[CPProt.net] A belated rescue of Cambodia's past

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

A belated rescue of Cambodia's past 
By Robert Turnbull International Herald Tribune 
MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2005

 
PHNOM PENH In the stampede to experience the glories of Angkor Wat, few of
today's hard-pressed tourists leave time to visit Cambodia's capital. It's a
regrettable omission. Nestled at the confluence of three rivers, Phnom
Penh's graceful skyline of pagodas and minarets, unspoiled by modern
high-rises, provides one of Southeast Asia's most enchanting panoramas. 
 
Adjacent to the Royal Palace at the heart of the city stands the National
Museum. With its angled roof, elaborately carved doors and terra cotta
façade, this classic example of "colonial Khmer" architecture is, alongside
the Musée Guimet in Paris, home to objects and relics that once furnished
Angkor Wat. It's scarcely possible to imagine the majesty and vitality that
animated this adamantine empire during its 12th-century heyday without a
morning in the museum's light-filled galleries.
 
The collection embodies both the acquisitive ambitions of French
colonialists and the current desire to foster a national cultural identity
by providing the link to Cambodia's ancestry.
 
It was inaugurated as the Musée de Cambodge on April 13, 1920, in the
presence of King Sisowath. The museum's architect and first curator was
George Groslier (1887-1945), a dedicated Orientalist and visionary who was
the first child to be born in Phnom Penh of French parentage. Obsessed with
the fragility of the Cambodian arts, Groslier built the museum not only to
preserve this patrimony but to encourage the transference of
thousand-year-old traditions of craftsmanship from the confines of a royal
palace in decline to a larger public arena. 
 
Groslier was shocked by the results of a survey conducted by the colonial
authorities into the state of Cambodia's heritage. He built the École des
Arts Cambodgiens as a complement to the museum, immediately behind it,
blurring the boundary between the two institutions so that students could
wander in and sketch among the visitors. Expert craftsmen who had drifted
back to the rice fields with the demise of royal patronage were summoned
back to train the next generation of goldsmiths, woodcarvers, weavers and
sculptors. 
 
Groslier's mysterious death at the hands of Japanese torturers during their
brief occupancy of Phnom Penh in 1945 had little effect on his efforts. He
had established a network of French residents in all Cambodian provinces who
acted as intermediaries in the collection of pieces. Antiquities were
brought to the museum for safety by farmers or dredged up from the silt of
the Mekong and Tonle rivers. Moreover, the museum's continued expansion up
to the time of independence in 1953 and beyond was as much the result of
efforts by the École Française d'Extrème Orient, whose experts and restorers
lived on site and documented some 50 of Angkor's monuments. A succession of
French and later Cambodian curators retained the National Museum's general
appearance established by Groslier.
 
At the museum, four galleries of 6th- to 13th-century Hindu and Buddhist
stone and bronze sculpture jostle with hundreds of objects in ceramic,
textiles and glass. Among scores of nagas, nandas, lingas and garudas are an
enviable number of masterpieces, such as the 12th-century carving of King
Jayavarman VII in Buddhist pose, two fighting giants from 10th-century Koh
Ker and a large fragment of a reclining Vishnu, originally 6 meters in
length, recovered from the Mebon temple in 1936.
 
Groslier can also be credited with stemming the hemorrhage of plunder to
France that began with the Mekong Commission's explorers in the 1880s and
reached its zenith with the Exposition Coloniale in Marseilles in 1902. In
1923, André Malraux, later to become Charles de Gaulle's minister of
culture, was caught red-handed and charged with trying to smuggle out almost
a ton of stones from the northerly temple of Banteay Srei. He was arrested
and convicted. The stones were returned to Angkor's most ornately carved red
stone edifice, and the scandal caused a pronounced shift in attitude. 
 
The miracle of the National Museum is that it survived almost 40 years of
political upheaval from 1970 without any structural damage or significant
looting. There were a few serious losses. A statue of the god Yama, for
instance, which once sat on the Terrace of the Leper King in Angkor Thom and
had been rescued during the '60s after someone tried to cut its head off,
went missing during the '80s. However, to most people's astonishment, the
building was left virtually untouched during the Khmer Rouge's brutally
destructive rule from 1975 to 1979.
 
The collection has been enriched in recent years. In 1999, armed Cambodian
soldiers were caught trying to cross into Thailand with large sections of
bas relief from Banteay Chmar, a magnificent structure with a perimeter wall
second only to that of Angkor Wat in size. These are now securely held at
the museum. 
 
A number of missing pieces of Cambodian art, bought in good faith, have been
returned to the country. The 10th-century hunchback from Koh Ker, for
example, was the property of a private American collector purchasing
Cambodian antiquity on the open market. He recognized the object from
photographs taken in the '60s. The Metropolitan Museum in New York was
loudly applauded for returning a head of Shiva, originally from Prasat Krom
in Siem Reap.
 
Outside the capital, in the former war zones of the Northwest, museums and
monuments were comprehensively looted in the turmoil of the late '90s. But
collections in Banteay Mencheay and Battambong provinces have reopened under
the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Fine Arts and Culture, and new edifices
are going up in the provincial centers of Takeo and Kompong Thom for what is
left of their rural collections.
 
"No one was entirely sure of how many collections there were before 1975,"
said Hab Touch, deputy director of the National Museum.
 
"A central inventory was kept in PP, but the rich documentation that existed
during the '60s was destroyed," he said. "We need to carefully document and
photograph what is left, identify the needs of all these museums, and
address how to improve their security and systems of management." 
 
Shelby White, an American philanthropist and long a supporter of
archaeological conservation, was shocked to discover that the National had
not updated its inventory in 50 years, and using a grant from her Leon Levy
Foundation, the museum's Inventory Project aims to improve on the network
established by the French, re-examining and rephotographing all objects for
entry into a modern database. Provincial collections are already benefiting
from the parallel Provincial Collections Survey, started in 2003 and funded
by the Friends of Khmer Culture Inc., headed by the historian and curator
Helen Jessup. 
 
The Phnom Penh inventory is being managed by Darryl Collins, an Australian
scholar and teacher who first came to Cambodia in 1994 to spend one year
creating order out of chaos.
 
"When I first walked into building in 1994, it was in such a parlous state
that I was quite shocked," Collins said. "The place had flooded continually,
there were piles of sculpture lying on the floor, covered in dirt, and you
could smell the presence of thousands of bats in the cavernous roof. There
were regular blackouts, and the museum had neither water nor air
conditioning." 
 
Collins thinks the inventories will have profound effect on security of the
national heritage. "Things may go missing from time to time, especially at
border areas," he said. "But if we have images of all Cambodian statuary,
then we can use them as identification and keep check on what is leaving the
country."
 
He wants the collection to travel, as it did in 1963, when about 100 pieces
were seen at Matsuzakaya Department stores in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. Two
huge tours of artifacts to Germany and Japan are planned for 2005 and 2007. 
 
Collins says it's unlikely that the Cambodian museum will be demanding the
return of objects from the Guimet. But their collaboration is assured, he
feels. The great Paris-Washington exhibition of 1997 was the first time that
works from the two great collections of Khmer art had ever been seen
together. But for Collins and Touch, and the many others committed to
Cambodia's cultural heritage, it won't be the last.