The first mentions of Cambodia on world maps: meeting the first cartographers

Editorial team
Oct 15
4 min read

On 10 October 2025, the SOSORO Museum hosted a fascinating lecture by Professor Olivier de Bernon entitled ‘The first mentions of Cambodia on world maps’. This lecture took an enlightened look at those who first sketched the Cambodian kingdom on maps, revealing both the fascination of these pioneers and the glaring limitations of their understanding of the territory.

Who drew the first maps?

The first maps to mention Cambodia were often the work of European travellers, traders, missionaries and later archaeologists, each of whom, in their own way, tried to understand a country whose culture and geography were largely unknown to them. Early cartographic sources include handwritten maps produced at the end of the nineteenth century by the Cambodian governorates themselves, at the request of the French Protectorate.

These maps, drawn in ink and sometimes coloured with pastels, are considered to be the oldest cartographic documents created by the Khmers, a remarkable originality given that most old maps were produced by foreigners. Today, these documents are invaluable for toponymy and archaeology, and some copies were presented to King Norodom Boromneath Sihamoni when he was admitted to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 2010, bearing witness to Cambodia's rich cartographic heritage.

Professor Olivier de Bernon: an explorer of Cambodian cartography

Professor Olivier de Bernon, a linguist and researcher specialising in Buddhist studies and Cambodian culture, is a key figure in the study of ancient Cambodian maps.

A scientific member of the École française d'Extrême-Orient since 1991, he has published numerous works on the religious and secular literature of Cambodia, as well as on the historical cartography of the kingdom.

His expertise sheds light on the complexity of early representations of Cambodia, where the limits of contemporary knowledge were often mixed with impressions of exoticism and geographical errors.

The first challenges faced by cartographers

Early maps, particularly those compiled in the 18th and 19th centuries, were based on indirect sources and imperfect observations. For example, a map drawn in Singapore in 1851, with information collected by Constantine de Monteiro, representing the sovereign Cambodia of Ang Duong, illustrates this mixture of exact observations and fine inaccuracies, particularly on the positions of rivers, provinces and major towns such as Phnom Penh or Oudong.

The water tower of Phnom Penh, called ‘Olompeh’ on some Western maps, was a well-known spiritual and political centre, but was often incorrectly positioned by European cartographers. These maps also reflect population movements, conflicts with Siamese and Cochinchinese neighbours and European commercial ambitions.

Travellers, missionaries and merchants: key players in the dissemination of cartography

Over the centuries, Western knowledge of Cambodia was built up by the successive arrival of daring travellers, determined missionaries and then merchants in search of economic opportunities.

These men, often the first Westerners to visit or settle in the area, left behind accounts that fed into the incipient cartography. In his 1878 book, Edme Casimir Croizier refers to Abbé Bouillevaux as the forerunner of exploration, followed by the Englishman King and Commandant Doudart de Lagrée, among others. These descriptions, although tinged with the subjectivity of their time, served as a basis for the gradual development of geographical knowledge of Cambodia.

Cambodia in Western cartography before 1511: between myths, discoveries and imperfect representations

Before the Great Discoveries, the cartographic representation of Cambodia in the Western world was embryonic, often imprecise, and closely linked to a mosaic of knowledge inherited as much from Greco-Roman antiquity as from exchanges with the Arab-Muslim world and East Asia.

Cambodia appears indirectly, under a variety of place names, on several medieval and pre-Renaissance world maps, where the Indochinese peninsula is often distorted and sometimes shifted on the map. For example, Fra Mauro's world map (1459), a monumental work produced in Venice, shows a ‘royal city’ called Nagari, which some specialists identify with Angkor, the great Khmer capital. This map is based in particular on the accounts of travellers such as Nicolo de Conti, who visited the region in the early 15th century. These references testify to a still fragmentary but distinctive knowledge of the Khmer kingdom at a time when its political influence was gradually being withdrawn from Angkor and shifted to other centres such as Lovk (Longvek).

Another key source is Martin de Behaim's globe (1492), produced in Germany, which explicitly mentions a ‘Kambaja’ kingdom with inscriptions accompanied by names such as ‘Loach’, interpreted by some as a Western transcription of the post-Angkorian capital Lovk. This map imposes a Ptolemaic representation, enriched by recent Portuguese observations, placing Cambodia in a still little-known Indochina, on the fringes of a still largely mythologised Indian Sea.

In addition to the traditional Ptolemaic models, other medieval maps, such as the one by the Genoese Pietro Vesconte (1321) and the Korean Kangnido world map (1402), of Chinese origin, may have influenced the spread of geographical knowledge about Southeast Asia. These documents, which appear in the corpus of cartographic representations prior to 1511, show an Asia that is deformed but already connected by commercial and cultural networks that were hitherto little traced in Europe.

A detailed study of these early maps also reveals that place names change according to the context of the voyages, whether Venetian, Portuguese or Byzantine, and always bear witness to the trial and error of Western knowledge of a Cambodia that Europeans had yet to approach directly. For many, the kingdom remains a mysterious place, sometimes confused with its neighbours, but always associated with fabulous cultural wealth and growing strategic importance.

The contribution of researchers such as Professor Olivier de Bernon is invaluable in putting these cartographies into context. His work on Khmer manuscripts, colonial archives and travel accounts sheds light on the accuracy, limitations and successive interpretations that these early maps had of the Cambodian kingdom, oscillating between fascination, ignorance and the quest for geopolitical mastery.

In this way, the conference at the SOSORO museum acquires a rich historical and scientific dimension, showing that Cambodia, through its first cartographic mentions, embodies an essential crossroads of cultural and geographical exchanges on the eve of European globalisation.