A Siamese Prince Journeys to Angkor: Encounters with a Shared Heritage

The author, a specialist in Thai literature and history, translated into English the klon (poem) opening Nirat Nokor Wat:

For a long time, I have heard from those who have been to Cambodia that the sandstone temples are an extraordinary sight.

They say that there are giant edifices built by the skilled hands of the ancient Khom [ancient Khmer] with elaborate designs curving in all directions.

Many have invited us to see them, but each time, duties have obstructed, and I have had to put off many well-laid plans.

Until this year of the Rat, there was a break — a rare opportunity to go to Nakhon (Angkor) Wat.

My sweet daughters also wished to go, and as I know well, their wishes cannot be thwarted.

Wherever I travel, they travel too.

And so it was that these delightful young ladies accompanied me, and we took leave from the city of heaven.

From the month of November until December, we were traveling in Cambodia.

The French generously welcomed us and helped us to arrange our stay. 

Wherever we went, we encountered pleasure and happiness for which we are thankful to our hosts.

The lords and nobles of Cambodia also welcomed us with open arms.

They spoke with us so graciously that we felt we were among family, which filled our hearts with gratitude.

During our pleasurable travels, we are always thinking of our dear friends left behind in the big city.

Thinking of you, I am reminded that I must find you a souvenir, but I am at a loss at what to bring you.

I can’t buy you any gifts as our funds are in short supply.

With more than 100 friends, the question of what mementos to bring home wracks my mind.

How can I overcome this problem wisely? I shall write a Nirat — a travelogue of my journey.

I will tell the story of my trip to Cambodia for all my dear friends to hear.

I will print up copies for distribution, and I suspect this will fulfill people’s desires.

But writing poetry (klon) bores and exhausts me, and I have tried for years without success.

Because of this lack of proficiency in poetic rhyme and meter, I will write instead in prose.

There is this just this small bit of poetry to add sparkle, reminiscent of the ancient’s wisdom and skill for verse.

After all, if not for this small token of poetry, my readers would say this is not a Nirat.

So having offered this short piece, I invite you to read the story that follows. 

[ADB Input: klon th กลอน, lao ກອນ, refers to poetic verse in Thai and Lao literature, considered as ​“authentic Thai” form in opposition to kap คำป, Indic- or Khmer-influenced poetry. Note that Prince Damrong inserted these verses to avoid that his readers ​“would say this is not a Nirat”, indicating that he wanted to follow the traditional form of Nirat , ​“poem of separation”.]

This minitious study of Prince Damrong’s book — whose first complete English translation was published in Bangkok in December 2024 — considers the transitional aspect of a text written by a Siamese statesman visiting for the first time Angkor seventeen years after its retrocession to Cambodia:

I suggest that Nirat Nakhon Wat can be understood in part as an expression of the Siamese ruling elite’s emergent nationalist narrative that mourned the losses of former Siamese territories to the colonial regimes of France and Britain. By portraying the French acquisition of Cambodia as an illegitimate theft of Siam’s vassal dependency, the creators of this national narrative set the precedent that the Thai populace would forever lament the Siamese nation that might have been, were it not for the colonial incursions. On the other hand, I argue that Nirat Nakhon Wat does much more than lament the ​“lost territories,” in that it challenges readers to acknowledge the messy truth that Thai and Cambodian heritage are entangled in ways that are guaranteed to perennially disrupt the purified idea of the nation. Through its disclosure of mutual cultural borrowings over centuries, Damrong’s text prompts us to recognize that precolonial societies defined by appropriation, emulation, and hybridity will never be neatly reconciled with the concept of the territorially and culturally bounded nation. One can only hope that revisionist histories of the region aimed at local audiences will one day foster greater mutual understanding by showing how these processes of appropriation gave rise to a shared cultural heritage that could be the basis of amity rather than contempt. [p 64]

This one of the conclusions drawn by the author, plural because this about the ​“journeys” of a Siamese prince to Angkor (and to the Royal Palace of Phnom Penh), since he traveled as an archaeologist and historian, as a personal friend of prominent EFEO researchers of the time, as a Siamese royal who shared personal memories with King Sisowath of Cambodia, and as a Siamese politician who had not yet come to terms with the prospect of a sovereign, independent Cambodia. 

