To Finance Their Lifestyle, a Young French Couple Went to Cambodia to Steal Antiquities. They Did Almost Everything Wrong

One morning in November 1923, a young French couple stopped by the headquarters of the École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO), the French School for the Far East, a stuccoed, ochre-painted villa shaded by frangipani and banyan trees in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. 

The pair had just arrived by boat and were soaking up the atmosphere of Southeast Asia. “The soup seller at the corner of the street, squatting beside his little bamboo stove, fussing over the embers on which the fish soup will simmer,” Clara Malraux, the wife, would write later, recalling the sights of the city. “The rickshaw driver running barefoot, panting between the wooden shafts of his car.”

Passing through a stately portico, the couple entered a reception room, where they introduced themselves to the school’s acting director, Léonard Aurousseau. They had come to Indochina, they explained, on a research trip: They planned to trek into the Cambodian jungle to explore remnants of the Royal Road, the main highway of the Khmer Empire, which had ruled much of Southeast Asia for 600 years until its collapse in the 15th century. Further, they had already obtained the endorsement of the Colonial Office in Paris for their research, which would include making drawings of Khmer antiquities. But before venturing into the wilderness, they needed to have their laissez-passer validated by the EFEO.

Examining their credentials, Aurousseau warned them that the region where they were heading was dangerous: Two EFEO scholars had recently been killed there by local armed groups. They brushed off the admonition. He also told them that any objects they found must be left in situ or excavated solely on behalf of the school. Too many had been appropriated by archaeologists and others who had flocked to Cambodia in recent decades, since the French naturalist Henri Mouhot brought the ruins of Angkor, the ancient Khmer capital, to the attention of Europeans in 1860. 

Having received their passes, they met Henri Parmentier, the EFEO’s Paris-born head of archaeology, who was tasked with documenting, safeguarding and restoring the monuments of Cambodia and Southern Vietnam. Parmentier, whom the Frenchwoman later described as a “somewhat strapping old bohemian,” was charmed by the couple’s evident interest in Khmer art and culture, and he offered to meet them in Phnom Penh and escort them upriver to Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor. 

But the couple were not researchers, and the fieldwork they described was a ruse. The Frenchman, André Malraux, would become one of the 20th century’s cultural giants. He later fought with the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War; joined the French Resistance during World War II; wrote such celebrated novels as Man’s Fate, a sweeping tale of self-sacrifice and betrayal set during the Chinese Revolution; received close to 100 nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature; became a confidant of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon; and served as France’s influential minister of cultural affairs under President Charles de Gaulle. But even today, Malraux remains an ambiguous figure: heroic and duplicitous, a genius and a rogue, and a foe of colonialism whose legacy remains tarnished by one impetuous act deep in the Cambodian jungle. That episode not only altered his life and that of his wife; it was an early flashpoint in coming disputes over Asia’s ownership of its cultural heritage and the legitimacy of colonial authority.

The French had dreamed of carving a colonial empire out of Indochina for generations. French missionaries arrived in Vietnam in the 17th century and began converting much of the population to Catholicism. In 1858, the French government, joined by its Spanish allies, used the pretext of protecting Catholics to dispatch warships and 3,000 troops to Southeast Asia, and within months they had captured Saigon. 

The French were also eyeing Cambodia. Mouhot, with the backing of Great Britain’s Royal Geographic Society and the Zoological Society of London, sailed for Indochina in 1858 on an expedition to collect flora and fauna. Two years later, he followed the tributaries of the Mekong and, deep in the jungle, came upon Angkor. Other Westerners had seen the ancient capital, but none had described or drawn it as vividly as Mouhot. “There are ruins of such grandeur,” he wrote, “that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works?” He rhapsodized about the largest temple, Angkor Wat, “a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michaelangelo,” and the Bayon, a Buddhist temple with stone towers adorned with 200 enigmatically smiling faces. 

