Image Credit from Leids Dagblad

For more than 160 years, two extraordinary copper-plate charters from South India sat within the collections of Leiden University Libraries. Known in scholarly literature as the Larger and Smaller Leiden Plates, or more recently as the Chola Plates, the objects are not small archival curiosities. Together they constitute some thirty kilograms of inscribed copper, bound by bronze rings carrying royal Chola seals. Their texts, written in Sanskrit and Tamil, record royal grants connected to Buddhist religious institutions at Nagapattinam, an important port city on India’s Coromandel Coast.

Leiden University has announced that it will return the Chola Plates, inventory numbers Or.1687 and Or.1688, to India, following the advice of the Dutch national Colonial Collections Committee. The 354 page advice can be read online.  

The objects were shown on 16 May 2026 during a formal moment in The Hague in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten. Their physical transfer to India will follow at a later date, with the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi expected to receive them. 

The political symbolism of the moment should not obscure the evidentiary work that brought the matter to this point. This was not simply a diplomatic courtesy timed to coincide with a prime ministerial visit. It was the outcome of a formal restitution process, a provenance investigation, an additional independent inquiry, and a legal-policy assessment under the Netherlands’ framework for cultural objects removed in colonial contexts.

The objects

The restitution request concerns two Chola-era charters. The first, Or.1687, consists of 21 copper plates held together by a bronze ring bearing the seal of Rājendra Chola I, who ruled from 1012 to 1042. Five plates contain Sanskrit text in Grantha script and sixteen contain Tamil text. The second, Or.1688, consists of three copper plates, also held together by a bronze ring, this time bearing the seal of Kulōttunga Chola I, who ruled from 1070 to 1120. 

Their inscriptions relate to the collection of revenues from villages for the maintenance of a Buddhist vihara ( a monastic residences or complexes serving as a center for spiritual practice and learning) at Nagapattinam. In plain terms, these were not decorative artefacts. They were documentary instruments of enduring legal, religious, and economic significance. The committee described them as important examples of South Indian royal decrees and as significant historical sources for the relationship between the Chola kingdom in South India and the Srivijaya world of Southeast Asia. 

That matters, because the legal and moral question in this case turned not only on where the plates were found, but on what they were understood to be.

How the Dutch procedure worked

India submitted its request to Leiden University on 6 July 2023. On 24 October 2023, Leiden asked the Dutch State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science to place the matter before the Colonial Collections Committee. This was important because Leiden University, not the Dutch State, owned the objects. Under the Dutch restitution framework, however, public owners other than the State may use the national procedure if they agree to be bound by its outcome. Leiden did so. 

The committee’s first task was not to decide immediately whether India should receive the objects. Its first task was procedural and evidentiary: was the provenance research sufficient?

Before the committee’s involvement, Leiden University Libraries had already commissioned research by historian Roelof van Gelder and by Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, former curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Rijksmuseum. Their findings were later summarised by Marieke van Meer and Doris Jedamski of Leiden University Libraries. India’s Ministry of Culture, through the Indian Embassy in the Netherlands, also submitted background documentation. 

The committee then identified gaps. It wanted further research into the precise route by which the objects left Nagapattinam, into local practices surrounding Chola Plates and related sacred objects, and into the possibility — ultimately rejected — that the plates may have travelled from India to the Srivijaya realm in pre-colonial times and only later reached Dutch hands. Independent historians Tristan Mostert and Lennart Bes were asked to carry out additional provenance research. Their report was delivered in June 2025, shared with Leiden University Libraries and the Archaeological Survey of India, and both institutions were invited to respond. 

Only after this research-and-response phase did the committee deliberate. On 21 November 2025, it adopted its advice.

The colonial setting

The committee found the request admissible because Nagapattinam had been conquered by the VOC from the Portuguese in 1658 and was then used as a Dutch trading post within the VOC’s colonial-commercial network. The VOC exercised territorial authority in and around Nagapattinam. 

The key historical question was how the plates left that setting. The provenance chain is clearest only from the early eighteenth century onward. A label once attached to Or.1687 indicated that Florentius Camper, a minister in Batavia, brought the objects to the Netherlands. Camper returned from Batavia in 1712 with his wife, Sara Geertrui Camper-Kettingh. In 1862, their descendants donated the plates to Leiden University. 

What remains uncertain is precisely how Camper or his household acquired them. The committee did not claim certainty where the evidence did not permit it. Instead, it worked with a standard of plausibility grounded in converging evidence.

