6:26:00 PM
The door of Wat Po Veal museum is jammed and the lock is stiff. It takes Hin Nuon, the nun who holds the keys, a few moments to force it open.
On first entrance, the interior is anticlimactic. The vihear, a large temple building normally used for ceremonies, looks like a storeroom, sheltering broken temple regalia and shelves upon shelves of paperwork.
But pushing past the haphazardly stored goods, the room reveals itself like a strange Narnia through the back of a cluttered wardrobe.
Propped up against the stained walls, or piled on the partially tiled floor, are a collection of almost 300 ancient artefacts: stone lingam and yoni statues, chunks of bas relief carvings, Angkorian busts and the vast wooden pediment of a 19th century temple.
Hin Nuon is 65 years old and has lived at Wat Po Veal for the past five years. It’s a large, active pagoda – the monks recently opened their own radio station, and foreign tour groups frequently roam the grounds.
But few visitors think to ask what’s in the locked vihear, and Hin Nuon wouldn’t know what to tell them if they did. “I don’t care about it so I haven’t tried to find out,” she says. “It’s the history of people who lived here a long time ago.”
Sat in his office overlooking the leafy, well-kept grounds of the National Museum, director Kong Virak nodded his head slowly as he listened to a description of the decrepit interior.
“Everyone knows the situation of Wat Po Veal,” he said. “The condition is a shame. We know that we have to move forward.”
Virak confirmed that the apparent value of the collection dotted around the vihear was no illusion.
After the artefacts housed in Phnom Penh’s National Museum, and those stored in Siem Reap, Battambang is home to Cambodia’s most significant museum collection, roughly half of which remains locked in the forsaken vihear at Wat Po Veal.
The others are housed in the Battambang Provincial Museum. Initially conceived of in 1968 as an overspill for Wat Po Veal’s burgeoning collection, the Provincial Museum has fared well by comparison: it is open to the public, and a major project was recently launched to renovate its collection.
On his laptop, Vireak pulled up a photo of how Wat Po Veal’s vihear once looked. The black and white image showed the upstairs of the two-storey building – a room lined with neat white columns, with exhibits presented in glass-fronted cabinets.
Elsewhere, there are inscriptions daubed in faded Khmer calligraphy: “Don’t make problems” and “Don’t take stuff from here,” they warn.
A tale of two art lovers
The museum, Virak explained, was a labour of love crafted by two very different, but complementary, personalities.
The collection began in 1926, at a time when farmers were frequently digging up ancient objects while ploughing their fields.
Sick of seeing the antiquities being abused (larger statues were sometimes broken down to use as knife grinders by villagers) the venerable monk Iv Tuth set out to tour the province, and requested that any unearthed antiquities be deposited at Wat Po Veal.
Beyond knowing that the statues were beautiful, the monk had little sense of their value.
“He just loved the objects and wanted to keep them and display them, not with the purpose of conservation,” Virak explained. “It’s completely different from the European [model].”
At first, the monks propped the objects up around the temple. In the 1950s, overcrowding prompted the construction of the two-storey vihear where the collection remains to this day.
The transition to a modern museum came in the early 1960s, when the French art historian Madeleine Gitou heard of the collection.
Gitou was a significant figure in Cambodian museology: a student of the celebrated archaeologist Jean Boisselier, she served as the last French curator of the National Museum from 1956 to 1966.
Speaking last week, Cambodia’s long-serving UNESCO representative Anne LeMaistre broke into a smile as she remembered the formidable Gitou, whose funeral she attended in Paris in 2005. “She was great,” said LeMaistre, “A very respectable woman, with a very strong character and absolute ethics and rigour regarding Khmer arts.”
Gitou took Iv Tuth’s ad hoc collection in hand. She catalogued it, and reordered it chronologically, opening the two-storey vihear as a public museum in 1965.
“She was an excellent curator because everything she was doing in terms of inventory was so precise, so rigorous,” said LeMaistre.
But Gitou’s rigour, and Iv Tuth’s passion, were no match for Cambodia’s increasingly turbulent politics.
As war descended on Cambodia in the 1970s, Wat Po Veal’s collection was broken up. Conservationists transported its bronzes and other precious items to greater safety in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh.
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