Thailand readies homecoming for stolen ancient statues located in US museum

Bangkok, Thailand – Local looters picked up the ruins of an ancient temple in northeast Thailand over the course of several years.

Possibly hundreds of centuries-old statues that were long buried beneath the soft, verdant grounds around the temple were stolen.

The Prakhon Chai hoard, which is collectively known as the Prakhon Chai hoard, is housed in museums and collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia, and is still in existence.

In a matter of weeks, though, the first of those statues will begin their journey home to Thailand.

The Asian Art Museum’s acquisitions committee recommended that four bronze statues from the hoard, which had been in the museum’s collection since the late 1960s, be released last year.

San Francisco city’s Asian Art Commission, which manages the museum, then approved the proposal on April 22, officially setting the pieces free.

They are scheduled to return to Thailand in about a month or two after being suspected of spiriting the statues out of the country six decades later by the late British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford.

“We are the righteous owners”, Disapong Netlomwong, senior curator for the Office of National Museums at Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, told Al Jazeera.

Disapong, who also serves on Thailand’s Committee for the Repatriation of Stolen Artefacts, said, “It is something our ancestors… have made, and it should be displayed here to show the civilisation and the beliefs of the people.”

The imminent return of the statues is the latest victory in Thailand’s quest to reclaim its pilfered heritage.

Their return exemplifies the efforts of nations all over the world to retrieve items from their own stolen histories that are still in the exhibit cases and the vaults of some of the best museums in the West.

From Thai temples to Athens’ Acropolis

Latchford, a high-profile Asian art dealer who came to settle in Bangkok and lived there until his death in 2020 at 88 years of age, is believed to have earned a fortune from auction houses, private collectors and museums around the world who acquired his smuggled ancient artefacts from Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia.

Nawapan Kriangsak, Latchford’s daughter, agreed in 2021 to give Cambodia access to her late father’s private collection, which included more than 100 artefacts, valued at more than $ 50 million.

Though never convicted during his lifetime, Latchford was charged with falsifying shipping records, wire fraud and a host of other crimes related to antiquities smuggling by a US federal grand jury in 2019.

Before the trial for the man’s death was possible, he passed away the following year.

In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return 16 pieces tied to Latchford’s smuggling network to Cambodia and Thailand.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has also previously returned pieces to Thailand – two intricately carved stone lintels taken from a pair of temples dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, in 2021.

Greece has had a good time with the British Museum in London, whereas Thailand and Cambodia have recently done fairly well in efforts to reclaim their looted heritage from US museum collections.

Perhaps no case of looted antiquities has grabbed more news headlines than that of the so-called “Elgin Marbles”.

The 2, 500-year-old friezes, also known as the Parthenon Marbles, were stolen from Athens’ famous Acropolis in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin’s agents, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time ruled Greece.

Elgin claimed he took the marbles with the permission of the Ottomans and then sold them in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they remain.

The non-governmental Hellenic Institute of Cultural Diplomacy claims that Greece has requested the return of the items since 1832 when it first declared its independence and that it first submitted an official request to the museum in 1983.

“Despite all these efforts, the British government has not deviated from its positions over the years, legally considering the Parthenon marbles to belong to Britain. According to the institute, they have even passed laws to stop the return of cultural objects.

Colonialism is still pervasive and pervasive.

Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit campaigning against the illicit trade of ancient art and artefacts, said that “colonialism is still alive and well in parts of the art world”.

Some institutions make the mistaken assumption that they are better carers, owners, and custodians of these cultural objects, Davis said.

But Davis, who has worked on Cambodia’s repatriation claims with US museums, says the “custodians” defence has long been debunked.

Before there was a market demand for these antiquities, leading to their looting and trafficking, “these were cared for by [their] communities for centuries, in some cases for millennia,” she said. “We still see resistance today.

Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government in its ongoing repatriation of stolen artefacts, has heard museums make all sorts of claims to defend retaining pieces that should be returned to their rightful homelands.

