Looted Cambodian treasures are headed back home
The museum voluntarily relinquished the four items after the feds moved to seize them in November
Four looted Cambodian antiquities that once sat in the Denver Art Museum soon will be headed back to their ancestral homeland.
The four pieces were part of 30 antiquities officially handed over by U.S. authorities to the Cambodian government on Monday during a repatriation ceremony in New York City — a momentous event for the Southeast Asian nation that has spent years trying to reclaim its plundered history from all corners of the globe.
“It’s like a returning of the souls of our culture back to our people,” Keo Chhea, Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States, said during the ceremony. “We’re very grateful.”
The antiquities that were on display Monday in New York date back more than a thousand years and showcase the might of the powerful Khmer Empire, a vast swath of land that covered much of modern-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam.
The prized relics included figurative sculptures, ceremonial bowls and elephantheaded Hindu gods. They ranged from seven inches in height to more than five feet tall and four tons in weight. All told, Cambodia estimates their total value at $35 million.
“These antiquities we return today were ripped from their country,” Ricky J. Patel, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York, said in a statement. “Beyond their extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship, many are sacred artifacts pried from temples and palaces to be smuggled across borders and peddled by those seeking profit, without any regard to the intangible value they have to the people of their homeland. …
“These artifacts belong to the people of Cambodia, and we are proud to participate in their recovery and their return home.”
All 30 pieces are tied to a single man: Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based art collector and dealer indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 on a host of charges related to trafficking illicit antiquities. Latchford died before he could stand trial, but federal prosecutors alleged he ran a decades-long scheme to sell looted goods from Southeast Asia to rich collectors and prominent museums from Denver to Australia.
After his death, Latchford’s daughter agreed to return many pieces of his collection to Cambodia, but countless items remain scattered in private collections and museums.
The four relics from Denver include a 12th-to-13th century Khmer sandstone sculpture depicting standing Prajnaparamita, a 7thto-8th century Khmer sandstone sculpture depicting standing Surya, an Iron Age Dong Son bronze bell, and a 7th-to-8th century sandstone lintel depicting the sleep of Vishnu and birth of Brahma.
Federal investigators alleged that Latchford swindled the Denver Art Museum in the early 2000s by providing false provenance — or ownership history — for the Prajnaparamita and Surya and lying repeatedly about how he obtained the valuable relics.
For the two other items, the Bell and the Lintel, Latchford provided the museum limited provenance information, according to a November forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.