Saraburi (Thailand), a false locality for 30 years?

I made a search with Saraburi and found nothing on the forum … may be I done wrong.
It seems that in this case, type material is involved and at least the material was used to make faunal lit of Thailand. The guy seems to have sold a lot of material worlwide.

I just posted a reply in the ResearchGate thread which I have copied below, but don't remember any discussion of this particular issue here before.


Adam Miles Cotton
Added an answer

Sabine Steinke is the wife of Hilmar Lehmann. They lived in Saraburi/Nakhon Rachasima area back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were dealing in insects, and I should say that their data should be treated with some suspicion.

As for Chiang Mai, which is where I have lived for more than 30 years, sometimes well-meaning Japanese collectors have given local catchers specimens from elsewhere as a gift, and of course they just take them to the dealers in town but don't tell them how they obtained them, so the dealers assume they caught them in the forest. I know of another instance where a researcher bought specimens from a dealer in Chiang Mai back in 1966 and recently these became type specimens of a non-existant new subspecies from northwestern Thailand. Unfortunately the dealer must have obtained these from eastern Thailand and not told the buyer, who assumed they came from Chiang Mai, but that species does not occur in NW Thailand at all.
One time a dealer called me asking why one of their collectors from Wiang Papao brought a specimen of Graphium phidias (an Annamese Mts species) in for sale. After some checking I found out that a Lao collector visited from Sam Neua, where the species can be found, and brought one with him as a gift. Of course this species does not occur anywhere near Thailand, it is only found on the mountains bordering Laos and Vietnam.

I am sure this can happen in many parts of the world, and caution should be exercised with data of all specimens. In fact even data of old museum specimens may be suspect, as sometimes it was falsified to protect the origin of valuable commercial material, as well as the issue mentioned above for the origin of very old material.

A more recent problem occurred with a recently deceased Chinese insect dealer who lived in Vientiane and used to sell specimens with false data in order to either sell more of them or sell them at an increased profit. I may be alluding to the same person as Michael Geiser above. This rogue dealer was well known for selling many different types of insects with false data, and unfortunately in future museum researchers will not be able to distinguish such specimens from those with reliable data. An Australian dealer once sent me some specimens of 2 species supposedly collected in Laos that he was suspicious about which came from this Chinese dealer. From the phenotype they clearly came from Sichuan. Those species do not actually occur in Laos at all, but the Chinese dealer was selling them for 5 times the price of the same specimens at source.