Some museums make excuses, including claims that they are unsure where the pieces came from, that disputed items were bought before domestic laws forbid their repatriation, or that the pieces’ ancestors deserve a wider audience than they would in their home country.

Still, none of those arguments should keep a stolen piece from coming home, Gordon said.

The artefact should be returned, he said, “if we believe the object is stolen and the country of origin wishes for it to come home.”

Old attitudes have started breaking down though, and more looted artefacts are starting to find their way back to their origins.

“I hope more museums follow the example of the Asian Art Museum, and there is definitely a growing trend toward doing the right thing in this area.” We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go”, Davis said.

Much of the progress, Davis believes, is down to growing media coverage of stolen antiquities and public awareness of the problem in the West, which has placed mounting pressure on museums to do the right thing.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a well-known US comedy show, gave the subject its own episode in 2022. As Oliver said, if you go to Greece and visit the Acropolis you might notice “some odd details”, such as sections missing from sculptures – which are now in Britain.

“Frankly out of ten, it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver quips. “Officially, if you’re ever looking for a missing artefact, it’s in there.”

Gordon also believes a generational shift in thinking is at play among those who once trafficked in the cultural heritage of other countries.

When their parents return the artefacts, he said, “for example, the children of many collectors do this once they are aware of the facts about how they were taken from the country of origin.”

Proof of the past

The San Francisco Museum’s four bronze statues date from the 7th and 9th centuries and are scheduled to arrive in Thailand soon.

Thai archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong said that period places them squarely in the Dvaravati civilisation, which dominated northeast Thailand, before the height of the Khmer empire that would build the towering spires of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia and come to conquer much of the surrounding region centuries later.

Bodhisattva, one of the slender, mottled Buddhas who follow Buddhists on the path to nirvana, are depicted in three of the slim, mottled figures, one of whom is nearly a metre tall (3. 2 feet). The other is the Buddha himself, who is draped in a wide, flowing robe.

Tanongsak, who brought the four pieces in the San Francisco collection to the attention of Thailand’s stolen artefacts repatriation committee in 2017, said they and the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard are priceless proof of Thailand’s Buddhist roots at a time when much of the region was still Hindu.

It means we don’t have any evidence of the Buddhist history of that time at all, he said, which is strange because there are no Prakhon Chai bronzes on display anywhere in Thailand, in the national museum, or any local museums, either.

The Fine Arts Department first inquired about the statues’ illegal provenance in a letter to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 2019, but it only became clear that it would get them returned once the US Department of Homeland Security intervened on behalf of Thailand.

Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator, said staff could find no evidence that the statues had been trafficked in their own records.

Once Homeland Security provided proof, with the assistance of Thai researchers, they were persuaded that they had been looted and smuggled out of Thailand and of Latchford’s involvement.

“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand”, Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.

“Clear the curtain,” you say?

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.

Additionally, it placed a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the specific queries raised by the incident regarding the theft of antiquities.

The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.

According to Mintz, “one of our goals was to try to show the museum’s visitors how significant it is to examine where works of art have been historically,”

“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice”, he said.

According to Mintz, Homeland Security has requested that the Asian Art Museum investigate the likely origin of at least another ten pieces from Thailand.

Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.

Disapong and Tanongsak claim that the Asian Art Museum’s recognition of Thailand’s legitimate claim to the statues could also aid in the return of the remaining Prakhon Chai hoard, which includes 14 more well-known pieces from other US museums and at least a dozen scattered throughout Europe and Australia.

“It is indeed a good example, because once we can show the world that the Prakhon Chai bronzes were all exported from Thailand illegally, then probably, hopefully some other museums will see that all the Prakhon Chai bronzes they have must be returned to Thailand as well”, Tanongsak said.

Thailand is looking to repatriate a number of other artifacts from international collections besides the Prakhon Chai hoard, he said.

Davis said the repatriation of stolen antiquities is still being treated by too many with collections as an obstacle when it should be seen, as the Asian Art Museum has, as an opportunity.

Davis remarked, “It’s a chance to educate the public.”

Source: Aljazeera