Many shops in Yangon now specialise in selling antique reproductions – like this figure for sale at Nandawun in Ahlone township – to stop the illegal export of Myanmar’s genuine treasures. Pic: Christopher Davy

“HISTORY for sale” reads the caption, below a Myanmar sandstone figure from the 16th century. Under the headline “The thrill is in the hunt”, the article – published last year in a major Australian newspaper – tells readers how to find “bargain antiques” in Bangkok “without being had” by dealers.

“Bangkok is a clearing house for treasures from all parts of Indochina – Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It’s where all the very finest art works go,” the article gushes.

Celadon ceramics from Chiang Mai. Wooden Buddha figures from Myanmar. Hmong textiles from Laos.

It’s all there, in an orgy of consumerism that left the reporter exclaiming they’ve rarely entered a Bangkok antique shop “and not found at least one piece that is simply screaming to be bought”.

However, it is not mentioned once that taking these objects out of their country of origin is usually illegal. The emphasis in this article is how buyers can avoid being “jipped”, rather than whether they are stealing a country’s heritage.

Most countries in Southeast Asia have laws to protect their cultural heritage. Myanmar has a long list of items that cannot be legally taken out of the country, including religious items, such as Buddha images and parabaik, bronze and clay pipes and bronze, stone or wood sculptures or carvings.

“According to [the Antiquities Act], antique items are not allowed to be traded locally or abroad,” says U San Win, the director general of the Department of Archaeology under the Ministry of Culture. “Any item which will be exported abroad should have an expert’s opinion from the Department of Archaeology that the items are not antiques. The expert must check it thoroughly and issue a certificate for it.”

“It is important for us that our country’s cultural properties are preserved. We are also cooperating with the neighbouring countries.”

Dr Rachanie Thosarta, formerly of the Fine Arts Department in Thailand, has dedicated much of her life to fighting the illicit trade in antiques in her home country and abroad.

She says Thailand is a “large market for the sale of illegal antiquities … [despite] legislation designed to safeguard cultural heritage”.

She describes trading of illicit antiques in Thailand and neighbouring countries as a “cancer. … The trading never stops”.

It is hard to say how much money changes hands in this illicit trade. Dougald O’Reilly, the founder and director of Heritage Watch, a Phnom Penh-based NGO, quotes sources that put the value of cultural items smuggled from Southeast Asia at US$22 million annually. Trafficking in stolen works of art and national treasures is valued at up to $8 billion a year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US.

But it is equally hard to define exactly what is illicit trading. Heritage Watch project coordinator Terressa Davis told Inter Press Service that “80 percent of the catalogues of international auction houses have no provenance” – the information on an item’s origin and history of ownership.

“The absence of provenance could mean either they really don’t know where the item came from, or the information could be incriminating,” she says.
In Myanmar, provenance is often hard to come by, says archaeologist Bob Hudson, who has worked extensively in the country.

“It is very difficult to tell whether something is genuine,” Mr Hudson, from Australia’s University of Sydney, says. “I think most of what is sold to foreigners as ‘antiques’ are actually copies or at least more recent material – say within the last 120 years – which often come from old monasteries.”

He cites the recent example of three Bagan bronzes, which sold for “several hundred thousand dollars but then turned out to be of recent Mandalay manufacture”.

“One story I have heard is how bronze makers will take a statue, treated with some kind of sulphur mix, and place it with a villager somewhere – so when the scouts for the antique shops come looking for old stuff that has been dug up, they buy the bronze from the ‘simple’ farmer, and from then on its provenance is genuine – ‘I got it from the farmer who dug it up.’”

“This does not mean that ‘genuine’ antiques do not sometimes find their way out of the country, but I suspect they are greatly outnumbered by reproductions.”

“The important pieces, whether genuinely antique or not, seem often to end up in the hands of local collectors, or in some cases the archaeology department or museums.”

It is the underground trade that is most worrying for those fighting antique smuggling. Ernelle Berliet, an archaeologist who wrote her thesis about Myanmar, agrees that many objects for sale in Bangkok are most likely reproductions.

“But some are likely to be real and the greatest pieces are usually not displayed in the gallery but stay underground and go directly from the seller to the customer without being displayed,” Ms Berliet says.

Despite the best efforts of the authorities in the region, it seems some antiques are slipping through the cracks. On January 25, The New York Times reported that FBI agents had raided a gallery and four museums in California as part of an investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from four countries, including Myanmar and Thailand.

While the items are not believed to be particularly rare or valuable, the perpetrators were caught largely because they were defrauding the Internal Revenue Service, which would indicate many more items are being smuggled undetected.

In a further twist, the antiquities were illegally imported because they were labelled as reproductions – with a “Made in Thailand” sticker.

But Ms Berliet says the market in Bangkok appears to have shifted from Myanmar antiques to countries with less stringent anti-smuggling laws.

“What I see mostly for sale these days in Bangkok, in terms of very ancient art, is a lot of pieces from Bengal that are unfortunately real. A lot of them are from the first centuries CE, while others are pala sculptures from the 10th to 12th century CE.”

There is some evidence that many of Myanmar’s treasures may have already left the country – particularly in the period before 1988 – for two reasons.

In the colonial era, there was a “commonly held notion that westerners could just take stuff, sometimes with a semi-official payment”, Mr Hudson says. Many pieces ended up in British museums. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum still has a significant collection of Myanmar pieces. Some items were returned in 1964 in a gesture of goodwill, including King Thibaw’s 8-metre-high throne, which is now on display in Yangon’s National Museum.

Experts are largely in agreement on how to combat the trade in antiques. While punitive measures may have some effect, cooperation at the national level coupled with education at the grassroots level are considered the most effective method.

Heritage Watch says education has begun to work in Cambodia, which has seen many of its Khmer artefacts end up in Bangkok shops and auction houses. Mr Rasmi is also an advocate of education but says buyers should also be targeted by education campaigns.

“Education about the past is a powerful tool to make people aware of their history, identity, heritage, and community or national pride,” Mr Rasmi says. “We need to promote a new perspective about the value of artefacts, and show that they are meaningless if we don’t know their context. We must change the public perception of artefacts solely as art objects.”

Dr Rachanie Thosarta is more blunt.
“The main problem is the demand; rich people want to buy and collect these antiques,” she says.

In Myanmar, most businesses have moved away from genuine antiques to reproductions and are not afraid to admit it.

Dr Thant Thaw Kaung, the managing director of Nandawun on Baho Road in Ahlone township, says most buyers here are happy to purchase high quality reproductions of Myanmar handicrafts.

“The Western market is very much interested in antiques but these don’t need to be real – as long as they look like antiques, that’s fine. So we call them reproductions and don’t promote them as antiques,” he says. “Most of our customers ask for a reproduction these days. They understand the dangers of exporting real antiques and understand that we want to protect against that.”

“Some customers will hunt for the real antiques, most of which have left the country already,” he says. “Maybe five or six years ago when I went to Bangkok and Chiang Mai I would see a lot of real, genuine antiques. But I think the law enforcement agencies on the Myanmar side have clamped down a lot and so there are more and more reproductions.”

He says local companies – with the exception of a few who deal in religious antiques – also know they have a responsibility to preserve Myanmar’s heritage.

“These items are the treasure of our country,” he says, “and if they end up in private collections then no one can see them.”