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tea2015-12-10 18:03

Spotlight: Repatriation of Chinese Mummy Buddha: where should he go?

The Buddha statue on display at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest in March. (Photo/Xinhua)

THE HAGUE, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) -- The disputed 1000-year-old Chinese mummy Buddha was thrown into the spotlight once again last week as the villagers of Yangchun, a small village in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian initiated a legal procedure to have the statue returned to its Puzhao temple, while the Dutch collector insists on giving it to a bigger temple in the same province only if his conditions for repatriation are satisfied.

"I can scientifically prove that the statue does not come from that village," the Dutch collector told Xinhua over the phone. His view stands in direct opposition to the declaration of the Chinese State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) that this statue known as "Zhanggong Patriarch"（章公祖师） had been stolen from no elsewhere but Yangchun village 20 years earlier.
"Reports said villagers remember a hole drilled in the left hand of the Buddha, and that the head was lost. With my hand on my heart I tell you, there is no hole in that hand, and his head is not lost at all," said the collector who still wishes to stay anonymous though his identity has been disclosed by other media.
"Just with these two points I can prove it is not their mummy. They can see the MRI scans of the statue. If they still do not believe it, they can make their own scans," he said.
It was through scans that researchers commissioned by the Dutch collector found out that a mummified body is encased in the statue.

When the statue toured in a mummy exhibition in Hungary last March, overseas Chinese residents there noticed its resemblance to the disappeared Zhanggong Patriarch in their home village and took on a cross-continental quest for its return.
For Chinese cultural heritage researchers, details such as a hole in a hand or a crack in the neck are excerpts from the memory of just a few villagers. "These details cannot be counted as hard arguments, especially when there is a full package of really crucial evidences," a SACH official told Xinhua.
In the photos taken by the villagers in the 1980s sits a Buddhist figure with a faint smile, cross-legged, shoulders slightly hunched forward. "Compared with widely mediated images of the statue now in hands of the Dutch collector, the facial expression, the posture and the decoration do look identical.
In an interview with Dutch daily NRC published last March, the collector said the Buddha statue came into his possession by coincidence, because actually the "crazy thing" did not fit in his collection.
"A Buddha is supposed to sit upright. This man has a curved back and proportionally his head is too large. And he is golden, something the owner does not like," said the NRC article. "But this made the statue intriguing and so the collector bought it for about 40,000 guilders."
An inescapable difference between the figure in villagers' photos and the statue once in exhibition is that the statue in the photos wears clothes, which makes the Dutchman suspect the authenticity of the Buddhist faith of the villagers.
"If someone really took away the statue, why would they have taken its clothes off? That he would ever have worn clothes is ridiculous. A real Buddhist monastery would not put clothes on such a statue. It is completely decorated with decorations of symbolic and religious value, you would not hide those under clothing," argued the collector in a conversation with Xinhua earlier in May.
A SACH document of which Xinhua obtained a copy explains that the specific Patriarch belief in the south of Fujian is a Buddhist belief that has adopted local forms. It is a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, witchcraft and folk-customs. In its particular traditions, Patriarch statues are always crowned and dressed. From generation to generation, village believers have always paraded their statues in full appeal at festivals every year.
In order to convince the collector that Zhanggong Patriarch does come from Yangchun, the SACH official has also sent him pictures of the linen text roll of the village's genealogy, and of the scroll and veiling that Puzhao Temple has kept for centuries.
The ancient text roll records the origin of Zhanggong Patriarch, or "Zhanggong Liuquan Zushi" by its full Chinese name, and shows that it has been worshiped at Puzhao temple in Yangchun village from the Song dynasty (960-1279) to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). The Chinese characters on these documents are consistent with those on the praying mat stolen along with the statue of the mummy Buddha, according to Chinese cultural heritage experts.

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Besides, a thorough investigation across Fujian province confirmed that apart from Yangchun village there is no other place where both a "Zhanggong Liuquan Zushi" and a "Puzhao Temple" existed together. In fact, ever since the mummy Buddha gained international attention, no other institution or individual in Fujian has made any claim for its ownership.
The collector also questioned the history of Puzhao temple in Yangchun village. "The temple shown on television is completely new, it is built recently with new wood," he told Xinhua.
However, the SACH told Xinhua that the Puzhao temple has been repaired and rebuilt many times, which actually demonstrates the deep bond and attachment between the villagers and their Zhanggong Patriarch. Certain pillars of the temple still stand on four stone foundations that date back to the Ming Dynasty, which proves that Puzhao temple is not a new construction, said the Chinese experts.
Earlier in March, the Dutch collector argued that the previous owner had acquired the statue in Hong Kong in the winter of 1994-1995 before shipping it to Amsterdam in 1995, and in mid-1996 he himself "legally acquired" it. If his saying proves to be true, the mummy Buddha appeared in both Hong Kong and the Netherlands before Yangchun villagers found their statue was stolen on Dec. 15, 1995. However, the collector did not accompany his statements with any proof.
"I am willing to return it to China, but I am not willing to return it to Yangchun," said the collector in an earlier interview with Xinhua. Contacted in May, he confirmed that negotiations for repatriation were underway with Chinese authorities and he expected that "in one or two weeks" the statue would go back to China "in the smartest way possible".
Last week, the Dutch collector disclosed his three conditions for the repatriation of the Chinese Mummy Buddha, which raised serious questioning over his sincerity. His conditions have been rejected by the Chinese authorities except for the request on cooperation for researches.
"We have told him that arrangements [for his intended researches in China] will be made properly, but only under the precondition that an actual intention of return has been reached," the SACH official told Xinhua.

