Millions at stake as
Chinese villagers take collector to court over "man in the
Buddha"
John Hooper and Ted
Plafker Jun 2 2017 AFRWEEKEND
Around the time that William of Normandy was
conquering England, the Buddhist master Zhang Qisan decided it was
time to die. Or rather, he felt it was time to begin the next stage
of his existence by transforming himself into a living
mummy.
Qisan was born in the tiny hill village of
Xukeng where even today most of the inhabitants have the surname
Zhang. His family had the unusual tradition of giving their
children numbers as forenames. "Qisan" means 73 – his
grandfather's age when he was born.
When he was a boy, he wandered far and wide
before deciding to enter a monastery. The profound knowledge of
herbal remedies he acquired there won him fame and affection. He
was so pious that he earned the honorific title of "Gong" (Lord)
and became known as Zhang Gong. He was – and is – considered a
bodhisattva: one capable of attaining nirvana, but who chooses to
remain in the physical world out of compassion for
humanity.
From around the late third century ad, some
masters, including Zhang Gong, succeeded in controlling the manner
and timing of their deaths by means of self-mummification. They
ordered their disciples to store their bodies after their deaths
and told them that when they recovered the body after a year or so,
they would find it intact.
These masters then ingested herbs that had
poisonous properties to speed their demise; and preservative ones
to begin the process of mummification from the inside out. Zhang
Gong, with his botanical education, would have been particularly
expert at this. The final stage was to adopt the lotus position and
enter a deep meditative trance. The faithful believe these masters
did not truly die, but entered a state of enlightenment in which
they became living Buddhas.
For his final meditation, Zhang Gong chose a
particularly auspicious spot near the village of Yangchun in Fujian
province, in the uplands of south-eastern China. There, he moved
into his final stage of existence, and was worshipped by villagers
– until, 1000 years later, he disappeared.
In 1997, Carel Kools, a restorer of Asian art
and antiquities in Amsterdam, was sent a shabby, life-sized statue
of a Buddha in the lotus position. "The statue came to me in a
really bad state," he says. "There was lots of damage from
insects." Attached to the base of the statue were two planks that
were also in poor condition. "So we removed the planks he was
sitting on and discovered these linen rolls."
Kools took out the rolls – one of which is
more of a cushion – peered inside the statue and found himself
staring at the remains of a human being: "I was looking straight at
the underside of his legs."
He rang the collector who had commissioned
him, an architect by the name of Oscar van Overeem. "I was abroad,"
Van Overeem recalls. "[Kools] said: 'Oscar, believe it or not, the
statue is no statue. It's a mummy.' I said: 'Carel. You should
drink better wine. Don't tease me.' I couldn't believe
it."
On July 14, a judge in Amsterdam will embark
on the unenviable task of deciding whether these two mummies are
one and the same. Lawyers representing the inhabitants of Yangchun
contend that the mummy that ended up in Kools's workshop is the one
stolen from their village temple two decades earlier and that it
contains the remains of Zhang Gong. They are also expected to argue
that Van Overeem cannot legally own a corpse.
Counsel for the Dutch collector will counter
that numerous museums and private collectors own mummies and Van
Overeem's is in any case not the one stolen from Yangchun; that
this is a case of mistaken identity, one that has become a
nightmare for their client.
At stake in this bizarre affair is possession
of an object said to be worth tens of millions of dollars. The
dispute over its ownership has already had an impact on relations
between China and the Netherlands at the highest level, and has
also highlighted an important change in Beijing's official policy
towards the recovery of millions of cultural artefacts that have
been removed from China, by sale or by theft, down the
centuries.
Hoping and praying
As sunset drew near on a cool March evening,
the scent of burning firewood hung in the air over Yangchun,
mingling with that of family suppers being cooked. Traffic along
the village's main road consisted mostly of waddling ducks,
scurrying chickens and small children with backpacks making their
way home from school in a township several kilometres
away.
The village is set amid high, thickly forested
hills. Ever since a motorway reached the area in around 2010, the
village has been a two-hour drive from the prosperous coastal city
of Quanzhou. Yangchun is only four kilometres from the motorway
exit. According to the local Communist Party secretary, Lin
Kaiwang, about 1800 people live in the village and most, like him,
are called Lin.
