When the war came to Europe, home leaves for the French colonists grew dangerous, then were suspended indefinitely.
Home leaves were not just for comfort; they were for survival. At the time, the tropics were believed to break the European body and, in time, the mind. Doctors had argued for decades that white men could never truly acclimatize to Indochina. They said that Cochinchina was “a terrible man-eater.” Those the climate did not kill it was thought to unstring, in the slow fraying called neurasthenia, “an ill commonly attributed to the colonies.”
In 1894 nearly a fifth of the naval infantry in Indochina, and well over a third of the artillery, had to be sent home due to illness, the artillery figure reaching forty percent two years later. That voyage home was the only escape from the climate, and still, it wasn’t a guaranteed cure. One navy doctor asked how many of the men sent home would see “only Toulon’s Saint-Mandrier hospital as their last piece of France.”
The war had closed that route off.
Cambodia already had a rest station, but the wrong kind. Years before, the administration had built a seaside retreat at Kèp, on the coast below the mountain. However, a seaside resort was still subject to the heat; what they needed was height. The colony wanted a mountain sanatorium: height and cool air, a change of climate without the long voyage home. The mountain retreat Meyer had dreamed of was now an administrative necessity.
Turning that necessity into a project fell to the Resident Superior of Cambodia: François Baudoin. He was the most senior Frenchman in the country, and within the colony he answered to no one but the Governor-General in Hanoi, who ran the whole of French Indochina. Meyer had sketches and plans. Baudoin had power: he could send men onto the mountain, order roads built, and ask the Governor-General for the money to do it.
But power did not mean he could ask for what he wanted. An altitude station meant a road cut miles up into the Elephant Mountains, and a mountain road built so that officials could take the cool air was the purest case of everything Maurice Viollette had denounced in the Chamber: colonial money and conscripted labour spent so a handful of Frenchmen could rest in comfort. In the fourth year of the war, Paris would not pay for that. So Baudoin never asked for it.
From here the story turns political. The men’s ambitions are hidden in reports that say one thing while their intentions lie elsewhere. Meyer has his account, the bureaucracy another, and what anyone truly wanted lies somewhere in between.
The way Meyer tells it, after years of being ignored, he finally won an approval in principle. A preliminary exploration was needed and an unnamed Khmer prince who had an estate near Kampot funded and produced it. Even in Meyer’s telling, the report was dubious: “Did it ever get past the foot of the mountains,” he wrote of the prince’s party, “or did it limit itself to gathering information from indigenous guides? It doesn’t matter. A favorable and conclusive report was needed. We had it. The prince brought back documentation and sketches whose authenticity we took good care not to contest.”
Meyer, the prophet ignored for ten years, is at last proved right; in his telling, the report goes up, an official mission follows, and the mountain is his doing.
But the official documents tell it differently. They are Baudoin’s papers, not Meyer’s. There is no prince in them. No prophet. Only a Resident Superior and his orders.
On 27 April 1917, Gourgand of the Forest Service and Bornet of the Cadastre made the first official crossing of the massif. By June, a small Forest Service post had gone up at Popok-Vil, 915 metres above the sea. Jubin, the one man at the Cadastre who had ever taken Meyer’s ideas seriously, moved onto the plateau to map it, and daily weather observations began there in July.
In the colony’s account, almost no one had lived there. Popok-Vil had been “little inhabited until then, even by the natives of Cambodia, peopled by the old legends of sorcerers and familiar spirits of the mountain.”
But people did live on the mountain. When the first survey party reached the waterfall, they came upon “a small encampment of Annamite monks.” They put questions to the monks about the mountain; the monks answered “with rather bad grace.”
“It had been necessary,” the survey’s published account put it, without going into details, “to use strict measures toward them.”
“The arrival of the Europeans at Popok-Vil,” it went on, “brought about an exodus among the monks of the mountain.”
The mountain had been remote and sacred, a place of pilgrimage. Soon it would fill with Frenchmen.
The surveyors had created a forest trail up the mountain near the Kamchay rapids. A real road was another matter, and in October 1917 Baudoin asked for one. His request to the Governor-General said nothing about sick officials; it sought money for a road into the Elephant Mountains on other grounds entirely: access to forests, possible minerals, and agricultural land. A road for the war economy could be defended. A road to a sanatorium could not, and a road to a luxury hotel least of all. Neither was mentioned; their case would wait for a second file, the following year.
