Interviews | Society | Southeast Asia

Matthew Campbell on the ‘Man Whole Stole the Gods’

A new book examines the life of Douglas Latchford, a British antiquities trader who was responsible for the mass looting of Cambodia’s Angkorian heritage.

Koh Ker, a complex of stone ruins in northern Cambodia, around 120 kilometers north of the town of Siem Reap. The area briefly served as the capital of the Angkorian Empire in the 10th century.

Throughout Cambodia’s long years of civil war, the country’s cultural patrimony was systematically looted. In remote areas of the country, centuries-old Angkorian temples were ransacked; hundreds of sacred sculptures were stolen, cut from sandstone pedestals and chiseled from bas-reliefs. They were then funneled secretly into the demimonde of the international art world.

The person most responsible for this plunder was Douglas Latchford, a British expatriate whose decades-long obsession with the Angkorian Empire led him to assemble one of the largest collections of Khmer antiquities in the world. “Dynamite Doug,” as he was known prior to his death in 2020, laundered the origin of these stolen items and helped to channel them into Western museums and the private collections of the rich – all while being feted across the globe as a leading expert on the art of the Angkorian Empire.

Latchford’s life is the subject of a new book by Matthew Campbell, a journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek, which examines in detail his role in the Cambodian antiquities trade, as well as the supportive role played by international art dealers and prominent Western museums.

Campbell spoke to The Diplomat’s Sebastian Strangio about how Latchford facilitated the theft of Cambodia’s cultural patrimony, the complicity of the international art world, and how some of these precious relics are now starting to return home.

First off, who was Douglas Latchford? When did he first arrive in Southeast Asia, and how did he get involved in the trafficking of stolen Khmer antiquities?

Latchford was a figure who, in some ways, lived in the wrong century. He was born in Bombay, as it was known, in the dying days of the Raj, and moved in the mid-1950s to Bangkok. There, he fell in with what you could call a community of expatriate aesthetes, dominated by Jim Thompson – the namesake of the silk company and the famous house – and Thompson’s friend Connie Mangskau. It could be a shadowy place; Thompson and Mangskau were both former (or not-so-former) intelligence operatives, and Latchford also crossed paths with spies.

All these people were interested in art and antiquities, and especially in the magnificent stone and bronze sculptures that came from Cambodia. Latchford started as a collector, but by the late 1960s, he was more of a dealer, moving works fresh from Cambodian temples onto the international market. And as he became a major player in that business, Cambodia was about to explode, with the Khmer Rouge emerging as a meaningful force around 1968 and full-blown civil war beginning in 1970. This transformed Latchford’s business, because violence and chaos created new supply.

By what means did these artifacts move from remote temples to the international art market?

Virtually everything Latchford sold was looted and smuggled, by any reasonable understanding of those terms. In the mid-1960s, this would have been sort of artisanal – small-scale, opportunistic thefts from temples in a poor country. But as the Cambodian civil war got going, it reached industrial scale. Wars run on money, and the combatants in the war – the Khmer Rouge, the North Vietnamese Army, and non-communist factions – looted temples to fund themselves. Other thefts were by people who just took advantage of the breakdown in public order. It’s important to remember that by 1970, the front line ran right through the center of Siem Reap, with Communist forces dug into positions inside the Angkor temples.

Looting crews would hit ancient sites, whether around Angkor or further afield in places like Koh Ker, using everything from chisels to construction equipment and even dynamite to rip artworks out. They would then carry the pieces to the Thai border, where brokers would move them across and onward to Bangkok, where Latchford was waiting. His role was to serve as the interface between upstream supply and downstream demand. He had impeccable relationships with auction houses, dealers and museums in Europe and the U.S., and especially with the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He was also connected to the looting crews on the Cambodian side, closely enough that he sometimes sent instructions up the chain, specifying the kind of pieces he wanted, which looters would then try to find.

What’s really shocking about this business model is that it didn’t come to an end in the 1970s. The Cambodian civil war only ended in 1998 with the death of Pol Pot, and major looting continued all the way through, with some of the very largest raids in 1995-1997. This was long after everyone involved, and certainly the Western buyers who snapped up whatever came out of Cambodia were supposed to have known better.

What means did Latchford use to conceal the thefts, and how did he characterize his own “work”?

Even in the 1970s, you couldn’t just sell a huge Cambodian sculpture freshly ripped out of a temple without some paperwork. There was some awareness that looting was a problem, and buyers wanted certain assurances. In particular, they wanted to know, or be able to plausibly claim, that a piece had left the country before 1970. That year was important for two reasons: first, it was the beginning of the full-blown civil war in Cambodia, and second, it was the date of a key United Nations treaty on cultural heritage.

Latchford’s solution was to forge the documents. Over the years, he got very good at providing letters and statements purporting to show that artworks were legitimate. These often wouldn’t have passed the barest scrutiny had anyone bothered to investigate them, but buyers generally didn’t. Amazingly, he continued doing this – and was still having his fake documents accepted by major institutions – into the 2010s. He was able to sell works with wildly illicit origins just about any time he wanted.

I think it’s fair to say that Latchford didn’t really care how his pieces were obtained and wasn’t that interested in the details. What he was interested in was the art itself, which obsessed him. He was a toxic character, but I think his love for the objects was genuine. He did make some comments much later indicating that he felt he was saving pieces that would otherwise have been destroyed in the war, but that seems to me like rationalization after the fact.

What was Latchford’s relationship with the Cambodian government, and how did this change over the years?

In the 1980s and........

© The Diplomat