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Although the French naturalist Henri Mouhot was not the first traveller from outside the region to visit the ruins of Angkor following the site’s abandonment in the 1430s – he had been preceded by many foreigners who had reported their existence as early as the 16th century – it was the posthumous publication of his travels in the early 1860s that brought them to international attention. His descriptions of the ‘lost city’ sparked considerable interest, which continues amongst archaeologists, art and cultural historians, and vastly increasing numbers of visitors.

Angkor is the name given to a complex of cities and temples spread over an area of 400 sq km between the Great Lake (Tonle Sap) and the Kulen Hills of what is now northern Cambodia. For much of the period from the 9th to the 15th century ad, it was
the site of a series of capital cities of the Khmer empire, which, in its 12th-century heyday, expanded beyond its core region to incorporate further extensive territories that today form part of the modern states of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

Since Angkor was brought to the attention of the wider world, a very considerable literature has been published and active scholarship continues. Much that has been published is specialist work, but there is a growing volume of material targeted at a more general readership. Since the primary aim here is to examine the contemporary issue of the plundering of Angkor, readers who seek detailed descriptions and illustrations of the extensive ruins and their history are invited to consult some of these sources.1

Angkor was founded in 802 by the second of a succession of Khmer monarchs who built more than 700 temples in sandstone and laterite over the following six centuries. One of the world’s most magnificent architectural masterpieces, it is the most famous of a number of substantial edifices combining Hindu and Buddhist influences that were created by the Indianised culture that dominated much of south-east Asia from the 6th to the 13th century. Most of the structures are concentrated in an area some 24 km east to west and 8 km north to south, although the Angkor Archaeological Park, which administers the area, includes sites as far away as Kbal Spean, a natural bridge about 48 km to the north that has given its name to a sacred site of the 11th-13th centuries.

The largest of all the structures, Angkor Wat, alone covers nearly 200 hectares and is one of the largest monuments ever built. Constructed between 1112 and 1150, with walls nearly a kilometre long on each side, it grandly portrays the Hindu cosmology, with central towers representing Mount Meru, home of the gods, the outer walls portraying the mountains enclosing the world, and a moat symbolising the oceans beyond. The later capital of Angkor Thom, built after Angkor Wat was sacked in 1177 by the neighbouring kingdom of Champa, has at its centre the magnificent Bayon temple, one of the last erected in Angkor. Construction of Angkor Thom coincided with a change from Hinduism to Mahayana Buddhism and the Bayon is one of the
few Buddhist temples in Angkor. Earlier temples were altered to display images of the Buddha, and Angkor Wat briefly became a Buddhist shrine. A Hindu revival in the late 13th century included a large-scale campaign of desecration of Buddhist images before Theravada Buddhism was established in the 14th century.

The Asian art historian Philip Rawson has described the best of southeast Asian art as ‘combining a sensuous sweetness with a luxuriant magnificence’.2 Sadly, these qualities have attracted collectors to a degree that has led to widespread pillage in the region, with Angkor amongst the worst to suffer. Angkor’s monuments have over time been damaged in addition by weather and encroachment by vegetation (Fig. 3), as well as by the deliberate destruction that occurred during the Hindu revival. Invasions by the Thai in the 15th century and the Burmese in the 16th led to further removal of statues – but for their presumed spiritual rather than other values.

Although not entirely a recent phenomenon, the widespread looting of historic sites and the removal of items for their value as antiquities or works of art has grown over the past half century. In the case of Angkor, the first examples of modern despoilment date from the removal of statuary by the French in the 1860s and 1870s, notably by Louis Delaporte (Fig. 1). He was in charge of an exploratory mission that visited Angkor, where he collected statues, drew up plans, copied lintels and prepared reconstructions. His collection of Khmer art was deposited in the Indochinese Museum, now incorporated in the Musée Guimet in Paris.

