Decades after they were stolen, 77 pieces of Khmer Empire jewelry have finally been returned to Cambodia from the private collection of an “antiquities trafficking kingpin.”
We open on an empty parking lot framed by the lush, green hills of the English countryside. In the distance, birds chirp and the occasional car passes down the nearby road, interrupting the tranquil silence of a stagnant summer afternoon. An unmarked vehicle with tinted windows, sitting in the middle of the parking lot comes into focus. Suddenly, another vehicle speeds into the lot, brakes squealing as it pulls up next to first. A moment passes before the doors open and the respective drivers and passengers file out. Few words and sharp nods are exchanged between the occupants, all of whom sport solemn expressions. As the trunk of the first car opens, four boxes sit side-by-side. Hesitantly, the passenger of the second car opens the lid on the first box and time comes to a standstill. A soft, golden light emerges from the box and as the camera pans closer, the distinct shape and sheen of a golden crown comes into view. It is what the passenger of the second car has been searching for years: the royal jewels of Khmer Empire royalty.
From once adorning the heads of Angkorian royals to being rediscovered decades later in boxes in the back of a car, this seems to be a scene straight out of a multi-million dollar Steven Spielberg movie. But this is exactly what happened when Bradley Gordon, a lawyer who leads the Cambodian government’s “efforts to repatriate stolen artifacts,” visited London last summer, becoming the first Cambodian representative to see the jewelry in person. “I was driven by a representative of the Latchford family to an undisclosed location. In the parking lot was a vehicle with four boxes inside,” he recalls to the BBC. “I felt like crying. I just thought - wow - the crown jewels of ancient Cambodian civilization packed into four boxes in the back of a car."
The crown jewels in question? Seventy-seven pieces of Khmer antiquities ranging from jewel-encrusted crowns and earrings to a solid gold rice bowl. This trove of golden artifacts was once kept in the private collection of Douglas Latchford, a British antiquities dealer and scholar on Khmer Empire art who had “built a career” on smuggling and selling priceless Cambodian artifacts. According to Molly Enking, a correspondent with the Smithsonian Magazine, Latchford was “attempting to sell some of the gold items in London,” which swiftly prompted the Department of Justice to indict him with the “trafficking in stolen and looted Cambodian antiquities.”
A few of the golden jewelry pieces from Latchford’s collection. (Image credit to Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, image found on the National Jeweler.)
The Department of Justice asserts that Latchford’s stolen treasures were “the product of looting, unauthorized excavation, and illicit smuggling.” This is a perfectly reasonable declaration, for, as Oscar Holland writes, “the murky market for Khmer antiques results from the social and political upheaval that ravaged Cambodia in the latter half of the 20th century.” Protecting their cultural heritage was “rarely a priority” at this time, so “looters took full advantage of the instability,” raiding temples and archaeological sites for artifacts that would eventually make their way into the global art market.
In their empirical study on the nature of the antiquities trafficking network from the The British Journal of Criminology, Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis report that between mid-1997 and mid-1998, approximately 92 statues were looted and trafficked. These operations were “characterized in the field by flexible groups of casualized looters” and were usually undertaken by willing and unwilling “local villagers.” Kampong Thom, one of the regional brokers, “identified several major statues” from a catalog that the authors showed him as ones “that he took from the Prasat Krachap temple at Koh Ker.” After they were looted, the statues were driven to the Thai border, where they then exchanged hands and were smuggled to Bangkok, until ultimately being “plac[ed]...for public sale in internationally respected venues.”
A golden bowl from Latchford’s collection. (Image credit to Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, image found on CNN.)
This highlights yet another problem with the “murky market for Khmer antiques”: provenance. As cases of provenance research into Nazi-looted art have revealed, a work’s provenance can easily be falsified and, to this day, many museums hold pieces of art with illicit provenance. In their November 27th, 2019 press release, the Department of Justice revealed that Latchford was allegedly involved in “creat[ing] and caus[ing] the creation of false provenance for the antiquities he was selling.” Latchford’s daughter, who spoke to CNN on her father’s behalf asserted that some items have “‘impeccable provenance.’” According to Tess Davis’ 2011 article in Crime, Law and Social Change, however, while “seventy-one percent of the antiquities [in Sotheby’s catalogs] had no published provenance,” only “29.44% of the antiquities had any provenance listed, and most of these were weak.” Furthermore, out of the 377 pieces studied, there is no evidence that “included a provenance from an official scientific excavation.” So, if the artifacts included at Sotheby’s, a world-renowned auction house, were weak, what does this mean for those in Latchford’s collection?
In a 2010 interview with the Bangkok Post, however, Latchford said that these pieces were “found or dug up by farmers in fields.” Already, this raises a red flag. If the calculating and organized Cambodian-Thai trafficking network was the primary source of Khmer antiquities, however, then there is no doubt that what Latchford said in his 2010 interview was false. Even Mackenzie and Davis write that during their “site visits” to Cambodian temples, there were “many pictures of headless statues, pedestals from which statues have been broken off at the ankles and holes in walls where reliefs used to be,” meaning that there is no way these intact objects could have ended up stranded in the middle of a modern farming field, especially since they were so precious to Angkorian royalty. Following Mackenzie and Davis’ research, it is more likely that not that Latchford was one of the dealers at the end of the chain who provided museums and auction houses around the world with the looted treasures.
More jewelry, including amulets and diadems, from Latchford’s collection. (Image credit to Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, image found on the National Jeweler.)
Though Latchford died awaiting trial in Bangkok, Thailand in 2020, his family agreed to return all the Khmer artifacts that were in his collection. These included an intact bronze statue from the 11th century and a 10th century stone sculpture from the Koh Ker temple complex. At the same time, many museums that possess items once owned by Latchford are sending them back “voluntarily or after court action.” These museums include New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Denver Museum of Art, among others. As the years go by and more Khmer artifacts are uncovered with Latchford’s name attached to their history or provenance, as the CEO of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, Lynda Albertson, says, “this might create a sense of ‘let's give it back or let's create some good press,’ or some feelings of goodwill between different collectors. But that remains to be seen.” On February 20th, 2023 a press release by the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts reported that Latchford’s collection of jewelry was safely returned to the country’s capital of Phnom Penh on February 17th. So much has been returned to Cambodia in the last two years from Latchford’s collection that the “country's national museum in Phnom Penh is being expanded to accommodate it.”
“The repatriation of these national treasures opens a new era of understanding and scholarship about the Angkorian empire and its significance to the world,” says Cambodian Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Dr. Phoeurng Sackona. Such returns are considered a “noble act” that Sackona asserts “contribute to the reconciliation and healing of Cambodians who went through decades of civil war and suffered tremendously from the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge genocide.” Awareness of the theft of precious cultural heritage has been heightened as a result of this story. This lends hope to those countries still fighting for the return of their cultural heritage and reminds them to keep fighting for the return of their artifacts and, the most important thing, to never give up.
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