Lintel from Prasat Nong Hong

Lintel from Prasat Nong Hong

The Nong Hong lintel was removed from above one of the inner sanctum doorways of Prasat Nong Hong temple in Buri Ram Province, Thailand at some point in the 1960s.

Both it and the Khao Lon lintel later surfaced in the private collection of Avery Brundage, an industrialist and International Olympic Committee president who donated over 7,000 Asian artworks and antiquities to the city of San Francisco from 1959 through the 1970s, forming the core collection of what is now the Asian Art Museum.

In 1966, the same year the Asian Art Museum opened, Brundage had bought the Nong Hong lintel from a London auction house for USD$15,000 after a Paris dealer commissioned it for sale, investigators found. The Paris dealer told Brundage one of the lintels had been stolen from Thailand, while another artifact had been taken out of Thailand illegally, court records show. A second dealer told Brundage that one of the lintels had been reported stolen by Thailand, whose 1934 Act on Ancient Monuments, Objects of Art, Antiquities and National Museums prohibited its export without a permit.

Thai authorities had asked Brundage for the return of the lintels before he died in 1975. Brundage had proposed that both stay on display at the San Francisco museum, calling it a “wonderful advertisement for your country and it’s culture.” The Thai government had thanked Brundage for his offer but said it “would be happier if it did not involve theft and mutilation of our monuments.”

The claim went unresolved for decades until 2016, when Thai Archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong was conducting research for his doctorate at Burapha University and discovered images of the lintels in the San Francisco museum’s catalogs. He recalled black and white slides from university classes that showed the lintels in situ in the 1950s. One slide, dated to 1959, showed the Prasat Nong Hong lintel specifically. Tanongsak remembered it because it was unique: Yama, lord of death, rarely decorated Khmer temples in Thailand.

Tanongsak initiated a new online campaign for their return, eventually convincing the Thai consul general in San Francisco to visit the museum in person and request their return. The museum did not respond to the consul general, so Thai officials reached out to the U.S. government in May 2017 and organized a formal Thai repatriation committee that included Tanongsak. The Thai government then issued an official request for the repatriation of the artifacts. That began a three-year probe led by Homeland Security Investigations that eventually resulted in the forfeiture of the two lintels. The Asian Art Museum claimed that the repatriation was already in progress when the government seized them.

In 2020, the museum removed a bust of Brundage from its vestibule, acknowledging that he was known as a Nazi-sympathizer who had championed anti-semitic views and was investigated by the FBI for ties to the Nazi party. "We took down the bust because Brundage’s racist, sexist and anti-Semitic words, and actions, simply don’t reflect our values as a public museum that welcomes everyone," the museum stated.

In a ceremony in Los Angeles on May 2021, the lintels began what Manasvi Srisodapol, Thailand’s Ambassador to the United States, called their “sacred journey back home.” The pair is now on display at the Bangkok National Museum in Phra Nakhon.

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Architecture – antefixes, doors, sconces, friezes

Khmer

Avery Brundage

Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

B66S10

Thailand

Damien Huffer

Jason Felch