Matthew Campbell on Cambodia’s Looted Artifacts

Your Fellows book project, Stealing the Gods, will tell the shocking story of how thousands of priceless Cambodian antiquities, looted during the country’s 30-year civil war, ended up in America’s top museums and the homes of New York billionaires. How did you come to this project?

I was largely ignorant of this story until late 2019, when the person at the center of the tale, a British art dealer named Douglas Latchford, was indicted criminally in New York. Those charges made the news, and I began looking into the background, which had been ably covered by some of my colleagues at other publications. Everything about it was fascinating, but I was especially struck by how the narrative stretched between such radically different places and times. It’s a tale that connects the Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of perhaps two million Cambodians, to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. You don’t often come across stories like that, and since I’m based in Southeast Asia, Cambodia is (relatively speaking) in my backyard.

I was quickly convinced that this wasn’t just a magazine project as I’d first envisioned. It was a book.

What were some of the biggest challenges in reporting the story?

By the time I came to this, Latchford was in his late 80s and severely ill; he died in 2020. So obviously I wasn’t able to speak to him, as I would have wanted to! The same was true of another key character, a former looter named Toek Tik, who passed away in 2021. As a result I’ve had to do a lot of reconstruction of both of their lives from other sources. In Latchford’s case, quite a few people who knew him well either refused to talk, or tried very hard to downplay the extent of their relationship. That made it difficult to build a detailed picture of his life.

Another big challenge was its sheer scale. The narrative of my book will begin in the mid-1950s and wrap up in 2023. Gathering the source material to write intelligently about all of those periods took a lot of work.

What inspired the now growing public debate over looted cultural property? What do you hope Stealing the Gods will contribute to this debate?

This debate has been going on for a long time. An example many will be familiar with is the Elgin Marbles, in the British Museum, which were hacked off the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century. The Greek government has been asking them back for more than 100 years, and they’re still trying. More recently, the debate about looting has become part of a broader reckoning over colonialism, for example, in West Africa.

The story I will tell in Stealing the Gods is a little different, not least because it’s so recent. Industrial-scale looting in Cambodia really got going in the 1980s and 1990s–long after people understood it was wrong, and long after the passage of relevant criminal laws in the United States, among other places. Nonetheless, I hope the book will help readers understand just how much cultural patrimony has been stolen from developing countries.

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