 So this really is one of the first in-person, jointly in-person and online meetings at the School of Arts, since we got over the peak of the pandemic and it's a real thrill to be back in-person and in this new hybrid format. And this kind of event exemplifies the research intensity of the School of Arts and of Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS in where two particular areas of strength overlap and intersect and one of those is issues of heritage and restitution and the other is Hindu Buddhist arts, archaeology and museology of Southeast Asia. And in addressing the histories and the restitution of ancient Indonesian objects, this event in particular further supports the really important SOAS agenda or initiative or imperative of our times namely decolonizing. It also builds the event, this event on a number of recent publications and I'm going to name check a few because they're important and they matter. Returning Southeast Asia's past edited by Panga Adyansya and Louise Tithucot in the National University of Singapore Press Series edited by my colleague, my other colleague Ashley Thompson and former colleague Pamela Corey. It builds on the doctoral work of Tien Nguyen on sham art from temple sites in Vietnam. It builds on the work of Ashley Thompson and Seng Senetra on Cambodia recently reported on BBC networks. It builds on the work of SAP alumni Mia Sopheep and Wong Chan Raksmi and Sopheep's work was also highlighted in BBC reporting last week. And it builds on collaborations between my academic colleagues in the School of Arts and in history of art, together with colleagues in Southeast Asia on restitution of which there is much more to come. The School of Arts has made a big investment in making this event happen and that fact I think demonstrates our continuing commitment to, so as to international collaborations of this kind. Now today's event takes place on the heels of some very important research news from last week and in common justice to my amazing colleagues in the School of Arts, I must reflect for a moment on some of that news. Specifically, the results published last Thursday of the what's called a research excellence framework or REF, which is a census of research in the UK that happens about every seven years to measure the quality of research in UK higher educations. I'm really delighted to report that research across the arts so as is really has been measured as going from strength to strength. Our colleagues in music, edged up to being the third placed department in the UK history of art edged up to sixth out of 84 departments with almost 60% of our research publications deemed in a category called world leading and the our environment for research that judged to be absolutely fully world leading in first position with just three others, which is really quite a distinction. So I please forgive me if I could continue to crow about this, but I really do it to recognize the achievements of my of my colleagues, it must be done. And if we think about history of arts, world leading research environment, it is precisely this event and other events like it that make it so. And part of the strength here I think is the pathway that we endeavor to open up for our SAP scholars and our students and our alumni pathways into the profession, into the museum, into the academy and into arts professions. And I think this event exemplifies that it's in that it is part of the established SAP CS, that's Southeast Asian Art Academic Program for those who possibly have been living under a rock, I don't know what it stands for and CS the Center for Southeast Asian Studies Research Seminar Series, which is currently co convened by a group of SAP scholars and alumni. Now I want to say a huge thank you to all of our international speakers who have traveled to London for this event, some perhaps leaving their country for the first time in a number of years. A very special thank you to two of the Java based speakers who've made it their business to come in person when international travel, as we all know, remains clearly a serious challenge. We appreciate it enormously and it will surely enrich the proceedings. The day is fully recorded and the recordings will provide a valuable record for so as teaching in the future. So let me finish by saying many congratulations to the organising team, the volunteers, the conveners of the SAP CS Research Seminar. You have made it look effortless and I can't think of a better platform for a wonderful event. OK, I guess it's my time now. So I'm Leslie Pullin, I'm the convener and I welcome you all. So I'm a pluggy for those of you somewhere across the world and for those of you understand Indonesian. But the first thing I need to say is to thank my colleague, Heidi Tan, who has stuck with me over the last few months, especially. But I want to tell you how this whole event started and she and I got together. I raised the idea into it back in 2018. It's a long time coming, but it really didn't come together until 2019. And it was first planned for the third term of the academic year of 2020. So you all were engaged at that stage and I was asked to employ speakers and who was I going to ask? So they were people I knew, all of you that I've employed today. I knew or I knew of you or I knew your work or I was recommended to you, as in Karen, who came in late because we had a number of speakers pulled out. So I really want to thank you all for staying with me and carrying on with this event and not publishing your work. Someone else, I presume you haven't done that. Maybe you have, but you're here and it means a lot to Heidi and I that we have virtually the same core group as when we started. So you might ask, why Java? Because I've been asked that, why did we have a conference on Java? Well, the mandatory statue here that's on the board here is which I will present on in panel two and forms the logo of this symposium has always remained a mystery to me. And with little information was ever published on its exact whereabouts until 2016. Therefore, the idea of the symposium addressing Hindu Buddhist objects originating from Java, Sumatra and Bali was a subject close to my heart and something very