The Architecture of South-East Asia through Travelers' Eyes.

• Author: CURTIS, J. WILLIAM
• Position: Review

The Architecture of South-East Asia through Travelers' Eyes. Edited by ROXANA WATERSON. Oxford Paperbacks. Kuala Lumpur: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. 311. $19.95.

This is a thoroughly delightful book, an entertaining and informative anthology on the architecture of Southeast Asia. Selected material is organized into convenient and logical groups: ruins, cities and towns, palaces, temples, villages, domestic architecture, and colonial residences. The broad range of geography and time encompassed do not permit further organization of articles beyond the categories listed above, nor can one imagine that this was intended.

While requiring the fine scholar's expertise and judgment that Roxana Waterson brings to this anthology, this is not a scholarly work in the usual sense--there is neither a presentation of a theoretical base or a hypothesis presented and argued--nor does it seem that either is necessary. It is a collection of descriptive material of a high order. Passages have been chosen for examination on account of the accuracy with which the author describes his or her subject, for insights that are shared, and for clarity of writing. Care also has been taken to select material that reflects sensitivity to the cultures and environments discussed, revealing, as well, an unusual aesthetic sensibility on the part of the editor.

The earliest passage included is titled "A Description of the Palace of the King of Siam," by Guy Tachard, a Jesuit priest who was part of a delegation sent to Thailand by King Louis XIV of France, arriving in Ayutthaya in October 1685, Two other early passages in the anthology are dated 1780. Four more are dated in the first half, and twenty in the last half, of the nineteenth century. The remainder of the fifty-two passages treated are from the twentieth century, of which all but one are prior to World War Two. Although the bulk of the descriptions are the work of British observers, there are eighteen by French, American, Dutch, German, Mexican, and Norwegian authors--the lone non-Western selection being an account by one Ng Seo Buck, a Chinese who arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 1902 at the age of nine--distinguished from the other authors not only by race but by not qualifying actually as a "traveler," having settled in the region permanently. Additionally, five of the passages were written by women: E. R. Sc idmore, an American who visited Java in the 1890s; Harriet Ponder, a British woman represented by two...