Yangchun has the mish-mash of architectural
styles that China's precipitous economic development has produced.
Some of the villagers live in grand, well-kept courtyard houses
built of grey brick with elegant roofs of high-quality slate tiles.
But there are also more modest houses of red brick or wood, and
crude three- and five-storey blocks made of bare cement. Some of
the houses are clad in garish yellow or pink tiles. One is adorned
with Corinthian columns.
Fir trees, which supply highly prized timber
for construction, are the commonest vegetation in the area. But the
key to Yangchun's recent – and still relative – prosperity is tea.
The bushes in the terraced fields around the village yield three
crops a year of a variety known as Tieguanyin, a renowned Oolong
tea midway between black and green that is ubiquitous in village
homes.
The standard tea-making kit includes a kettle,
a pot for brewing tea and a bowl into which the cups are dipped in
and out of water using purpose-made tongs to rinse and warm them.
The tea is served in small cups which are constantly
refilled.
The centre of village life – both physical and
spiritual – is the Puzhao Temple. During the day, people gather in
the square in front of the temple, or on its steps, sitting and
chatting. At night, loudspeakers often blare out music for the
group dancing that is popular in villages and cities all over
China.
The fir-wood pillars and walls of the temple
are hung with vertical red scrolls bearing ink-brush calligraphy on
Buddhist themes. Strung across the front of the building is the
kind of horizontal red banner with yellow characters on which
political slogans often appear. On this one, however, the message
reads: "Hoping and praying that the Zhang Gong bodhisattva mummy
returns soon to its native home!"
Theft of a relic
The mummy's survival through centuries of
Chinese political turmoil is testament to the villagers' love for
it. It survived even Mao Zedong's exhortation during the Cultural
Revolution to "Smash the Four Olds" – customs, culture, habits and
ideas. Mao's young cadres destroyed artworks all around the
country, but Yangchun's inhabitants took great risks to protect the
mummy, moving it from house to house.
A night-watchman at the temple was supposed to
keep it safe, but on the crucial night in December 1995 he seems,
to no one's great surprise, to have been asleep. According to Lin
Wenyu, a local, the only people who noticed anything odd were some
workers at a brick factory near the entrance to the village. They
saw a van make its way very slowly over the bumpy road that ran
through the village. Since motor vehicles of any kind were still a
rarity in rural China, the workers were curious enough to peer into
the back of the van as it crawled along.
"In the rear seat, they saw a seated figure
covered with a blanket," says Lin. "They assumed it was someone who
was seriously ill and who was being taken away for medical
treatment."
The theft was a terrible blow to the
community. According to Lin Lemiao, a retired teacher who has lived
all of his 72 years in Yangchun, "You can't imagine how distraught
we all were. People were crying bitterly. Everyone was just
miserable."
Two decades later, the loss was still sharp
enough that, when the villagers heard tell of a statue in an
exhibition in Budapest that seemed to resemble their relic, they
swung into action. They enlisted the help of the diaspora: one of
the villagers, working as a cook in Hungary, was sent to see if the
mummy was that of Zhang Gong.
When he reported back that it was, the
villagers contacted Liu Yang, a lawyer in Beijing known for his
work in recovering Chinese cultural property from abroad. He got
hold of HIL, a firm of Dutch lawyers, which is bringing the case
against Oscar van Overeem to court.
'Hi. I'm Oscar'
An ebullient, remarkably youthful-looking
54-year-old, Van Overeem – "Hi. I'm Oscar" – arrived for what he
said was his first in-depth interview since the start of the
dispute wearing jeans, trainers and a sweatshirt. Round, wire-frame
spectacles were perched at the end of his nose and his hair looked
as if it had not enjoyed the attentions of a comb in
weeks.
The world in which Van Overeem moves is a long
way from that of the villagers of Yangchun. An
architect-cum-interior designer, he works at the top end of the
market. He says he often takes on commissions from other collectors
to create private galleries. A specialist in Japanese architecture,
he has developed a style he describes as "very detailed, minimalist
– and extremely luxurious".
Warming to his subject, he produces a few of
his designs: cool grey interiors intended to encourage visitors to
focus on his clients' possessions. Sculptures and other pricey
artefacts are displayed to maximum advantage in softly – yet
intensely – lit niches. Later, Van Overeem pulls out the plans of
what he says is a penthouse he designed for a Gulf potentate. It
looks about the size of a soccer pitch.
