For most westerners, “Angkor” or “Angkor Wat” conjures images of a lone European explorer hacking his way through the thick undergrowth in the jungles of Indochina, and stumbling across lost ruins: giant blocks of stone choked by vines and the giant roots of giant trees, which turn out to part of one of the “Wonders of the Ancient World.” I was no different, and only knew better after visiting Angkor for myself in 2005.

The part about a run-down Angkor succumbing to nature and being in a serious state of disrepair is true, but Angkor was never lost! The location of every single Angkor site on the tourist itinerary today, was always known to the Khmers, who had never stopped worshipping at their altars and temples, since Angkor's heyday in the 10th century A.D. And as far as Henri Mouhot, the mid-19th-century explorer supposedly responsible for “finding” a “lost” Angkor in the jungles? He never actually claimed that Angkor was ever “lost” or “rediscovered.” In fact, Angkor had already been visited since the 16th century by several westerners who were taken there by locals, traveling along trails and roads (already charted territory) leading up to these sites. Yet, somehow, this persistent myth about one of the Great Wonders of the “Ancient” World being lost and found by an European explorer is still perpetuated today:

• Discovery Channel recently aired a Beyond Borders episode on Cambodia, where its host described just such a scenario of a European explorer hacking through the jungles to stumble upon the ruins of Angkor which had been lost for centuries
• Western school books still credit “French explorer Mouhot” with the discovery of Angkor
• In movies such as Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, Hollywood plays on lost-temple mythology, on images of lone Europeans stumbling upon lost and abandoned Angkor-like ruins in the jungles
• Numerous websites still incorrectly state that Angkor (or Angkor Wat—they often don't know the difference between the two!)—was lost and rediscovered by Henri Mouhot
• Angkor Wat is still widely refered to as an “Ancient Wonder” even though it was built around the time of the High Middle Ages in Europe, and we don't exactly call the Tower of London (1078 A.D.) an “ancient wonder”; nor Notre Dame de Paris (1160 A.D.) or any number of old European castles from that period for that matter.

It was never my intention to be iconoclastic, but I got into serious trouble as a kid in school, questioning my history teacher sincerely and innocently, how Christopher Columbus could possibly have “discovered” America, if it was already populated by “Indians.” She was stumped at my insolent query and I was made to face the wall. The only way I could make sense of it all, was that Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had “discovered America for the Europeans,” because before that, they were in the dark about the continent. Unfortunately though, when it comes to Muhout, this is one case where Eurocentrism and the Great-White-Man-Explorer Syndrome—Henri discovering a lost Angkor for the Europeans—doesn’t even begin to explain the fallacy. There's quite a bit more to the story than that.

So how did this shameless Eurocentric falsehood come about? I submit that to find the answer, we have to explore the life of the Explorer incorrectly credited with “Angkor’s discovery”—Henri Mouhot; as well as stakes-and-claims mindset of the backers of his expeditions, the colonialist era in which he lived and the prevalent patronizing mindset of westerners in general.

Henri Mouhot

Henri Mouhot (May 15, 1826 — November 10, 1861) was a French naturalist and explorer, remembered mostly in connection to Angkor and incorrectly credited with its “discovery.” Born in Montbéliard, Doubs, France, near the Swiss border, Mouhot spent his childhood in Russia. As a young professor of philology, Mouhot spent at least 10 years of his life working as a language tutor in Russia. He traveled throughout Europe with his brother Charles, studying photographic techniques developed by Louis Daguerre. In 1856, he began devoting himself to the study of Natural Science, and that same year he married the grand-daughter of Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Upon reading The Kingdom and People of Siam by Sir James Bowring in 1857, Mouhot decided to travel to Indochina to conduct a series of botanical expeditions for the collection of new zoological specimens. His initial requests for grants and passage were rejected by French companies and the government of Napoleon III. However, the Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society of London lent him their support, and he set sail for Bangkok, via the British colony of Singapore.

Mouhot’s Expeditions and Death

In 1858, from his base in Bangkok, Mouhot made 4 journeys into the interior of Siam, Cambodia and Laos. Over a period of three years, he endured extreme hardships and fended off wild animals to explore some previously uncharted jungle territory.

On his first expedition, he visited Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam—already-charted territory—and gathered an extensive collection of insects, terrestrial and river shells, and sent them on to England.