Lunsingh Scheurleer had argued that the plates were likely unearthed during VOC construction works at Fort De Vijf Sinnen and the redevelopment of the area around the so-called China Pagoda in Nagapattinam between 1687 and 1700. Mostert and Bes found the circumstantial evidence for this scenario to be “more than substantial.” The inscriptions, archaeology, and European documentary sources all pointed to the likelihood that the Leiden Chola Plates belonged to a group of Buddhist finds made in Nagapattinam during that period. 

Why burial did not mean abandonment

One of the most consequential elements of the committee’s reasoning concerns the meaning of burial.

Objects like the Chola Plates, Buddhist bronzes, and other religious materials were often carefully buried in the region. The question was whether burial could be interpreted as abandonment — whether the objects had become ownerless, or res nullius, and therefore available for taking.

The committee answered no.

The research indicated that careful burial was most commonly understood as a means of protection in times of unrest, not as an act of relinquishment. Sir Walter Elliot, writing in the nineteenth century about finds at the China Pagoda, observed that objects had been placed carefully in a chamber under brick covering, apparently with a view to future religious use. The committee treated this as consistent with a protective practice rather than disposal. 

This point is crucial. The Chola Plates were not scrap metal, curios, or abandoned ruins. They had been legal-religious charters intended to remain permanently with the Buddhist institutions to which they related. The committee noted that their grants were considered to have perpetual validity and that comparable Chola plates were still used as evidence in legal proceedings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Even if the Buddhist institutions at Nagapattinam were no longer active at the time the plates were removed, the committee concluded that this did not mean there were no rightsholders. Nor did it mean that those rightsholders had consented to the removal.

The legal and ethical conclusion

Under the Dutch policy framework, once involuntary loss of possession in a colonial context is established with a reasonable degree of certainty, the appropriate recommendation is unconditional return. If involuntary loss cannot be established, the committee may instead undertake a broader balancing of interests. 

In this case, the committee did not need to rely merely on a balancing exercise. It concluded that the plates had likely been removed from Nagapattinam without the consent of rightsholders and that they were not ownerless objects. The removal therefore amounted to involuntary loss of possession. 

The committee advised Leiden University to return both sets of Chola Plates unconditionally to the Republic of India. It also advised that associated metadata, including archival material, correspondence, and contextual documentation, should be made available to India as part of the work of repairing historical injustice. 

Leiden has accepted the advice.

Why this case matters

For provenance researchers, the Chola Plates case is instructive precisely because it is not built on a single dramatic document saying “taken by force.” Many colonial-era object histories do not provide that kind of archival clarity. Instead, they require the careful reading of inscriptions, ownership functions, local religious practice, colonial construction history, European collecting networks, shipping movements, family transmission, and institutional acquisition.

Here, the evidentiary pattern was enough.

The plates were made for named religious institutions in Nagapattinam. They were meant to remain there as proof of land and revenue rights. Their likely discovery occurred during VOC works in a city under Dutch colonial control. Their burial was understood not as abandonment but as safeguarding. No evidence of consent by rightsholders was found. Their later movement into a European family collection and then into Leiden University did not cure the original loss.

That is the deeper lesson behind the diplomatic photographs.

The return of the Chola Plates is a reminder that colonial restitution is not only about the removal of objects from Western institutions. It is about the reconstruction of historical relationships: between archive and archaeology, between sacred and legal function, between possession and entitlement, and between what an institution can hold and what it should now return.

By: Edgar Tijhuis

Dutch crime journalist John van den Heuvel, long known in the Netherlands for his reporting on organised crime and high-profile criminal investigations, has now become linked to the discreet return later today of a Nazi-looted artwork we wrote about this morning.  The painting had been hidden for decades with a descendant of a World War II wartime collaborator, first disclosed by Private Investigator Arthur Brand.

The painting, Portrait of a Young Girl by Dutch artist Toon Kelder, looted by Nazis from the famous Goudstikker collection, has been handed over today to Telegraaf journalist John van den Heuvel by a descendant of the notorious Dutch SS lieutenant general and NSB figurehead Hendrik Alexander Seyffardt, one of the Netherlands’ most prominent wartime collaborators.  The painting had originally belonged to prominent Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker before being displaced during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

As mentioned in ARCA's blog post early this morning, this painting resurfaced after descendants connected to Hendrik Alexander Seyffardt, the Dutch general who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, began confronting difficult aspects of their family history.  Private investigator Arthur Brand was ultimately contacted regarding the painting’s origins and the family's wartime connection. Van den Heuvel reportedly assisted in bringing public attention to the case, helping frame the discovery not simply as a story of hidden art, but as part of the Netherlands’ continuing reckoning with unresolved wartime dispossession.

