George Coedes (1886? - 1969) and the Coedes Collection
From tana@uow.edu.au Thu Apr 15 10:05:21 2004
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 11:07:52 +1000
From: Tana Li <tana@uow.edu.au>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Coedes collection
I am forwarding this information on the Coedes collection in Australia. It was sent few months ago to the discussion list (VietnamLaosCambodge@yahoogroups.com) by Chris Goscha.
Je me permet de vous signaler un article, publié en 1996, concernant le fonds de G. Coedes, déposée à Canberra, Australie (Bibliothèque
nationale d'Australie)
This is an article, published in 1996, about the G. Coedes collection, now held in Australian National Library in Canberra, Australia.
Asia's French Connection : George Coedes and the Coedes Collection
Article by by Ann Nugent, published in National Library of Australia
News, 6 (4), January 1996, pp 6-8.
http://www.nla.gov.au/asian/form/coedes.html
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In 1910 a young Frenchman was seated at his desk in Paris writing about the connections between Greek and Latin texts and the civilisations of the Far East. That man was George Coedes. His first published book, Textes d'auteurs relatifs a l'Extreme Orient depuis le IVe siecle avant J-C, jusqu'au XIVe siecle, demonstrated the prodigious breadth of his linguistic and historical scholarship.
Coedes was to spend his adult life filling in the spaces in Western knowledge of classical Southeast Asia. His early career was spent at the prestigious French research school situated in Hanoi, L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient, where he was a pensionnaire and later a member of staff. In 1918, at 32 years of age, he took up the directorship of the National Library of Thailand in Bangkok. He worked there for 11 years - during which time he translated inscriptions from ancient steles and monuments throughout Southeast Asia - before returning to Hanoi to become the Director of L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient. In 1946, after 17 years in this position and at a politically turbulent time in Vietnam, Coedes left Hanoi for Paris where he was appointed Professor of Southeast Asian History at L'Ecole des Langues Orientales. There he stayed and retained the position of curator of the Musee d'Ennery, Avenue Foch, Paris, from 1946 until his death in 1969.
Why should this be of any interest to the National Library ? Because in 1970, not long after Coedes' death, the Library was interested in acquiring formed collections for its Asian collection, and Dr Loofs-Wissowa, of the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, alerted it to the availability of the Coedes Collection. At that time German-born Dr Loofs-Wissowa - a former student of Coedes in Paris in the late 1950s - was based in Canberra and was keen to build up Southeast Asian and particularly Cambodian resources. The Coedes Collection seemed made to order and so after some competition from American libraries the National Library purchased the entire collection for A$72,000. The Coedes Collection consists of 6,000 items including books, serials, maps and manuscripts. At the time of purchase, items were available in other places; however, the conflict in Cambodia and the consequent destruction of Cambodian source material has meant that the collection has appreciated both in its cultural significance and commercial value. The Khmer-language Tripitaka is the rarest edition of the Buddhist Scriptures held by the National Library.
Among the monographs in the Coedes Collection are books on philosophy, art, sociology, archaeology, religion and ethnography, as well as dictionaries and grammars of languages of the region. Many of the publications are in French and quite a few in English. Some of Coedes' papers and typescripts accompanied the collection and they are preserved in the Library's Manuscript section. Several titles published before 1801 are held in the Rare Books collection.
What makes the Coedes Collection unique is the man who assembled it : a French academic wedded to his field. As Dr Loofs-Wissowa remarks 'Coedes was an amazing man'. His particular genius was that he penetrated the data, and wrote about the people, the history, the culture and above all, the ideas. Gathered over a lifetime, the collection traces Coedes' research. Indeed there is little in the collection that cannot be directly traced in some way to his academic interests. Grammars, ancient monuments, classical languages. all these are fields of rarefied knowledge, of specialist expertise. Interestingly, only a couple of French novels have infiltrated the collection.