In 1863, the French, citing “threats” from the king of neighboring Siam, pressured the Cambodian ruler, King Norodom, into a treaty of protection, which allowed troops to enter the country. Ten years after that, the French governor general marched into the Royal Palace and forced Norodom to cede control of his country. French administrators quickly set up sugar plantations and put the peasantry to work at low pay under harsh conditions. Soldiers and govern­ment officials grabbed whatever Khmer antiquities they could. One naval officer, Louis Delaporte, removed 70 sculptures, lintels and bas-­reliefs from Ang­kor and other sites and shipped them to the Guimet Museum in Paris. He argued that he was saving them from destruction. “Khmer art,” Delaporte wrote, “has remained the most beautiful expression of human genius in this vast part of Asia.” In the wake of Delaporte’s looting spree, colonial authorities declared all relics state property and forbade their export, but many temples remained unguarded. 

Malraux, born in 1901 in Paris, fell under the spell of Indochina as a young man. The son of a swaggering but failing stockbroker who would die by suicide in 1930, he grew up after his parents’ divorce with his mother, aunt and Italian grandmother, a small-time grocer in a Paris exurb. Dropping out of school at 17, he dreamed of literary fame. “Malraux liked to think of himself as an accursed poet of genius,” wrote his biographer Olivier Todd in 2002. “He could see himself not only in Hugo, but in Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.” For a while, Malraux scratched out a living buying and selling antiquarian books, including pornography, while writing essays on Cubist and Dadaist art for avant-garde magazines. In the evenings, he frequented the bohemian cafés of Montmartre, sporting a fedora, a cane, a silk poplin shirt and a fake pearl pin, a cigarette cocked between his lips. He had “a dark beauty and a magnetism,” Todd, who met him in the 1940s, wrote about the young dandy. Malraux’s friend, the writer Pascal Pia, observed that “a love of art and a taste for travel tormented him from his youth.”

In 1921, another friend introduced Malraux to Clara Goldschmidt, a writer-editor for the influential modernist Paris magazine Action! and the daughter of prosperous German Jews. Four years older than Malraux, Goldschmidt, wrote Todd, was “effervescent, cosmopolitan, five-foot-nothing, gray eyes, dark brown hair, a rather long nose and a determined chin.” After a whirlwind courtship of tango dancing and cabaret-going, they married that October. 

Shortly afterward, the couple hatched a plot. Modest collectors of Asian art, they had visited Parisian auction houses and become aware of the soaring prices being paid for Cambodian statuary. In 1923, after reversals in the Paris stock exchange wiped out much of their savings, Malraux proposed that they head for Indochina. “From Siam to Cambodia, along the Royal Route, there [are] large temples, those that were identified and described in the [government] inventory, but there [are] certainly others, smaller ones still unknown today,” Malraux told his wife, according to her memoir, Our Twenty Years. He said that they should “go to some small temple, take a few statues, sell them in America and live comfortably for two or three years.”

To prepare for the journey, the couple spent hours in the National Library and at the Guimet Museum studying Parmentier’s surveys. According to Walter Langlois, who wrote a 1966 study of the couple’s time in Indochina, they were also careful to read up on the laws of Cambodian archaeological sites, and they believed they had discovered a loophole: Some newfound temples might not yet have fallen under government protection. The most prominent was a Hindu temple complex in the greater Angkor region called Banteay Srei. Built in A.D. 967 by a revered guru to two Khmer kings, it was adorned with friezes depicting scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the sacred texts of Hinduism. The site fell into disuse in the 12th century, after Jayavarman VII declared Buddhism the state religion; gradually consumed by jungle, it was uncovered again only in 1914. Surveying it two years later, Parmentier wrote that it was “a marvel without equal in Cambodia.” The high-quality pink sandstone, quarried a few miles from the site, made its friezes almost impervious to decay, preserving the artworks in remarkable condition. “Its decoration and its refinement,” Parmentier went on, “give it incomparable beauty.” 

In her memoir, Clara Malraux described the plan: “We decided to head toward Banteay Srei, then lost in the bush.” Since Parmentier’s visit, she wrote, “no one had gone there to see what had happened to it. Perhaps it had collapsed under the vines? Perhaps it had transformed into hearthstones [because] stone is rare in this region.” Lia Genovese, an expert in French Indochina and a biographer of the Malrauxs, believes that Clara may have been the real instigator of the scheme. In her view, the couple was driven by both a thirst for adventure and a smug sense of superiority. “This was an escapade, done almost on a dare, and they never thought they would get caught,” Genovese told me. “Their attitude was, ‘People are so dim-witted; we’ll get away with it.’”