Xinhua News Agency on Dec 8, 2015 @ 8:16 AM Spotlight: Repatriation of Chinese Mummy Buddha: where should he go?
http://www.globalpost.com/article/6701388/2015/12/08/spotlight-repatriation-chinese-mummy-buddha-where-should-he-go

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2015-12-10 18:20 0人喜欢

Dutch collector puts conditions on stolen Buddha statue's return to China

A 1000-year-old Buddha statue with a mummified monk inside, now in possession of Dutch private collector Oscar van Overeem, triggered a series of disputes in the past eight months between the collector and villagers of Yangchun in Southeastern China's Fujian province who claim that the statue was the one of Patriarch Zhanggong which was stolen in 1995 from the Puzhao Temple in their village.

Recently, the villagers hired a group of lawyers who obtained evidence in preparation to a lawsuit in Holland. Oscar van Overeem contacted journalists at Xinhua News Agency stressing that he can scientifically prove that the statue is not the one from Yangchun village. He then introduced three conditions on returning the statue to China.

The collector told Chinese journalists that he agreed to return the statue to China but demanded to return it to a grand temple instead of a small temple in a village. The Chinese government agreed to help him do research on something irrelevant to the statue but has failed to deliver on its promise. The Chinese side refusess to overcompensate for his loss on the statue.

"I've suggested adding the statue to a series of Chinese collections. In that case, if someone buys them for China, no one knows the single price of the statue. However, they refused to do so," Oscar van Overeem said.

"I've told the Chinese government in September that if they would buy the statue with other relics, the single price of the statue would be much cheaper than 20-30 million US dollars, which is the asking prices of other people who planned to buy it from me," he said.

The collector once said that he bought the statue for 40,000 Dutch guilders ($20,500) in 1996 from a collector in Amsterdam who had acquired it in Hong Kong, and refused to sell it despite the steep offer of ten million Euros ($10.85 million).

Some European collectors gathered a set of Chinese cultural relics and tried to find an intermediary to sell it in 2013. Oscar van Overeem recently added the mummified Buddha statue to that collection.

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2015-12-10 18:20 0人喜欢

According to Xinhua News Agency, the collector wished to return the statue a 1,000-year-old temple in Xiamen city of Fujian province called NanPutuo Temple. The Temple issued a certificate that they had never enshrined and worshipped any mummified Buddha statue in history and would not worship it in the future, but the collector still insisted to return the statue to that temple.

Experts say the statue should return to its original owner, especially when the ethical principle is concerned that human remains should be repatriated to their original country. According to Dr. Inge C. van der Vlies, professor of constitutional and public law at the University of Amsterdam, there were cases that artistic relics were returned at requests of choosing museums with the ability to well protect and display the relics, if the relics are proved to be really precious and in a fragile state. However, the statue of Patriarch Zhanggong is obviously not only an artistic relic, but also a cultural and religious relic.

"As a statue of Buddha, it makes no difference whether the temple is grand or small, ancient or new. The only factor to judge whether it could be well treated and protected should be the people, the believers and users of the statue," said Ms. van der Vlies who is also vice-chair of the Advisory Committee on the Assessment of Restitution Applications for Items of Cultural Value and the Second World War.

She suggested that villagers of Yangchun should prove that the statue belonged to the village in history and show the world that the statue is still a key part of the cultural and religious life in the village.

The worship of Patriarch Zhanggong never stopped in the village. In an interview with a journalist from China Daily, Lin Yongtuan, a Yangchun villager and one of the first residents to recognize the Buddha from pictures of artifacts in a public exhibition, said the Buddha statue was stolen in 1995, and the annual ritual of worship was never interrupted. Lin also noted that they were busy preparing for the worship ceremony of 2015.

The statue grabbed global attention this February after a scan revealed that it contained the mummified remains of a Buddhist monk. It was part of the Mummy World Exhibition at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, which had planned to display it until May.

In March, after seeing picture of the statue, residents of Yangchun pointed out its resemblance to the one that was stolen in 1995. Evidence has been presented by the Fujian Administration of Cultural Heritage suggesting the stolen statue is the one shown in Budapest.

Chinese State Administration of Cultural Heritage said later that it would communicate with the collector of the statue in hopes to convince him to return the Buddha figure to China. The Yangchun villagers also went through official and private channels to negotiate with the collector for the return of the statue.

In addition, the Chinese side stressed that the statue had been proved to be a stolen cultural relic from China. According to the relevant international convention laws in both China and Holland as well as international practices, stolen relics should be returned unconditionally, instead of purchased.

2015-12-08 16:41chinadaily.com.cn Editor: Wang Fan Dutch collector puts conditions on stolen Buddha statue's return to China
http://www.ecns.cn/2015/12-08/191752.shtml

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