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The following is an excerpt from a new release by John Burgess, Angkor’s Temples in the Modern Era: War, Pride, and Tourist Dollars (River Books, 2021).

During the research for this book, the author’s fifth on Angkor, he found an abiding theme: tensions between the foreigners who came to Angkor—the capital of a great empire from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries—and the Cambodians who were already there. Foreigners were largely concerned with archaeology and conservation; Cambodians saw Angkor in mystical terms, a focus of spiritual energy.

In 1941, the world was watching Japan, wondering what its huge armed forces were going to do next in East and Southeast Asia. The United States had imposed economic sanctions and was demanding, among other things, that Japan withdraw its troops from Indochina. Japan was refusing, in fact sending more soldiers there. The signing of the Franco-Thai treaty in Tokyo, formally ending a brief border war, coincided with the landing of Japanese troops at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam to set up a new base there.

In Siem Reap, people experienced the suspense close-up. Japanese soldiers continued to arrive. A detachment of them climbed to the top tier of Angkor Wat in uniform, a comrade with a flag in the lead. These men were clearly not tourists. The Japanese newspaper Asahi noted the event with a photograph, turned into an illustration in the journalistic style of the day. The temples of Angkor were now under the protection of the Imperial Army, a related article announced.

By late in the year, the Japanese force in Siem Reap had grown to about fourteen hundred men, French conservator Maurice Glaize told his superiors in Hanoi. He reported no ‘grave incidents,’ but there were plenty of the minor ones that come with hosting large numbers of military men. The Japanese were driving trucks through the gates of Angkor Thom at full speed, the vibration risking knocking loose stones from their places. They were cutting trees indiscriminately. They had taken bamboo that was part of a memorial to Charles Carpeaux, the man who had surveyed the Bayon four decades earlier. Some of the soldiers were visiting the temples unsupervised, raising fears of theft or other misbehavior. Glaize worked with Japanese commanders to address these and other problems, but his influence was limited. The Japanese might or might not listen. Commanders did pledge that their soldiers would go to temples only in the company of superiors. But in a report to the Hanoi headquarters of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the institute that oversaw Angkor, Glaize revealed a certain feeling of helplessness on this point: ‘We believe that the religious character of the monuments will be their best safeguard.’

One day there came a ‘request’ from the Japanese for something that surely dismayed him: the creation of a live-ammunition firing range by a small hill inside the Angkor zone, about a kilometre from Preah Khan temple. Glaize signed off, noting that the requested area had only scrub and no ancient structures.

At the airport. meanwhile, the Japanese were now doing their own construction work—and paying better wages than the conservation. Many of its workers defected to jobs there. And soon the Japanese were pressing for the same thing that French civil engineers had earlier sought: removal of ancient towers near the runway on grounds they were a hazard to aviation.

It was in this period that a new king ascended the Cambodian throne, Norodom Sihanouk. He was a nineteen-year-old feeling his way. The French were convinced they could easily manipulate him, but in the years ahead he would become a seminal, willful figure in the country’s modern history, as well as Angkor’s.

Shortly after his coronation, the young king paid respects at the old capital, Maurice Glaize at his side. He visited the various anastylosis sites, showing detailed interest in the reconstruction work underway there (he was given a photo album including before-and-after shots). But perhaps his most important purpose was attending a large-scale religious ceremony at Angkor Wat. It was really more of a mass display of patriotic sentiments unleashed by the recent loss of three provinces to Thailand after the border war. In the presence of five hundred monks, the young king was solemnly presented with a silver box containing soil collected from the provinces. It would stay at Angkor Wat until Cambodia regained sovereignty over those lands. A flame that Sihanouk lit burned for a night in the central tower, then began an Olympic-style relay that French officials had organized as a demonstration of colonial unity. It would wind around Indochina and end up in Hanoi.

International tensions with Japan continued to mount. As a precaution, conservation workers created a protective dug-out near their buildings.

On December 7, the wait came to a close. In coordination with the attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor eleven thousand kilometres away, Japanese troops staged a general offensive in Southeast Asia. They struck the Americans in the Philippines and the British in Malaya. And the Thais in Thailand. Siem Reap, now a border town due to the shifting of frontiers earlier in the year, was a natural jumping-off point for this assault. Thailand had failed to promptly grant permission for Japanese forces to pass through its territory as part of the offensive, so troops simply stormed across the border at Siem Reap under cover of darkness, treating Thailand as a hostile power. Japanese planes took off from Siem Reap airport to attack the Thai town of Aranyaprathet. War with Thailand proved very brief—its government capitulated in less than a day, letting the foreign army enter unopposed. Western colonial powers in neighboring countries kept up resistance, though they would succumb too. By some accounts, Japanese planes flew support missions from Siem Reap during the two-month campaign against the British that ended with their surrender in Singapore.

As it turned out, the ignition of total war across the region was good news for Angkor. It meant that almost all of the Japanese troops there moved into Thailand and did not return. Soon the Japanese warplanes at the airport flew away as well. All that remained at the end of December, Glaize noted in a report to Hanoi, was a Japanese guard post at the Bungalow hotel at Angkor Wat’s main entrance. ‘The most complete calm’ had settled in, Glaize wrote.

At the airport, the towers near the runway remained undemolished. Glaize had again turned back that pressure.

Angkor’s Temples in the Modern Era: War, Pride and Tourist Dollars will be published by River Books in April, 2021.