Examples from 2024 include the return of a 900-year-old bronze statue – known as the ‘Golden Boy’ – to Thailand from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while 70 artefacts arrived back in Cambodia from different institutions in the US.
The previous year, two museums in the Netherlands returned a collection of Indonesian and Sri Lankan artefacts.
In the colonial time, many individual collectors and governments took what they wanted, for example, when the Dutch ruled Indonesia, the French controlled Cambodia and the British reigned in Malaysia – a period that lasted until the middle of the century.
Discussing the 1970 UNESCO Convention, Brad Gordon, Managing Partner of Edenbridge Asia in Cambodia – a firm that has worked on the return of over 300 objects to the country – highlights that the framework only applies to artefacts taken after the 1970s. As a result, ‘the Convention doesn’t help us if something was taken out in the sixties or the fifties,’ he explains.
This is one of the reasons why only four out of the 147 countries that have ratified the Convention are from Southeast Asia – namely, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam – says Stephen Murphy, Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at SOAS University of London. For example, he says, the Convention wouldn’t help the Indonesians in regard to artefacts taken during the Dutch colonial period.
