To Finance Their Lifestyle, a Young French Couple Went to Cambodia to Steal Antiquities. They Did Almost Everything Wrong Clara and André Malraux conspired to loot the pink temple of Banteay Srei, but their failure started a battle of reclamation Photographs by Justin Mott April/May 2026 The tenth-century temple of Banteay Srei, northeast of Angkor, where Clara and André Malraux planned an audacious 1923 heist. The Hindu shrine complex, built from intricately carved red sandstone, is celebrated for some of the finest surviving decorative stonework of the Khmer era. Justin Mott One morning in November 1923, a young French couple stopped by the headquarters of the École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO), the French School for the Far East, a stuccoed, ochre-painted villa shaded by frangipani and banyan trees in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.  The pair had just arrived by boat and were soaking up the atmosphere of Southeast Asia.…