Thousand-Year-Old Buddhist Treasure Stolen From China

Pilgrims pray in front of a Buddha statue during a ceremony to mark the Buddha's birthday at Huayan Temple on May 5, 2006 in Chongqing Municipality, China. China Photos/Getty Images

A thousand-year-old statue of a monk from southeastern China, which was stolen in 1995, was found in the Netherlands 20 years later. The process of returning it to China has been lengthy as international coordination is involved.

According to the official website of the Datian County government in Sanming city in Fujian Province, on June 22, the local tourism authority said that it will double its efforts to recover the statue from a Western collector by all means.

The priceless statue is of a monk named Zhang Gong, commonly known as Zhang Qisan, and whose art name was Liuquan, and dharma name was Puzhao. He was born in the Northern Song Dynasty (960 to 1279) more than 1000 years ago. He was a physician and was known for his benevolence.

Zhang Gong converted to Buddhism, practiced with devotion, and became a monk. He passed away at 37, the date is estimated to have been between 1022 to 1155.

Medical imaging (a CT scan) shows Zhang Gong’s mummified body, minus all internal organs, seated inside the gold lacquered statue.

Locals sculpted his likeness into a statue and worshiped it as Zhang Gong grandmaster in the Puzhao Hall in Yangchun village, Fujian Province.

But since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came into power, many such Buddhist treasures have been nearly destroyed, or stolen and shipped out of the country.

A man worships the God of Fortune at the Guiyuan Temple in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 20, 2018. Wang He/Getty Images

Robbery During the Cultural Revolution

Lin Mingzhao, who lived in Yangchun village, told Chinese news media The Paper on Dec. 13, 2018, that the village had been worshiping and guarding the corporeal Buddha statue of Zhang Gong for more than 1,000 years.

“Every generation of Yangchun people has grown up listening to the story of Zhang Gong Grandmaster,” Lin said.

The villagers have followed Buddhism since ancient times.

However, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a political movement Mao Zedong launched to consolidate his rule, traditional Chinese thought, culture, customs, and habits were defined as the “Four Olds” and to be eradicated at the root.

Buddhist temples, scriptures, and treasures were no exception to the cultural ravages.

Some locals began protecting Buddhist treasures from being destroyed and so the statue of Zhang Gong was hidden away.

On a winter day in 1966, the “Destroy the Four Olds” working group was stationed in Yangchun Village and asked the villagers to hand over the statue of Zhang Gong.

To keep the statue hidden, villagers had moved it overnight, and concealed the 1.2 meters (3.9 feet) high and 50-kilogram (110 pound) artifact, in the deep mountains.

The officials tortured the villagers to reveal the whereabouts of the statue by forcing them to kneel on broken porcelain tiles.

In desperation, some villagers came up with a solution: a substitute. There was a statue of another monk, Chen Gong, that didn’t contain a non-decaying body, but had another Buddhist treasure sarira, a shiny substance found in the ashes of a cremated monk.

According to the recollection of a local villager, one night a villager led a working group to look for the statue of Zhang Gong, but in fact, “discovered” the statue of Chen Gong. In order to prevent the group from recognizing the identity of the statue, the villager used a knife to destroy the statue’s face. The villager then pried open the base, took out the sarira, and threw it into the grass while no one was looking.

The group then burned the statue of Chen Gong and demolished the Puzhao Hall.

Afterward, the villager returned covertly and picked up the sarira.

Thus, the statue of Zhang Gong survived a potential disaster.

Mysterious Disappearance

In 1993 the locals rebuilt Puzhao Hall and reinstated the golden statue of Zhang Gong.

But after the Cultural Revolution, more people were looking to earn money and didn’t care so much about traditional things.

On Dec. 15, 1995, villagers were surprised to find that the statue of Zhang Gong had disappeared, leaving only the robe and hat that Zhang Gong had worn. The thieves entered Puzhao Hall by digging through a side wall.

Although the villagers called the police and searched everywhere, the statue was not found.

The thousand-year-old Buddhist treasure had mysteriously disappeared without a trace.

Thefts of cultural artifacts were rampant in the 1990s. A 2013 article in Archaeology, an American archaeological journal, estimated that about 100,000 people in China are engaged in this underground occupation and that they have excavated at least 400,000 ancient tombs in the past 20 years.

Most stolen cultural artifacts are transported abroad for lucrative benefits.

