The Prakhon Chai sculptures have long symbolized both the artistic brilliance of Southeast Asia and the dark history of cultural plunder. From your perspective, what makes this return particularly significant at this moment—for Thailand, and for communities across Southeast Asia?
This return shows the success that can be achieved through fieldwork and campaigning by local communities. It was about a decade ago that a local independent archaeologist, Tanongsak Hanwong, and his colleagues visited the area in rural northeast Thailand where stood the remains of an ancient temple, Prasat Hin Khao Plai Bat II. A chance discovery there in the mid 1960s had revealed that buried under the ruins were dozens of sculptures of Buddhist divinities, mostly bronze, in the style of the 7th-9th centuries. After word of the extraordinary find spread, the statues were soon smuggled out of Thailand and onto the international art market. They are now displayed in foreign museums, especially in the U.S., and in private collections. Hanwong and his colleagues, with photos in hand of the statues, found elders in the nearby village of Ban Yai Yaem Watthana who recalled the sculptures and recounted how sixty years ago they had spent days and nights, for about two years, digging for them. A pair of Bangkok businessmen had eagerly purchased the artefacts with sums of money far beyond the villagers’ meager earnings from farming. These businessmen, unlike the villagers, understood what they had found and trafficked the statues overseas in contravention of Thai antiquities law to sell for top dollar to wealthy individuals and foreign museums. Not a single piece went to a Thai museum.
Hanwong and others spread the story of the Prakhon Chai thefts on press and social media, bringing awareness to a wider public in Thailand – and inspiring the Thai government to establish a committee, chaired by the Minister of Culture, to seek the restitution of Prakhon Chai and other Thai antiquities from foreign collections. In the US, Thailand’s evidence was brought to the attention of Homeland Security Investigations’ David Keller, a leading expert in antiquities trafficking cases, who then opened investigations of Thai antiquities in several museums. The Asian Art Museum, one of the premier collections of Asian art in the U.S., has made two returns to date, of two ancient stone lintels repatriated in 2021 and the four Prakhon Chai figures confirmed for return this year.
There are still dozens of Prakhon Chai statues in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Asia Society Museum, Denver Art Museum, Kimbell Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Norton Simon Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum. Hopefully, the evidence of illicit activity will also encourage further repatriations.
Given the role of Douglas Latchford in the smuggling of these sculptures, how do high-profile cases like this shape our understanding of the criminal networks that enable the illicit trade trade in art and antiquities? How might they prompt more proactive scrutiny from museums and collectors?
The Prakhon Chai case certainly provides a vivid example of a criminal network that brought antiquities from the soil of the Thai countryside to the halls of American museums. Here, I would like to focus on how the success of the criminal network in achieving sales of looted art to prominent museums was facilitated by particular aspects of the culture of the art market.
One of the businessmen from Bangkok who went repeatedly to northeast Thailand in the 1960s to buy up Prakhon Chai statues was Douglas Latchford (1931-2020), a British citizen living in Thailand with ambitions in the antiquities trade. From the mid 1960s through the next five decades, he became arguably the most prolific ever trafficker of Khmer artefacts, a career that he concealed while cultivating for himself a reputation as an expert connoisseur or self-described “adventurer-scholar” among museum curators, wealthy collectors, and scholars around the world to whom he marketed antiquities. Numerous Cambodian and Thai artefacts passed through his hands to prestigious museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Norton Simon Museum. In 2019, after coming to the attention of authorities in several cases involving illicit antiquities, Latchford was indicted by the US government for smuggling. He denied wrongdoing but died before the case came to trial.
As Brad Gordon, lawyer on restitution for Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, has observed, Latchford’s handling of the Prakhon Chai sculptures may well have been his “first big heist.” He gained experience in how to evade Thailand’s antiquities law in order to export the statues. He also initiated two working relationships that would prove crucial to his success in the international antiquities market.
One of the collaborations Latchford began at that time was with Spink & Son Ltd. A leading London art dealer counting museums and wealthy collectors around the world among its clientele, Spink was in the early 1960s just beginning to add Cambodian and Thai antiquities to its showrooms. The prestige of Spink, which traced its founding to 1666, no doubt cast a glow of legitimacy on the stolen Prakhon Chai sculptures and on Latchford himself as his name began to be known internationally. In the following decades, according to the 2019 U.S. indictment of Latchford, he “regularly supplied” Spink with pillaged Khmer antiquities. Cambodian and Thai artefacts sold by Spink (not all of which may have come from Latchford) are now in collections around the world, such as the Asia Society Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Each sale to a famous museum or well-known private collector further enhanced the reputation of Spink in the eyes of the market. Latchford’s collaboration with Spink reflects how the art market’s custom of taking well-known names of dealers and collectors as a sign of legitimacy has facilitated the sale of Prakhon Chai and other illicit artefacts.
