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" 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.