Archive & History : Jean Commaille and the Hidden Tomb at Angkor Thom

Many of those who visit the temple complex of Angkor Thom do not know that a discreet tomb lies concealed among the bushes and shrubs to the southwest of the road circling the Bayon. It is, however, the grave of Jean Commaille (1868–1916), the first conservator of Angkor on behalf of the École française d’Extrême‑Orient (EFEO).

A photograph of Jean Commaille’s grave. EFEO photo

On 30 April 1916, Jean Commaille was assassinated by thieves on the road to Angkor Wat. Although his name is less familiar than that of Georges Groslier, he was nevertheless one of the first to make a significant contribution to the conservation of Angkor.

Henri Parmentier, who was head of the EFEO’s archaeological service, paid him tribute in the EFEO Bulletin:

A great loss

On 29 April 1916 our collaborator Jean Commaille, conservator of the Angkor group, was assassinated, a victim of some bandits lured by the money he was bringing back from Siem Reap to pay the coolies. It was a great loss for the School and for the very work being undertaken at Angkor, a work to which he had devoted himself with all his soul.

A restless life

I shall briefly recall in a few words what little I know of him before his entry into the EFEO; I shall dwell more at length on the period when we counted among us this precious friend. He himself said that he had found his true vocation only from the day he took part in our task. The son of a soldier, he made his first studies at the Prytanée de la Flèche and always liked to recall the memory of this place; but he was too independent‑minded to submit his whole career to the inflexible discipline of the military, and moreover art called to him too strongly for him to resist its appeal. He therefore renounced Saint‑Cyr, and then came the harsh existence of the born artist to whom the means of working are denied.

Yet, despite his unstable labours, he acquired a solid knowledge of drawing, and he had, in an intense degree, the natural gift for colour. For several years his life was one of the most restless imaginable; a final turning‑point cast him into the Foreign Legion. It was thus that he came to Indochina, then passed into the civil services.

The École française d’Extrême‑Orient

In 1900, Commaille entered the École française d’Extrême‑Orient as secretary‑treasurer; the School kept him for many years and found in him an extremely devoted collaborator. If at the same time the appointment of an architect‑pensionnaire somewhat reduced the role he might have hoped to play among us with his talent for drawing and painting, on the other hand his duties in our still very young School were not yet very demanding, and he found in arranging our small museum in Saigon a perfect outlet for his energy.

Moreover, an interesting excavation, that of Bassak, was soon entrusted to him, and he acquitted himself honourably, though such work was entirely new to him. He also rendered great service during the transport of our collections to Hanoi and their arrangement for the 1902 Exhibition.

Money troubles

Unfortunately, cruel financial embarrassments, to which his rather extravagant tastes were bound sooner or later to lead him, obliged him to leave the EFEO in search of a more lucrative occupation. He found one, still very much in line with his tastes, in the management of the Schneider printing house, whose director was returning to France on leave. On the latter’s return, Commaille did not long delay in rejoining the civil services, and it was there, in 1907, that the retrocession of the northern provinces of Cambodia brought Angkor under our surveillance, enabling the EFEO to seek him out once more and entrust him with the post of conservator of the Angkor group, which, despite harsh fatigue and painful isolation, offered him the very ideal of life he dreamed of.

He was exactly the “right man in the right place,” and he lived there for nearly eight years, with no other interruption than a year’s leave in France, a leave he had certainly earned, since when he left he had, I believe, more than ten years of colonial service behind him.

These monuments, which he already knew very well and which he loved, became so familiar to him, right down to their smallest details, that his excellent Guide to Angkor clearly shows with what affection he devoted himself to them. He had consecrated himself with ever‑growing fervour to their rescue, a task often deeply distressing.

Angkor

It was first of all Angkor that demanded long and often tedious work from him. He devoted nearly four years to it, living most of the time either in the wretched hut built long ago for travellers or in a second hut erected at the time of the visit of His Majesty Sisowath, which soon became scarcely more comfortable, surrounded as it was by the glare of the dazzling paved causeway and assailed by the whirling swarms of mosquitoes that breed in Angkor’s pools and which no matter how suffocating the fires, never wholly disappear. The departure of his wife, whose health could not withstand such harsh conditions of life, left him alone in these dead solitudes for three‑quarters of the year.

