Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the Magazine Antiques. I'm Ben Miller. When you visit an art museum, it's easy to get lost in those quiet, climate-controlled galleries.
Speaker: You stand in front a majestic centuries-old sculpture and maybe you glance down at that little white card on the wall and it lists the location, the date,
Speaker: And then there's that small print that most people skip over, provenance. That's usually just a polite, unassuming list of previous owners. But behind some of those sterile museum labels lies a dark and chaotic underbelly of international intrigue. Because for some pieces that provenance was a carefully manufactured lot designed to launder billions of dollars worth of sacred antiquities stolen right out from under the shadow of civil war.
Speaker: My guest today has spent years peeling back those polite labels to reveal a breathtaking global heist. Matthew Campbell is an investigative journalist and the author of an exciting new book, The Man Who Stole the Gods, a true story of war, obsession, and a global art conspiracy. The book is suspenseful, yet deeply researched dive into the life of Douglas Latchford, a British agent who managed to position himself as the gatekeeper to Cambodian antiquities, orchestrating ah a decades-long smuggling network, while for the most part, the world looked the other way.
Speaker: Matthew, i am delighted to have you on the show. Welcome to Curious Objects. Thank you so much. Now, our curious object today is a visceral piece of this puzzle. It's an ancient Khmer deity, a masterwork smuggled across borders in the back of an ox cart. But before we get to all that, Matthew, I have some rapid fire questions for you. Are you ready?
Speaker: Let's go. What was the first ancient object or or artwork that captivated you? I don't remember the specific piece, but I think it was, in general, the collections at the museum of moreos in the neighborhood where I grew up in Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, which is a wonderful institution with amazing collections of indigenous art from North America, of ancient works from China, Korea, Japan, things from Europe and the Mediterranean world, just an incredible place. And as a kid, it was something that really blew my mind. And is that is that still your favorite museum to visit? Or is there another one?
Speaker: I have a lot of favorite museums. The one that leaps immediately to mind, which it may be a little bit surprising given some of we're about to talk about, is the Met.
Speaker: The Met is just an incredible experience. You can lose yourself in there for hours and hours. The last time I was in there was with my kids and my four-year-old niece, however, which but did not really allow me to lose myself for hours and hours.
Speaker: But the Met, nonetheless, is is just amazing. I find with kids, it's always fun to have a little game. Like, you know, can you find all the rabbits and in the Renaissance paintings or that sort of thing? Oh, yeah. They'd find a lot of rabbits, for sure. That's a good one. I'll try that next time. the Yeah, we got to the armor. ah The armor was a hit. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: All the nightly stuff. um And then I'll plug one in my my hometown of the last 10 years, Singapore. The Asian Civilizations Museum here is fantastic.
Speaker: What's the best movie about art theft? I think it's hard to compete for durable drama and cultural resonance with Indiana Jones. That's going to be with us for a long time. The original ones or the new ones too? Of course. Yes. No, no, no. Yeah. The new ones. It's like the, the the new ones are like the Star Wars prequels. They don't exist. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. um what's What's the most unusual or or unexpected source that you've ever turned to for a story?
Speaker: That is an easy question to answer because it was a source I turned to in the recording of this book, ThaiBody.com, which is a comprehensive chronicle of everything going on in the world of Thai bodybuilding. and for several months i had a premium subscription to thebody dot com and it was actually quite useful for reasons we will get into. Yes, I imagine listeners are very curious what you found there, and we'll get to that. Yeah, muscles I didn't know existed. What's one major misconception that people have about international shipping?
Speaker: A major misconception about international shipping, and this gets into the subject matter of my last book, Dead the Water, is that it's safe. Even today, even with satellite navigation, with all of the technology that gets stuffed into modern vessels, ships run into trouble and collide or sink all the time.
Speaker: And sometimes this happens because their owners want them to collide or sink. And that is something that I explored in a lot of depth in Dead & Noir.
Speaker: If you could snap your fingers and instantly know the full true provenance of any single artifact, what would it be? I think it's less single artifacts for me, but it's the Greco-Roman works that have ended up in places like the British Museum, where you have to wonder, where was this stuff? you know How did it get through the Dark Ages? and the middle ages and the renaissance and then eventually find its way to london who had it who was buying and selling it how was it kept safe a lot of it was lost of course
Speaker: One of the really interesting things about looking at objects is the history of objects is in many ways the history of the societies that the objects existed in and you can learn a lot from understanding how an object was bought and sold, who had it, why why they got rid of it, who then acquired it. Yeah, well, in your book, it's just a a real masterclass in that kind of investigation. So we'll get to that in a second. But for now, you have a tough choice to make because there's an asteroid heading for Earth, and you have naturally been selected to be placed on the escape pod.
