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On a humid evening in 1957, a young businessman named Douglas Latchford saw the object that would change his life. It was a Khmer female figure, about two feet tall, carved in stone. Around him, men in linen suits and women in flowing dresses of Thai silk-guests at an elegant dinner party in Bangkok-clinked glasses and conversed in myriad languages. But Latchford could only stand among them in silence, staring at the statue: the cool gray of its torso, the fine curves of its waist and shoulders. Like most educated Britons of his generation, he was familiar with Greek and Roman sculpture. This was different, less detailed-no rippling muscles or individually sculpted strands of hair-but no less refined. The piece was like nothing Latchford had ever seen, and it stirred a desire he had never before experienced. He felt that he was looking at the human form reduced to its absolute essentials, somehow made more powerful in its simplicity.
New experiences had been a constant since Latchford had arrived in Bangkok the year prior. He was tall and robustly built, with a firm jaw and wavy auburn hair; in the right light, he had a passing resemblance to the actor Roger Moore. Just twenty-four years old, he had to get to know a city that could feel impossibly exotic to outsiders. The only country in Southeast Asia never to have been colonized by a Western power, Thailand-or Siam, as many still called it-was a world apart. Buddhist monks roamed barefoot from house to house, feeding themselves with alms from strangers. The streets teemed not with cars but with samlors, sturdy trishaws pedaled by laborers who dripped sweat in the tropical heat. Barely anyone outside the elite spoke English, and social norms bewildered the uninitiated. To touch a Thai’s head, considered the most sacred part of the body, was a major faux pas, while a smile could indicate anger just as easily as it could signal happiness.
The host of the dinner party, a Belgian aesthete named François Duhau de Berenx, soon noticed that his guest was transfixed by the statue. Its effect was gravitational, magnetic. Latchford knew nothing about its origins, but he knew he needed to possess a figure of his own. “There’s another one at the shop where I bought this,” Duhau de Berenx told him. It was located in the Woeng Nakhon Kasem, or Thieves’ Market, a bazaar in Bangkok’s Chinatown where, as the name suggested, neither the merchants nor the customers were especially concerned about the provenance of goods. Latchford went there the next day, weaving between shirtless children and stores stuffed with so many wares-furniture, luggage, pots, and pans-that they spilled over the sidewalk onto the road. The twin to Duhau de Berenx’s statue was priced at eighteen thousand Thai baht, or about $900-far more than Latchford could afford. He went to his bank, where he meekly explained why he needed a loan. Happily, the manager agreed. Latchford took the object home, where he could adore its form in private, and began reading whatever he could about the Khmer Empire, the civilization that had produced it.
He had virtually no prior exposure to the subject. Latchford had been born in 1931 in Bombay, during the dying days of the British Raj. His father was a banker, and Latchford had led a relatively privileged life. For an English education, his parents sent him to Brighton College, a well-regarded boarding school in Sussex, where he’d read works like The Jungle Book-reminders of the thrilling, verdant land he’d left behind. Compared with India, the United Kingdom of the late 1940s was a depressing place. For Latchford, its leaden skies and economic privation couldn’t compete with the opportunities, and pleasures, on offer in Asia. He skipped university, instead working in Madras and Singapore before moving to Bangkok, where his older brother, Trevor, also chose to pursue a career.
In addition to the challenges of adjusting to the culture, the city had its inconveniences: drinking water had to be boiled, and it was advisable to carry a flashlight when walking at night, to spot the many species of venomous snakes. But for a young man looking for a little adventure, there was nowhere quite like it. Life was lived largely on the water, with hawkers selling melons and coconuts from narrow boats on the khlongs, or canals, that threaded through each neighborhood. On the main waterway, the Chao Phraya, ferries and fishing skiffs puttered past Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, its 270-foot spire decorated with snail shells and pieces of Chinese porcelain. Embassies placed their front doors facing the river, since guests of any distinction were likelier to arrive afloat.
Simply being an expatriate conferred some of that status. For perhaps $200 a month, a foreigner could rent a villa in the heart of the city. For not much more, he could populate it with a full household staff, including a driver, cook, maid, and gardener, plus a managerial “number one,” ideally with a basic command of English, to keep them all in line. Because Bangkok had nothing like the professional competition in London or New York, the barriers to success were relatively low. Some among the expats joked that it was a first-rate place for second-rate people.
