Lawyers to file suit seeking return of statue
Print Edition
A TEAM of seven lawyers will file a lawsuit against a Dutch antiquities collector who holds an ancient, mummified Buddha statue believed to have been stolen from a village in Fujian Province 20 years ago, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.
The legal team is now working on the lawsuit and expects to file on the behalf of villagers from Yangchun in a Dutch court before the end of the year.
The team, which includes a Dutchman and is led by Chinese lawyer Liu Yang, who earned a reputation for successfully leading a Chinese legal team in recovering relics looted from the Old Summer Palace, will sue for the repatriation of the 1,000-year-old mummy.
Until the statue’s disappearance in 1995, villagers used to pray to the sitting Buddha as an ancestor.
The unnamed Dutch collector has said that he purchased the statue in Europe in 1996 and did not know of its exact origin until he took it to Drents Museum in Holland to have chips on the gold-painted exterior fixed, according to reports by CNN. The museum ordered a medical scan that revealed the sitting remains, dated back to the 11th or 12th century.
Once news of the find spread to Yangchun village, residents identified the statue as the one they had worshipped for centuries.
Initially, the Dutch collector intended to return the artefact, but then demanded money for storing the relic for almost 20 years, Yangchun’s Party chief Lin Wenqing told Xinhua.
The collector later claimed that the previous owner had purchased the statue in 1994, a year before it was stolen from Yangchun, making it impossible for the relics to be identical.
The lawyers have already gathered overwhelming evidence supporting the villagers’ claim, Liu said, adding that the fact that the villagers have a deep spiritual connection with the statue would also play in their favor.
The mummified remains inside the statue are believed to be those of Zhanggong Zushi, a prominent Buddhist monk who likely self-mummified himself at age 37. At the time, monks who felt that they were about to die would stop to eat and drink to empty their inner organs, according to CNN.
Last year, the Buddha statue proved to be a visitor magnet when it went on an exhibit tour in the Netherlands, Hungary and Luxembourg.
Chinese authorities, including the Fujian Cultural Heritage Bureau and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, support the villagers’ claim.
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