In November 1923, André and Clara Malraux rendezvoused in Saigon with Louis Chevasson, an amiable bookseller whom Malraux had known since grammar school. Malraux needed Chevasson “to do their dirty work,” Genovese says, including cutting stones and hauling crates. Then they traveled by boat up the Mekong River to Phnom Penh, “the Pearl of the Orient,” dominated by the pagodas and spires of the 19th-century Royal Palace.

One of their first encounters in the capital was fateful. At the Albert Sarraut Museum, today the National Museum of Cambodia, a stylized Khmer temple with serpentlike roof finials, they met the institution’s founding director and principal architect, George Groslier. The son of colonial civil servants, Groslier “had been conceived, born and nurtured in Cambodia, and its essence infused his soul,” his biographer, Kent Davis, told me recently. Groslier was a painter, the founder of a local art school, an expert in Cambodian dance and a conservator. “He believed in restoring Khmer art to the Khmer people. He saw their artistic past, their greatness, and thought it belonged to Cambodia.”

Malraux, hoping to line up additional support for the Royal Road project, tried to charm him. “Malraux was a young kid, smart and reckless, who used the people he needed,” Davis says. But as Groslier led the couple through the exhibit halls, Malraux kept asking him what certain artworks might fetch in Paris galleries, and Groslier sensed that he was up to something. “The impression that Mr. Malraux had left on me,” Groslier would recall bluntly, was “unfavorable.” 

On December 7, Malraux, Clara and Chevasson, with Parmentier as their escort, arrived in Siem Reap and checked into the town’s sole tourist bungalow. Parmentier went off to survey a local temple, leaving the trio unsupervised. Meanwhile, François Crémazy, a local French administrator, helped the group recruit a dozen guides and porters, along with six ox-cart drivers and their two-wheeled carts. Then they set out down a muddy path, the local workers hacking the underbrush with knives and sweeping away stinging insects and venomous snakes. “Something is rotting around us, there is no longer just the danger of the vines, there is that of this thick, reddish earth, which the horses have trouble getting rid of,” Clara wrote. “There are also the mosquitoes, a curtain of angry insects that accompanies us, that we cross, that reforms around us, in front of us, behind us.”

The jungle slog lasted two days, with an overnight stop at a crude traveler’s hut. Meals consisted of pork, bread and yams cooked inside a large earthen termite mound. Finally, they crossed the Siem Reap River—here a narrow stream—and arrived at an ancient, paved promenade. The guides led them through a broken gate, then down a stone corridor choked with vegetation. In his 1930 novel, The Royal Way, about two French adventurers seeking treasure in Cambodia, Malraux presented a version of the scene. Before one character “lay a chaos of fallen stones, some of them lying flat, but most of them upended; it looked like a mason’s yard invaded by the jungle.” The novel’s larger story was fictional, but the description of the heist, according to Malraux’s biographers and witnesses to the crime, was largely accurate. One of the fortune seekers straddled a stone block that had tumbled from a wall and began to cut away a bas-relief. The tool “bit into the sandstone with a shrill, rasping sound,” Malraux wrote. “At his fifth stroke it skidded; when he drew it from the fissure, he found that all its teeth were gone.”

Undeterred, the accomplices clambered over banyan tree roots and broken stones and approached three miniature temples, or prasat, standing side by side. The upper parts had collapsed, but several perfectly preserved friezes of buxom, scantily clad deities, known as devatas, framed by geometric and floral patterns, covered the six-foot-high stumps. Surmising that the “dancing girls” might together fetch them 500,000 francs or more—tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars today—the men attacked the stones with chisels and hammers. “Suddenly … the blows were sounding differently,” Malraux wrote. “The stone had split! Sunlight sparkled on the break; the sculptured frontage had split off clean and was lying on the ground, like a newly severed head.” 

In real life, Malraux, Chevasson and Clara placed their stolen prizes into seven crates marked “chemical products,” a bounty including five goddesses and two votive tablets featuring a male guardian and a bearded ascetic, plus four friezes carved with elaborate headdresses. Then they turned around and plodded back through the jungle. To avoid Siem Reap, they carted the load toward the Tonlé Sap Lake, 16 miles south of the town, where they boarded a steamboat and stashed the crates in the hold. Malraux intended to transport the friezes across the lake to the Tonlé Sap River, a tributary of the Mekong, and then sail downstream 270 miles to Saigon. There, they would put the precious cargo on a ship to Europe.

