Chinese court accepts suit over stolen mummy

FUZHOU, Dec. 12 -- A Chinese court has accepted a suit that called for a Dutch collector to return a mummified buddha believed stolen from an east China village in 1995.

Sanming Intermediate People's Court in Fujian Province has accepted the suit.

Liu Yang, a representative of a lawyers team hired by villagers from Yangchun Village, Datian County, will also head to the Netherlands to bring the case to a Dutch court.

The simultaneous suits both in China and Netherlands do not contradict each other, said Xu Huajie, a member of the lawyers team.

The suit in China is an infringement case that calls for the Dutch collector to stop the infringement act and return the buddha while the suit in Netherlands is a property case that calls for the collector to return the village property, he said.

The village has gone through official and private channels to negotiate with the Dutch collector for the return of the statue, which was worshipped as a god in the village temple for around 1,000 years, according to Lin Wenqing, Party chief of Yangchun village.

Zhanggong Zushi was a local man who became a monk in his 20s and won fame for helping people treat disease and spreading Buddhist belief.

When he died at the age of 37, his body was mummified and encased during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) in the statue in which it remains.

The statue was displayed in a "Mummy World" exhibition which opened in October last year in the Hungarian Natural History Museum. It was scheduled to be on show until May 17, but was pulled from the exhibition following allegations it was stolen.

In the temple, local people still display the statue's hat and clothes left behind after it disappeared.