Since Thailand was too distant for many foreign companies to set up their own operations, they relied on “agencies”-local firms that imported goods and handled distribution on behalf of multinationals. Despite not having a university degree or much professional training, Latchford soon got a job as an assistant manager at one such firm: Eastern Agencies, which brought to Southeast Asia some of the consumer bounty of the 1950s. The business was relatively simple, and lucrative. Manufacturers had already done the hard work of developing their products. All that was left for an agency to do was to find retailers to stock them and figure out a marketing plan.
The number of people in Bangkok who could afford such goods would soon grow. Early in the Cold War, the US had identified Thailand as a potential bastion for the West. Viewed from Washington, such a fortress was essential. France had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, where forces led by Ho Chi Minh had ejected their former colonial masters; to the south, Malayan Communists were aiming to do the same to Britain. Meanwhile, Mao Zedong’s China appeared to have revolutionary designs on much of the continent, starting with the countries closest to its borders. In 1954, Thailand became a founding member of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, the American-led attempt to create a regional equivalent to NATO, and the alliance’s headquarters were placed in Bangkok.
The US plowed tens of millions of aid dollars into Thailand each year, helping to build highways, airfields, and port facilities, and the economy grew briskly. Soon there were enough US businesses in Bangkok to form an American Chamber of Commerce; at the Oriental, a graceful riverside hotel preferred by every traveler who could afford it, a new, modern wing opened, complete with a French restaurant, Le Normandie, and the capital’s first elevator. In less prestigious quarters, around industrial sites and railway tracks, an unceasing flow of rural migrants erected their own crude shelters-shanties of plywood and sheet metal, accessed by narrow footpaths.
As he settled in, Latchford learned the city’s peculiar social geography. The pinnacle of Thai society was occupied by the royal family, a dynasty that traced its roots to the thirteenth-century Sukhothai Kingdom. For both Thais and foreigners, proximity to the royals was the ultimate currency. Though the country had become a constitutional monarchy in the 1930s, each king remained a powerful political force. Beyond the royals themselves were concentric circles of Thai aristocrats, many of whom were educated overseas. Latchford would eventually befriend some of them, bonding through vigorous games of squash.
But there was also an expatriate elite, centered on a blue-blooded American whom Latchford deeply admired. His name was Jim Thompson. Worldly, cultivated, and at ease in Asia, Thompson was exactly the sort of man Latchford wanted to become. He was also a spy. His route to Bangkok had begun in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. As a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Princeton, Thompson fit right in; the OSS had a habit of recruiting operatives from wealthy East Coast families, prompting some wags to joke that its name really stood for “Oh So Social.” He served heroically, helping prepare the ground for the Allied invasion of southern France. As the conflict in Europe wound down, he was sent to Thailand, tasked with helping to secure it as a postwar ally. Though Thompson had formally resigned from government service in 1947, he remained in Bangkok and continued to do unofficial intelligence work. As the Cold War heated up, the city became a hub for the CIA’s increasingly violent efforts to contain the spread of Communism in Asia.
At the same time, Thompson built a profitable textile business, hiring traditional silk weavers and exporting their fabrics. He abhorred being without company in the evening and so threw constant dinner parties, sometimes with as many as one hundred guests. It seemed that every notable visitor to the city, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Truman Capote, made sure to attend. For many of them, his home was an attraction in itself. Rather than live in a European-style villa, Thompson had bought six traditional Thai houses, built from butter-smooth teak and topped with steeply gabled roofs, in different locations. He then had them floated into Bangkok by barge and assembled on the side of a khlong-an extraordinary homage to the country’s vernacular architecture.
Once Thompson’s guests had finished sipping cocktails on the veranda, boat traffic churning by, he would take his place at the dining table. There he would tell stories about his life in Thailand while his houseboy, Yee, darted about barefoot, keeping glasses refreshed. While the talk was often of politics-Thompson was growing openly disillusioned with US foreign policy, at one point prompting the FBI to investigate him for “un-American activities”-his other favorite topic was antiquities. Like Latchford, Thompson felt a powerful attraction to Khmer statuary, and by the late 1950s he had become a major collector. At one end of his dining room, he kept a stone carving of the four-armed Hindu god Vishnu; elsewhere in the house, Thompson and his guests mingled among bronze Buddhas and dancing apsaras, the heavenly nymphs of Hindu legend.
