Related News
Fight over 1,000-year-old Chinese mummy hits Dutch court
A Dutch court will Friday hear arguments involving ownership of a 1,000-year-old mummified monk in a case brought against a local collector by Chinese villagers who claim their ancestor was stolen.
The eastern Chinese village of Yangchun will square off against a Dutch collector, whom they said bought the stolen Buddha statue containing the remains of a monk in Hong Kong in 1996, a lawyer representing the village said.
The human-sized sitting Buddha statue, called the “Zhanggong Patriarch”, disappeared from a temple in Yangchun in late 1995 after being worshipped for centuries, Jan Holthuis said.
“We are going to present our arguments to a judge to explain why the villagers want their statue back,” he told AFP.
Missing for two decades, the Buddha statue resurfaced when villagers in 2015 recognised it as part of a display at the “Mummy World Exhibition” at Budapest’s Natural History Museum.
The statue was subsequently withdrawn.
Relatives of the monk -- who Holthuis says have written proof of their family ties -- are entitled to have their ancestor returned to his rightful place, the lawyer said.
The lawyers will argue that according to Dutch law “a person is not allowed to have a known body in their possession,” Holthuis said.
“We also have enough evidence to prove that the statue is indeed the one that was stolen from the temple,” he added.
“The fact that it was sold a few months after it was stolen, that it contains certain texts referring to the name ‘Zhanggong’ and that its dating more-or-less corresponds to the period that the monk was alive,” were some of the arguments which will be presented, he said.
However, on Wednesday the statue’s immediate whereabouts were not known as the original collector allegedly swapped it with a third party in 2015, Holthuis said.
The Amsterdam-based collector’s lawyers declined to comment to AFP.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
- RSS
- |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证:沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证:31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证:0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证:沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证:沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.