Speaker: And you've been given the choice of one object to bring with you, anything in the world. What is it going to be? I think I would have to grab, after a quick trip to Madrid, Guernica, Picasso's great painting, which I think is one of the most important artworks of the 20th century, if not ever.
Speaker: But as we've learned from a controversy, because the authorities in the Basque country are trying to get it moved from madrid to i thinken us or Bilbao.
Speaker: Guernica is very delicate and apparently cannot be moved. So we would need the world's finest art movers to help get into the escape pod, a very large escape pod, hopefully. And then after having done so, I guess they would be incinerated with the meteor strike. So it's not a very happy ending for them. Yes, but at least they've preserved culture so that you can spend the rest of your life getting depressed as you look at that picture on the wall of year your escape pod.
Speaker: Yeah, because on the trip to Alpha Centauri, you'll have it to look at. um and Not quite off the Centauri, but what was your last international trip? The week before last, i was in Chengdu in Sichuan in China, which is a lovely city that more people should visit.
Speaker: What is one lost artifact that you would most like to rediscover? Well, we'll get into discussing the ancient Khmer and the
Speaker: and a very very sophisticated urban culture in the ninth tenth eleventh twelfth centuries but one thing that we do not have from the ancient Khmer is much writing.
Speaker: So there are inscriptions in temples which are in stone. Those have survived. But they also wrote these manuscripts on palm leaves, which recorded, well, we don't know what they recorded, presumably literature or records of some kind. But because palm leaves do not last very long in the Southeast Asian climate, none of these has ever been found. and probably none exist But if we could get some, that would tell us a great deal more about this grand and mysterious lost civilization.
Speaker: Last question. If you could interrogate any historical art dealer or looter or collector over dinner, who would it be? Or in a jail cell, if you prefer.
Speaker: Look, I think it would be very interesting to know more about the Nazi obsession with art. You Hermann Goering was the big one. this this voracious collector you know and obviously these are people evil to a degree that has rarely been seen before or since.
Speaker: But nonetheless, they were incredibly concerned with aesthetics, many had very bad taste. But nonetheless, this is something that even as they were engaged in what they thought would be the conquest of the world, they viewed as a priority. And I think learning more about that demented psychology would be fascinating.
Speaker: Well, we'll be right back with Matthew Campbell. As always, I want to take a minute just to thank you all for listening. And thanks for for getting in touch with me and sharing your thoughts. If you haven't subscribed to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast app, I highly recommend it.
Speaker: That way you won't miss future episodes as they come out. And thanks to all of you who have heard an episode and talked told someone about it because you think they might find it interesting. That word of mouth is really my favorite way for for curious objects to grow.
Speaker: ah we We don't advertise. We don't work with a major a podcast publisher. we We don't have a paywall for any of our episodes. So your help is really critical. um Another way you can help is by leaving a review in your podcast app.
Speaker: If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at my new updated handle at CuriousObjectsNYC.
Speaker: And now let's get to Khmer sculptures. So Matthew... The book you've written picks apart the history of artifact looting in Cambodia, especially over the last 75 years or so. And our curious object is a remarkable example of medieval Cambodian stone carving, a 10th century statue of the gods ah Shiva and Skanda. Can you share with listeners what this statue looks like?
Speaker: So this is a piece that two figures. One of whom is meant to be Shiva, the the great Hindu god, the destroyer, and the other Skanda, who's Shiva's son, who later becomes the god of war as an adult in Hindu mythology.
Speaker: And they're pictured as a father and child carved with just astounding detail. This piece dates to the 10th century. And so making it about a thousand years old, obviously, it is obviously a piece of religious art that would have been very legible and understandable to people in the culture that produced it But one of the things you see in Chimera sculpture that is really interesting and is absolutely going on here is everything had kind of a an eternal meaning and a temporal meaning.
Speaker: this is meant to be a religious object an object of devotion an homage to these deities But it's also meant, we think, and there's a lot of conjecture here for reasons I can get into, to bear a resemblance to the king who commissioned it and probably to his son.
Speaker: So the cosmology of the ancient Khmer was all about kind of god kings or or kings who had a privileged relationship with the divine.
Speaker: And one way you would emphasize that relationship is to say, look, know here is this devotional object of one of our gods. Oh, and doesn't it look a bit like the guy who rules from the palace over there? And similarly, doesn't Skanda look rather like the heir to the guy who rules from the palace over there? So it's sort of both a spiritual and a political. purpose and the artistry of it is pretty astounding. Right. And this is not a pocket sized sculpture either, right? No, it's big. This thing is, it's not life size. I mean, there there are a lot of chimera works where you have human figures who are, you know, five, five and half feet tall.
Speaker: This is more on the, I would struggle get you the exact dimensions off the top of my head, but it's, it's no, it is not this is not a miniature. It's more like probably a meter wide and nearly a meter tall.