There is a constant balancing act in Prince Damrong’s account of his journey to Cambodia, and we can envision him torn between the scientific evidence of the extent of the former Khmer Empire and the desire to justify the Siamese policy towards its southern neigbor. The ​“incorporation” of distinctively Khmer (or ​“Khom”, as he preferred to call them) cultural traits into the Siamese culture is the main intellectual obstacle for him to grasp the historicity of Khmer culture:

In Nirat Nakhon Wat, Damrong’s consideration of the causes of the collapse of Angkor illustrates this dialectic of incorporation. Even though he recognized the widespread existence of Buddhism alongside Hindu-Brahminism in Angkor, Prince Damrong noted the dominance of Hindu-Brahminism and attributed the extensive construction of monumental shrines to the Hindu-Brahmin belief that gods and kings had to be raised high above the earthly realm of humans. He contrasted the elaborate and labor-intensive construction of Hindu-Brahmin temples with the simpler structures of Buddhist monasteries, which were generally made of wood and lower to the ground, and which served the purpose of honoring the Buddha and studying his teachings. Damrong then proceeded to challenge French theories of Angkor’s decline which laid blame for the destruction of ancient Khmer civilization on the Siamese invasions circa 1431 CE, suggesting that one of the central weaknesses of this hypothesis was its failure to consider historical data from the Khmer chronicles. Had the French read these sources, they would have seen that the Khmer kings were constantly in the process of expanding, moving and rebuilding their capitals — a system which was not only taxing on the corvée laborers who had to construct new royal temples of heavy sandstone and limestone, but also had destructive effects on the architectural landscape of former capitals, as these old temples were often neglected by new kings eager to substantiate their own prowess by building new temples. Contrary to the French view of external invasion, therefore, Prince Damrong argued that it was the internal excesses of monument construction that rendered Angkor vulnerable to conquest by external powers. The conquest and collapse of Angkor did not lead to its disappearance, however, and Damrong describes many features of Angkorian civilization that persisted in Siam, such as Hindu-Brahmin elements and architectural motifs, which were incorporated into the dominant Theravada Buddhism.

Since Angkor was de jure part of French protected Cambodia, what were the consequences for someone who was busy at building a Siamese ​“national history”? Ironically, the quest for answers about the intricate shared heritage went through French archaeologists:

In another anecdote, Prince Damrong elaborated on the theme of the Angkorian source of Siam’s sacred objects. Even before embarking on his journey, Prince Damrong had hoped to trace the origin of two small Buddha amulets in his possession called Phra Kring, which were believed to be images dating to the reign of the Khmer King Pathumsuriyawong, circa the 13^th century CE (117). As Prince Damrong explained, he had acquired the first of these powerful amulets from his grandfather, who in turn had acquired the image from a Buddhist monk named Phra Amonmoli who had been the first to establish the Thammayut sect of Buddhism in Cambodia during the reign of King Mongkut, Rama IV. Prince Damrong later acquired the second image from a monk who had come to Bangkok from Surin Province. In his discussions with Monsieur Marchal, a French archaeologist in charge of research and conservation at Angkor, Prince Damrong discovered that the same images had been found in the region of a Buddhist sanctuary near the Bakeng mountain temple, thereby confirming their ancient Khmer (Khom) provenance.

[ADB Input: Damrong was also impressed with the fact that, while asking the brahmins (baku) of the Royal Palace of Phnom Penh about their origin, ​“he received the answer that the ancestor of the family came from Varanasi. But the brahmins in Bangkok did not know where their family origins came from.”] 

“Cultural hybridity”

Tracing the origins of monuments and artefacts within the prism of racial or national identity was not something Prince Damrong was prepared to do, even in 1924, more than twenty years after discussing the Khmer ruins in Siamese provinces with French explorer Lunet de Lajonquière. Rightly, the author reminds us of artefacts that have been changed ownership and cultural significance over the years, fior instance ​“the Emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew in Bangkok [which], through its repeated capture and relocation by ambitious monarchs vying for regional power, traveled to the ancient capitals of Pagan (Bagan), Angkor, Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang and
Vientiane before arriving in Bangkok, where it stands as the palladium of the Chakri dynasty and the most revered Buddha image in the Thai nation”.

