They spent the next two hours conversing with 74-year-old So Nin about her childhood amidst the ruins of the Angkor kingdom and her memories of the ancient monuments built by the Khmer empire before its collapse in the 15th century.
A few weeks later, four of the visitors returned, carrying books, binders, and a laptop filled with photographs of artifacts from that era, many of which they believed had been stolen and sold overseas.
They showed So photographs of Buddha statues, stoic guardians, and a three-eyed goddess, hoping she might recognize them.
However, she shook her head no.
Then, one photograph caught her attention: a stone slab featuring the Hindu god Vishnu reclining against a giant snake, which today is on display in Pasadena as part of the Asian art collection at the Norton Simon Museum.
Her eyebrows furrowed as she leaned forward to contemplate the carving.
“Can you show us where you saw it?” asked one of the visitors.
The site was just a few miles away at the Ta Keo temple, but she hadn't been there in more than 50 years. They agreed to visit it together the next morning.
The visitors, including a 55-year-old American attorney named Bradley J.
Gordon and three Cambodian women working for him, are leading an expedition to recover thousands of artifacts that disappeared from Cambodia’s temples during a civil war, genocide, and decades of turmoil that followed.
The wholesale plunder started in the late-1960s, as soldiers and local gangs combed through the nation’s temples for statues, carvings, and other objects of cultural significance to smuggle across the border to Thailand. From there, the objects were sold to art brokers, private collectors, and museums worldwide.
Now, Cambodia is accelerating its efforts to bring back the sacred artifacts. “Our cultural heritage should be owned by us,” said Huot Samnang, director of antiquities at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.
“They are our spiritual ancestors, so they should come home.”
The country scored a major victory in December, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City agreed to return 14 pieces from its collection.
But there is much more work to be done. Gordon and his team have been scouring the sanctuaries and neighboring villages for evidence that hundreds of antiquities now on display in U.S. museums had left the country illegally.
The carving that caught So's attention is one of 40 objects of interest at the Norton Simon.
The team is also investigating 48 artifacts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and 90 in other California institutions, including 81 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
“This is a new chapter of our approach,” Gordon said.
As planned, So and the investigators climbed into a minivan for the 10-minute drive to Ta Keo, which was built for a boy king in the 10th century and abandoned after a lightning strike that was deemed an ill omen.
The last time So was there, the temple was surrounded by jungle foliage, and the stones were a glossy black. Since then, most of the trees had been cleared, and the stones had faded to brown and gray. The Vishnu carving that had impressed her as a young woman was missing from its spot above the temple entrance.
“It was beautiful," she said. "I loved it."
So’s recollection alone was not enough to request the return of the artifact from the Norton Simon.
But if villagers can identify where a sculpture or object once stood, Cambodia can conduct an excavation to look for physical proof of looting — a fragment or plinth or limb left behind like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
“The Duryodhana was really the beginning of the restitution renaissance,” Gordon said.
“At that point, we were a small part of the story.”
For the last six months of 2012, Gordon searched Koh Ker for witnesses who might remember the disputed sandstone statue, conducting more than 100 interviews to uncover the local smuggling network responsible for the theft.
In June of 2014, both sculptures — along with another god from the scene, Balarama, that was recovered from Christie’s auction house — were unloaded at the airport in Phnom Penh, decorated with flowers and driven through the streets of the capital on the flatbed of a truck under “welcome home” banners.
Warrack, who attended the homecoming, explained its significance for Cambodians: “They lost 20% of the population during the genocide. None of those people are coming back. They also lost thousands of statues and sculptures.
Those can come back.”
One of the people Gordon interviewed in the Duryodhana case was a former Khmer Rouge foot soldier named Toek Tik, who confessed to stealing hundreds of sacred objects and said he wanted to repent by helping retrieve them.
Soon he would become a key informant for the Cambodian government, under the code name Lion.
In 2018, after the Cambodian government made Gordon a legal advisor on repatriation, the two men began meeting frequently, often traveling to temples where Lion pointed out the former locations of artifacts he had looted.
In the summer of 2021, the meetings took on a greater urgency: Lion was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“He made this decision to just transfer everything he had in his mind to us,” said Gordon, recounting how he and Lion would meet for days on end in Gordon's apartment in Siem Reap.
Before his death later that year, Lion was able to point authorities to dozens of looted artifacts he recognized from museum catalogs and other photographs.
Many of those pieces passed through another known linchpin in the illicit antiquities trade, the British art dealer Douglas Latchford.
For decades, Latchford had enjoyed a reputation as a dedicated patron and scholar of Cambodian art, but he came under scrutiny by U.S. federal prosecutors for his role in supplying the Duryodhana statue.
In 2019, he was indicted for trafficking looted objects and falsifying documents to cover their tracks. He died before trial the following year.
His personal collection of antiquities, valued at more than $50 million, was passed to his daughter, who agreed to give it back to Cambodia. In 2021, the Denver Art Museum returned four other pieces linked to Latchford.
Netscape founder Jim Clark agreed to send back 35 artifacts worth more than $35 million, and the family of pipeline billionaire George Lindemann returned 33 items worth $20 million.
The returns have united most of the supporting cast of the stone showdown between Duryodhana and Bhima, which are now on display at the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Gordon is still seeking the ninth and final figure from the tableau, a statue of the Hindu deity Krishna.
“This whole project means so much to the Cambodians in terms of healing, what you do after war and how do you recover,” he said.
“Now that I’ve spent so much of my life on this, it just makes sense to continue.”
Between visits with So, Gordon stopped by a two-story house along the Siem Reap River.
Accompanying him were three of his researchers, who didn't want their names published because of the sensitivity of cases they are investigating.
In the field, they go by code names: Tida, or beautiful woman; Kanha,