Angkor Revisited: How Master Craftsmen Are Forging Khmer Antiquities

Dusty statues litter the floor of Di Bun Pheav's workshop, arms snapped off of their blackened torsos. A statue of Ganesh lies near a pedestal with a pair of feet attached. Pieces of broken statues are everywhere. To the untrained eye, the yard looks like an archeological site, with stone elbows jutting out from under shrubs and mounds of dirt. But despite the wear and tear they exhibit, the pieces are barely a year old.

'If someone dug these up from the ground, they would think they're originals,' says Pheav, whose friends call him Terry.

For 12 years, Terry has worked to perfect his craft, artificially ageing statues so that professional archaeologists have trouble distinguishing them from pieces from the Angkorian period, which lasted from the ninth to the 15th century.

Terry is part of a small group of Siem Reap sculptors who are creating high-end reproductions of antiquities. In workshops around the province, they carve and age sculptures that perfectly duplicate ancient works. Their statues are then sold to art dealers in Thailand, many of whom market the items to tourists and art dealers as genuine Angkorian or pre-Angkorian pieces. Sometimes, the items are sold to European dealers who can sell them for millions of dollars to museums and auction houses in the United States and Europe.

Khmer antiquities have been sold in auction houses for prices as high as $3 million, though a sampling of more than 300 Khmer sculptures sold at Sotheby's in New York between 1988 and 2010 averaged $17,000 to $24,000 per item.

According to Jim Sanborn, an American sculptor who studies Khmer antiquities, only about 40 percent of the Khmer antiquities for sale in Bangkok's River City gallery complex, where much of the Cambodian-made statuary is sold, are genuine. He also says that a portion of the Khmer antiquities that have ended up in museums are not as old as they appear to be.

Many collectors see the pieces as well-made forgeries, intended to dupe buyers, a fact that would render their makers criminals. But Sanborn says the artists are providing a valuable service. Amid the chaos of war and the Khmer Rouge regime, looters plundered genuine Cambodian artefacts throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Artists like Terry, Sanborn says, are meeting the foreign demand for ancient artwork without contributing to the rampant looting of the Kingdom's temples.

'This large-scale production of perfect replicas is both heroic and legal,' he says. 'These artists are not producing forgeries. Their works only attain that moniker when...