFEO primarily focused on archaeological research in Vietnam, although there were several pre-1907 EFEO projects in Cambodia and Siam. In addition, members of the EFEO, including some of France’s most accomplished Indologists,⁴ worked at translating Sanskrit and Khmer inscriptions copied as rubbings, taken at Angkor. Once the monuments were retroceded to Cambodia, the maintenance, study, and cataloguing of Angkor became one of the EFEO’s largest.

The EFEO’s interactions with Angkor before 1907 were not restricted to the transcription and translation of inscriptions, but also included cataloguing, and even limited clearing, at some of the monuments. In July of 1900 a French officer named Commandant Lunet de Lajonquière was commissioned along with two topography officers, Lieutenants Buat and Ducret, by the EFEO to study and record the location of all monuments, inscriptions, or structures of archaeological interest within the “current territory of Cambodia.” He was directed by the EFEO to “follow, in a systematic manner, the information gathered by the first explorers, Doudart de Lagrée, Louis Delaporte, and, later, Étienne Aymonier.”

De Lajonquière’s mission included not only sighting and mapping these structures, but also noting and notifying the EFEO of the location of objects that were of the most artistic and archaeological interest for the École, so that they might mount subsequent missions to retrieve them. The 1900 expedition was the first of several commissions, and the results of the missions that Lajonquière conducted were published by the EFEO in three volumes, entitled l’Inventaire descriptif des Monuments du Cambodge.

 monuments du Cambodge. The first volume was published in 1901, followed by the second in 1907, and the last in 1911. Each volume contained research in a geographically distinct area, and the expansion of French control over the territory can be seen within the geographical focus of each volume.

The first volume concentrates on the vestiges of the Khmer empire that could be found within the boundaries of French Cambodia at the time of Lajonquière’s mission in 1900. By the time Lajonquière’s second mission, the protectorate had gained territory, and this territorial expansion is reflected in the geographic concentration of the second volume in this series. The topic of the study has been expanded in this second volume to include a significant portion of Siamese territory, including three chapters entitled “Laos Siamois Oriental,” “Laos Siamois Occidental,” and “Vallée du Menam.” The scope of these chapters covers the vestiges of Isan, as well as cities, such as Bangkok, in the Menam river valley, and includes studies of both Khmer and Siamese structures. The remaining chapters discuss Khmer vestiges in “Laos Français,” and, in a chapter entitled “Provinces nouvellement rattachées au Cambodge,” those structures within the provinces of Melu Prei, Thala Borirat, and Stung Treng, which the protectorate gained in 1904.

The final volume in this series is comprised of a study of the Khmer vestiges found in the last provinces to be retroceded to Cambodia by Siam: Angkor, Battambang, and Sisophon. In the introduction to this volume, de Lajonquière parallels the timing of France’s gaining the territory with the maturity and gradual improvement of his own work as a researcher of Khmer vestiges. After nearly a decade of traveling through the territory of the former Khmer empire, he is finally. able to write about the most important collection of vestiges, and his excitement is palpable.

De Lajonquière's missions were primarily fact-finding in nature. He followed in the footsteps of Étienne Aymonier, who spent more than a year traveling through not only the area surrounding Angkor, but also through Isan in northeastern Siam, collecting information. Like the travelogues of explorers such as Henri Mouhot and Louis de Carné, de Lajonquière's Inventaire attempts to construct a rationale for the expansion of French control into eastern Siam. As an inventory, de Lajonquière's writing is spare and practical; his purpose is to collect data and to catalogue and organize what he finds. The argument for expansion lies in the series of acts that are de Lajonquière's project: first, in the identification of "Khmer" objects and the collection of information about these objects; next, in the organization of that information; and lastly, in the publication of that information.

As a government-sponsored mission, the EFEO’s commission to de Lajonquière contained within it the implication of the colonial administration’s commitment towards “retrieving” Angkor’s lost history, and “retrieving” Angkor itself. This underlying rationale shows through at a number of points, such as in his second volume of writing. Prior to conducting this study he received the cooperation and support of the Siamese Minister of the Interior, Prince Damrong Rajanubhap, particularly for his further mapping and investigation of Siamese provinces and structures at the Prince’s behest. Nevertheless, it is clear that Lajonquière believes the retrocession of these territories to France to be the best possible outcome, declaring that the “former Siamese province of Melu Prei has been transformed since its reunion with French Indochina…”10 This belief exposes 

One of the important purposes of missions like de Lajonquière's: to show, through the collection of an archaeological record, that these territories were "Cambodian."

In addition, as this kind of information-gathering had not been taken up systematically before, de Lajonquière's mission was a way for the EFEO to show that they were best positioned to care for and study the monuments. De Lajonquière's mission was designed to show that France's savants were the men (and occasionally the women) best prepared not only to collect, but to process the data. The vast catalogue of information—descriptions, locations, even some coordinates—collected by de Lajonquière was subsequently arranged in a seemingly systematic manner, and then provided to the Francophone public. The EFEO’s publication of these materials was an evidential act: for members of the EFEO, it showed what had been accomplished. It also exposed the foci of the EFEO’s, and by extension the colonial administration’s, attention. The collection and cataloguing of the information was a step towards the absorption of Angkor into the French Empire.