"… And this is his bedroom … and this is his
bathroom … and, right next to it, the pool because he likes to swim
just after he gets up. That bit's for the sharks. So you see, he
can …"
"Sharks?"
"Yes. The sheikh likes to swim alongside
sharks. There's a transparent barrier between the two halves of the
pool, of course."
Architecture is Van Overeem's second career.
He originally worked in graphic design and claims to have been
among the first in the field to employ digital technology. By his
mid-20s, he had earned enough to start collecting. His Chinese
collection focuses on works produced before the end of the Tang
dynasty at the start of the tenth century.
Van Overeem's principal agent was a dealer and
collector he names as Benny Rustenburg, now retired and living in
the Philippines: "a hippy type", but "a very good businessman".
Rustenburg had a storage facility in Amsterdam, and it was there,
in late 1995, Van Overeem says, that he first saw the seated Buddha
that was going to change his life.
He says that Rustenburg had bought it in Hong
Kong at the end of 1994 or the beginning of 1995, and that it had
been shipped to Amsterdam in mid-1995 – several months before Zhang
Gong's mummy disappeared from Yangchun.
Van Overeem was initially not interested in
buying the statue. It was gold. "And I don't like golden statues,"
he says in a voice infused with distaste. It was damaged and
adorned with dragon motifs that seemed to date it to the Ming
dynasty, which was founded almost five centuries after the latest
period in which Van Overeem had until then shown an interest. "I
said, 'It's not my cup of tea.'"
To keep stock moving, retailers will sometimes
bundle objects they know their customers want with others they want
less – or not at all. According to Van Overeem, that is what
Rustenburg – "the smartass", as he ruefully calls the dealer – did
with the sitting Buddha. He added it to "a few beautiful terracotta
objects" that he knew his young client would love to
own.
Van Overeem says he sent the statue, as he
believed it to be, to his restorer, Carel Kools, who did not get
around to tackling it until early 1997. After discovering that it
was in fact a mummy, Kools suggested it be X-rayed. He had a second
job at the time working in a hospital and could arrange for access
to the radiography department out of normal hours.
'We felt like Indiana
Jones'
"So what I did was, during the night – this is
a movie, eh? – I put the mummy in my car, in the front seat, put a
cloth over him and put a seat belt on him," says Van Overeem. "We
drove to the hospital. There, he was put in a wheelchair and we
pushed him, covered up, to the X-ray department. We felt like
Indiana Jones."
The X-rays showed there was a more or less
complete skeleton inside (it was later discovered that the internal
organs had all been removed, along with some finger bones which Van
Overeem thinks were taken as relics). Kools then took a sample from
the linen cushion and had it carbon-tested. The results dated the
cushion to the 13th century – 300 years before the decorations on
the casing of the mummy.
"Then we tested the mummy itself – and then we
were really confused," says Van Overeem. The body was at least 100
years older than the cushion. It was from the Song dynasty. But, as
an expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
subsequently explained, it was not uncommon for mummies to have
things added to them in later centuries. In this case, a cushion
had been thoughtfully placed under the master's behind and the
casing had been gilded and redecorated. But the casing itself and
the body inside were about 1000 years old. It was the stuff of
collectors' dreams.
"A Ming statue can [fetch] nowadays, let's
say, between €20,000 ($30,400) and €100,000," says Van Overeem.
"But a Song-dynasty statue? Even in those days, millions." The
least appreciated item in a job lot had turned out to be worth a
fortune: his gaudy Ming statue was actually "the rarest of the
rarest".
For 18 years, the dream remained intact. Van
Overeem says he turned away an offer of $US20 million. But, after
he lent the mummy to the exhibition in Budapest, his association
with it became increasingly problematic.
International claims
Faced with the villagers' claim that the mummy
had been stolen, the exhibition organisers asked him to withdraw
it. Overnight, Van Overeem went from being a respected collector to
an alleged recipient of stolen goods (though, as he points out, if
he had suspected the mummy was stolen, he would hardly have allowed
it to be exhibited for all the world to see). Suddenly, he was
"that rich bastard in Holland" who was depriving the poor
inhabitants of Yangchun of their beloved holy man and, he says, his
architectural practice suffered as a result.