little discussed. So biographies and restitution became the title from which I sought you all our speakers. And now I have to say my few thank yous because this event couldn't happen without SAP and I'm not going to spell it all out because I'm sure you all know who that is now. And thank you, Shane, for being here and supporting the event and for Ashley, our two senior heads of department who will close up at the end of the day. But I'd also need to thank Nick Bernard and Stephen Murphy and Christian Luxonis and Heidi Tan for agreeing to manage the four sections of today. And of course, all our volunteers who are so evidently dressed, giving you stickers and lunch menus, things that we've never usually have it so us. And to Sirius, my young man who has really organized this whole event with the signposts and all the papers everywhere. So we know what it event is like without the team, you can't get going. So just to briefly show you our day is broken up into a number of sections. We will try to keep to time as best as possible. So I'm pleased to ask you to be back up from lunch or the breaks on time because we're online as well. Obviously, we don't want to hold up the online speakers. So each speaker has 20 minutes and then hopefully 10 minutes for discussion and chat after each event. And the discussants, panel leaders will sit here at the front. Unfortunately, we were hoping to have the big white screen, but it failed on us. So we have the computer screen. So some of the captions, some of you may not be able to read because they were designed for a big screen. Anyhow, so be it. We have to go with what we have. And as Shane has already said, one thing that is important with this event is to look at past publications. He's already mentioned the Louise Tithicott and Pangas book, Returning Southeast Asia Past. But there were others that I want to highlight and people who are here in the audience, Marika Blumbergern, Pieter Ticuz and Mirjam Hocznik. All these publications in the just the last few years have discussed or touched on the subject we'll be looking at today. But also what's come up recently, there was a post created called Provenance Research and Object Historian at the National Museum of Washington, DC. And that reflects a need to learn and understand the provenance of objects. This year at the ACM in Singapore, hosted a book launch titled Raffles Revisited, Essays on Collection and Colonism. This was edited by Stephen Murphy, one of our own here. And it re-looked at Stanford's Raffles Impact. And one question posed was, why should we honour him? A change of view, perhaps. The Atoneo Veneta in Venice, another online conference, called Why Are We Still Looking for Nazi Looted Art in Italy? I intended this one at my home. This conference highlighted the importance of provenance and negotiated solutions in returning artworks. Then there was a third event early this year that I watched or listened to. And it was from the National Museum also of Asian art and it was titled Asian Art and the Third Reich. And it showed how Asian art objects were most popular forms of art collected in the early 20th century. And just a few weeks ago, the Indian Art Circle here in London hosted Why Does Tibetan Art Need Decolonising in Memory of our Beloved John Clark? In the early years of the 19th century, there were many players in the collecting and study of art objects. And I thought I'd share with you a few names. And I know Pieter, our keynote speaker, will elaborate further on this subject. One Stanford Raffles, everybody's heard of Raffles, was the Lieutenant Governor General from 1811 to 16. And during his tenure, known as the British Interregnum, a large quantity of the statues were removed and shipped to the Netherlands and to Bengal. In Bengal, they were placed in the Indian Museum, founded by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1814. Another character, Colonel Colin McKenzie of the Madras engineers, worked in Java under Raffles' governorship between 1811 and 13, taking accurate surveys of ruins and drawings and making sketches of prambanan and other sites. McKenzie was responsible for much of the activity in Bengal, where many antiquities were deposited and still remain today. I know Echo, our first speaker online, will talk about one of those briefly. Professor Kasper Reimark was a journal national, was sent to and soon became chairman of the Batavia Science of Art and Sciences under the British Interregnum. The society was instrumental in accumulating knowledge about Germany's culture. And of course, last, Professor Kasper Reuvens, who was one of the modern Dutch scholars and Nicholas Engelhardt, who was part of the Old Guard, who was responsible for many of the sculptures that were removed from Singasari and Chandi Jago, more in my paper later. Engelhardt wrote to Reuvens and accused Raffles of plagiarism, suggesting Raffles claimed the glory of research for himself by not mentioning the original authors of the drawings. Furthermore, Engelhardt contended that most of the charts and illustrations of temples and sculptures in the history of Java were his. Many of these facts, I think people don't really know. So I will conclude and hoping that this symposium will provide some insight into the sensitive issue of whether the restitution in inverted commas of ancient objects to Indonesia is any different from their restitution to other Asians in South and Southeast Asia. For instance, whilst it's clear that predominantly Hindu India is pressing for the restitution of the ancient Hindu objects and predominantly Buddhist Cambodia is pressing for the return of their ancient Buddhist objects, is predominantly Muslim Indonesia pressing equally hard for the restitution of their ancient Hindu Buddhist objects. We can only acquire, does the predominant contemporary religion impact the political will invested in restitution by each national government and its agencies, especially when such ancient objects are clearly representing another religion to their national religion. So on that note, I hope that subject comes up again. I'll close and wish you all a great day and I'll hand you over to Nick Bernard who's the great of South and