How 1 000 Year Old Antiquities Are Illegally Sold Today

We're on a mission to explore the international black market for looted and fake antiquities. A journey that's taken us from London to New York and now to Kathmandu, Nepal, where a campaign to find and recover gods stolen from shrines and temples is revealing dark truths. From millionaire private owners to prestigious auction houses and even prominent museums, from the shadows, stolen artefacts and deities are beginning to emerge. Nepal has been a fountain of cultural abundance for the world, but countries like this are having to invent new ways of dealing with the illegal trade in their artefacts and deities. The National Museum of Nepal seemed like a good place to come and see for myself what happens on the few occasions that items and deities do find their way back to their rightful place. We've managed to get exclusive access to some of the items in the vault of the museum. These precious items have just been recovered. Is this the original colour? Yeah, it is somehow faded, but it is the original colour. As chief of the museum, Jayaram Srishta has spent the last three years navigating this complex and sensitive situation. This is just three items that you've taken out of storage to show me, which I'm grateful for. But how many more do you have? How big is this problem? How many objects do you have that need to be returned to their rightful place? Do you trust the international system to do what is right? Are the regulators, the enforcers doing everything that needs to be done? You have no choice? Yeah. You have to trust it? Yeah, we should trust them. People are calling this a new form of colonialism, by stealing a culture because you like the decoration. Maybe this was in somebody's house in their living room. You know, this is in somebody's display cabinet. By now, I'd become familiar with one of Kathmandu's greatest treasures, the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Darbar Square. I'd heard rumblings that the museum dedicated to the cultural preservation of the square was getting ready to make a monumental announcement. The original Lakshmi Narayan deity had returned home. Hello. Yes, it's good to see you. I want to show you something. To come with you now? Yes, sure. Okay. What is it that you want me to see? I'm very excited to see the sculpture. Oh, you're making me excited. I can't wait. Is it through here? Yeah, because it's a very small area. Yeah, I'll mind my head. Thank you. Is that...? Yeah, this is it. Yeah. Oh my. This is the deity? Yeah. Beautiful. The work is so detailed, even on the legs. Wow. How old is the deity, this sculpture? 14th century. I never think this sculpture is back because we have so many sculptures stolen. Big books of the stolen image of Nepal. Yeah. So before when the story in the social media, I never think it will be back. Never think. The deity should never have been taken, never sold, never needed to be returned. This should never have happened. No. So one of the motive of this temporary exhibition, we can't identify the sculpture from here. And so maybe somebody comes here, this sculpture is from our community, and we want to back. We are very happy. In all of their history, this temporary exhibition with me standing in front of them, it feels monumental and also a blip in the timeline of the history of Nepal, of Kathmandu, of the community and of this God. But it's also quite haunting to know I'm in a lost and found for deities. That's what it feels like being in this place because all of these other deities and sculptures and artefacts behind me, they're all lost. They have been severed from their homes, from their communities, from the people that love them, that they belong to. And it's a waiting game to see if anyone comes and claims them. When these deities are removed, it's almost like a God is stolen and a statue is returned. And it's up to the community to look beyond that, to have faith. The market demand that led to Lakshminarayan's theft all those years ago isn't going anywhere. In recent years, the market has exploded in popularity online, where an estimated 80% of high-value items sold are either looted or fake. Anytime you have a market, people will want to feed that market to make money. If you only had completely verifiably genuine, ownership history complete antiquities, that would be a very small market. So in order for all of these auction houses and gallerists and dealers to keep functioning, they need a supply. Where does the supply come from? Looted antiquities and also forged antiquities. The reality is the barrel's full of sketchy apples, that so many antiquities come to us, end up in our museums, paid for by public dollars, without really any indication of their ownership history. The market only keeps going if there's product to sell. So there's really very little incentive for the sellers to scrutinize so much what they're selling that they will be unable to sell it. They only make money if they sell an object. Nobody makes money if they say, this is a fake. Has anyone ever given you anything that you are suspicious of? Because I really want to see what it is you're talking about. Do you have anything? Let's look at them. Over here, so a customer sent me these objects after purchasing them. This is supposed to be an antiquity? It's a necktoke, so you're supposed to wear it as a lovely necklace. You look great. This is a ritual spatula of some sort. The buyer paid over £700 for this. Are you joking? No. And then this one, which he paid over £1,000 for. This is £1,000, so like $1,400 or $1,300 depending. What is it supposed to be? It's a necklace. Supposed to be a Viking necklace. A Viking necklace. You put the word Viking in front of anything, people will pay a Celtic chariot fitting. Wow. I mean, this looks old. What you're doing is exactly what most buyers would do. You say, well, it looks old. There's nothing about it that screams made yesterday. But that is not enough just to say, all right, it's got some incrustation, it's discoloured. That doesn't tell you it's a genuine antiquity. People don't know that they should be asking questions. They don't know that they shouldn't trust everybody who comes along with a Viking pendant. With Professor Thompson's permission, we took these items and attempted to authenticate them with other experts. It was a mission that quickly became a lesson in just how difficult the authentication process can be. Our attempts at lab analysis were not only quoted in the thousands of dollars per object, out of reach of most buyers, but the forensic archaeologists we spoke to said they would almost always be inconclusive. Criminals often fake objects made of dirty metals because there are virtually no known tests that can date