Speaker: So huge artistry, huge skill in terms of stone carving to produce this. And there are a lot of mysteries about the Khmer. And one of the mysteries, something we know nothing about, is how these things were made.
Speaker: Now, this statue, like so many others, came through the hands of the central figure in your book. This is a a British pharmaceutical entrepreneur and, as you've hinted, a bodybuilding enthusiast turned art dealer named Douglas Latchford. How did you come to be interested in in Latchford in the first place?
Speaker: So I had no background in any of this. I do live in this part of the world, but I'd actually never even been to Angkor. And what I do in my day job at Bloomberg is I cover crime and corruption. I do stories on big transnational scandals, conspiracies, crimes.
Speaker: And i just happened to be reading the news. And in 2019, saw that a British art dealer had been indicted federally in New York. for fraud in the sale of Cambodian antiquities. And I thought, well, that's pretty interesting.
Speaker: So I started reading about that. And then I read a little bit more about Blatchford. And I read that he was, by all accounts, the main source of southeast asian antiquities for the entire planet he was the guy for certainly the big marquee seven figure out pieces, and a very eccentric character. You know, when I read, I think I was probably hooked when I read that he was the longtime president of the Thai Bodybuilding and Physique Sports Association. I thought, all right, that's a guy I have to know more about. Yeah, there's got to be a story there, right?
Speaker: and And there is. Yeah, and there was ah an amazing story. Yeah, and a story that, as I try to get into in the book, is also the story of Southeast Asia, Thailand, Cambodia in the 20th century, which is inextricable. from what Latchford was able to do.
Speaker: Now, this statue, this a curious object of ours, is featured on on the cover of Latchford's ah career defining book.
Speaker: So why why did he give this of all the many, many pieces that he handled, Pride of Place? This is totally unique as Chimera artworks go. We just don't have other pieces like this.
Speaker: And there's one other, there's something called Scanda on a Peacock, which is actually now on display next to it in Phnom Penh in the National Museum, which is more or less a similar scale, seems to be taken from a similar aesthetic perspective. And one thing that some of the experts who look at this wonder is,
Speaker: could these two piecessis have been created by the same person or maybe in a in a workshop overseen by the same person because there are these stylistic similarities. But Shiva and Skanda and Skanda on a Peacock are really unusual as Khmer sculpture goes in the fact that there are two figures in the detailing, in the size.
Speaker: And in fact, they're so unusual that when Lashford first published them, a lot of people thought they were fake. And there was a kind of a movement among the academics who study this topic to say, oh, that's not real. you know Stay away from that. Don't cite that in your paper because we can't really know that that's legit.
Speaker: But in fact, they weren't fake. The reason they were so unfamiliar when they were first published and that was in the early 2000s was they had just polluted. Yeah, and as we'll get into, I mean, when the proof of their authenticity ah lies in nefarious activity, that makes it a little difficult to defend.
Speaker: But for Latchford, you know, obviously this was a piece close to his heart. And although in the book, it's not identified where this piece is, As it turns out, he had actually kept it for himself. We'll we'll talk about that, but the the story behind this piece is is really violent. And you know that starts even you know just from its physical state, its condition and damage that it suffered. What does the physical state of that piece suggest to us about its history?
Speaker: Shiva Ascanda is in reasonable shape compared to a lot of Khmer works. There were bits of it missing, small extremities, an ear and a part of an arm and we don't know when those were knocked off, but with a lot of Khmer statuary damage, is because of the means by which it was ripped from its original sites.
Speaker: So these are stone pieces that were built into the walls or the floors of temples all over Cambodia. All the ancient sites in Cambodia are religious, which is something we can get into.
Speaker: And during the 70s and 80s, and especially the 90s, there was industrial scale looting going on all over the country. And a lot of works were damaged with simple tools, picks, chisels, shovels, but then it goes up the scale to jackhammers and other power tools and even things like backhoes and in some cases dynamite because explosives were used to dislodge statues from wherever they happened to be.
Speaker: So you do see a lot of damage on these objects when they come through. which actually makes the really good condition of Shiva and Skandal more remarkable considering how it was removed.
Speaker: Then wasn't it fragmented for for ease of transport? This one, I don't think so. With other big ones, so with the Duryodhana, which was a big statue that ended up at Sotheby's before the federal government got involved and and ultimately got it sent back to Cambodia, that one, the head had been taken off the body. And that's something that happened very frequently with these larger Khmer pieces, is heads are taken off from the torso so they can be transported more easily, or actually, and this is what happened with the Duryodhana, the head goes frown.
