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Major temple group, Angkor Wat

(Courtesy of Miriam Stark)

One expedition member, Louis Delaporte, pursued his interest in Angkor by heading the Mission d’Explorations des Monuments Khmers (Mission to explore the Khmer Monuments) in 1873 to document ancient monuments in northwestern Cambodia. His efforts produced scale drawings of Khmer monuments and sculptures and generated evocative illustrations of the Angkorian ruins that captured the European imagination in the Paris Exhibition of 1878. In 1885 Auguste Pavie was appointed by the Cochin Chinese government to establish telegraph lines between southern Vietnam and northwestern Cambodia. Pavie’s archaeological research at Angkor and his imaginative essays surrounding this monument proclaimed the glory of this lost civilization, and he contrasted the current (sordid) conditions of the Cambodians with their glorious and vanished past.

We now know that Cambodians had never entirely abandoned the crumbling ruins of Angkor and that the Cambodian state continued (even if in diminished form) until and throughout the French colonial period. We also know that foreigners, both Asian and European, had visited the ruins for centuries before the French; historical and scientific research now suggests that many of Pavie’s ideas regarding the Angkorian past lack scientific substance. Yet it was through French expeditions such as those