Southeast Asia at the Victorian Outland Museum who will introduce our keynote speaker, Nick. Thank you very much, Leslie. And many thanks to Saab and Sias for this conference and to Leslie, thank you very much for inviting me to participate today. So it's going to be a pleasure from an honor this morning to introduce Professor Dr. Peter Tavkos, the Professor for Museums, Collections and Society at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts and Society and also Professor of Material Culture at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. He specializes in critical museum studies and studies in material culture, was formerly the curator at the National Museum of Ethnology, focusing on the Indonesian collections, did fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and in Indonesia in the 80s and 90s and has created several exhibitions around the world. In the period 2003 to 2009, which I think we're going to hear a bit more about this morning, he concentrated on cooperation with museums in the insular Southeast Asia and researched the history of colonial collecting. His research concerns the role of museums collections in research, the practice of collecting, changes in material culture around 1800, also Dutch collecting in the Mediterranean and perceptions of Antiquities in the Netherlands and therefore with publications on a very wide range of subjects in all these fields. So if I may invite up Professor Tavkos to give this keynote speech, which I think will be extremely pertinent to the kind of issues that we are discussing and thinking about today, thank you very much. Well, I would like to start by thanking the organizers, Leslie and Heidi and the whole group for inviting me. That was about three years ago. I think you talked about it for the first time. And I have to confess that I had my doubts at the time because I think I told you, I haven't been in Southeast Asia since 2009. So that means I don't have a lot of recent information. I didn't do any recent fieldwork there. So I thought, am I the right speaker here? But of course you convinced me that I should come anyhow, and maybe it's also good. It was anyhow good for me to get back to my old material and with a distance in time to have also a bit more reflection on what we did, particularly in that period between 2003 and 2009 when Nick was already referring to. So I am happy that I'm here. So let that be clear. And let me take a relatively random point of departure for my lecture. As you know, the Indonesian-Dutch relationship has had its ups and downs to say the least. I will not summarize the whole colonial and post-colonial history because I think for you, the sensitivities will be clear enough the moment I describe certain events. Around the mid-1990s, the relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands was not at its best. The Dutch Minister for Development Corporation, John Pong, repeatedly asked attention for the human rights situation in Indonesia and in East Timor. And of course, the Indonesian government was furious. A former colonizer cannot reprimand its former colony on human rights issues. However well intended these remarks may have been. And this tension between the two countries was clearly noticeable at the official diplomatic level, much less among museum colleagues. That was much more relaxed at the time. But at the time I was involved in several negotiations for loans and the moment high civil servants of Indonesian ministries were involved in these negotiations. The first question they always asked me, how is your relation with Minister Pong? So that was clearly a moment to put some pressure on the negotiations, maybe to insert some extra difficulties. So it was clearly an issue in the mid-1990s. So in 1995, Indonesia celebrated the 50 years of independence with a large exhibition in Germany at that time in Hildesheim. Maybe some of you remember that magnificent exhibition and not with an exhibition in the Netherlands. That was a clear statement, although the exhibition in Hildesheim had a lot of Dutch loans from Dutch museums. In that same year, the Dutch government made again an inexcusable plunder. They sent the queen to Indonesia a few days after the independence celebration. So she was not there during the celebrations. And that was in the eyes of many people, an enormous mistake, and we've heard it for years. But in 2002, so I'm skipping a bit in time, in 2002 it was clear that the 60th anniversary of the independence in 2005 would again be a great event and the Dutch government had to come up with a policy on how to deal with these sensitive issues. After really long and complex discussions, it was accepted by the ministries of both foreign affairs and education and culture, that cultural cooperation would be an important key for normalizing the relations. So a year later already, we started the project Shared Cultural Heritage, Paris on Boudaia Bersama, with a clear focus on research, on colonial collecting, comparing the collections of Jakarta and Leiden, and with the aim of creating two large exhibitions in 2005, one in Jakarta and one in Amsterdam. So we had only two years, in fact, a little bit less to prepare all that. But I will come back to this at the end of the lecture. I just want you to keep it in mind. And I will first address some important issues in the collecting history of Hindu-Buddhist remains in Indonesia. Some of it has already been mentioned by Leslie, but I will maybe take a slightly different view angle. Since the second half of the 16th century, Hindu-Buddhism was marginalized. Of course, you all know that in Indonesia. On Java, only a few pockets remained in the Western, in the East, and of course, the island of Bali never converted to the new religion, to Islam. It is most likely, however, that the decline of the Majapite Empire does not coincide entirely with the decline of Hindu-Buddhist monuments. Many of the stone monuments probably were already in a bad shape at that time. The neglect and lack of maintenance of the sometimes spectacular and solid stone monuments, stone temples, must have started much earlier than that period, and was probably well underway already in the 17th