Speaker: and then the looting crew would go back for the body and then they get reattached overseas right it's maybe not quite as brazen as the you know old dealers in renaissance sculpture who might intentionally lop the head off to make the statue more attractive uh there might have been some of that it's entirely possible So tell, talk to me about the the origins of this statue and and pieces like it. you know, who was actually responsible for for making these? Who was commissioning these pieces in 10th century or or more broadly, sort of medieval Cambodia?
Speaker: So starting in 802 so beginning of the 9th century, you have the beginnings of what we understand now to be Khmer Empire, the civilization that produced onor watt and lots of other amazing sites that that many people listening will have visited or have seen pictures of and it was at the time one of the most sophisticated if not the most sophisticated urban civilization anywhere in the world uh encore at its height was a city of something like 750 000 people this was in a period when
Speaker: london would have been thirty or forty thousand at the absolute most this was a very very successful political economy They had a big surplus of food, which allowed them to do all kinds of things because they could raise armies and buy off rival rulers.
Speaker: And of course, they could build. And they were builders par excellence. I mean, they just built and built and built. And Encore, which is not just one site. unkorre wad is actually a single structure but there are hundreds of sites within encore that was kind of the mother ship but there are these other sites all over cambodia one of which is a place called we spell Kho Kher.
Speaker: ah Cambodians would pronounce it Gok And it was the capital for a short period, just a few decades in the 10th century.
Speaker: And we don't really know why the capital moved from Angkor to Kher. We don't know why it moved back. But what we do know is that in this brief period,
Speaker: it had a very unique artistic style There were pieces that were much more expressive, much more dynamic than a lot of what you see in Khmer art, often depicted in motion or as sort of vignettes of some kind of scene going on. And that is why, to a lot of people who study Khmer art and, by the way, Douglas Ashford, Cookhair was so fascinating because it was so different.
Speaker: So ah we're going to fast forward a bit um because there's there's about 1,000 years of history that um we don't necessarily have time to get into in detail right now. But um yeah in a nutshell, how did sites like the ones you've described and how did artifacts like this statue we're talking about manage to to survive until the 20th century?
Speaker: So Cambodia, had a very strange thing happen sometime around the 1500s, which is this enormous, sophisticated urban civilization didn't disappear. That's an oversimplification.
Speaker: But the center of gravity just moved. Encore was not a place that was a center of political power anymore. the capital shifted to pom pen where it remains today the orientation became more towards the lower becong and trade with the outside world.
Speaker: And these sites were never forgotten exactly. i mean, there is a there are these European accounts from the 19th century that are very Indiana Jonesy, you know, coming upon this lost temple that had been swallowed by the jungle, which is not actually what happened. Like like these were sites that were inhabited to some degree all the way along.
Speaker: But they weren't really that central to what was going on in Cambodia. They were sort of peripheral. And as a result, a huge amount of what was in them did survive. And either it survived in situ in buildings you could still walk into, or it survived buried under some amount of sediment.
Speaker: So by the time we get to the 20th century, when people have the ability and the incentive to go back into them, there was a hell of a lot to steal. Yeah, I mean, it sounds interesting. It's sort of like what they say in in tech, you know so security through obscurity.
Speaker: If nobody is paying attention, then it you it can actually be pretty safe for a while. Well, and also, you know the other thing, and this is critical in any with any illicit good, is there has to be market.
Speaker: And you know there was no one willing to pay top dollar for market. the products of this civilization until we get into the 20th century.
Speaker: Yeah, and so your story really picks up around the 1970s. And this is a time of of tremendous instability across Southeast Asia oh for for obvious reasons.
Speaker: And you know instability and and looting are often hand in hand. So talk to me about the circumstances that made Cambodia especially susceptible to this kind of looting.
Speaker: So Cambodia, as you'll see if you look at a map, is next to Vietnam. And Vietnam, of course, was central feeder of the Cold War in Asia for a good 25 years, from the French conflict with the Viet Minh all the way up to what we call the Vietnam War, or what the Vietnamese call the American War.
Speaker: And you know the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were being supplied by ohuman trail something a lot of readers will be familiar with which was this chain of overland routes going down from China into Vietnam, except a lot of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was actually in Cambodia. And so the country was inextricably mixed up in the Vietnam War, whether it wanted to be or not, basically.
Speaker: And at the same time, there was a indigenous communist insurgency known, of course, as the Khmer Rouge, who were fighting the then ruler of cambodia in the late sixty s princeanou um in very much the same fashion as communist insurgents elsewhere in Asia were doing.
Speaker: Then you have, there's a lot of history, a great deal happened. You had an American backed coup 1970, which results in cduke actually joining forces with the khmer rouge And then for the next five years, 1970 to 1975, you have a brutal civil war between what was called the United Front, but basically the Khmer Rouge, and this American-backed military dictatorship in Phnom Penh.
Speaker: And there was five very, very violent circumstances all over the country. The front line, as early as 1970, ran right through where Encore is.
