Cambodia’s Stolen Statues Are Coming Home to an Overflowing Museum

The four cavernous wings of Cambodia’s national museum are so packed with objects that visitors need to watch their elbows while strolling among the roughly 1,400 on display.

The century-old building in central Phnom Penh is running out of room partly because foreign collectors and institutions have returned about 300 stolen artifacts over the past six years. On a recent afternoon, returned statues the size of refrigerators were sheltering under the courtyard’s blood-red roof eaves in their foam packaging.

“Space,” the director, Chhay Visoth, said during an interview in the courtyard when asked what tops his long wish list.

An expansion and a renovation are planned, but it’s unclear who would pay for upgrades, how the money would be managed, or how the museum plans to handle its internal politics.

There is also the challenge of designing galleries for Cambodian visitors who see its statues not as artwork, but as divinities holding the souls of their ancestors. For them, the museum is more of a temple.

“They come to see the gods, or to be seen by the gods,” said Huot Samnang, the director of Cambodia’s antiquities department.

He was standing in a conservation lab near the galleries where specialists were removing adhesive from the base of a statue lying on wooden pallet. The remnants of its blue shipping crate, sealed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York weeks earlier, were scattered on a nearby ledge, nails poking through plywood.

Cambodia’s national museum has come a long way since it was closed and neglected during the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. The bats that once lived in its rafters are gone, a noisy roof repair is complete, and the roof’s ornate spires have a fresh coat of white paint.

But foreign experts in Khmer art said in interviews that the museum could do a better job of telling Cambodia’s story. That includes the rise and fall of the Khmer Empire that built Angkor Wat, and the looting of Cambodian artifacts that peaked in the 1990s.

On a fall afternoon, visitors would not have known that several 10th-century statues in one gallery depict a battle scene from the Mahabharata, an Indian epic, or that one was donated to the Met in pieces, years after it was smuggled out of a jungle temple. It was one of two such statues that the Met returned to Cambodia in 2013.

Another point that didn’t come through was that Douglas A.J. Latchford, an art dealer who died in 2020, had been accused of organizing many of the thefts. In 2019, U.S. prosecutors charged him with illicitly trafficking Cambodian antiquities. His longtime legal adviser has said that Mr. Latchford was comatose at the time and unable to rebut the charges.

About 4,000 stolen Cambodian pieces still reside with foreign museums and private collectors, said Bradley Gordon, a lawyer representing the government in a yearslong campaign to pressure the Met and others for more repatriations.

Portia Jezard, 37, a British tourist who visited the museum recently, said she left wondering which foreign museums and collectors still owned stolen Khmer treasure, and what Cambodia was doing about it.

“Are they giving it willingly?” she asked. “Or are you having to go, ‘Hey, give us our stuff back’?”

A few weeks later, the museum installed a few new panels to help address such questions. One was titled “Returning Home: The Story of Looting and Restitution.”

Statue repatriations are an important part of Cambodia’s reckoning with the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, a totalitarian regime that killed up to a quarter of the population. Among the victims was a former director of the national museum.

They have “a significance that is much more than getting back stolen property,” said Helen Jessup, an expert on Cambodian art and architecture. “This going to be an emotional issue forever for the Cambodians.”

At the museum recently, waves of Cambodian visitors, some from provinces that are a several hours’ drive from Phnom Penh, expressed wonder at the collection. A few said the statues were far more impressive than the ones they were used to seeing in local temples.

They also said that the displays hadn’t taught them much about the artifacts.

Som Preksa, 27, a Buddhist monk and a recent university graduate who was standing near the entrance gate in a bright orange robe, said he had been overwhelmed by the number of statues. A few displays explaining how they are connected to Cambodian history might have helped, he added.

Mr. Chhay Visoth, the museum director, said his priorities included making the displays more accessible for schoolchildren, and installing a climate-control system for bronze objects.

But Cambodia’s National Museum does not aspire to be a Western-style institution, officials said, and many of its challenges are distinctly Cambodian.

One is whether visitors should be allowed to touch statues or put flowers on them, as they would in a temple. Mr. Chhay Visoth says no, although he allows flowers to be placed on the floor near them on some Buddhist holidays.

“Compromise for the Cambodian context,” he said with a laugh.

There are also proposals to send statues from the museum back to the places they were looted from, including the 10th-century temples of Koh Ker, near Angkor Wat. Mr. Chhay Visoth is open to the idea, he said, as long as the new sites are secure.

Many museums collect more material than they could ever display. In Cambodia, where the national collection comprises an estimated 19,500 objects, the question of where to put them takes on additional weight. One reason is that many Western institutions have argued that museums in countries where artwork was stolen can’t properly care for the returned pieces.

Mr. Gordon, the lawyer, said that Cambodia rejects such arguments.

“We just keep saying, ‘Look, it’s stolen,’” he said. “Cambodians want it back. It should come home.”

There is wide agreement that the museum needs a makeover. Its conservation labs look rickety. Its galleries, which open onto the courtyard, have an awkward mixture of natural and artificial light. Its basement storage area has a history of flooding.

But exactly what a new version of the museum should look like is up for debate.

France, which ruled Cambodia from 1863 to 1953, is financing a study to explore a renovation and expansion. The adjacent Royal University of Fine Arts is moving its campus to create space, its director, Heng Sophady, said.

Ashley Thompson, a specialist in premodern Cambodian arts with decades of experience in the country, said that a model for a new wing could be the Acropolis Museum in Athens. That museum, which opened in 2009, includes a reconstruction of friezes stolen from the site by a 19th century British aristocrat and explains how they ended up in the British Museum.

“It’s a very effective call for restitution,” said Professor Thompson, the chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London.

Cambodian tycoons have offered to pay for upgrades at the national museum, according to Mr. Chhay Visoth. Professor Thompson said that Western institutions that benefited from the plundering of Cambodia’s cultural heritage should also bear some of the costs.

Several prominent institutions have signed agreements with Cambodia’s national museum that include staff trainings and exchanges. A few, like the Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art, have returned stolen statues. But Mr. Gordon said that none has offered to help pay for any capital projects.

The Met, which has a sometimes fraught relationship with Cambodia, did not make a representative available for an interview. Ann Bailis, a spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Met would “continue to actively engage with ongoing efforts to further advance the world’s understanding and appreciation of Khmer art and culture.”

Completing the repatriation process could take decades. In the meantime, there are more urgent tasks.

There are ancient inscriptions to interpret, a vacant curator position to fill, pieces to prepare for trips abroad and a new exhibition at the museum by the Cambodian artist Leang Seckon. Culture Ministry officials are also debating whether some statues with murky provenance could be fakes. And Mr. Gordon said that 74 stone and bronze artifacts, relinquished to Cambodia by Mr. Latchford’s estate, could soon be sent to the museum from London.

There are administrative distractions, too. One is that, in 2023, some members of the museum’s staff accused Mr. Chhay Visoth of embezzling ticket revenue. He denied wrongdoing, and there is no evidence that he has faced any charges. The anticorruption agency that handles such accusations did not respond to an inquiry.

Staff members haven’t gotten around to removing a 2009 plaque near the entrance that honored museum benefactors who have since been indicted or imprisoned on charges related to the looting trade. Among the people the plaque honors for their “generous support and assistance” is the man blamed for orchestrating much of the theft: Mr. Latchford.

Sun Narin contributed reporting.