The Cultural Institutions of Indochina Today

Extract

Culturally Indochina has suffered considerably, though less as a result of the war than of the strife which has followed it, and the damage sustained has been in the fields of both personnel and material equipment.

The losses of the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) have been chiefly in regard to personnel. Its prewar and wartime director, Georges Coedès, has resigned and is living in France, where he has succeeded Paul Pelliot as head of the Musée Dennery. P. Guilleminet, the ethnologist, has also retired from the EFEO, and M. Destombes, the school's specialist in ancient maps, is now working with UNESCO in Paris. Georges Groslier, another distinguished member of the EFEO staff and curator of the Phnom Penh museum, died in June 1945 during an interrogation by the Japanese. Madeleine Colani, ethnographer of Tonkin and Laos, died at Hanoi in June 1943 at an advanced age.