Macron's Angkor visit highlights France's custodial role

The newly restored West Mebon temple rises from a reservoir at Cambodia's sprawling Angkor archaeological complex, the latest in a century of conservation projects led by former colonial power France.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni will inaugurate the nearly 1,000-year-old temple on the sidelines of a summit of French-speaking nations in Phnom Penh on November 15-16.

Conservationists have restored the 16 towers and surrounding walls over the past 14 years, and put the finishing touches on a stone marker at the entrance last week.

The temple is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site at Angkor, once the centre of the Khmer Empire, and includes the national treasure Angkor Wat.

It was here that archaeologists unearthed the largest bronze statue ever found in Cambodia, "Reclining Vishnu", which is now touring the world.

The site is steeped in legend.

"In 1936, a villager had a dream in which the Buddha came to him to ask to be freed from the earth, where he was suffocating," French project coordinator Sarah Coudry told AFP.

Excavations had already taken place on the site but when work restarted at the exact spot indicated by the villager, they found the statue of the Hindu god.

Now the temple itself has been restored, in what Coudry said was like assembling "a giant 3D puzzle without a reference model".

Crucial to the work has been the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO), which in 1908, under the supervision of the French government, began clearing, cataloguing and safeguarding archaeological remnants that had been forgotten in the jungle.

The legacy of a near-century of colonial rule is still contested but archaeologist Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney said France had made a valuable contribution.

EFEO's work has made visible to the world "one of the greatest cultural achievements of humankind", the Briton said.

"I've always joked that if the British had become the colonial administrators of Cambodia, they would have done nothing with Angkor," he said.

Near the EFEO centre in nearby Siem Reap city, a "Dancing Shiva" statue nearly touches the ceiling of the warehouse where it awaits a return to its home at Koh Ker, a Khmer heritage site northeast of Angkor.

The centre's director Eric Bourdonneau is inexhaustible as he describes the meticulous work required to reassemble the five-metre (16-foot), seven-tonne statue.

Looters had smashed the statue into thousands of fragments at several points during the 20th century but it was finally restored to its former glory this year.

Beyond restoration projects, EFEO sees itself as a research institution, with manuscript specialists, language experts and anthropologists.

"We have this distinctive feature... of covering pretty much all fields of knowledge that will allow us to better understand the history and society of Cambodia," Bourdonneau said.

Conservation efforts at Angkor have become international since independence in 1953, with signs noting contributions to various projects from Japan, South Korea, India and China.

But France still has a unique place: more than a century of excavations, inventories and photographs have made EFEO a kind of scientific memory of the ancient Khmer capital.

"The French have a great deal of knowledge, above all documentation," said Kim Sothin, deputy director of the Apsara National Authority, the Cambodian government body that oversees the Angkor complex.

"They have studied all the monuments since 1863," the start of the French protectorate.

"If you want to study archaeology or monumental architecture, you also have to study French so you can read all the old documents written by the French," he told AFP in French.

He said Cambodians do not "yet have all the skills" to work alone.

But this is changing.

Cambodian architect Meng Sovanlylin, 32, is among those who have been trained by the French to help preserve and investigate her country's heritage.

"The older generation transfers all the knowledge to us," she said, perched atop precarious scaffolding in the centre of the Bayon temple.

"And then we can learn and practise... and be able to work by ourselves."

Phem Phan, a 65-year-old worker wearing a yellow hard-hat and a faded blue shirt, sees another, more practical advantage to working with the French.

"The salary is decent," he said. "And when we stop working, we have pensions."