Guest Speech｜Chhay Visoth, Director of National Museum of Cambodia
Date：2022-06-10
Speech by Chhay Visoth, Director of National Museum of Cambodia
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Good afternoon from Cambodia. My name is Chhay Visoth. I am the director of the National Museum of Cambodia. Today it is a great pleasure for me to attend the dialogue online which is organized by the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative. My presentation will be about the returning to my art objects to the National Museum of Cambodia. Let me brief you the contents of my presentation. The first part is gonna be about the history of the National Museum and its collection, the missing objects from Cambodia, the repatriation of Khmer ancient object to the National Museum Cambodia, and the conclusion.
The first museum of Cambodia was built in 1905 during the colonial times. And then the second one was built in 1920, where larger collection are housing until the present time. There are 18,115 objects that are housing in the National Museum collections. And these collections are stone, wood, metal, ceramics, and also textile. These collections were from the mission that École française d'Extrême-Orient did between 1898 to 1975 from the excavation, from purchasing, from seizing of the border between Cambodia and Thailand, and also from donation from local and international friends.
For the missing objects from Cambodia, as you know, the emerge of the Khmer civilization attract the interest of western researchers and also collectors. As a result, many objects are moving from the original places for a different reason. It can be the safety reason, can be the reason for exhibition and also for selling to the art markets. We can see two different periods of missing object in Cambodia. One is during the French colonial time, because they just tried to collect all the object for displaying in Paris, in France. And also some other researchers when they came, they just want to bring back the collection for their own purpose to display or selling in Paris. After French colonial time, we have a very bad experiences with the looting side in order to bring the art object to sell between the Khmer and Thai border, especially from 1970s.
The third part of my presentation is about the returning Khmer art object to the National Museum of Cambodia. Up to date, we have about 5240 objects brought back to Cambodia and housing at the National Museum Cambodia between 1996 to 2021. We have two different sources of these collections donated to the National Museum of Cambodia. One is local donation and another one is international donation, I mean, from different country to our Cambodia. For local donation we can see 4442 objects. These come from the government institution or from individual, while another 798 objects through the channels of the government negotiations, individuals and expatriate, or foreigners who are living in Cambodia. They get into the question, why can Cambodian get all these artifacts back? The first is because we have, Cambodia have, law on the protecting of cultural heritage in 1996, we have ratified the UNESCO convention in 1970 on the means of protecting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property, to which both countries are state parties. Another one, MOU, between Cambodia and US on the imposition of import restrictions on Khmer archaeological material. Another one is about archaeological remain from the site itself that can prove the origins of the statue publication. It can be book or catalogues and archive, documents. In some cases we need to use the lawsuit to auction agency or institution or individual in order to claim, to get our object back. But the best way that our Cambodian government do, it's about negotiation. We try our best to negotiate to get those artifacts back. Last but not least, we have 14 countries give objects back to Cambodia.
In conclusion, Cambodia is one of the greatest countries for our cultural heritage in Southeast Asia, but it has a very bad history of looting cultural object from art markets. The Regal government Cambodia is working so hard to get the missing object back home through diplomatic negotiation with other countries, institutions or individual art dealers. We are going to continue negotiating with collectors for some objects looting during the 1970s. And the National Museum will play an important role for the process of getting ancient objects back to Cambodia. Thank you so much.
