A Siamese Prince Journeys to Angkor
Encounters with a Shared Heritage
Abstract
This article presents an analysis of Nirat Nakhon Wat (Journey to Angkor)—Prince Damrong’s account of his visit to Cambodia in 1924. On the one hand, considering the scholarship on the role of travel during the era of high imperialism, I argue that the prince’s journey to Angkor was part of the Siamese ruling elite’s strategy for projecting an image of civility in a new imperial world order comprised of colonial masters and their “not yet civilized” colonies. On the other hand, by reading Journey to Angkor through a local lens, we find that it is shaped by a precolonial perception of culture and power among mandala polities that recognized centuries of mutual cultural influence between the Cambodian and Siamese courts. While acknowledging that Journey to Angkor can be critiqued as an irredentist lament for Siam’s “lost territories”, this article argues that Damrong’s text speaks to the abiding problem of endeavoring to contain shared forms of cultural heritage within the fixed boundaries of the nation-state.
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