Thompson and Latchford were friendly at the time, and the younger man listened, rapt, as Thompson recounted his travels to source artifacts-conveying knowledge that Latchford would eventually put to use. Much of what Thompson obtained, he was willing to part with for the right price. In his early days selling statues and bronzes, relatively few outsiders had any experience of Southeast Asia, let alone the objects left by its ancient cultures. But that would begin to change as wealthy travelers took advantage of the shrinking distances of the Jet Age. One of the most enthusiastic was “the richest girl in the world”: six-foot-tall socialite Doris Duke, the only child of tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke. After a visit to Bangkok in 1957, she attempted to purchase a series of Thai houses for shipment to her home in Hawaii. John D. Rockefeller III was another prolific buyer, building a collection that he would eventually put on display in Manhattan.
In what was still an impoverished region, such works seemed like they were there for the taking. In 1959, Thompson became intrigued by rumors of a “lost temple” on the Cambodian border. One Friday in November, he and two friends set out from Bangkok to find it. Driving in a Land Rover, it took them until past midnight to reach Aranyaprathet, the last major town before the frontier. They snatched some brief sleep in a country hotel and set out at dawn into the forest. For much of the morning, they bumped along a track used by logging trucks, lucky to make ten miles an hour. Finally, they emerged into a clearing, where there stood a village of modest wooden houses, ringed with palm trees and rice paddies.
There, the group found some men who agreed to guide them to the place Thompson was looking for. They crossed a flat, grassy area, which Thompson identified as the remains of an ancient moat, pierced by an island of tall trees. Then, “in we went over a huge laterite wall,” he wrote in a letter to his sister Elinor.
It was all cool and green with 150-ft. high trees-ferns of every description, air plants, shafts of sunlight-a great walled enclosure of sandstone and laterite-great towers 60 ft. high still partly standing-piles of gigantic stones carved with dancing Bodhisattvas, acanthus leaves, and other decorations-maidenhair ferns growing out of every crevice-strange birds calling in the trees-blue and orange butterflies flying through the shafts of sunlight.
While his companions snapped photos, Thompson took out a pencil and notepad and surveyed the ruins, producing a detailed sketch of their layout. Later, with a storm moving in, they returned to the village and installed themselves in the open-air hall of its Buddhist pagoda. The residents watched curiously as their visitors tucked into a dinner of canned baked beans and chicken breasts, accompanied by Ballantine’s whisky. The next day, Thompson left with several artifacts, including a stone piece he dated to the seventh or eighth century. “Only known one in Siam is in the museum in Bangkok,” he boasted to Elinor. “Very very rare.”
Armed with Thompson’s advice, Latchford had been trying to educate himself about the Khmer Empire. As a schoolboy in England, he had been captivated by the idea of forgotten temples deep inside trackless jungles. Now, though he excelled at his job importing foreign products to Bangkok, that interest was growing into an obsession, occupying more and more of his waking hours. In Thailand, the legacies of the Khmer civilization were plain to see. At their greatest extent, its dominions had extended nearly to Bangkok, and the country was dotted with ruins. The written form of the Thai language-a forty-four-consonant alphabet of gracefully looping forms-was derived from classical Cambodian script.
Following in Thompson’s footsteps by visiting Khmer sites in Thailand was interesting enough. But Latchford had still never traveled to Cambodia itself. He needed to go to the source.
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The sun climbed steadily up from the tropical horizon, bathing the sandstone below in a brilliant golden hue. In a pair of reflecting pools, five conical towers mirrored themselves precisely, gilded by the advancing dawn. The same light streamed through the pillars at the opening of a cool stone gallery, illuminating carved friezes of breathtaking intricacy-scenes from the Hindu epics that anchored the spiritual lives of their makers. Just beyond, in the jungle that extended almost to the perimeter of the structure, macaques and gibbons called out to one another across the foliage, indifferent to the presence of one of humanity’s most impressive architectural achievements.
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