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A Chinese court ordered the Dutch collector to return the ancient Buddha statue containing the monk’s mummy within 30 days.
The Intermediate People’s Court of Tam Minh City, Fujian Province, ruled on December 4 that the inhabitants of Yangchun and Dongpu villages in Dai Dien district had exclusive rights to Buddha statues and the right to revoke valuable statues. cultural relics. it is smuggled into foreign countries.
The statue is currently owned by Oscar van Overeem, a Dutch art collector. Residents accused Van Overeem of buying the stolen statue in Hong Kong in 1996. The court ordered the collector to return the statue to the status quo in eastern China’s Fujian province within 30 days.
Buddha statue containing the monk’s mummy (left) and a CT scan showing the human skeleton inside the statue on display in Hungary in 2015. Photo: Xinhua.
The ruling will be valid if it is not appealed to a higher court within 30 days, in accordance with China’s Civil Procedure Law.
The Buddha statue was worshiped in the temple jointly owned by Yangchun and Dongpu villages for centuries before it was stolen in late 1995. The statue is 1000 years old, the equivalent in life size, inside contains se believes that a monk’s mummy is Truong Cong Luc Toan.
Truong Cong Luc Toan was a revered monk of the Song dynasty (960-1279). After his death at the age of 37, he was mummified and wrapped in a statue. The statue was kept in the temple for more than 1,000 years before being stolen.
The statue reappeared at an exhibition in Hungary in March 2015. Villagers and the Fujian Provincial Cultural Heritage Administration confirmed that it was the late Buddha Truong Cong Luc Toan. In early February of the same year, a CT scan showed a statue containing the mummy of a monk.
After unsuccessful negotiations, the villages sued Van Overeem in Fujian province in 2015 and in the Netherlands in 2016 to demand the return of the Buddha statue. The Dutch court in Amsterdam held the first trial on July 14, 2017, but did not deliver a verdict, while the Fujian court tried it twice in July and October 2018.
The Tam Minh Intermediate People’s Court declared that the Buddha statue is an important heritage in the place where it appears and is preserved, feeding the spirits of many local devotees.
Van Overrem once said that he exchanged the statue with a Chinese collector in 2015 and did not know the identity of the person. However, he was happy if the statue returned to China and denied the sale of Chinese antiquities and the purchase of the statue in Hong Kong.
“I am an architect, an art enthusiast, certainly not a merchant,” he said. Van Overeem claims that he does not know the origin of the statue.
Returns of Chinese antiquities are usually made through diplomatic channels. In recent years, Beijing has fiercely opposed the trade in artifacts that it considers stolen in the 19th century, when European powers entered China.
Flee him (According to the CGTN)