century. The Hindu-Buddhist empires were notoriously unstable. They were temporarily extremely powerful, being able to build the Borobudur and the Parmadang complex, for instance, but these periods never lasted long. So how do you maintain these enormous stone buildings without the political structure and without the resources to organize it? Some temples, such as the temple, the main temple of Singasariu, was never finalized, was never finished. And most were not well maintained after the builders had disappeared from the political landscape. We can assume that the spectacular central Japanese temples of the 8th and the 9th century, and even the 13th century Singasariu temples were already in decline by the time the Europeans arrived. During the 17th and the 18th century, particularly the 18th century, some officers of the Dutch East Indies Company, the VOC, were well aware of the importance of Hindu, yeah, that's the one I had to show earlier. This is already a later painting by Sieber. This is from 1840, and then already part of the building was already cleaned, but it must have looked even worse. This is the famous Singasari temple. By, well, there were some VOC servants who were very well aware of the importance of the Hindu-Buddhist remains, particularly on Java, and they collected as individual antiquarians, not on behalf of institutions, not on behalf of the government. But this interest in ancient remains, who were at the time actually not so ancient as they thought, was, of course, limited. I mean, earning money by monopolizing trade was, of course, the main occupation of the company. But, of course, a major step was taken in the 1778, when the Dutch VOC employee, Jacobus Radarmacher, founded with some colleagues the Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences. In his own words, oh, I see, I wrote it in Old Dutch, so I have to translate it a bit for you. Actually, in his own words, he wants to bring together an anzinlik, a group of people with certain status and knowledge to try together and to do all the attempts to stimulate and to elevate the arts, the crafts, and all that sort of things in Batavia, and also, he says, in the other regions of the East. So it was a rather vague statement to start with, but that was the start of the Batavian Society. And in the beginning, this society did not receive approval or support from the official authorities of the company. They were just not interested and probably afraid that sooner or later they had to pay for it. Yeah, but the ideas of Radarmacher and his colleagues were very much inspired by Enlightenment thought and were also inspired by the many scholarly societies in 18th century Europe. These ideas prevailed finally. In the first decades, it was actually very difficult for the Batavian Society. It even had to be revived by rebels, as you know. But then a major change occurred around that time, around the beginning of the 19th century, but collecting activity showed a shift from private individual initiatives to active involvement of the nation-state, a development that occurs in other parts of the world as well at the same time. That it is, of course, the start of 19th century nationalism. In the beginning of the 19th century, the VOC property was formally transferred to the Dutch state and Indonesia became officially a colony. This new situation led to collecting activities in which the state played more and more a central role. This is clearly illustrated with the example that was already mentioned also by Leslie of Nikolaus Engelhardt. This Nikolaus Engelhardt was originally a VOC officer who collected Hindu Buddhist statues, put them in his garden in Samarang and to be admired by the guests he had. However, since Engelhardt was now no longer a VOC servant, but a servant of the state of the Dutch colonial state, he had less freedom after 1800 than before. After the Napoleonic wars, the Dutch slowly intensified their grip on the colony and they also started attempts to control collecting activities. So someone like Engelhardt was approached by the colonial government with requests to transfer his antiquities that were no longer seen as his, but owned by the state to the Batavian society. And these people like Engelhardt, they were actually criticized by the authorities very openly, not for taking these statues out of the temples, but for keeping them for themselves. From now on, they were urged to transfer the object to state institutions, particularly to the Batavian society. Here we have Engelhardt. And the idea was that the local population no longer felt any relationship with the Hindu-Buddhist remains since they had now, or at least most of them, converted to Islam. And therefore the statues could best be taken care of in a European-type museum. In reality, it is, of course, not as simple as that. I'll come back to this point later. From the 1820s onwards, the Hindu-Buddhist material remains regularly found their way to Dutch collections, particularly the National Museum of Antiquities. So not the Museum of Ethnology where they are now, but the Museum of Antiquities. I have to tell you a small story in between. In 2009, when I changed job from the Museum of Ethnology to the Museum of Antiquities, the director looked at me in a kind of shock and saying, but you're not going to get the Hindu-Buddhist collection to bring to the Museum of Antiquities. So you can imagine a bit the competition that must have been there, particularly in the 19th century. Two persons were instrumental in the stimulating this new flow of objects from Indonesia to both the Batavian Society as well as the Museum in Leiden. And these are Reinhardt, Professor Reinhardt. There's now the Reinhardt Academy in Amsterdam, where museum professionals are trained. And Professor Kaspar Leuvens, the first director of the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. And it goes far beyond the scope of this paper to describe the importance of these two persons in detail, but just a few remarks to sketch the context of collecting in that period. Reinhardt was sent to the newly acquired colony by the King because the King wanted to stimulate scientific research, he wanted to have more knowledge