It is important to note that the publication of de Lajonquière's guide was not accomplished in order to acquaint Cambodians with the location of their historical vestiges, as evidenced by its use of French rather than Khmer. Instead, it was compiled and published to display the EFEO's accomplishments to France, its citizen, and, importantly, its government. These accomplishments were collected and displayed not only for the use of scholars, but also as a way of stamping French identity on to the objects contained between the Inventaire's covers. Furthermore, the publication was a step towards asserting that it should be the French savants whose work would open the history of Cambodia, echoing the earlier assertions by men like Mouhot that it would take European scholars to open the "seal" on the

monuments Finally, this and other publications were objects of evidence presented to a French public who was funding the colonial expansion and upkeep of the empire. Publications such as de Lajonquière's provided to their reading audiences examples of tangible "results" from the colonial project, and the Inventaire is an early example of a theme that recurs in numerous publications—particularly French productions—over the colonial period. This theme as it appears in works, such as the Inventaire, is one of several acts of "exposure" that will be discussed in this chapter.

Marking the Borders

Between 1907, when Angkor officially became part of the French Empire, and 1953, when Cambodia achieved its independence from France, the Angkor Historical Park consumed a varying, but always significant, percentage of the EFEO's annual budget. The maintenance of the monuments alone required the hiring by the Conservation d'Angkor of dozens of workers, or "coolies," to clear vegetation from between the stones and to cut back the trees and grasses. The drainage ditches and moats needed to be cleared of vegetation in order to prevent flooding, and the stones and rubble from structural collapses that had happened over time needed to be collected and cleared. Where the buildings were unstable the conservators needed to organize and implement reconstruction and stabilization projects. In addition, each of the conservators also set in motion much larger scale reconstruction projects, such as the reconstruction of Banteay Srei temple in the 1930s.

The first of these projects actually began before Angkor was retroceded to Cambodia. In 1901 the EFEO sent Henri Dufour and the sculptor Charles Carpeaux on a mission to Angkor. While there the two men began the first clearing project to free the path to the Bayon and the surrounding area from vegetation. Dufour and Carpeaux returned to Angkor at the behest of the EFEO in 1904 in order to create a complete set of photographs documenting the monument's bas-relief sculptures.12

Why would the EFEO send these two men on a mission to Angkor when, at the time, the monuments were not part of French territory in Southeast Asia? Investigations at Angkor were not the only EFEO-sponsored missions that sent scholars searching for information about cultures and histories outside of French Indochina. Sinologists and Indologists were not only among the members of the EFEO, but were also among the scholars who were based at the EFEO's main office in Hanoi. EFEO projects included studies into topics which touched upon Japan, China, Tibet, Burma, and central Asia, among others. However, with the repeated calls, in travelogues as well as in public debates, to gather additional territory in Southeast Asia, missions such as Carpeaux and Dufour's likely had behind them more than a simple pursuit of knowledge.

In the earlier of these missions the two men set about conducting the initial clearing of the Bayon. Unlike Angkor Wat, the Bayon appears not to have had a monastery nearby whose members might have maintained a path to the structure, and the clearing performed by Dufour and Carpeaux might have been necessary in order to reach the temple. But in performing the initial clearing of the site Dufour, Carpeaux, and the EFEO took on the role, however briefly, of patron and overseer. In subsequent years this first act of cleaning would be compared, most notably by the first conservator of Angkor, Jean Commaille,13 to the absence of such acts by the Siamese government when the monuments had been under their authority.

Dufour and Carpeaux's act was as symbolic as it was a physical reality: by clearing the path to the Bayon the EFEO could present the need for such work as an example of the Siamese court's lack of commitment to the monuments' upkeep, and as undermining Siamese legitimacy over the area, while simultaneously displaying the act as proof of France's own commitment to their maintenance.

Dufour and Carpeaux's second mission, in 1904, was conducted both for the purpose of collection and of documentation. The photographs allowed for the EFEO office in Hanoi to "collect" the bas-reliefs from Angkor, perhaps in anticipation of having them in their possession in the future. However, the photographs also document the moment that would subsequently be thought of as "before": before the official arrival of French authority over the area. The "before" and "after" aspects of collection and documentation became important after 1907, and manifested most clearly in the guidebooks written by the conservators of Angkor, and in particular those written by Jean Commaille, Henri Marchal, and Maurice Glaize. This chapter will focus on the view, descriptions, and exposures found within these official guidebooks to Angkor published during the colonial period, including an investigation of how the view that was framed for visitors was created and maintained.

When the provinces of Angkor, Battambang, and Sisophon were retroceded to Cambodia in March of 1907, Claude-Eugène Maitre, the director of the EFEO (1907-1920), laid out a plan for the direction the École planned to take with the temples In describing this plan in the pages of the Bulletin of the EFEO, he stated that the temples are deserving of special treatment not only because of the large number of structures within a limited space, but also because of their “incomparable beauty” and their importance as objects of “historical memory.”14 He furthermore explains that the EFEO carries a duty to protect the temples under the legal mechanisms put in place with regards to antiquities in 1900, and to safeguard the structures from the dangers of the natural elements and jungle through the process of clearing the structures of vegetation. Finally, he explains that in light of the ever-growing number of tourists, the EFEO was compelled, as its most important task, to make the temples more accessible to travelers: “We have thus a double task to fulfill: 1) to facilitate the means of access and the conditions of travel; 2) to assure the conservation and maintenance of these edifices.”

The establishment of the Angkor Historical Park, its status, rules, and regulations, was a long and ongoing process throughout the colonial period, beginning in 1907 with the retrocession of the territory. It was a process that included the complicated bureaucratic procedures attached to the writing and ratifying of arrêté, as well as the organization of practical matters such as the construction of access roads. The restoration of the monuments at Angkor quickly became one of the largest and most expensive undertakings that the EFEO would engage in over he course of its history. However, it seems significant that the first obligation Maitre lists for the EFEO at the outset of the park's creation is not the conservation of the structures, but is the implementation of projects designed to facilitate the access and comfort of visitors to the temples. An investigation of the archival materials connected to the programs and concerns of the Conservation