Wondrous Angkor
by
Deane Dickason

Elephants at Royal Portico, Angkor Wat⁠a

The Author and the Book

Deane Henry Dickason was born June 23, 1898 in the tiny hamlet of Granada, Colorado (USA). He graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1920, where he was already exercising his talents as what we might call a voiceover man: he would go on to become primarily known as a producer and narrator of travel films, although he also worked from time to time as a lecturer on the occasional cruise ship. As far as I know, Wondrous Angkor is the only book he ever wrote.

Most of the places about which he made his movies, some of them in collaboration with his first wife Sarah Crawford Rorer, are in the Far East and the Pacific, a part of the world he fell in love with in his early thirties. He had made a name for himself with the almost chastely prurient Virgins of Bali (1932), and after that many other such short subjects followed, usually with an eye to young native women, if not quite as overtly; politically his scripts often breathed a tone of benevolent colonial paternalism.⁠b Nine of his travelogues in the "Port O'Call" series can be found on The Travel Film Archive and on YouTube, and at least one more travelogue, Children of the Nile, can be viewed at Archive.Org. One of these, narrated by Dickason himself as most or maybe all of them were, is Jungle Bound: Angkor, Cambodia (available at Angkor Database and at Travel Film Archive — each, unfortunately, cut off at 9′21″, although the movie apparently didn't run much past that, only about 10 minutes total). Readers of our book will recognize snippets of the prose, and some of the photographs in the book are still frames from the movie.

Deane Dickason died in Hong Kong on November 12, 1953, of a fall off a wall; as reported on p32 of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Dec. 9 of that year, witnesses told the jury at the coroner's inquest that he had complained of feeling ill and weak, and that while he was standing on a wall preparing to take some pictures, he suddenly keeled over. Despite what we can read in various places online, it was not a high wall but only about four feet tall; yet it was enough to kill him. He is buried in Colma, CA.

As you might expect from the foregoing, Wondrous Angkor is not a scholar­ly work; but it's much better than the author's movies would have one fear. He knew the monuments first‑hand, did his homework, and considering especially the time in which he wrote when Angkor was still almost unknown and pretty hard to get to, produced a very useful guidebook to the ancient site's monuments, history, and art. The occasional patch of purplish prose, merci­fully brief, and his vagueness and enthusiasm when some of us might wish for a bit more precision — but these are just quibbles on my part. He has given us something readable, informative, reasonably thorough, and profusely illustrated; an interesting book.

Contents

 p. xiii  List of Illustrations

 p. xvi  Maps

Technical Details

Edition, Copyright

The book transcribed here is my own copy of the revised second edition (1939), published by a British house based in Singapore and Hong Kong, which printed it in Shanghai.

The copyright situation is complicated. The author was an American national, the publisher was British, the place of publication was the International Settlement of Shanghai in China.

If the copyright is governed by British law, the author died in 1953, so the copyright lapsed seventy years after his death, and the book has been in the public domain since January 1, 2024.

If the copyright is governed by Chinese law — noting that although in some matters the International Settlement of Shanghai was ruled by its own laws, it was still sovereign Chinese territory — until the adoption of a new statute in 1999, copyright lapsed a mere 30 years after the author's death: thus putting Wondrous Angkor in the public domain in China on January 1, 1984.

If, finally, the copyright is governed by American law, the English-language book was published without a proper copyright notice (it is marked only "All Rights Reserved"), and in any case no American copyright in it was renewed before 1968 when required by the law in force at the time: so at the latest, in the United States the book rose into the public domain on January 1, 1969. This wasn't the end of the story, however: a new copyright law took effect in the United States in 1978, by which the copyright on books like this one — published outside the United States without compliance with U. S. formalities — might be restored; provided they were not in the public domain in their source country as of January 1, 1996. But such was not the case for Wondrous Angkor: as we saw under Chinese law, in China it was in the public domain in 1984, and therefore the book has remained firmly in the public domain in the United States as well. Details here on the U. S. copyright law involved.

Pronunciations

In the printed book, a page of rudimentary pronunciations is given in the appendices at the end, on p155. I reproduce it here:

Pagination and Local Links, Illustrations

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

The illustrations each occupy their own page, and are placed somewhat more for the publisher's convenience than strict connection with the text near them. I've moved most of them, often quite far from their placement in the printed book, to places in the text where they seemed to me most useful.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each section's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was well proofread — the inevitable few errors I found were all trivial and I corrected them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any mistakes are therefore almost certainly my own: if you find one then, please drop me a line; especially if you're looking at a printed copy of the book in front of you.

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Notes:

a The woman standing on the elephant appears again in the photo on p73, wearing the same hat. She looks very much like the author's wife, Sarah Rorer: a photograph of the couple can be found at Angkor Database.

b One of the less happy evidences of Dickason's attitude can be found on p8, where he writes that "the modern Cambodian is almost a savage"; one really wonders where people get off saying such things, or even thinking them. Yet the following sensitively chosen photograph of his, with its caption, is printed on p10 in the same chapter:

(p10)

Modern Cambodians at Siemreap

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a cropped version of the black-and‑white photograph of Angkor Wat on p35, colorized to the colors of the flag of Cambodia.

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