António da Madelena, a Portuguese Capuchin friar, was one of the first Western visitors to Angkor Wat. “It is of such extraordinary construction”, he told the historian Diogo do Couto, about his visit in 1586. Three centuries later, Europeans were baffled by what they saw at Angkor. Henri Mouhout, a young French naturalist and explorer, who arrived in January 1860, wrote “it is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome." His sketches, published posthumously, encouraged successive waves of archaeologists to Cambodia in pursuit of the ancient civilization.