In January 1860, at the end of his second and longest journey, he reached Angkor (already-charted territory). Angkor comprises of an area spread over more than 400 km², and consists of many sites of ancient terraces, pools, moated cities, palaces and temples, the most famous of which is Angkor Wat. Mouhot recorded his visit to Angkor in his travel journals, which included 3 weeks of detailed observations. These journals and illustrations were later incorporated into books which were published posthumously.

Mouhot died of a malarial fever on his fourth expedition, in the jungles of Laos. He had been visiting Luang Prabang, capital of the Lan Xang kingdom, one of three kingdoms which eventually merged into what can be known as modern day Laos, and was under the patronage of the king. Two of his servants buried him near a French mission in Naphan, by the banks of the Nam Khan river. Mouhot’s favourite servant, Phrai, transported all of Mouhot’s journals and specimens back to Bangkok, from where they were shipped to Europe.

Henri Mouhot Did NOT Discover Angkor

The fact is that Mouhot himself mentions in his journals that his contemporary, Father Bouillevaux, had reported that he and other western explorers and missionaries had already visited Angkor Wat and the other Khmer temples at least five years before Mouhot decided to visit the sites himself.

The location and existence of the entire series of Angkor sites was always known to the Khmers, and Mouhot was certainly not the first westerner to visit Angkor. By the time Mouhot reached Angkor in 1860, it had already been visited by several westerners since the 16th century:

• In 1550, a Portuguese trader by the name of Diogo do Couto published the accounts of his visit to Angkor. He had been shown the way to Angkor by locals.
• In 1586, Portuguese monk Antonio da Magdalena visited Angkor Wat and wrote about his trip. He had traveled along roads and trails leading to villages within and surrounding the Angkor sites, probably modern-day Siem Reap.
• In 1857, Father Charles Emile Bouillevaux, a French missionary based in Battambang, published his accounts of visiting Angkor in his book: Travels in Indochina 1848–1846, The Annam and Cambodia.

How the Posthumous Myth Began

Mouhot’s journals were shipped to Europe after his death. His writings were collected and published posthumously in a book called Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos, and began to popularise Angkor in the West. Perhaps none of the previous European visitors to Angkor wrote as evocatively as Mouhot, who included interesting and detailed sketches. His assumtive statements and flambuoyant theories—arrogant by any standards—found a receptive audience in Europeans of the colonial era, capturing their imaginations.

Mouhot had compared Angkor to the pyramids, for it was popular in the West at that time to ascribe the origin of all civilization to the Middle East. For example, he described the Buddha heads at the gateways to Angkor Thom as “four immense heads in the Egyptian style,” and he wrote of Angkor:

“One of these temples—a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michael Angelo—might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.”

Of course it didn’t help that the locals whom Mouhot had met had attributed the buildings to the works of “god kings” and “giants,” but rather than look into their culture of mythology, Mouhot had rushed to fill in the gaps, erroneously asserting that Angkor was the work of an earlier civilization than the Khmer. Ever the superior European, he assumed that the authors of such grandeur were a disappeared race, and fallaciously dated the creation of Angkor back to over two millennia, to around the same era as Rome. For although the very same civilization which built Angkor was alive and right before his eyes, Mouhot considered them in a “state of barbarism” and could not believe the Khmer were civilized or enlightened enough to have built it:

“At Ongcor, there are ...ruins of such grandeur... that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works?”

There you have it: Mouhot had arrogantly decided that Angkor had to have been built by some other enlightened civilization long ago, but not the “barbaric” Khmers before him. It was quotations like these which gave rise to the popular misconception that Mouhot had “found” the “abandoned ruins” of a “lost civilisation.”

The Royal Geographical Society and The Zoological Society, both with vested interests in announcing new finds in a very competitive age of scientific discovery, may likely have encouraged the rumor that Mouhot—whom they had sponsored to chart mountains and rivers and catalog new species—had “discovered” Angkor. This was the Victorian Era, the golden age of the British Empire, when notions that barbaric pagans should be Christianized, when notions that their lives were not as meaningful, were quite acceptable to Europeans. If Christopher Columbus had “discovered America,” when it was already populated, then it was no great leap of logic that one of their “own,” Henri Mouhot—the son-in-law of Scottish explorer Mungo Park—had certainly “discovered Angkor.”

