Our group visited the Phanom Rung Historical Park where we saw two lintels that were stolen and thence returned. The lintels traversed through multiple cultures1 and time scales, national boundaries and destination points, and changed many hands before ultimately returning to a home that is familiar and yet distant. One lintel was from the Nong Hong temple and now housed in the Phanom Rung Historical Park, and the other stolen from the Phanom Rung temple and reinstalled at its original location. Both temples are in Buriram Province. The lintels were stolen from the temples in the 1960s, sold in the art market, and were subsequently displayed in two museums in the US. After years of negotiations involving museum officials, US government officers, Thai public, archaeologists, and the Thai government, the lintels were finally returned. The Phanom Rung lintel was reinstalled in the temple in its original location, while the Nong Hong lintel occupies a small building to the southwest of the Phanom Rung Historical Park. How do their current locations influence their reception and respective ontologies?
The Nong Hong lintel was detached from its temple in the 1960s and smuggled out of Thailand. Bought by the former president of the International Olympic Committee and art collector Avery Brundage at an auction in London, it was eventually donated to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. In 2016, Tanongsak Hanwong, a Thai archaeologist who came across the lintel in the museum recognized it and initiated the efforts for its return. After a three-year investigation led by the US Department of Homeland Security it was agreed that the lintel was indeed stolen and returned to Thailand. It had been suggested that the lintel be kept in a museum instead of returning it to the original site because of safety concerns. The lintel thus made its way to the Phanom Rung temple complex where it sits in the new building in the Park. The Phanom Rung lintel featuring a carving of the Phra Narai (reclining Vishnu), also stolen in the ’60s, reappeared in the Art Institute of Chicago as an item donated by the Chicago business executive James Alsdorf. Initial efforts by Thai academics and government officials to have it returned failed. Some years later there was strong public protest asking for its return as an integral part of Thai national heritage. After negotiations with the museum, the lintel was returned and reinstalled at its original location above a doorway on the temple.2 It is a point of special interest to many who now visit the temple.
Detached from their original setting centuries after their creation, the lintels were set off on a journey that transformed their identities from a sacred sculpture to contraband, to an art item, to palladia; “Cultural heritage”, “art smuggling”, “stolen antiquity” and “repatriation” are some of the terms now part of its historiography. Until the point when they were separated from the temples, the lintels’ identities were more or less coterminous with those of the temples. Their individual identities crystallized when they were marked as “objects” worth removing. Their journey—reaching the art market, assessed for their value as art pieces, later termed as stolen (cultural heritage) items, and finally returned (both to the country and specifically to their sites)—incrementally added layers of meaning to the lintels, and thus (re)moving them at a progressive ontological distance from the temples they were once a part of.
Before approaching the walkway to the Phanom Rung temple complex, there is a small building to the left which houses the Nong Hong lintel. The building is a modern construction with some architectural and design features of a Khmer-style temple. The lintel, with an image of Yama seated on a buffalo, sits in the center of the room on a pedestal. Carefully placed texts recount the recent history of the lintel. A certificate placed directly under the lintel, written in formulaic formal language recognizes (legitimizes?) the transfer of this lintel from the US government to the Thai government “this twenty-fifth of May, two thousand twenty-one” et cetera. Visitors circumambulate the lintel, observing, photographing, reading the texts, connecting the lintel and texts to other texts and discussions. A visitor from a neighboring province comes by and asks my colleague what the building is and what is inside it. When she tells him that the building houses a lintel, he asks if it was the same lintel that was returned from abroad. He then proceeds to take his shoes off before entering the room and pays his respects to it.3 The lintel, far removed from its home temple, now appears to function as part art object, part palladium, and part sacred object.
Even with a detached lintel being re-joined with the temple as in the case of the Phra Narai lintel at Phanom Rung, there continues to remain at this point a gulf between the two, with the lintel’s recent history incontiguous with that of the temple. A consequence of this disjuncture was demonstrated on our visit to the Phanom Rung temple where, even as we walked around the temple premises, the re-attached lintel drew special attention, as we disconnected and connected it to other texts and experiences, an act perhaps repeated by other visitors to the temple with knowledge of the lintel’s history. Every publication that focused on the lintel before and after its return also function to underscore its singular identity. This suggests that the return of objects even to their exact same location do not necessarily entail a seamless re-joining. Are there degrees of disconnectedness between objects and their original homes, some less disruptive than others?4 Is it a disruption, and if so, is it merely academic? Does this apparent disconnectedness have a place within the broader narrative of the process of repatriation? Or are repatriated objects in some way or the other, always dislocated?
- The lintels are distinctly Angkorean in style. Buriram Province where the two temples are located lies on the border with Cambodia. From around the 11th to the 14th century, at least parts of the province were part of the Angkorean kingdom. This accounts for the Khmer-style temples in the area including Phanom Rung and Phimai. ↩︎
- For a more detailed account of the lintel’s history see Keyes, Charles F. 1991. “The Case of the Purloined Lintel: The Politics of a Khmer Shrine as a Thai National Treasure”, in Thailand: Aspects of Identity, 1939 – 1989. Craig Reynolds, ed. Melbourne: Monash University, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, No. 25, Pp. 261 – 292. ↩︎
- In Thailand there is a custom of removing footwear before entering sacred spaces. I am grateful to my cohort member Udomluck Hoontrakul for recounting this exchange with the visitor. ↩︎
- The themes of connectedness and dislocation discussed in this piece resonate with a newspaper article titled ‘The Tragedy of Phanom Rung’ written in 1971 by Hiram Woodward, under the pseudonym D.W. Ward. In it he notes the historical connections of the temple to Cambodia and the social links between the temple and the people living around it, even after it fell into disrepair. He comments that even if the stolen pieces from the temple were to be returned, the damage done by the act of separating them from the temple is hard to repair, which suggests that an element of disconnection will always remain attached to the lintel’s history. See Ward, D.W. “The Tragedy of Phanom Rung”, Bangkok Standard Magazine (distr. with Bangkok World), 20 November 1971. My thanks to Ashley Thompson for pointing out this article to me, and to Hiram Woodward for his comments. ↩︎