One Find, Divided Three Ways, and a Fight Over the Third

When William Claxton Peppe excavated the Piprahwa stupa on his estate in 1898, the relics and roughly 1,800 gems he uncovered were divided under the colonial government's treasure trove arrangements: the reliquaries and the bulk of the material went to the Indian Museum in Kolkata, a portion of the relics was given by the British to King Chulalongkorn of Siam as a gift to a fellow Buddhist monarch, who further distributed some to Buddhist communities elsewhere in Asia, and Peppe himself was permitted to keep a smaller share of the gems as the excavator's reward, a common practice under the era's antiquities law.

That third share, retained by Peppe's descendants for over a century, became the center of an international controversy in 2025, when family members planned to auction roughly 1,800 of the gems through Sotheby's in Hong Kong. Indian government officials and Buddhist organisations objected strongly, arguing the gems were sacred relics rather than ordinary heritage property and that a colonial-era division of a religious find did not entitle a private family to sell it internationally; the sale was withdrawn amid the controversy, and the gems were reported on display in India in 2026 after more than a century abroad. The dispute illustrates how a single excavation's legal division under colonial rule can generate a live restitution argument well over a hundred years later, one the atlas records as unresolved rather than settled by the 2026 exhibition.