Henri Marchal: The Conservator Who Rebuilt Angkor, Stone by Stone
In 1916, a young Parisian architect arrived at Angkor to replace a man murdered on the road to the temple. He would stay there, on and off, until his death in 1970. Along the way, Henri Marchal developed a restoration method still used in Cambodia today, and grew more attached to the country than most Frenchmen of his generation ever did.
A Parisian architect confronts the ruins
Henri Marchal was born in Paris on 24 June 1876. He passed his baccalauréat in 1895 and entered the École des Beaux-Arts, studying in the workshop of architect Gaston Redon — a conventional training that gave no particular sign of where his career would lead. In 1904 he arrived in Cochinchina, then Cambodia, and was appointed inspector of civil buildings the following year. In 1910 he passed the Khmer language exam, which let him read inscriptions himself rather than rely on other people's translations. He became assistant curator of the EFEO museum in Phnom Penh, before being posted to Saigon in 1912.
On 30 April 1916, Jean Commaille, the first conservator of Angkor, was murdered by robbers while carrying his workers' payroll. Marchal was sent to take his place. He was forty. He would spend most of the rest of his life there.
Site after site
The following two decades were spent on methodical, unglamorous work: clearing and consolidating the Baphuon, the Bayon, Phimeanakas, the royal palace of Angkor Thom. Marchal then moved on to Ta Prohm in 1920, followed by Preah Khan, Neak Pean, Phnom Bakheng between 1922 and 1929, and Prasat Kravan alongside Henri Parmentier and Victor Goloubew. Named a permanent member of the École française d'Extrême-Orient in 1919 with the title "Curator of Angkor," he became one of the few Frenchmen who knew the site stone by stone.
Anastylosis, or rebuilding a temple like a puzzle
In 1930, aware of the limits of the simple consolidation methods used until then, Marchal travelled to Java to study a technique developed by the Dutch East Indies archaeological service: anastylosis. The principle is to dismantle a collapsed structure entirely, number every stone, and rebuild it as it originally stood, adding only the minimum of new material — always clearly identifiable as such.
Back in Cambodia, he applied the method for the first time at Banteay Srei, between 1931 and 1936. The result was hailed as an exemplary success and became the reference for every restoration at Angkor since. The small pink sandstone temple, once swallowed by vegetation, was legible again in its original form.
A life split between two worlds
Marchal's personal life reflected this Cambodian anchoring. He had married Mary Gerny, a poet, and lost her in the mid-1940s in France, where the couple had retreated during the war. Back in Cambodia, he had a collection of poems she had written in the 1920s and 1930s published posthumously, under the title Enthousiasmes, Recueillements et Poèmes khmers. His eldest daughter, Sappho Marchal, also grew up close to the temples: she would go on to write a reference study of the costumes and ornaments worn by the dancers depicted in Angkor's bas-reliefs.
Marchal also shared his life with a Cambodian companion, Nang Nêv, with whom he had a daughter, Sally. Official colonial-era records say little about this part of his life — unremarkable for the period — but it matches what his contemporaries already described as a way of living far removed from the rest of the French colony.
The postwar return
Marchal returned to France in 1938 and spent the Second World War there. Back in Cambodia afterward, he resumed his post as conservator of Angkor from 1947 to 1953, succeeding Maurice Glaize. His first task was restoring Angkor Wat's south gallery, partly collapsed during the war as a result of Thai bombing in the area. In 1961 he published his Nouveau Guide d'Angkor, for decades the standard reference for visitors to the site.
"Cremated as a simple Khmer"
Officially retired in 1957, Marchal chose to stay in Siem Reap rather than return to France. He settled into a house by the river, not far from the site to which he had given his life, where he spent his remaining years reading, writing and listening to music. He died there on 10 April 1970, at the age of 93. In the words of his daughter Sappho, he was "cremated as a simple Khmer."
Some Cambodians who have studied his life still call him "the most Cambodian of French archaeologists." It sums up, fairly well, a life that ran longer on the banks of the Siem Reap River than it ever did in Paris.
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