Unanswered Prayers
Almost 30 years after a statue containing the 1,000-year-old mummified remains of a Buddhist master was stolen and sold overseas, thousands from a small village in Southeast China are still fighting for its return
Among the bamboo groves dotted around Yangchun Village sits Puzhaotang Hall, home of a shrine to the revered Buddhist master Zhanggong. Above the shrine, a gilded statue sits cross-legged, its shoulders slightly hunched forward, smiling gently to the hall’s visitors. The statue is a replica. The original, which contained the ancient remains of a mummified monk, was stolen in 1995. It was eventually sold off and is now somewhere in the Netherlands.
Almost all the 2,060 people in Yangchun Village and over 400 people in neighboring Dongpu Village, Datian County of southeastern China’s Fujian Province, share the same surname: Lin. They all worship the same deity, Zhanggong, a Song Dynasty (960-1270) Buddhist monk surnamed Zhang. Gong is an honorific for “elder master.”
Lin Yongtuan’s house is just 20 meters from the hall. The 43-year-old said the original Zhanggong statue was of the ancient Buddhist master who passed away peacefully seated in that position while watching his favorite opera, according to local legend. The body was mummified and entombed in the statue, where it was worshipped as a whole-body Buddhist relic.
“Zhanggong is not only our patron deity but an [honorary] member of the Lin clan, which includes hundreds of families across the community here,” Lin Yongtuan said in Puzhaotang Hall. “This whole-body relic was unique and famous for being complete… including the head, torso and four limbs.
“Ever since my childhood Zhanggong was with us, and we often prayed to his statue for health, wealth and success,” he said. “His amiable, faint smile has never left my mind.”
The villagers have moved beyond prayer for the statue’s safe return. Lawsuits were filed both in China and the Netherlands, making this case the first to involve simultaneous litigation for a Chinese cultural relic in two different countries. The rulings, however, stand in stark contrast, highlighting the complexities and challenges of cross-border cultural heritage disputes.
Master Works
According to Datian County archives, the first Puzhaotang Hall was built in 1086 during the Northern Song Dynasty.
Soon after, a young man named Zhang Qisan moved to Yangchun with his mother and worked as a cowherd. He became a Buddhist monk in his 20s, and was given the ordained name Puzhao. He had extensive knowledge of herbal medicine. When a plague swept the area, Zhang saved many lives. According to legend, he trained with a Buddhist master and attained nirvana upon his death at age 37.
Although there is speculation as to how Zhang died, some say he committed self-mummification, a practice in which monks observe asceticism to the point of death. However, most believe that locals embalmed him and encased his remains inside a gilded statue to serve as a protective deity. Some Buddhists believe that mummification itself is an advanced spiritual state.
“We have two major festivals to celebrate Zhanggong. Extravagant rituals are held on his birthday and on Lunar New Year,” said Yangchun resident Lin Kaiwang. “Our village also holds minor ceremonies for other occasions such as during the spring plowing time and autumn harvests,” the 53-year-old said.
Both ancestor and Buddhist master worship are prevalent in Fujian Province. With its high concentration of Buddhists, southern Fujian boasts up to 6,000 temples enshrining over 500 different local deities. The worship of Buddhist masters in the area began in the
Northern Song Dynasty, and has since mixed with other forms of ancestor worship.
Lin Shengzhong, an expert in the local culture of Datian County, said many eminent Buddhist monks of the time would self-immolate when ready to attain nirvana. Their remains, such as bones and teeth, would be encased in a statue for locals to worship as holy Buddhist relics, called sasira in Sanskrit. Only a few whole-body relics survived the tumultuous events of modern China, such as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nearby Yankou Village, for example, lost a similar statue during this decade.
Gui Shuzhong, a documentarian in Fujian, said that such worship mainly involves local historical figures. “In most cases, family clans enshrined both their ancestral gods and Buddhist masters inside the same ancestral hall,” Gui said. “The same master may be worshipped in many neighboring villages, or even a whole region.”
Local belief in Zhanggong’s power to perform miracles persists, even among younger generations. Lin Mei, 33, said that praying to Zhanggong can cure illness. Three interviewed teenagers said they were proud to have Zhanggong as their guardian deity, and his annual birthday celebration has become a big event for villagers young and old to gather. “This belief system creates harmony in villagers’ relationships and enhances mutual trust among community members,” one teenage girl said.
Missing Statue
In the 1970s, locals performed their own miracle by sheltering the Zhanggong statue from the Cultural Revolution, a time when religious sites and objects faced devastating destruction. “I learned from village elders that the statue, though weighing some 60 kilograms, was lifted easily by a single person on the day they secreted it away and hid it,” Lin Kaiwang said.
“As religion and many other cultural traditions gradually revived starting in the mid-1980s, we reestablished Puzhaotang Hall and set up the Zhanggong shrine,” he added.
Meanwhile, particularly during the 1990s, cultural relics in China were under threat from smugglers, tomb raiders and thieves. The situation worsened as the market for Chinese artifacts boomed both at home and abroad.
Among the sites plundered was Puzhaotang Hall. On December 14, 1995, people entered to find the Zhanggong statue missing from the shrine, its faded decorative crown and cloak left behind.
Thousands of villagers took part in an extensive search. “In 1995, there were no means of transportation, no one in our village owned a car. We learned that a gang of thieves came in a van during the night to steal valuable cultural relics, including some Buddha statues from some neighboring mountain villages around 1995,” Lin Kaiwang told Newschina. “You know, southern Fujian is very close to Hong Kong, so it is easy for those robbers to fence stolen artifacts there before they’re smuggled to overseas markets,” he said.
Yangchun residents reported the theft to Datian County police, but never gave up their own search efforts. The trail eventually went cold – until March 6, 2015.
Lin Yongtuan said he had just finished lunch and was scrolling the news on his phone when a report caught his attention: Researchers in Europe had discovered the 1,000-year-old
mummified body of a monk encased in a statue. An X-ray revealed the mummified skeleton inside the statue, which was on display in Hungary at the Mummy World Exhibition in Budapest’s Natural History Museum.
Lin Yongtuan was speechless: the included photo showed the lost Zhanggong statue that had been missing from their village for 20 years.
He quickly shared the news with other villagers. After some research, they identified the statue’s owner – Dutch art dealer Oscar van Overeem.
Chinese media soon picked up the story, and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage became involved.
Reporters requested interviews with the museum in Budapest and photographed the exhibited statue. Amid the brewing controversy, van Overeem withdrew the statue from the exhibition and canceled scheduled showings in other parts of Europe.
Lawsuits in Two Cities
Despite van Overeem initially denying that his was the statue in question, evidence quickly piled up: Archival materials, old photos and documents pointed to the Zhanggong statue.
Through both official and private channels, people from Yangchun and Dongpu began to negotiate with van Overeem for the statue’s return. According to one Yangchun resident involved in the recovery efforts, van Overeem asked for US$20 million, but he wanted the statue to go to Nanputuo, a larger and well-known Buddhist temple in the metropolis of Xiamen, around 200 kilometers south of Yangchun. “We couldn’t afford that much money. More importantly, he bought the statue in Hong Kong for 40,000 Dutch guilders (around US$20,000) in 1996, which was illegal,” added the villager, who requested anonymity.
When negotiations failed, villagers turned to the courts. With the help of a pro bono legal team, Yangchun