The other key collaboration that Latchford commenced with the Prakhon Chai heist was with Emma C. Bunker (1930-2021), an American art historian and consultant to the Denver Art Museum. Until then, she had studied Chinese and Central Asian art, but in 1972, she published an article in an American academic journal on the Prakhon Chai bronzes. She illustrated it with photos of a site that she described as a temple at the town of Prakhon Chai, where, she wrote, incorrectly, the statues had been found. The bulk of the article consisted of pages of photos of 25 statues and the names of the private collectors and museums that owned each, together with a chronology she set out for them based on stylistic features.
With this article, Bunker furnished a key document that Latchford and other dealers could use to market Prakhon Chai bronzes. She established the figures as a distinctive, named category, “Prakhon Chai,” with particular features, dating, place of origin and a chronology. This facilitated the market’s ability to categorize the statues and position them within the existing market for Asian sculpture. The article also supplied a further fundamental support for marketing with its catalogue-like listing of statues, including selective provenance information that named owners such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III but did not mention Douglas Latchford’s earlier possession. Bunker’s article also concealed the actual site of the looting, Khao Plai Bat II near Ban Yai. Prakhon Chai was a different town. Whether Bunker was aware that the information was incorrect at the time of publication is unknown; it seems likely that Latchford or Spink gave it to her. It was not until 2002 that Bunker, for still unrevealed reasons, published Khao Plai Bat II as the correct findspot.
Bunker’s 1972 piece on Prakhon Chai was the first of at least a dozen books and articles over the next five decades that she wrote, some co-authored with Latchford and self-published by him, that featured numerous antiquities owned or handled by Latchford. He well understood the art market custom of regarding publication as a testament of the legitimacy of an artefact – no matter the quality of the publication, nor any errors or omissions it may contain. As we know from Latchford’s emails, he highlighted Bunker’s publications to potential buyers. According to U.S. authorities, she also allegedly provided him with false provenance documents. Bunker and Latchford became close friends – and “Co-Conspirator #1 and Co-Conspirator #2” in the sale of illicit antiquities, as a US court filing labelled them.
At the root of Latchford’s success in marketing Prakhon Chai is the inadequate concern among dealers, museums, and collectors with how antiquities got from archaeological sites to the art market and the crimes that may have propelled that journey. On the one hand, Latchford, by projecting a scholarly reputation, placing his items in luxurious galleries, and printing glossy publications, pulled curtains around his illicit activities to shield them from the eyes of potential buyers. On the other hand, these could have been exactly the kind of diversionary furnishings that collectors and museums desired to allow them to avoid having to look at the grubby truth. From this angle, Latchford’s talent was not so much in concealment but in developing himself as a fictively reputable persona from whom museum curators and collectors could comfortably purchase antiquities.
With multiple returns from major U.S. institutions over the past two years, including the Metropolitan Museum and Art and now the Asian Art Museum, are we witnessing a broader shift in how museums are reckoning with their Southeast Asian collections? What still needs to happen to ensure these efforts lead to more structural, rather than symbolic, change?
Museums have played a crucial role in the market for illicit antiquities. As arbiters of cultural canons and values, they have long stood at the apex of influence and power in the art market. Display in a museum stamps an artwork with quality and legitimacy. Museums’ demand for artefacts fuelled looting in Southeast Asia, and their acceptance of poorly-provenanced items signalled to dealers and private collectors that they could do the same. In his emails, Latchford bragged to potential buyers of Prakhon Chai statues of the many examples acquired by museums. If museums strengthened their collection ethics, it would effect change across the art market.
The returns to Southeast Asia to date by U.S. museums have been wonderful first steps towards redress, celebrated by the public not only in Southeast Asia but in the U.S. as well. In too many cases, however, the museum involved did not disclose the evidence and reasoning that led it to decide to make the return. The lack of transparency—not to mention the numerous questionable antiquities still held by museums—fuels doubt about whether museum attitudes and policies will actually change. The inability of museums to be more forthcoming is hard to reconcile with core objectives of museums: to serve as responsible repositories and trusted sources of knowledge. Museums have long presented themselves as possessing extraordinary expertise that makes them uniquely capable of interpreting the Asian objects in their collections for the American public. Yet the narratives museums present about their collections in galleries and publications typically don’t disclose how the antiquities left their sites of origin and arrived in the museum. This is a major gap in both scholarship and accountability. To restore public trust, museums must be open about the true history behind their collections, in line with their objectives in responsible curation and public education. Where they do not know these histories, they should collaborate on research with the artefacts’ countries of origin. Enabling visitors to engage with challenging issues and grapple with facts and questions should replace outdated museum customs of hiding information and imposing narratives. Recently, the Asian Art Museum took an exemplary step in this direction. From 15 November 2024 to 10 March 2025, it held an exhibition on the four Prakhon Chai bronzes it will return entitled “Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities.” The display recounted the history of looting of the sculptures, how the objects came to be in the museum’s collection, the local communities affected, and the sequence of events leading to the decision to repatriate. The exhibition invited visitors to provide their views on the future of collections on an in-gallery community response wall. This seems to be the kind of thoughtful and open approach to the various dimensions of museum purpose, authority, and ethics that are raised by restitution and that other museums must also consider if they are to begin to restore public trust.
