The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts reported that Cambodia received 1,158 Khmer objects from abroad last year, forty of them from institutions and 1,118 from individuals. The figures sit in the ministry’s report on its 2025 work, dated 4 February and carried by the Khmer newspaper Kampuchea Thmey. This desk did not reach the report itself. Working from the ministry’s two numbers, forty is about three in every hundred pieces it counted.
The count stops before the year does. It runs from January to 21 November 2025, and it counts objects received rather than objects given up. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco transferred ownership of thirteen Khmer objects to Cambodia in September 2025, after a formal request from the ministry. A preliminary agreement left those objects in San Francisco on a two-year loan. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art announced three more on 11 December, after the count had closed. Neither set could show up in a tally of arrivals.
No one has published a figure for how many Khmer objects sit in collections outside Cambodia. This desk reached none, from any museum or any government, on either side of the traffic. Forty therefore has no total to sit against. A count of arrivals answers how much came in. It does not answer how much is out.
The ministry’s longer record runs the other way. Prime Minister Hun Manet said in August 2024 that 1,098 objects had come home since 1996, 571 of them from private collections and 527 from foreign institutions and governments. On that count, institutions and governments supplied close to half.
Federal prosecutors in New York indicted the London dealer Douglas Latchford on 27 November 2019. The indictment set out a route: Khmer pieces taken from their sites, passed along a chain of hands, and reaching the market with false papers on shipping and on who had owned them. An indictment is a charge. It states what prosecutors say they can prove, and on its own it proves nothing at all.
In September 2020 the court dismissed the case because Latchford had died. A dismissal on death ends a case without resolving it. The allegations stopped where they were on the day they were filed, and they are allegations still.
On 22 June 2023 his daughter agreed to forfeit 12 million dollars to the United States government. That was a civil forfeiture, a process that takes property tied to an offence without convicting anybody of it. It runs against the property rather than against a person, which is how it can finish without a finding about anyone. The same agreement records that she expressly denies fault, liability or wrongdoing. The denial sits inside the paper that produced the money.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York let sixteen pieces go in December 2023, fourteen to Cambodia and two to Thailand. A museum that releases an object de-accessions it, which means striking it off the permanent collection so that it can leave the building. Sixteen is what the Met struck off, not what it holds. The museum said in the same announcement that its review of Khmer material was still running.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists identified 43 objects linked to Latchford or to three of his associates across ten museums. It worked from museum websites, gallery catalogues and Latchford’s own books. Its results covered only the museums that answered. It said what it found almost certainly represented a small fraction of what Latchford once owned. In one of his books alone the team counted 80 pieces captioned as owned by one of his trusts.
Prosecutors read those books on Khmer bronze and gold as a record of what passed through his hands. The reporters read the same books to match photographs and measurements against objects in museums. The catalogue that documented the material is also the tool for finding it.
In 2008 Cambodia gave Latchford the Royal Order of Monisaraphon, a state honour. The same year he donated Khmer royal regalia, the ornaments of royal dress, to the National Museum in Phnom Penh. In the late 2000s he was one of a group of donors who paid to rewire the building. This desk reached no Cambodian record of the honour or the gifts, only foreign reporting of them.
That recognition has already been used against Cambodia’s case. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth was asked in 2021 about a Harihara figure it bought in 1988. It said it had received a sworn affidavit from Latchford and a Thai export licence. It then added: “At the time, Mr. Latchford was a widely respected art collector and expert on Cambodian art, who would later receive accolades and awards from the Cambodian government.” The honour came twenty years after that purchase, so it cannot have informed it. Kimbell was arguing about his standing, not about the sequence.
Two of the sixteen the Met released went to Thailand, which is a claimant in the same trade. Four bronzes from Prakhon Chai in Buriram province went back to Thailand from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in December 2025, in a handover coordinated with United States investigators. Those objects went to Bangkok. They are not part of the Cambodian count.
Seventy-four objects from the Latchford family in Britain were unveiled at the National Museum in Phnom Penh on 27 February 2026, under a 2020 agreement between the ministry and the family. The ministry thanked Chip Mong Group, Canadia Bank and two Cambodian artists for paying towards the cost of moving them. Part of the freight on that return came from private donors rather than from the state.
On 6 April 2026 the ministry announced twenty more, given up by a private collector in Asia and including Bayon-period figures it believes came from Angkor Thom. Nothing in the accounts this desk reached ties those twenty to Latchford. The ministry has not said when they arrived, and it did not name the collector.
