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Korean officials discovered the painting in the Smart Museum’s collection at the University of Chicago. It was stolen from a temple nearly 35 years ago.
By Zachary Small
An order of Buddhist monks in South Korea were shocked in the summer of 1989 when their temple was ransacked during a violent thunderstorm. Thieves had posed as hikers to enter the grounds of the Bomunsa temple in the North Gyeongsang province, and they sped away in a beige van with four sacred paintings.
For years, guilt and anguish haunted the temple’s abbot, Ham Tae-wan. Two of the stolen paintings were eventually recovered in 2014 after an extensive search in South Korea, and the thieves were prosecuted. But the trail of the last two paintings ran cold. More years passed, and the abbot became despondent.
