Browsing on his laptop at his Thiruvananthapuram home in February 2025, Soheb Wahab stumbled upon a subject of interest: up for auction on Sotheby’s Hong Kong website were “rare gems from India”.
“The 1898 discovery of these gems by William Claxton Peppé at Piprahwa in northern India — where they were found buried together in reliquaries with the corporeal relics of the Historical Buddha — ranks among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time,” stated the listing on the auction house’s website.
The gems, part of a “family’s private collection”, were to be auctioned in Hong Kong on May 7 for an estimated $100 million.
“I forwarded the link to Naman Ahuja (Professor, Art and Architecture of Ancient India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), who has always been invested in the subject,” Wahab tells The Indian Express over telephone from Philadelphia, where he is doing his PhD.
The gems are currently being exhibited at Qila Rai Pithora, a 12th-century monument in Delhi. (Express photo by Abhinav Saha)
Wahab, who did his Master’s from JNU in 2021, says he first heard of the gems in Ahuja’s classes. They agreed that something needed to be done: the gems were too precious to go under the hammer.
Ahuja then sent a dossier to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), setting off a chain of events that ended in the auction being called off.
Almost 127 years after they were taken away, in July 2025, the gems made a quiet journey home from Hong Kong — inside a lined box on a commercial flight.
The gems are currently being exhibited at Qila Rai Pithora, a 12th-century monument in Delhi, along with other relics from the 1898 Piprahwa excavation that had been stored in the vaults of the Kolkata-based Indian Museum since 1899.
The gems brought back from Hong at the exhibition in Delhi. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)
In the 1890s, the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) discovery of the Lumbini pillar with Ashokan inscriptions sparked a surge of archaeological activity as scholars sought physical evidence of sites associated with the Buddha. It was thus that William Claxton Peppé, a British estate manager and a trained engineer, led an excavation on a mound at the Birdpur Estate in Piprahwa village, now considered to be the site of the ancient Kapilavastu, in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddharthnagar district.
Peppé got lucky. He unearthed an 18-foot shaft that led to a sandstone coffer with five small urns that held bone fragments of the Buddha, soapstone, crystal caskets, and offerings of gold ornaments and gemstones — the ASI recorded nearly 1,800 pearls, rubies, topaz and sapphires. An inscription in Brahmi script on one of the caskets confirmed these as relics of the Buddha, deposited by the Buddha’s own Shakya clan.
While most of the gems and precious metals, the five urns, the sandstone coffer and some gold sheets went to the Indian Museum in Kolkata, where they would remain inside secure vaults for over a century, Peppé retained a fifth of the total find.
The five reliquaries discovered in Piprahwa. (Photo: Wikipedia)
In an article on Sotheby’s website before the proposed auction, Peppé’s great-grandson Chris Peppé, a Los Angeles-based film editor who had put up the gems for auction, explains how he inherited the relics, “The gem relics were passed down from my great uncle to his son, then in 2013, they came to myself and two cousins. It was at this point that I began in-depth research into the discovery of the gems by my great-grandfather.”
Sitting in his office in New Delhi’s Lado Sarai, Prof Ahuja recalls the alarm he felt when he heard of the Sotheby’s auction scheduled for May 7.
“This raised certain core critical questions. The relics are supposed to be sarir-dhaatu (remains) of a deceased. Can they even be monetised like this?” says Ahuja, who specialises in Indian iconography, temple and stupa architecture.
By March that year, a month after he was alerted of the auction, Ahuja put together a dossier on the importance of these relics. “The dossier contained a detailed letter to the PMO, news clippings, details of the excavation and whatever other material I could get my hands on.”
Naman Ahuja, Professor, Art and Architecture of Ancient India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, was alerted about the Sotheby’s auction by a former student in February 2025. (Special Arrangement)
On April 7, 2025, the dossier was hand-delivered to the PMO. “Just to play it safe, I sent it to the PMO via e-mail too. Then, I waited.”
That wait, he says, would stretch to a few weeks. “Then, I received an acknowledgement and a follow-up call from the PMO that a file had been created on my grievance,” he says.
The PMO sent the file to Union Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat’s office. Meanwhile, changes were brewing at the Ministry’s office at Shastri Bhawan — Vivek Aggarwal, a 1994-batch IAS officer, was taking charge as the new Culture Secretary.
Among the first files on his table would be Ahuja’s dossier. “I joined as Culture Secretary on April 21, 2025. When I called on the Culture Minister, he raised the matter of the Sotheby’s auction,” Aggarwal says.
The instruction was clear: the auction had to be stopped.
With the auction scheduled for 10 am (Hong Kong time) on May 7, the challenge before India was formidable: the sale lay outside the country’s legal jurisdiction, time was critically short, and the issue carried deep emotional weight for India and millions of Buddhists.
Aggarwal set out to gather background details, alerted all the agencies, convened a high-level strategy meeting and started exploring legal options.
Vivek Aggarwal, a 1994-batch IAS officer, took charge as the new Culture Secretary on April 21, 2025. Among the first files on his table were Ahuja’s dossier on the Piprahwa gems.(Special Arrangement)
Given Chris Peppé ’s British nationality, on May 2, 2025, five days before the scheduled auction, during a bilateral meeting with Lisa Nandy, the UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Minister Shekhawat pressed for UK’s intervention. Nandy, however, expressed the UK’s inability to intervene, as the gems were part of Peppé’s private collection.