them accurately. High-end forgers are even known to use authentic objects made of materials like metal, stone, clay or gems and transform them into more lucrative fakes. In fact, the authenticity or the provenance of just about any antiquity is hard to confirm. Which leaves buyers with little assurance that what they're purchasing is the real deal and above board. I wanted to meet one of these buyers, someone who now realises the dubious nature of items they bought on the online market for antiquities. You and I have been talking back and forth for several weeks now and it's taken a lot to come here. Why is that? Why doesn't anyone want to talk about this? If one has bought something that's obviously fake and fraudulent at an auction, there's an element of embarrassment. So many people would prefer to forget it. In my case, the losses were significant but the onus relies on the buyer to assure himself or herself that what they're buying is value for money. You know, there's cost-benefit analysis here. You're going to spend more time and money pursuing a relatively finite amount of money. So most people would calculate, okay, it's not worth it. And they're depending on that? They're depending on that, yeah. That's absolutely sure. And most people listening to this would say, well, you know, you're an idiot. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. But this basically corrodes the reputable art market and it also devalues the experience of going to a museum. Why so? Because once you have a large number of fakes in circulation, how can you be sure that anything you look at or some things you look at in the museum are not fakes? For those with means, the trouble with this market is the risk of getting duped out of major money. But for even the small-time purchasers, another kind of buyer's remorse comes for those who realise their mere participation is too high a price to pay. Do you think this is fake? I have no way of knowing because I do not have that expertise. And the best answer I can give you is I hope it's fake. Because even though it's upsetting to get ripped off, it's even more upsetting to buy something that's real that came at a price like that. How did you come to be in this world of antiquity, of artefacts and of buying and selling things on auction? So it started off with collecting coins. It also started out with just the fascination about how cheap some of them start. That much can actually get you things and just seeing it for sale online and seeing it and thinking like, wow, I can actually own this. I can have this in my hands. It seemed too good to be true, really. I mean, I guess it's for the same reason why I find history fascinating. I mean, it's a connection to people who lived thousands of years ago, one, two, three, four thousand years ago. It's a time so far back that it's kind of unfathomable, but we forget that those people are literally just like us. Looking at the online infrastructure, you just assume that, well, it can't possibly be something immoral. It can't possibly, I mean, surely there are laws and regulations that govern this, that if this were bad, someone would have put a stop to it long ago. And then I realized more and more that it's almost impossible to do this completely ethically. Almost impossible. I would say so. I don't know the exact nature of the items that I've bought. Some artifacts simply can't be authenticated unless you know the specific details of where they were taken out of the ground and when and how. And that information gets lost, sometimes purposefully, as the item changes hands. My first thought was, oh, I chose a bad auction site. I'm disappointed that all my items came from them. But then that very quickly led to reading about how kind of the whole industry is rotten. And that made me realize, oh, it's not just this auction site I chose. It's the fact that I've been participating in this at all. It's the fact that this exists. How does that make you feel? Well, I mean, there's a realization that I've funded indirectly or directly the destruction of history. And it seems like the opposite when you're buying things. Like, oh, I can take care of this. I can preserve it. But really, if it's real, it's probably been ripped from the ground somewhere from likely some developing nation. And the information that an archaeologist could look at and determine about where it was dug up, who owned it, why, for what purpose, that's lost forever once it's taken out of the ground. And the amount of items that's happened to is staggering. There was a period in the early 2000s where you could buy a cuneiform tablet for five pounds that was real. They flooded the market as soon as Iraq was invaded. In 2011, Syrian coins started flooding the market in the years after that. And I have a feeling that with the recent fall of Afghanistan in the coming years, we're probably going to see some Afghanistan items on the market. You know, I'm from Afghanistan. I do, yes. You were born in Kabul. The only reason I say that is because, sorry, I'm getting a little bit emotional. No, it's fine. It's sad. You have a personal connection to this. Well, it's my home. It's where I was born. And I feel... It's horrifying. For lots of reasons. One of them is I'll never get to access or experience that culture again. But some rich person somewhere in the world can have a bit of my history and my story in their living room. I mean, you should be angry. If a country is not rich in money, the one thing that's usually rich in is heritage. And this is another way of siphoning that wealth. Despite urgings from Interpol, there are no laws requiring any auction house or seller to put a disclaimer on their items for sale. A lack of regulation and resources in monitoring the antiquities trade creates little incentive for sellers and auctioneers to authenticate their items for sale. The reward of selling illegal artefacts outweighs the risk of doing so. Days after I got to stand face-to-face with a god, the 800-year-old looted idol, Lakshmi Narayan, was returned to their rightful place. The community that worships them. That's the thing that I've noticed in my time in Nepal is you can go into any temple and they'll never stop you. This isn't a place where foreigners are barred. It's so central to the way of life here. It's almost like breathing air. Ritual and religion and spirituality all embedded into one, which is why it's so jarring to look at the temple behind me and think of it in terms of pounds and dollars. Every inch of that can fetch a price in an auction somewhere. These places are part of life here. And thinking of every bit of that temple behind some sort of glass wall cage in a gallery somewhere or sold in an auction to be put into a living room just feels wrong.