(Reuters) — The separated 1,459-year-old jade Buddha statue was reunited after 18 years in a ceremony on Saturday (May 23) at the Fo Guang Shan Monastery in Kaohsiung in Taiwan.
The Buddha’s head and body will not be glued at the reunion ceremony in order to protect the cultural relics, according to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. The ceremony not only celebrated the reunion, but also welcomed the returning of the stolen Buddha statue.
Li Xiaojie, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage exchanged certificates with Master Hsing Yun, founder of Fo Guang Shan Monastery, and gave him a calligraphic scroll as a gift at the ceremony.
According to an agreement between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, the whole statue will be sent back to the mainland next spring and preserved in the Hebei provincial museum, after the reunion of the statue’s head and the body in Taiwan, and a three-month exhibition tour across the southeast China island.
The sculpture, made of white marble, dates back to the North Qi (550-557) of South and North Dynasties. It was originally worshiped in north China’s Hebei Province, where the Buddha’s head was stolen in 1996. Master Hsing Yun decided to donate the head back to the mainland in 2014.