about, that was the idea, more knowledge about the colony, as well as for collecting activities. And it was in this period that the authorities started to reprimand the 18th century antiquarians for keeping the collections for themselves. And really the beginning of the 19th century. As a result, Hindu Buddhist statues, bronze objects and architectural elements more and more found their way to the Netherlands. Leuvens was a young, and he died also young, he died when he was 42. Leuvens was the young and dynamic director of the National Museum of Antiquities who due to his extensive network could secure collections from Leiden. So this was the period that the Singasari statues came to Leiden, around 1820 and some a bit later. For Leuvens, the Museum of Antiquities was the most logical place for these statues since, and here we come again with that same argument. They came from a dead culture. The local people didn't have any relation with the objects. So it was clear that they should go to a museum of antiquities and not to the cabinet of rarities that was still existing at the time. And also not to what was later founded the Museum of Ethnology. Important changes in policies occurred in 1840 and 1840. When it was first stipulated by the colonial government that no private persons were to consider antiquities as their own property, that no antiquity was allowed to leave Java without the consent of the governor general. But if the governor general would consent to it, it had only to be sent to the Netherlands, not to any other European country. In 1842, and that is remarkable, I think, sorry, this was followed by a decree stating that severe disapproval for the removal of antiquities from their original location. So the government started to have a kind of awareness of the other aspects of taking these objects from the original location. Also, the local attachment to these objects that may still exist. Shortly after came an appeal to the resident, the colonial officers who ruled a certain area to protect local antiquities. And the president of the Batavian society was invited to make a list of antiquities for the society's collection without offending the conceptions and institutions of the Japanese people. So there was already quite a consciousness of how important it was to keep that in mind. It's only after these new guidelines that the Batavian society could start to collect more Hindu Buddhist remains, a development that would strengthen the society's collections finally up to a level that would surpass the Dutch collections, both in quality and in quantity. A major exception being, of course, to singasari statues because they were collected before the 1840 degree. So you really see important changes in that period. So the respect for local Japanese ideas concerning their own heritage was already clearly present in the official policies of the colonial administration. In reality, things were of course not as they seem to be. The official guidelines were regularly avoided and the trade in ancient objects could not be completely controlled. Also because the local elite collected Hindu Buddhist object. Of course, they didn't want to offend the local elite in intervening there. By that time, Reuvens was already dead and his plan to build an entirely new museum, here you see his own sketch with the Hindu Buddhist collection at the center of attention as main center of attraction is this plan never materialized. Under Reuvens successor, and this is a print from around 1840, under Reuvens successor, Konrad Lehmans, a regular flow of Hindu Buddhist object arrived at the museum in Leiden. But one can argue that it was never in great quantities at the same time and also mostly not of the same quality as the Sinasari statues. One more regulation should be mentioned. But this is the only picture, the only print we have from the Hindu Buddhist display in the Museum of Antiquities in around the 1840s. And you can really recognize the statues at the non-Divansingasari, the Ganesha, the Pratapaparamita, the Temple Guard, non-Dishwaras, really clear that they were all there. One more regulation should be mentioned. I don't know how far I am in the time. Okay, that's all right. In 1862, Lehmans, by that time, he was also director of the Museum of Ethnology, succeeded to convince the colonial government to implement a law that stipulated that every collector in the Dutch East Indies was obliged to send the objects to the Batavian society where the board would decide which part of the collection would be sent to the Netherlands and which part would stay in the East Indies. Lehmans made this proposal to strengthen the collections of the Ethnology Museum in Leiden, but the result was that many of the best objects stayed in the Museum of the Batavian Society. Now the National Museum of Indonesia, the board of the society consisted of Dutch people who lived a lifetime in the Dutch East Indies and they had no intention to send the best pieces to the Netherlands. Seeing Dutch Indonesian scholars as armchair anthropologists, armchair scholars, far removed from actual Indonesian cultural practices. I cannot summarize the two centuries of collecting, so I'll have to skip some things. It was by the time that Kora Lehmans left the museum, he stayed, he remained the director for 52 years, you can imagine, but by that time, so then we are in the end of the 19th century, the discussion on where to store and present Hindu Buddhist collections had been in the air already for decades. Some wanted it in the Museum of Antiquities, others wanted it in the Museum of Ethnology. Reuvens and Lehmans were both very clear, so-called dead cultures should be represented in the Museum of Antiquities. And Hindu Buddhism was supposed to be dead. However, both Reuvens and Lehmans should have known better. Actually, Reuvens already made remarks like, well, it's maybe not as simple as that. Even in early 19th century sources, we can note that local views and practices around the Hindu Buddhist remains were still alive. One of the best-known examples is of course the Prataparamita that represents not only a Buddhist figure, but according to the local population, also can dead as the