Dutch police came to interview him, apparently
at the request of their Chinese counterparts. And while abroad on
business, he received a call from the Dutch foreign ministry asking
him to come to The Hague the moment he landed back in
Holland.
"I thought I might be arrested at the
airport," says Van Overeem.
He wasn't, but was asked to explain the affair
to an annoyed Dutch government. The prime minister, it turned out,
had been on a visit to Beijing and had been embarrassingly
wrong-footed when his opposite number started quizzing him about
the return of a mummy of which he knew nothing. The mummy had
become a smaller, slightly gruesome, Chinese version of the Elgin
marbles: an emblem of the despoliation of Chinese culture by
rapacious foreigners.
According to the Chinese Academy of Cultural
Heritage, there are around 10 million Chinese objects in foreign
museums and collections. Some were produced specifically for
export; some were valuable cultural objects that were sold; some
were looted.
The most notorious episode was the sacking by
the British and French in 1860 of Beijing's magnificent Old Summer
Palace. According to the Chinese, 23,000 items plundered during
that orgy of destruction and pillage at the end of the second opium
war are in the British Museum.
Not that the Chinese themselves are free of
responsibility. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911,
officials helped themselves to treasures from the Imperial Palace
that were then sold abroad.
The Cultural Revolution was a disaster – even
more for Tibet's heritage than for China's. "The Red Guards were
heavily involved in programmatic looting and export," says Sam
Hardy, an expert on the illegal trade in art and antiquities at
University College London. "China trafficked so much cultural
property from Tibet that it flooded the markets of Hong Kong and
Tokyo."
The clearance of areas for major
infrastructure projects like the Three Gorges Dam also saw the
wholesale looting of cultural artefacts.
But China's opening to the world has gone
hand-in-hand with what Hardy calls "huge interest in the recovery
of looted antiquities, which is tied up with identity, pride and
power".
'State operation'
For several years, it was fashionable for rich
individuals to acquire Chinese objects from abroad so that they
could enhance their standing by donating them to museums. One of
the most intriguing questions concerns responsibility for a string
of apparent "thefts to order" of items seized from the Old Summer
Palace. Beginning in 2010, museums in Sweden, Norway, Britain and
France were targeted. Hardy says that the robberies may have been
commissioned by private collectors who either intended to keep the
artefacts for themselves or to donate them to the state at some
point in the future – but he does not rule out the possibility that
they are part of a "state operation".
The Chinese government has certainly expressed
a growing interest in the country's cultural heritage. In 2014,
President Xi Jinping signalled a radical change in the Communist
Party's view of China's past when he welcomed traditional culture
as a "foundation for China to compete in the world". Since then,
the authorities, in particular the State Administration of Cultural
Heritage, have become increasingly involved in the recovery of
historical artefacts.
That the government raised the case of the
mummy during a state visit shows how concerned it is about this
case. Who is financing it is not clear. Liu Yang says he is working
pro bono: "I haven't taken any money from the people in Yangchun
…They are peasants of very modest means – mountain villagers.
Maybe, if we succeed in getting [the mummy] back, they'll think
about giving me something. But it's not important." Jan Holthuis of
HIL, the Dutch lawyers' firm, will not say who is paying
them.
The government has also changed its line on
accepting cultural objects as gifts. According to Liu, the
authorities "no longer encourage rich Chinese to buy things back
and donate them, because they're afraid it creates a market, and as
the prices go up it will be harder and harder to find buyers like
that. It's not seen as a good way to handle things" – as Van
Overeem was to discover.
The villagers are unanimous in their certainty
that the mummy is theirs.
"When I was small and went to worship Zhang
Gong, that base was at eye-level for me and the photos look exactly
the same," says Lin Wenyu.
"Just from the pictures we saw from the
exhibition in Hungary, we knew instantly," says Lin Lemiao, the
retired teacher. "There can be no doubt that [the mummy] is
ours."
Lin Qizhou, a local official, says: "It is
simply laughable to think that this is not our mummy. All the
people here have been visiting the temple for their entire lives,
and we all just know. It is not even open to debate." It will,
however, be open to debate in the Dutch court, which will be
looking for hard evidence.
No receipt
Van Overeem's biggest handicap is that he has
no receipt from Benny Rustenburg to back his version of how he
acquired the mummy. "Everybody says, like, 'Can you give me proof?'
