Southeast Asia / France / history E “Penny Edwards’ Cambodge is an original and impressive tour de force D W (Continued from front flap) of scholarly analysis. She provides a richly textured cultural A genealogy of state formation in Cambodia by reassessing the impact R D T of French colonialism on modern Khmer thought and nation building. S emergence as a national monument will be Relying on extensive archival research, Edwards traces a complex his strikingly original study of Cambodian of particular interest to students of Asian nationalism brings to life eight turbulent cultural history of Angkor as the site of competing religious and political and European religion, museology, heritage decades of cultural change and sheds investment that not only redefined regional boundaries and imperial studies, and art history. As a highly read- new light on the colonial ancestry of Pol power relations but also determined the very notion of Khmerness. able guide to Cambodia’s recent past, it will Pot’s murderous dystopia. Penny Edwards Her book is a most important intervention in Southeast Asian history also appeal to specialists in modern French re-creates the intellectual milieux and and should engage scholars across such diverse disciplines as archeology, history, cultural studies, and colonialism, cultural traffic linking Europe and empire, art, history, religion, cultural and literary studies.” as well as readers with a general interest in interweaving analysis of key movements Cambodia. —Panivong Norindr, and ideas in the French Protectorate of author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology Cambodge with contemporary develop- in Architecture, Film, and Literature ments in the Métropole. From the natural- ist Henri Mouhot’s expedition to Angkor in Penny edwards is assistant professor of “Cambodge utilizes an impressive range of sources to explore the 1860 to the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh’s Southeast Asian studies at the University of short-lived premiership in 1945, this history complex relationship between colonialism and nationalism. California, Berkeley. of ideas tracks the talented Cambodian In this well-conceived, highly readable book, Edwards examines and French men and women who shaped museography, spectacles, the politics of authenticity, religion, arts and the contours of the modern Khmer nation. crafts, and tourism and architecture, among others, to reveal the Their visions and ambitions played out many uses of the Cambodian past(s). Previous work on Cambodia has within a shifting landscape of Angkorean focused overwhelmingly on Angkor or Pol Pot’s regime: at last, temples, Parisian museums, Khmer printing a book fills the void in between, while also shedding new light on both.” presses, world’s fairs, Buddhist monasteries, —Eric Jennings, and Cambodian youth hostels. This is cross- author of Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, cultural history at its best. Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 With its fresh take on the dynamics of Jacket art: Poster for the Cambodge Pavilion at the Hanoi colonial fair, 1919. colonialism and nationalism, Cambodge: Courtesy of the National Archives of Cambodia. The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 will become essential reading for scholars of Jacket design by Santos Barbasa Jr. history, politics, and society in Southeast Asia. Edwards’ nuanced analysis of Bud- UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS dhism and her consideration of Angkor’s Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 (Continued on back flap) www.uhpress.hawaii.edu jack mech.indd 1 12/18/06 1:26:00 PM Cambodge 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd i 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM Southeast Asia politics, meaning, and memory David Chandler and Rita Smith Kipp series editors OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES Hard Bargaining in Sumatra Western Travelers and Toba Bataks in the Marketplace of Souvenirs Andrew Causey Print and Power Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam Shawn Frederick McHale Toms and Dees Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand Megan J. Sinnott Investing in Miracles El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines Katharine L. Wiegele In the Name of Civil Society From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines Eva-Lotta E. Hedman The Tây Son Uprising Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam George Dutton Spreading the Dhamma Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand Daniel M. Veidlinger Art as Politics Re-Crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia Kathleen M. Adams 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd ii 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM Cambodge The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 penny edwards university of hawai‘i press Honolulu 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd iii 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM For my parents © 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwards, Penny. Cambodge : the cultivation of a nation, 1860–1945 / Penny Edwards. p. cm.