A CT scan of a thousand-year-old golden statue was found to contain a meditating monk by Drents Museum at Meander Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Courtesy of Drents Museum

Villagers Recognize the Statue

On Feb. 23, 2015, the Daily Mail reported that an expert had studied a statue and was surprised to find, through CT scans and endoscopy, that it contained the remains of a monk, and could be traced back to the 11th to 12th century.

The report said that the mummy was of Buddhist master Liuquan, who belonged to the Chinese Meditation School. Liuquan is Zhang Gong’s art name.

After the scan, the mummy was taken to Budapest, where it was on display at the Hungarian Natural History Museum until May 2015.

Westerners mistook Zhang Gong’s flesh body to have been mummified, in fact, these are two different things, said Lei Shuhong, Doctorate in medicine at the University of Tokyo, saying that a mummy is a dead body treated in a special way, so it is dry. In contrast, a non-decaying body like Zhang Gong’s does not require special treatment and his body remains “elastic” even over a long period of time.

The news of the statue’s contents was widely circulated and also attracted attention in China.

A villager in Fujian Province looked at the picture and said, “Isn’t this Zhang Gong?” The Fujian Provincial Bureau of Cultural Heritage confirmed that the seated figure on display in Hungary was Zhang Gong.

Shortly after, the official Chinese media claimed that the monk’s statue was “stolen from China,” and demanded that the collector return the statue to China.

Oscar van Overeem, a Dutch architect, admitted to being the owner of the golden statue of Zhang Gong, and said he bought it in Hong Kong in 1996 from another collector. The previous collector allegedly acquired it from an artist friend in China, Dutch News reported on July 17, 2017.

As for how the seated statue arrived in Hong Kong from the Fujian countryside, no one knows.

International Lawsuit

After the Chinese side contacted van Overeem in the Netherlands, he agreed to conditionally return the statue, but the two sides were unsuccessful in negotiating acceptable terms and conditions.

In late 2015, committees from the villages of Yangchun and Dongpu, Fujian Province, filed litigation in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, seeking return of the Zhang Gong statue.

On Dec. 12, 2018, the Amsterdam District Court ruled that the community groups could not be considered legal entities and were therefore ineligible to claim compensation.

The two village councils also filed a similar lawsuit in the district court of Fujian and won the case. But there is no bilateral agreement between the Netherlands and China to recognize civil judgments, so the outcome of the Chinese court’s decision is meaningless in the Netherlands.

Litigation for the recovery of cultural relics across borders is fairly complex, involving both jurisdictional issues and applicable law, and sometimes historical disputes.

China News reported on Jan.29, 2017, that data from the Cultural Relics Academy shows that more than 10 million pieces of cultural relics have outflowed from China to Europe, America, Japan, Southeast Asia, and other countries and regions since the Opium War in 1840,

According to the British Museum, it has collected about 23,000 objects from China.

There has been a long-standing controversy about the need to recover these lost artifacts from China. Some argue that China should find a way to get its cultural relics back; while others believe that if the artifacts hadn’t been taken out of China, they would have been destroyed by the CCP and are therefore better preserved in foreign museums to promote Chinese culture.

Buddhist monks meditate at Mendut Temple on Vesak Day, commonly known as "Buddha's birthday," at the Borobudur Mahayana Buddhist monument on May 09, 2009 in Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia. Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

A Monk’s Flesh Body Does not Decompose After Death

The phenomenon of a Buddhist adherent’s flesh body remaining intact after death was a common occurrence in ancient China.

The most famous one is the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Hui Neng, whose incorruptible body has been in Nanhua Temple in Guangdong Province for over 1300 years.

It has been vandalized three times and was nearly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1996, Li Jinsuo, a village head in Mianshan town in Shanxi Province, was cleaning a statue of Buddha at the local Zhengguo Temple when he found a loose mud tile on the head of the statue. Under the tile he saw an exposed white skull. Li immediately reported to his superiors. Subsequently, it was confirmed that there was a monk’s body inside. And it was not the only one. All 15 statues in the temple were made from mud sculpted over the bodies of deceased monks. So far, this may be the world’s largest group of non-decaying flesh statues found.

The CCP, which only recognizes atheism, did not say a word about this important news until 20 years after it was reported in the media.

The reason a monk’s body does not decompose after death, Lei told The Epoch Times, cannot be explained with modern science. Based on her practice of Falun Dafa, a spiritual discipline, she knows that monks can break through the current material world and enter another dimension, a more microscopic one that is beyond the limitations of time and space; so their flesh body won’t decompose after they pass away after hundreds or even thousands of years.

Ellen Wan contributed to this article.