Mint Magalogue/Science

A statue of a sitting Buddha that made its way from a temple in China to a market in the Netherlands revealed an extraordinary secret -- a 1,000-year-old mummified monk.

The mummy was discovered, encased in a cavity in the statue, when a private buyer brought it to an expert for restoration. It's unclear when or how the statue was removed from China. 

Scientists made a bizarre discovery when they took a CT scan of an ancient Buddha statue from China. Inside was a mummy sitting in the same lotus position. Further investigation revealed that the organs had been removed and replaced by scraps of paper with Chinese writing on them.

The Buddha statue, dating back to 1100 CE, belongs to the Drents Museum in the Netherlands and is currently on loan to a museum in Budapest.

The mummy was found sitting on a bundle of cloth covered in Chinese inscriptions, revealing its identity as a Buddhist monk called Liuquan who may have practiced "self-mummification" to prepare for life after death.

The process of self-mummification is a known tradition in countries like Japan, China and Thailand, and was practiced over a thousand years ago.

The elaborate and arduous process includes eating a special diet and drinking a poisonous tea so the body would be too toxic to be eaten by maggots. The few monks that were able to successfully complete the process were highly revered.

A gastrointestinal specialist also used an endoscope to take samples from inside the chest and abdominal cavities of the mummy and found, in place of organs, scraps of paper with ancient Chinese writing and other as yet unidentified materials.

The statue is now housed in the National Museum of Natural History in Budapest and will move to Luxembourg in May as a part of an international tour.