—(Southeast Asia—politics, meaning, memory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-2923-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-2923-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cambodia—Intellectual life—19th century. 2. Cambodia— Intellectual life—20th century. 3. Nationalism—Cambodia— History. 4. Cambodia—History—1863–1953. I. Title. II. Series. DS554.7.E39 2006 959.6’03—dc22 2006000837 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Series designed by Richard Hendel Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd iv 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Originations 1 1. T he Temple Complex: Angkor and the Archaeology of Colonial Fantasy, 1860–1906 19 2. Urban Legend: Capitalizing on Angkor 40 3. Les fidèles Cambodgiens and les Khmèrophiles: Scripting a Khmer Nation, 1870–1935 64 4. Colonialism and Its Demerits: Bringing Buddhism to Book, 1863–1922 95 5. Violent Lives: Disengaging Angkor, 1907–1916 125 6. Copy Rites: Angkor and the Art of Authenticity 144 7. Secularizing the Sangha, 1900–1935 166 8. Holy Trinity: Chuon Nath, Huot Tath, and Suzanne Karpelès 183 9. Traffic: Setting Khmerism in Motion, 1935–1945 210 10. Past Colonial? 242 Notes 257 Glossary 317 Bibliography 325 Index 341 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd v 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd vi 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Historians are ventriloquists, giving voice to plural pasts. We’re also soliloquists. Throughout this project, my inspirational and irresistible husband, Peter Bartu, and our radiant children, Benjamin, Maxine, and Lorenza, have all pulled me incessantly out of the past with their zest for the present, bringing light and fresh insights to what might otherwise have remained a quiet conversation between me and the men and women who walk the pages of this book. How, why, and with what effect people and ideas travel across time and space is a central focus of this book. In its various incarnations, the book’s manuscript trav- elled to and through France, Australia, Cambodia, Burma, and America. Our jour- ney began with a wrong turn in a library. Fresh from a year as a media analyst with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, I was browsing the South- east Asia stacks in Cornell University’s Kroch collection in 1993, gathering materials for a planned PhD on Sino-Cambodian relations, when the gilded spines of some old French tomes caught my eye. Behind their quaint jackets, I found statements about the Khmer character and the temples of Angkor similar to the nationalist diatribes broadcast by the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian People’s Party, the royalist party Funcinpec, and the Buddhist Liberal Democrat Party whose propaganda it had been my job, as a United Nations officer, to analyze and summarize. That frisson of déjà-vu stretched into more than a decade of research, whose final outcome is this book. I could have found no better tutor at this juncture than Benedict Anderson, whose legendary course on Plural Societies framed my first analytical encounters with European colonialism, and who provided thought-provoking feedback on my initial scribblings. No less important were Vaddey and Blake Ratner, whose creative talents, powers of perception, and great humor warmed and have long outlasted my Ithaca winter. In 1994 I travelled to Australia to join my fiancé, Peter Bartu, who had become an inseparable part of my life and adventures since we first met over frogs legs and beer in Phnom Penh. We were married two years later. Peter’s intuitive grasp of the human condition, his sense of the Cambodian landscape, his gift for deciphering political machinations, his eclectic music and literature collection, his penchant for new adventures, and his unwavering enthusiasm for my work have all been vital ingredients of this book. My most significant other willing accomplice has been David Chandler, who supervised my doctoral dissertation at Monash University. David’s energy, his passion for history, and his generosity with ideas and materials added greatly to my thesis. Ian Mabbett’s erudite feedback on my dissertation, and insightful critiques by my examiners Thongchai Winichakul and Tony Reid all helped sculpt this book. In France in 1996, Michael Vann and David Deltesta guided me through colonial 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd vii 12/19/06 5:04:53 PM viii : Acknowledgments archives, and Christopher Goscha, Nasir