One of the more disheartening sights for the visitor to Southeast Asia is the sight of headless or dismembered statues at important cultural and religious sites. The reason that the heads and limbs are often missing, as Masayuki Nagashima explains in this book, is not the result of natural erosion, but because they have been stolen and put up for sale.
Formerly a journalist in Japan, and now the editor of a Japanese-language journal in Thailand, Nagashima began his investigation several years ago. It is not hard to get a start, for the sale of forged and genuine antiquities in Bangkok is a lucrative business, especially in the vicinity of luxury hotels. From time to time, important cultural assets are among the illicit trade items retrieved by the police.
Accounts of stolen goods recovered can be found periodically in local papers like the Bangkok Post, but Nagashima's book begins really at the end of his story, with a journey to Cambodia. The main focus of his investigations has been on the depredation of Khmer ruins, and it is to see one of these that he travels to the interior. But his journey is not to the major complex at Angkor Wat, which is so much visited today, but to another site of almost equal splendor.