From 20 years ago?" he protests. "Come on! I always paid the man
cash or I paid him [by bank transfer] to Hong Kong."
Nor, crucially, can Van Overeem expect
corroboration from the dealer. "He's not willing to say anything."
A Benny Rustenburg living in the Philippines has a profile on
LinkedIn in which he describes himself as retired from "Benny Art";
but neither online inquiries nor shoe-leather in Manila succeeded
in raising him.
The villagers are also short of hard evidence.
Local officials say old photos of the mummy from before the theft
are "no longer here"; Yangchun's genealogical records, which are
said to prove the link with Zhang Gong, are "in storage", though
presumably they can be extracted if they are helpful to the
case.
The strongest evidence in the villagers'
favour is the round, flat cushion found underneath the mummy, of
which they have photographs. On the rim there is writing in ancient
Chinese characters. Some are illegible, but the key passages read
as follows: "Since patriarch Zhang Gong Liuquan [a term denoting
the entire body] from the Puzhao Temple manifested himself, years
passed by which were not recorded. Since [missing characters] this
hall…hardly any people visited, no incense rose and disasters
occurred. The leaders of the village, Lin Zhangxin and Lin Shixing,
touched the hearts of the villagers to raise money…to remodel and
redecorate the valuable statue of the patriarch."
Puzhao – "universal illumination" – is a
popular name for Buddhist temples in China, so is little help in
identifying the statue's origins; but two things link the cushion
to Yangchun. First, the village leaders who organised the
whip-round to refurbish the mummy were both called Lin; second, and
more convincing (since Lin is one of the most common surnames in
China), Zhang Gong is referred to by name.
For James Robson, a Harvard professor and
expert on Chinese Buddhism, this represents "a pretty tight
connection", though Van Overeem argues that monasteries often
"sneakily attributed the identity of a renowned Buddhist master to
a different preserved corpse" to enhance their standing and their
revenues.
The sophisticated iconography on the casing,
which includes elements from the Tantric tradition of Buddhism and
"a secret character rendered in an unusual variant of the sacred
Siddham script from India" makes a case, he says, for the mummy
being from an important monastery rather than an obscure upland
village. This might seem like special pleading but for two pieces
of evidence in Van Overeem's favour.
Distinguishing
characteristics
Back in early 2015, the villagers told
reporters, both Chinese and foreign, that Zhang Gong's mummy had
two distinguishing characteristics. The first was a hole between
the thumb and index finger of the Buddha's left hand, said to have
been made in the 1950s by an official who was sceptical of the
villagers' claim that the statue contained a mummy and wanted to
feel inside. A news agency report quoted and named a man who said
he had filled in the hole in the 1980s.
The mummy's other unique feature was a wobbly
neck: the villagers took it out of the temple on special occasions
to process around Yangchun and on one occasion it had hit a
staircase. Van Overeem says, however, that a magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scan in January found no evidence of a repaired hole
in either hand while the X-rays had already shown that the corpse
inside his statue was fitted with a steel rod running from the
forehead over the back of the head and down the spine. "If there is
one thing stable about this mummy, then it's his neck," he
says.
While holding to his view that "my mummy is
not their mummy," Van Overeem says he has always sought a
compromise. After he was summoned to the foreign ministry, Dutch
officials arranged for him to meet Chinese diplomats in the
Netherlands who in turn involved the sach. Van Overeem says he
worked for months on a solution, even travelling to China to meet a
rich benefactor who was ready to buy the mummy in order to gift it
to the state. But a sach official scotched the deal, telling Van
Overeem flatly the Chinese authorities did not accept donations. "I
was furious," he says.
In November 2015, Van Overeem announced that
talks had broken down and that he would look seriously at offers he
had received for the mummy. He then came into contact with a "big
collector specialising in Buddhist sculptures: very powerful, very
rich", who proposed that, instead of selling the mummy, Van Overeem
should swap it for sculptures in his collection.
"Within one hour, we were done." The new owner
of the mummy, he says, intends to remain anonymous and keep the
mummy's location secret, so "I cannot deliver that statue, no
matter what."
Quite how the judge – and the Chinese
authorities – will react to that remains to be seen. But as James
Robson says, the affair "seems to have a life that keeps going …
like the mummy itself."