A group of Chinese villagers have travelled to the Netherlands to demand a Dutch collector return a Buddha statue that contains the remains of a 1,000-year-old monk.
The villagers claimed that the statue was of Zhanggong Zushi, a respected Buddhist Master, and it was stolen from their local temple in south-east China in 1995.
The Dutch collector, named Oscar van Overeem, said he was willing to return the statue and the remains, but he had failed to reach an agreement with the Chinese on the terms of the return, according to media reports.
The golden Buddha statue has been the centre of an international dispute for two years
A CT scan in 2015 revealed the statue (left) contained the remains of a mummified monk (right)
Scientists in the Netherlands were shocked by the result of the scan which showed the remains
The trial of the lawsuit started on July 14 in Amsterdam.
The Chinese villagers said the statue and remains of Zhanggong Zushi had been the pride and joy of the village of Yangchun until it was stolen 22 years ago, according to NL Times, quoting a report from Dutch website Volkskrant.
Mr van Overeem, however, told the court that he was willing to return the relic, but the Chinese did not agreed to his request of receiving ‘reasonable compensation’, said the same report.
He also said that there could be a mistake in identifying the statue and the statue might not be the one that was stolen from Yangchun.
The art collector added that he had exchanged the statue and the mummified remains for a number of other statues’ with an unidentified businessman because the case had cost him ‘a lot of negative energy, money and business’.
Liu Yang, who successfully led a Chinese legal team in recovering relics looted from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, is representing the villagers in fighting for the Buddha.
Mr Liu is apparently confident to win the case.
He told The telegraph ahead of the trial: ‘The statue belongs to the villagers, and I think the Dutch owner should act in a graceful way to take himself out of a predicament.’
A woman looks at a Buddha statue at the Natural History Museum in Budapest in March, 2015
Controversy arose after a Chinese villager saw the statue being displayed in Budapest on TV
The Buddha at the centre of the lawsuit is around 1,000-years-old and measures 1.2 metres tall (3.93 feet).
A CT scan in February, 2015, revealed that the golden statue concealed the remains of a mummified monk.
Controversy about the Buddha arose in 2015 after a villager of Yangchun saw it on TV as the statue was being displayed at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest.
In 2015, Mr van Overeem said he bought the statue for 40,000 guilders (around £16,000) in 1996 from another collector, who had acquired it from a Chinese artist friend in late 1994 or early 1995, according to a report on DutchNews.
Pictured right is a Buddha once displayed at the temple in Yangchun village. Locals believe it was the same statue (left) previously owned by the Dutch collector Oscar van Overeem
The mummified body inside the golden statue is said to be that of Zhanggong Zushi, a local monk who helped treat disease and spread Buddhist belief.
When he died at the age of 37, his body was mummified and placed inside the statue during China’s Song Dynasty (960-1279).
Villagers in Yangchun believe the statue was stolen in 1995.
The only thing that was left behind was the hat and clothes which are still in the temple.
According to People’s Daily Online, Lin Wenqing, party chief of Yangchun village, claimed in late 2015 that the statue had been worshiped as a god in the village temple for around a millennium.
