The history of the collection
The history of contacts between pre-revolutionary Russia and Siam began only in the 1860s and the collection of Siamese sculpture in the Hermitage is in a way a link in this chain, perhaps the last. All the objects, with a few exceptions, belonged to George Plancon (1859 - late 1930s), a Russian diplomat, orientalist and collector. He was the grandson of a French officer, Charles Plancon de Rigny, who after being wounded near Wilno in 1812 remained permanently in Russia.

George Plancon graduated from the oriental and law faculties of St Petersburg University in 1888 and entered the civil service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he made a brilliant career. He served mainly in the Far East and in January 1910 he was appointed Russia's Ambassador General and Extraordinary to the court of King Rama V Chulalongkorn of Siam. In April 1916, he unexpectedly tendered his resignation, went on holiday with his wife to Switzerland and never returned to Russia.

In Bangkok Plancon became fascinated with the history and culture of Siam. He began collecting works of sculpture and applied art, as recorded in his diaries that have been discovered in one of the Moscow archives. Disappointingly little information has survived about Plancon's life and activities. Only the archive material has shed a little light on both his biography and the story of his collection in Russia. Its fate was a sad one. When he returned to Russia, Plancon brought his collection with him, but, following his departure to Switzerland and the revolution that came soon after, the "ownerless" collection passed to the Museum Fund. In 1923 members of the Russian Museum staff identified the "anonymous" assortment of Siamese statuettes as "the Plancon Collection" and managed to get it transferred from the Museum Fund to the Ethnographic Section of their own museum. In 1931, as part of a general reorganization of museums, the collection of Siamese sculpture, having lost the name of its creator a second time, came into the Hermitage, where it remained unstudied and unpublished until the mid-1990s. In 1997, to mark the 100th anniversary of King Chulalongkorn's visit to Russia, the Hermitage held a temporary exhibition which featured more than a hundred of the best pieces of Siamese art from the Plancon Collection.

Portrait of George Plançon
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Buddha in meditation
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