The interest shown in ancient monuments centred on the Khmer site of
Angkor in present-day Cambodia and, at a later date, on the Cham sites of Mi
Son and Dong Duong in Vietnam. Angkor was the earliest site to attract
scholarly attention, and throughout French rule it would become one of the
reference points in the French imaginary of the Far East and the most
prominent architectural and archaeological symbol of Cambodia (Norindr
1996: 4, 156). Angkor had been the capital city of the Khmers several times.
A civilization that hadXourished there in the sixth centurycedeclined in the
fourteenth century. It had been described by the Chinese scholar Zhou
Daguan in the thirteenth century, and three centuries later was still inhabited
and received Portuguese and Spanish travellers, theWrst Europeans to visit the
area. It was abandoned soon after the invasion of Cambodia by the Thais at
the end of theWfteenth century. In the nineteenth century theWrst person to
encounter the ruins was a French missionary, Charles-E ́mile Bouillevaux
(1823–1913), in 1857. However, an appreciation of their value for the schol-
arly world only came four years later with the French naturalist, Henri
Mouhot (1826–61). He measured the ruins and described them as ‘so impos-
ing, the fruit of an illustrious and prodigious work that produces profound
admiration’ (in Boudet & Masson 1931: 49). His account, published in a
popular journal and in a book,Le Tour du Monde(1863), as well as his
romanticized death from exhaustion at the end of the expedition,Wred public
imagination. Mouhot’s work also drew the attention of learned scholars, such
as the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian, then travelling as a ship’s doctor
around the world, who already in 1863 linked the ruins of Angkor with Indian
architecture (Rooney 1998).
Mouhot’s expedition had been undertaken just before the establishment of
a French protectorate in 1863, and he had been unable to obtain funds
(instead, interestingly, he got a subsidy from the Royal Geographical Society
of London!). TheWrst oYcial French expedition to the site occurred as part of
an expedition exploring the Mekong valley, led by the captain Ernest Doudart
de Lagre ́e (1823–68) in 1866–8. However, his main objective was not arch-
aeological, but to map and study the populations of the area in the search for
a river route believed to reach south China—the expedition later concluded
that the Mekong River was unsuitable as a commercial artery. Despite archae-
ology not being part of its objectives, the expedition found Angkor on their
way, and its value was appreciated to the extent that attention was diverted for
a while in June 1866 in order to undertake the graphic documentation of its
remains. The work was carried out by Louis Delaporte (1842–1925), a young
man trained in the Naval School, who, as a member of the expedition, was in
charge of the topography and making drawings. His work was published in
232 Colonial Archaeology