But things did not go according to plan. Crémazy, the French administrator, had been suspicious of Malraux from the start, and he planted spies among the porters and guides. Tipped off, he telegraphed Gros­lier, who, his own suspicions confirmed, obtained a search warrant from the state prosecutor. Then Groslier raced up the road to the port of Kampong Chhnang, near where the lake meets the river, to stop the thieves before they could abscond to Saigon.

Groslier arrived while the ship was still moored at the dock. The museum director boarded the vessel, opened the crates, and directed the captain to keep Malraux and his accomplices on board. Then he telegraphed ahead to the police in Phnom Penh, 55 miles downriver, through which the boat would pass on its way to Saigon. Late on Christmas Eve 1923, as church bells tolled across Phnom Penh, the ship arrived at the port. “Two inspectors from the Sûreté”—French law enforcement—“boarded the steamer,” a local journalist reported, “and after indicating to two passengers, MM. Malraux and Chevasson, that they had been ordered to search their baggage, had the latter opened and found … some pieces of statuary from the Angkor ruins.” Police detained the trio at the Grand Manolis, a comfortable hotel opposite the police headquarters. 

On January 5, 1924, L’Echo du Cambodge, the country’s largest newspaper, reported that Malraux and his accomplices had been arrested for committing “an act of pillage, which bespeaks an unbelievable audacity … and special knowledge of the value of the sculptures that were stolen.” In her memoir, Clara tried to minimize the crime. “I was not going to be upset because they had found in our crates fragments of a nearly collapsed temple,” she wrote, “to which, for years, so little attention had been paid that it could have collapsed, torn apart by the roots of the banyan trees or demolished by a peasant’s tools.” 

Clara’s illusions melted away three months later, when the prosecutor handed down a felony indictment and set a trial date in July. Clara, still in custody at the Grand Manolis, had a nervous breakdown. “That evening,” Malraux wrote to the high commissioner from the hotel, “my wife poisoned herself with Veronal,” a barbiturate used to treat insomnia. (She recovered at a local hospital.) 

Malraux, in less-than-heroic fashion, persuaded Chevasson to take the rap, arguing that if Malraux were acquitted, he could travel to France to file an appeal on his friend’s behalf. “He has admitted acting entirely alone,” Malraux wrote in the same letter. “While I await judgment with some impatience, I do so without any anxiety.” Weeks later, deciding that she was too fragile to withstand a trial, authorities released Clara Malraux from custody, and she returned to France.

The proceedings against André Malraux and Chevasson opened on July 16 at the criminal court of Phnom Penh, a neoclassical villa with a red-tile roof across the road from the Royal Palace. For two days, the judge took testimony from Crémazy; the Cambodian guides and ox drivers; Malraux and Chevasson; and Parmentier. In hot water with his EFEO bosses for failing to protect Banteay Srei, the French archaeologist downplayed the crime, even praising the care the thieves had taken with their chisels. The defense attorney argued that Banteay Srei had not been under official protection and denounced what he called the state’s desire to “mercilessly punish two young people guilty of removing a few stones from a virtually abandoned monument.” 

Malraux’s strategy to blame Chevasson crumbled. “The proceedings showed that Chevasson did not have the intelligence to engineer an elaborate plan,” Genovese, the Malraux biographer, told me. On Monday, July 21, the judge found both men guilty of theft and sentenced them to among the harshest punishments allowed by law: for Malraux, three years in prison and a five-year prohibition of residence in Indochina. For Chevasson, 18 months. Both petitioned for a hearing before the court of appeals in Saigon and were released until the court could weigh in. 

In France, the press was divided. “Gentleman Fop Sentenced to Three Years in Prison,” declared Le Matin with derision. Le Journal reported that Malraux had not hesitated to “completely sack a temple … and make off with a ton of booty.” But other newspapers, praising Malraux’s literary promise, called the sentence a travesty. In Paris, meanwhile, Clara Malraux rallied some of France’s most influential literati behind her husband, repeating the argument that the temple had been abandoned and the objects were largely worthless. André Gide, André Breton and other French authors petitioned France’s Ministry of Justice to suspend the sentences. In October 1924, the Saigon Court of Appeal, while striking down the verdict, still found the men guilty of damaging a protected site, but it reduced the sentences to a year for Malraux and six months for Chevasson. Nevertheless, the French government immediately suspended the sentences.