More than eighty years after the war, the rediscovery of this Kelder portrait demonstrates that the legacy of Nazi cultural theft still persists not only in archives and courtrooms, but inside ordinary homes where displaced objects continue to carry histories their current holders may only now be beginning to understand.

More than three years after a dramatic break-in at the Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Dutch authorities have brought a suspect before the courts, marking a significant development in a case that initially seemed unlikely to reach resolution. The suspect, Tyrese H., is a 22-year-old man from Almere, who is alleged to have been part of a small group responsible for the February 2023 burglary, in which a number of rare Chinese ceramic objects were targeted in a highly specific and unusually destructive theft. 

The suspect was already serving an eight-year prison sentence handed down in connection with his role in the robbery and fatal stabbing death of 29-year-old party organizer, Lorenz Schaasberg, in Vinkeveen in December 2023.  In the museum case, the Public Prosecution Service cites burglary, theft, and the dumping of license plates as charges, but releases few further details.

The arrest comes as something of a surprise, as many had largely assumed the investigation had stalled, given the passage of time and the lack of earlier breakthroughs. The renewed movement in the case reflects the often slow and complex nature of art crime investigations, where forensic evidence, witness testimony, and investigative leads can take years to coalesce into prosecutable cases.

The original theft at the 109-year museum occurred in the early hours of 13 February 2023 and followed on an earlier unsuccessful attempt on Wednesday, the first of February.  Back then, intruders gained access to the museum by climbing a drainpipe and entering through a smashed window near the museum's roof, demonstrating both planning and familiarity with the building. Once inside, they moved quickly to the first floor featuring Chinese ceramics and removed eleven objects from display.  Of note, though valuable, these were not the highest valued objects on display in the museum's collection.

What distinguishes this burglary from many others is what happened next. As the alarm sounded and the perpetrators fled, seven of the stolen objects were either horrifically dropped while the culprit(s) made their getaway or deliberately smashed in the street just outside the museum. Witnesses later described the surrounding area as covered in shards. Some of the ceramics were so badly damaged that restoration proved impossible, effectively transforming theft into irreversible destruction.

At the time, investigators and museum officials were struck by its apparent selectivity of the operation. The objects had been taken quickly from a specific installation within an exhibition, suggesting that the perpetrators had prior knowledge of the display and location within the museum. There had also been a failed break-in attempt 12 days earlier. 

Four of the stolen ceramics remain missing to this day and are pictured here.  Unlike paintings or widely recognisable antiquities, high-end ceramics occupy a narrower market, particularly when they are well documented and publicly exhibited. Early speculation suggested that the theft may not have been motivated by resale in the conventional art market. Instead, the possibility of a targeted commission or non-commercial motive was raised, reflecting the limited avenues through which such objects can be discreetly circulated.

The recent court appearance of the suspect sheds further light on how the burglary was carried out. Prosecutors allege that the accused was part of a group of three individuals involved in the operation. The method of entry, the rapid removal of objects, and the chaotic exit all align with what might be described as a short-duration, high-risk intrusion, a pattern seen in a number of museum thefts where perpetrators seek to minimise time on site.

Yet, the aftermath complicates any straightforward reading of the crime. The destruction of the majority of the stolen objects raises questions about intent. Whether the breakage was accidental, the result of haste, or indicative of a lack of familiarity with handling fragile objects or in highly timed burglaries. Even in cases where stolen objects are later recovered, their evidentiary and cultural value can be significantly diminished if their physical integrity has been compromised.

The Princessehof itself occupies a distinctive place within the Dutch museum landscape. Housed in an eighteenth-century palace and known for its extensive collection of Asian and European ceramics, it is the only national museum of ceramics in the northern Netherlands. The objects targeted in 2023 were part of a temporary exhibition exploring themes of celebration, making their removal not only a loss of individual artefacts but also a disruption to a curated narrative.

The case also highlights the broader challenges faced by museums exhibiting portable and fragile works. Asian Ceramics, while culturally significant, are becoming a known target and are physically vulnerable and often easier to transport than larger or more structurally robust objects. At the same time, their niche market can limit opportunities for resale, creating a paradox in which objects are both attractive targets and difficult to monetize.

As the legal proceedings begin, their focus will likely shift toward establishing the extent of the suspect’s involvement and the role of the two accomplices. For investigators, the case represents both a resolution and a reminder. While the arrest demonstrates persistence in pursuing leads over time, the fate of the remaining missing objects underscores the limits of recovery once objects have been removed and dispersed.