A Dutch court will tomorrow hear arguments involving ownership of a 1,000-year-old mummified monk in a case brought against a local collector by Chinese villagers who claim their ancestor was stolen. The small eastern Chinese village of Yangchun will square off against a Dutch collector, whom they said bought the stolen Buddha statue containing the remains of a monk in Hong Kong in 1996, a lawyer representing the village said. The human-sized sitting Buddha statue, called the "Zhanggong Patriarch", disappeared from a temple in Yangchun in late 1995 after being worshipped for centuries, Jan Holthuis said. Missing for two decades, the Buddha statue resurfaced when villagers in 2015 recognised it as part of a display at the "Mummy World Exhibition" at Budapest's Natural History Museum. The case is being closely watched as it could mark one of the first successful retrievals of Chinese relics in court, the state-run Chinese newspaper Global Times reported yesterday.

Source: dna July 12, 2017 16:30 UTC