Thailand has high hopes that a sandstone lintel which was illegally smuggled from the Khao Lon Khmer Sanctuary in Sa Kaeo decades ago and later sold to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco will be returned home in the wake of some new discoveries.
Khao Lon Khmer Sanctuary in Sa Kaeo.
Anandha Chuchoti, director-general of the Fine Arts Department, said ongoing excavation work has turned up many pieces of evidence to confirm the lintel in the United States is the very piece that went missing from the top of a door frame at the Khao Lon Sanctuary.
The lintel depicts the Hindu god Indra and a mythical creature called Kiattimuk.
The evidence matches a written document in 1959 about the lintel portraying Indra and Kiattimuk as well as some photos taken by historian MC Subhadradis Diskul who also mentioned the existence of the lintel at Khao Lon in 1967, said Mr Anandha.
"We recently began our mission to reclaim the lintel from the Asian Art Museum through the comparison of photos. The mission is now in progress," he said.
"There are good signs because we have clear evidence of the existence of the lintel here at Khon Lon. Our excavation work has also found a lotus-shaped frame which had been removed and left here," the director-general said.
He said the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been working with the US embassy in Bangkok and the US Department of Homeland Security in seeking the handover of the horizontal support.
The US charge d'affaires met Culture Minister Veera Rojpojanarat recently about the matter. Officials from the US Department of Homeland Security later conducted an inspection of the lintel and related documents at the museum.
Thai authorities are ready to appoint a delegation to hold talks with the US side.
They will try to show the lintel was illegally removed from Thailand -- much like the reclining Vishnu lintel which was returned by the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s.
"There are good signs and we are on course to bringing the lintel back. However, the date of the handover is not set yet," Mr Anandha said.
"We have also sent the photos captured by MC Subhadradis Diskul in 1967 as evidence."
Won Inphla, a local villager in his 60s, told the Bangkok Post he saw the lintel at Khao Lon Sanctuary when he was about 12 years old while taking his cattle to feed on grassland nearby.
He confirmed from the photos that they appeared to be one and the same.