Authorities urge return of stolen Buddha
Print Edition
CHINESE authorities are urging the return of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue containing a mummified monk that they say was stolen from a village in southeast China in 1995.
The State Administration of Cultural Heritage said it had launched procedures to retrieve the statue currently in the possession of a Dutch collector.
The statue was on display at a “Mummy World” exhibition at the Hungarian Natural History Museum that opened in October last year and was originally scheduled to be on display until May 17.
The anonymous collector said yesterday he had decided to withdraw the relic from the exhibition “at least for the time being” in order to “calmly and critically evaluate the unexpected situation,” according to a statement sent to Xinhua news agency.
The Cultural Relics Bureau in Fujian Province said at the weekend that judging from research and media reports, experts had confirmed that the statue on show in the Hungary museum was the one stolen from Yangchun village in 1995.
According to Yangchun archives, Zhanggong Zushi was a local man who became a monk in his 20s. He was a master of Chinese herbal medicine and helped cure a lot of people.
When he died at the age of 37, his body was mummified and local people made a statue with the mummy inside at some point during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The statue had been worshipped in the village temple ever since.
The collector’s statement said he first saw the statue in mid-1995 and that a previous owner had it in 1994-1995, both dates before the Chinese villagers reported their Buddha stolen.
However, a spokesman for the Da Tian Museum in Fujian told Xinhua there were five major proofs to show that the Buddha statue in Hungary was the same as the one stolen in 1995.
“They have the same facial expression and scratches on the stomach and left hand,” he said. The height, shape and weight were also the same as in records held by the museum.
“I fixed a broken part on the Buddha’s left hand in the 1980s, so I can tell it was the statue that was stolen,” 81-year-old villager Xu Youwu told Xinhua yesterday.
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