French architects rebuild Cambodian temple on sand
French architects rebuild Cambodian temple on sand
By Leo Dobbs
ANGKOR THOM, Cambodia (Reuter): Foreign experts, backed by computers, modern technology and a keen local work force, are returning to this ancient royal citadel to complete vital restoration work that war forced their peers to abandon.
French, Indonesian and Japanese technicians ignore busloads of tourists, only pausing to warn off straying backpackers as they clean and rebuild the 11th-13th century temples, towers, palaces and bas-reliefs of Angkor Thom.
Foremost among the experts are architects and engineers of the acclaimed Ecole Francaise D'Extreme Orient (French School of the Far East, or EFEO), who have almost finished restoring the Leper King Terrace.
Also, in February the EFEO began rebuilding the Baphuon temple mountain under a US$6 million, eight-year project funded by France.
The EFEO started work at Angkor Thom and the nearby -- and more famous -- Angkor Wat soon after its organization was set up in 1898. Its experts studied and worked at the temples through the decades, apart from a break during World War II.
In 1960, archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier launched EFEO's last major project, the restoration of the crumbling five-levels of the Baphuon, an 11th Century temple mountain built on a base of symbolically pure, white sand.
But Cambodia's civil war in the early 1970s forced the French to quit Angkor Thom in 1972.
School
The school came back in late 1993 to restore and protect bas- reliefs of mythical beings on the inner and outer walls that mark the Leper King Terrace close to the Baphuon.
A French architect at the site in northwest Cambodia said they expected to complete the work by the end of the year.
Their second and far more ambitious project, completing the Baphuon restoration, started in earnest last February under 68- year-old Jacques du Marcay, who worked with Groslier in the 1960s, project architect Pascale Royere told Reuters.
Some 500,000 blocks will be put back in their original places, including thousands that make up a unique reclining Buddha erected on the west face of the temple's second level with stones taken from first-floor galleries in the late 15th Century, he said.
One year before Royere, civil engineer Jean-Francois Blusseau and 70 Cambodian workers moved onto the site, du Marcay commissioned a computer graphics study to mark the exact location in the original structure of tens of thousands of marked and unmarked stones scattered around the site.
A three-dimensional photograph of the temple was created and a drawing, indicating where unmarked and missing stones should go, will also be produced, EFEO staff said.
But Blusseau said the endeavor would have its problems.
These would start with the search for the stones and continue during the process of placing them back on the increasingly unstable giant sand dune.
"In the 1960s the temple was dismantled to be rebuilt but because of the war they stopped... It's a bit difficult, we haven't the old plan of the (deposit) fields," he said. "The stones are a bit mixed."
Also, because the Baphuon is falling down, "we have to make a concrete belt around the temple (hill) and in front of this belt we put the stones.
"If you make a little mistake at the bottom of the temple you will have at the top a mistake of one or two metres," said the engineer.
France's National Geographic Institute will contribute to the project by using architectural photogrammetry techniques to create a map of the 60-metre long reclining Buddha, allowing for the crumbling figure's reconstruction.
"We will keep the Buddha because it is part of the story -- it is historical," said Blusseau.