Speaker: And by 74, 75, Phnom Penh was basically cut off from the rest of the country. It was just an island that had to be supplied by air. And in this time, not after the commaritors takeover, which is interesting, and we'll get to that, but in this time when the fighting was at its most intense, there was a huge amount of looting going on, both opportunistically just people who realized they could get into the temples and take something and and get it on the road and also in a more organized fashion by different armed groups who needed to find themselves.
Speaker: Yeah, and your book takes a very close look, in particular, at one especially efficient operation, which was run by a actually Khmer Rouge child soldier who escaped the regime, but then went on to become one of the most prolific temple looters.
Speaker: So who was this person, and and how did he operate? A lot of the book tells the story of a man named Tartik, who had an experience that was, as shocking as it is, kind of typical of people of his generation in Cambodia. He grew up in a small village.
Speaker: The Khmer Rouge arrived in his village when he was 11. And the deal basically was, you do what they tell you. And if you don't, things are not going to end well for you.
Speaker: So he did do as he was told and eventually became a soldier. And his job as a soldier, though, was not to fight battles. It was to exterminate internal enemies, the enemies of the revolution.
Speaker: And if you've seen the film The Killing Fields, which is actually a very accurate retelling of what Life Under the Khmer Rouge was like, you you have an idea of what I mean.
Speaker: ah Basically, you can beat all for almost anything in a khmer roe commune for questioning an order, for not working hard enough, for foraging for food, which betrayed a lack of faith in the ability of the government to provide to arcctick eventually decided that this is not something he could keep doing and he took huge risk he went on the run and he escaped and he hit for a period of about a year and when he came out of hiding the regime was collapsing
Speaker: And the Khmer Rouge were chased out by the Vietnamese army in 1979, leaving behind a country shattered to a degree that is honestly hard to describe i mean there there are stories of some of the first outsiders who came in in seventy nine every everyone wanted of their pencils and paper because country had been so hollowed out there wasn't even that their interpreters would faint from malnutrition that's the situation theyve found
Speaker: And in this shattered society, people had to find a way to survive. And Tartik figured out that one way to survive and later, in fact, to thrive was by looting this historical endowment that his country still had.
Speaker: Now, he, of course, needed a link to the outside world. And as your book explores, that that link took the form of this curious fellow, ah Douglas Latchford. And this is a fellow who I think to many of his contemporaries, in these early years at least, was was really known as a kind of a smooth operator, a suave connoisseur, but eventually would also take on the nickname Dynamite Doug.
Speaker: So tell me about how this British expat from colonial India managed to position himself as this gatekeeper to the material history of of Cambodia.
Speaker: Douglas Latchford was... british and he'd grown up in india and what was that in bombay And he came to Southeast Asia right out of high school.
Speaker: First in Singapore, then he ended up in Bangkok. in He arrived in Bangkok in, I believe, 1956.
Speaker: and was quite successful. It was and for expats of a certain kind. It was kind of an easy place to get ahead. you know The joke, what they said in Bangkok then, and actually they still say it now is you it's a first class it's a first class place for second class people. And he yeah he did well, he made a lot of money, but he was obsessed, became obsessed with these statutes which you could get kind of glimpses of In the 50s and 60s, one person who he befriended and became reasonably close to was someone who many listeners will have heard of, Jim Thompson, who was this American spy who was also a major art collector and silk entrepreneur, who was kind of Lashford's role model in some ways. But Lashford was not content to just
Speaker: sit in bangkok and you know see what some gallery might get in He wanted to go to the source. So he traveled extensively to Cambodia. He had a network there. And over time, by the 70s and certainly by the 80s, he had a network that crossed the border, basically. And there was a very efficient and very effective supply chain that began with people like Tok Tik in the temples
Speaker: went through a chain of brokers and couriers and ended up ultimately with Latchford Bangkok. And he was then the interface to the international market and particularly to the U.S. Now, this is a period when it's it's no longer quite the Wild West of ah looting and antiquities trafficking that that you might think of from the 18th or 19th centuries. there There are efforts, international efforts, to try to stem the tide.
Speaker: But those efforts are largely toothless. you know In 1970, we have the UNESCO Convention, which establishes protections and, in theory, some kind of enforcement mechanism to prevent looting.
Speaker: But this is a fairly impotent effort to to try to protect cultural heritage. So Latchford is able to take advantage of this real lack of of international enforcement.
Speaker: But more than just a lack of enforcement, I think there was a lack of interest or of um consensus around the ethics and legality of transporting artifacts like this across borders.
Speaker: So, I mean, to take one of the really classic repatriation debates, if you think about the Elgin marbles, You know that debate hinges in part on the how you evaluate the legitimacy of a controversial government.