The money came through that autumn, and they could press for the sanatorium itself. But first the men who wanted it had to see the place for themselves. In the spring of 1918 they went up together, by automobile and boat to the Kamchay rapids and then on foot up the forest path, with Jubin and Vincent for guides. They spent two days on the plateau gathering the notes that would make their case. Before they came down, they stood for a photograph which gives us our first look at the founders of Bokor.
Seven men on a shelf of bare rock, the forest closed up behind them: Baudoin and Rousseau, Meyer, Gourgand and Jubin, with Flacourt of the agricultural service and Babillot the chief engineer.
They have arranged themselves the way colonial officials were meant to: tunics buttoned to the throat, boots laced to the knee, hands clasped behind the back. Two of them sit, Flacourt at the far left, turned in toward the others, and Jubin on the rock in front. Baudoin stands in the centre, his hands at his sides, less formally than the others.. Rousseau stands nearest him, closer than any other two men in the row.
One person stands apart, and it is Meyer. He is at the left end of the line, the youngest there and the only one out of step: where the others are dressed alike in the same drab cloth, his jacket is a different colour, cut with wide lapels over a tie. Every other man has a moustache. Meyer is clean shaven, which leaves him looking younger still, and further out of place.
Weeks later, from Kampot, Rousseau filed his report. He was no longer writing in his administrative style. He lavished praise on the mountain, and on Baudoin.
It is the splendor, the majesty of the panorama that spread before my eyes: the sea, the Gulf of Siam, stretches as far as the eye can see… the deep bays that cut the coast into so many successive crescents… Luck favored us, for at no moment did the clouds or the mist obscure the superb view that unrolled before our marveling eyes.
In a line that could have come from Meyer himself, he wrote that this splendid corner of the mountain lacked only one thing to become “the dreamed-of colonial Eden”: a comfortable, well-appointed sanatorium.
To the Resident Superior, Rousseau wrote in pure flattery:
You were good enough to share all your plans with me, to make me, so to speak, the confidant of your thoughts and conceptions… You could not have found a more resolute partisan, a more devoted collaborator, to help you carry through to the end a task so fine, so worthy of interest.
The project, he wrote, was “eminently patriotic and philanthropic.” Rousseau, who had ignored Meyer, now made himself the most devoted servant of Baudoin, and of the mountain.
Once Baudoin had his report, he moved. The road was by now being cut on the strength of its forests, and the Resident Superior no longer had to hide where it led. In July he sent the Governor-General a second dossier, and this time he made it clear: an altitude sanatorium for the colony’s sick and exhausted, with Rousseau’s report attached.
Meyer’s dream was finally moving, carried not by his vision but by Baudoin’s maneuvering. Infatuation had not been enough; what it took was politics. Luc Mogenet, in his 2008 study La création de la station climatique du Bokor, saw it as well, and commented on the difficulty of working out what really went on:
A Resident Superior of Cambodia keeping little secrets from his superior, the Governor-General of Indochina. A Resident of Kampot who first ignores, even fights, the project, only to glorify it later. An activist claiming the credit for himself. What happened? One can only read between the lines of the various reports and works devoted to Bokor. Everything suggests there were two opposing camps; in the end, the Governor-General having come round to the station, everyone fell in line.
On 2 June 1919, Rousseau convened a commission at the Kampot Residence to plan the station: a mountain town of hotel, villas, and an indigenous quarter set well back from the European centre. Then they turned to names.
Across the map they wrote names of their own: Côte d’Opale, Val d’Émeraude, Bella Vista, Terrasse des Éléphants. It was Rousseau who insisted that any Siamese name be banished, as likely to “arouse the susceptibility of the Cambodians.”
The Cambodian names were at least kept, if rarely where they belonged. The French never agreed what the Cambodians had called any of it: to Pavie the summit was Popok-Vil; to Meyer it was Bauk-Kô, Khmer for “the cow’s hump”; to Berret and Jubin it was Tiong Poch. Three Frenchmen, three mountain names.
