In 1952, two years before Cambodia gained independence from French rule, a letter comparing democracy and diamonds appeared in the Khmer-language press, under the nom de plume “The Original Khmer” (Kmae daem).¹ The writer would assume other names, but his self-identification as a Kmae daem was not so easily shrugged off. At the height of his political career, from 1975 to 1977, he practiced John Doe politics, ruling under the mantle of anonymity, in the shadows of the invisible but brutally omnipresent Angkaa (the “organization”). This bizarre preemption of Maurice Blanchot’s description of the holocaust as the “unknown name, alien...

In 1860, a team of Chinese coolies and Siamese guides escorted a young French naturalist named Henri Mouhot through the dense jungle undergrowth surrounding the former seat of the Khmer Empire at Siem Reap, named after the decisive battle that had seen its annexation by Siam in the fifteenth century. Before the year was out, he was dead, but what he saw on this Siamese side trip as a naturalist turned accidental tourist filled him with wonder and catapulted him to posthumous fame.

Mouhot’s guides may well have marvelled at his wonder, for there was no novelty for them and...

On moving from Phnom Penh to the Métropole in the 1910s, a teenager of royal descent named Atman (Khmer for “soul”) wrestles a fit of depression encapsulating many of the contradictions inherent in colonial and postcolonial visions of the Cambodian nation. As she travels through the streets, eyeing major monuments, the immensity of her surroundings overwhelms her, stoking deep emotions and sparking a vision in which “all the capitals of my Khmer ancestors” issue forth from Paris. On passing the Seine, the Mekong floods her soul. “Ordinarily,” she ponders, “though it is their only valid measure, Asiatics in Europe do...

Crossing the rural landscape for the first time, Son Diep is filled with a certain melancholy. Later, his heart lifts. The dancing girls, exotic angels descended from paradise, fill his dreams. Heavenly creatures on the stage, they are no less “superb” on the streets. He finds their faces magnificent, their bodies like thekinnari,the feather-bodied, winged women who haunt Khmer mythology and folklore. The metaphor captures his own sense of giddy flight. He sees them in the Opéra, in the Moulin Rouge. He might also see them, disguised in Oriental garb, at the 1900 Exposition universelle in the Indochinese...

The identification and authentication of a national religion, orsasana-jiet,for Cambodge was a complex process. Khmer monks, sponsors of reform within the Khmer court, French-educated notables, and French scholars and museologists collectively mapped the contours of a particular type of Buddhism as the national religion in textual and material realms. The most prominent architects of this transformation were Chuon Nath (1883–1969) and Huot Tath (1891–1975). Widely iconized in Khmer temples today, by the early 1940s Nath and Tath had emerged as leading figures of the Khmer nationalist movement. Intellectual curiosity led them in unorthodox directions. They were...

Penned by the distinguished poet Oknya Suttantaprija In (1859–1924) in his verseJourney to Angkor Vat (Nirieh Nokor Vat),commemorating King Sisowath’s visit to Angkor in 1909, the above description of French conservation is serene and orderly.¹ We see the newly appointed curator to Angkor, Jean Commaille, portrayed as poetry in motion, diligently restoring order, seemliness, and cleanliness. But the serenity of the above scene was undercut by ripples of violence, culminating in the curator’s brutal gang murder on his own journey to Angkor Thom in 1916. Three years after the establishment of the protectorate, the pioneer of conservation...

“What is a nation?” asked a Khmer contributor to the scouting magazineServir,writing under the pseudonym Yuvan Boraan (Ancient Youth) in 1942. “A nation is all things that are Khmer, . . . the territory on which Khmers live, . . . the conservation of our handicrafts, ancient customs,”and the sites holding the bones of the ancient ancestors of “our Khmer race.”¹ The writer’s pen name echoed the central oxymoron of modern nationalisms, which claim both the youthfulness of a nation-information and its purported rootedness in antiquity, a bipolarity reflected in the author’s exhortation to his readers to worship...

Outside the rarefied domain of Buddhist studies, colonial perceptions of thesanghawere colored by a deeper ambivalence than that shaping the scholarly mistrust of erratic scribes and inaccurate scriptures. In the 1860s, the entrepreneur L. Faucheur felt nothing short of repulsion for Cambodge’s ubiquitous monks whom he nicknamedtalapoins(small, yellowish monkeys), with their shaved heads, yellow costumes, begging bowls, and hypocrisy, their ducklike walk and mendacity. Gradually, however, his feelings changed to admiration for the monks’ immersion in religion, dedication to children’s education, and observation of religious discipline.¹ Others clung to their initial negative impressions. “I don’t like...

It is the first time Cambodian monks have gathered in Paris in such numbers. They are seated in the inner hall of a temple, where barefoot men and women also sit, dwarfed by a statue of Buddha in beatific pose. Their heads are bowed and palms joined in asamp’ea,a gesture of respect that European onlookers will readily translate as prayer. A row of bowls laden with fruits and other offerings separates them from some thirty men, women, and children seated on a rush mat. The women wear crocheted lace tops and silksampots,the men a mixture of...

“An aging mind, a used soul can find refuge in religion. . . . But a mind, a soul of tender years is anchored in passion.” Or so was “the opinion of the students of the Lycée Sisowath, in the years leading up to the Second World War.” “All these youngsters thought, perhaps wrongly and not quite fairly, that adults oppressed their mind and soul, and would even go as far as poisoning their pleasure. Rightly or wrongly, once they have an idea in their head, adolescents waste no time in doing every thing in their power to “make it...

On 9 November 1953, France granted full independence to Cambodge, an act marked by the closure of colonial departments and functions operating in Cambodge and the withdrawal of colonial military troops. While this political and military withdrawal was relatively straightforward, cultural disengagement was far more complex. The symbiotic, indigenous–European cultural legacy of the French Protectorate was already indelibly marked in the sculpting of a Khmer national style and character in religious, museological, and artistic areas. There was therefore no need to indulge in an “official” handover of many colonial tropes and cultural visions of the Khmer nation articulated in...