Speaker: In this case, it's the Ottoman Empire controlling Athens. i You know, they sold the marbles. The Greeks later contested that that wasn't a legal sale because the Ottomans weren't too a legitimate government. Anyway, without getting too deep into those weeds,
Speaker: the political circumstances around these exportations can lead to some real ambiguities. And in wartime Cambodia, the political situation was vastly complex, as the the brutality that you've described would indicate. So where where does legal acquisition and outright looting begin in that kind of a you know civil war context?
Speaker: Well, you mentioned the UNESCO Treaty, and the basic idea of the UNESCO Treaty on Cultural Heritage as it has been interpreted is that 1970 is a critical year.
Speaker: So there are all kinds of national laws and all kinds of different ways to look at this, but the basic vibe these days, I'm before 1970, you're more or less okay. In Cambodia, we are talking about events that were post 1970. There was very little looting before 70, certainly some, but the the big market demand was all later. And crucially, a lot of these sites didn't really have roads running to them until the late 60s. 1970, quite neatly for our story here, is also when the most intense phase in the civil war starts so that's an important year to keep in mind
Speaker: um And then, you know as we take the story forward, the really industrial scale looting in Cambodia was in two ways. One was 70 to 75 during the Civil War.
Speaker: There's then a remarkable hiatus, actually, during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule for two reasons. One is the country's borders were sealed. There was no trade.
Speaker: So you can't really get things out. And the other reason which does make a lot of logical sense is the Khmer Rouge abolished money.
Speaker: There were no markets. So, you know, you could get fistfuls of baht or US dollars, but they couldn't buy you anything in Cambodia. It was a barter economy. So the looting basically shut down for a period of about four years. And then it roars back in the 80s, late 90s. And the peak, as far as we can tell, is actually around 96, 97, which is the long asster everyone understood this is not something you should be doing in the US and other Western countries, and also crucially, know long after the passage of various relevant US laws that did make this trade illegal.
Speaker: So that's the legal framework. you know The other thing is, I think there's an ethical framework and a degree of just sheer incuriosity or ignorance that I find very striking.
Speaker: You know, events in Cambodia in the 1980s were literally front page news as they were in the 70s. The Killing Fields, which i will plug again, it's a fantastic film, came out in 1983 and won, i think, either three or four Academy Awards.
Speaker: So the the general circumstances of what was happening in that country would have been very familiar to anyone educated in New York or LA or London. But you can find you know literal times when the front page of the newspaper would be covering the latest developments in the Cambodian Civil War in the early eighty s And the front page of the art section talks about all the wonderful new Cambodian sculptures that have come into the Met or whatever your local museum is.
Speaker: And I think it would have taken a great deal of effort not to see the connection between those two things if you bothered to look into it. Yeah, that word you use in curiosity ah really hits the nail on the head, I think. I mean, when you think about the the auction houses, the dealers, the collectors, the museums, and the journalists who were all involved in in this field at the time,
Speaker: um It's an incredible thing to be able to overlook that coincidence. And um I have to wonder, you you cite in the book a few instances where a journalist or an art critic might tip their hat in the direction of some kind of understanding of the connection between the civil strife in Cambodia and the brand new availability of all of these artifacts. But There doesn't seem to have been any real effort to pay attention to that. How is that possible? It makes no sense and in a contemporary context.
Speaker: Well, it's cliche to say so, but it was a different time. These issues were less front of mind. And to the extent they were front of mind, it was to do with...
Speaker: big countries from the Mediterranean basin, basically Italy, Greece, and Turkey, that had a lot more ability than Cambodia did to make a fuss in the US. So there's a case that in the annals of debates over looting and repatriation is pretty famous, which is the Euphronios crater, which was this this cup that the Met bought in 1972.
Speaker: There was a Curious Objects podcast about the Euphronius crater. So if anyone wants to do a deep dive, you can find that in the archives. Oh, great, fantastic, yeah. So you can walk us through for for those who haven't haven't heard. Basically, the Met bought it in 1972. They paid a million dollars, which 1972 was quite a lot of money. for this black and gold cup as a scene from the Iliad on it. It's really something. And Thomas Hovind, the then director of the Met, made a huge splash with this. He was very, very into publicity, and this was meant to be real
Speaker: for his Museum. And basically people started asking questions about where the hell this thing came from within about a day of it being unveiled. And Hoving den denied everything he said in a very memorable quote he'd been assured it was not a quote, hot pot. um And basically, in the New York Times dug into this. They put a reporter on the story whose previous job had been covering the mafia, which turned out to be the right kind of experience. And he basically figured it out, which is that it had been stolen by Tomb Raiders somewhere near Rome within a few years of it being purchased by the Met.
Speaker: But that was not given back until I think 2006, 2007. as they should have. Cambodia who was not in a position to do so.
