Joyce Clark will never forget the day she visited Douglas Latchford’s apartment in Bangkok a decade ago to deliver a book from a friend.
The Asian art aficionado didn’t know Latchford well, but the host insisted she stay for a glass of champagne and dinner.
Guests started streaming in the door. Then came the caviar.
“They were literally kissing his ring,” Clark said. “He was an emperor of sorts.”
This was Latchford in a nutshell — charming, gregarious, a man of exquisite tastes who wined and dined government officials, museum curators and wealthy collectors from his lavish perch in Bangkok.
A British citizen who spent much of his life in Thailand, Latchford became enamored with Khmer art in the 1950s, amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of Cambodian antiquities.
“It was like an addiction,” said Geraldine Cox, a close friend.
Long beloved in Cambodia for his generous donations to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, Latchford’s reputation dramatically shifted toward the end of his life.
American authorities — in civil and criminal cases beginning in 2012 — accused Latchford of helping plunder Cambodia’s sacred temples for prized relics that netted him millions in sales to rich foreigners and prominent museums.
A federal grand jury charged the dealer and collector in 2019 with a host of crimes, including wire fraud and smuggling, related to the decades-long looting scheme. He died in 2020 before he could stand trial.
“Latchford built a career out of the smuggling and illicit sale of priceless Cambodian antiquities, often straight from archeological sites, in the international art market,” then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman said after the dealer’s indictment.
Cambodian officials, meanwhile, have spent the past few years on a global hunt, trying to reclaim the nation’s stolen history that Latchford dispersed around the world.
That effort was complicated by the fact that the Bangkok dealer also used secret offshore companies and trusts to hide stolen artifacts and, critics say, evade taxes and government oversight, the “Pandora Papers” investigation found.
After his death, Latchford’s daughter agreed to return her father’s collection — valued at more than $50 million — to the Southeast Asian nation. And museums from Denver to Australia are giving back more pieces from him by the month, as the Cambodians present evidence that Latchford illegally exported them abroad.
Douglas Arthur Joseph Latchford was born Oct. 15, 1931, in Mumbai, India — at the time still under British rule. Educated at an elite British prep school, Latchford returned to India just before its independence in 1947.
He started his career in the pharmaceutical industry, eventually settling in Bangkok.
Latchford embraced Thai culture, becoming a citizen in the 1960s and marrying a Thai woman. He even took a Thai name: Pakpong Kriangsak.
The collector was incredibly generous with his staff, Cox said, paying school tuition for drivers, cooks and housekeepers. He once flew from Bangkok to Phnom Penh just so Cox wouldn’t spend a birthday alone. After lunch at a swanky French restaurant, Latchford hopped back on a plane home.
“He was truly a wonderful friend,” she said.
Cambodia treated him like one of their own — so much so that the government granted him the equivalent of a knighthood in 2008 and invited him to become a citizen. He signed his emails “Bong,” a term of respect in Cambodia used for a slightly older person.
In interviews over the years, Latchford defended his collecting habits.
“If the French and other Western collectors had not preserved this art, what would be the understanding of Khmer culture today?” he told The New York Times in 2012.
A believer in reincarnation, Latchford told The Times that two Buddhist priests had once told him that “in a previous life I had been Khmer, and that what I collect had once belonged to me.”
His daughter Nawapan Kriangsak told The Times last year that she viewed his collecting as an act of reverence, not a result of greed.
“Despite what people say or accuse against Douglas, my father started his collection in a very different era, and his world has changed,” she said in announcing the return of his collection to the Cambodians.
He was also a bodybuilding aficionado, helping put on competitions for Thai and Cambodian musclemen.
Dougald O’Reilly, an archaeologist and professor, recalls one competition outside the Grand Hotel in Siem Reap in northern Cambodia. More than 100 people showed up, watching teams of bodybuilders, lathered in expensive tinting cream, flex and flaunt on stage.
“It was a bizarre affair,” he said.
In Latchford’s later years, as reporters delved deeper into his collections and prosecutors honed in on his dealings, the once-revered collector lost much of his following.
But he “wasn’t the ogre he was made out to be,” Cox said.
“I’m glad he died before he went to court,” she said. “It would have killed him.”
