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Thailand’s National Museum hosted a welcome-home ceremony for two ancient statues that were illegally trafficked from the country by a British collector of antiquities.
A tall bronze figure called the Standing Shiva or Golden Boy and a smaller sculpture called Kneeling Female are thought to be around 1,000 years old.
They were returned from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This most recent repatriation of artwork comes as many museums in the U.S. and Europe reckon with collections that contain objects looted from Asia, Africa and other places during centuries of colonialism or in times of upheaval.
The Metropolitan Museum had announced last December that it would return more than a dozen artifacts to Thailand and Cambodia after they were linked to the late Douglas Latchford, an art dealer and collector accused of running a huge antiquities trafficking network out of Southeast Asia.