Speaker: And so there just wasn't the same awareness. And you know you mentioned art critics and journalists. There's one quote that always sticks in my mind in a New York Times review of a show of Khmer Stashruri in the Met.
Speaker: the critic wrote after describing all these amazing pieces, something like, and here one is tempted to speculate on how objects from war-torn countries, you know, should happen to land in the lap of a rich museum.
Speaker: And then next paragraph doesn't return to it. It's like, well, yes, I think you should speculate a little bit about that. yes the the speculation is left as an exercise for the reader. yeah So, I mean, stepping a little bit outside of our story here to ah just a meta question, I mean, how do you think about the rights of governments to claim ownership of artifacts that predate their own existence? Yeah.
Speaker: So you know my my favorite example of this is Egypt, where the the modern Egyptian government has claimed legal rights to ownership of every ancient Egyptian a object that was exported from the country.
Speaker: And yet this government is removed by wave after wave of brutal conquest from the ancient Egyptian people who originally made those artifacts. So The fact that the modern government owns the land where these artifacts were made, is that enough to give, forget about legal, but but moral right to ownership of these objects?
Speaker: No, I don't think it is enough. And i think Egypt is an interesting case. There's an amazing book called The World Beneath the Sands, which is all about the early days of Egyptology, you know going back even before the Napoleonic expedition.
Speaker: And one of the striking things in there is for a good long while, the Egyptian government of the day of the 19th century was not interested in these in these objects. They were pre-Islamic.
Speaker: It was, as far as they were concerned, just a bunch of rocks. And if the British or French or German governments wanted to take those rocks and in exchange give them useful things like maxim guns and ammunition. yeah That was a trade the Egyptians were very happy to make.
Speaker: you know And then in the late 19th, early 20th century, as Egyptian nationalism gets going, the government becomes much more interested in that history. So no, I don't think just you know being the quote unquote successor state to some ancient empire is enough. um I'm much more interested in crime and crimes we understand it today So look, if something was taken in the 19th century or the 18th century, I think that's regrettable and there's a discussion to be had.
Speaker: But I think 20th or 21st century fast by people who understand this is not something you should do in contexts where there are laws, both in the source countries and the destination countries like the US that make this illegal, that for me is a is a very different category from you know the Louvre debating with Egypt,
Speaker: the propriety of its e egyptian collection that was taken by napoleon So kind of coming back to your book, um the investigation that you did into Latchford and the circles around him, ah gosh, I mean, the sources that you quote in this book are really astonishing. i mean, internal records, communications that are, I would say, devastating.
Speaker: ah in terms of the light that they cast on the kinds of actions that um that people, not just Latchford, but that dealers and curators located in the West were were just routinely doing. So I'm curious how you got access to these really damning records. What what were the sources that you relied on to to try to piece this story together?
Speaker: Well, I benefited in the reporting of the book from the fact that Lashford and his network have been in and out of the US court system in various ways for quite a while.
Speaker: And US federal court cases particularly are just a gift from heaven as far as journalists are concerned, because they generate so much documentation, so much gets filed through emails, original documents, handwritten notes, whatever you name it.
Speaker: So a lot of it just came to me that way. There were other instances where people who'd been, who'd corresponded with him or had been part of Lashford's world in one way or another passed me documents.
Speaker: um And then there is another source, which is that when Lashford died and in 2020, quite a lot of his personal records were handed over to the Cambodian government.
Speaker: as' part of a deal with his daughter to essentially try and draw a line under her father's legacy and return what he had taken, or at least what he had taken it was still in his possession. So the Cambodians have a lot of this and a lot of material from his laptop, particularly. So for the more recent digital age correspondence, that's very helpful as well. So you know you when you get all this from different directions and you plot it out on a timeline, eventually you get a pretty good picture what was going on. Well, and speaking of pieces that were still in his collection, this statue of Shiva and Skanda, tell me about, so this is a piece that, you know, it was important enough for him to put on the cover of his book. It's presumably one of the most significant pieces that he ever handled. And yet he he didn't sell it.
Speaker: Presumably could have made a lot of money, but instead decided to sell to keep it. what Why do you think he kept it? and And how did that then ultimately make its way back to the Cambodian government?
Speaker: I think he loved it. And he wanted to keep it doesn't mean he wouldn't have sold it if someone had offered him a huge amount of money ah But the piece clearly was the pride of his collection. He he really loved it. and he really did love these objects i don't i think he was totally obsessed with them actually and i don't think there was anything transparent about that.
Speaker: The twin piece, Skandana Peacock, not a twin, but it's related, it found the same site at the same time, a very similar style. He did sell. He sold it for $1.5 million. dollars So that was the league these things were running in. Skandana Peacock was eventually recovered by the Department of Justice.
