Thai experts probing mystery of 9 Buddhist relics returned from Australia
The Fine Arts Department is examining nine Buddhist antiquities that were returned to Thailand on Wednesday after spending over a century in Australia.
Murray Upton, an Australian national, told the Thai Embassy in Canberra that he had inherited the wooden Buddha statues from his father who had possessed them since 1911 after working in Siam as a railway engineer.
Standing 10 to 15 centimetres tall, the nine carvings were handed over to the Fine Arts Dept at a ceremony held by the Foreign Ministry in Bangkok.
The statues are believed to have been carved in the southern province of Trang but experts at the department will compare them with similar relics to confirm their origins and date. The nine statues will be conserved and placed in the National Museum’s storage facility in Pathum Thani before going on display.
The statues are the latest in a long line of artifacts to be returned to Thailand after centuries of looting and black-market trade in Thai Buddhist relics.
In 2018, a treasure trove comprising two stone lintels and 13 Buddha statues dating back to the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods was returned from the US. They had been on display at New York museums after being smuggled out of Thailand in the 1960s.
