Customer Reviews

Discoveries: Angkor (Discoveries (Harry Abrams))

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This is an interesting book on the history of research, scholarship, and popular views of Angkor. Unfortunately, there is not much information about the city or culture of Angkor. Thus the book is mistitled. Are the French and other explorers and scholars of Angkor really more important than the ancient Khmer peoples and their accomplishments?

Angkor is an ancient Cambodia city, which is mostly known for its temples with giant smiling faces carved on them, and banyan trees growing all over them. This book has a few Chinese accounts of Angkor when it was still inhabited, but deals mostly with its discovery by western archeologists, and subsequent tourism and restoration efforts. The book also has brief discussions of military campaigns from the colonial period through the Khmer Rouge, and their impact on the ruins. There are some nice cross section illustrations of the temples at Angkor Wat, and many photographs of banyan trees growing on buildings.

If you're going to visit Cambodia, or if you want to know more about the ancient city of Angkor Wat, you won't go wrong if you first read this small but lavishly illustrated, even gorgeous, book.

It's not, however, a guidebook. Rather it's a readable history of the "discovery" and exploration of the ruins, mostly by 19th and 20th century French explorers, adventurers, scholars, and governors. It presents in full color the best of the impressive drawings, paintings, surveys, maps, lithographs, and photos that they commissioned.

You can piece together the history of the Khmer kingdom and the building of the many temples from the book, but it's by reading what the explorers found and the scholars concluded. The section on Khmer cosmography ("churning of the ocean of milk"), for instance, is brief.

This view of Angkor Wat through foreign eyes (rather than understanding the city and the kingdom on its own terms) is a conceptual shortcoming, yes. There's something of an Indiana Jones feeling to the volume. But since Western visitors encounter a radically different culture and worldview in the ruins, it may be that the author's approach through the eyes of the foreign discoverers -- and early tourists -- works for the traveler who is unlikely to be a specialist.

The final pages of the book provide extensive excerpts from the accounts of the foreign travelers, including the report by Chinese visitor Zhou Daguan ("Chou Ta-kuan") and early Portuguese visitors.

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