Village awaits return of Buddha statue with monk inside
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E-mail China Daily, September 14, 2015
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(From left to right) Chinese delegates Lai Shuilian, Chen Yueping, Fu Bin,Liu Wenjian, Li Zhen, You Dengta, Wu Liujin and Lin Guozhang appeal for the return of the mummified Buddha in front of the Dutch Embassy in Hungary on April 13. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] |
The fading banner hanging across the gate posts of Puzhao Temple reads "We hope that the statue of Patriach Zhanggong will come home soon."
The statue, which contains the body of a Buddhist monk and is the heartof Yangchun village in Southern China's Fujian province, remains abroad, as worldwide attention that called for it to be returned by a Dutch collector faded just like the banner.
"The Dutch collector said he would return the statue of Patriach Zhanggong this April, and we have been expecting this for the past several months," Lin Jianfei, a Yangchun village teacher, said. "Yet what we have learned now is that the Dutch collector, who told the media several months ago that he would return the statue, now turns out to be rather reluctant to do so and is making all kinds of excuses, which shocks me. I feel angry."
In March, the Buddhist statue, was part of the Mummy World exhibition at the Hungarian Natural History Museum. The statue was proved to be the one that was stolen from Fujian province's Yangchun village in 1995.
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A CT scan shows a body, whose internal organs were removed, concealed in an ancient Chinese statue of a Buddha. [Photos provided by the Drents Museum] |
According to a New York Times report, Oscar van Overeem is a Dutch architect, and he acquired the statue in dispute in 1996 from a collector in Amsterdam who had acquired it in Hong Kong. Not long after the report, the collector said on his LinkedIn page that he had reached a tentative agreement to donate the mummy to "a major Buddhist temple" near Yangchun village in the southeastern province of Fujian, where the statue was likely to be the personification of Patriach Zhanggong. But as time went by, he changed his mind.
"The Dutch collector now disputes that the statue is the one that comes from Yangchun village - he said that a larger temple also has the Chinese characters '普照'(puzhao), and that the statue couldn't have belonged to a small village like Yangchun," said Lin Yongtuan, who first discovered that the statue on display in Europe is the statue of Patiach Zhanggong.
Lin Yongtuan said the characters '普照'are a common expression in Buddhism, yet on the cushion of Patriach Zhanggong's statue, it is written clearly that the Puzhao temple is in Yangchun village.
As an intellectual, Lin Jianfei has studied the statue's history and that of the Puzhao temple, and according to him, "evidence, no matter those from villagers or those from Chinese officials, all say that the statue on display in Europe several months ago is the statue of Patriach Zhanggong from Yangchun village that went missing in 1995."
"The Dutch collector's claim that the statue belongs somewhere else in China is just ridiculous," Lin said.
Lin Yongtuan said that China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage has sent staff to investigate, and made sure that the statue collected by the Dutch collector is the one that was stolen from Yangchun village.
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