Tuesday 29 June 2010

Khmer Architecture in A Nineteenth Century Exploration of Cambodia


These engravings are the frontispiece plus selected illustrations of a book on Khmer art and architecture written by nineteenth century explorer Louis Delaporte, and reprinted in 1999. Louis Delaporte was a cartographer and draughtsman who accompanied his first expedition in 1866, and returned to Cambodia as the head of his own expedition with the goal of assembling a collection of Khmer art.

At the culmination of the expedition, he set out to record the story of his travels, which forms the narrative of the book. His plentiful illustrations convey all the nineteenth century sense of wonder of vanished worlds. With him we catch privileged private glimpses of Bayon and Angkor Wat, the vast temple complex built in the early twelfth century. As Jacques Dolia mentions in his introduction, the power of this extraordinarily beautiful book lies in his personal recollections of the moments of discovery of Khmer art.

In my rough translation from the French, we can feel the exhilaration of the numinous, the wonder of stone magic of the guardian divinities in the ruined sanctuaries of the tangled Cambodian jungle:

"Digging in the middle of the rubble, we exhumed among other things, a character whose stone feet and eight arms were broken, but whose head, full expression and refinement, remained intact … the whole person of the god or deity is formed of a multitude of small gods, some seated … other in the attitude of prayer … the weave of the coat that he wears are figurines; his belt, his necklace, are small gods, his hair just as many tiny characters."


Frontispiece: View from the Ruins of Bayon





The French Explorers among the Khmer ruins.


Delaporte's map of Southern Indochina — the ancient Kingdom of Cambodia, with the pink tint indicating Khmer ruins that had been explored up to his day.

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