The truth about Angkor

Mouhot and the Societies were wrong on all counts: The true history of Angkor/Angkor Wat was later pieced together from the book The Customs of Cambodia written by Temur Khan’s envoy Zhou Daguan to Cambodia in 1295-1296, and from stylistic and epigraphic evidence accumulated during the subsequent clearing and restoration work carried out across the whole Angkor site. It is now known that the dates of Angkor’s habitation were from the early 9th to the early 15th centuries—Angkor was built by the very same race of people standing before Mouhot, but he was too arrogant to believe it.

Mouhot’s Legacy

Mouhot was buried near a French mission in Naphan, by the banks of the Nam Khan river. A modest monument was erected over his grave in 1867, under the orders of French commander Doudart de Lagrée, who gave him this eulogy:

“We found everywhere the memory of our compatriot who, by the uprightness of his character and his natural benevolence, had acquired the regard and the affection of the natives.”

The monument was destroyed by the overflow of the river Nam Khan. It was replaced in 1887 by a more durable crypt monument, and a maisonnette was built nearby to house and feed visitors to the white shrine. Some restoration work was done on the tomb in 1951 by the EFEO (Ecole Française d’Extrème Orient — The French School of the Far East).

In an ironic twist of fate, Mouhot’s tomb was consumed by the jungle and lost for 40 years, until it was accidentally rediscovered in 1990. His birth town of Montbeliard then helped with its restoration that same year. A new plaque on one end of the crypt commemorates the rediscovery of Mouhot’s burial place in 1990.

The popularity of Angkor generated by Mouhot’s writings, led to popular support for a major French role in its study and preservation. The French carried out the majority of research work on Angkor until recently.

Some have argued that Mouhot may have been a tool for French colonialism and the annexation of territories which followed shortly after his death. To be fair however, Mouhot himself, while having displayed the traits of a Euro-supremacist like so many of his contemporaries, did not seem to be a hardcore colonialist, for he occasionally doubted the beneficial effects of European colonisation:

“Will the present movement of the nations of Europe towards the East result in good by introducing into these lands the blessings of our civilization? Or shall we, as blind instruments of boundless ambition, come hither as a scourge, to add to their present miseries?”

Borne of the posthumous misattribution to Henri Mouhot discovering Angkor, the idea that the Angkor ruins were lost and (re)discovered by Europeans lingers on.

Mouhot’s writings—his travel journals—are immortalized in Voyage dans les royaumes de Siam, de Cambodge, de Laos et autres parties centrales de l’Indochine (published 1863, 1864) — English title: Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China, Cambodia and Laos During the Years 1858,1859, and 1860 (see Literature section below).

• External links
  • www.angkorwat.org/html/L2225.html
  • Short biography (in French)
  • www.kh.refer.org/cbodg_ct/decouvert_kh/culture_kh/livres/mouhot.htm (in French)
  • www.insecula.com/contact/A010818.html (in French)
  • www.angkor.com/hd.shtml
• Literature
  
  • Travels in Siam, Cambodia, Laos, and Annam - Henri Mouhot, M. Mouhot (ISBN 974-8434-03-6)
  • Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos, 1858-1860 - Henri Mouhot, Michael Smithies
    (ISBN 0-19-588614-3)
  • Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos During the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860 -- Mouhot, M. Henri (Illustrated by Profusely illus in b/w) (ISBN 974-8495-11-6)
• References
  • Encyclopedia Britannica
  • Angkor Guide, published in Siem Reap by the Cambodian Ministry of Information
  • Cambodia History, Khmer History, published by the Cambodian Ministry of Information
  • Angkor History, published by the Cambodian Ministry of Information
  • The Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide (quarterly—March-May 2005), Canby publications
    (www.canbypublications.com)
  • University of California Irvine, Cambodian Students Organization, Knowledge Section
    [online: http://spirit.dos.uci.edu/cambo/ retreived August 2005]
  • Ron Emmon’s Biographies (http://ronemmons.com/biographies/mouhot/)
  • Angkor.com - The Forgotten Crypt of Henri Mouhot (1826-1861) (www.angkor.com/hd.shtml)
  • German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Mouhot
  • Henri Mouhot’s diary; Travels in the Central Parts of Siam, Cambodia and Laos During the Years 1858-61
  • Angkor Wat Online [online: http://angkor.wat.online.fr/dec-henri_mouhot.htm retrieved august 2005]
  • Bryson, 2003, A Short History of Nearly Everything, chap. 6, ISBN 0-552-15174-2