Explorators
ROUER Jerome, Dec 96, Jan, June 97.
The origins of Angkor remain a mystery.
Since the beginning of this century, by dint of scholarly research, a timeline was restored. The temples are dated and attributed to the kings. But there remains many questions and gaps. Who was the founder of this to civilization, where did it, how the people lived?
We have some Chinese texts for the periods Founan and Chenla, then nothing between X ° and 1295, end of the great Angkorian period.
Many travelers have passed between the fifteenth and the nineteenth, but their writings, for the most part remain to be discovered.
Bruno Daggens Gallimard in his little guide, "Angkor, the Stone Forest" offers a brilliant cultural synthesis.
Dominique Berard has written a delightful anthology of texts by French authors. (Available on diskette in SYFED.REFER of Phnom Penh)
Chou Ta-kuan (1296) (time of Marco Polo)
Chou Ta-kuan, also called Zhou Daguan, was one of the companions of Chinese Embassy in the Yuan Dynasty. He spent nearly a year and visited Angkor in Cambodia in 1296, at the end of the historically known Angkor: we know nothing of the kings who reigned thirty-one years later, from 1327 to 1432, when the taken Angkor by the Siamese.
His diary, entitled Memoirs of the customs of Cambodia, 1902 waiting to be properly translated (by Paul Pelliot), remains the fundamental writing and richer understanding of the customs of the time.
Various Spanish and Portuguese missionaries from 1550
Diego do Couto is the author of a precise description of Angkor Wat written around 1550 but was not published until 1958!
(Diego de Couto speaks of a "city which had lost even the memory" during an elephant hunt "in the thickest forests," the king's people, "beating the bush, gave on of important buildings, overgrown inside a bush exuberant ".." The king, struck with admiration, decided on the field to carry his court. "
The Portuguese Dominicans Gaspar de Cruz stayed in Cambodia in 1556.
In the seventeenth a Japanese pilgrim draws the leading known Angkor Wat
This plan will be discovered in Japan in 1911.
Father Charles-Emile Bouillevaux (1823/1913)
He lived from Bangkok to Battambang. It was "The first tourists to Angkor." His descriptions, published in France in 1857 (Travel Indochina 1848-1856, Annam and Cambodia) will be used to Henri Mouhot ...
Henri Mouhot (1860)
French naturalist and explorer, on a mission for the British Royal Geographic Society, Mouhot was the first Westerner to brag to the public the wonders of Angkor (1861). His descriptions published in France in the journal "World Tour" Rose and the Library after his death caused a sensation in Laos.
Adolf Bastian (1863)
German ethnographer. He was the first to combine the architectural style of Angkor monuments in India.
Douart of Lagree (1860 +) and the mission of the Mekong
Polytechnique, marine, lead actor of the Protectorate of France over Cambodia (1863) which then included the Angkor region.
Four years later, while on mission to explore the upper Mekong River with Francis Garnier, a secret treaty between France and Siam ceded the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap to Siam who, in exchange, gave up all claims to the rest of Cambodia. These provinces will be returned to Cambodia in 1907.
His first mission to Cambodia and Angkor fell on other archaeological sites He is the first detailed plan of the temples.
The mission of Doudart Lagree-Garnier (1866-1868) was to explore the upper Mekong to open a route to China. He died in 1868, during this mission, in Yunnan.
J. Moura
Moura was the first to attempt a reconstruction of the royal lineages of Cambodia. His work is still essential. (Read Royal Annals)
Auguste Pavie (1847-1925)
Former sergeant in the infantry colonial protectorate representative in Kampot (he remained 11 years in Cambodia), he became in 1885 Vice-Consul of Luang Prabang, Laos, then Commissioner General he served and loved deeply. He wrote his memoirs and ten volumes of his missions in Indochina. (Read his monograph)
Pierre Loti (1850-1923)
Louis Delaporte (1873)
Designer clever fellow Douart Lagree of whom he succeeded as head of the mission of the Mekong, it was later in charge of a mission for the Study of Khmer monuments which he published under the title "Journey to Cambodia".
Its shipments of statues and carvings in France stampings accelerate knowledge of Angkor. He struggles a lot to Paris to raise awareness of Khmer art.
Angkor Wat was designed by Louis Delaporte .............
Delaporte ends with the era of the discoverers, the beginning of tourists and scientists ...
Aymonier Etienne (1844-1929)
Marine and epigraphist he first inventory of monuments of Cambodia.
Resident General of the Protectorate, author of a three-volume study on Cambodia, which gives the first translations of the inscriptions found on the site.
Lunet de la Jonquiere, continuing the work of Aymonier, lists and numbers 910 monuments.
1899: Founding of the French School of Far East in 1908 that created the Angkor Conservation.
