If you read our recent article about the Dong Son bell identified at a museum in Assen and the troubling questions surrounding its provenance, you will recognise a pattern that extends far beyond that single suspect artefact.  That case, resting on little more than a hypothetical pre-1970 export date, forms part of a larger story that has been unfolding for years.  It is a story that continues to cast a long shadow over the global market in Southeast Asian antiquities, museum institutions, and private collections worldwide.  Time and again, it is a story in which the fingerprints of Douglas Latchford can be found on objects that passed through his hands, sometimes decades before his alleged crimes were brought to light.

Recently, I was working to identify the Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese artefacts purchased by Leon Black which were mentioned in some of the three million documents released by the U.S. Justice Department on 30 January 2026 as part of the Jeffrey Epstein data dump.  During my wanderings my searches brought me back to Latchford's and Emma Bunker's artistic publications. 

Cultivating the image of a passionate scholar-collector prior to his indictment, the Bangkok-based dealer worked closely with Bunker to publish a series of lavishly illustrated books on Southeast Asian and Khmer art that featured many of the objects he circulated through the antiquities market.  Far from being neutral scholarly exercises, these publications functioned as instruments of laundering. 

Sculptures and bronzes with little or no documented provenance were presented alongside established museum holdings and described as significant works from private collections.  They were framed within authoritative art historical narratives that obscured both their true ownership history and the circumstances of their removal from Cambodia.  By embedding freshly surfaced objects in academic-style volumes, Latchford and Bunker effectively manufactured a sort of cosmetic legitimacy, transforming recently trafficked antiquities into catalogue-worthy published masterpieces, thereby smoothing their path into major collections.

In the book Latchford and Bunker went on to describe the unusual piece as coming from Angkor Borei, adding:  

This fierce little Hanuman once surmounted a battle standard to which he was attached by a short tang under the foot. Hanuman waves his arms vigorously as he balances on one foot, a pose very similar to that of a gilded-bronze male figure from Vietnam in the Musee Guimet that has also been identified as a standard emblem. Hanuman is often represented in later Khmer art.

In their 544-page tome, and including this bronze, there is an outstanding number of pieces, which appear courtesy of "Skanda Trust."  Formed just three months before the book’s publication, Skanda Trust is now understood to have been one of Latchford’s offshore vehicles, registered in Jersey in the Channel Islands, and estimated by experts to have held art-related assets valued at approximately $10 million.  An email from Latchford dated 23 April 2007 to a New York dealer left little to no doubt about the dealer's level of direct involvement and knowledge in transnational criminal activity against Cambodian artefacts. In it Latchford offered his colleague (and sometimes cohort in crime) a looted standing Buddha from the same pre-Khmer site of Angkor Borei.  That artefact was depicted in a photo that showed signs of recent excavation.

So where did this Hanuman wander off to?

In a 2017 Facebook post, the Asian Civilisations Museum shared a photograph of an eighth-century bronze monkey figure identified as probably depicting Hanuman and coming from Angkor Borei.  The figure was described as unusual because it was unclothed.  I had saved a screenshot of that image for use in my course on open-source intelligence research in object tracing. It served as an excellent example of how museums use social media and how such posts can reveal information about objects in their collections, even when full catalogues are not accessible online or researchers cannot physically visit a specific institution in another country.

That is why the image clicked in my memory when reviewing Latchford’s publication.  They were one and the same.  The museum appears to have acquired the bronze in 2014 and assigned it Accession number: 2014-00439.

The presence of this Hanuman in a Latchford publication, attributed to Skanda Trust and later accessioned into an important museum collection, is not a trivial detail.  It places the object squarely within a museum collection that has already led to previous restitutions to India. 

In recent years, the museum has begun to confront the uncomfortable reality that publication history and aesthetic importance cannot substitute for clear, documented provenance.  If they are serious about transparency and ethical stewardship, then works linked to Latchford’s orbit warrant their careful review. 

The question is no longer whether these objects are beautiful or significant. It is whether they left Cambodia lawfully.  One hopes that this bronze will receive that scrutiny it needs, and that if the evidence points where other cases have led, that his path home will be quick. 

By:   Lynda Albertson