first queen of Singhasari. So apparently the statue had not lost its meaning the moment it was collected. And you can wonder whether it's morally acceptable that such a statue that's still important for the local population is taken away from its context. To create a clear distinction between the two museums in Leiden and the artificial difference between dead and alive, dead cultures and alive, that may have served well in museum politics, but it did not help to get a clear picture on how the Hindu Buddhist objects were actually treated and appreciated by the local population. And I think this is an important point, particularly also for restitution matters. To give one more example of local entanglement with the Hindu Buddhist remains, and I use an example that's already used by Pauline Jensings-Hurleyer in her article of 2007. And I cite her, the Batavian society did at least sometimes adhered to its own condition about keeping the interest of the local population in mind, as appears from the refusal of the resident of Kediri in 1851 to send sculptures standing in his garden to Batavia. Because it would strike the population very unpleasantly as in its superstition it is firmly attached to them and it would imagine that the loss of the antiquities would also cause it to lose some of its luck. So they were allowed to keep the statues in Kediri. Actually, when one reads the minutes of the Batavian society or the reports of the archaeological service, there are many more similar examples to find. And in a few weeks, there will be an article published by the Leiden researcher, Arthur Krug, who will focus particularly on the period in 1910, 1920, when not only the interest or when there was a great interest in restoring the monuments and the restorations that the Dutch restorers wanted to propose was not always in line with what the local population wanted. There are even examples that certain temples were restored and that a year later they came back to inspect and the local population had completely destroyed the restorations because they said the spirits of the temple can't move freely when you block them with a wall that may have been there originally, but that was not, so when you look for it, there are many more examples to find. Well, the Hindu-Buddhist collection was transferred to the Museum of Ethnology in 1903 finally. By the end of the 19th century, the museums had shifted from a more universal history of mankind, of humanity to a more particular history that the objects were no longer supposed to represent a universal history of humanity as Reuvens and Lehmanns advocated, but the uniqueness of each culture. So everything that was considered part of the origin of Europe, Egypt, Greek, Roman, stayed in the Museum of Antiquities and all the non-Western things went to the Museum of Ethnology. Also the Central and South American antiquities moved to the Museum of Ethnology. To finalize, I skipped a bit the point on the institution of the Patna Paramita and the Lombok treasure, because I think that's all very well known and we can discuss that in the discussions later on. I will finalize with coming back to the Corporation of 2003-2009. As I mentioned, in 1862, Lehmanns succeeded to convince the colonial authorities to send more objects to the Museum in Leiden. And the selection was done by the Board of the Batavian Society. Much of the collected material stayed in the colony and became part of what is now the National Museum. But this regulation of 1862 was the starting point of our cooperation project in 2003. So in that year, we started the shared cultural heritage program with a lot of attention for research into the collecting history and mutual loans were realized for high-profile exhibitions in Jakarta and in Amsterdam. And on the 18th of August, 2005, the day after the Independence celebrations, we opened the exhibition in Jakarta, which included most of the Singasari statues that are in Leiden. That was really a big event. There was a lot of resistance, also among politicians, but we think if we really want to show that we want to take the cooperation seriously, we really have to do something seriously also. So we lend out most of the Singasari statues. And during the opening, when the Indonesian President, Suruyono, and the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Boet, entered the Museum to open the exhibition. There were about 300 people there. The Indonesian President started his speech with the word, it's the first time that the Dutch Minister is present at the celebration of Indonesia's independence. And everybody stood up and erupted in a very long-standing ovation. So you can imagine that we really had the feeling that, well, finally, culture helps a bit to improve the relations. It was also during our project that it became clear that the local voice on heritage and ownership of objects until then had been largely ignored. At the end of the first phase of the project, some staff members of the National Museum in Jakarta planned fieldwork in areas where contested heritage was an issue. Some were very successful in their research, but unfortunately, none of them succeeded to publish their results in an English-language journal. So let me conclude by stating that discussions on collection care, property rights, and restitution cannot be held without ample attention for local views, the views of the people where the objects originally come from. The Pratna Paramita did not go back to Malang or to one of the sites in Singasari and went back to the National Collection in Jakarta. The Lombok treasure went back to Lombok. And we know from the fieldwork that people of Lombok didn't like that. So there's a fundamental tension there. The view of the local people is very important. That's not an easy task to make steps further in this direction. We need much more research. And in many countries of the world, I didn't only work in Indonesia. The national authorities do not automatically serve the interests of their own people or their own minority groups. They are usually not very keen on activating local feelings of identity. So the story is to be continued, hopefully partly with the discussion here. The other slide was a photo of the exhibition in Amsterdam in 2005. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. There was a really rich and illuminating discussion of this subject and with many different facets to it, I think. Starting with the ways that Hindu-Buddhist antiquities were collected in Java in the 19th century, moving through the return of certain objects in the late 1970s and the new phase of cooperation from 2003. I think it's interesting the way that you situated those in this political context. Another interesting strand, I think, is the way that you've made it clear that the 19th century collecting practices were by no means uniform, but they experienced important changes over time from the individual collecting activities in the 17th and 18th century of the employees of the VOC to the establishment of the Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences in 1778, but then from the early 19th century, the involvement of the Dutch state. And this fascinating story about Nikolaus Engelhardt taking the statues from Singasari to decorate his garden and the way that that became criticized not for removing the statues from their place of origin, but for him keeping them in his own possession. I thought that was very revealing. And then this process from the 1820s of sending those, including the Singasari statues, important objects to Amsterdam, to Leiden and the Netherlands, to the National Museum of Antiquities. And then the situation changing quite fundamentally again from 1840 to 42 when there was a regulation against the private owning of Antiquities, but also against exporting them without the consent of the Governor General. And even from this point, if I understand correctly, the removal of Antiquities from their original location was now frowned upon. So there's quite a big change at that point in time. And I thought it was fascinating also that you referred to the Batavian Society after the 1840s keeping really the best and the majority of objects in Java and not wanting them to go to the Netherlands where they feel they may be only discussed by armchair scholars, which is very, very interesting. And then something else I found intriguing is this supposed distinction between dead and living cultures, which caused the sculptures in Leiden to be placed at first in the Museum of Antiquities, which presumably was to some extent used to justify the removal of objects in the first place from their original location. And of course the proper time, proper optimization of that concept of dead cultures. And I was interested to see that the idea that these beliefs and practices around Hindu Buddhist sculptures, the idea that these were dead, was already being questioned as early as the early 19th century. So it's not something new. It reminds me of an anecdote about an American collector who was active in Bangladesh, Muslim country in the late 1960s. And he was collecting Buddhist sculpture. And there was one piece which was in a pond in a village. It had fallen into the pond and he wanted to buy it from the villagers. But the villagers didn't want to let it go because they said if they took away the statue all the fish would die. So very much that belief and fortune that the ancient statues were bringing and seen in Bangladesh as well. Then you mentioned in 1903 the transfer of the Hindu Buddhist collection to the Museum of Ethnology and the different ways that that could indicate that they were thinking about these collections at the end of this universal history of humanity and the sighting of it within those. And then this fascinating aspect of the return of the objects in the late 1970s after three decades of negotiation after independence, the way that the objects didn't go to their original location, but the Prachna Paramita statue from Sinkasari in Eastern Java instead went to the Museum of Jaka in Jakarta, the National Museum. And of course the treasures from Lombok also. And I want to come back to that, but the shared cultural heritage project from 2003 and the development of loans and exhibitions and the way that you mentioned that the Dutch Foreign Minister's attendance was very well received because this was the first time a Dutch minister had been present in the Indonesian Independence Day. And I think that reveals the power, not only the power of these activities as cultural diplomacy as it's often referred to, but also the way that political concerns can perhaps influence the way that restitutions and co-operations can take place. And that in itself may have a perhaps a damaging effect in the way that in the local because of the prestige that might attach to a national museum. And you stated that the local voice and heritage had not been heard. And I thought that your plea for the views of people in the area from which the objects came was very interesting and your comments on about how that might be intentioned with the views of the national authorities. So I'd like to open this up to questions now, but if I may start with a question myself. I wanted to follow this theme of the local views up and wonder if you could say a little bit more about how those can be, you mentioned the idea of doing more research into the local origins of statues and various artifacts, but how the beliefs and attitudes of local people can be taken into account and what as the representative of academic and museum institutions in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the West how you can approach this in a way obviously it could seem insensitive for a formal colonial power to say to a national government where they should return an object to if an object is restituted from the West to the country of origin. How does one go about approaching that sensitive issue and what ways might there be to negotiate some of these issues. For example, can new technologies like scanning and 3D imaging play a useful role. I'd be very grateful if you could sort of say a bit more about some of those themes. There are in such issues there are two extremes or you do nothing or you get the object back, you return it and you think about yours now. Which is also an extreme point of view because very often there are no facilities they want to