Douglas Latchford
Respected ‘adventurer scholar’ who was indicted for trafficking in stolen and looted Khmer antiquities
DOUGLAS LATCHFORD, who has died aged 89, was a self-described “adventurer scholar” who became a respected expert and dealer in Khmer (Cambodian) and Indian antiquities.
But in November last year a New York district attorney announced his indictment on charges of smuggling and trafficking in stolen and looted Cambodian antiquities and outlined allegations that for several decades he had created “false provenances” and “falsified invoices and shipping documents” to smuggle looted artefacts out of the country and sell them to museums and collectors in the West.
“Frequently, Mr Latchford listed the ‘country of origin’ as ‘Great Britain’ or ‘Laos’, rather than Cambodia,’’ read an accompanying press release, “and often described the objects as ‘figures’ from the 17th or 18th century’’ rather than dating to the Khmer Empire, which ended in the 15th century.
Douglas Latchford was born to British parents in Bombay on October 15 1931 and lived in India until the age of 12, when he was sent to Brighton College. He claimed that there, while reading works such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, he became fascinated by illustrations of deserted temples in jungles.
He left school at 16 and returned to live in India, where he worked for a trading company and became interested in Indian bronzes, particularly those from the Chola period (ninth to 13th century).
In the early 1950s he moved, via Singapore, to Bangkok as an assistant branch manager for the British pharmaceutical company Smith and Nephew: “We sold pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, chemicals, a bit of everything … We were one of the first big foreign firms importing goods into this part of the world.”
He also dabbled in property in Bangkok and Pattaya, the coastal resort which grew exponentially in the 1970s with the arrival of American troops on R & R from Vietnam. He continued to own a large luxury block of flats in Bangkok, where he lived in a penthouse.
He also founded an organisation running Thai and Cambodian bodybuilding competitions and later served as president of the South East Asian Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation and of the Thai Body Building and Physique Sports Association.
According to Latchford, his interest in Khmer art was sparked at a dinner party in Bangkok in 1955, when he was shown a 24-inch high stone female torso. Immediately “smitten”, he began collecting Khmer antiquities.
“I went to Cambodia the first time in about 1961, to Phnom Penh and
Siem Reap,” he recalled, “and it was wonderful then. The Angkor [Angkor Wat] complex then was completely devoid of tourists.”
He enjoyed telling journalists how his interest grew as he travelled the dirt roads of Thailand and Cambodia exploring ruins and local antiquities markets. By the 1970s he had become one of the leading suppliers of Cambodian art to museums and collectors around the world, and he built up considerable expertise, writing, three books with Emma Bunker, Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (2003). Khmer Gold (2008) and Khmer Bronzes (2011).
These became reference works, though one review of the last book observed that while it provided “numerous new elements to the knowledge of ancient Cambodian art”, there were problems “raised by the lack of information on the provenance of a considerable number of very high quality unpublished works”.
Latchford held dual Thai-british citizenship, having become a Thai citizen in the 1960s and assumed the name of Pakpong Kriangsak. He built up a substantial personal collection of Khmer art and regularly loaned pieces to museums around the world. He also donated several important pieces to the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh, for which he was awarded the country’s equivalent of a knighthood in 2008.
In 2010 Latchford told the Bangkok Post that “most of the pieces I have come across have been found and dug up by farmers in fields”. In 2012 he suggested that Westerners who had acquired antiquities during the decades of war in Cambodia and Vietnam should be seen as rescuers of objects that might have crumbled in the jungle or been destroyed.
In 2011, however, a 500 lb, 10thcentury sandstone statue of a mythic warrior known as Duryodhana was withdrawn from auction at Sotheby’s after a Cambodian official claimed that it had been looted from the archeological site of Koh Ker.
Prosecutors alleged that Latchford had exported the figure from Cambodia in 1972, but when Sotheby’s was seeking to verify its provenance he claimed that he had had the statue in London in 1970 – then changed his story to claim that he had never owned it at all.
Sotheby’s agreed to return the Duryodhana to Cambodia after a court case in which the US government sided with Cambodia.
Then in 2013 the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return two statues from the same site after Cambodian officials presented evidence that they had been smuggled out of the country during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. The statues had arrived at the museum in four separate pieces as a series of gifts between 1987 and 1992. Latchford was the donor or partdonor for three of them.
Latchford always denied any wrongdoing and any involvement in smuggling, an argument supported after his death by a “close friend” who told
:
“His collection was substantially put together long before cultural heritage laws were introduced. The world was very different in those days, it is wrong to perceive his actions solely through a 2020s lens.”
But a different gloss was put on his activities by Tess Davis, director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washingtonbased NGO which works to stop the looting and trafficking of antiquities. She has described him as “a one-man supply-and-demand for Cambodian art for half a century”, known by expatriates in Cambodia in the 1960s as “Dynamite Doug” for his preferred method of extracting buried treasures.
Latchford, she claimed in a recent article, “used money and threats to protect his monopoly and his reputation. Security at his luxury Thai condo rivalled that of embassies, guarded by a pack of young muscled men … While investigating his network, I was told more than once to drop my inquiries. A Bangkok journalist, whom I tried to interest in the story, flatly refused, citing Latchford’s connections to the Thai military and the going assassination rate.”
When US prosecutors issued their indictment last year, they published, among other things, a series of emails as evidence against him. One April 2007 message featuring a photo of a standing Buddha statue, read: “Hold on to your hat, just been offered this 56 cm Angkor Borei Buddha, just excavated, which looks fantastic. It’s still across the border, but WOW.”
In the 1970s Latchford was briefly married to a Thai woman with whom he had a daughter.
Douglas Latchford, born October 15 1931, died August 2 2020