Cambodian mat

When the French missionary Charles-Émile Bouillevaux, after being the first Frenchmen to discover Angkor Wat, traveled to the Eastern bank of the Mekong and encountered the Bunong people, he considered it an honour to be invited to sit on a Cambodian mat.

The Cambodian mat was promoted as "a fine and neat article" which attracted the attention of Japanese merchants at the Hanoi Exhibition in 1903; it was often sold in Saigon stuffed with kapok.

[10] Since the beginning of the 21st century, weavers have learned how to dye and design patterns such as lanterns, pineapple eyes, grids, and strings.

Reeds are usually grown on the edge of rice fields for making mats when the water recedes from the lake behind their village during the dry season when weaving is done from January to May.

[15] The mangrove palm tree first needs to be cut and divided into three sections: one is the central spine, and the two other is the soft wings on both sides.

[19] Red mats are usually weaved with white reeds that are not diked at one top side to identify its orientation as it would be inconvenient that the head lay were the feet have trodden.

[20] It is a secondary source of income for Cambodian farmers who can add up to 2000 US dollars to the yearly revenue by weaving these red mats.

The French author Claude Farrère refers often to the Cambodian mat in Les Petites Allées,[25] Le Quadrille des Mers de Chine,[26] and La Sonate à la Mer,[27] as an exotic reference to the colonial fantasm, which can also be found in the novel Lélie, fumeuse d'opium published under pseudonym and illustrated with pin-up illustrations of nude and semi-nude women by Raphael Kirchner.