Thailand’s National Museum hosted a welcome-home ceremony on Tuesday for two ancient statues illegally trafficked from Thailand by a British antiquities collector and returned from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met).
The 129-centimeter statue called the “Golden Boy” was long thought to be a Hindu statue of Shiva. However, archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong claims:
The Golden Boy is more similar in style to the carvings found at the Phimai stone castle. This suggests that the artifact is a sculpture of King Jayavarman VI (1080 to 1107 AD) of the Mahidharapura Dynasty, who built the Phimai stone castle as the administrative center of the ancient Khmer Empire.
A second 43-centimeter bronze sculpture, the “Kneeling Female,” depicts a kneeling female figure with her hands above her head in a Thai greeting posture. Both statues are thought to be around 1,000 years old and were smuggled out of Thailand in 1975. The statues, displayed in the Met from 1988 to 2023, were discovered during an archaeological dig at Prasat Ban Yang ruins near the Cambodian border. They spent over three decades at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before being welcomed back to Thailand.
The US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, has led an ongoing investigation into the looting of antiquities, specifically the link of former acclaimed collector Douglas Latchford to the trafficking of Kmer relics. Latchford was indicted in 2019, right before he passed away at age 88. As reported by Thaiger News, the findings were based on accounts of the trafficking by a reformed looter, Toek Tik.
The repatriation reflects a growing awareness among museums about the need to address objects looted during colonial times or periods of civil war, such as, in this case, at the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Thai Culture Minister Sudawan Wangsuphakijkosol expressed gratitude for the return of these national assets. The director-general of Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, Phnombootra Chandrachoti, added, “We are honored to get these artifacts back; they shall be located in their motherland permanently. However, the effort of returning looted objects doesn’t end here. We aim to get them all back.”
Max Hollein, the Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been actively involved in the repatriation efforts related to stolen sculptures. The Met states that its collecting practices are guided by research, transparency, and collaboration. Hollein writes, “Douglas Latchford has rightly been the focus of much scrutiny by the media and experts in the field, including at The Met. Here, we have been working diligently for years to resolve questions surrounding a group of Khmer works associated with him in the collection.”
