Thai stone carvers are at the center of criminal activity

AYUTTHAYA, Thailand -- The best stone carvers here are the artistic descendants of the craftsmen who built the great temples of Asia, shaping images of Buddha and Shiva with age-old skill and passion.

But they are criminals.

With chisels modeled on ancient tools, they chip and hone as their fathers and grandfathers taught them, but now they mostly work in the service of syndicates that steal, repair, make fakes of and smuggle the historical treasures of Thailand, Cambodia and Burma.

Their trade has been an open secret for years. Now, for the moment at least, the Thai government is cracking down.

Sunthorn Sowapee, 62, one of the finest craftsmen here in the ancient capital of Siam, 50 miles north of Bangkok, was arrested last year and is awaiting trial.

In a raid on his small wooden house at the edge of a rice field, the authorities found 399 stolen artifacts -- Buddha heads, Khmer statues, bits of carved lintels and porticos, some lying openly in his courtyard, some submerged in the three ponds that surround it.

It was a major operation for investigators just to winch the heavy stones from the ponds, some of them covered in black engine oil to mask their genuineness.

"This is very fine craftsmanship," said Metha Wichakana, who heads the Ayutthaya office of the Department of Fine Arts and who took part in the raid. "He is one of the best stone carvers in Thailand. Maybe there are three or four people who can do work like Sunthorn."

Sunthorn now hangs his head in contrition. "We did not know it was illegal," he told a local reporter after his arrest. "Now we know."

His house now stands empty, ripe papayas hanging unpicked in the trees and small dogs with huge ears sniffing around chunks of partly carved limestone. A neighbor says he misses the constant ring of chisel on stone: "It was a calming sound. It made it easy to fall asleep."

In addition to his own handiwork, some of the stones dredged from Sunthorn's ponds were important long-missing artifacts, like a seventh-century lintel stolen from a temple on the Thai-Cambodian border 20 years ago.

The raid on Sunthorn's house was part of a broader anti-smuggling campaign that gained momentum last year. In a series of sweeps, the authorities confiscated hundreds of fakes or illegally trafficked antiquities from shops in Bangkok, mostly in the River City shopping mall.

In another step, the government returned more than 100 carved stone blocks that had been smuggled into the country in early 1999 after being hacked from the walls of the great temple of Banteay Chhmar in northwestern Cambodia.

Because of increased surveillance, experts say, an alternate smuggling route from Cambodia through Singapore has emerged, but that route too has come under pressure. Thai customs agents last year intercepted a shipment from Singapore of 43 Cambodian stone statues weighing more than eight tons.

"There is no doubt that antique smuggling is becoming a more and more well-organized operation," said Wanchai Pussadej, a deputy director general at the Customs Department.

It is also a complex operation, from its logistics to its layers of corruption to its artistic subtleties. It is here that masters such as Sunthorn are essential.

To make them easier to transport, artifacts are often cut into pieces or sliced from the faces of stone lintels, then reassembled by skilled craftsmen using ground stone and epoxy cement, Metha said.

Statues are more valuable if they are in good repair, so artists like Sunthorn often remodel figures that have been broken over the centuries or while they are being smuggled. "A head with eroded features can be repaired," Metha said. "The features can be reconstructed just like plastic surgery."

At the same time, antiquity is prized, so any new carvings the masters produce are treated in a variety of ways to make them look old.

Metha said methods included chemical treatment, long immersion underground or in ponds filled with lichen, or simply chipping and rubbing traces of damage into newly made fakes.

"With the eyes of an archaeologist it is not too difficult to see which are genuine and which are real," he said. "If you live with ancient monuments you look at them every day, every night, and when you see one that is new you can tell the difference. But for other people it can be quite difficult, because the stone carving in Ayutthaya is very skillful."

Though many of the artifacts that pass through Ayutthaya come from far away, the ancient city itself is a continuing source for illegal dealers.

Some artifacts are stolen by local people who sell them at low prices to middlemen. Others are stolen by special order or bought illegally from temples by collectors and smugglers.

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