On May 5, 2025, the Culture Ministry served a legal notice to Sotheby’s and the Peppé family, demanding the “immediate cessation” of the auction and the repatriation of the relics to India. “The May 5 legal notice to Sotheby’s cited Indian laws and international conventions,” says Aggarwal.
Despite being a ratified signatory of 1970 UNESCO Convention, India faced the burden of proof and lack of bilateral treaties to get the relics back.
Leveraging Aggarwal’s past experience as Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit of India (FIU), a government arm that collects and analyses intelligence on offences related to money laundering, a notice to stop the auction was issued under the EGMONT protocol (for the international FIU network) to FIU Hong Kong on May 5. The Union External Affairs Ministry too stepped up pressure through its Europe West and East Asia divisions to ensure that embassies in the UK and Hong Kong followed up.
Piprahwa vase with relics of the Buddha according to the inscription. (Photo: Wikipedia)
Following the intense pressure, Sotheby’s agreed for a discussion on May 6. At the meeting, Sotheby’s allegedly argued that India had no claim on the relics since they had left the nation before Independence.
Aggarwal says, “We emphasised that the sacred sarir-dhaatu of the Buddha cannot be treated as objects for sale. Sotheby’s was also reminded about their business interests in India and how those could be adversely affected due to the wrong perception created on account of this irresponsible act.”
By late evening on May 6, 2025, India had exhausted every diplomatic and legal avenue available to halt the auction.
The next morning brought good news. Around 5 am (India time), Aggarwal got an e-mail from Sotheby’s. “The e-mail said the auction had been postponed,” he says, recalling the relief he felt.
To a query on the postponement of the auction, Nancy Wong, spokesperson, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, told The Indian Express over e-mail, “In light of the matters raised by the Government of India and with the agreement of the consignors, the auction of the Piprahwa gems of the Historical Buddha, which was initially scheduled for May 7, was postponed to allow for discussions between the parties.”
An email sent to Chris Peppé seeking his comments went unanswered.
William Claxton Peppé (Photo: Peppé family)
With the auction put off, the mission now was to find a way to bring the relics home — and India had three options.
The first was to force repatriation through a court procedure. “We could not find a credible legal method for the repatriation of relics taken away from India during colonial rule,” says Aggarwal.
The second was to offer compensation from the government exchequer — a “very difficult” option since the amount could not be objectively determined.
The third was to secure their repatriation via public-private-partnership (PPP) through an Indian philanthropist. Sotheby’s had informed the Culture Ministry that an Indian philanthropist — Mumbai-based industrialist Pirojsha Godrej — had approached it to acquire the relics on behalf of India. Godrej declined to comment on the matter.
Secretary Aggarwal said he was unaware of the compensation that Godrej paid for the relics.
Though the PPP route for repatriation was a first for India, the ministry decided to go ahead. “We had to move quickly. Intelligence had suggested that the relics could be sold to an organisation in South-East Asia or another country seeking to appropriate the Buddha’s legacy for geopolitical gain,” said a source in the Ministry.
Handwritten note by Péppe to Vincent Arthur Smith about the inscription in 1898. (Photo: Wikipedia)
On May 21, 2025, a three-member delegation — Alok Tripathy, Additional Director General, ASI; Sayan Bhattacharya, Deputy Director, Indian Museum, Kolkata; and Shamoon Ahmed, Assistant Superintending Archaeologist, ASI — was sent to Hong Kong to examine the relics.
Senior archaeologist Tripathy says they examined the relics at Sotheby’s Hong Kong head office. “The three frames advertised by Sotheby’s on their website were presented before us in the office. We checked them closely: the number of gems (349), their present state and whether they matched the (221) relics at the Kolkata museum,” he says. A day later, the team returned to India and submitted their report to the Ministry.
Some time in early July, Aggarwal organised a tripartite meeting with Godrej, Sotheby’s and Peppé’s team to iron out the repatriation terms.
Aggarwal says that in their meeting with Godrej, they agreed on the following: “The relics will be in the government’s possession and will be inalienable, meaning they cannot be sold in future or moved out of India without permission. Most of the relics will be at a government museum for display for five years and then moved to a museum established by Godrej.”
Now for the most critical step: the transportation of the gems to India.
Though the relics are accorded the protocol of a dignitary, official sources say there were apprehensions that they would get stuck at Hong Kong airport’s Chinese Customs given China’s assertions on the Buddha’s legacy.
Stupa Piparwaha (Photo: Wikipedia)
“After Godrej acquired them, the government considered sending an Air Force plane to bring them back. We later decided to be as discreet as possible, so as to not raise the hackles of the Chinese authorities,” says a source.
Another option – later dropped – was to land the relics in a third country, before escorting them to India.
Finally, Godrej ended up taking them on a commercial flight from Hong Kong to Mumbai. “The relics were flown out of Hong Kong overnight (on July 29), right from under the nose of the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong,” says a source in the Ministry.
On July 30, Godrej and a few Ministry officials boarded a private chartered flight from Mumbai to Delhi. At Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, he was received, among others, by Minister Shekhawat and senior bureaucrats. In keeping with the protocol of receiving the holy relics, monks played the gyaling (a Tibetan monastic instrument) and chanted in both the Mahayana and Theravada traditions.
It all ended well as Sotheby’s Wong and Chris Peppé issued statements expressing their “delight” at facilitating the return of the Piprahwa gems to India.
At his Lado Sarai office, JNU’s Ahuja says, “Everything worked out before it was too late. These relics were too important to not be placed back in the Indian context, the land of the Buddha and the nation that holds his legacy.”
Curated by Aisha Patel
