12 Facts About Henri Mouhot

Alexandre Henri Mouhot was a French naturalist and explorer of the mid-19th century.

Henri Mouhot was born in Montbeliard, Doubs, France, near the Swiss border.

Henri Mouhot traveled throughout Europe with his brother Charles, studying photographic techniques developed by Louis Daguerre.

From his base in Bangkok in 1858, Henri Mouhot made four journeys into the interior of Siam, Cambodia and Laos.

Henri Mouhot recorded this visit in his travel journals, which included three weeks of detailed observations.

Henri Mouhot assumed that the authors of such grandeur were a disappeared race and mistakenly dated Angkor back over two millennia, to around the same era as Rome.

Henri Mouhot's exploration covered 4,955 kilometers in Southeast Asia, in three years, six months and 13 days.

Henri Mouhot himself did not seem to be a hardcore colonialist, for he occasionally doubted the beneficial effects of European colonisation:.

However, Henri Mouhot appears in his notes as genuinely interested in South East Asia and its culture, and kept in mind the benefits he thought France could provide to those countries.

Henri Mouhot died of a malarial fever on his fourth expedition, in the jungles of Laos.

Henri Mouhot had been visiting Luang Prabang, capital of the Lan Xang kingdom, one of three kingdoms which eventually merged into what can be known as modern-day Laos, and was under the patronage of the king.

The popularity of Angkor generated by Henri Mouhot's writings led to the popular support for a major French role in its study and preservation.