The global hunt for a cache of stolen Thai treasures runs through Denver

Rojanabundit said his father Singto was in charge of packing the statues — 20 or 30 at a time — in secure boxes to be shipped by train to Bangkok, labeling them as mechanical objects to avoid suspicion.“The hardship was really bad,” Rojanabundit said, explaining that poor villagers who couldn’t afford rice would dig for tapioca in the ground. “So anything that could generate money, people would go for without hesitation.

“Even the police were asking to use his Jeep,” Rojanabundit said with a grin. His father bought land with Latchford’s money. He built a house. “I felt I had no choice,” Promrak said of the looting, his hand shaking slightly. Even decades later, he can still draw maps of the underground vaults at Plai Bat II. “I had to do it.”

The statues became known as the “Prakhon Chai hoard,” an archaeological term for artifacts buried in the ground. Where exactly this hoard ended up, however, remained a mystery.The Colorado art scholar, who spent decades with the Denver Art Museum and Colorado College, had become a well-known authority on Chinese and Central Asian art.

These prized relics, she wrote in 2002, “have the distinction of being among the most misunderstood objects in Southeast Asian art history.” Art scholars and Thai officials wonder, though, just how Bunker’s scholarship came about. Why, after years of writing exclusively about Central Asian and Chinese art, did she suddenly wade into Thai antiquities? How did she know to look at the Plai Bat II temple?

Gordon, an American working in Phnom Penh, may know more about Latchford’s life than anyone outside his immediate family. After the Bangkok dealer’s death, his daughter gave the Cambodians correspondence, a gesture of goodwill that has helped the Southeast Asian nation reclaim scores of historic artifacts.

It’s also uncertain when or how many times Bunker visited the temple or the nearby villages. Locals told The Post that while they remembered Latchford and his frequent trips, they couldn’t recall Bunker.

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