There was also King Mongkut, Rama IV’s project of ​“construction of a replica of Angkor on the grounds of
the royal palace in Bangkok as well as the latter monarch’s unrealized plans to transfer several Angkorian sanctuaries to Bangkok in 1859 CE (A record of King Mongkut’s plans to transfer the actual edifices can be found in the Royal Siamese Chronicles of the Fourth Reign of the Chakri Dynasty, written by Phra Chao Thipakorawong (1961). On page 224 of the chronicle, the author states that the king ordered a number of edifices to be transferred to Bangkok as they would bring prestige (pen kiad yod pai khang na).”

This is illustrated by the challenged status of artworks that have been ​“stolen” for some, ​“appropriated” for other observers:

We can see this logic operating again later in the same section, in Damrong’s response to the popular Khmer complaint that the Thais had stolen all the Khmer’s sacred objects. In keeping with the dialectical logic of encompassment described above, his justification for these acquisitions was implicitly framed in the same narrative of the waning of Hindu-Brahminism and the rise of Theravada Buddhism. As he explained, in the Royal Chronicles, it was written that forty bronze statues of lions and other animals were taken from the Khmer court of Nakhon Thom following the Siamese invasions in the early 15^th century, which were later offered as sacred objects of Buddhist veneration (khrueang phuthabucha) at the temple of Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya. In the late 18^th century the Siamese King Rama I acquired another pair of bronze lions after a military triumph over the Khmer court. As his predecessor had done several centuries prior, Rama I offered these Khmer bronze lions to a Buddhist temple, Wat Phrasrirathanasadharam (Wat Phra Kaew), where they have been standing guard at the temple’s ordination hall ever since (147). As this example illustrates, Prince Damrong viewed Ayutthaya’s acquisition of sacred artifacts from Angkor very differently from the French, who espoused a racialized interpretation of Angkor where the Khmer had an intrinsic right to their cultural heritage. In Damrong’s logic, such acts of appropriation did not qualify as theft, as they were embedded within a larger historical dialectic of the internal collapse of Hindu-Brahminism and the subsequent rise of Theravada Buddhism throughout the region beginning in the 13^th century. Indeed, what is telling about this passage is that it exemplifies the fact that the rise of Theravada Buddhism did not bring about the total abandonment of Hindu-Brahmin forms and practices. Rather, by incorporating religious symbols, sacred objects, and practices from the Angkorian Empire within the new Theravada Buddhist order, they became signs of a reconfigured religious and political hierarchy, wherein the Hindu deities were subordinated to the Buddha. [p 63 – 4]

Nirat Nakhon Wat shows us a Prince Damrong still in the shadows of his father’s appropriatory [some would say ​“predatory”] plans, but also engaged in reassessing the part of the Khmer heritage in the budding ​“national history”. His journey to Preah Vihear six years later, in January 1930, showed that he had not completely decided on the ​“Cambodianess” of Cambodia’s northern provinces. For the author of the present study, there is no doubt the prince-archaeologist was still at odds with the vision of Angkor as symbol of a sovereign Cambodia: 

While Prince Damrong initially undertook the voyage to Angkor to share in the French colonial experience of exploration and discovery, […] many of the prince’s observations are better described as rediscoveries of Siam’s and Cambodia’s overlapping social and symbolic field. Thus, despite its structural similarities to the genre of colonial travelogues, Prince Damrong’s text differed markedly from its European prototypes, in that rather than seeking to discover and document the attributes of clearly demarcated races and cultures, Nirat Nakhon Wat revealed forms of cultural hybridity produced over the centuries of cultural transmission back and forth between the neighboring Cambodian and Siamese courts. Upon closer examination of the text, however, it becomes clear that Journey to Angkor did not merely express a neutral and objective view of this hybridity. On the contrary, Damrong’s particular reading of this shared past was one which reasserted both Siam’s historical status as Cambodia’s overlord and its extant claims of entitlement to Angkor. […] Nirat Nakhon Wat articulated precolonial conceptions of how the rights to symbolic capital such as the Khmer ruins of Angkor were determined. Rights to symbolic capital were not governed by the ostensibly empirical category of race, but rather by processes of conquest and incorporation, which [Richard H.] Davis has called ​“the rhetoric of appropriation [1]”. [p 55]

[1] in Lives of Indian Images, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997, repub. 1999 ISBN 0−691−00520−6.