More on the Museum

Up until the early nineteenth century the colonial rulers in Southeast Asia exhibited very little interest in the antique monuments of the civilizations they had subjected. Thomas Stamford Raffles, ominous emissary from William Joness Calcutta, was the first prominent colonial official not merely to amass a large personal collection of local objets dart, but systematically to study their history.(27) Thereafter, with increasing speed, the grandeurs of the Borobudur, of Angkor, of Pagan, and of other ancient sites were successively disinterred, unjungled, measured, photographed, reconstructed, fenced off, analysed, and displayed.(28) Colonial Archaeological Services became powerful and prestigious institutions, calling on the services of some exceptionally capable scholar officials.(29)