For those close to the crime, the absence of a punishment did not go down well. Jeanne Leuba, a writer and the wife of Parmentier, described Malraux and Clara in a letter as “two unpleasant, pretentious and ill-mannered scoundrels.” Groslier would dismiss Malraux as “le petit voleur”—the little thief—and remained furious that he had stayed out of prison. “The secretive little so-and-so,” he wrote to a friend, “had hidden from us that he was a decadent man of letters in order to pass himself off in our eyes as a well-informed archaeologist.” In 1926, the appeals court issued its final judgment, reaffirming the men’s guilt, but by then the matter was moot. 

Malraux would never apologize for what he had done. Yet the enforced sojourn in Phnom Penh and later in Saigon, while awaiting his appeal, seemed to shake him out of his apolitical self-absorption, Genovese says. Malraux had spent months observing the French colonial system’s underbelly: the theft of antiquities by corrupt officials, the casual racism and cruelty, heavy-handed attempts to stifle anti-French protests and the press. Only months after his return to France in late 1924, he and Clara traveled back to Saigon, where he founded a pro-independence newspaper called L’Indochine and joined the Young Annam Movement, which opposed the French presence in the region. “Malraux moved from political indifference to political commitment,” wrote the French scholar Raoul Jennar in How Malraux Became Malraux, published in 2015. The looter of Cambodia’s patrimony had morphed into an agitator for the anticolonial cause. 

Vietnam also served as a jumping off point for Malraux’s next adventures. In 1925, on a trip to Hong Kong to buy linotype for his new­spaper (which was later squeezed out of business by French authorities), he took an excursion up the Pearl River to Canton. Clashes were breaking out between Communist workers and the right-wing Kuomintang government, led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1928, Malraux published The Conquerors, a novel about the Canton uprising, and it gave the author what he had long craved: recognition as a major literary voice. In Man’s Fate, his masterpiece, published five years later, Malraux chronicled the heroics of a failed Communist uprising in Shanghai and a massacre of sympathizers by the Kuomintang. “All that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends … to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity,” he wrote. Malraux regarded communism as a powerful force against injustice, and he romanticized armed struggle. It was, some observed, as if he needed to redeem himself after the courts had branded him a criminal. Malraux’s conviction, wrote the American literary critic Roger Shattuck in 1968, had “a traumatic effect,” forcing Malraux to square off with “the dark angel of his own past.” 

Malraux continued to redefine himself as a foe of authoritarianism and a voice of the oppressed. When civil war broke out in Spain, in July 1936, he used his rising influence to secure French aircraft on behalf of the Republicans, then organized air crews and accompanied them on operations. He joined the French Resistance in 1944, taking part in the harassment of an SS division as it moved north to join the battle for Normandy. In July of that year, he was wounded and captured, then was left behind in a Toulouse prison camp when the Germans retreated. Malraux met Charles de Gaulle at the end of the war and was captivated by the general, regarding him as another self-made and charismatic man of action. The admiration was mutual. Later, when de Gaulle became president, he “looked into Malraux’s background and saw the crime in Cambodia as no impediment” to his appointment as France’s first minister of cultural affairs in 1959, Genovese says. He was widely regarded as an ambitious and effective minister, renovating much of the country’s deteriorating state architecture; democratizing the arts by opening maisons de la culture, state-funded cultural centers, in many provincial cities; and revitalizing the Louvre, the Comédie Francaise and other great institutions.

Malraux moved easily in circles of power. He formed a close attachment to the Kennedys, escorted the first lady during trips to Paris and visited her in the United States after her husband’s assassination. He made a memorable state trip to China in 1965, where he was feted by Premier Zhou Enlai and met with Chairman Mao Zedong for several hours. Malraux came away impressed by Mao’s mastery of global affairs, and before Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China seven years later, the president conferred with Malraux in the White House about Mao’s character and mind-set. One of the few places Malraux found himself unwelcome was Cambodia. A planned visit with de Gaulle in 1968 had to be aborted after George Groslier’s son, Bernard Philippe, then the conservator of Angkor, threatened to quit in protest.