Left to himself, he had to take the temple apart, floor by floor, and remove the tons of earth that the wind had piled up there. Then, once this operation was completed for the upper storeys, it had to be repeated for the large courtyards of the intermediate and lower levels; and the scale of the work may be grasped if one knows that the side avenues of the sanctuary, which together extend more than a kilometre at an average height of about one metre, were entirely reconstructed from these excavated materials.

A gigantic task

Commaille had to move almost everywhere the enormous stones of the foundations in order to pull out the stumps of the bushes that had invaded them and, even more tedious, repeat this cleaning several years running, so vigorous is the vegetation in these tropical regions. In the end this exhausting task could be regarded as completed, and he was at last able to realize his dearest wish: the clearing of the Bayon, whose mysterious beauty haunts all those who have approached, even if only for a day, the ruins of Angkor. He had the good fortune to carry this enterprise through without any collapse in a building so precarious and so ruined, and he was able to study it, during the course of these works, in the most minute detail.

He dreamed of composing a complete monograph that would acquaint the scholarly public with all the oddities of this monument, one of the strangest human conceptions, and of explaining all the mysteries he had recognized in the course of his long hours of research.

Remarkable studies

Unfortunately, relying on his excellent memory, he took no notes, or at least none of this kind have been found among his papers. In contrast, he had prepared several large‑scale drawings. These surveys were to form the essential part of this important work, designed in his mind to perpetuate his memory. Although in pencil and on squared paper, hence impossible to reproduce in that state, these remarkable studies are so clear and precise—I may add, so strikingly accurate, having myself checked them in part—that one may hope one day to publish them; thus the dream he cherished and the efforts he expended to make it real would not be entirely lost.

Other temples

When the clearing of the Bayon was finished, he began the clearing of the Baphuon and the Terrace of the Elephants, and had already brought both works far along when a sudden death cut short his labours, a death all the more cruel and unjust because nothing in his relations with the local people could explain the attack. He was greatly loved by them; he knew how to lead them without brutality, though with that firmness they understand, and perhaps even desire, in a chief responsible for them and who guarantees them what they want above all: justice.

Fluent in the language of the country, he could explain his orders and mingle with them a humorous spirit that galvanized men and made them give the required effort willingly and almost without realizing it. The best proof of his influence, beyond the testimony of all who saw him at work, is that recruiting coolies was never a difficulty for him; and yet it had been necessary to shift these wood‑cutters from forest‑work to the wholly different, and not very welcome, task of moving stones. His death was a genuine mourning for the workers on his sites, and it was with sincere indignation that they rejected any suspicion of complicity with his assassins.

His premature death deprived our School of a passionately devoted servant, in whose service he had found the freedom and interest in work that were indispensable to him; and it is far more by the work he actually accomplished at Angkor, at the cost of so much toil and self‑sacrifice, than by the small monument erected near the Bayon he so loved, that his memory will be preserved for as long as the old stones themselves to which he devoted himself continue to stand.

Henri Parmentier

Jean Commaille published several studies on Cambodian archaeology, of which we think it useful to give the following list:

1. The ruins of Bassak (Cambodia). (BEFEO, II , p. 260–267.)

2. The monuments of Angkor. I. A rapid view of the ramparts and the overall layout of the ancient royal city. — II. The Bayon. — III. The Baphuon. — IV. The group of Phimeanakas. — V. The Terrace known as the Leper King. (Revue indochinoise, XIII , p. 363–373; XIV , p. 7–14, 141–151, 340–353.)

3. The ruins of Angkor (Cambodia): a lecture [delivered in Marseille on 18 February 1912]. (Bulletin de la Société de géographie de Marseille, XXXVI, 1912, p. 36–47.)

4. Guide to the ruins of Angkor. Paris, Hachette, 1912, 12mo.

5. Angkor, with 44 illustrations. I. Angkor Wat. II. Angkor Thorm. (Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, Jahrg. II, Heft 1–2. Berlin, 1913, 4to.)

6. Notes on Cambodian decoration. (BEFEO, XIII , in‑8, p. 1–38.) XVI. 5