keep or maybe they want to destroy it if that's a traditional way of dealing with an object but I think there are many possibilities in between and for instance at the end of the project because in doing collection research we could identify some highly important objects that were in storage never seen as important and going through the archives we could also a lot of Dutch archives which was also important for them to get we could identify some objects and there was for instance an important Chris an important ritual dagger that was also seen by the local population as being important particularly during a particular ritual and we discussed with the director of the National Museum how to solve this and that object was given online during the ritual and the local people said okay well this is a good alternative then we can use it during our ritual in once in a few years and then the National Museum can take care of it so that means that the museum has to step back a bit from the traditional point of view you have to conserve everything you have to keep everything in good order nobody is allowed to touch it etc etc you can only use gloves to touch it that's not a point of view that you can keep because the museums are working with local populations so these are possibilities and I think also not only Indonesia but in other parts of the world that's happening more and more that the museums make a deal with the local population saying well okay we recognize this originally yours but wouldn't it be better that we take care of it and that you sometimes use it in the Netherlands I've encountered a similar problem when I moved from the Museum of Ethnology to the Museum of Antiquities one of the first things I had to deal with was a village in the southern part of the Netherlands writing a very aggressive letter you have a Roman helmet a golden helmet from the second or third century AD and it's found in our village we want it back really very clear they had the support of the Queen, the Mayor etc etc and that was 100 years the helmet was found in 1910 and this letter came in in 2010 so for them it was important so in the past museums would put that letter in a drawer and think well leave it, it's too complicated we said no, let's talk to them let's go there it's not very far, the southern Netherlands from Leiden so and it appeared that there were six action groups claiming the helmet so one of the first things I did was okay I'm willing to talk to everybody at the same time and if I enter the room and one action group is lacking then I will return to Leiden because I didn't want to choose theoretically which group got the helmet so that was a difficult moment but finally they were all there and they said we have a village house and we can make a very good showcase and then it can be on display how many people have the key of the village house the whole village that's the type of discussion just to show to them do you think it's a good idea because it's one of the six existing helmets of this kind it's not only your heritage it's also the European heritage well and that convinced them that we came to an alternative we gave the helmet on loan for a week and we updated facilities there of the local gallery we gave them our guards of course it cost us a lot of money but that didn't matter and they had the whole week feast reenactments Roman soldiers walking there in the village and it wasn't great so that's also an alternative sending it back for a week but you have to do that in consultation with the people yes and in some cases the local people may not be happy to receive things only as a loan and obviously that's an issue with certain objects like treasures looted from Ethiopia in the 19th century or with the Parthenon Marbles for example there are issues about what's those but I think we're coming towards the end of the session I just want to know would anyone like to ask a question before we close yes you go please thank you thank you for that I have a lot of questions but we talk later we have other opportunities so also since you used the word again but I was a bit struck why you said that it is in the 2000s the Heritage Exhibition why the gesture of blending the Singasari statues to the museum was showing a sign that the museum was finally taking seriously and I also wonder why you seem to suggest that helmets from the Roman Empire are comparable to statues that have their origin in the temples that were obviously taken as a form of nudity the helmet was not a helmet to be used in warfare that was also a helmet that had a kind of ritual purpose it is a very light silver gilded silver helmet could never have been used in warfare but that is another thing you mean why not back to singasari statues that was the easy answer there was never a formal request to give it back but the more complicated answer is that it was discussed at a certain moment and we have really weighed the pros and the contras of starting the process and finally both the Indonesian partners and myself said let's not do it because we were very much afraid that the project would be hijacked by politicians that there would be an enormous emotional reaction on the various sides and the whole project was financed by ministries and we were very much afraid that we had a very good relation among museum colleagues and we were really afraid what the effects would be if Indonesia would formally request the object back is that an answer it's also politics it's pure politics I don't exclude the fact that there will be sooner or later return also because the situation has changed a lot but at that time the relationship was so sensitive that we thought it's better not to discuss it and yeah it never reached the status of a formal request they did inform informally and of course also very polite but we finally found it better that the time had not yet come I know you're not convinced of this answer but unfortunately we have run out of time but I hope we'll be able to continue this conversation in the break and throughout the day but thank you so much it was a really illuminating talk and really fascinating on this very very lively topic we're in a very different place thank you very much