Puttering around Siem Reap: Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles

Poor Justin has either caught whatever I had in Fukuoka, or has started from scratch with something indigenous.

If we had read our Cambodian fortunes, we would have seen this coming.

Fortunately, we had set up our schedule to have some days off, and we moved one of them to today to allow him to rest. There are two bad things about Justin being sick. The first is that Justin is sick, and that sucks. The second is that without somebody paying attention, this is what I eat for lunch:

Fried bananas and vanilla ice cream. Indescribably good.

We've loved our hotel here (the Bunwin Boutique Hotel), not in the least because it has its own tuk-tuks (little carts pulled by motor scooters) and they provide you with a cell phone so you can call the hotel to be picked up or dropped off anywhere you like for free. We took motorcycle taxis around the Philippines but it always feels awkward, because I hate worrying about the price and haggling and wondering if I'm actually being taken where I want to go. Without the Bunwin tuk-tuks, I probably would have sat around the hotel all day. I'm not that confident going around by myself - I'm still not entirely convinced I'm an adult who should be let out on her own, and I'm always shocked when school trips come around and I'm the chaperone. So it was kind of a big deal for me to strike out on my own without Justin.

I went to the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles here in Siem Reap. The institute, like many Cambodian buildings, is a second-story only built up on stilts. The ground floor is really just a shadowed portico. That's where the workshop is; upstairs is a shop. There isn't a tour guide or anything, but you can read about the process and they have a DVD in English and Japanese.

The mission of IKTT is to preserve and grow the knowledge of Khmer textiles, which was nearly wiped out in the Cambodian Civil War and subsequent genocide. Permit me a history teacher detour for a moment (and my genuine apologies for the fact that this topic deserves more detail). Cambodia was part of the French colony of Indochina before World War II. Japan took over Cambodia during the war and put the monarch, Norodom Sihanouk, back on the throne. The king held on until 1970, when he was deposed by a military coup. To make matters worse, the US was bombing Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. Within Cambodia, civil war broke out between rightist forces and the Communist Khmer Rouge, which took power in 1975. The Khmer Rouge and its infamous leader Pol Pot immediately set about trying to make everybody miss the good old days of civil war and bombing by instituting what is now called the Cambodian Genocide.

I am not going to be able to do the subject justice in this post, but the basics are as follows. Approximately 1 out of 5 Cambodians (somewhere in the area of 1.7 million) died in the Genocide (the notorious Cambodian Killing Fields are Cambodia's second most visited attraction, after Angkor Wat). You can see this impact statistically on the population pyramids of Cambodia - watch for the devastated red birth cohort of the 1975-9 period.  Main motivating factors appear to have been Communist ideology (targeting urbanites, religious people, intellectuals, etc) and nationalism (targeting ethnic minorities). For more information, I suggest the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program web site.

Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia in 1979. Eventually, under the UN, Cambodia negotiated its way to elections. To return to textiles, UNESCO brought a Japanese silk expert named Kikuo Morimoto to Cambodia to find out what, if anything, had survived of the traditional Khmer textile industry. The answer was not much. The Khmer Rouge had destroyed silk-weaving equipment and forbidden the teaching of techniques. Famine and displacement had devastated the trees and other natural infrastructure. Morimoto was able to identify a few very senior senior citizens. He began building on this knowledge, supporting apprenticeships by younger women and, a few years ago, buying land outside of Siem Reap for a village and farm complex to sustain silkworms and the plants which provide natural dyes. Today, IKTT employs nearly 500 Cambodians at various stages of the silk production process, and maintains good fair trade standards. Mothers are allowed to bring their children to the workshop - I saw a lot of kids running around or napping in hammocks while their mothers spun silk.

Here you can see the raw silk. Cocoons on the left, finished silk on top, and on the bottom, the raw gold silk which has not yet had the protein outer layer stripped off. It feels crunchy, like horsehair, while the ivory-colored finished silk is smooth as... yeah. You know.

Top: Dyed yellow from a plant called Prohut; bottom: dyed brownish pink via coconut

Red and purple come from the nests of the Lac insect

The grand product of IKTT is Cambodian ikat. Instead of these single-color threads, ikat involves dying a white thread multiple times to create a pattern on the thread itself. Basically, the threads are tied with bits of banana leaf, which cover up parts of the thread and keep them white. You dye in a certain order, retying banana leaf as necessary, until the thread is colored in such a way that it will produce a pattern upon weaving. The complexity and mathematics of this are mind-boggling.

White silk with banana ties

Multicolored threads being woven on a loom

 As you might guess, the products in the upstairs shop are amazing but priced to reflect this process. An ikat scarf is in the US $50+ range, while some exquisite wall hangings are priced upwards of $500. You can find cheaper items in monochrome or in handkerchief size.

So do I recommend a visit to IKTT? For two types of people: people who like to know about hand-production of textiles, and people who would like to own spectacular examples of hand-produced textiles. Since neither of these is Justin, it's just as well I went without him.

Please wish Justin a speedy recovery, as we have more temples we hope to see tomorrow!