Despite his accomplishments, Malraux remained something of the hustler and prevaricator of his youth. He had an endless capacity for self-­mythologizing. In the introduction to the first edition of Man’s Fate, he claimed falsely that he had served on a 12-man revolutionary committee in Canton in 1924 and “participated in hand-to-hand fighting.” In his biography, Todd wrote that Malraux exaggerated his relationship with Mao as well as his heroics during World War II and may even have made off with Resistance funds after the Nazi surrender. By then, he was separated from Clara, who survived World War II in hiding and later carved out a successful career as a novelist and memoirist; she died in 1982.

Half a century after André Malraux’s death in 1976, the Cambodian misadventure divides opinion about him. Was he a conman and a scoundrel? A renegade romantic? Many Cambodians still view him as epitomizing the greed and arrogance of the colonial system. Youk Chhang, the founding director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, which records Cambodia’s turbulent recent history, says Malraux’s lack of contrition and rise to the top of the French establishment sent the message from the country’s former colonizer that “Cambodia still belongs to us.” Nor did the theft of Cambodian antiquities end with Malraux—far from it. Artifacts were misappropriated throughout the French colonial period, which ended in 1954. The murderous Khmer Rouge regime officially prohibited the destruction of temples, but cadres often trafficked in antiquities to finance their activities. After the regime fell, in 1979, lawlessness and civil strife engulfed the country, and looting continued without restraint for 20 or more years. (Late last year, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art returned three Khmer sculptures to Cambodia after determining that they were likely looted during the 1960s or ’70s.)

In 2019, prosecutors in New York indicted Douglas Latchford, a British expat living in Thailand, charging him with using New York bank accounts to facilitate a wide-scale theft and smuggling operation dating to the 1990s. Latchford employed dozens of thieves to chisel off hundreds of sculptures and snatch bronze figurines from Khmer temples. He reportedly earned tens of millions of dollars faking provenances and selling the art to private collectors and Western museums. Latchford died in 2020, before standing trial, and the extent of his crimes is only now coming to light. “Malraux’s vanishing act in 1923 stopped at the border, but Latchford’s did not,” says Brad Gordon, an American lawyer who is assisting Cambodia in tracking down its lost art. “He proudly trafficked Cambodia’s treasures into prestigious Western institutions and into the living rooms of billionaires.” Genovese, reflecting on what she calls Malraux’s “juvenile indiscretion,” further distinguishes between the crimes, arguing that in Malraux’s case, the friezes were returned without lasting damage to Banteay Srei. “I’m willing to be generous toward Malraux,” she says. 

Today, Banteay Srei has emerged as one of Cambodia’s most popular attractions. Perhaps ironically, its fortunes improved profoundly as a result of Malraux’s desecration. In January 1924, Parmentier trekked to the ruins to verify what Malraux had stolen, then oversaw the effort to clear vegetation, inventory artifacts and translate inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer. Seven years later, Henri Marchal, the conservator of Angkor, reassembled the toppled temples using both the original stones and modern materials.

I visited the complex late on a July afternoon, arriving at the same moment as a tour group consisting of dozens of Cambodian women wearing identical purple dresses. Following the throng down a stone corridor described by Malraux in The Royal Way, I emerged into daylight to see the temples directly in front of me. The three small prasat that Malraux had defaced, intact again, glowed in the setting sun. The smiling goddesses perched on pedestals inside shallow niches. Heads tilted, hair pulled tight beneath elaborate crowns, with dangling, lotus-­petal earrings, each wore a sarong and an ornamental sash. The frames around the niches were rich with curving vines, angelic attendants, crowned birds, scrolls, curlicues and rosettes, all carved from the same reddish-pink sandstone. 

The tenth-century Khmer sculptors had created these devatas with such detailed vibrancy that they seemed ready to leap off the facade. “After they carved the eyes and finished the statue, they believed that the essence of the god was now incarnated,” Olivier Cunin, a French archaeologist who has studied the temple for a quarter century, told me in Siem Reap. Malraux had snatched away the deities in an act of avarice and sacrilege. Now the gods were smiling again.