Chinese villagers have taken their campaign to retrieve a “stolen” 1,000-year-old mummified monk to a Dutch court, as China ramps up efforts to reclaim precious artefacts scattered across the globe – including in the UK.

The latest legal battle involves residents of Yangchun in south-eastern China seeking to force a Dutch art collector to return a Buddha sculpture which they claim went missing from their village in 1995.

The villagers say the 1.2 metre-tall golden sitting Buddha, which is called Zhanggong Zushi, contains the skeletal remains of one of their ancestors, a monk who lived and was worshipped in Yangchun since the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD).

The sculpture sat in a temple in the village for a thousand years, the villagers claim, before being stolen 22 years ago.