A Village Is Missing Its Mummy

YANGCHUN, China — One day in March, Lin Yongtuan was scrolling through the news on his phone when he saw a story about a remarkable discovery: the nearly 1,000-year- old mummy of a monk encased in a statue of a gilded Buddhist figure sitting cross-legged.

Mr. Lin rushed to this lush mountain village, where he had grown up praying to a similar statue. He passed around the story’s photo of the statue, displayed in a museum in Budapest.

The villagers agreed: It was the same statue.

“Everyone in the village was so excited,” said Mr. Lin, 46. “The smile, the eyes, his posture — it was unmistakable.”

They called it the Zhanggong Patriarch, and it had been stolen 20 years earlier.

Since March, the 1,800 residents of Yangchun have been on a mission to get their mummy back. They have welcomed journalists to the village, appealed for help on social media, and lobbied the government, which has stepped up efforts to reclaim looted cultural relics.

On the main altar on a recent afternoon stood a crude replica of the Zhanggong Patriarch overlooking a table where residents had laid out evidence to support their claim to the statue: photos of it taken in 1989 and the clothes that had adorned the figure and were left behind by whoever made off with it in 1995.

“To us, Zhanggong Patriarch is not a cultural relic,” said Lin Wenqing, 39. “We see him as family. He is one of us.”

Before its theft, residents prayed to the Zhanggong Patriarch at every important event in the village. These traditions appear to go back centuries, passed down from generation to generation along with tales of the patriarch as a boy with the surname Zhang who moved to the village with his mother, worked as a cowherd and became a monk.

“They always told us that he lived during the Song dynasty,” said Lin Chengfa, 44, “and that inside the statue was his mummified corpse.”

Mummification was once a sign of eminence among monks of the Chan school of Buddhism.

Mr. Lin, who was part of the police unit that responded in December 1995 when the statue disappeared, recalled that several villagers wept. Some older residents had gone to great lengths to protect the statue during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

When reached on the site LinkedIn, the Dutch architect Oscar van Overeem said he owned the mummy, having bought it in 1996 from a collector who found it in Hong Kong.

Workers restoring the statue re-

A statue containing a mummified monk is going to China.

alized something might be inside, and Mr. van Overeem decided to get a CT scan. But he insists that his statue is not the Zhanggong Patriarch.

“I have convinced the Chinese representatives easily with facts and research that the villagers’ claim is unjustified or unlikely,” he wrote via LinkedIn.

But he said he had agreed to donate the mummy to “a major Buddhist temple” near Yangchun, which he referred to as a village that “pretends the mummy belongs to them.”

Lin Wenqing said, “We want our Zhanggong Patriarch back so we can pray to him and worship him, not so that some collector can keep him in a cold basement or in a museum display case.”