Abdoul-Carime, and Serge Thion all gave generously of their time. Much of this book is in dialogue with the work of the brilliant art historian In- grid Muan. This conversation was cut brutally short when Ingrid died, far too young, in Phnom Penh, in January 2005. Ingrid and I met in Phnom Penh in late 1999, and while I was juggling research and babies in later years, she generously shared her notes from the National Archives of Cambodia. Her scholarship informs much of what follows. My parents, John and Felicity, whose love of travel and books first stoked my curiosity for new places and strange tales, encouraged and indulged my interest in Cambodge with mailings of rare books, news clippings, long hours at photocopy shops, and visits to my research sites. Demelza Stubbing’s enterprise first got me to Cambodia in 1991, and her incisive intellect and political savvy have helped me to make sense of much of what I have found since. Demetra Tzanaki opened up new ways of thinking about culture and nationalism. Several sponsors backed my global roamings. A postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research 2000–2002, a Discovery Project Fellowship from the Australia Research Council 2003–2005, and a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia sustained the bulk of this book’s long gestation. A Fulbright Travel and Maintenance Award financed my year at Cornell. My PhD was funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship, a Robert Menzies Travel Award, a Monash Graduate Scholarship, and, when all that ran out in the months before completion, the Felicity Edwards Drifting Daughter’s Tuition Award and a John T. and Catherine D. Macarthur Research and Writing Grant. In Cambodia, the Khmer Institute of Democracy, the Buddhist Institute, and the Centre for Khmer Studies all provided essential writing and thinking space. The staff of the National Archives of Cambodia and of numerous libraries and archives worldwide gave invaluable assistance. I also owe thanks to Michel Antelme, Olivier de Bernon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Murray Cox, Ly Dary, Erik Davis, Noël Deschamps, May Ebihara, Jaqueline Fillio- zat, Kate Frieson, Christopher Goscha, Peter Gyallay-Pap, Anne Hansen, Ian Harris, Marie-Paul Ha, Stephen Heder, Peter Heehs, Julio Jeldres, Henri Locard, John Mar- ston, Gregor Muller, Jacques Népote, Khing Hoc Dy, Panivong Norindr, Leakthina Chaupech Ollier, Ashley Thompson, and to my many fabulous colleagues at the Cen- tre for Cross-Cultural Research. Finally, I have the talented team at the University of Hawai‘i Press to thank for its professionalism and painstaking production of this book. Needless to say, I have only myself to blame for any surviving errors. 00 Edwards FM ppF i-viii.indd viii 12/19/06 5:04:54 PM Introduction Originations 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 to naming” ensured that no names or faces could be put to his regime, making it harder to translate the terror into political opposition.2 In a famous public speech delivered in late September 1977, he unmasked Angkaa as the Cambodian Communist Party and identified himself as Pol Pot, another pseudonym. The man behind this masquerade was born as Saloth Sar. In its attempt to transform Cambodia’s culturally diverse terrain into an eth ni- cally homogeneous, revolutionary utopia, Saloth Sar’s murderous regime of Demo- cratic Kampuchea (DK, 1975–1978) criminalized superstition, tradition, religion, and the linguistic, sartorial, and culinary expressions of ethnic difference. As he in- dicated with pride in a 1978 interview, Saloth Sar equated the assimilation of Cam- bodia’s upland tribal groups with their modernization, declaring that while these “national minorities” were very miserable before, “now one cannot distinguish them from the other people. They wear the same dress and live like every one.” In many re- spects, the DK regime was one where the right to life was determined by one’s pow- ers of mimicry. It was not enough to be a Cambodian, born on the land: one had to speak, act, dress, and perform according to an ideal—that of the Original Khmer. The curious ideological mix of the DK combined the rejection of modernity with the quest for a return to a prefeudal past and the simultaneous search for a pro- gressive future. In internal policy documents and public pronouncements, boasts that the DK could outleap Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward sat alongside explicit ap- peals to the “masses” to prove their mettle as worthy descendants of the builders of the twelfth-century temple complex of Angkor Vat, and implicit exhortations to re- turn modern Cambodia to its past glory. Whereas Marx had set out to turn all peas- ants into citizens, Saloth Sar was determined to turn all citizens into peasants, view- 00a Edwards IntroppF 1-18.indd 1 12/19/06 5:05:12 PM