Only one of the three was the mountain’s own name: Tiong Poch, the Khmer for its summit, which Berret and Jubin had recorded. The commission dismissed it as “barbarous” and hard to pronounce, and Mont-Bokor, the name of a wholly different peak, was used in its place. That the plateau is flat, and nothing like a cow’s hump, seemed to trouble no one. Popok-Vil, the turning clouds that roll over the cliffs, they kept but demoted to a small waterfall and its mist. The men around the table, not one of them Khmer, stripped the mountain of names it had carried for centuries and rewrote them. They were finished before lunch.
The final act was the vote on where the station would stand. Three sites were in contention: Bokor, Grand Éperon, and the Cascades. Bokor won, and at half past eleven Rousseau and the others signed the minutes, sealing the mountain’s future.
Around 1920, both Rousseau and Meyer left Kampot. Rousseau would eventually return to France. Meyer was banished to Laos.
In 1922, Rousseau was back in Paris as Cambodia’s delegate to a colonial exposition. That season the Cambodian Royal Ballet danced at the Opéra, the troupe King Sisowath had first brought to France in 1906, the same dancers who, sixteen years before, had overwhelmed a seventeen-year-old Roland Meyer in the crowd at Marseille.
Yvonne, the wife who had sailed home from Kampot, was with him again at the end. He died at Noisy-le-Grand, outside Paris, in January 1949, aged eighty-one. She followed six weeks later.
Before he left Kampot, in 1918, Rousseau had written his monograph of Kampot, a full official account of the province he had governed: its geography, its peoples, its trade. It remains the oldest complete description of colonial Kampot. It does not mention Bokor.
Rousseau had left Kampot. The mountain was still there. It still needed a road, not the survey’s forest trail but a motor road, fit for cars, cut through treacherous forest.
The French weren’t going to build it. They would force the Cambodians to build it for them.
This is the end of the first part of the Bokor story, the long prelude before anyone broke ground. The next part follows the road up the mountain, and the price it was built at.
Sources:
Auguste Pavie, Mission Pavie: Géographie et voyages and Excursion dans le Cambodge et le royaume de Siam
Roland Meyer, Komlah, visions d’Asie (1930)
A. Rousseau, Monographie de la Résidence de Kampot et de la côte cambodgienne du golfe de Siam (1918; Mogenet re-edition, 2008)
A. Rousseau, Le Protectorat français du Cambodge (1904)
Dr Berret, with notes by G. Jubin, Popok-Vil et le Mont Bockor: station climatérique d’altitude maritime au Cambodge (1920)
Luc Mogenet, La création de la station climatique du Bokor (Cambodge): présentation commentée de sources d’archives inédites (2008)
Eric T. Jennings, “The Bokor Palace Hotel: a colonial white elephant atop Cambodia’s Elephant Mountains,” Journal of Tourism History 17, no. 3 (2025)
Eric T. Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (2011)
Aline Demay, Tourisme et colonisation en Indochine, 1898-1939 (2011)
Maurice Viollette, parliamentary reports on Indochina (1911)
“Popok-Vil et le mont Bockor,” Revue indochinoise (1919); Verdale, untitled article on Kampot, Revue indochinoise (1903)
Kitagawa Takako, “Kampot of the Belle Époque: From the Outlet of Cambodia to a Colonial Resort,” Southeast Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2005)
Further reading
Mun Sui: The King's Pirate
A Chinese pirate arrived in Kampot in 1858 with a hundred men and a plan to burn the town. The king made him commander of the coast-guard.
The Massacre of Rạch Giá
On the morning of June 17th, 1868, a Chinese cattle merchant was travelling from Châu Đốc along a canal to Rạch Giá, a small port on the Gulf of Siam just south of the Cambodian border. The port was originally founded by Chinese settlers and had been occupied by the French just the year before.
Kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge: The 1994 Kampot Train Attack
In July 1994, three backpackers took a train from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville. It was a journey that would lead them into the heart of a Khmer Rouge stronghold in Kampot Province.
Books About Cambodia: Where to Start Reading
A reading list for understanding Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, from David Chandler's history to survivor memoirs and the In the Shadows of Utopia podcast.