Henri Mouhot (1826 — 1861)

[KALKI]

Henri Mouhot (May 15, 1826 — November 10, 1861) was a French naturalist and explorer of the mid-19th century. He was born in Montbéliard, Doubs, France - near the Swiss border, but spent his childhood in Russia and possibly, parts of Asia. He died near Naphan, Laos. He is remembered mostly in connection to Angkor. Mouhot's tomb is located just outside of Ban Phanom, to the east of Luang Prabang.



As a young professor of philology Mouhot spent at least 10 years of his life working as a language tutor in Russia. He traveled throughout Europe with his brother Charles, studying photographic techniques developed by Louis Daguerre. In 1856, he began devoting himself to the study of Natural Science. In 1856 he married a descendant, likely the granddaughter, of Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Upon reading "The Kingdom and People of Siam" by Sir James Bowring in 1857, Mouhot decided to travel to Indochina to conduct a series of botanical expeditions for the collection of new zoological specimens. His initial requests for grants and passage were rejected by French companies and the government of Napoleon III. The Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society of London lent him their support, and he set sail for Bangkok, via Singapore.


Mouhot is often mistakenly credited with "discovering" Angkor, although Angkor was never lost — the location and existence of the entire series of Angkor sites was always known to the Khmers and had been visited by several westerners since the 16th century. Mouhot mentions in his journals that his contemporary, Father Charles Emile Bouillevaux — a French missionary based in Battambang — had reported that he and other western explorers and missionaries had visited Angkor Wat and the other Khmer temples, at least five years before Mouhot. Father Bouillevaux published his accounts in 1857: "Travel in Indochina 1848–1846, The Annam and Cambodia". Previously, a Portuguese trader Diogo do Couto visited Angkor and wrote his accounts about it in 1550, and the Portuguese monk Antonio da Magdalena had also written about his visit to Angkor Wat in 1586.

Mouhot did however popularise Angkor in the West. Perhaps none of the previous European visitors wrote as evocatively as Mouhot, who included interesting and detailed sketches. In his posthumously published "Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos" Mouhot compared Angkor to the pyramids, for it was popular in the west at that time to ascribe the origin of all civilization to the Middle East. For example, he described the Buddha heads at the gateways to Angkor Thom as "four immense heads in the Egyptian style", and wrote of Angkor:


"One of these temples—a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michael Angelo—might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged."

Mouhot also wrote that:


"At Ongcor, there are ...ruins of such grandeur... that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works?"

Such quotations may have given rise to the popular misconception that Mouhot had found the abandoned ruins of a lost civilisation. The Royal Geographical Society and The Zoological Society, both interested in announcing new finds, seemed to have encouraged the rumor that Mouhot — whom they had sponsored to chart mountains and rivers and catalog new species — had discovered Angkor. Mouhot himself erroneously asserted that Angkor was the work of an earlier civilization than the Khmer. For although the very same civilization which built Angkor was alive and right before his eyes, he considered them in a "state of barbarism" and could not believe they were civilized or enlightened enough to have built it. He assumed that the authors of such grandeur were a disappeared race, and mistakenly dated Angkor back over two millennia, to around the same era as Rome. The true history of Angkor Wat was later pieced together from the book The Customs of Cambodia written by Temür Khan's envoy Zhou Daguan to Cambodia in 1295-1296[1] and from stylistic and epigraphic evidence accumulated during the subsequent clearing and restoration work carried out across the whole Angkor site. It is now known that the dates of Angkor's habitation were from the early 9th to the early 15th centuries.