This removal of antiquities may not have been considered looting in the modern sense, since it had the approval of the French authorities, who, by a treaty signed with the local monarch in 1863, had acquired protectorate status over Cambodia. However, the same cannot be said of the theft of several important pieces of sculpture from Banteay Srei by a European expedition planned in 1923 by the writer André Malraux, who became France’s Minister for Culture in the De Gaulle government (Fig. 2). Malraux and his colleagues were jailed for trafficking in antiquities, but were released with suspended sentences after appeal.3

In 1925, a 10,800-hectare area around the Angkor temples was declared a national park, the first in southeast Asia. Access to the complex was made possible and modern tourism initiated. World War ii, followed by the Indo-China conflicts, eliminated the visitor trade. However, countless priceless historic artefacts were smuggled out of
the country during the long period of civil unrest. General accessibility was restored following the signing in Paris in 1991 of the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, which ended the 30 years of civil strife. Sadly, it also inaugurated what Roger Atwood has described as ‘an almost immediate and unprecedented assault by the antiquities trade’.4 More damage was done to Angkor in the last quarter of the 20th century than in the previous 800 years.

Worldwide, the plundering of historic sites and the shipment overseas of the antiquities they yield has one or both of two principal forms – small-scale opportunistic looting, resulting mainly from extreme poverty, and major commercially ‘commissioned’ theft. Opportunistic looting is carried out mainly by locals, many scratching a living from small-scale agriculture. Items so obtained are generally small, such as beads, pottery or metal objects. They are mostly sold on to dealers and then to tourists or overseas outlets. The locals make very little money but will continue to scavenge at the site until little of value to the market is left. In many parts of Asia, the development of mass tourism in recent years has greatly added to the local market opportunity.

By contrast, many antiquities never appear on the market but are removed on the orders of wealthy collectors who specify particular pieces and are willing to pay exorbitant amounts to procure them. Rachanie Thosarat, of the Thailand Office of Archaeology and Museums, reports that rumour has it that photographs and even videos are taken of reliefs and statues in Cambodia.5 Collectors can then order the items they wish to have stolen, leading to the hacking away of lintels or the removal from walls of reliefs of apsaras – celestial nymphs or dancers represented in the shape of flying figures. Atwood records that, on a visit 10 years after the peace agreement, he observed that most of the 540 huge stone figures that lined the five causeways leading into the ruined city of Angkor Thom had been decapitated (Fig. 5). In some cases the heads had been replaced by concrete substitutes, some of which had also been stolen.6

Most looted pieces are smuggled from Cambodia either into Thailand for sale in Bangkok – often followed by shipment overseas – or to Singapore. Neither Thailand nor Singapore is a signatory to unesco’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, making the export of looted material more difficult to counter. The convention enables members to recover stolen antiquities that surface in the countries of fellow signatories, although it is not retroactive.

Angkor has been on unesco’s World Heritage list since 1992 and was placed on the inaugural Watch List of the World Monument Fund’s most endangered sites in 1996. The United Nations has been exerting moral pressure on museums and collectors worldwide to return art stolen from the site. Some countries, including France, the Netherlands and the usa, have been working to suppress the import, sale and transit of suspect Cambodian artefacts within their own jurisdictions.

In the late 1990s, 350 Heritage Police, trained by the French, were deployed around Angkor to counter looting. However, the outer ruins remain vulnerable. In early 1999 a unesco mission to the site of Banteay Chhmar, a late-12th-century temple near the Thai border, and three hours by road from Angkor, found that it had been systematically plundered. Heads had been hacked off statues, bas-reliefs pillaged and even 12-metre-long wall sections removed.7 The most recent report, by a tourist operator and frequent visitor to Cambodia, Andy Brouwer, describes a missing head from a devata, or small female deity figure, at Banteay Prei, the cut of which was still so clean that it must have been made only a few days or weeks before.8

Dougald O’Reilly, director of HeritageWatch, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting and preserving southeast Asia’s cultural heritage, has written that most temples are now devoid of statuary.9 Tourists interested in viewing the sculptural achievements of the ancient Khmer must visit the National Museum in Phnom Penh,
to which statues have been moved to protect them from further looting. Many more sculptures are housed at the Conservation d’Angkor in nearby Siem Reap and await the construction of a new museum near the temple complex.

