Chinese court upholds ruling that Dutch collector should repatriate mummified Buddha

FUZHOU, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The provincial higher people's court of east China's Fujian on Tuesday rejected the appeal of a Dutch collector, upholding the original judgement that the collector should return a stolen millennium-old Buddha statue to local villagers.

The statue is of Zhanggong Zushi, a Song Dynasty (960-1279) monk who gained fame for curing diseases and spreading Buddhist beliefs. When he died at 37, his body was mummified according to his wishes and placed inside a statue.

The statue had been housed in a temple in what is today known as Sanming City of Fujian, where it was worshipped by locals for over 1,000 years before it was stolen in 1995.

The villagers searched for the lost statue until they found it on exhibition in Hungary in 2015. They later unsuccessfully negotiated for its return with Dutch national Oscar van Overeem, the then holder of the statue.

The Sanming Intermediate People's Court registered the case in 2015 and held two court hearings in 2018. On Dec. 4, 2020, the court ordered that the Dutch collector return the statue to the plaintiffs, the villagers committees of Yangchun and Dongpu, within 30 days.

Yangchun Village and Dongpu Village co-own the temple that stored the ancient statue.

Van Overeem appealed the result soon after the first trial.

During the second trial, the provincial higher people's court of Fujian maintained the original verdict, which held that the statue is a collectively owned relic, handed down in the area for generations, and thus its collective ownership by Yangchun and Dongpu residents is protected by law. Van Overeem, who claimed to have bought the statue in 1996, did not provide transaction documents as evidence.

In the appeal, the higher court classified the statue as an illegally exported stolen cultural relic that has a unique emotional connection with the villagers and reflects local customs and history, and said it should be returned based on law, sense and sentiment.

In 2016, a Dutch court registered the lawsuit filed by the two villagers committees, and the first public hearing in Amsterdam was held the following year. However, the court rejected the case in December 2018, ruling that the villagers committees were not legal entities and ineligible to file a claim.