Mummified monk faces hard journey back home

A mummified monk inside a gold-painted papier-mache Buddha statue that was exhibited in European museums (the latest being at Budapest) might have been stolen from a village in Fujian province in 1995. People in the village say the statue was the personification of Zhanggong Liuquan, who underwent the excruciating, years-long process of self-mummification to attain nirvana during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and was worshiped as a "Buddha" for centuries.

If the claims are proven, can China bring the statue back? It can, gong by precedents. For instance, China won a lawsuit in a Copenhagen district court in 2008 and claimed back 156 antiques of the Xia (21st-16th century BC) and Shang (16th-11th century BC) dynasties. And in 2001, it won a case in a New York court to retrieve the wall paintings stolen from the tomb of Wang Chuzhi, a warlord during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

For the restitution of stolen cultural heritages and traded abroad, three international conventions play important roles: the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (or the Hague Convention), the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property (or the 1970 UNESCO Convention) and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (or the 1995 Convention).