Coedes was heir to the great enthusiasm for studying the 'Extreme-Orient' that developed in France in the late nineteenth century, and culminated in the foundation of L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient in 1900. Coedes bestrode the field of Southeast Asian study for over half a century. His great legacy to scholars is his documentation of the cultural influence of India in most parts of Southeast Asia. That influence brought Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas, the Indian concept of kingship, the use of Sanskrit as an official and ceremonial language, as well as Indian artistic traditions to the peoples of Southeast Asia
During his period as Director of L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient, Coedes collected and created many sources for study of Southeast Asian civilisations. He followed in the footsteps of late nineteenth-century French scholars Abel Bergaigne and Auguste Barth, and those of the early twentieth century, Sylvain Levi, Alfred Foucher and Louis Finot. Coedes was influenced particularly by Finot, whom he succeeded as Director of L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient, and who emphasised the Indochinese Peninsula as a research field. Academician Jean Filliozat in his notice on the life and works of George Coedes acknowledges that Coedes became the 'undisputed master' in the field of Indochinese inscriptions. A survey of the collection leaves no doubt of Coedes' extraordinary influence on contemporary understanding of Southeast Asian history, not only in the French- speaking world. Dr Loofs-Wissowa states with some pride that two generations of Australian National University Asian Studies students have been nurtured on Coedes' foundational texts, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968, 1975) and The Making of South East Asia (1966). In these books Coedes directs his readers' attention to 'the origins and prehistory of the peoples of Indochina and Indonesia and to the nature of their contacts with the two great Asian civilisations - the Indian and the Chinese'. In his introduction to The Making of South East Asia, Coedes laments that in most specialised histories of Indochina 'the first fifteen centuries' were 'dismissed in a few chapters, or even a few pages'. Coedes makes good that lack. In the Indianized States of Southeast Asia he clears the jungle from Angkor, the Borobudur, the Cham towers in South Vietnam, the ruins of Pagan in Burma and Sukhothai in Thailand, and many other sites. On the basis of his translations of inscriptions Coedes has constructed 'a beautifully clear and coherent history of the Indianized states of Southeast Asia during the first millennium and a half A.D.' His is a work of unageing intellect drawing on over a thousand inscriptions in Sanskrit, Pali, Old Khmer, Old Malay, Mon, Thai, Cham and other languages from an area extending from Burma to Indonesia. Coedes' histories of Southeast Asia are not simply a collection of exotica, the names and dates of ancient kings, rather in his hands they become an integral part of the human story.
At the personal level, the collection reveals connections between people and people, and people and places, from Paris to Vietnam to Canberra. As Director of L'Ecole francaise d'Extreme Orient, Coedes was preeminently a scholar and researcher but he also inspired others to conduct their own research and to write their own books. A large number of titles in the collection have handwritten dedications by their authors to Professor Coedes. He also kept up correspondence with scholars and former students working in Southeast Asian studies. Just a few months before his death he wrote a detailed letter to Dr Loofs-Wissowa, the last in a long correspondence. M. Philippe Baude, former French Ambassador to Australia, had also been a student of Coedes.
Despite his ability to inspire others with his enthusiasm for research, Coedes had the reputation for giving dry lectures with the genealogy of the kings of Cambodia being his most tedious topic. Tedious lectures aside there is little doubt that Coedes was a man of flair and individuality. He was born in Paris on 10 August 1886, the son of a stockbroker. His Jewish grandfather had come to Paris from Hungary bearing the name Kados. Once in France the family decided to change the name, rejecting the simple Cados for the French-sounding and more mysterious and distinctive Coedes. George was very particular about the ligature of the 'oe' in his family name. It had style, and the hint of leaving the old behind and setting out on something new.
George Coedes certainly left the old behind. He spent 35 years of his life working and writing in Southeast Asia. Seven years after his arrival in Hanoi he married Mlle Neang Yao, a Cambodian, some 11 years his junior. They had six children, one of whom - Pierre - became the admiral of the Cambodian Navy.
In the decades that George Coedes transcribed inscriptions two world wars took place, but nothing, it seems interrupted his research - not military service, not wars, not the burden of his administrative responsibilities. In Paris on 2 October 1969, aged 84 years, George Coedes died. His legacy is a specialised library which not only represents a doorway to the origins of his ideas, but is a fecund resource for scholars of Indochinese history.