legacy guy

Around about 155 years ago, a French naturalist called Henri Mouhot went to the British Royal Geographic Society and asked them for some money. He and his wife wanted to go on a botanical expedition to Indo-China, and he wanted them to provide all the necessary funds for him to meander through obscure parts of the Far East, scribbling in his sketch pad and collecting samples of unknown flowers.

Correction: he and his wife wanted to go on four botanical expeditions, and he wanted the Geographical Society to pay for all of them.

Now, I d'know about you, but to me this sounds like a request which was almost tailor-made to be a) laughed at and b) flatly rejected. I mean, I'm sure if you've ever applied for an arts or science grant, or worked in project management and fought hard to get project budgets approved, you'll appreciate that getting the people with the money to be enthused about your Big Idea is always a challenge. And of course, getting them to actually open their purse and let you put your hands in is harder still. In this case, though, we're talking about an even bigger ask: a French explorer wants money from a British organisation, to bankroll his exploits in a region (Indo-China) that was of little interest to anyone at the time – and for a completely uncertain, probably very minimal result that would be of interest to a select few scientists and enthusiasts.

Hmmm ... not the easiest thing to sell.

The fact that Mouhot did manage to get the money for these expeditions forces me to consider an idea which I generally resist with all my argumentative powers: namely, that perhaps some things really are meant to happen. See, at that point, nobody (including Mouhot himself) could've predicted how much a few quirky little expeditions would enlarge our knowledge of the world, and the strange wonders lying therein. His big discovery had nothing to do with flowers, and everything to do with ...

wait, I'll tell you in a sec.

On his third Indo-Chinese round-trip, Mouhot traversed the jungles of northern northern Cambodia. There he came across something which hadn't been the focus of his journey at all, but which so moved and inspired him that he decided to deviate from his orginal plan and investigate. Out of the endless tangles of dense vegetation, as he hacked his way through with machetes, there emerged a series of impossibly vast, stunningly ornate and sublimely beautiful temple complexes – "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome"*, as he later put it. They were so overrun by nature that they seemed almost at one with the fertile jungle flora, but nonetheless they were still at least partially intact.   

Astonished and moved by what he'd discovered, Mouhot started sketching these weird, wonderful, other-worldly sacred sites. He also started writing ... evocatively, passionately, copiously. As it turned out, our nerdy botanist hero had quite a talent for literary description, and when he brought his accounts of these buried temples back to France, they caused quite a sensation.

It was only a couple of years later that Mouhot's writings were compiled into an illustrated book – an instant bestseller which fired the imaginations of the French people and made Angkor the subject of intense interest and speculation. Mouhot never claimed to have "re-discovered" the temples in his writing (because he knew that at least two other Europeans had been there before him), but before long, his name had become synonymous with 'the ancient city of Angkor'. 

And here comes the inevitable tragic twist to the story – the bit which convinces me that, if indeed there is such a thing as fate, she's a cruel bitch who deserves to be tied to the back of a tuk-tuk* and dragged through streets freshly re-surfaced with boiling tar. See, Mouhot never got to see the stunning effects of his work. Fired up as he was about expedition #4, he stayed only a short time in France before venturing even further into the unknown. By the time his book had been published, and become a sensation, he was lying in a grave in Laos, having died there of malarial fever in 1861.

See? Cruel. Bitch. Boiling tar.

As to why I'm telling you all this: well, I guess I kind of admire, and even slightly identify with, this Nerdy Little Plant Nerd (who, btw, worked as a language tutor in Russia before he disappeared into the Eastern haze). As I read more about him, I've also come to see him as something like the Indo-Chinese equivalent of those "Men of The Stans", who I've written about previously in The Manor, and who I admire very much. And lastly, I feel kind of a debt to Mouhot, since it was his work more than anything before it which eventually resulted in the re-habilitation of Angkor's temples.

Thousands of other people who come to Angkor and sit sketching the temples ("following in Mouhot's footsteps", as one website puts it) also feel seem to feel this debt. He's become almost as much of a legend as the temples themselves. And deservedly so, it seems to me – firstly for having such a wonderfully silly dream (the whole 'Flower-sketching in Indo-China' thing), secondly for convincing others to let him follow said dream, thirdly for being ready to Man Up and face the jungle, and fourthly for bringing such an incredible thing to the eyes of the world.

So ... thank you, Legacy Guy. We owe you one )))

I'm gonna write more about Angkor ... probably much more, in fact. It's without doubt one of the most astounding places I've ever been to, so I figure it's worth a couple of entries – plus I have loads of pics to show you.

Bye!   


* (A quote from Mouhot's writings.)

* A motorbike or bicycle taxi, very numerous in Thailand and Cambodia. They're kind of like a horse and cart, but with a roof on the cart and a bicycle or motorbike where the horse should be. Great way to travel in the hot Indo-Chinese weather, 'cause you get shelter from the sun and wind on your face )))