Opportunistic looting is also a threat to much earlier sites. The construction of a road in north-western Cambodia in 2000 led to the discovery of
an Iron Age cemetery at the village of Phum Snay, probably dating from between ad 300 and 600. Unfortunately this sparked an episode of looting that led to the near destruction of the site. O’Reilly reported in 2003 that he witnessed people trading in looted artefacts in Phnom Penh’s Russian market, although looters sold their ‘wares’ mainly to middlemen, who transferred them across the border into Thailand.10 Reports in the Phnom Penh press of looting and destruction served to encourage collectors to turn up and buy directly from villagers.

A Heritage Watch study has found that nearly 20% of foreign tourists admit to buying an antiquity in Cambodia. Given that Cambodia receives about a million tourists per annum, hundreds of thousands of antiquities leave the country each year.11 1,000- year-old small green bowls, for example, have been reported on sale on the road to Mount Kulen, north of the temples of Angkor, for us$2.50 each. A kilogram of antique iron artefacts is reported as selling for the equivalent of about two us cents.

In addition to their unintended contribution to the small-scale looting activities, tourists to Cambodia are inadvertently creating abuse to the monuments by their sheer numbers as they bump and scrape against carved stonework and scramble for often erosion-prone viewpoints. Government expectation of an annual three million visitors to the site by 2010 will further increase the direct damage, and unesco has also warned that heavy demand for water from the escalating numbers of new hotels is lowering the watertable, which could undermine Angkor Wat’s particularly fragile foundations. Although us$50m has been spent by foreign donors and governments over the past 15 years in restoration, work is far from complete, and new threats are emerging.12

However, despite the extensive damage that Angkor has suffered from the environment, historic pillage and recent looting, not all the news about the great complex is bad. The Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (efeo), established in 1898, is
the most dedicated and influential body to study Angkor.13 Except for a brief period during World War ii, it worked there continuously until forced to leave in 1972 by the civil war but re-established itself in Cambodia in 1989. International support and direction was offered to Cambodia following its recognition by the United Nations in 1991. In October 1993, the Japanese government hosted the Intergovernmental Conference on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor.
It brought together representatives of Cambodia, international organisations, financial institutions and ngos, who adopted the ‘Tokyo Declaration’, which decided to establish in Phnom Penh the International Co-ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (icc), to support the Cambodian authorities. All projects are monitored by the appropriately named apsara – the Authority for
the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap – set up by Cambodia in 1995. Most recently, a new national heritage police authority has been established in Cambodia which has also enlisted international security agencies, including us homeland security and the fbi, to help counter looting.14

In addition to the provision of international and governmental aid, non-government organisations are active at Angkor on both restoration and research projects. The World Monuments Fund, the first non-government foundation to arrive at Angkor in 1989 with offers of assistance, is helping to preserve a number of sites (Fig. 7). It also administers on-site training for architects and archaeologists to help replace those lost in years of civil conflict. It discourages the purchase of Angkorian antiquities – stone or pottery more than 100 years old – and urges collectors to buy the work of contemporary artisans using traditional methods and materials. In 1999, the wmf founded the Center for Khmer Studies, which provides a meeting ground for scholars of Khmer culture in Cambodia.

HeritageWatch is providing training to villagers in business management, tourism and English language as part of a pilot project to involve local populations in protecting their heritage while benefiting from it at the same time. Local experts in 15 small teams are documenting Cambodia’s ruins, so there is visual evidence should artefacts be removed and later appear at auctions or in collections. These teams use comic books in Khmer to explain to villagers why they should protect their temples and ruins.
In the September 2006 issue of the Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia, which was devoted to Angkor, Terressa Davis of Heritage Watch writes that ‘having survived centuries of war and abandon-ment [Cambodia’s temples] may not survive the threat of looting’.16 In 1988 the British Academy defined the movement of antiquities as illicit in one or more of three senses – if excavated illegally or clandestinely, if stolen from their owners before export and if exported from their countries of origin in contravention of those countrys’ laws. There can be little doubt that much of the trade in Cambodian antiquities is not only illegal but also, in the words of Paul Sussman of cnn, ‘a crime against humanity’.17

Philip Courtenay is a geographer and formerly Professor and Rector of the Cairns Campus of James Cook University, Australia.

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