Speaker: Shiva and Skanda came back to Cambodia because look back up a bit so unlessford moved to bangkok in the fifty s he was briefly married to a Thai woman, but was gay. And that became very apparent to the Thai woman to whom he was married and they split up. But there was a daughter who Lashford sort of reconnected with in adulthood.
Speaker: And she was his primary heir and was advised and I think figured out that she had to do something dramatic, make some grand gesture, or this was going haunt her forever.
Speaker: and what she decided to do was to hand back her father's entire collection to the government of cambodia of which shiva scanda was a very important piece sow it and lots of other amazing works repatriated by Julia are now in the National Museum in Phnom Penh where you can go see them and they're truly special.
Speaker: And you have seen them there, right? Yes, many times. it's a The National Museum itself is has kind of an amazing story. Like everything else in Cambodia, it's progressed
Speaker: It was built by the French, then became the the main museum of independent Cambodia, and then under the Khmer Rouge was just shut down. And the fear was that everything in it had been destroyed. actually wasn't.
Speaker: There was this theory of the Khmer Rouge, and this is something Lashford was happy to encourage, that they were like the Taliban with ah the Bamiyan Buddhas, that they were iconoclasts and they wanted to actually destroy our works. They actually didn't. They were much more interested in destroying people so the pieces in places like the national museum did survive just totally neglected and then starting in the eighty s these heroic curators reopened the place and and kept it running until Cambodia stabilized in the late 90s, early 2000s. So you can go now. It is full of repatriated works that have come from all over the world, you know many of them with the assistance of US law enforcement.
Speaker: It is definitely overstuffed. And something the Cambodians are going to have to figure out and they are trying to figure out is how to have an expansion
Speaker: And so hopefully that is eventually resolved. Is there any thought to trying to replace some of these artifacts in their original context? Is that even between all of the recovered notes? Is is there any conceivable possibility of that?
Speaker: I think that would be amazing to actually bring them back to the temples where they're from. There are a lot of questions about how you would do that. Also questions about how you would secure them because there is still a market and things could be looted if they're just in the jungle. A lot of the temple sites where they're from are quite remote.
Speaker: So there's also an accessibility consideration, like how many people would really see them. But I think it would be really amazing to bring back at least some of them to the angorre complex which does get many many visitors of courses and to put them back in situ, as it were.
Speaker: But I think right now the focus for the Cambodians is on the museum. So having researched this whole story and dwelled in that for so long, how does it feel for you to stand in front of this Shiva and Skanda or other statues that have been returned to the National Museum?
Speaker: Well, this is an interesting thing to admit on you know podcast about objects, but I never got into this because of the objects. I was i think the objects are very cool and I'm fascinated by the history behind them, but I've always been much more motivated by what the objects made people do.
Speaker: And you know in the case of Latchford, in the case of the people who investigated him and case of talktick the luar the pursuit of these objects transformed their lives and made them do things that know they never thought they could do or shouldn't have done.
Speaker: So that's where I came at this originally. And i suppose in some alternate universe, I could have written a book about diamonds or Renaissance paintings or whatever it is, you know, the ah the underlying object doesn't matter. But actually, as I have spent time on this topic and spent a lot of time in Cambodia and met a lot of experts, I've come to really appreciate the objects.
Speaker: They contain within them so much historical information, so much spiritual power, even though it's from a spiritual tradition that is not my own.
Speaker: And you can just appreciate that these were created as part of a living religious and political culture that would have meant an enormous amount to the people who grew up in that culture and and this is really remarkable when you see it in action they mean a lot to cambodians today so this is something that uh i didn't expect i think a lot of people perhaps didn't expect it cambodia now is a buddhist country uh it's been buddhist for six or seven hundred years these objects are largely hindu there is nonetheless a kind of syncretic tradition that has been passed on
Speaker: through families and through folklore and through general cultural memory where people revere them as divine. And so you see people bow to them.
Speaker: People come to pray to these pieces when they're sick or or if someone is they're having a baby or has some big life event. Cambodians leave offerings or they light incense.
Speaker: So the contrast between these works, you sitting in the living room of some billionaire on the Upper East Side versus being part of this environment where they are a living part of people's viewa the world It's pretty amazing.
Speaker: Well, I think that's a great note to to end on Matthew. Thank you so much. Really appreciated this conversation. Again, the the book is The Man Who Stole the Gods. It's a page turner, I have to say. it's It's a very engaging read. And there's so much more I wish that we could have gotten to. But listeners will just have to pick up a copy.
Speaker: and thanks Thanks for being here with me. my pleasure thanks so much ben
Speaker: Curious Objects is produced by Urvashi Lele. Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva. Support from Magazine Antiques editorial team includes senior editor Sarah Stafford-Turner and managing editor Christine Heldbrand.
